Ohio

The Palestine solidarity student conference is off. Off campus, that is.
Rutgers University canceled the controversial three-day conference slated for the campus Oct. 10-12, declaring that the student backers of the event, NJ Solidarity, failed to file the necessary paperwork and make a deposit to use university facilities.
NJ Solidarity quickly charged Rutgers with political repression and vowed to find a new location.

A rift has broken out between a New Jersey-based pro-Palestinian student group and a national pro-Palestinian organization, threatening a three-day Palestinian solidarity conference scheduled for Rutgers University in New Brunswick in October.
A spokeswoman for the National Student Conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement (PSM) confirmed that the group has voted to move its third annual national conference from Rutgers to Ohio State University because of "concerns about the capability of New Jersey Solidarity (NJS) to host this year's conference successfully."

Samuel J. Wurzelbacher of Toledo, Ohio, became the most famous plumber in the United States during this year’s presidential campaign for a question he asked then Sen. Barack Obama about the candidate’s tax policies.

Now Joe the Plumber is Joe the War Correspondent.
Wurzelbacher, who became a campaign punch line and John McCain supporter, went to Israel last week to report on the war in Gaza for the conservative Pajamas TV (www.pjtv.com) Web site.

Several Ohio Jewish organizations joined together this week to launch a pro-Israel campaign at Ohio State University a week before the start of a three-day national pro-Palestinian student conference.
A coalition including Chabad, OSU's Hillel, the Columbus Jewish Federation, AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish National Fund was planning the Israel Activism on Campus campaign Tuesday featuring noted attorney Alan Dershowitz, author of the new book "The Case for Israel."

Israel is heading toward an international religious crisis and the loss of untold millions in tourism following increased police actions against Christians.
So warned millennium experts and Christian and Jewish leaders in the wake of Israel’s midnight raid, arrest and deportation this week of a group of 21 Christians, mostly Americans, who had been living without incident near the Mount of Olives anticipating the “return” of Jesus and the beginning of the End of Days.

In Richardson, Texas, they call it “Miriam’s seder.” “Hers Seder” is the term of art in Pennsylvania, at the American Jewish Congress gatherings. And in a diverse cross-section of neighborhoods, towns and cities, from the semi-suburbia of Hollis Hills, Queens, to the flatlands of Canton, Ohio, to the East Bay of San Francisco, to the deep South of Birmingham, Ala., the event is known simply as a women’s seder.

Samuel J. Wurzelbacher of Toledo, Ohio, became the most famous plumber in the United States during this year’s presidential campaign for a question he asked then Sen. Barack Obama about the candidate’s tax policies.

Now Joe the Plumber is Joe the War Correspondent.

Philadelphia — Aviva Koloski, a junior at Stern Hebrew High School here, plays on her Modern Orthodox day school’s girls’ basketball team, but she never considered playing basketball in college.
Because of various halachic restrictions, “I never would have thought it was possible for an Orthodox Jewish girl to play basketball” at the collegiate level, she said.

Today, Koloski is giving the matter another thought.

Search the amazon.com Web site for “Jewish mothers” and 6,075 hits come up. Including a related title, “Yiddishe Mamas: The Truth About the Jewish Mother.”
That’s the new book by Marnie Winston-Macauley, a Flushing-born author who lives in Las Vegas and set out to investigate and shatter the often-unflattering stereotypes about the Jewish mother.

One of the guests of honor at the recent commencement exercises of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, sitting at the far left of the first row of the sanctuary in Temple Emanu-El, was neither guest speaker, college official Nor financial supporter of the institution.

Dalia Samansky, a third-year rabbinical student at the school’s Los Angeles campus who received her master’s degree in L.A. the following week, was invited to the New York commencement as role model.

She had saved a life.