U.S. Report

NEW YORK (JTA) -- The White House's release of a 1998 photograph showing a handshake between Rep. Rick Lazio and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat is the latest battle for the Jewish vote in the race for U.S. Senate from New York.

White House officials said they released the photo because Lazio had criticized President Clinton for shaking Cuban leader Fidel Castro's hand last week at the U.N. Millennium Summit and his opponent, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, for kissing Arafat's wife, Suha, during a visit to the West Bank last year.

But Lazio criticized the Clinton administration for spending "taxpayer dollars" on the first lady's campaign. The race is a statistical dead heat, but Clinton is beating Lazio by 70 to 23 percent among Jewish voters, according to a Zogby International poll published in the New York Post.

Lynching scars prod rabbi vs. NFL owner

ATLANTA (JTA) -- A local rabbi is asking the National Football League to censure a part-owner of the Atlanta Falcons team for comments he made about the 1915 lynching of a Jewish pencil factory manager.

Rabbi Steven Lebow said he made the complaint after Tom Watson Brown said Leo Frank was lynched because his supporters bought off John Slaton, the then-governor who pardoned Frank for the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan.

The case led to the form-ation of the Anti-Defamation League.

Amicus curiae filed on behalf of lesbians

NEW YORK (JTA) -- The state's attorney general filed a brief in support of two lesbian students who are suing Yeshiva University for alleged discrimination in the school's housing policy.

The plaintiffs, whose case has been in the courts for more than a year, claim the university discriminates against gays and lesbians because they are ineligible to live in the school's married-student housing.

The Orthodox-founded university, which is nonsectarian and bound by discrimination law, argues that requiring a marriage certificate for the housing is not unequal treatment.

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