WASHINGTON (JTA) –President Donald Trump has pledged to combat anti-Semitism and Holocaust denialism, and to defend Israel in a speech marking the national days of Holocaust remembrance. “Those who deny the Holocaust are an accomplice to this horrible evil,” he said Tuesday, April 24, at the annual ceremony organized by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in the Capitol Rotunda. “And […]

DC Report By Douglas Bloomfield With little fanfare, the Washington Post recently added a motto to the top of page one just below its name:  “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It had been in the works since early last year, but newly inaugurated President Donald Trump took it as a personal insult, as did many of his supporters, according to published […]

DC Report By Douglas Bloomfield “Where were you when I needed you?” That thought probably crossed Benjamin Netanyahu’s mind recently when he heard that Donald Trump had ordered cruise missile strikes on the Shayrt air field from which the Syrian dictator launched nerve gas attacks on his own people. The Israeli prime minister had to be thinking back to 2014 […]

By Peter Keepnews and Richard Severo The New York Times Don Rickles, the acidic stand-up comic who became world-famous not by telling jokes but by insulting his audience, died on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 90. The cause was kidney failure, said a spokesman, Paul Shefrin. For more than half a century, on nightclub stages, in concert […]

By RON KAMPEAS WASHINGTON (JTA) – “Many voices, one mission.” If AIPAC’s 2017 annual policy conference slogan, popping up on the conference app on activists’ smartphones, isn’t clear enough, the morning pick-me-up video it runs before conference business begins is pretty straightforward. In the video, activists are gravitating through sunny streets here toward the convention center, and titles float above them: Democrat, […]

By ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL NEW YORK CITY (JTA) – Literally within seconds of the news of the arrest in Israel of an Israeli-American teenager for the bulk of the JCC bomb threats, Twitter lit up with Jewish anxiety. “[I] fear the inevitable backlash from haters who we whipped [into] a frenzy for our own nefarious political aims” is how someone responded to the JTA […]

  NEW YORK CITY (JTA) –Adam Krief, a Jewish cancer patient whose search for a bone marrow donor captured the attention of social media and celebrities including Kim Kardashian, Mayim Bialik and Jason Biggs, has died. Krief, a father of three from Los Angeles, died Tuesday, March 14, a family friend confirmed to JTA. He was 31. Krief was diagnosed […]

NEW YORK CITY (JTA) – The St. Louis man accused of making at least eight bomb threats against Jewish community centers and the Anti-Defamation League must remain in jail until his trial, a federal judge in that city ruled. The allegations against Juan Thompson, 32, are “very serious,” U.S. District Court Judge David Noce said Monday, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch […]

BOSTON (JTA) – Ownership of the country’s oldest synagogue and its valuable religious and ritual objects is being decided by a federal appeals court. The hearing of the case by a three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston is the latest development in a closely watched legal battle pitting New York City’s Shearith Israel, the […]

NEW YORK CITY (JTA) – At least seven Jewish community centers in the United States and Canada received bomb threats while they were hosting Purim events. The threats, either called in or e-mailed, were reported Sunday at JCCs in Rochester, New York; Chicago; Indianapolis; Milwaukee; Cleveland; Houston, and Vancouver, British Columbia. Most of the JCCs were evacuated and searched. None […]