About 100 protesters withstood Friday’s rain to protest the USNS Harvey Milk, docked at San Francisco’s Piers 30-32 before its maiden voyage. The protesters called for a cease-fire in Gaza, and a few managed to gain unauthorized access to the Navy vessel. Rep. Nancy Pelosi was on hand to celebrate the Navy ship, a refueling and supply transport vessel named for the Jewish gay rights activist. Milk, one of the nation’s first openly gay politicians, was assassinated in 1978 while serving on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. The ship was stopping in San Francisco before embarking for the Mi ..read more

Kehillah Jewish High School in Palo Alto isn’t just thinking outside the box when it comes to student recruitment. It’s thinking outside the continent. After years of opening its doors to non-Jewish applicants — like most other Jewish day schools in the Bay Area — Kehillah is now actively recruiting students from mainland China.  The pluralistic Jewish school, founded in 1999, launched its new international program on Feb. 26. The original plan was to recruit students from both Israel and China, said David Weiner, the school’s admissions director. But after Oct. 7 and with the ongoing war ..read more

After 20 years of delivering freshly baked challah to Jewish schools, institutions and stores, as well as to people’s homes, Irving Greisman, founder of Irving’s Premium Challah, is retiring from the bread business. On March 27, he sent an email to his customers, saying the coming weekend would be his last. He is hoping a buyer will come forward to keep the business going. “It has been our distinct honor to have our challah become an integral part of your Simchas for the last twenty years,” the email said. “We deeply cherish the privilege of being woven into the fabric of your lives through ou ..read more

(JTA) – Alison Sharaf, a staffer for Sen. Joe Lieberman in 2000, remembers the moment she heard that he would be making history. Sharaf, then a manager in Lieberman’s Hartford office, was confident that Al Gore would pick her boss to be his running mate on the Democratic ticket — despite fears that the country was “not ready” to vote for an Orthodox Jew. She got to the office at 3 a.m. that morning anticipating the announcement and, later, Lieberman celebrated the news with her and the rest of his team. “The whole staff in Connecticut, he took us on a boat ride down the Connecticut River and s ..read more

“Yearning to Breathe Free,” the latest show from Los Angeles-based Jewish theater company The Braid, takes its title from Emma Lazarus’ famous poem posted at the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” A recording of Australian-born musician Shelley Rosenberg singing an original song with lyrics from the poem opens the show, which features four actors telling nine true stories of Jewish immigrants living in the United States. “They’re all performing authentic stories written by other writers, but you can’t tell from their performances ..read more

WASHINGTON (JTA) — President Joe Biden said the United States would continue to “impose costs” on Russia for its imprisonment of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested one year ago. The Journal marked the March 29 anniversary by leaving most of its front page empty below a headline reading, “HIS STORY SHOULD BE HERE.” Every other article and headline on the front page involved Gershkovich. “Today we mark a painful anniversary: one year of American journalist Evan Gershkovich’s wrongful detention in Russia,” Biden said in a statement. “As I have told Evan’s parents, I w ..read more

A new phrase has arisen in Gaza: “Wounded child, no surviving family.” “WCNSF” is written on files by Doctors without Borders volunteers in Gaza. It gives a heads up to subsequent medical professionals: There is no one to take responsibility for this injured child. As a Holocaust educator at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont for 25 years, images of Gaza appear to me through a Holocaust lens. The rubble of Gaza looks like the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto after the uprising. Hollow-eyed, starving children in Gaza look no different to me than pictures of children in the ghettos during the ..read more

This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox. Donald Trump is now selling Bibles — at $59.99 a piece, a hefty price for a Bible — with the red-white-and-blue title “God Bless the USA Bible,” and including the pledge of allegiance and the constitution. (Apparently the traditional title of “Holy Bible” was not good enough.) Trump’s two most prominent roles have been huckster and showman, both combined in his highly effective performance, while president and during his latest campaign, as demagogue. The Bible he ..read more

Hate crimes targeting Jews more than quadrupled in San Francisco last year compared with 2022, data from the San Francisco Police Department shows, spurred in large part by a dramatic uptick following the Oct. 7 terrorist attack in Israel. SFPD recorded 23 anti-Jewish hate crimes in the city last year — as many as in the previous five years combined. In 2022, there were five; in 2021, there were eight. More than half of last year’s hate crimes occurred in October. The increase after Oct. 7 coincides with national trends for large American cities, according to Brian Levin, professor emeritus of ..read more

Because the vast majority of contemporary Hebrew novels go untranslated, it is something of an event for Israeli writers when their work is published in English. It offers the opportunity to be discovered and appreciated beyond the relatively small universe of Hebrew readers. So I write about Noa Yedlin’s “Stockholm” with sympathy for its author, imagining the difficulty of releasing a novel — and particularly a funny one — in the midst of the terrible moment ushered in on Oct. 7. The appetite to read a dark comedy is lessened when one is in darkness. Yedlin is a major novelist in Israel and a ..read more