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Israeli journalist’s allegation of discrimination on United flight comes amid inflamed tensions over gender segregation in Israel
(JTA) – An Israeli reporter is claiming that she was the victim of discrimination by haredi Orthodox men on a recent United Airlines flight to Newark — and that the Israeli flight attendant had sided with the men over her.
Neria Kraus’s account ricocheted across the internet while her plane was in the air. Competing accounts of what transpired and why soon emerged with other passengers claiming the reporter’s gender was never an issue and arguing that she had jumped to a conclusion based on a man’s religious head covering.
What’s clear is that Kraus, a U.S. correspondent for the Israeli TV network Channel 13, has initiated a new episode in a longstanding tension between religious and secular Jews, at a time when issues of gender segregation are returning to the fore in Israel.
The situation erupted on Tuesday, when Kraus tweeted while onboard a United flight from Tel Aviv to Newark that haredi Orthodox men had tried to pressure her to move seats, and that when she refused, a female flight attendant “shouted at me that the flight will not take off” if she did not comply.
“I was told the flight might touch down in Egypt and it would be my fault,” Kraus wrote as she posted a video of her arguing with passengers and crew. “What a humiliating event for me as a woman.” Kraus refused to move and the flight departed on time.
The account and subsequent social media frenzy came at a delicate moment, when incidents of sex-segregation in public accommodations within Israel, usually illegal, have magnified concerns about the right-wing government’s concessions to religious parties representing communities where sex segregation is the norm.
The country’s growing and politically powerful haredi Orthodox contingent enforces strict gender segregation within its own communities, and their political influence has extended to contested gender and modesty norms in other spaces including the Western Wall, public buses, beaches, college classes and trains.
Israel’s top court has typically ruled against gender segregation in public settings. But in recent months, as Israel’s right-wing governing coalition, which includes two haredi parties and few women lawmakers, has pressed forward with legislation that would sap the judiciary’s power, the country’s press has been rife with reports of activities that flout the law. One Orthodox municipality plans to hold a gender-segregated public concert despite three legal rulings against it; another community adopted sex-segregated swimming hours at a public spring. Multiple women say they have been denied transportation on public buses because of what they were wearing.
“You live in a Jewish state and you should respect the people living here,” a driver told teenaged girls as he ordered them to the back of a bus in one incident, according to a video obtained by Israeli news outlets, adding, “When you get on a bus where there are religious and ultra-Orthodox people who respect your way of life, you should respect theirs.” An Israeli protest group that has frequently staged demonstrations wearing outfits from “The Handmaid’s Tale” filed an incitement complaint over the incident.
United is not an Israeli company, and it is not bound by Israeli laws. Still, the incident on the flight filled with Israeli and U.S. Jews triggered associations with the contemporary climate in Israeli, Kraus told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“There have been a few events in the past days or weeks of trying to tell women to sit on the back of the bus, or not allowing women to get on a bus. So I think this is a situation in Israeli society that Israelis really care about,” Kraus said. “I didn’t think that it would get so much exposure, but it did, and a lot of women are writing me, ‘Thank you for talking in our names.’”
The long-term takeaways from the incident involving Kraus remain as uncertain as what actually happened on the plane.
As attention to the incident grew, competing accounts emerged. A “guerrilla” journalist in New York, Daniel Amram, published an interview late Tuesday with Nigel, a Brooklyn man who appears in Kraus’s initial photo and claimed to have been the person who first asked her to change seats. Nigel, who wears a kippah but not any other signifiers of haredi identity, said he had asked her to move only so that his son and his friend could sit next to each other. He told Amram that he dropped the request when she refused.
“I said, ‘Do you mind switching? It’s the same aisle seat,’” the man recalled. After he removed his cap to reveal his kippah, he told Amram, “She started screaming, ‘It’s because I’m a woman, you want me to move. She started screaming, ‘Discrimination, discrimination!”’
The man further claimed that the flight attendant had threatened to cancel the flight after hearing Kraus allege discrimination. The Orthodox travel site DansDeals also spoke to Nigel and claimed Kraus had exaggerated her account of the flight.
The next day, Kraus continued to defend her interpretation of events, tweeting an interview with a man who she claimed was a fellow flight attendant on the plane. In the video, the man indicated that he concurred that the seating request had been an act of discrimination.
“You have a problem sitting next to a female, you should take a different flight — go fly El Al, we don’t care,” he told the man, referencing the Israeli airline sued for acquiescing to haredi Orthodox men’s demands to move women away from them and ordered by an Israeli judge to stop.
“Everything I said is true. Everything else is lies,” Kraus tweeted. However, the man in the video does not address Kraus’ allegation that the United flight attendant “started yelling at me.”
