World News

(New York Jewish Week) — Three state lawmakers are asking if Yeshiva University misrepresented itself as a secular institution in order to qualify for more than $230 million in public funds. Their letter demanding a full accounting from the Modern Orthodox flagship is the latest twist in the university’s attempts to block an LGBT student…

(New York Jewish Week) — When a fire devastated the Middle Collegiate Church in the East Village two years ago, East End Temple, a nearby Reform synagogue, welcomed church-goers to worship in their sanctuary. Since then, a relationship has blossomed between the synagogue and the church, which has remained homeless due to the six-alarm fire that…

WASHINGTON (JTA) –Republican Party officials in Rep. George Santos’ Long Island district called on the serial fabricator to quit, citing among other lies his claims to Jewish and Holocaust heritage. The call Wednesday by officials of the Nassau County Republican party was significant because the Republican majority in the U.S. House of representatives is precarious…

(JTA) — Steven Spielberg said he was the sixth-happiest person in the world after he won best director at this year’s Golden Globes awards for “The Fabelmans,” his autobiographical film about his Jewish family. “I think … there’s five people happier than I am,” he said in his acceptance speech, which he said he had…

(JTA) — Adolfo Kaminsky, the French-Jewish photographer, forger, smuggler and resistance fighter who saved thousands of people during the Holocaust as part of the French underground, died at 97 in his home in Paris on Monday. Kaminsky’s improbable and heroic story was detailed in a book by his daughter, written in his voice, and in…

(JTA) — An exodus of Jews from Russia since President Vladimir Putin invaded neighboring Ukraine has drawn widespread attention over the last year. But according to statistics released recently by Russia’s official statistics bureau, the country’s Jewish population had fallen sharply long before the tanks began rolling. The statistics, published last month by Russia’s Federal…

(New York Jewish Week) — A revival of “Parade,” a musical about the 1915 lynching of Jewish factory manager Leo Frank, will arrive on Broadway this spring, following a successful seven-performance run last November.  Ben Platt, the Jewish Tony-award winning actor who originated the title role in the Broadway hit “Dear Evan Hansen,” will star…

WASHINGTON (JTA) — With a new right-wing government in Israel raising alarm bells among many in the United States, the timing seemed ripe for a gathering by AIPAC, which regularly convenes bigwigs to talk about the U.S.-Israel relationship. But the group’s conference this week in Washington is focusing not on that relationship but on American…

(New York Jewish Week) — In 2017, Deborah Veach went back to Germany, looking for the site of the displaced persons camp where she and her parents had been housed after World War II. They were in suspension, between the lives her parents led in Belarus before they were shattered by the Nazis, and the…

(JTA) – As Israel’s new right-wing government continued to signal that it would push through measures to cripple the judiciary and clamp down on public dissent and news operations, thousands of citizens took to the streets in protest and one prominent opposition figure warned of imminent “civil war.” A reported 10,000 demonstrators gathered Saturday night…