Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice

Articles written by Edwin Black


Sorted by date  Results 1 - 8 of 8

  • Yom HaGirush - The inside story

    Edwin Black|Dec 3, 2021

    Today, we speak of a largely forgotten ethnic cleansing unparalleled in the history of humanitarian abuses. Recall the coordinated international expulsion of some 850,000 Jews from Arab and Muslim lands, where they had lived peaceably for as long as 27 centuries. In 2014, the Israeli government set aside Nov. 30 as a commemoration of this mass atrocity. It has had no real identity or name like “Kristallnacht.” But from this day forward, it will be known as Yom HaGirush: “Expulsion Day.” It began the moment Hitler came to power in 1933. The int...

  • Israel's tourism triumph: The restaurant scene

    Edwin Black|May 17, 2019

    (JNS) Israel's adversaries in the BDS movement thought they could starve Israel through economic warfare that included even its food sector. Many remember the furor over SodaStream, Sabra hummus, ordinary fruits and vegetables, as well as Israeli cuisine and the country's culinary scene. But none of it has stopped Israel's restaurant sector from exploding into an audacious, red-hot success, now leading the planet in culinary excellence and bravado. As far as the Israeli restaurant scene is...

  • Israel's tourism triumph

    Edwin Black|Apr 12, 2019

    (JNS)—The virulently anti-Israel movement known as Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is roiling through college campuses, overflowing into city councils, encroaching into corporate boardrooms and now chomping at the essence of Israel’s special niche in the world: its travel and tourism industry. Everywhere, the boycotters have been asking to isolate Israel. BDS even convinced Airbnb to stop listing Jewish locations in Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank (a term invented after Jordan invaded in 1948, when the Uni...

  • Finally, some movement against California colleges that disrupted pro-Israel events

    Edwin Black|Feb 8, 2019

    (JNS)—Organized disruptors, both students and non-students, who shut down a pro-Israel gathering at University of California Los Angeles last May might not be prosecuted, according to information from LA City Attorney Mike Feuer’s office. Instead, they will be called to a confidential but mandatory proceeding called a “City Attorney Hearing,” an alternative to prosecution that can be described as a “warning” not to repeat the conduct. One legal expert compared it as a “deferred prosecution,” but stressed a full trial could still result. V...

  • Students file criminal complaints against anti-Israel disruptors

    Edwin Black|Jul 6, 2018

    Criminal complaints are now being filed by students following the belligerent disruption of a May 17, 2018, Students Supporting Israel [SSI] event at University of California Los Angeles. At least a half-dozen students announced they would visit the UCLA police department to file formal complaints reporting criminal disruption of a meeting, as well as disturbing the peace and conspiracy. The move follows media disclosures that UCLA was reneging on the public pledge by two chancellors in the...

  • 'Judaism, Zionism and the Land of Israel' fills a void

    Edwin Black|Jun 15, 2018

    For decades, Rabbi Yotav Eliach, esteemed principal of Rambam Mesivta High School in Long Island, has accumulated his teachings, writings, and those of many other scholars and rabbinical authorities, tracking the history of Israel. His mission was not just to chronicle the dispossession and repossession of a people, as Walter Laqueur did in "A History of Zionism," but to go beyond. Rabbi Eliach completes the circle and ties in the religious component-spiritual Judaism itself. The result is a...

  • International Farhud Day stymies invented history

    Edwin Black|Jun 8, 2018

    When International Farhud Day was proclaimed at a conference convened at the United Nations headquarters on June 1, 2015, its proponents wanted to achieve more than merely establish a commemoration of the ghastly 1941 Arab-Nazi pogrom in Baghdad that killed and injured hundreds of Iraqi Jews. Farhud means violent dispossession. The Farhud was but the first bloody step along the tormented path to the ultimate expulsion of some 850,000 Jews from across the Arab world. That systematic expulsion ended centuries of Jewish existence and stature in...

  • Remembering Robert Wolfe, guardian of Nazi-era archives

    Edwin Black, JTA|Jan 9, 2015

    WASHINGTON (JTA)-Robert Wolfe, the irreplaceable former chief archivist for captured Nazi documents at the National Archives here, died Dec. 10 at the age of 93. With his death, a legacy also dies. Wolfe singlehandedly galvanized a generation of Holocaust and Nazi-era historians and authors-including me. He was assigned to the Nuremberg War Crimes prosecutor's office, where he became familiar not only with the infamous testimony now published in many volumes of the Nuremberg Trials, but also...

Rendered 10/12/2024 09:16