Knesset members slammed over attending J Street conference
(JNS.org) Member of Knesset Ayelet Shaked (HaBayit HaYehudi) slammed the Israeli Knesset members for attending the Washington, DC conference of J Street, which she called “Israel’s loudest critic.”
“Among its actions are the leading of a media campaign against the placing of sanctions on Iran by the U.S. Congress; denunciation of the Cast Lead operation and its definition as ‘an illegitimate and even criminal operation’; defining the takeover of the Marmara as ‘brutal and cruel’; support for the U.S. administration’s demand to freeze construction in Jerusalem; pressure on the U.S. administration not to veto the proposal by the Palestinian Authority to denounce Israel for construction in Judea and Samaria and more,” Shaked wrote on Facebook on Tuesday, Israel National News reported.
Addressing Knesset members such as Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, Yitzhak Vaknin (Shas), and Tzachi Hanegbi (Likud), Shaked asked, “Are these the elements with whom you choose to identify?”
“Your participation in the conference grants legitimacy to extreme and unbalanced criticism of Israel,” she wrote.
Palestinian terrorist’s former employer in Bat Yam is site of attempted arson
(JNS.org) Unknown assailants tried to set a Bat Yam restaurant on fire early Tuesday, just more than a week after 20-year-old IDF Sgt. Tomer Hazan was lured to the West Bank and murdered by a Palestinian coworker illegally employed by the establishment.
Last month, 42-year-old Palestinian terrorist Nidal Amar allegedly murdered Hazan and buried his body. A canister of flammable fluid was tossed into the Tzachi Meats restaurant and set on fire around 6:30 a.m. on Tuesday. The flames were doused before any damage was caused. The owner of the restaurant, Tzachi Antebbi, told Israel Hayom that a lit cigarette had caused the fire. But Tel Aviv Police said the incident was definitely a case of attempted arson.
American Jewish population 6.7-6.8 million, new reports say
(JNS.org) New reports from the Pew Research Center and Brandeis University’s Steinhardt Social Research Institute (SSRI) peg the Jewish population of the United States at 6.7 million and 6.8 million, respectively.
Pew’s Religion and Public Life Project on Tuesday released “A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” based on a survey of 3,475 Jews from Feb. 20 to June 13, 2013. The report estimated that there are 6.7 million Jews in the U.S., and that 78 percent of that population identifies as Jewish by religion, as opposed to by background or other criteria. A day earlier, SSRI released “American Jewish Population Estimates: 2012,” which concluded that there are 6.8 million American Jews, with about 81 percent identifying as Jewish by religion.
Prof. Leonard Saxe, SSRI’s director and the new report’s co-author, had estimated in December 2011 that the U.S. Jewish population was 6.4 million. Amid the release of the new figures, Saxe said the population increase as well as the stabilization of the number of those identifying as Jewish by religion (1.8 percent of the total American population, according to SSRI) could be interpreted as either a positive or negative narrative, being that synagogue membership and engagement with other Jewish institutions have not risen at the same rate as the Jewish population.
“You can either say, ‘Wow, this is a problem,’ or you can say, ‘This is an opportunity for the Jewish community,’” Saxe told JNS.org.
SSRI’s new data said that 24 percent of American Jews are 65 or older. More than 20 percent live in the state of New York, followed by 14 percent in California, 12 percent in Florida, 8 percent in New Jersey, and 5 percent each in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.
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