Uncategorized
5 rabbis sue state of Missouri over abortion bans on religious freedom grounds
(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 in Missouri’s constitution.
“I was really proud to have the opportunity to join in this lawsuit because I’ve seen the ways in which religious views are being enshrined into laws in Missouri and across the country,” Maharat Rori Picker Neiss, the executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of St. Louis and a prominent activist in the St. Louis area, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“That’s fundamentally dangerous, I think, for our democracy, for all citizens, but especially for our Jewish community,” she added.
Jewish activists have been particularly active in contesting abortion restrictions imposed since the Supreme Court’s rollback of Roe v. Wade last year.
In Florida, a synagogue sued the state over its abortion law in June, arguing that the 15-week ban on abortion “prohibits Jewish women from practicing their faith free of government intrusion and this violates their privacy rights and religious freedom.” In September, three Jewish women were part of a lawsuit filed in Indiana claiming that the state’s ban on abortion violates the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
And in October, three Jewish women filed a lawsuit to block Kentucky’s abortion restrictions on religious freedom grounds, arguing that the law violates their ability to practice Jewish understandings of when life begins and impedes the possibility of in-vitro fertilization, which is also permissible by Jewish law.
In Missouri, the faith leaders partnered with the National Women’s Law Center and Americans United for Separation of Church and State in drafting their lawsuit. They are seeking to overturn a blanket ban on abortions except in the case of a medical emergency. The law, which was written in 2019 but went into effect after the Supreme Court ruling because of a “trigger” provision, makes performing abortions a felony punishable by five to 15 years in prison and says providers can lose their medical licenses.
“What the lawsuit says is that when you legislate your religious beliefs into law, you impose your beliefs on everyone else and force all of us to live by your own narrow beliefs,” said Michelle Banker, the director of reproductive rights and health at the National Women’s Law Center and the lead attorney in the case. “And that hurts us. That denies our basic human rights.”
The lawsuit cites multiple specific instances of religious language used by the bill’s sponsors and supporters. The bill’s lead sponsor, for example, is quoted in the lawsuit as having said, “As a Catholic I do believe life begins at conception and that is built into our legislative findings.”
Jewish tradition does not include the same belief, which is one reason that Jewish activists have been heavily involved in resisting abortion restrictions. Picker Neiss, who trained in an Orthodox setting, is joined by three Reform rabbis and one nondenominational rabbi who work in Missouri synagogues: James Bennett, Susan Talve, Andrea Goldstein and Douglas Alpert. Together, they make up 40% of the religious leaders to sign onto the lawsuit.
After filing their suit Thursday morning in St. Louis, the Missouri plaintiffs held a press conference and then marched to the Civil Courts building.
“It was really empowering to stand alongside so many people of such a diverse range of faith traditions, who all wanted to come together to say that religion doesn’t have any one answer to questions about abortion,” Picker Neiss said. “There is no one religious view in America. And so I just felt so heartened and inspired to stand arm in arm with religious leaders from across the spectrum.”
—
The post 5 rabbis sue state of Missouri over abortion bans on religious freedom grounds appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Gaza ‘Board of Peace’ to Convene at WH on Feb. 19, One Day After Trump’s Meeting with Netanyahu
US President Donald Trump speaks to the media during the 56th annual World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland, January 22, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse/File Photo
i24 News – A senior official from one of the member states confirms to i24NEWS that an invitation has been received for a gathering of President Trump’s Board of Peace at the White House on February 19, just one day after the president’s planned meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The meeting comes amid efforts to advance the implementation of the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire, following the limited reopening of the Rafah crossing, the expected announcement on the composition and mandate of the International Stabilization Force, and anticipation of a Trump declaration setting a deadline for Hamas to disarm.
In Israel officials assess that the announcement is expected very soon but has been delayed in part due to ongoing talks with the Americans over Israel’s demands for the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip. Trump reiterated on Thursday his promise that Hamas will indeed be disarmed.
Uncategorized
If US Attacks, Iran Says It Will Strike US Bases in the Region
FILE PHOTO: Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi meets with Omani Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr Albusaidi in Muscat, Oman, February 6, 2026. Photo: Omani Ministry of Foreign Affairs/ Handout via REUTERS/File Photo
Iran will strike US bases in the Middle East if it is attacked by US forces that have massed in the region, its foreign minister said on Saturday, insisting that this should not be seen as an attack on the countries hosting them.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi spoke to Qatari Al Jazeera TV a day after Tehran and Washington pledged to continue indirect nuclear talks following what both sides described as positive discussions on Friday in Oman.
While Araqchi said no date had yet been set for the next round of negotiations, US President Donald Trump said they could take place early next week. “We and Washington believe it should be held soon,” Araqchi said.
Trump has threatened to strike Iran after a US naval buildup in the region, demanding that it renounce uranium enrichment, a possible pathway to nuclear bombs, as well as stopping ballistic missile development and support for armed groups around the region. Tehran has long denied any intent to weaponize nuclear fuel production.
