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Hey new followers and visitors, welcome to the Forward's Instagram page! 🌟

We’re here to bring you independent Jewish journalism that prioritizes truth, accountability, and in-depth insights. From politics and antisemitism to culture and community, our reporting is fearless, fair, and focused on the stories that matter most. 🗞️✡️

Since 1897, the Forward has been a trusted voice, uncovering the facts, challenging misinformation, and championing Jewish voices with integrity. Join us as we dive into the issues shaping our world today with courage and clarity. 🌍💬

Follow us for thought-provoking coverage and share your thoughts — together, we’re building a more informed and connected community.

👉 Swipe through to learn more about our Instagram page, and be sure to check us out on our website at forward.com

📸 Matt Litman/Marc Brenner/Kia Rastar - Middle East Images via Getty Images

Hey new followers and visitors, welcome to the Forward's Instagram page! 🌟

We’re here to bring you independent Jewish journalism that prioritizes truth, accountability, and in-depth insights. From politics and antisemitism to culture and community, our reporting is fearless, fair, and focused on the stories that matter most. 🗞️✡️

Since 1897, the Forward has been a trusted voice, uncovering the facts, challenging misinformation, and championing Jewish voices with integrity. Join us as we dive into the issues shaping our world today with courage and clarity. 🌍💬

Follow us for thought-provoking coverage and share your thoughts — together, we’re building a more informed and connected community.

👉 Swipe through to learn more about our Instagram page, and be sure to check us out on our website at forward.com

📸 Matt Litman/Marc Brenner/Kia Rastar - Middle East Images via Getty Images

Hey new followers and visitors, welcome to the Forward's Instagram page! 🌟

We’re here to bring you independent Jewish journalism that prioritizes truth, accountability, and in-depth insights. From politics and antisemitism to culture and community, our reporting is fearless, fair, and focused on the stories that matter most. 🗞️✡️

Since 1897, the Forward has been a trusted voice, uncovering the facts, challenging misinformation, and championing Jewish voices with integrity. Join us as we dive into the issues shaping our world today with courage and clarity. 🌍💬

Follow us for thought-provoking coverage and share your thoughts — together, we’re building a more informed and connected community.

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📸 Matt Litman/Marc Brenner/Kia Rastar - Middle East Images via Getty Images

Hey new followers and visitors, welcome to the Forward's Instagram page! 🌟

We’re here to bring you independent Jewish journalism that prioritizes truth, accountability, and in-depth insights. From politics and antisemitism to culture and community, our reporting is fearless, fair, and focused on the stories that matter most. 🗞️✡️

Since 1897, the Forward has been a trusted voice, uncovering the facts, challenging misinformation, and championing Jewish voices with integrity. Join us as we dive into the issues shaping our world today with courage and clarity. 🌍💬

Follow us for thought-provoking coverage and share your thoughts — together, we’re building a more informed and connected community.

👉 Swipe through to learn more about our Instagram page, and be sure to check us out on our website at forward.com

📸 Matt Litman/Marc Brenner/Kia Rastar - Middle East Images via Getty Images

Hey new followers and visitors, welcome to the Forward's Instagram page! 🌟

We’re here to bring you independent Jewish journalism that prioritizes truth, accountability, and in-depth insights. From politics and antisemitism to culture and community, our reporting is fearless, fair, and focused on the stories that matter most. 🗞️✡️

Since 1897, the Forward has been a trusted voice, uncovering the facts, challenging misinformation, and championing Jewish voices with integrity. Join us as we dive into the issues shaping our world today with courage and clarity. 🌍💬

Follow us for thought-provoking coverage and share your thoughts — together, we’re building a more informed and connected community.

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📸 Matt Litman/Marc Brenner/Kia Rastar - Middle East Images via Getty Images

One of the smash hits of New York’s thriving Yiddish theater scene in the early 20th century grappled with socio-political issues that still resonate 100-plus years later. It’s coming back for a very limited run and you don’t have to speak Yiddish to enjoy it.

The production — a concert of songs from the 1912 Yiddish operetta "Khantshe in Amerike" — will be performed twice this month, first at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York and then at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan.

