American Jewish World

10/01/2025

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10/01/2025

Upcoming this month at Mount Zion Temple: "Defining Antisemitism: A Panel Discussion on When Criticism of Israel Becomes Antisemitism"

Sunday, Jan. 26 at 10:00 am - 11:30 am

10/01/2025

Attention, snowbirds in Florida: Paris Chansons has shows this weekend. (Notice for Boca show in comments.)

Julia Postolov Kantor

Inviting you to an unforgettable night of French music with an Eastern European gypsy twist!

10/01/2025

obsessive A.J. Weberman shares his thoughts on "A Complete Undknown."

"It sucked," says the notorious Jewish writer and gadfly, who has lots of theories on just about everything.

09/01/2025

Trump will not be president for another 12 days, but he’s already creating chaos in US foreign relations.

NBC News:
European leaders expressed their confusion and pushed back Wednesday against President-elect Donald Trump's refusal to rule out using military force to take over Greenland.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told reporters in Berlin on Wednesday that the leaders of the nations of the European Union would not tolerate the violation of the Danish territory's borders, the sovereignty of which is a principle of international law.

Whether serious or not, Trump's remarks that he wants to buy or seize Greenland from Denmark could do lasting damage to transatlantic relations, experts say.

08/01/2025

The Forward:
Cantor Ruth Berman Harris searched for her husband through the thick smoke that engulfed the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center. Laurence Harris had been beside her just moments before, but now, as flames closed in and the air grew heavier, he was nowhere in sight.

“Do you have the Torahs?” she shouted, her voice slicing through the chaos, trying to find him amid the suffocating darkness.

And then, there he was. Emerging through the smoke, almost surreal in his calm, carrying one of the synagogue’s 13 Torahs — a Sephardic scroll, heavier than the rest, encased in silver etched with the patterns of a long-lost homeland. It had been donated by a congregant who fled Iran, a piece of history held in trembling hands.

The Pasadena Jewish Center rescued 13 Torahs from the Palisades fire but the temple and campus were destroyed.

08/01/2025

JTA News:
A memorial to Jews deported from the Warsaw Ghetto was defaced with graffiti appearing to equate the Holocaust with the war in Gaza.

The graffiti makes Warsaw’s Umschlagplatz memorial the latest of a string of Holocaust monuments to be vandalized with anti-Israel messages.

The marble structure commemorates the spot where hundreds of thousands of Jews were assembled before being deported to concentration camps in 1942 and 1943. The red graffiti says “Warsaw 1943 = Gaza 2025,” and was written beneath a quote from the biblical book of Job in Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish reading, “Earth, do not cover my blood; let there be no resting place for my outcry.”

The graffiti echoes the claim made by pro-Palestinian activists that Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza constitutes a genocide, an accusation Israel vigorously denies. On Tuesday, Yacov Livne, Israel’s ambassador in Poland, decried the graffiti.

The red graffiti says "Warsaw 1943 = Gaza 2025," and was written beneath a quote from the book of Job.

08/01/2025

California wildfires destroy shuls.

The Forward:
LOS ANGELES — The wildfires ripping through the Los Angeles area Tuesday destroyed at least one synagogue and had other local Jewish leaders wondering if their spiritual homes would still be standing in the morning.

The Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center, a Conservative synagogue whose campus dates back to the 1920s, was among the hundreds of structures ravaged by the Eaton Fire overnight. The main sanctuary could be seen on live television engulfed in flames, stunning news reporters and onlookers.

Fueled by roaring winds, the fires began Tuesday morning in the Pacific Palisades, a tony coastal suburb that is home to a large Jewish population and at least two synagogues: Kehillat Israel, which is Reconstructionist, and Chabad of Pacific Palisades.

The Pacific Palisades fire in Los Angeles and Pasadena, California has destroyed one synagogue and is threatening two others and many homes.

08/01/2025

JTA News:
Peter Yarrow, one-third of the hit-making 1960s folk group Peter, Paul and Mary, and a Jewish activist who promoted Israeli-Palestinian coexistence and other progressive causes, died Tuesday at age 86.

The longtime resident of Manhattan’s Upper West Side entered hospice last month. The cause of death was bladder cancer.

Yarrow was a Cornell graduate playing in Greenwich Village clubs during the early 1960s folk revival when manager and musical impresario Albert Grossman, who also steered Bob Dylan’s career, suggested he team up with the Kentucky-born singer Mary Travers. Travers in turn proposed they include Paul Stookey.

After polishing their act at clubs in the Village like the Bitter End and the Gaslight, the trio signed with Warner and went on to record a series of hits, including folk standards like “Lemon Tree” and “500 Miles,” and compositions by other revivalists, including Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer” and Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

A champion of Middle East peace whose career was tarnished by a morals charge involving a minor.

