United Airlines restarts flights to Israel
(JTA) — United Airlines resumed service to Israel this weekend, becoming the first U.S. carrier to return to Tel Aviv after interruptions due to the Israel-Hamas war.
The Chicago-based legacy carrier restarted daily service to Israel from its hub at Newark Liberty International Airport on March 15, while its daytime return flight to the United States departed from Ben-Gurion International Airport on March 16.
United will restore its second daily flight on March 29 with nighttime departure times.
Before the war broke out, United offered the largest number of flights to Israel of any U.S. carrier with 14 weekly flights from the New York area, as well as service from Chicago; San Francisco; and Washington, D.C.
United said last month that it would resume additional flights to Israel based on demand.
Schumer book tour postponed due to ‘security concerns’
(JNS) — Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has put a tour promoting his forthcoming book Antisemitism in America: A Warning on hold, “as the New York Democrat faces blowback over his recent vote to avert a government shutdown,” Jewish Insider reported.
The “urgent and personal,” 256-page book “sheds light on the Jewish American experience and sounds the alarm about the troubling resurgence of antisemitism,” according to the publisher, Grand Central Publishing, which is slated to release the book on March 18.
Related events in Washington, Baltimore and New York have been postponed, Jewish Insider reported, as well as Philadelphia.
Risa Heller, a spokeswoman for the tour, told JNS that “due to security concerns, Sen. Schumer’s book events are being rescheduled.”
Five years of ‘receivership’ for Mideast program to get $400 million back, Trump admin tells Columbia
(JTA) — Among the preconditions for formal discussions to restore $400 million in federal funding, which the Trump administration is withholding from Columbia University for its failure to respond adequately to Jew-hatred on campus, are banning masks, reforming the admissions process and moving campus discipline under the university president directly, according to a letter that The Free Press reported.
“Columbia University has fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment in addition to other alleged violations of Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” the U.S. officials stated.
The letter listed nine items the officials said were collectively “a precondition for formal negotiations regarding Columbia University’s continued financial relationship with the United States government.”
Breaking with recent consensus, Trump makes ‘anti-Semitism’ hyphenated again
(JTA) — It was supposed to be settled: Strike the hyphen from “anti-Semitism” and use “antisemitism” instead.
Public debate heated up in 2020 and by 2024, nearly everyone had made the switch: Jews and gentiles; academics and journalists; government officials and private citizens; right-wingers and left-wingers.
Then Trump took office and made “anti-Semitism” hyphenated again.
Does the spelling matter? For many advocates, including the authors of the definition of antisemitism that the Trump administration committed to using, it does.
Michaela Küchler is secretary general of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which authored the definition and helped popularize the unhyphenated form.
“The IHRA advocates for the spelling of antisemitism without a hyphen to emphasise that the term specifically refers to opposition and hatred toward Jews,” she wrote in an email to JTA. “By using the unhyphenated form, the IHRA aims to provide clarity in addressing and combating antisemitism in all its forms, especially at a time when we are witnessing increased violence and rhetoric aimed against Jews worldwide.”
