Author: Sara Wood

WASHINGTON (JTA) — In a rare comment on internal Israeli politics, the umbrella organization for local Jewish federations is urging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to drop one element of his government’s controversial plan for judicial reform. On Tuesday, the Jewish Federations of North America sent an open letter to Netanyahu and Yair Lapid, leader of […]

(JTA) — The Israeli minister responsible for relations with Jews in the Diaspora has a message for the government of the country where most of them live: “Mind your own business.” Amichai Chikli made the comment Sunday in a radio interview in Israel, where he was asked to address recent comments by U.S. ambassador Tom […]

LOS ANGELES (JTA) — The morning after Los Angeles police arrested a man suspected of shooting two Jews outside their synagogues, the biggest indicator of disruption in the neighborhood where the incidents took place was a caravan of news trucks. Along Pico Boulevard, the thoroughfare running through the Pico-Robertson neighborhood that is home to a […]

(JTA) — Assembling abortion aftercare kits. A Havdalah ceremony combined with an update on state reproductive rights legislation. Sermons on abortion and Jewish law. Those are some of the many ways more than 1500 synagogues and Jewish communities nationwide are observing the third annual “Repro Shabbat,” which begins tonight. It’s the first time the Shabbat […]

(JTA) — Among Sandra Fox’s most memorable finds during her years mining American archives for materials about Jewish summer camps was a series of letters about the hours before lights-out. The letters were by counselors who were documenting an unusual window in the day when they stopped supervising campers, leaving the teens instead to their own […]

When Rabbi Adam Englander arrived at a recent national gathering in Denver of Jewish day school and yeshiva educators, he had a good sense of what conference sessions he wanted to attend and whom he wanted to meet. But it turns out that one of the most valuable benefits Englander experienced at the Prizmah educators […]

(JTA) – For days, students and police at Cleveland State University had been trying to figure out who stole a banner belonging to a campus Palestinian rights group. The banner, which belonged to the student group Palestinian Human Rights Organization, read “CSU Solidarity for Palestinian Rights” and was illustrated with an outline of Israel, the […]

(JTA) – A high school championship soccer game between a Miami Jewish day school and a local Catholic school ended with an ugly on-field brawl and at least one injury, along with reports of the Catholic students possibly having uttered antisemitic slurs. Videos from the incident circulated online, eliciting competing accounts about what happened and […]

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Ted Lerner, who died on Sunday at age 97, was as famously workaholic as he was shy. So it was a big deal when Washingtonian magazine scored an interview with him in 2007, the year after he assumed ownership of the Nationals, the first baseball team in Washington, D.C., since 1971. In […]

(JTA) — The Los Angeles Police Department has no evidence that two shootings of Jewish men this week were motivated by hate, though it is still investigating, a spokesperson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.  A statement Thursday morning from Los Angeles’ Jewish federation echoed that assessment, saying that “at this time there is no indication […]