Kraus told JTA that she still believes she had been asked to move because the men did not want to sit next to a woman, and disputed details of Nigel’s account. At the same time, she walked back her criticism of the flight attendant, saying, “I don’t want to see anyone losing their jobs because of this.”
United’s response was as muddied as anyone else’s. The plane was still in the air when the company issued a non-committal statement to JTA: “We offered the customer another seat — which was declined — the flight departed for New York/Newark and is expected to arrive on time.”
Thirty minutes later, United publicly tweeted an apology to Kraus, writing, “We deeply apologize for this interaction and would like to look into this further.” Kraus also told JTA the flight attendants had apologized to her during the flight.
She told JTA that she did not want to speculate about why her story went so viral. But she acknowledged that sex segregation has been in the news in Israel. “People really care about it,” she said. “I think this is the issue.”
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The post Israeli journalist’s allegation of discrimination on United flight comes amid inflamed tensions over gender segregation in Israel appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Hamas Frees Three Hostages, Israel Begins Releasing Palestinians
Released hostage Or Levy, Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan, February 8, 2025. Photo: Haim Zach/GPO/Handout via REUTERS
Palestinian terrorist group Hamas on Saturday handed over three Israeli hostages whose gaunt appearance shocked Israelis, and Israel began freeing dozens of Palestinians in the latest stage of a ceasefire aimed at ending the war in Gaza.
Ohad Ben Ami and Eli Sharabi, who were taken hostage from Kibbutz Be’eri during the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, and Or Levy, who was abducted that day from the Nova music festival, were led onto a Hamas podium by gunmen.
The three men appeared thin, weak and pale, in worse condition than the 18 other hostages already freed under the truce agreed in January after 15 months of war.
“He looked like a skeleton, it was awful to see,” Ohad Ben Ami’s mother-in-law, Michal Cohen, told Channel 13 News as she watched the Hamas-directed handover ceremony, which included the hostages answering questions posed by a masked man as militants armed with automatic rifles stood on each side.
In another show of force by Hamas, which has paraded fighters during previous releases, dozens of its terrorists deployed in central Gaza as it handed hostages over to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The hostages were then driven in ICRC cars to Israeli forces and into Israel, where they had tearful reunions with family members, and flown to hospitals. “We missed you so much,” the mother of Or Levy, Geula, said as she hugged her son.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the sight of the frail hostages was shocking and would be addressed.
Israel’s President Isaac Herzog described the release ceremony as cynical and vicious. “This is what a crime against humanity looks like,” he said.
The Hostage Families Forum said the images of the hostages evoked images of survivors of Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. “We have to get ALL THE HOSTAGES out of hell,” it said.
In exchange for the hostages’ release, Israel was freeing 183 Palestinian prisoners, some convicted of involvement in attacks that killed dozens of people, as well as 111 detained in Gaza during the war.
Cheering crowds greeted the buses as they arrived in Gaza, embracing the freed detainees, some of them weeping with joy and tearing prison-issued bracelets off their wrists.
Among those freed in Ramallah, in the West Bank, was Eyad Abu Shkaidem, sentenced to 18 life terms in Israel for masterminding suicide attacks in revenge for Israel’s 2004 assassinations of Hamas leaders.
“Today, I am reborn,” Shkaidem told reporters as the crowd cheered.
The Palestinian Red Crescent medical service said six of the 42 released in the West Bank were in poor health and were taken to hospital. Some prisoners complained of ill-treatment. “The occupation humiliated us for over a year,” said Shkaidem.
PAINFUL RETURN
Some hostages face a painful return. Sharabi’s two teenage daughters and his British-born wife were slain in the Hamas attack on Kibbutz Be’eri, where one in 10 residents was killed.
Israel’s Channel 12 said Sharabi had not been told about their deaths and asked where they were when he arrived.
Levy will be reunited with his three-year-old son. His wife was killed in the attack.
Dr Hagar Mizrachi from Israel’s Ichilov Hospital said the hostages exhibited severe weight loss and malnutrition.
Sixteen Israeli and five Thai hostages have been released so far and 583 Palestinian prisoners and detainees have been freed.
The first 42-day phase of the ceasefire, mediated by Washington, Cairo and Doha, has largely held since it took effect on January 19.
Netanyahu sent a delegation for talks in Doha on Saturday, Israel’s Channel 12 reported, citing a political source.
Concern the deal might collapse before all remaining 76 hostages are free has grown since President Donald Trump’s surprise call for Palestinians to be moved from Gaza and for the enclave to be handed to the United States and developed into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Arab states and Palestinian groups have rejected Trump’s proposal, which critics said would amount to ethnic cleansing. Hamas said on Saturday its armed display at the hostage handover showed it could not be excluded from post-war Gaza arrangements.
