Author: Sara Wood

(JTA) — Five rabbis from multiple Jewish denominations are among more than a dozen Missouri faith leaders challenging the state’s ban on abortion. In a lawsuit filed Thursday in St. Louis Circuit Court, the faith leaders charge that lawmakers acted according to their personal religious beliefs and violated the separation of church and state protected […]

(JTA) – A newly hired dean of students for a Michigan middle school resigned after only nine school days on the job after receiving an anonymous antisemitic death threat. The threat sent the district into lockdown and contributed to the decision to cancel classes during the first week of the year. Michael Woodberg was hired […]

(JTA) — Last Friday, as George Santos completed his second week in Congress, Mazi Melesa Pilip was contemplating the relief Shabbat would bring — and also the sting of the betrayal she felt by her fellow Long Island lawmaker. Among the welter of falsehoods that Santos scattered throughout  the byways of the Great Neck area in […]

(JTA) – Harvard University will extend a fellowship offer to former Human Rights Watch Director Ken Roth after previously rejecting him over his past comments on Israel, capping weeks of controversy that ensnared the Ivy League school in a global debate about academic freedom and criticism of Israel. In an open letter Thursday, Harvard Kennedy […]

(JTA) – George Washington University says it has opened an investigation into whether a psychology professor displayed antisemitic behavior in her interactions with Jewish and Israeli students, in the latest row over the state of Jewish life at the university in Washington, D.C. The investigation was prompted by a federal complaint filed by the pro-Israel […]

(JTA) — The painting in a key room in the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy was as striking as it was massive: Jesus, his arms outstretched, hovered over a lifeboat packed with grateful sailors, lost at sea. Eighteen people — including five Jews — among the school’s thousands of midshipmen, alumni, staffers and faculty decided they […]

(JTA) — The minister holding the country’s purse strings calls himself a “proud homophobe.” Another minister says Pride parades are “vulgar,” while a deputy minister who wants to cancel them was just given power over some aspects of what schoolchildren are taught. And then there are the lawmakers who want doctors to be able to […]

(JTA) — On the day before he was set to be sworn in as Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro had somewhere important to be: the Jewish community center in the state capital of Harrisburg. Shapiro and his family spent Monday volunteering at the Alexander Grass Campus for Jewish Life, which was hosting a Martin Luther King […]

BOSTON (JTA) – A month after Rev Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel stood on the front line of the 1965 march from Selma, Alabama, to demand voting rights for African Americans, another march unfolded in Boston. There, on April 23, 1965, King led more than 20,000 people on a march from […]

(JTA) — A conference of Jewish educators became first responders of sorts when Colorado Gov. Jared Polis had an emergency: The Jewish Democrat was about to be sworn in for a second term and he couldn’t find his Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible. It ended well — “when looking for a Tanakh, there’s never one too […]