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NOVEMBER 24, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM



nation / world
Israel Won’t Cooperate With FBI Inquiry Into Journalist's Killing
Israel's defense minister said the nation will not cooperate with an FBI investigation
into the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian American journalist who died
in May in an exchange of fire between Palestinian and Israeli troops, JTA.org reported.

“The American Justice Department’s decision to investigate the regrettable
death of Shireen Abu Akleh is a grave mistake,” Benny Gantz, Israel’s defense
minister, said on Nov. 14 on Twitter. “I made clear to American representatives
that we stand behind Israeli soldiers, we will not cooperate with any outside
inquiry and we will not allow interference in Israeli internal matters.”
Such an investigation is significant because the Biden administration’s State
Department has already signed off on Israel’s finding that an Israeli soldier likely shot
the fatal bullet, and that there was no evidence that the killing was intentional. The
FBI may be ready to investigate whether the shooting was intentional, as Palestinian
officials and Abu Akleh’s family have alleged. Gantz, who deleted and then reposted
his tweets, said the Israeli inquiry was “independent and professional.”
Several Holocaust Books Yanked From Some Missouri Schools
Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” along with six books about the Holocaust geared
toward young readers, are among the hundreds of books that a handful of school
districts in Missouri have reportedly removed from their shelves since the start
of this school year, JTA.org reported.

The list of books pulled from shelves was published on Nov. 16 by the literary
free-expression advocacy group PEN America, along with a letter of protest
signed by Spiegelman and other authors.

“This is what happens when we are operating in a climate of fear,” said Jonathan
Friedman, PEN America’s director of free expression and education programs.

The books were pulled owing to an amendment to a new Missouri state law,
largely dealing with child trafficking and sexual abuse, that also establishes a
criminal penalty for providing “explicit sexual material” to students. The law
orders possible jail time for any educators found to be in violation.

The vast majority of the affected books originated from one school district:
Wentzville, a St. Louis exurb that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported had
ordered its librarians to pull more than 200 books off its shelves.

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New Romanian Law Guarantees the Right to Kosher Slaughter
Romanian authorities adopted a law that recognizes and gives specific protection
to shechitah, or kosher ritual slaughter of animals, the Conference of European
Rabbis said in a statement, hailing the move as a “landmark” example for other
countries in Europe, JTA.org reported.

The new legislation, which the Romanian parliament passed on Nov. 15, comes
roughly a year after the Court of the European Union upheld the bans of both the
Muslim and Jewish traditional methods of slaughter of animals for food in two
Belgian states.

Jewish leaders and organizations decried the ruling, which the Israeli ambas-
sador in Belgium called “catastrophic and a blow to Jewish life in Europe.” They
have worked to lobby the European Union for protection and were heartened
last month after the EU convened Muslim and Jewish leaders for the first time to
discuss ritual meat production.

Israeli-led Study Finds Oldest Evidence Yet of Cooked Food
Fish remains discovered at Israel’s Gesher Benot Yaakov archaeological site
appear to show that humans were cooking their food hundreds of thousands of
years ago, JNS.org reported.

Until now, the earliest evidence of cooking is claimed to date back about 170,000
years. However, these findings, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, indi-
cate that the practice is much older, dating back as far as 780,000 years.

Researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University and
Bar-Ilan University collaborated with the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History,
Oranim Academic College, the Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research
institution, the Natural History Museum in London and the Johannes Gutenberg
University in Mainz on the research that produced the new theory. JE
— Compiled by Andy Gotlieb
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