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“Her prose disrupted my mind,” I wrote, “confronting me with words I had never seen come together before.”

The post Remembering Elly Katz: She Came to Teach Us How appeared first on Jewish Journal.

(RNS) — On the first day in 16 years that three death row inmates were scheduled to be executed on the same day, faith groups in Tennessee, Georgia, Texas, Kentucky, Wisconsin and Iowa tolled their bells as part of a campaign led by the Death Penalty Action advocacy group. In Tennessee, they rang for two minutes at 10 a.m. CT that coincided with a scheduled execution in the state.

“ We have to be together in our opposition to executions and in our statement that this is not in alignment with the teachings of our faiths,” Abraham Bonowitz, the executive director of Death Penalty Action and co-founder of L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty, told RNS. “ There should never be an execution without protest.”

On Thursday morning (Aug. 13), Tennessee executed Anthony Darrell Hines and Oklahoma executed Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez. Alabama is scheduled to execute Jeremy Williams Thursday evening. All three were convicted of murder.

Last year saw a surge in executions, with 47 people put to death, more than any year since 2009.

The faith-based effort to toll church bells is a revival of a campaign originally inspired by Filipino Cardinal Jaime Sin’s 1983 order that Catholic churches ring their bells to call for an investigation into the assassination of opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr., which opposition leaders claimed was ordered by President Ferdinand Marcos.

In 1999, Catholic Bishop Walter Sullivan of Richmond, Virginia, asked churches in his diocese to toll bells on the evening of an execution.

Faith-based anti-death penalty activists have since used the tactic throughout the country in various waves, but today is the first widespread bell tolling since Death Penalty Action took up the campaign, Bonowitz said.

In the 50 years since a Supreme Court decision reignited the modern era of the death penalty in the United States, faith-based opposition has been a cornerstone of successful abolition and commutation campaigns — even as religious Americans as a whole tend to support the death penalty, data suggests. 

In addition to the bell-ringing campaign, called For Whom the Bells Toll, Death Penalty Action hosted a virtual vigil, which included recordings of “El Malei Rachamim,” a Jewish prayer for the dead, and Psalm 23 by Cantor Michael Zoosman, an anti-death penalty activist.

Last weekend, activists with Death Penalty Action marched from Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, where Tennessee’s men’s death row is housed, to the state Capitol to call for the abolition of the death penalty.

In downtown Nashville on Thursday, First Evangelical Lutheran Church rang a bell provided by Death Penalty Action because the church does not have its own bell. That bell, created by Delaware Citizens Opposed to the Death Penalty, tolled outside as Delaware prisoners were executed in the 1990s and 2000s, until the state ended executions. Since then, it has been rung in opposition to the death penalty in more than a dozen states, according to Death Penalty Action.

The Rev. Travis Meier, the church’s pastor, told RNS the decision to toll the bell was inspired by 1 Corinthians  15:26,  ”The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” Meier said the death penalty is another way “ we have mechanized death as a society.”

Meier entrusted his music director to ring the bell as he went to Riverbend Maximum Security Institution to attend a prayer vigil that local activists hold outside executions.

On Wednesday, Dan Mann, a Christian who regularly visits a man on death row there, told RNS that he planned to be present for that vigil. Mann said that he regularly talks to other men in the visitation room and that he met Hines once.

Of the men he sees more often, he said, “ We tell them about our life and what we have going on. They tell us about theirs. And in all of that, we’ve become very close,” Mann said.

Inspired by Matthew 25, Mann and his wife, Bethany, have been visiting death row since 2010. In years when there are many executions, the prisoners become especially “somber” and reflective about their childhoods, he said. 

Growing up a fundamentalist Christian, Mann said he was taught that “ if you killed somebody, you deserved to die.” But he now believes that people on death row “are not the people that were put in there 40 years ago,” leading him to conclude that “there is nobody out of the reach of God’s mercy.”

Now, Mann attends Christ Church Cathedral, an Episcopal church that joined other downtown Nashville churches in asking Gov. Bill Lee to stay Hines’ execution. The governor declined to intervene earlier this week. 

Christ Church Cathedral also committed to toll its bells. The five pastors who signed a letter about it wrote, “The bells will toll for mercy, remembering the words of Scripture: ‘Mercy triumphs over judgment.’”

At the vigil outside the prison, after an opening prayer and reading scripture together, the group of a couple dozen waited for news that Hines had been executed, Meier said.

During that time, “ I pray, and I walk because I can’t sit still,” Meier said. His prayers are for Hines, his victim and her family, the prison staff and for a change of heart among legislators.

On Thursday, Meier said, the somber gathering also grappled with “frustration” over Tennessee’s most recent botched execution attempt, during which a doctor spent over an hour trying to insert an IV line to execute Tony Carruthers. Witnesses say the attempt created excruciating pain for Carruthers, who has now been spared execution for a year.

Unlike that last vigil, this time, faith leaders received news that Hines had been successfully executed. The faith leaders sang “Amazing Grace” and prayed the Commendation of the Dying, Meier said.

