September 1, 2019

(JTA) — A Jewish man was verbally and physically attacked in the Brooklyn, New York neighborhood of Flatbush.

In the Saturday afternoon attack, two men who may have been drunk hit the Jewish man in the face with a belt and yelled “anti-Jewish racial slurs,” the Vosizneias Jewish news website reported. No age was given for the victim.

The victim told police that he and the men did not speak to each other before the attack.

The New York Police Department is investigating the incident as a hate crime, the website reported.

It is the third attack on an Orthodox Jewish man in Brooklyn in about a week.

(JTA) — Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she is on her way “to being very well” after undergoing a three-week treatment course for a tumor found on her pancreas.

Ginsburg made the comment on Saturday at the 2019 Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington DC. She also said: “As this audience can see I am alive.”

She told the audience that she’ll be ready for the start of the next Supreme Court session in October, saying: “We have more than a month yet to go. I will be prepared when the time comes.”

She said her job has kept her going. “I love my job. It’s the best and the hardest job that I have ever had. It’s kept me going through four cancer bouts. Instead of concentrating on my aches and pains, I just know that I have to read this set of briefs, go over the draft opinion,” she said.

Her remarks come a week after the Supreme Court in a statement announced that she had completed the radiation treatment and was maintaining an “active schedule.”

Ginsburg had surgery last year to remove a cancerous growth from her left lung, which was her third bout with cancer.

She is one of three Jewish justices on the court and leads its liberal minority.

JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for the boycott of an Israeli television channel for producing and screening the controversial HBO series “Our Boys.”

Netanyahu made the charge in a post Friday on Facebook, calling the show “anti-Semitic” and asserting that it “gives a bad and false name to Israel.”

The post included a graphic sporting the logos of Channel 12 and its news division, under the words “fake news.”

The first moments of the 10-episode series focuses on the kidnapping in June 2014 of three teenage Israeli boys who were found dead two weeks later, and then focuses for the rest of the series on the retaliatory murder of a Palestinian teen by Jewish extremists.

“They took but a few minutes to show what happened to the three, and then the plot moves away from their heinous murder, and instead focuses on the horrible, but unique case of the murder of a single Arab child,” Netanyahu said.

“I’m not surprised that Channel 12 slanders Israel, as I am used to them slandering me on a daily basis,” he said.

Netanyahu has regularly criticized Keshet for its coverage of corruption charged against him, including on Saturday night when he accused the station on social media of “committing a terror attack against democracy” and of attempting to influence the outcome of the upcoming national elections.

WARSAW, Poland (JTA) — The Polish prosecutor’s office will discontinue the case of anti-Semitic graffiti discovered in the demolished workshop of a stonemason who was renovating a local Holocaust memorial.

According to prosecutor Dorota Bochen, the graffiti “was not public,” therefore the perpetrator will not be responsible for anti-Semitism, but only for vandalism.

The workshop of Krzysztof Kolibski – a stonemason who created monuments erected on the graves of Jews murdered during the Holocaust – was demolished by a bulldozer on June 15 in the village of Wawolnica, in eastern Poland.. On one of the stone blocks inside the building, the perpetrator painted the inscription: “Jews away.”

The perpetrator was quickly found by police. Two legal proceedings are pending against him: One related to the destruction of property is underway; The second, regarding anti-Semitism, was discontinued by the Lublin District Prosecutor’s Office earlier this month.

Bochen said in the decision that since the graffiti had been placed inside the demolished workshop, it was not “public hate speech,” which is illegal in Poland. In her opinion, the anti-Semitic inscription was “an expression of disapproval of Krzysztof Kolibski for his cooperation with Jewish foundations.”

Since the prosecutor’s office will not prosecute the perpetrator, Kolibski can file a civil lawsuit.