Tobia Zevi is a rising star in Rome’s Jewish community. Can he become the city’s next mayor?

(JTA) — Tobia Zevi is candid: He wants to become the next mayor of Rome. “I’ve dreamed of becoming mayor of my city my entire life,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an interview. “For years, I’ve been thinking about how to transform it and make it more liveable for its residents and more attractive for its tourists.”

If he succeeds, he is set to make history, becoming the second-ever Jewish mayor of the Italian capital, the first in over a century.

The 36-year-old, who has been involved in both local and national politics for 15 years, announced this summer his run for the capital’s mayoral primary in 2021. Since the announcement, he has gained momentum in the crowded field thanks to a series of high-profile newspaper interviews and social media posts. Over the summer, Zevi took advantage of the city’s relatively low infection rate to start campaigning, after the country was severely hit by the coronavirus pandemic in the spring. Continue reading…

Online Teaching: Challenges and Experiences

In March, when the university I work for in New York City decided to suspend all in-person classes and transition online, I worried about the challenges that I was going to face as a professor.

After months of online teaching, I’ve gathered some of the strategies that in my experience have helped me involve the students and not lose too many elements of in-person lectures. Read the full article here.

At Yeshiva University, Students Prepare To March For LGBTQ Rights

Molly Meisels, a student at Yeshiva University, wanted to invite assemblymember Deborah Glick to talk about her experience as New York’s first openly gay legislator to the school’s College Democrats club. The university administration had other ideas.

Two weeks before the event took place, Meisels said she was called into an office and asked not to advertise the event in any way as LGBTQ-related and not to ask the assemblymember LGBTQ-related questions. “They told me that someone from higher up in the university was trying to stop the event from happening,” she said.