Category: Local

A group of 27 Jewish organizations and synagogues have filed an amicus brief voicing their support for Rümeysa Öztürk, the detained Tufts University doctoral student, the latest in a string of Jewish voices objecting to her arrest. The brief calls antisemitism a “persistent scourge” and says that fighting it is “laudable,” but adds, “arresting, detaining, […]

In advance of a pivotal court hearing this week in the deportation case of Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian protest leader at Columbia University, a judge demanded that the State Department lay out its case against him. Now, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has done so, in a two-page memo that says “beliefs, statements, or associations” […]

To over 300,000 TikTok followers, Hayim Nissim Cohen was a rabbi who had taken in nine adoptive sons and documented their Jewish lives. But after one of the children spoke out about the sexual abuse that was happening off-camera, that illusion came crashing down. On Monday, Cohen, 40, pleaded guilty in a Houston state court […]

A California school’s ethnic studies curriculum that included discussions of Israel as a “settler colonial state” was found to have discriminated against Jewish students. The California Department of Education issued the ruling last Friday following an investigation into a September complaint by the Bay Area Jewish Coalition — Education and Advocacy, which is affiliated with […]

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced Wednesday that it is now surveilling the social media of people applying to immigrate and international students for “antisemitic activity.” The new policy will go into effect immediately, and any evidence of antisemitism or the “physical harassment of Jewish individuals” on social media could be used to reject […]

A new study has found that most Americans don’t want the United States to conquer Gaza, a policy that President Donald Trump first proposed in February. It also found that Americans across age groups and party lines feel less favorably toward Israel than they did before Oct. 7, 2023, and that views of Israeli Prime […]

Cornell and Northwestern Universities have joined five other schools in the Ivy League in facing steep funding cuts from the Trump administration, ostensibly over their handling of campus antisemitism. Both schools have Jewish presidents. In Cornell’s case, Michael Kotlikoff, who was recently promoted from interim to permanent president, has broadcast confidence about the climate for […]

The name of a Jewish fraternity was graffitied in a Muslim prayer room at New York University’s library last week, according to school officials.  A student was visiting the prayer room in Bobst Library last Thursday when they discovered that the room had been vandalized. Its prayer mats were soaked in urine, and a phallic […]

A museum holding one of the most important photography collections of pre-Holocaust Jewish life wanted to scan thousands of images and make them accessible to the public online.  As part of the fundraising to digitize the archive of the renowned Russian Jewish photographer Roman Vishniac, the museum, known as the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art […]

Picture a Jew in Miami. Is the person you’re thinking of older? Perhaps a retiree from New York — complete with the accent — who lives in a condo on the beach? According to a recent Jewish population study of Miami-Dade County, at least part of that snapshot is becoming outdated. The southeast corner of […]