E Baito

Sarah Lawrence College for years has promoted itself as an experimental and progressive haven, a leafy enclave where students design curriculums and believe in what its president has called “the underlying goodness of others.”“You are different. So are we” was a slogan the school used. Some students saw it as a declaration that they would be understood and valued.Now former students are accusing the college of betraying them by allowing a 50-year-old ex-con to roam its Westchester County campus; spend nights in a dormitory where his daughter lived; and form relationships with students whom he went on to abuse.That man, Lawrence V. Ray, was convicted in 2022 of extortion, sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy after a trial in Manhattan. Federal prosecutors said that he used cult-leade...

When Dr. Yael Mozer-Glassberg, a senior physician at Schneider Children’s Medical Center of Israel, was initially asked to join the team of people who would be responsible for the intake of child hostages returning to Israel, her internal reaction was immediate.“Oh my God, no,” she recalled saying to herself. “But how could I say no? It’s a national mission.”She was selected to join a group in Petah Tikva, near Tel Aviv, comprising the first medical professionals to care for a group of children and their mothers returning to Israel. During the cease-fire, which lasted from Nov. 24 to Dec. 1, the hospital admitted 19 children and 6 women who were kidnapped on Oct. 7 in Israel by Hamas and other militant groups.To the initial surprise of many, the children were quick to speak freely about th...

The Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Education Department has opened an investigation into allegations of antisemitism at Harvard University, where the campus, like many others, has been roiled by demonstrations and confrontations between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students in the weeks since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.The complaint against Harvard, filed on Tuesday, joins a growing list of federal civil rights investigations into complaints of discrimination based on “shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics,” including at Columbia, Cornell, Wellesley College, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Tampa and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.The list includes a handful of school districts as well, including New York City public schools, Clar...

Conditions in the city are grim, with little access to running water or sanitation. People are sleeping in the open, and aid workers have largely stopped distributing water and flour because of the intensity of the fighting and Israeli bombardments, U.N. officials have said.More than 20,000 people have taken refuge at a training center in the city that is designed to shelter one-tenth of that number, according to the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.Gazans are being pushed into an area that covers less than one-third of the enclave, according to the United Nations.“The level of human suffering is intolerable,” the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Mirjana Spoljaric, who visited Gaza on Monday, said in a statement. She added: “It i...

Hunter College has agreed to reschedule a screening of a documentary critical of Israel, following an outcry from faculty members and students who claimed that the administration’s earlier decision to cancel it violated academic freedom.A screening of the documentary, “Israelism,” had been scheduled for Nov. 14 as part of a film series organized by a professor in the New York school’s film and media department. It would have been followed by a discussion with one of the directors and one of the film’s protagonists, a young American Jew who travels to Israel and the West Bank and discovers a reality very different from the story she was raised with.But that morning, Hunter’s interim president, Ann Kirschner, announced that the screening would be canceled because of safety concerns.“In the c...