(JTA) — The founder of Guernica, the progressive literary magazine that published and then retracted an essay by an Israeli writer last month, says he never wanted to publish the piece in the first place. In a seven-paragraph statement published on Guernica’s website Friday, Michael Archer writes that he thought from the start that the essay, “From the Edges of a Broken World” by Joanna Chen, was a departure from the journal’s values. “When Jina [Moore, the editor in chief and publisher of the magazine] called my attention to this piece, I disagreed that it was a fit for the magazine,” Archer ..read more

(JTA) — The number of antisemitic incidents more than doubled last year, shooting up particularly following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s annual audit. The ADL and other Jewish organizations, in addition to law enforcement agencies, have reported a spike in antisemitism after Oct. 7, as protests against Israel have taken place across the country. But the ADL report found that antisemitic incidents were rising prior to Oct. 7, and that even after the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, nearly half of the reported incidents did not directly involve Israe ..read more

WASHINGTON (JTA) — The House will vote on sending approximately $14 billion in aid to Israel and other U.S. allies, Speaker Mike Johnson said on Monday, ending a months-long holdup of foreign assistance passed by the Senate.  The upcoming vote is the latest ripple effect of Iran’s attack on Israel this weekend. Johnson, a Republican, has agreed with Democratic colleagues that Israel should receive the aid — though the parties continue to blame each other for delaying its passage and undermining Israel’s security. “We know that the world is watching us to see how we react,” Johnson said, a ..read more

WASHINGTON (JTA) —  Republicans and Democrats in Congress are uniting to pass a bill that would create a national coordinator of antisemitism — though it faces competition from another Republican-backed bill that seeks to define antisemitism.  The bipartisan Countering Antisemitism Act, introduced last week, is meant to advance President Joe Biden’s national strategy to fight antisemitism, rolled out nearly a year ago. The plan focused on action across the executive branch, demanding reforms in federal agencies from the Education Department to the Department of Agriculture.  The ..read more

(JTA) — More than 24 hours after stymieing a direct Iranian attack, Israel is weighing how to respond as the United States is urging restraint.  That decision will come alongside another pivotal one: how to respond to a truce proposal from Hamas that would halt the war in Gaza and free hostages in exchange for the release of more than a thousand Palestinian security prisoners.  Together, the decisions will help determine whether violence may cool in the region or heat up further. Iran’s attack on Israel — its first direct strike on the country following decades of proxy conflicts and ..read more

(JTA) — The sirens started blaring all over Israel just before 2 a.m. — in the south, in the north, near army bases around the country and, unusually, in and around Jerusalem. The sirens are meant to stop Israelis in their tracks — or wake them from their slumber — and send them rushing to safe rooms when an air infiltration is detected. Not that many people were sleeping easily. The barrage came after days of increasingly insistent warnings that Iran was planning to attack Israel, and hours after Israeli leaders, tipped off by U.S. officials, confirmed that Tehran had let ..read more

(JTA) — Iran launched more than 100 drones at Israel late Saturday, in a gambit that may be aimed at overloading Israel’s air defenses. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel was ready to strike back, portending an escalation in a growing regional conflict surrounding the Israel-Hamas war. “We are watching the threat. It will take hours to arrive,” Israel Defense Forces spokesman Daniel Hagari said in a televised announcement of the launch of the drones from Iran and from territories controlled by actors allied with the regime. The drone attack marks the first time that Israel’s ..read more

(JTA) — Some Jewish students would like to see the Anti-Defamation League after class. This week the antisemitism watchdog organization unveiled its Campus Antisemitism Report Card, a series of letter grades assigned to 85 colleges and universities based on how well the group believes they are addressing antisemitism. For many elite schools, the results were not good.  Only two schools — Brandeis, which was founded by Jews, and Elon — earned an “A.” Many others fared quite poorly, with Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology among the 13 “F” grades. Anot ..read more

(JTA) — An Argentine court has ruled that Iran and Hezbollah were behind the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, a landmark development in the reckoning over the antisemitic attack that may open the door to international legal action. In a nearly 800-page ruling, the country’s highest criminal court said on Thursday that Iran directed the 1994 bombing of AMIA, which killed 85 people, and defined the attack as “a crime against humanity” and Iran as “a terrorist state.” The bombing was, at the time, the deadliest single attack on Jews since the Holocaust. It ca ..read more

This article was sent as a newsletter. Sign up for our weekly Jewish sports newsletter here. (JTA) — Hello, Jewish sports fans! In this week’s Jewish Sport Report, we’ve got a touching baseball story, plus big Israeli sports news and injury and contract updates from college basketball and the NHL. Let’s get to it! Jewish comedian Eitan Levine is on a mission to make baseball history Comedian Eitan Levine. (Courtesy) According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the unclaimed record for most ceremonial first pitches thrown by one person in a baseball season would be 40. So New York Ci ..read more