World News

WASHINGTON (JTA) — The U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to congratulate Israel on its 75th birthday and to wish it well in making peace with other countries. But the encouragement of peace deals did not extend to the Palestinians, in a breach with the language typical of U.S. lawmakers’ past Israeli Independence Day resolutions…

(JTA) — The English Premier League club Arsenal has launched a new fan affiliate group called the “Jewish Gooners,” as part of its plan to address recent incidents of antisemitism. The club also announced that it had banned 31 fans for three years each over “abusive and discriminatory behaviour since the start of the 2021/22…

TEL AVIV (JTA) — Avigail Arnheim has been protesting Benjamin Netanyahu for years, starting with the demonstrations in Jerusalem that began in 2020, calling on him to resign as Israel’s prime minister. When Netanyahu returned to office in December, Arnheim again took to the streets — this time to protest Netanyahu’s attempt to sap the Israeli…

(JTA) — As many as 50,000 Jews traveled to a Hungarian town for the anniversary of a noted rabbi’s death this week, marking significant growth for the annual pilgrimage and generating what the town’s mayor called “culture shock” for non-Jewish locals. Since the fall of communism in 1989, Jewish pilgrims have been visiting Bodrogkeresztur, known…

(JTA) — Frankfurt’s administrative court ruled that the city can’t cancel a Roger Waters concert after calling him “one of the most widely known antisemites in the world.” Waters, the former frontman of the band Pink Floyd, took legal action and prevailed on Tuesday after Frankfurt officials said in February they would cancel his concert…

(New York Jewish Week) — Barrier-smashing singer, actor and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte, who once boasted of being “the most popular Jew in America” because of his rendition of a Hebrew classic, died Tuesday at his longtime Upper West Side home. He was 96. The New York City native was the one of the…

(JTA) — Beginner and intermediate Talmud courses are back on the course schedule for undergraduate students at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women, after an uproar over their cancellation. Stern College administrators had said the school would not offer beginning and intermediate Talmud — courses about a foundational Jewish text for women at the country’s flagship…

TEL AVIV (JTA) — In an unusual politicization of Israel’s Memorial Day on Tuesday, several senior Israeli government officials faced protests at ceremonies commemorating fallen soldiers. The tensions unfolded as an Israeli was wounded in a shooting in the West Bank, and after five people were wounded in a car ramming Monday at Jerusalem’s Mahane…

(JTA) — This week marks Yom Haatzmaut, our beloved Israel’s 75th birthday — the day on the Hebrew calendar when David Ben-Gurion proclaimed “the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate” by establishing a Jewish state in the land of Israel. Together with countless Jews around the world, we…

(JTA) — Sofia Richie, a model and the daughter of musician Lionel Richie, married Jewish music executive Elliot Grainge on Saturday, less than a month after she said she completed her conversion to Judaism. Earlier this month, Richie had posted on Instagram that Nathan Lam, a prominent Los Angeles cantor, had been “helping me along…