BERLIN (JTA) — Rising antisemitism, Germany’s relationship with Israel, pensions for aging Soviet immigrants — these are just some of the issues Jewish voters across Germany are considering before casting their vote in Sunday’s federal election. The nation is replacing the retiring Chancellor Angela Merkel after a monumental 16 years in the position. The latest […]
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WASHINGTON (JTA) — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive congresswoman from New York, said she changed her vote from “no” to “present” on a bill for special funding for Israel’s anti-missile Iron Dome defense system because of the “panic and horror” that seized the moment. Ocasio-Cortez could be seen weeping on the floor of Congress Thursday after […]
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(JTA) — Were it not for Rudolph Vrba and Alfréd Wexler, would the world today know the true extent of the mass murder the Nazis inflicted during the Holocaust? The two men, both Slovak Jews who escaped from Auschwitz, secretly recorded fastidious notes about details of the death camp unknown to the outside world. These […]
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(JTA) – A female police officer allegedly wrote fawning letters to the imprisoned gunman who attempted to attack a synagogue in Halle, Germany on Yom Kippur in 2019. The unnamed officer, a police commissioner in the Dessau-Roßlau district, has been suspended pending a further investigation, according to the German news agency DPA. The gunman, Stephan […]
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In a mishnah at the bottom of yesterday’s daf, we learn a fairly straightforward rule: A person may not say to a butcher on a festival: Weigh for me a dinar’s worth of meat. But the butcher may slaughter an animal and apportion it without stipulating a price. As has been well established by our […]
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Today’s daf introduces us to two people we may not have met before in our journey through the Talmud — Rabbi Malkiyu and Rabbi Malkiyah. Neither appears a lot in the Talmud, so their mention here is an opportunity to explore them in more depth. We first meet Rabbi Malkiyu, a fourth-generation Babylonian Amora (later rabbi) in […]
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(JTA) – At a political rally in Berlin in June, a young Jewish gay man wearing a turquoise kippah launched his campaign to represent one of Germany’s most ethnically diverse constituencies in parliament. The man, 34-year-old Marcel Yaron Goldhammer, promised to stoke the “embers of unity, justice and freedom” during his announcement speech in front […]
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(JTA) — Mervyn Taylor, who was reportedly the first Jewish person to serve as a cabinet minister in Ireland, has died at the age of 89. Taylor, who died of cancer in London Thursday, served for about four years as equality and law reform minister between 1993 and 1997, under Ireland’s Labour party. In total, […]
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(JTA) — Several church groups in Norway are organizing a photo exhibition from the West Bank, to be displayed in a cathedral, whose text states that Palestinians undergo “daily crucifixions.” The exhibition, which has prompted protest by the country’s Jewish community and a pro-Israel group, is part of Church Week for Peace in Palestine and […]
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ON MONDAY, Bari Weiss—the former New York Times opinion editor who now publishes her own popular right-wing email newsletter—sent out an essay titled “Everybody Hates the Jews.” Like much of Weiss’s work, the piece centered on the specter of rising antisemitism in the United States. As a central piece of evidence, she cited a just-released […]
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