Netanyahu welcomed Trump’s intervention and his defense minister has ordered the military to make plans to allow Palestinians who wish to leave Gaza to do so.
Under the ceasefire deal, 33 Israeli children, women and sick, wounded and older men are to be released during the first stage in exchange for almost 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees.
Negotiations on a second phase began this week aimed at returning the remaining hostages and agreeing on a full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza in preparation for a final end to the war.
Hamas-led terrorists killed some 1,200 people and seizing more than 250 as hostages in the October 7, 2023 attack.
The post Hamas Frees Three Hostages, Israel Begins Releasing Palestinians first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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‘F—k the Jew, F—k the Zionist’: Former CAIR Director Launches Antisemitic Tirade in Manhattan
Noora Shalash confronting Jewish men in New York City. Photo: Screenshot
A former senior employee of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) was caught on camera launching a profane and antisemitic tirade at Jewish men in New York City in a viral video posted to social media on Thursday.
Noora Shalash, who previously worked as the director of government affairs for CAIR’s Kentucky branch, was confronted by an individual in an office building after allegedly harassing a “visibly Jewish man.” After being grilled for her alleged conduct, Shalash then went on an antisemitic diatribe.
“F—k the Jew. F—k the Zionist,” Shalash said.
Shalash then said that she “loves Jesus” and claimed Jews “dishonor the Virgin Mary and call her a ‘whore.’” She also called the man recording the video a “b—ch” and swiped her hand at his cellphone. A security guard intervened and physically pulled Shalash away while she appeared to continue attempting to assault the man.
“This is what Jews have to deal with in New York City,” the man said.
Midtown Manhattan – crazed antisemite assaults a visible Jew and gets arrested.
“F*ck the Jew … f*ck the Zionists” she says confidently. pic.twitter.com/EdmTR2UzWg
— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) February 7, 2025
The video, which was obtained and posted on X/Twitter by the watchdog group StopAntisemitism, quickly went viral on social media, gaining nearly 600,000 views within 16 hours.
CAIR National responded to the viral incident, claiming that Shalash had not been employed by the organization for five years and currently has “no other role at our civil rights group.”
“We condemn and reject the antisemitic comments in the video, just as we condemn and reject the anti-Palestinian racism and anti-Muslim hate,” the organization added.
A picture circulated on social media showing CAIR identifying Shalash as a senior official as of October 2020.
PHOTO: CAIR-KY met with #Kentucky Senate Pres Robert Stivers. Representing CAIR-KY were CAIR-KY Board members: Dr. Salah Shakir, Dr. Nadia Rasheed, Dr. Dina Rasheed, Noora Shalash (CAIR-KY Dir Gov Affairs) Sen. Reginald Thomas attended @kysenatepres @BGPolitics @tweet2waheedah pic.twitter.com/YtYGH7z8V3
— CAIR National (@CAIRNational) October 1, 2020
CAIR has long been a controversial organization. In the 2000s, the organization was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case. Politico noted in 2010 that “US District Court Judge Jorge Solis found that the government presented ‘ample evidence to establish the association’” of CAIR with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “some of CAIR’s current leadership had early connections with organizations that are or were affiliated with Hamas.” CAIR has disputed the accuracy of the ADL’s claim and asserted that it “unequivocally condemn[s] all acts of terrorism, whether carried out by al-Qa’ida, the Real IRA, FARC, Hamas, ETA, or any other group designated by the US Department of State as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization.’”
CAIR leaders have also found themselves embroiled in further controversy since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The head of CAIR, for example, said he was “happy” to witness Hamas’s rampage of rape, murder, and kidnapping of Israelis in what was the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
“The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege — the walls of the concentration camp — on Oct. 7,” CAIR co-founder and executive director Nihad Awad said in a speech during the American Muslims for Palestine convention in Chicago last November. “And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land, and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in.”
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New ‘Gaza Encampment’ Hits Bowdoin College
Anti-Zionist Bowdoin College students storming the Smith Union administrative building on the evening of February 6, 2025 to occupy it in protest of what they said are the college’s links to Israel. Photo: Screenshot
“Gaza Solidarity Encampments” returned to American higher education on Thursday with the capture and occupation of an administrative building at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine by the group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).
According to the Bowdoin Orient, the campus newspaper, SJP stormed Smith Union and installed its encampment on Thursday night in response to US President Donald Trump’s proposing that the US “take over” the Gaza Strip and transform it into a hub for tourism and economic dynamism. The roughly 50 students residing inside the building have vowed not to leave until the Bowdoin officials agree to adopt the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
“President Trump’s recent statement suggests a potential endorsement on Israel’s annexation of the West Bank, a move that threatens the rights and aspirations of the Palestinian people and undermines the prospect for a just and lasting peace,” SJP leader Yusur Jasmin said during a speech delivered to the students, who are breaking multiple school rules to hold the demonstration.
