Author: Sara Wood

A string of recent synagogue attacks across North America and Europe has left security officials sounding the alarm bells. “We are in the midst of the most elevated and complex threat environment the Jewish community and this country has seen in modern history,” said Kerry Sleeper, chief of threat management and information sharing for the […]

The Trump administration’s Religious Liberties Commission was wracked again this week over anti-Israel sentiment, as a second affiliated individual has exited while claiming it had been hijacked by a “Zionist political agenda.” Sameerah Munshi, a Muslim member of a board that advises the commission, announced late Thursday that she would be stepping down. Her reason, […]

Oklahoma’s attorney general is accusing a state board of trying to rig the legal fight over a proposed Jewish charter school — a dispute that could open the door for publicly funded religious charter schools across the United States. Attorney General Gentner Drummond filed a motion this week asking an Oklahoma County district judge to […]

The Department of Homeland Security has identified the man killed while attacking a suburban Detroit synagogue as Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a U.S. citizen who immigrated from Lebanon 15 years ago. Ghazali, 41, was a resident of Dearborn Heights, Michigan, according to its mayor, Mo Baydoun. Baydoun said in a statement that members of Ghazali’s family, […]

The suspected assailant, armed with rifles and smoke bombs, who rammed into Temple Israel on Thursday encountered a synagogue that was well prepared for just such an attack. He hit and injured the congregation’s security director with his car as he plowed through the synagogue’s doors and drove down a hallway. But he didn’t manage […]

Over 1,100 Jewish clergy from across the United States have signed onto a letter affirming their support for immigrant rights and calling on leaders not to “wrong or oppress the stranger.” The letter published by the Jewish refugee aid group HIAS comes as Jewish communities across the country are grappling with the Trump administration’s aggressive […]

A YouTuber, a theater consultant and an accordionist walk into a kosher Chinese restaurant. It’s not the setup to a Borscht Belt joke — it’s half of the party that grabbed a table recently at Buddha Bodai in New York City’s Chinatown for a lively debate over dim sum and tea. The men were part of […]

President Donald Trump gave mixed signals about the status of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran on Monday, telling reporters that the war was “very complete, pretty much” even as he said that he would make a “mutual” decision with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about its end. At the same time, he threatened Iran in […]

The Department of Government Efficiency tagged Jewish themes as “DEI” in ChatGPT when searching for federal humanities grants to cancel last year, according to a class-action lawsuit. The methodology contributed to the cancellation of National Endowment for the Humanities grants to study violence against women during the Holocaust, postwar Soviet Jewish literature and hundreds of […]