Meier lamented “the system of death” in the U.S. “ That three executions can happen in the same day, and a majority of the population have no clue that it’s happening — it’s just so commonplace that nobody bats an eye,” he said.

Back when the National Basketball Association was little more than a startup, two Jewish businessmen named Benjamin Berger and Morris Chalfen bought the worst team in the sport, the Detroit Gems, for $15,000. They relocated the franchise to Minneapolis and gave it a name that nodded to state geography.

Eighty years later, the Lakers are a global brand, have won 17 championships and play in Los Angeles — and for the first time since Berger and Chalfen sold, a Jewish duo will take the reins. Joshua Kushner and Bob Iger are buying a majority stake in the team, ESPN reported Wednesday. They’ll be paying a tad more than Berger did in the 1940s —the Lakers were valued at $12.5 billion in the sale.

It’s been a busy summer for Kushner, a real estate scion married to supermodel Karlie Kloss; his brother Jared is a former Trump administration fixture. A company backed by his VC firm, Thrive Capital, tried to buy a stake in the World Cup last month, causing an international backlash that may yet lead to the resignation of FIFA president Gianni Infantino. (That subsidiary, Thrive Eternal, also owns a stake in the San Francisco Giants.)

Kushner and Iger were reportedly angling to buy an expansion NBA franchise in Las Vegas before pivoting to the Lakers.

“As lifelong NBA fans, we are deeply honored for the opportunity to become stewards of the Los Angeles Lakers, one of the most iconic sports franchises in the world,” Kushner and Iger said in a statement to ESPN.

Kushner is now tasked with restoring the Lakers to “Showtime” glory — perhaps with Kloss courtside in the seat once held by an earlier model-turned-owner, Jeanie Buss.

He comes from a family well-acquainted with the tabloids. His brother, Jared, is married to Ivanka Trump and serves as a White House advisor. Their father, Charles Kushner, made billions in real estate development before he was sent to prison for illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion and witness tampering. (Trump later pardoned him, and today Kushner serves as the U.S. ambassador to France.)

The sale comes 14 months after Buss sold the Lakers to Mark Walter, the head of a private equity firm and a co-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Walter, who bought the team at a $10 billion valuation, is currently facing federal and SEC investigations into insurance companies tied to his broader business operations.

It was not publicly known that the Lakers were for sale, and ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne reported Wednesday that Kushner and Iger — who had previously been bidding for an expansion NBA team in Las Vegas — approached Walter with an offer he couldn’t refuse.

The sale would make the Lakers the 14th NBA team out of 30 with Jewish principal owners. The league was founded by Jewish businessmen in the 1940s.

The newcomers will inherit a roster in transition following the departure of LeBron James, who at 41 is a few months older than Kushner, the youngest majority owner in the NBA.

Behind James and Luka Dončić, the Lakers finished with the fourth-best record in the Western Conference last season and were eliminated in the second round of the playoffs. James signed with the Philadelphia 76ers this offseason in free agency.

This story was originally published on the Forward.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge in Boston on Thursday dismissed a Trump administration lawsuit that accused Harvard University of turning a blind eye to harassment of Jewish students.

The decision from U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns said that President Donald Trump’s administration failed to prove an ongoing violation of federal civil rights laws. The judge said the lawsuit, filed in March, mostly focuses on incidents that took place in the 2023-24 academic year, with a few from March 2025.

The cases were “too isolated and episodic” to prove a persistent civil rights violation at the Ivy League campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the judge said.

“We disagree with the ruling and are assessing next steps,” said Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice. Harvard did not immediately provide a comment on the decision.

The lawsuit accused Harvard of failing to protect Jewish students during pro-Palestinian demonstrations that roiled the campus after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel. The Trump administration argued Harvard officials did nothing as Jewish students were “harassed, physically assaulted, stalked, and spat upon.”

In a statement after the lawsuit was filed, Harvard said it “cares deeply about members of our Jewish and Israeli community and remains committed to ensuring they are embraced, respected, and can thrive on our campus.”

Harvard President Alan M. Garber says the university formed a task force to combat antisemitism. The university also hired a new provost and new deans and reformed its discipline policies to make them “more consistent, fair and effective,” Garber has said.

The government’s case sought to recover billions of dollars in federal research grants awarded to Harvard since October 2023. Trump officials argued they had a right to recoup the money under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a federal law barring discrimination based on race or national origin.

The lawsuit is among several actions the government has taken against Harvard since the Ivy League university refused a list of demands made by the White House after Trump, a Republican, returned to office last year. Trump officials have separately sought to cut Harvard’s research funding and limit its ability to enroll foreign students and U.S. military members.

In a separate legal case last year, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reverse more than $2.6 billion in federal funding cuts to Harvard. That decision found that the White House put unconstitutional conditions on federal funding, using antisemitism as a “smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault” on universities.

Despite their bitter dispute, Harvard and the Trump administration have held some negotiations, and Trump himself said the two sides had been close to reaching an agreement. But when the Justice Department filed this civil rights lawsuit in March, it pointed to an extraordinary impasse. When colleges are found in violation of federal civil rights law, they almost always reach compliance through voluntary agreements.