Category: Local

(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 […]

(JTA) — Dick Savitt, the Jewish tennis champion who won both the Australian Open and Wimbledon Championships in 1951, died Jan. 6 at 95 at his home in New York. He was the first Jewish athlete to win either tournament. A native of Bayonne, New Jersey, Savitt never took a tennis lesson — his primary […]

WASHINGTON (JTA) –Republican Party officials in Rep. George Santos’ Long Island district called on the serial fabricator to quit, citing among other lies his claims to Jewish and Holocaust heritage. The call Wednesday by officials of the Nassau County Republican party was significant because the Republican majority in the U.S. House of representatives is precarious […]

(JTA) — When Talia Avrahami was asked to resign from a job teaching in an Orthodox Jewish day school after people there found out she was transgender, she was devastated. But she hoped to be able to turn to her synagogue in Washington Heights, where she had found a home for the last year and […]

WASHINGTON (JTA) — With a new right-wing government in Israel raising alarm bells among many in the United States, the timing seemed ripe for a gathering by AIPAC, which regularly convenes bigwigs to talk about the U.S.-Israel relationship. But the group’s conference this week in Washington is focusing not on that relationship but on American […]

(JTA) – The Israeli ministry responsible for engaging with the half of the world’s Jews who don’t live in Israel has gotten a new name — and a leader who disdains the values of many American Jews. Amichai Chikli announced during his swearing-in ceremony Monday that his ministry was changing its name from the Ministry of […]