JIMENA in the Press

By Sarah Levin, Times of Israel. March 18, 2019 Earlier this month, when Congresswoman Ilhan Omar accused American Jews of dual-loyalty to the State of Israel, many former Jewish refugees from Arab countries and Iran recoiled, remembering the innocent Jewish lives imprisoned and lost in their countries of origin because of anti-Semitic accusations of dual loyalty. American Jews, including those from the Arab world and Iran, questioned why leaders of the Democratic party insist on keeping Congresswoman Omar on the House Foreign Affairs Committee after she repeatedly spouted the same anti-Semitic tropes that led to the oppression and ethnic cleansing
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JNS.org – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “breaking bread” with Arab leaders at the Warsaw conference on Middle East security was a warming and unprecedented sight. But no sooner had a video been leaked online of a friendly interaction between Netanyahu and the Yemen foreign minister than it was deleted. This is symptomatic of the push-me, pull-you relationship between Israel and its Arab “frenemies.” Two steps on the road to normalization, two steps back. In February, an Iraqi poet who had written about the Jews of his country was murdered. At about the same time, Egyptians complained that the Israeli
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Syracuse University is being urged to cease granting college credits to students who intern with an activist group that promotes the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign. The Syracuse Peace Council (SPC) is listed as one of 14 “internship sites” available to students majoring in Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition, each of which offers three credits and a letter grade. By Shiri Moshe, the Algemeiner The calls come in the wake of a gathering hosted by the SPC’s Justice for Palestine Committee on January 22 at ArtRage Gallery in Syracuse, which was attended by more than two dozen people, among them Campus
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A coalition of Sephardi and Mizrahi groups — Jews who came from the Middle East and Africa — condemned a recent statement by the anti-Israel group, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), saying that it expressed “racist exclusion,” in a statement released Wednesday.
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By Sarah Levin, JNS (January 22, 2019 / JNS) Like so many other Jewish women, I grappled over and over again with the decision to attend the Women’s March on Jan. 19. I missed the first march because I was recovering from childbirth, and was overcome with exhaustion and uncertainties about how I was going manage motherhood and my very full-time work at JIMENA. Since the initial march, I’ve yearned to be a part of a women’s movement that initially filled me with radical hope. This hope began to seriously wane for me last May when I happened to be
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(JTA) — Eighteen Jewish groups urged Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to exclude Jewish artifacts when making import restriction agreements with countries in the Middle East and North Africa. In a letter sent Tuesday to Pompeo, the organizations expressed worry that deals meant to curb looting would prevent Jews now living in the United States from retrieving personal and community belongings from their countries of origin. Jews were forced out of countries in the Middle East and North Africa amid heavy persecution following the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. The letter was organized by Jews Indigenous to
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BY MICHELLE SHABTAI, KAREN WINOKAN | OCTOBER 23, 2018 The Silicon Valley Jewish Film Festival will screen the 2017 documentary “Remember Baghdad” on Oct. 30, with JIMENA serving as a co-sponsor. JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa) was founded in 2001 by Gina Waldman, a Jew from Libya, and her Egyptian friend, the late Joseph Wahed. The S.F.-based nonprofit’s core mission is to bear witness to the suffering of Jewish refugees from Arab lands. The SVJFF recently sat down with Waldman to talk about the film, which follows the lives of four Iraqi Jewish families. SVJFF:
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By Raffael Hoffman,Hamodia, July 25, 2018, Haaretz A bipartisan Senate resolution urges the State Department to revisit an agreement to return a trove of thousands of sefarim and manuscripts, including those of the Ben Ish Chai, and other items seized from the Iraqi Jewish community, to the Iraqi government. Controversy over legitimate ownership of what has become known as the Iraqi Jewish Archive dates back many years, with activists and politicians long advocating that the collection, captured by U.S. forces during the Iraq War, should remain in America or Israel, where it can be accessible to scholars and Iraqi Jews.
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By Kate Fitz Gibbon, July 12, 2018, Cultural Property News Against Jewish Protests, State Department Seeks to Add Another Brick in the Wall… The State Department is rushing through another proposed agreement to block U.S. public access to art, this time with the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria. On June 13, 2018, the State Department announced that it had received a request from Algeria under the Convention on Cultural Property Implementation Act to block importation of its cultural objects from entry into the United States.
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By Felicia Herman, E-Jewish Philanthropy, July 23, 2018 Today, we are proud to announce Natan’s 15th annual grant slate, representing nearly $925,000 in new grants and loans to 39 Jewish and Israeli social entrepreneurs, nonprofit startups and post-startups, social businesses, and networks of grassroots initiatives
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