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Raphael Mechoulam, Israel’s ‘father of cannabis research,’ dies at 92
(JTA) — In the early 1960s, a Bulgarian-born scientist named Raphael Mechoulam was caught carrying five kilograms of, as he called it, “superb, smuggled Lebanese hashish” on a bus from Tel Aviv to Rehovot. But he wasn’t planning on smoking the stuff.
Mechoulam was a fledgling researcher keen on exploring the science behind cannabis, a stigmatized plant whose specific medical properties were not yet known. Over the decades he became a pioneer in cannabis research, whose findings about the psychoactive substance helped ease its entry out of the counterculture and into the mainstream.
Mechoulam died in Israel at age 92; his death was announced Friday by American Friends of the Hebrew University, where Mechoulam helped form The Hebrew University Multidisciplinary Center for Cannabinoid Research in 2017.
“Most of the human and scientific knowledge about cannabis was accumulated thanks to Prof. Mechoulam,” Hebrew University President Asher Cohen said in a statement. “He paved the way for groundbreaking studies and initiated scientific cooperation between researchers around the world. Mechoulam was a sharp-minded and charismatic pioneer.”
As a professor in the Hebrew University School of Pharmacy, Mechoulam and his research team isolated THC, the psychoactive component of cannabis, as well as cannabidiol, or CBD, an active ingredient in cannabis with a range of medicinal benefits.
He also pioneered the study of the body’s own cannabinoid system, which produces chemicals similar to THC to help regulate appetite, manage pain and operate the immune system.
As Mechoulam discovered more about cannabis and its efficacy in easing symptoms of cancer, epilepsy and other diseases, he lamented that strict drug laws in the United States and elsewhere suppressed research and kept the derivatives of cannabis off the market.
“Medicinal cannabis has to follow medical lines of thought and development and modern medical routes” in order to be part of proper drugs, he told the New York Times in 2017. “Israel has more [clinical trials] than the United States at the moment, which is ridiculous.”
Mechoulam was a founding member of the International Association for Cannabinoid Medicines and the International Cannabinoid Research Society. In 1994, he was elected to be a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Mechoulam was born in Bulgaria in 1930 and immigrated in 1949 with his family to Israel, where he later studied chemistry. He received his PhD at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, writing a thesis on the chemistry of steroids. After postdoctoral studies at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, he joined the scientific staff of the Weizmann Institute.
Mechoulam became a full professor at Hebrew University in 1972 and was named the Lionel Jacobson Professor of Medicinal Chemistry in 1975, serving as the university’s rector from 1979-1982.
In 2022, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City mounted its exhibition on Jewish contributions to the history of cannabis and highlighted the work of Mechoulam. “He’s worked on cannabis his entire life, and in the 1990s he and his colleagues discovered the endocannabinoid system, which regulates homeostasis — a significant discovery on how the human body deals with cannabinoids,” Eddy Portnoy, who curated the exhibit, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency at the time. “I read an interview with him where he says that because he was in a small country, he would have to find a niche that other people weren’t working in.”
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UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage
A campus event featuring freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov drew the condemnation of UCLA’s student government on Tuesday. In an open letter, the UCLA Students Associated Council said that bringing Tov to speak to students “served to legitimize and normalize” atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Shem Tov, 23, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza until his release in a prisoner exchange in February 2025. UCLA hosted him on April 14 for a Yom HaShoah event.
“While we affirm the humanity of all people impacted by violence, we reject the selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence,” the student government letter wrote in the letter, which was addressed to the UCLA administration and UCLA Hillel among others. “Israel is currently continuing to carry out what has been widely identified by human rights advocates as a genocide in Gaza, while also expanding its illegal military campaign into Lebanon.
“In this context, elevating a single narrative, absent of critical political and humanitarian framing, serves to legitimize and normalize these ongoing atrocities.”
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel’s director emeritus, called the statement “completely ridiculous.”
“You can’t present the narrative of your experience without it being called ‘one sided,’” Seidler-Feller said. “There has to be a counter-story to persecution. Is there a counter-story to killing people?”
UCLA Hillel executive director Daniel Gold dismissed the criticism in Tuesday’s letter as antisemitic.