07/01/2025

The Times of Israel:
As Israel Defense Forces troops carried out counterterrorism raids across the West Bank, Defense Minister Israel Katz visited on Tuesday the site of a deadly terror attack in the Palestinian village of al-Funduq, which he said was an “act of war” that will be answered in kind.

Two elderly women and an off-duty cop were killed and eight Israelis were wounded when Palestinian terrorists opened fire on vehicles as they passed through the village on Monday.

The three perpetrators from the Jenin area of the northern West Bank are still at large.

IDF says 3 Palestinian gunmen killed in drone strike, gun battle amid counterterror operation; IDF soldier seriously wounded; perpetrators of al-Fundaq shooting still on the lam

07/01/2025

At his ongoing speech/press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump brought up his pick for Middle East special envoy, Steven Witkoff. Trump vowed that if does not release the Israeli hostages by Jan. 20, “all hell will break out.”

06/01/2025

The Forward:
A joint session of Congress has peacefully certified President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election on Jan. 6, the date federally mandated. But four years ago, after President Joe Biden won, the U.S. Capitol was overrun with people aiming to prevent a smooth transition of power.

Standing out among the mob of rioters was a long-haired, bearded man in a black hoodie. The words “Camp Auschwitz” were emblazoned across the front.

Robert Keith Packer, a former pipefitter and unlicensed plumber from Newport News, Virginia, gained national attention for wearing the sweatshirt — which had “STAFF” printed on the back, and on the front was a drawing of a skull and the phrase “Work Brings Freedom,” a translation of the slogan at the entrance of Auschwitz concentration camp. The hoodie drew widespread condemnation.

Robert Keith Packer was imprisoned for U.S. Capitol riot. Congress certified the election of Donald Trump, who has vowed to pardon rioters.

06/01/2025

Right-wing figures in this country denounced Trump for inciting the mob in the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol.

As this article shows, these same individuals have been engaged in the "Great Forgetting" over the past four years about the horrific events that occurred.

They give hypocrites a bad name.

On January 6, 2021, as a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol and halted Congress’ counting of electoral votes, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade dashed off a desperate text to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. “Please, get him on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished,” he wrote of...

05/01/2025

PJ Grisar writes in The Forward:
What if, instead of hanging out at Satriale’s Pork Store, Tony Soprano and his crew were regulars at a deli that served cholent?

The question no one asked has an answer in the German series "The Zweiflers," playing as part of the New York Jewish Film Festival this month, about a Frankfurt family who opened a traditional Jewish deli — after leaving behind the business of red-light district brothels.

Created by the husband-and-wife team of David and Sarah Hadda with Juri Sternburg, the show, which won best series at the Cannes International Series festival, takes its cues from American shows like The Sopranos and Mad Men and in its culinary coolness a bit of The Bear. Critics have said it doesn’t resemble a German television show either in style or content; that was by design.

"The Zweiflers," playing at Jewish film festivals this January, follows a family in the deli business — and the patriarch's criminal past.

02/01/2025

Nina Bernstein writes in The Forward about Trump's mass deportation scheme:
Imagine a place with a housing shortage where, under a new government, tens of thousands of homes are emptied of people overnight. The previous tenants have fled, or have been rounded up in camps by armed government agents, with no right to contest expulsion. People with connections jockey for the best apartments. Neighbors alert to the pre-dawn banging down the hall can tip off their friends that a nice two-bedroom will be available soon.

That is how mass deportation plays out as housing policy. It is the plan that Donald Trump and the Republican party are championing. And it is exactly what unfolded in Paris between 1940 and 1944, as the Vichy regime redistributed vacated “Jewish apartments” to non-Jews. To Sarah Gensburger, a French social scientist who has spent a decade with two colleagues researching the archives for a forthcoming book, the parallels between the declared MAGA plan and that fascist past are shocking and surreal.

During the N**i occupation, the archives show, successive round-ups by the French police were treated as a solution to a major housing crisis. In today’s campaign for president, Donald Trump promises mass round-ups and deportation camps as the answer to a shortage of affordable housing. “The similarities are horrifying,” Gensburger said. “It creates a special kind of market for all the worst impulses of mankind.”

Trump says mass deportations will ease the housing crisis. We've seen that before — under the N**is in France.

01/01/2025

Are having a freilichen Hanukkah 🕎?

5167 likes, 222 comments. “Chanukah medley with the family 🎶”

30/12/2024

Sir Paul wishes the Yidn a Happy Hanuka.

29/12/2024

Barbara Cohen and Little Lizard gig rescheduled.

**POSTPONED TO SATURDAY, MARCH 1, 2025**
We are sorry to inform you, that due to unforeseen illness, the December 28th Barbara Cohen and Little Lizard concert is being postponed to Saturday, March 1st, 2025. Your ticket purchase will be honored for the postponed date. Thank you for your understanding. We’re looking forward to seeing you all in 2025!
https://thehookmpls.com/event/barbaracohen-littlelizard-levy/