Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 1 - 14 of 14
Jews are asking if we’re back in the 1920s. To me, the scene outside a Charlottesville synagogue is more like Odessa in 1905. Across from the synagogue stood three white supremacists with semi-automatic weapons. During the Friday night torchlight parade that passed the synagogue, the alt-right marchers, hands in the salute formation, hurled slogans reminiscent of the Nazi era. The armed men in fatigues looked as if they were ready to carry out the threats. The police were called. They did not show. Did the city council want blood spilled to adv... Full story
San Francisco State University has been a hotbed of anti-Semitism for decades. During this time, Jewish community leaders either ignored the hostile campus environment or worked quietly behind the scenes, failing to alleviate the problem. But a year after protesters from the General Union of Palestinian Students prevented Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat from speaking, shouting him down with amplified obscenities while the police stood by, the anger in the Jewish community has recently surfaced in a long series of published articles. SFSU President... Full story
Imagine you are an impoverished religious Jew living in Paris. You can no longer wear religious garb out of fear of being set upon by assailants from North Africa who will beat you to within an inch of your life, if not take it. Your children are bullied in school, as their teachers ignore their complaints, and might even take perverse satisfaction in their plight. Even though French political figures make speeches condemning anti-Semitism and police are routinely sent to protect Jewish institutions, the anti-Semitism grows on the body politic... Full story
To say the implementation of President Donald Trump’s travel ban was clumsy would be an understatement. To say, however, that the principles involved were totally without constitutional justification would be unwarranted. Since Trump’s inauguration, nothing has dominated the political conversation as much as hatred punctuated by hysteria. The aspiration toward civility that once served as a norm for political discourse in this country has been consumed in conflagration, riots, mass demonstrations and physical attacks. In no other policy are... Full story
Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center will be giving a benediction at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration ceremony Jan. 20. Liberal Jews are petitioning Hier to decline the honor, charging that it will give legitimacy to some 21st-century version of the Third Reich. In how many nation-states outside of Israel would a rabbi be asked to give the benediction at the swearing-in of a national leader? Perhaps if Jewish liberals began with this question, they might be more capable of confronting the sheer obscenity of what they are d... Full story
The United Nations resolution condemning Israeli settlements comes in the wake of two other U.N. resolutions, passed by the UNESCO cultural body in October, that denied the historic and biblical relationship between the Jews and the land of Israel. The U.N. can pass resolutions, but it can neither change history nor alter reality. America’s abstention and refusal to use its veto power on an anti-Israel measure at the U.N. was a betrayal of historic proportions. For the Jewish alt-left such as the New Israel Fund and J Street, which is supported... Full story
Haim Saban is wrong when he says Minnesota’s U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison is unqualified to head the Democratic National Committee. Ellison’s anti-Israel and anti-Semitic lineages do not disqualify him from the position. They more than qualify him. It is Ellison, not Saban—the Israeli-American mega-donor to both the Democratic Party and pro-Israel causes—who represents the Democrats’ true colors. The party has been abandoning support for the Jewish state for well over a decade. Recent studies by Brookings, Gallup, and Pew reveal a growing gap of su... Full story
The Jewish community’s polarization in reaction to the selection of Sen. Tim Kaine (Va.) as Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s running mate illustrates the political chasm that divides American Jewry. Predictably, the J Street lobby, which had shilled for President Barack Obama’s deceptive Iran deal, sprang into support mode. Still touting its role in bringing the deal to a successful conclusion, J Street has been undeterred by recent revelations of Iran’s hunt in Germany for materials to build an aggressive nuclear weapons... Full story
Every group of people has its betrayers. And if Jews needed a reminder of that adage, 11 Jewish law students and alumni at Harvard Law School just might have provided it. Indeed, the surprise was that it was only 11. These students and alumni became witting apologists for Husam El-Qoulaq, the Harvard law student and Palestinian activist who invoked the anti-Semitic stereotype of the smelly Jew, when he hurled a question at former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni as to why she was so “smelly.” Livni was a panelist at a law sch... Full story
In parts of Europe, Jews have been warned that wearing anything that identifies them as Jewish means putting a target on their back. In Stockholm, Jews were asked to stay away from the Kristallnacht remembrance ceremonies for fear of sparking violence. French Jews are immigrating to Israel in increasing numbers. In Manchester, England, special police accompany Jewish children to school. The main synagogue in Florence, Italy, looks like an American military outpost in Afghanistan. All of this is in response to a growing and flourishing anti-Semi... Full story
JNS.org—The explosive controversy over Ben Carson’s remarks about Jews, guns, and the Holocaust illustrates a new low in media spin. Carson is a Republican presidential nomination frontrunner, and the legacy press needs to undermine his credibility. Therefore, the controversy is not remotely about what Carson actually said, but about what the media says he said. Contrary to the way Carson’s remarks are being reconstructed, he never said that if Jews owned guns, there would not have been a Holocaust. He said that if Jews owned guns, the Holoc... Full story
Although Israel has been providing free medical treatment to Syrian refugees as well as Palestinians from the disputed territories and even from Gaza, the U.N. World Health Organization singled out Israel as the one country in the world to be condemned for violating human health rights. Saudi Arabia, which sits as a member of the U.N. Human Rights Council, sponsored the exercise in the absurd. If hypocrisy needed a poster child, the despotic and brutal regime of Saudi Arabia, which is currently... Full story
Leave it to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to shill shamelessly for President Barack Obama. In a lengthy interview about the Iran nuclear framework, the ever-sycophantic Friedman gives us new insight into the banality of mediocrity—Obama’s as statesman and his as journalist. Seldom before have we seen such a coupling try to spin diplomatic surrender into victory. Unchallenged, the voluble Obama reveals his personal hurt about being labeled anti-Israel by segments of the American Jewish community. Once again, Obama reminds Friedman’s v... Full story
The dramatic event often rips away the thin gossamer of protection that keeps a corrupt institution from exposure to the antiseptic of public outrage. Such an event is occurring for the second time in 2014 at Brandeis University. Daniel Mael, a Brandeis student and professional blogger, took to the Internet to expose fellow student Khadijah Lynch’s raw hatred for the New York Police Department, America, and the “Zionist” institution where she is getting an education and serves as a student leader and adviser to impressionable younger stude... Full story
