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A bill for school buffer zones is back. The New York City Council has reintroduced a bill to restrict protests outside schools — this time with a veto-proof majority, Politico reports. Mayor Zohran Mamdani vetoed the original legislation, created in the wake of pro-Palestinian protests. The revised measure has a narrowed scope, mainly covering early childhood centers and K-12 schools while excluding college campuses, the site of many demonstrations against Israel.
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A poll of New York state voters found that 51% believe Israel is “committing genocide against Palestinian people in Gaza.” The survey, conducted by the progressive firm Data for Progress, also found that 60% of voters said the United States should restrict taxpayer-funded weapons to Israel “until it stops attacking civilians in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, supports Palestinian rights, and commits to a long-term peace process.”
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Micah Lasher is “exhausted” by questions about Israel. The Jewish Assemblymember running to succeed Rep. Jerry Nadler in NY-12 said he was tired of “the obsession on a plot of land the size of New Jersey” during a candidate forum at B’nai Jeshurun on the Upper West Side last night, reports our Joseph Strauss, who was there even as the crowd thinned ahead of the Knicks game. The Democratic primary candidates, who also include Assemblymember Alex Bores, Kennedy scion Jack Schlossberg and lawyer George Conway, will face off tonight in their final broadcast debate.
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A coalition of Hasidic sects have endorsed Antonio Reynoso. The Brooklyn borough president, who grew up in Williamsburg near a large Hasidic community, won support from the bloc of Hasidic leaders in the NY-7 Democratic primary to succeed Rep. Nydia Velázquez, reports Jacob Kornbluh of The Forward. He is competing against Mamdani’s chosen candidate, Clare Valdez.
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A Nazi-looted Degas painting is back in court. A Manhattan appellate court last week unfroze a long-delayed lawsuit by the descendants of Holocaust survivor Margaret Kainer, reports AmNY. The family says that Christie’s sold Degas’s “Danseuse rose,” which was stolen by the Nazis, without consulting or benefiting Kainer’s living heirs.
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