“Hillel at UCLA and Students Supporting Israel UCLA would like to apologize…for absolutely nothing,” he wrote in a statement. “Members of UCLA student government have once again shown they are anti-dialogue, anti-learning, anti-truth, anti-student and antisemitic.”
The USAC did not respond to a request for comment.
As college campuses across the country became a hotspot for pro-Palestinian activism following the Oct. 7 attack, UCLA, with an activist history and a large Jewish population, stood out as a major flashpoint. Its student encampment was the site of a riot in April 2024 and eventually cleared by police in riot gear.
The USAC has sided with pro-Palestinian protesters throughout. In a Feb. 2025 letter titled “We Are All SJP,” the USAC, which is democratically elected by the roughly 30,000-member UCLA student body, condemned Chancellor Julio Frenk’s suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine. The letter referred to Israel only as “the Zionist state” or put the country’s name inside quotation marks.
The University of California has since been sued by the Department of Justice, which said that UCLA created a hostile work environment against Jewish and Israeli faculty in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
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Trump extends ceasefire with Iran, even after Iran balks at new round of negotiations
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he would unilaterally extend the U.S.-Israeli ceasefire with Iran, even though Iran had not agreed to his conditions or even to return to the negotiating table.
Trump announced the decision on Truth Social just hours before the two-week-old deal was set to expire. Citing Iran’s “fractured” leadership, Trump wrote that he had been asked by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to “hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”
Vice President JD Vance’s planned trip to Islamabad, where talks were set to take place, was postponed indefinitely after Iran failed to confirm its participation in negotiations.
Trump added that the United States would maintain its naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, despite Iran’s repeated calls for the restrictions to be lifted.
The announcement marked a sharp departure from the president’s statements earlier in the day, telling CNBC that, if a deal was not made before the deadline, “I expect to be bombing.”
In a statement Tuesday, Sharif thanked Trump for his “gracious acceptance” of Pakistan’s request to extend the ceasefire, adding that the country would “continue its earnest efforts for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.”
The announcement adds to uncertain about the war’s future, including for Israelis who lived through six weeks of Iranian bombing, and renews questions about Trump’s commitment to achieving his war goals, which have varied and included blunting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, achieving regime change, and destroying Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles. He said earlier this week that he was asking Iran to limit its nuclear program for 20 years, five years longer than was required by the deal struck by Barack Obama in 2015. Trump exited that deal in 2018.
Last week, Trump announced a different ceasefire, between Israel and Lebanon, on Truth Social, contradicting Israel’s claim that the Iran ceasefire would not apply to its fighting with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed proxy in Lebanon.
Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire extension came during the night in Israel, after Israelis began their celebration of Independence Day. It drew criticism from one of his staunchest pro-Israel supporters, the Zionist Organization of America, whose national president Morton Klein said in a statement that “interminable delay is the standard Islamic Iranian regime negotiating tactic” and that acceding to it represented a victory for Iran. The statement did not mention Trump.
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Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’
(JTA) — Alan Dershowitz, the prominent pro-Israel attorney whose clients have included Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, announced on Monday that he was leaving the Democratic party and registering as a Republican.
Describing himself as a “lifelong Democrat,” Dershowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had decided to “bite the bullet and register as a Republican,” citing Democratic support for an arms embargo on Israel last week and the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric.
“There is no denying that the hard left, anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party has moved from the fringe to the mainstream,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that “Republicans have their own antisemitic fringe, but for now it remains a fringe.”
The announcement formalized a political evolution for Dershowitz, who defended Trump during his first impeachment and has increasingly broken with Democrats over Israel in recent years.
In 2021, Dershowitz nominated Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Avi Berkowitz, Trump’s top Middle Eastern envoy during his first administration, for the Nobel Peace Prize over their hand in shaping the Abraham Accords.
Dershowitz — who has recently faced scrutiny over his ties to Epstein, and previously denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by one of Epstein’s accusers — panned the Democratic Party as the “most anti-Israel party in U.S. history” in the op-ed.
“I believe that the Democratic Party’s hostility to Israel represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the center and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that he intended to “work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate.”
Dershowitz’s comments are in line with Trump’s statements about Jews and the Democratic Party. He has repeatedly expressed amazement at how any Jews could vote for the Democrats considering his own record when it comes to Israel.
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