"The protagonist, Khantshe, is a young working-class woman who dresses as a man, working as a chauffeur for a nouveau-riche immigrant family," writes Jon Kalish. "Khantshe flirts with and romances the women she works for — mother and daughter alike. The operetta grapples with class conflict, women’s rights, gender fluidity and cars."

🔗 Link to story is in bio
📸 Ronald Robboy

The suspects texted each other as though they had everyone fooled.

“How's the rabbi?” one asked in a message. “Is he still scheduled for surgery?”

“We are still waiting for the doctor to check if it’s still needed,” came the response.

But there was no surgery, authorities say, and there was no rabbi. Instead, prosecutors allege, the men were referring to Amazon’s impending acquisition of the vacuum company iRobot, hoping to trade on what was then still a closely guarded secret. According to a pair of federal indictments unsealed last week, the deal was one of dozens leaked to a criminal network that used Jewish code words to plan their investments.

At the center of the alleged insider trading scheme was Nicolo Nourafchan, 43, a corporate lawyer who prosecutors say used his access to company files to collect and share deal information with a sprawling network of middlemen and investors. Capitalizing on the lawyer’s knowledge of in-progress mergers and acquisitions, the crew allegedly racked up tens of millions of dollars in illicit proceeds over the course of a decade.

The indictments are rife with Jewish code words that the defendants used in the alleged plot. “Torahs” and “mitzvahs” were stock tips, and a merger was a “flight to Israel.” A “chavrusa” — Aramaic for study partner — meant another lawyer or investor, and a company was a “shul.”

Nineteen of the case’s 30 defendants have been arrested in Los Angeles, New York and Florida and have appeared in federal court. (Two located in Russia and Israel are considered fugitives, according to the Department of Justice.)

🔗 Read more at the link in our bio.
📸 Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a nearly ninefold increase in New York City’s budget for preventing hate crimes as part of his budget proposal announced Tuesday, fulfilling a campaign promise that was central to his outreach to Jewish voters amid concerns about his stance against Israel.

Our senior political reporter, Jacob Kornbluh, explains what’s in the budget, what it can be used for, and how Jewish groups are responding.

Context: The Jewish community overwhelmingly did not support Mamdani’s election, and his proposal comes amid rising tensions stoked by anti-Israel protests — most recently on Monday night, when dozens descended on a heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood where a synagogue hosted a real estate sale that included West Bank properties.

By the numbers: Mamdani’s proposed $26 million for the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes would significantly expand an agency created in 2019 to combat rising antisemitism and other forms of hate, which currently has a $3 million annual budget. The office is tasked with addressing all hate crimes, and Mamdani did not specify how much of the $26 million would be directed specifically toward combating antisemitism.

🔗 Link to the story in comments
📸 Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images

🥯 The bagel’s stock is, apparently, rising — literally. Private equity investors have decided, apparently en masse, that bagels are the new frontier for expansion. But can the art of the perfect New York bagel be scaled across the country?

"It just seems unlikely," writes our culture reporter Mira Fox.

The term “enshittification,” coined by writer Cory Doctorow, has been around for a few years. It describes the way that large companies make their products worse over time in the process of wringing money out of the business to serve their CEOs and investors.

But, Mira warns, perhaps what is more at risk is the spiritual offerings of a good bagel.

"Bagel shops are not just places that produce chewy bread with a hole in the center. They have a cultural value," she writes, adding: "They’re a symbol of uniqueness and authenticity — which, of course, is definitionally impossible to buy. The more constructed something is, the less authentic."

✍️ Let us know your favorite bagel order in the comments!

🔗 Link to the story in bio
📸 Ozgur Coskun/iStock

In November 2023, Middlebury College Hillel announced a challah sale to raise money for World Central Kitchen, a humanitarian aid organization that was working in Israel and Gaza. According to the Jewish student group's presidents, the fundraiser elicited a negative response from Hillel International, their parent organization.

"We got a stern email from Hillel International, saying, ‘Why are you guys raising money for Gaza?’" co-president Caroline Jaffe told Middlebury's student paper, The Campus. "I think that was the first time I remember [thinking], oh wow, this really isn’t aligned with my Jewish values at all, to be like, ‘Why are you guys feeding these starving people?'"

