(JTA) — Hamas has released a video showing one of the remaining American-Israelis that the terror group is holding hostage in Gaza, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, calling for the Israeli government to strike a deal to release the remaining hostages. Goldberg-Polin, 23, was abducted Oct. 7 from the site of the Nova music festival after having his hand blown off by a Hamas grenade. His parents, Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin, have become some of the most prominent advocates for the hostages; Rachel has met with Pope Francis, Zoomed with President Joe Biden and spoken at the United Nations. Last week ..read more

This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives. (JTA) — Naama Hertz signed up to come to America to teach diaspora Jews about life in Israel. Assigned to St. Louis, the Israeli teen couldn’t wait to talk to students about the food, music, dance and culture of the country she loves so much. She never imagined that only months into her year-long IDF deferment she would be speaking to non-Jewish women and girls at the National Charity League about the Israel-Hamas war o ..read more

This article is also available as a weekly newsletter, “Life Stories,” where we remember those who made an outsize impact in the Jewish world — or just left their community a better or more interesting place. Subscribe here to get “Life Stories” in your inbox every Tuesday. Trina Robbins, 85, the first woman to draw a full issue of “Wonder Woman” Trina Robbins grew up in Brooklyn, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Belarus. Her mother, a New York city school teacher, would bring home “an endless supply of 8½” by 11” Board of Education paper and No. 2 pencils, from which ..read more

This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives. (JTA) — Growing up Orthodox Jewish in the suburbs of New York City, Dahlia Adler read books that showed a life vastly different from her own. “I started writing as a way to live both at once — to be someone who kept Shabbos and kosher but also ate whatever and wore bikinis to the beach,” said Adler, the author of the young adult novels “Cool for the Summer” and “Going Bicoastal.”  When Adler encountered Jewish repr ..read more

(New York Jewish Week) — About a decade ago, author and illustrator Ellen Weinstein, a Lower East Side native, was flying back to New York City after teaching some workshops in Russia. On the plane, she began to think about a similar journey her Jewish grandparents had made from Russia to New York about 100 years prior. That journey was by ship, of course, and under very different conditions — but both transatlantic crossings, it turns out, were transformational experiences. “I began to wonder about what life was like for my grandmother, to come all this way to someplace new,” Weinstein recall ..read more

(JTA) – A pro-Palestinian protest at Yale University allegedly turned violent with dozens of arrests. The University of Southern California canceled all its planned commencement speakers. Encampments have sprung up at campuses from Boston to Ann Arbor and Chapel Hill. It’s not just Columbia: The unrest that has overtaken the Ivy League university in New York City, and upended life for Jewish students and everyone else, is spilling over into the rest of the country. The spread of the demonstrations is being promoted and celebrated by pro-Palestinian activists, including the anti-Zionist Jewish ..read more

(New York Jewish Week) – An outspoken Israeli professor was blocked from entering a portion of the Columbia University campus and Jewish members of Congress demanded action from the administration on Monday as pro-Palestinian protests continued to roil the Manhattan university. Shai Davidai, an Israeli assistant professor at Columbia University’s business school, had announced on social media that he planned to enter the university’s main campus on Monday morning to hold a “peaceful sit in” in the area of pro-Palestinian demonstrators who have occupied the campus lawn since last week. But the ..read more

(New York Jewish Week) — When Rabbi Albert Thaler was invited to run Ramah Day Camp in Nyack in 1970 it had neither staff nor campers. It did have a site — a campus in New York’s Rockland County that had hosted American Seminar, a program for youngsters who were unable to attend one of the Conservative movement’s signature programs in Israel.  Over the next few years, Thaler would build “Ramah Nyack” into one of the most successful camps in the Ramah network, drawing devoted campers from New Jersey, Queens, Manhattan and New York’s Westchester County.  Perhaps as importantly, it deve ..read more

(JTA) — Israel’s military intelligence chief resigned, saying he assumed responsibility for the intelligence failures that failed to prevent the Oct. 7 Hamas invasion that launched the current war. The resignation letter Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva sent Monday to the Israeli military chief of staff, Lt. Herzi Halevi, is unusual in that he assumed responsibility for the failures even before the launch of a state inquiry into the missteps that left Israel unprepared for the attack. “The intelligence division under my command did not live up to the mission we were sworn to,” Haliva wrote in his lette ..read more

(JTA) — Why are these macaroons different from all other macaroons? It’s a question that many American Jews may find themselves asking this Passover, and the answer will be: how they’re packaged. That’s because Manischewitz, the iconic purveyor of kosher-for-Passover products, has shaken up its look, eschewing macaroon canisters for resealable bags, splashing the orange from its old logo all over its matzah boxes and covering its packaging with playful cartoon figures. It has won new fans in the process. “I told my mom her Manischewitz box was yassified,” read one representative tweet about th ..read more