January 17, 2021
By RON KAMPEAS
(JTA) — Hackers shut down an Atlanta synagogue’s live stream of Senator-Elect Raphael Warnock delivering a sermon to honor Martin Luther King, whose church he leads.
Kent Alexander, The Temple’s president, said in a letter sent Saturday to congregants that the website’s service provider said “malicious user agents … continuously loaded the Temple website with the objective of shutting it down. In doing so, they blocked access...
January 17, 2021
(JTA) — A Moroccan institution has with official government backing signed an agreement with the U.S. State Department to combat anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, the second such agreement in the Arab Middle East.
The agreement signed Friday by El Mehdi Boudra, the president of Association Mimouna, and Elan Carr, the State Department’s envoy to combat anti-Semitism, signals the far-reaching ambition of the Trump Administration’s Abraham Accords, to normalize among Arabs the...
January 15, 2021
(JTA) — The U.S. Army is removing an officer who made a Holocaust joke last year on TikTok.
Nathan Freihofer, a second lieutenant, has millions of followers on TikTok, the video social media platform. In August, Freihofer posted a joke about the Holocaust, then told his followers, “If you get offended, get the f*** out because it’s a joke.”
Freihofer was suspended from his leadership duties after posting the video,...
January 15, 2021
(JTA) — President-elect Joe Biden named David Cohen, the deputy CIA director under President Barack Obama, to his old job.
Cohen, who rose up through the intelligence ranks as an Iran sanctions enforcer, will be able to start as soon as Biden is inaugurated on Jan. 20, as the deputy director is not subject to Senate confirmation. His experience at the agency will prove useful to Biden as the likelihood...
January 15, 2021
(JNS.org) – The grassroots Jewish civil-rights movement End Jew Hatred protested outside the California home of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Monday, blaring audio recordings of Holocaust-denying tweets that have not been removed from Twitter.
The group said Dorsey has been quick to edit content deemed to be “misinformation” when it comes to politics, the coronavirus pandemic and other issues of consequence. But when users on his platform spread harmful lies...
January 14, 2021
(JTA) — President-elect Joe Biden named Samantha Power, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to a top foreign aid post on Wednesday.
Power — notable during her U.N. tenure in part because of her role in allowing through an anti-settlements resolution at the tail end of the Obama administration — was tapped as the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Biden elevated her position to include...
January 14, 2021
By ERIC BERGER
When someone threw rocks a couple months ago at the doors of a Chabad center in Atlanta, the glass didn’t shatter.
That’s because earlier in the year, local Chabad leaders decided to reevaluate their security following an incident with a trespasser.
Neil Rabinovitz, a former 22-year veteran of the FBI who now works as community security director for the Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta, visited the site...
January 14, 2021
By BEN SALES
(JTA) — Following other conservative pundits, Glenn Beck compared social media’s restrictions against disinformation and incitement to the Holocaust.
In recent days, Twitter and Facebook have banned President Donald Trump’s accounts for incitement to violence. Twitter also removed 70,000 accounts promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory. And the social network Parler, a haven for the far right, was taken offline.
Beck appeared to object to these decisions.
“You...
January 14, 2021
(JTA) — A man seen wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirt during the Capitol insurrection was arrested Wednesday.
Federal authorities took Robert Keith Packer, 56, into custody in Newport News, a city on Virginia’s central coast. Authorities throughout the country are seeking to arrest dozens of people identified on video and in photos of the riot last week.
His shirt also said “Work Brings Freedom,” a rough translation of the phrase...
January 13, 2021
(JTA) — As chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jerry Nadler has been busy this week creating impeachment history. But he he hasn’t gone hungry, apparently.
C-SPAN caught Nadler carrying a bag from Zabar’s, the famed New York grocery and appetizing store located in his Upper West Side congressional district, as he took his seat on Wednesday. The bold orange logo would be unmistakeable to anyone familiar with the...