While both sides have indicated readiness to revive diplomacy over Tehran’s long-running nuclear dispute with the West, Araqchi balked at widening the talks out.
“Any dialogue requires refraining from threats and pressure. (Tehran) only discusses its nuclear issue … We do not discuss any other issue with the US,” he said.
Last June, the US bombed Iranian nuclear facilities, joining in the final stages of a 12-day Israeli bombing campaign. Tehran has since said it has halted uranium enrichment activity.
Its response at the time included a missile attack on a US base in Qatar, which maintains good relations with both Tehran and Washington.
In the event of a new US attack, Araqchi said the consequences could be similar.
“It would not be possible to attack American soil, but we will target their bases in the region,” he said.
“We will not attack neighboring countries; rather, we will target US bases stationed in them. There is a big difference between the two.”
Iran says it wants recognition of its right to enrich uranium, and that putting its missile program on the negotiating table would leave it vulnerable to Israeli attacks.
Uncategorized
My university wants me to sign a loyalty oath — am I in America or Vichy France?
As a historian of modern France, I have rarely seen a connection between my everyday life in my adopted state of Texas and my work on my adopted specialization: the period we call Vichy France. Apart from the Texan boast that the Lone Star Republic is bigger than the French Republic, and the small town of Paris, Texas, which boasts its own Eiffel Tower, I had no reason to compare the two places where I have spent more than half of my life.
Until now.
Last week, professors and instructors at the University of Houston received an unsettling memo from the administration, which asked us to sign a statement that we teach rather than “indoctrinate” our students.
Though the administration did not define “indoctrinate,” it hardly takes a PhD in English to read between the lines. Indoctrination is precisely what our state government has already forbidden us from doing in our classes. There must not be the slightest sign in our courses and curricula of references to diversity, identity and inclusion. The catch-all word used is “ideology,” a term Governor Greg Abbott recently invoked when he warned that “Texas is targeting professors who are more focused on pushing leftist ideologies rather than preparing students to lead our nation. We must end indoctrination.”
This is not the first time in the past several months that I have been reminded of what occurred in France during the four years that it was ruled by its German occupiers and Vichy collaborators.
Very briefly, with Germany’s rapid and complete defeat of France in 1940, an authoritarian, antisemitic and collaborationist regime assumed power. Among its first acts was to purge French Jews from all the professions, including high school and university faculties, and to impose an “oath of loyalty” to the person of Marshal Philippe Pétain, the elderly but ramrod straight and clear-headed hero of World War I.
The purpose of the oath was simple and straightforward: By demanding the fealty of all state employees to the person of Pétain, it also demanded their hostility to the secular and democratic values of the French republican tradition. Nevertheless, an overwhelming majority of teachers signed the oath —even the novelist and feminist Simone de Beauvoir, who needed her salary as a lycée teacher, as did the writer Jean Guéhenno, a visceral anti-Pétainist who continued to teach at the prestigious Paris lycée Henri IV until he was fired in 1943.
Vichy’s ministers of education understood the vital importance that schools and universities played in shaping citizens. Determined to replace the revolutionary values of liberty, equality and fraternity with the reactionary goals of family, work and homeland, they sought to eliminate “godless schools” and instill a “moral order” based on submission to state and church authorities. This radical experiment, powered by a reactionary ideology, to return France to the golden age of kings, cardinals and social castes came to an inglorious end with the Allied liberation of the country and collapse of Vichy scarcely four years after it had begun.
The French Jewish historian Marc Bloch — who joined the Resistance and sacrificed his life on behalf of a very different ideology we can call humanism — always insisted on the importance of comparative history. But comparison was important not because it identified similarities but because it illuminated differences. Clearly, the situation of professors at UH is very different from that of their French peers in Vichy France. We are not risking our jobs, much less our lives, by resisting this ham-handed effort to demand our loyalty to an anti-indoctrination memo.
But the two situations are not entirely dissimilar, either. Historians of fascism like Robert Paxton remind us that such movements begin slowly, then suddenly assume terrifying proportions. This was certainly the case in interwar France, where highly polarized politics, frequent political violence and a long history of antisemitism and anti-republicanism prepared the ground for Vichy. In France, Paxton writes, this slow, then sudden transformation “changed the practice of citizenship from the enjoyment of constitutional rights and duties to participation in mass ceremonies of affirmation and conformity.”
As an historian of France, I always thought its lurch into authoritarianism was shocking, but not surprising. After all, many of the elements for this change had existed well before 1940. But as a citizen of America, I am not just shocked, but also surprised by official demands for affirmation and conformity. One day I will find the time to think hard about my naiveté. But the time is now to think about how we should respond to these demands.
The post My university wants me to sign a loyalty oath — am I in America or Vichy France? appeared first on The Forward.