The incident set Jaffe and her peers on the Middlebury Hillel student board on a path that culminated last week in a new name, and a formal distancing from Hillel International. Going forward, the student group will be known as the Jewish Association of Middlebury.

The renaming at Middlebury, a small liberal arts college in Vermont, comes amid a nationwide campaign against Hillel on college campuses premised on the organization’s involvement in Israel. Recently, students at New York University and at the New School have pushed to defund campus Hillels or disaffiliate them from the century-old Jewish organization.

But Middlebury College is believed to be the first school post-Oct. 7 where leaders of the campus Hillel itself were behind the push to untether from the international movement. The student board had wanted to totally disaffiliate from Hillel International, but were told by college administrators they did not have the authority.

Jaffe told the Middlebury student outlet that Hillel's ban on events with student organizations that endorse the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement was one motivating factor for the change.

"How are we ever going to get to peace in Israel and Palestine," Jaffe said, "if we can't even have a Middlebury Jewish group and a Middlebury SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine] talk to each other in Vermont?"

🔗 Read more at the link in our bio.
📸 Photo by PenelopeIsMe via Wikicommons

Commencement speakers this year at the University of Michigan, Rutgers and Georgetown have drawn fire over their stances on the Middle East. “A university education is supposed to widen the aperture through which students see the world, and to equip them with the intellectual tools to engage the world with curiosity, humility and rigor,” writes Dr. Alanna Cooper, the Jewish Studies chair at Case Western.

When a speaker shows “students not how to think, but what to conclude and who to condemn, he suggests something alarming: that narrowing of minds, pointing of fingers and pronouncing of verdicts is what four years of university education has amounted to. That is a profound loss.”

🔗 Link to the story in bio
📸 Nic Antaya/Getty Images

Commencement speakers this year at the University of Michigan, Rutgers and Georgetown have drawn fire over their stances on the Middle East. “A university education is supposed to widen the aperture through which students see the world, and to equip them with the intellectual tools to engage the world with curiosity, humility and rigor,” writes Dr. Alanna Cooper, the Jewish Studies chair at Case Western.

When a speaker shows “students not how to think, but what to conclude and who to condemn, he suggests something alarming: that narrowing of minds, pointing of fingers and pronouncing of verdicts is what four years of university education has amounted to. That is a profound loss.”

🔗 Link to the story in bio
📸 Nic Antaya/Getty Images

On Wednesday, Nik Jakobs was planting corn. On Thursday, the 41-year-old Illinois cattle farmer stood in a two-acre cornfield preparing to plant something else: a synagogue.

This week, Jakobs and his community broke ground on a planned 4,000-square-foot building that will also house a Holocaust museum inspired by the story of Jakobs’ grandparents, Edith and Norbert, who survived the war after Christian families in the Netherlands hid them in their homes for years.

Jakobs described the future museum as a place devoted not only to Jewish history, but to teaching the dangers of hatred and division. “If you have the choice to be right or kind,” he said, repeating advice from his grandmother, “choose kind.”

The synagogue rising from this Illinois cornfield will house pieces of the past: Many of the sacred objects (ark, Torah, bimah, stained glass windows) were donated to Jakobs by closing congregations across America.

A breakfast and groundbreaking ceremony yesterday, coinciding with the National Day of Prayer, brought out pastors, farmers, city officials and members of neighboring churches. “I was so happy to see bagels, lox and cream cheese,” said Rev. James Keenan, a Catholic priest originally from Brooklyn. “It reminded me of home.”

🔗 Link to story is in bio
📸 Benyamin Cohen

Hundreds of protesters and counterprotesters converged Tuesday night outside Park East Synagogue in Manhattan, reigniting the kind of combustible confrontations that have repeatedly spilled onto New York City streets since the war in Gaza began.

The demonstration centered on a real estate event held inside the shul which was promoting property sales in Israel and West Bank settlements. Pro-Palestinian activists denounced the event, separated by police from the house of worship as well as from Israel supporters who rallied in response and sang “Hatikvah.”

The protest came just days after New York City’s new law took effect directing the NYPD to issue a protection plan for houses of worship — legislation pushed by Julie Menin, the first Jewish City Council Speaker, after similar clashes outside the same synagogue last year.

