World News

(New York Jewish Week) – International Holocaust Remembrance Day is on Friday, marking 78 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp. In commemoration of this day, there are numerous events across the city to remember victims and honor survivors of the genocide. The United Nations designated International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2005…

(JTA) — Last summer, in the days after the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that protected the right to an abortion, Paula Eiselt was doing press work for her acclaimed documentary “Aftershock.” The film — which documents how the American healthcare system disproportionately fails to keep women of color…

(JTA) — David Bowie, Greta Garbo and Sean Connery were not Jewish. But some of the garments they made famous — Bowie’s dresses, Garbo’s hats and the tuxedo Connery donned as James Bond — all had Jewish creators. A London Museum is trying to gather some of those pieces of clothing for an exhibit on…

(New York Jewish Week) — The head of North American’s largest Jewish federation made the rare step of criticizing proposed legislation by Israel’s government and “imploring” its prime minister to shelve it. In an email sent Friday to supporters of the UJA-Federation of New York, its CEO, Eric Goldstein, wrote that he is “alarmed” by…

When Yad Vashem was created in 1953 on the slopes of Jerusalem’s Mount of Remembrance to commemorate the Holocaust, its founders understood that one of the central functions of the institution would be to document the names of the 6 million Jewish victims. It was seen as a moral imperative: to demonstrate that behind the…

(Houston Jewish Herald Voice and JTA) — A Houston synagogue is shoring up its security practices after a woman who said she was motivated to vandalize it by Messianic beliefs entered without being detected. Ezra Law broke into Congregation Emanu El in the early hours of Jan. 14, causing damage to both the building and…

(JTA) — Grigory Kanovich, a Lithuanian-born Jew and award winning author who endeavored to tell the story of his people despite Soviet pressure, died on Friday at 93 in his home in Tel Aviv. Kanovich’s repertoire includes more than 30 plays and screenplays, a dozen novels and several collections of poems and short stories, almost…

(New York Jewish Week) — More than a dozen songs written by Jews imprisoned in concentration camps and ghettos during the Holocaust will be brought to life at Carnegie Hall next week as part of a commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Featuring Broadway bigwigs and performers such as Harvey Fierstein, Chita Rivera, Mikhl Yashinsky…

(JTA) — Days after his first chief of staff announced that he would step down, President Joe Biden has announced a replacement: another Jewish advisor, this time an investor in a popular Washington, D.C., Jewish deli. Jeff Zients, led the Biden administration’s COVID-19 response from 2021 to 2022. He had previously held multiple positions in…

(JTA) — Eric Alterman, born in 1960, says the view of Israel he absorbed growing up in a Jewish family in suburban Scarsdale, New York, was decidedly one-sided.  “I went on this nerdy presidential classroom thing when I was in high school,” he recalls, “and some Christian kid from the South raised his hand and…