by | Jun 22, 2025 11:39 am | Comments (34)
Blumenthal, DeLauro, Murphy: Seeking answers on bombing.
New Haven’s Washington representatives promptly condemned the Trump administration decision to enter a Mideast war by bombing three Iranian nuclear facilities.
Continue reading ‘Murphy, DeLauro, Blumenthal Blast Trump's Iran Bombings’
by | Jun 3, 2025 9:44 am | Comments (6)
contributed photos
Lewis, center, with Santiago — "the best pizza maker in New Haven," according to Lewis — to his left and pizza aficionado Ben McClain to his right.
Londoner Max Lewis was in line at Sally’s Apizza with his friend Dan when a wise stranger recommended the potato pie. It was late 2023, nine months before Lewis would open his own apizza spot across the pond.
“No, I’ve got a plan,” he told the man.
Lewis had come all the way from London just to sample the famed New Haven style, and he’d already thought through which pies to get and what order to eat them in.
Lewis was caught off guard, then, when he got to his table and his server brought over two slices of potato pie. “At this point, I’ve not been in New Haven for an hour,” he told me, recounting the story over a recent Whatsapp voice call. He remembered thinking, “Where does this happen, where people feel so strongly about a pizza that they’ll give you their pizza?”
The answer, he realized over the course of the apizza-fueled year he’d have, was New Haven.
by | May 23, 2025 4:22 pm | Comments (17)
Lary Bloom photo
PFC Zlotowski's plot.
NORMANDY, FRANCE — I watch on this sunny day in late May as a barefoot young girl twirls and twirls in the sand as if she is the prima ballerina, and not performing on a spot where 81 years ago death became a cheap commodity.
by | May 13, 2025 8:23 pm | Comments (13)
Nathaniel Rosenberg photo
At Tuesday's hunger strike.
(Updated) A group of six Yale University affiliates abstained from eating for a fourth day Tuesday as part of a hunger strike in support of Palestinians at risk of famine in Gaza.
by | May 12, 2025 2:23 pm | Comments (0)
Masorti Olami Kyiv photos
Praying with the minyan at Masoret Kyiv.
Tsenya Garashchenko holds the Havdalah candle, marking the end of Shabbat.
The following article was written by the New Haven Independent’s Kyiv correspondent.
KYIV, Ukraine — Three years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv’s Conservative Jewish community is still hard at work continuing the Jewish tradition in the city.
Continue reading ‘Amid War, Kyiv's Jewish Community Perseveres’
by | May 9, 2025 11:12 am | Comments (11)
Man spits at pro-Palestinian protester.
(Updated) City police are looking for a man who appeared to shout an anti-trans slur at a pro-Palestinian protester before spitting in that protester’s face.
Continue reading ‘Cops Probe Spitting Incident At Ben-Gvir Protest’
by | May 2, 2025 12:05 pm | Comments (9)
Allan Appel photo
Sam Moyn, M. Gessen, and Zack Beauchamp at Thursday's conference.
It takes perhaps a retired Reform rabbi to see beyond the agonized Talmudic pilpul, that is, the fine distinction-making between antisemitism and anti-Zionism
Yet a major take-away for retired Yale Jewish Chaplain Rabbi Jim Ponet from the two-day conference at Yale this week on “Antisemitism and the Crisis of Liberalism” was precisely that.
Continue reading ‘Antisemitism & Anti-Antisemitism Explored’
by | Apr 24, 2025 9:05 pm | Comments (3)
Theia Chatelle photos
Ukraine Search and Rescue looks for bodies underneath the rubble after Thursday's attack.
The following article was submitted by the New Haven Independent’s Kyiv correspondent, Theia Chatelle.
KYIV—Sirens first sounded in Kyiv at 12:36 a.m. Thursday.
They didn’t turn off until 6:33 a.m. — following a coordinated aerial attack by Russia that has left at least 12 dead and 100 injured across Ukraine.
Continue reading ‘The View From Kyiv Under Russian Bombardment’
by and | Apr 23, 2025 11:31 pm | Comments (10)
Nathaniel Rosenberg photo
Itamar Ben-Gvir (center) with Rabbi Shmully Hecht (second from left), as security protects the Israeli minister from water bottles thrown by protesters.
Nathaniel Rosenberg photo
Earlier in the day outside 442 Orange.
Protesters jeer attendees as they leave the event; water bottles were thrown at Ben-Gvir. Video by Nathaniel Rosenberg.
(Updated) Up to 200 protesters ranging from kaffiyeh-clad pro-Palestine activists to yarmulke-wearing pro-Israel Jews gathered at the intersection of Orange and Trumbull streets Wednesday evening to protest the arrival of far right-wing Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir to address a Jewish student society called Shabtai.
The night ended with water bottles thrown at the visiting minister and one arrest of a protester.
Continue reading ‘Crowd Fills Streets To Protest Israeli Minister’
by | Apr 23, 2025 9:07 pm | Comments (4)
Below are photos from Wednesday’s protest of Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s visit to the East Rock headquarters of Shabtai, a Jewish society directed towards Yale students. Click here to read a full story about those protests.
Thomas Breen photos
Continue reading ‘Scenes From A Protest: 4/23 On Orange St.’
by | Mar 7, 2025 4:07 pm | Comments (15)
Allan Appel Photo
Figlus, DeLauro, and Melnyk, among others, at Friday presser.
“The past few weeks have been among the most shameful in our nation’s history,” U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro said at a somber Friday press conference. “Trump is willing to sacrifice the freedom of an entire nation so that he can be seen as closing what is in his mind just another real estate deal.”
by | Mar 6, 2025 3:46 pm | Comments (17)
Instagram photo
Yair Netanyahu (top right) at Ricotta in September.