Following the action, Bowdoin officials promptly moved to deescalate the situation by counseling the students to mind the “gravity of situation” in which they placed themselves, with senior associate dean Katie Toro-Ferrari warning that their behavior “could put them on the path where they are jeopardizing their ability to remain as Bowdoin students.” However, the Orient said the students continued to flood Smith Union anyway. One student, Olivia Kenney, proclaimed that “Bowdoin does not know how to handle us right now.”
Bowdoin has not conceded the fight to gain control of Smith Union. On Friday, the Orient said it ordered security to declare the building closed for the day and to deny access to all who attempt to enter it, including Orient reporters seeking interviews with the occupiers. The directive has so far blocked entry to over a dozen students who approached its doors on Friday while chanting “This institution does not scare us. To the security, you do not scare us.” The school has also stated unequivocally that refusing to end the demonstration will prompt a “disciplinary process,” the paper added.
“The demonstration that began on our campus on Feb. 6 is in clear violation of our policies, and those students who are participating will be subject to the disciplinary process. Bowdoin’s priority is to ensure that all our students, faculty, and staff feel safe and welcome on campus,” Bowdoin College told The Algemeiner on Friday in a statement.
No college or university has seen the successful establishment of a “Gaza Solidarity Encampments,” since the conclusion of the spring semester of the 2023-2024 academic school year, when anti-Zionists across the US commandeered school property and vowed to maintain control of them until school officials agreed to boycott and divest from Israel, a measure they said would signal disapproval of Israel’s prosecution of its war to eradicate Hamas from Gaza. Several attempts to do so this academic year were undertaken at the University of California, Los Angeles and Sarah Lawrence College, as well as the University of Cambridge and Munich University in Europe, but those endeavors were short lived.
Bowdoin’s encampment, equipped with tents and provisions to support an extended stay inside Smith Union, seems to be modeled directly on those which emerged last year and could be just as difficult to uproot. Some schools, such as Stanford University, failed to negotiate an end their encampments for as many as 120 days. How Bowdoin moves forward will be an early example of how college officials plan to operate in new political and legal parameters set by Trump’s second administration, which has vowed to quell campus unrest.
On Friday the National Association of Scholars, which published in 2013 a groundbreaking study — titled, What Does Bowdoin Teach? — of scholar-activism at Bowdoin College and has been a vocal critic of the anti-Zionist campus movement, called on school officials to restore order and uphold “the core mission of liberal arts education.”
It continued, “We urge Bowdoin College to reaffirm its dedication to a balanced liberal arts education by maintaining an environment where academic inquiry prevails over political activism. By doing so, the college can uphold its responsibility to educate students who are well-equipped to engage thoughtfully and constructively in civic life.”
Bowdoin College is not the only higher education institution that has been convulsed by anti-Israel activity this semester.
Columbia University was a victim of infrastructural sabotage last month, when an extremist anti-Zionist group flooded the toilets of an academic building with concrete to mark the anniversary of an alleged killing of a Palestinian child. The targeted facilities were located on several floors of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), according to Keren Yarhi-Milo, dean of the school, who addressed the matter, calling the behavior “deplorable, disruptive, and deeply unsettling, as our campus is a space we cherish for learning teaching, and working, and it will not be tolerated.”
Numerous reports indicate the attack may be the premeditated result of planning sessions which took place many months ago at an event held by Alpha Delta Phi (ADP) — a literary society, according to the Washington Free Beacon. During the event, the Free Beacon reported, ADP distributed literature dedicated to “aspiring revolutionaries” who wish to commit seditious acts. Additionally, a presentation was given in which complete instructions for the exact kind of attack which struck Columbia on Wednesday were shared with students.
Republicans in Washington, DC have said that such behavior “will no longer be tolerated in the Trump administration.” Meanwhile, the new president has enacted a slew of policies aimed at reining in disruptive and discriminatory behavior.
Continuing work started started during his first administration — when Trump issued Executive Order 13899 to ensure that civil rights law apply equally Jews — Trump’s recent “Additional Measures to Combat Antisemitism” calls for “using all appropriate legal tools to prosecute, remove, or otherwise … hold to account perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.” The order also requires each government agency to write a report explaining how it can be of help in carrying out its enforcement. Another major provision of the order calls for the deportation of extremist “alien” student activists, whose support for terrorist organizations, intellectual and material, such as Hamas contributed to fostering antisemitism, violence, and property destruction.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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