Sam Kestenbaum is a contributing editor and former staff writer for the Forward. Before this, he worked for The New York Times and newsrooms in Sana, Ramallah and Beijing. Contact him at kestenbaum@forward.com and follow him on Twitter at @skestenbaum and on Instagram at @skestenbaum.
The U.S. Department of Education has accused the Michigan Jewish Institute, a college in the Detroit suburb of West Bloomfield, of illegally obtaining federal Pell Grants for its study abroad program. “The Department will permit this scheme to continue no longer,” the DOE stated in a damning , outlining their investigation. Last week, the DOE…
The federal Department of Education has revoked grant eligibility for a Jewish college that has prospered from millions of dollars in government aid over the years even though almost all its students live in Israel. The Michigan Jewish Institute suspended most operations Wednesday, citing the federal government’s refusal to re-certify it as a school whose…
Far from political discussions about Bernie Sanders and the meaning of secular Jewish socialism, Jewish political history has just been made — in Uganda. An African Jew, and chief rabbi, no less, has just won a parliamentary seat, a first for the country. On February 19, Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, the spiritual leader of the century-old…
Yeshiva University will cede almost half of its $1 billion endowment to the Albert Einstein School of Medicine, as the medical college — which was formerly under its wing — becomes part of a separate, newly formed joint venture with Montefiore Health System. The scope of Y.U.’s transfer of funds to the new venture—a total of $465…
Do Jews still want to call God their Lord, King and Master? Maybe not. Some words and phrases like this won’t resonate for many American Jews, said Rabbi Edward Feld, the senior editor of a new prayer book for the Conservative movement, Siddur Lev Shalem. “The word ‘king’ is just empty for people living in…
Some 15 years ago, the lawyer Remy C. Ilona traveled deep into rural Nigeria, on bus rides that lasted seven hours and through villages without electricity, just to hear stories. The folklore of origins and customs of his people, the Igbo, could be forgotten within a generation. So he came to document them. “These things…
In a conversation with his lawyer and public relations advisor, Marc Gafni, the controversial spiritual leader, speculated about suing the Forward as a “test case” and said that the public campaign denouncing him was driven by Jews who are upset about his new think tank’s success. The conversation occurred December 30 after the end of…
Marc Gafni, a once-promising Jewish leader dogged by allegations of sexual improprieties stretching back years, has returned to the public eye as a leader of a California think tank. But his stunning re-emergence, trumpeted in a recent New York Times article, has elicited a new wave of condemnations from Jewish leaders. Rabbi David Ingber, an…
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