Heritage Florida Jewish News - Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice

(Jewish Journal via JNS)—At a time of rampant assimilation and declining synagogue attendance, how do you get more Jews to connect to their tradition? In recent years, the non-Orthodox streams of Judaism have tackled this challenge with renewed v...

(Jewish Journal via JNS)—It’s almost a boring thought these days to observe that we are bitterly divided by our political tribes. Democrats hate Republicans, Republicans hate Democrats. Need we say more? We no longer want to win arguments; we wan...

(Jewish Journal via JNS)—It’s a sign of how politicized our national discourse has become that nothing is out of bounds—not even the Holocaust. When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) used the charged term “concentration camp” last week to d...

Imagine eating stomach lining on your first date, served up by your future mother-in-law hoping to impress you with her choice of protein. That was David Shapiro’s introduction to my Sephardic family in the late 1970’s, as he began dating my sis...

You can make a strong case that President Barack Obama’ s decision to allow United Nations Security Council resolution 2334 to pass was very harmful to Israel. By endorsing the anti-Israel narrative that every square inch of territory captured by I...

When I was in my late teens, I listened to the second side of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album, pretty much every day for three weeks in a forest about an hour north of Montreal. I was living in a tent with other Jewish wannabe hippies at Camp Bnai B...

It’s not the disputed occupation of the West Bank that convinced a 17-year-old Palestinian teenager to stab a 13-year-old Jewish girl to death while she was sleeping. Rather, it’s the corrosive and longtime occupation of Palestinian hearts and min...

The stunning rise of a narcissistic blowhard like Donald Trump may be absurd, irrational and even embarrassing, but there’s a very rational idea that is keeping the Trump phenomenon alive: A large number of Americans are sick and tired of seeing thei...

If you discriminate against the only Jewish country in the world, is that anti-Semitism? Let’s take the European Union (EU), which routinely discriminates against the Jewish state. Among the numerous “occupied territories” around the world, for e...

I didn’t think the Iran deal could get any worse. I didn’t think I would find any more loopholes that would make it even easier for the Iranians to cheat and get away with it. Then, this morning, I read this extraordinary news item from the Ass...

I’ve been thinking for years about the best way to respond to the threat of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. I’ve read pretty much everything on the topic and brainstormed every possible idea, but I’ve never heard...

There’s been a lot of talk lately about how President Barack Obama feels hurt and misunderstood by Israel and by many Jews in the pro-Israel community. The storyline is that those Jews simply don’t appreciate how “Jewish” the president really...

“What will you tell the president when you see him?” was my daughter Eva’s first reaction when I told her I’d been invited to the White House Chanukah party (Actually, it was her second reaction. Her first was, “Take me!”). Kids are innocent th...

I’m repulsed by these anti-Israel groups on college campuses that pretend to care about oppressed people in the Middle East. They don’t. What they really care about is undermining Israel. Groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, for exa...

It boggles the mind to think that a determined, Jew-hating terror army would fire more than 1,000 rockets at Israel over seven days and inflict so few casualties. I wonder what must be going through the minds of those Hamas terrorists right now:...

There’s something about war that can make intelligent people look foolish. I’m thinking right now of all those smart people in Tel Aviv who analyzed the subtleties of peace at the Haaretz Peace Conference—only a few hours before Jew-hating terro...

We’re so used to seeing the Israeli-Palestinian peace process fail that we often overlook this simple question: How is it possible that so many can try so hard for so long and still fail to make any progress? How can it be that the United States, t...

When I see the earnest and eager John Kerry globe-trotting the world in his sharp business suits trying to convince mullahs not to build a nuclear bomb, I can’t help but have these politically incorrect thoughts that are loaded with stereotypes. The...

There was so much Jewish outrage in the wake of professor Steven Hawking’s decision to join the academic boycott against Israel, it’s hard to know where to start. The most dramatic expression of that outrage could be found in the many commentaries an...

It’s common these days to micromanage what information we receive. Many of us have a list of favorite Web sites and blogs we regularly go to, as well as Facebook pages and mobile apps that reflect our individual tastes and ideologies. It’s a way of...

It’s funny how the American Jewish community has a way of getting all breathless and excited when a new study comes out, as is happening right now with the new Pew survey. As if we needed all this sophisticated evidence to remind us that Judaism i...

It’s tempting to see the chaos in Egypt right now, with President Morsi ousted and his Muslim Brotherhood party discredited, as just another failure of government. But there’s another aspect to this failure—and that is religion. It’s conceivable that...

As we witness the latest attempts to restart the comatose peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, we heard about the recent shutting down of Better Place, a much-ballyhooed Israeli venture that aimed to revolutionize the world of electric...

In a crummy economy, people are always looking for good investments—a promising stock, a real estate opportunity, a star mutual fund. It’s really not that different in the “mitzvah economy”—donors and do-gooders are also looking to squeeze the maxim...

Apparently, there are smart people out there who still believe it’s up to Israel to revive the dead Middle East peace process. Just last week, over 100 prominent American Jews released a letter, sponsored by the Israel Policy Forum (IPF), urging Isra...