🥹 Evan Gershkovich is back on U.S. soil: The Jewish Wall Street Journal reporter, who was detained in Russia for 491 days, landed in Washington, D.C. with two other released Americans late last night. The quest to free him involved months of secret negotiations and high-stakes diplomacy, with a surprising starring role played by his mother, Ella Milman, who emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1979. (AP, Wall Street Journal)
⚖️ A 28-year-old woman was arrested on hate crime charges over vandalism that targeted leaders of the Brooklyn Museum, an act that drew allegations of antisemitism. Five other suspects in the incident, which drew outrage over graffiti calling the museum’s Jewish director a “white-supremacist Zionist,” are still being sought. (AP)
👀 Five pro-Palestinian student groups were suspended by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee over a mid-July Instagram story that called Hillel Milwaukee and Milwaukee’s Jewish Federation “local extremist groups.” The suspension is temporary as the university investigates. (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
😞 A group of 200 Jewish staff and contributors at the BBC accused the media company of failing to investigate internal antisemitism, citing a “mental health toll on Jewish BBC staff, their feelings of isolation and alienation from their bosses and experiences of prejudice and racism at work.” (Deadline)
😢 Poland marked the 80th anniversary of the onset of the Warsaw Uprising; the day began with news that 106-year-old Barbara Sowa, the oldest living rebel involved in the uprising, had died. (AP)
What else we’re reading ➤“What can a city do when neo-Nazis start marching down its streets?” … “Discrimination against trans Olympians has roots in Nazi Germany” … “Safi Rauf, a Muslim humanitarian, was held captive by the Taliban for 105 days. Secret calls on a smuggled phone with Sammi Cannold, a Jewish Broadway director, were his lifeline.”
