Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS) - Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, 69, a Chicago native, was elected as the new pope of the Catholic Church on May 8. He will be called Leo XIV. The first U.S.-born pope is also a Peruvian citizen and was previously archbishop of Peru, the Associated Press reported. Most recently, the new pope was prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops and president of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, "one of the most important jobs in the Catholic Church," the AP reported, as "the powerful head...
(JNS) - Some 100 people, ranging in age from about 8 to 102, huddled for warmth as they braved 40-degree temperatures on a damp day at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday to watch, as speaker after speaker put it, Pfc. Adolph Hanf and Pvt. David Moser "come home." Neither of the Jewish soldiers, who served in World War I and who have been dead for more than 100 years, underwent a geographic relocation. But with the help of Operation Benjamin, a donor-supported nonprofit, Moser (1898-1919) and...
(JNS)- U.S. President Donald Trump named an Orthodox Jewish judge, whose official bio notes his penchant for studying the Talmud, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. Per his official biography, Matthew H. Solomson, of Silver Spring, Md., "enjoys studying Talmud, playing tennis and spending time at the beach with his family." "It's notable that Judge Solomson is the first Orthodox Jew to be appointed as chief judge of the federal court he is serving on," Nathan Diament, executive dir...
(JNS) - After 298 Jewish men and women had sat down, randomly paired together in a speed dating event in Crown Heights, in Brooklyn, N.Y., the dating coach Manya Lazaroff called out a question for them to discuss in their two minutes before being reassigned to another date. "How much money does someone need to be financially stable?" Lazaroff, co-director of the Rohr Chabad Jewish Center at Texas A&M University in College Station, asked the couples in the ballroom of the school Oholei Torah....
(JNS) - For hundreds of years, a mosaic lay hidden in Megiddo in northern Israel until, in 2005, it was found and preserved as a local prison sought to expand. The mosaic recently made the trip, in nearly a dozen pieces, across the ocean to Washington, D.C., where it is on exhibit at the Museum of the Bible. At an opening reception for the exhibit on Sunday afternoon, Carlos Campo, CEO of the museum, said that the mosaic, which dates to around the year 230, like an Impressionist show that...
(JNS) — Half a dozen Middle East experts indicated that it was news to them when JNS drew their attention to a recent phrase that the U.S. Defense Department has published on its website referring to the Gaza Strip as “entirely inside Israel.” “The Gaza Strip, which is about 25 miles long, lies entirely inside Israel and shares a border to the south with Egypt,” C. Todd Lopez wrote on the Pentagon website on Tuesday. “There are three locations along its border where humanitarian supplies could move into Gaza from either Egypt or Israel.” Th...
(JNS) — Esther Panitch was inspired when Renee Evans, of the World Jewish Congress, bought trees in Israel recently for Peach State legislators who voted in favor of a bill to codify into law the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism. Evans put Jewish National Fund tree certificates on the lawmakers’ desks. “I saw the certificate, and I was like, ‘Huh. This would be great if I could just name it in honor of a troll,’” Panitch, a Democrat who is the only Jewish state representative in Georgia, told...
(JNS) — Marc Tracy’s New York Times article on Jan. 14 refers to “left-wing” Jews and a “left-wing” Jewish publication, and a “far-right” Israeli government and its “extreme-right ministers.” The avian metaphors add up to the culture reporter to implications for human appendages as well. “If I forget you, O’ Jerusalem,” states Psalm 137:5, “let me draw a blank on my right hand.” The Times article headline has a different notion of the Jewish faith than does Jewish scripture. “Is Israel part of what it means to be Jewish?” the article asks, n...
(JNS) — A hostile environment toward Jews and Israelis has been growing for years at American University, in Washington, D.C., “but has intensified following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack against Israelis,” according to a 26-page complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Students “have been threatened, marginalized, shunned and made to feel unwelcome in their dormitories, classrooms and social spaces throughout the campus, which has become a hostile environment,” per the complaint, which The Louis D. Brandeis Ce...
(JNS) — Despite reports of Jews being fearful to display their faith outwardly amid rising antisemitism globally, so many Jews are reconnecting with their faith that supplies are short, according to the largest Jewish network, Chabad-Lubavitch. “There’s a global shortage of tefillin and mezuzahs,” Rabbi Motti Seligson, a spokesman for Chabad, told JNS. “We’re seeing an immense amount of people wanting to connect, wanting to double down and leaning into their Jewish identity and practice,” Seligson said. “People wanting to start putting on tefi...
(JNS) - The singer and actor, who was president of ZOA's California chapter, died on May 21 at the age of 95. Some 15 or 20 years ago, Mort Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America, saw a man who looked a lot like entertainer Ed Ames at an American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference in Washington. "He was tall. He stood out among everyone," Klein told JNS. "I knew it wasn't Ed Ames, because he was at an AIPAC conference. Ed Ames wouldn't be at an AIPAC...
(JNS) - The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was not the only example of armed Jewish resistance against the Nazis during the Holocaust. A very small percentage of ghetto prisoners fought, and the revolt occurred late in the war, from April 19 to May 16, 1943. "There is plenty of ignorance in the general public about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and about the context in which it took place," Zachary Mazur, a senior historian at the Warsaw-based POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, told JNS. Mazur...
(JNS) — Until recently, French Impressionism was a Cinderella story. Derided in the late 19th century and excluded from the French academy (Salon), Impressionism—whose name derives from a critic’s mockery—became one of the most beloved art movements. Impressionist sections are among the most trafficked in art museums, whose gift shops hawk umbrellas, tote bags, ballpoint pens and other accessories decorated with works by Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro and others. Those artists’ fortunes rose so much th...
(JNS) — On Feb. 2, John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, shared a joke on his magazine’s podcast riffing on Hunter Biden’s laptop—what Miranda Devine has called the “Laptop from Hell.” So, have you heard the one about the Jew who returns 40 years later to pick up a pair of shoes from the cobbler? “The shoe store owner says, ‘Was they wing tips?’ ‘Yes. They were wing tips.’ ‘Were they black with a brown trim?’ ‘Yeah. You have them?’” Podhoretz said, exaggerating the cobbler’s accent. “‘They’ll be ready Tuesday.’” Clearly, the original owner...
(JNS) — In 2021, a University of Michigan music professor showed a 1965 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Othello,” which featured a white actor in blackface, in class. The professor apologized and stepped down, yet a dean at the university stated that the experience “was hurtful and upsetting to the students in the class,” and the professor’s actions “do not align with our school’s commitment to anti-racist action, diversity, equity and inclusion.” When someone distributed racist fliers on the school’s Ann Arbor campus five years prior, the...
WASHINGTON (JTA)-The opening of an exhibit at the Austrian Embassy in Washington of more than 50 photographs by an 84-year-old Jewish Nobel laureate was something of an amateur hour-twice over. Both Austria's ambassador and Martin Karplus, the photographer, referred to the pictures-postcard-style views of Europe in the 1950s and a more recent series on China and India-as hobby rather than high art. Then at a reception, many of the approximately 250 guests handed their phones to strangers to...
NEW YORK (JTA)—Dimly lit, the stone slab, or stele, doesn’t look particularly noteworthy, especially when compared to the more lavish sphinxes, jewelry and cauldrons one encounters en route to the room where it is installed. Indeed, in a Twitter post this fall, art journalist Lee Rosenbaum described the nearly 13-by-16 inch c. 830 BCE rock, which resembles an aardvark or elephant, as “homely.” What’s significant about this stone—on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of its “Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age...
