Author: Sara Wood

WASHINGTON (JTA) — George Santos, the New York Republican congressman in trouble for a string of lies about his education, his career and his background, said his claims of Jewish identity were a “party favor joke.” But he doubled down on his debunked claim that his maternal grandparents were Jewish. Santos made the comments on […]

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Rep. David Cicilline, the Jewish Rhode Island Democrat and influential pro-Israel progressive, is leaving Congress. Cicilline said Tuesday he will exit Congress in June to head the Rhode Island Foundation, the biggest funder of nonprofits in the Ocean State. The foundation is massively influential in the state and leading it could offer […]

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 […]