Avi Mayer, a pro-Israel activist and communications professional has been named the next editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. Mayer, 38, will succeed the current editor of the 90-year-old English language newspaper in mid-April, after Passover.

He most recently served as managing director of global communications and public affairs for the American Jewish Committee, and previously served as the spokesperson for the Jewish Agency for Israel. He also served in the spokesperson’s unit of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

This just in…but it won’t be out until November. Penguin Random House wants to be sure everyone knows that Barbara Streisand has written a memoir and, to that end, the hype has already begun — even though the current pub date is Nov. 7 — nine months until the baby is birthed.

My Name Is Barbra talks about life and career, natch, and with so much to talk about, the star squeezes the content into a reported 1,040 pages — just in time for Hanukkah gift-giving

Meet the new Jewish members of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 118th Congress. Their varied backgrounds are illustrative of the many paths Jews are taking to the halls of Congress in the 21st century.

• Daniel Goldman, D-NY: Daniel Sachs Goldman, 46, heir to the Levi-Strauss & Co. fortune, is as federal prosecutor in Manhattan, and legal analyst for NBC and MSNBC. He has already established a profile on Capitol Hill, joining Democratic Representative Ritchie Torres of the Bronx to file a complaint with the House Ethics Committee regarding George Santos.
• Max Miller, R-OH: A former Marine, Miller, 34, is the scion of a wealthy Cleveland-area real estate family. He won his district on a platform of opposition to teaching “critical race theory” in schools, opposition to the two-state solution in the Middle East, and cutting inflation through reduced government spending and lower taxes.
• Greg Landsman, D-OH: During the campaign, Greg Landsman, 46, billed himself as a “former public school teacher,” even though he taught Spanish for just a year in 2001, two years after graduating from college. He went on to earn a graduate degree from the Harvard Divinity School and returned to Cincinnati, where he worked in the education nonprofit sector. Landsman has joined the New Democratic Coalition, the main alliance of moderate Democrats in the House.
• Becca Balint, D-VT: Becca Balint, 54, an LGBTQ person, won election last November to the seat occupied by Bernie Sanders (1991-2007) before his move to the Senate. She is the first woman House member from Vermont and was the first woman president pro tempore of the Vermont State Senate. She won her seat as a left-wing, Bernie-style progressive. Her campaign stressed her fight for paid parental leave, increased minimum wage, reproductive freedom, and her belief in “healthcare for all.”
• Jared Moskowitz, D-FL: Three weeks after a gunman murdered 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL, in February 2018, Democratic State Representative Jared Moskowitz, now 42, rose on the floor of the legislature and spoke in favor of a wide-ranging measure on gun safety. He was instrumental in the passage of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Public Safety Act, signed by then-Republican Governor Rick Scott, an achievement in increasingly red Florida. He is now the House member for the district. Like Landsman of Ohio, Moskowitz has joined the centrist New Democrat Coalition.

IsraAid CEO Yotam Polizer has been named this year’s Charles Bronfman Prize recipient, a $100,000 award launched in 2004 and given to a humanitarian activist younger than 50.

IsraAid, a nonprofit Israeli refugee aid organization, operates with a budget of approximately $20 million and 320 employees spread across 14 countries. “Yotam was chosen because IsraAid is not a government operation,” said Charles Bronfman, in whose name the prize was founded. “It’s an entrepreneurial philanthropy, and has done God’s work. Yotam has spearheaded an organization that now is usually the first in a country that’s in humanitarian trouble.”

At present, a major focus of the group is Ukraine. IsraAid now has more than 30 people on the ground inside Ukraine, and another dozen or so in the neighboring countries of Moldova and Romania.

The New York University Board of Trustees has named Linda G. Mills to be the university’s 17th president, the first woman to be appointed to the post. She will take up her new duties on July 1, 2023.

Prior to her appointment, the president-designate served for more than a decade as NYU’s Vice Chancellor and Senior Vice Provost for Global Programs and University Life. She is the Lisa Ellen Goldberg Professor of Social Work, Public Policy, and Law, also the executive director of the NYU Center on Violence and Recovery. Her principal areas of scholarly focus are trauma, bias, and domestic violence. She is a widely published author of articles and books. As a filmmaker, she has produced award-winning documentaries, including one on the Holocaust experiences of her own family.

She received her PhD in Health Policy in 1994 from Brandeis University, where she was a Pew Scholar; her MSW from San Francisco State University in 1986; her JD from the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco in 1983; and her BA in history and social thought from the University of California, Irvine in 1979. She was admitted to the California Bar in 1983, and first became a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in 1990.

Her appointment follows a six-month international search by a Presidential Search Committee of trustees, deans, faculty, students and administrators that reviewed more than 100 candidates.

Two stars of the hit television show Shtisel will be reuniting for a miniseries about a family that survived the Holocaust. Actors Michael Aloni and Hadas Yaron, who played Akiva and Libbi on Shtisel, will once again play a married couple in the new show, which is being made by Hulu. The new show, release date TBD, is based on a 2017 bestselling book, We Were the Lucky Ones.