The NYPD sealed off the block with barricades, keeping demonstrators far from the synagogue entrance as chants of “There is only one solution, intifada revolution” echoed through the streets.

A spokesman for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a vocal critic of Israel and Israeli settlements, condemned the real estate event but defended the police operation, saying the city was committed both to protecting access to houses of worship and safeguarding First Amendment rights.

As one Jewish counterprotester put it: “Today, thank God, they’re away from the synagogue. But what happens if next time the police commissioner decides that they can be 50 feet or 10 feet away?”

🔗 Link to story is in bio
📸 Hannah Feuer

Murder investigators in Arizona are encountering a stubborn obstacle to solving a decades-old cold case involving an unidentified dead body: The woman’s Ashkenazi Jewish DNA.

In 1989, an unclothed dead body was found on the side of a highway in northwest Arizona. The woman was never identified, though small details offered clues about her life: red nail polish on her fingers and toes, faux diamond stud earrings, and a handmade floral blouse found under a nearby tree.

The woman appeared to have been beaten, found with a broken nose and possible hematoma on the left side of her skull, though the medical examiner did not determine a cause of death. An autopsy determined the woman was between 25 and 30 years old.

In 2021, authorities reopened the case and uploaded the woman’s DNA profile to genetic databases available to law enforcement, hoping for a breakthrough. Instead, they hit a wall.

“Investigators learned that the victim was 96% Ashkenazi Jew, which made it extremely difficult to trace her ancestry and locate family members,” the Mohave County Sheriff's Office said in a statement.

Ashkenazi Jews who try to track down relatives through genetic testing are familiar with the problem that the sheriff encountered: DNA testing, usually a powerful tool for finding relatives, often does not yield usable results for them.

🔗 Learn more about why at the link in the bio.
📸 onlyyouqj/iStock

The seed for 'Giant,' nominated this morning for multiple Tony Awards, was planted almost 35 years ago when a 14-year old Mark Rosenblatt and his friend were tasked with presenting at a school assembly.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin had just died and Rosenblatt assumed that they should mark the passing of a hero. His friend, a Muslim, equally assumed that everyone would understand that Begin was a terrorist.

Fast forward from London’s St. Paul’s School in March 1992 to May 2026 in New York, and Rosenblatt is nominated for a Tony for best new play for his run of 'Giant' on Broadway. The play, which he wrote about an episode in the life of children’s book author Roald Dahl ('Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,' 'James and the Giant Peach') when he criticized Israel and espoused a pernicious antisemitism, deals with differences in perspectives on the Jewish state, and the limits of reasonable opinions.

"It didn’t transform me overnight,” Rosenblatt said of his school assembly moment. “But I became aware very quickly that other people thought very, very differently.”

🔗 Link to story in the comments
📸 Emilio Madrid

The selection of Israeli President Isaac Herzog as the Jewish Theological Seminary’s commencement speaker has divided undergraduates at the school, with several seniors and dozens of other current students and alumni signing a letter calling on the school’s chancellor to disinvite Herzog.

The letter accused Herzog of inciting violence against civilians in Gaza early in the Israel-Hamas war and criticized him for not taking action more recently against settler violence in the West Bank. Herzog has faced criticism for comments he made after the Oct. 7 attacks, in which he said that it was “an entire nation” that was responsible.

Six JTS seniors said Herzog’s involvement in the schoolwide May 19 ceremony — when he will also receive an honorary degree from the seminary — would leave them “morally conflicted about attending.”

Meanwhile, other JTS seniors affirming the speaker choice wrote a letter of their own that has gathered 24 signatures, representing roughly half of the senior class.

The controversy unfolded amid ongoing tensions around Israel in Conservative Jewish spaces and at Columbia University, which has a joint undergraduate program with JTS. The flagship academic institution of the Conservative movement, JTS includes in its mission deepening students’ connection to Israel, and requires its rabbinical students to spend a year learning there.

🔗 Read more about JTS Chancellor Shuly Rubin Schwartz's response at the link in the bio.
📸 Photo by Martin Ollman/Newswire – Pool/Getty Images