April 09, 2021
By BEN SALES
(JTA) — Tucker Carlson, a popular Fox News host, defended a white supremacist conspiracy theory on the cable network, spurring the head of the Anti-Defamation League to tweet “Tucker Must Go” and send a letter to Fox News saying he should be fired.
Appearing Thursday on “Fox News Primetime,” Carlson said Democrats are coordinating a “replacement” of current U.S. voters with immigrants from the “Third World.”
“I...
April 09, 2021
By RON KAMPEAS
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations are by their nature calls for accountability for atrocities past and present.
Antony Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, used the occasion to take his own department to task for its neglect of Jews during the Nazi era, and to call for action on behalf of the persecuted today.
Blinklen, delivering the keynote address Thursday at the event organized by...
April 09, 2021
(JTA) — Jewish and Arab-American are joining in support of a bipartisan bill in the House and Senate that would streamline the reporting of hate crimes.
The NO HATE bill introduced Thursday would train law enforcement across the country to report hate crimes according to a single standard.
Anti-defamation groups have long complained that assessing hate crimes in the United States is frustrated by wildly varying standards among police departments...
April 08, 2021
By BEN HARRIS
(JTA) — On the first weekend of the coronavirus lockdowns in New York City in March 2020, Rabbi Rachel Ain decided that her Conservative synagogue would conduct Shabbat services online over Zoom, the videoconferencing platform then still largely confined to the business world but soon to become a household word.
Doing so technically violated a 2001 decision by the Conservative movement’s Jewish law authority, which had voted...
April 08, 2021
By RON KAMPEAS
(JTA) — Daniel Cox, a Maryland Republican in the state legislature, said he would mark Yom Ha’Shoah, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, by voting against a bill that would allow children to consent to mental health care.
Cox said his mask had a picture from the Nuremberg trials printed on it, and compared the bill to the Nazis’ infringement on “the rights of parents.”
“One of the things...
April 08, 2021
By SHIRA HANAU
(JTA) — The editor-in-chief of the Jewish Press, a politically conservative Jewish newspaper based in Brooklyn that serves a primarily Orthodox audience, was identified as one of the rioters who breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
Elliot Resnick was identified in a video of the Capitol breach by an anonymous researcher and first reported by Politico.
Resnick later wrote about the Jan. 6 riot, which left...
April 06, 2021
(JTA) — Calling for a “kinder” civil society, Dr. Amy Acton, the Jewish Ohio Department of Health director who resigned last year after her pandemic shutdown orders sparked rage and an anti-Semitic backlash, said she was no longer considering a U.S. Senate run.
“I know many of us are tired of the vitriol and hate,” Acton, a Democrat, said in a release Tuesday announcing that she was no longer considering...
April 06, 2021
By ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL
(JTA) — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sat down for a public interview with a top New York City Jewish group, ending what some had considered a snub of Jewish leadership since the progressive New York Democrat’s election in 2019.
In her April 1 talk with Michael Miller, head of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, Ocasio-Cortez acknowledged that she hadn’t engaged with national and citywide Jewish...
April 02, 2021
by RON KAMPEAS
(JTA) — Iran and the United States will join talks in Vienna next week that aim to return all parties to the terms of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
There will not be direct contact between Iran and the United States at the in-person meeting, according to a European Union statement issued after a virtual meeting Thursday of the countries left in the deal — China, Russia,...
March 30, 2021
By RON KAMPEAS
WASHINGTON (JTA) — President Joe Biden’s State Department has revived the use of the term “occupied,” but with caveats noting Trump administration changes in policy.
In 2018, the State Department stripped “occupation” and “occupied” from the sections of its annual human rights report dealing with Israel and Palestinian areas at the behest of David Friedman, then-President Donald Trump’s ambassador, who has ties to the settlement movement. Under...