Thomas Breen photo
The Annex house now owned by Yair Netanyahu's company.
Yair Netanyahu, the oldest son of the Israeli prime minister and a prominent defender of his father’s government, has formed a company in Fair Haven and bought a house in the Annex to boost his work speaking on college campuses about Israeli history, Judaism, antisemitism, and his life at the center of his home country’s politics.
His business creation, real estate purchase, and recent visits to New Haven — including at a downtown kosher restaurant — reveal the younger Netanyahu’s tie to a small city with a growing Orthodox Jewish community.
by | Dec 12, 2024 4:25 pm | Comments (0)
Linda Zhou photo
Elena's Light Founder Fereshteh Ganjavi (left) with Qaderi (center) and Siawash.
When Siawash reads the once-unsent letters that his mom wrote to him while she was living in exile and he was a child in Afghanistan, he isn’t filled with sorrow.
“Every time I read the letters my mom wrote to me, I see that history repeats and repeats,” Siawash said before a crowd in Yale’s Dwight Hall. “I have hope for the future.”
Continue reading ‘Homeira and Julia Bring Ukraine, Afghanistan To New Haven’
by | Nov 6, 2024 1:20 pm | Comments (4)
Crownmediahouse photo
Sasa Harriott: "My fight was not over yet."
The crowd listened, rapt, as Sasa Harriott told them about her lowest point.
by | Oct 31, 2024 1:39 pm | Comments (4)
Yash Roy file photo
At the scene of the April 22 Yale encampment arrests.
More than two dozen pro-Palestine Yale arrestees pleaded guilty to infractions and agreed to pay $90 fines in order to have criminal trespassing cases dropped — as 13 more decided instead to keep fighting for those “illegitimate” charges to be dismissed.
by | Oct 9, 2024 3:40 pm | Comments (15)
Allan Appel photo
Pengyan Sun and daughter Sophie with (now retired) longtime NHFPL employee Xia Feng, at Tuesday's meetup.
English lessons for Chinese grandparents. Exercise equipment for the elderly. And a library-hosted WeChat channel for Chinese New Haveners looking to connect.
Those recommendations rose to the fore as a dozen people gathered for the city library system’s first ever meeting held entirely in Chinese — to help think through how New Haven’s public library system could improve over the next half decade.
by | Aug 28, 2024 2:37 pm | Comments (24)
Laura Glesby Photo
Student-led protests resume as the semester starts up.
Over 100 Yale students and allies marked the first day of classes by calling for a “Free, Free Palestine” on the steps of the Elm Street courthouse — as 14 students arrested on campus for protesting last spring returned to the courtroom to call for their misdemeanor trespassing charges to be dismissed.
by | Aug 19, 2024 11:52 am | Comments (1)
Jabez Choi photos
Protestors walking down Church Street.
Protestors gathered outside City Hall.
Krisly Carreno teared up as she spotted dozens of yellow-blue-and-red flags on the backs of protesters while she walked down Church Street.
“It was so emotional,” Carreno said. “I had no idea how many Venezuelans [are] in Connecticut.”
by | Aug 6, 2024 1:37 pm | Comments (4)
Allan Appel photo
City Peace Commissioners Millie Grenough and Paul Bloom, at Tuesday's vigil.
On the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, a half dozen American aircraft arrived and hovered over Hiroshima, Japan. They included planes tracking the weather, taking pictures, and monitoring weapons systems. One carried the world’s first atomic bomb.
Continue reading ‘Hiroshima Bombing Remembered On The Green’
by | Jul 24, 2024 11:31 am | Comments (15)
Skip the political theater. Focus on human lives at risk
by | Jun 24, 2024 9:11 am | Comments (1)
Naseema, Aminah, Astou, and Adila serving their dishes on the Green.
“The word ‘refugee’ hurts,” said Aminah Alsaleh, “it means you don’t have a home.”
As she served yalanji — vegetarian stuffed grape leaves — to New Haveners on the Green, more than 8 years after fleeing war in her home country of Syria, she reflected that she no longer identifies with the label.
She was one of three representatives from Sanctuary Kitchen, along with Chefs Astou and Adila, who brought dishes from their home countries to Arts & Ideas’ World Food Bazaar on Thursday evening in celebration of World Refugee Day.
by | May 7, 2024 12:04 pm | Comments (9)
Laura Glesby file photo
Westville Alder Adam Marchand.
The following “Legislative Update” email was sent by Westville Alder Adam Marchand to constituents Tuesday morning, explaining why he voted with a majority of his Board of Alders colleagues to not adopt a proposed resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Continue reading ‘Marchand: Ceasefire Resolution Was "Flawed Beyond Repair"’
by | May 6, 2024 8:04 pm | Comments (43)
Laura Glesby Photo
Protesters rally outside City Hall ...
... before filling the Aldermanic Chamber for Monday's vote.
The Board of Alders voted not to adopt a proposed resolution supporting a ceasefire in Gaza on Monday evening, prompting backlash from over a hundred protesters.
by | Apr 30, 2024 7:29 am | Comments (49)
Yale facilities workers remove empty tents ...
... after Yale PD issued dispersal warnings early Tuesday morning.
(Updated 8:12 a.m., Tuesday, April 30, with university comment) Yale and city police cleared another pro-Palestinian tent encampment from the university’s downtown campus early Tuesday morning — but this time, there were no arrests.
by | Apr 28, 2024 3:15 pm | Comments (79)
Chris Volpe photo
At Sunday's protest on Chapel Street and (below) the Green.
Thomas Breen photo
More than 1,500 pro-Palestinian protesters from across the state on Sunday marched downtown in the latest mass public demonstration of outrage with Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.
Continue reading ‘Pro-Palestinian Protest Fills Downtown Streets’