Author: Mike Wagenheim/JNS.org

Mike Wagenheim/JNS.org Though Rebeca Grynspan has won four of five straw polls, her “negative” votes doubled on Wednesday. Rebeca Grynspan, an economist and former Costa Rican vice president who is Jewish, still leads the race to become the next United Nations secretary-general. But the number of “negative” votes she received in the U.N. Security Council’s fifth straw poll, on Wednesday, was double what she received in the previous poll. A U.N. executive and daughter of Holocaust refugees, Grynspan fell from 10 “encourage” votes in the last poll to nine on Wednesday, according to results widely leaked to the press. Her…

Mike Wagenheim/JNS.org The Argentinian, Australian, Canadian, French, German, British and American Jewish communities, known as the J7-Large Communities’ Task Force Against Antisemitism, asked United Nations member states to take combating Jew-hatred into account when they chose the next U.N. secretary-general. “The United Nations was founded on the promise of equal dignity, human rights and the protection of all peoples,” but antisemitism, which is “expressed through the conduct of mandate holders, in materials produced under the U.N.’s emblem and in a culture permitted to take hold in parts of the human rights system,” is “among its serious failures,” the J7 wrote…

Mike Wagenheim/JNS.org U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last week that the Pentagon will have a new Office of Religious Affairs that “will report straight to the top.” Hegseth made the announcement at Marine Corps Base Quantico during his second annual State of the Force address, in which he launched several technology and cultural initiatives. The secretary said state-of-the-art technology, new bases and recruitment partnerships with colleges outside the Ivy League “are still incomplete without the most essential component of our republic: faith.” “Decisions about faith and religion were made by secular careerists in cubicles and lawyers running around with…

Mike Wagenheim/JNS.org After years of claiming that Israel falsely accused Hamas of blocking humanitarian aid delivery in Gaza, the United Nations said on Sunday that the terror group, which it didn’t name, has “endangered humanitarian personnel, intimidated workers delivering lifesaving food assistance and disrupted lifesaving humanitarian operations.” Ramiz Alakbarov, U.N. deputy special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, stated that on Saturday, armed people “affiliated with the de facto authorities” forced their way into a food distribution point in northern Gaza and entered a World Food Programme warehouse “and reportedly assaulted two truck drivers who were delivering humanitarian supplies.”…

Irish Jews experienced 143 incidents of antisemitism in a six-month stretch, according to a new survey published by the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland on Sunday. Maurice Cohen, chair of the council, stated that there is “deep concern about the findings in this report.” The council urges “rapid development of a dedicated national plan to counter growing antisemitism,” Cohen said. “These findings raise serious concerns for public policy, institutional governance and social cohesion,” he added. Some three-quarters of the 143 incidents took place in offices, at schools or in healthcare settings. “The report does not claim that antisemitism has become…