Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 1 - 15 of 15
(JNS) — Borrowing a nifty lyric from the Beastie Boys (those white-hot, hip-hop Jewish sensations): “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Hate Jews!).” Yes, the original rap song focused on an altogether different “Right”: the one to “Party!” — once an eager rallying cry at college. But those were different collegiate days — before social justice and self-importance transformed mirthful campuses into humorless hotbeds of antisemitism. Keggers officially traded for keffiyehs. Faculty and student priorities took an extreme hard-left and Isl...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — President Theodore Roosevelt is known for the saying, “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.” The presidencies of Barack Obama and Joe Biden will be remembered for a very different aphorism: “Speak in apologetic whispers and defund your sticks; you will go backwards in retreat.” Those are two very different approaches to diplomacy and the realities of international affairs. It explains why both Obama and Biden were among the least capable foreign policy leaders our country has ever known. A good exam...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — As if legal systems, and international bodies like the United Nations, needed any assistance in further damaging the public’s perception of them, the International Criminal Court has sullied the name of the rule of law even more. It’s really time for the United States to withdraw its funding to kangaroo courts like the ICC and the International Court of Justice. The names of these institutions are laughable misnomers (“justice”?), not unlike the Human Rights Council of the United Nations, which occasionally features...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — America reached a new low this past week simultaneous with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of Congress. Thousands of pro-Hamas activists rioted outside the Capitol Building and scuffled with the Capitol Police. The dress rehearsal for this anti-American hatefest took place in Dearborn, Michigan, where protesters shouted “Death to America!” on April 5. That’s the date when the United States finally joined Europeans in realizing that there is an Islamist belief system wholly incomp...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — There is a certain kind of person for whom “The West Wing” was dramatic television at its finest. It featured sharp, brainy, political dialogue with a cast walking around the White House outwitting one another—not outdoing the other’s wits, but simply being wittier. The president was a former professor and Nobel Prize-winning economist. Naturally, he was a Democrat. “The West Wing” catered to coastal elites in the same way that “Roseanne” and “My Name Is Earl” were beloved by the working class in red states—or, at...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — Middle East heat indices aside, the truest hot spot on the planet is, always, wherever the Israel Defense Forces happens to be killing Muslims, no matter the reason. Jews taking the lives of Arabs always commands the world’s attention. Muslims killing Muslims—such as the savage sectarian violence between Shi’ites and Sunnis, with a body count in the millions — is never newsworthy. A cause of death brought about by Jews, however, is of special interest to the “human rights” community. Jews fighting for their surviva...
(JNS) — The world feels like it’s on fire, with flames spreading in diverse directions. If the Jewish state was not at center stage, however, there would not have been any smoke. Ukrainians wonder why no fuss was made over Russia’s invasion of their country nearly two years ago. Twenty thousand Ukrainian children were kidnapped. No posters exist for them; no one is tearing down posters, insisting that it’s all propaganda. What a difference a change of scenery and age-old antisemitism makes. Ukrainians shouldn’t feel too neglected, though. T...
(JNS) - Finally, a movie about two Jews facing off in a war of ambitions, petty rivalries and contrasting moral absolutes-with actual wars in the background! ("Schindler's List," after all, is a film about two Nazis.) Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" is a movie experience worth watching in old-school fashion-in a darkened theater, on a wide screen that does not allow for pandemic-streaming or impulsive pausing. Nolan, the director of "Interstellar," "Memento," "Inception" and "The Prestige,"...
(JNS) - Here's a joke: "A Jew, a Black and a Hispanic walk into a bar... association.... " It's not really a joke, but rather a colorful way of describing the composition of liberal Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, as embodied by justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, in order of seniority. The black robes, as it turns out, are mere uniforms for when the court is in session. Compared to the first 233 years of its existence, when it was largely an all-white male...
(JNS) — Come on. Be honest. Surely someone reading this is hoarding a keepsake from the Eisenhower administration, stashed away in the attic. Better check, because you might be in violation of the Espionage Act. It seems that anyone who’s anyone, and even a few nobodies, is in possession of state secrets with classified markings and fuzzy provenance. Secure facilities are so yesterday. Nowadays, top-secret documents apparently have feet and simply slip away to improbable locations. That’s the only conclusion one can reach now that we know...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — As members of the progressive Jewish left continue to raise their fists while marching on behalf of movements that largely hate Jews and despise Israel, a beachhead of cultural pride and resuscitation was erected in lower Manhattan at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. The annual festival “Yiddish New York” opened right before Christmas and closed out 2022 with a sampling of the old-world Jewish culture of Eastern Europe and the Pale of Settlement (what is now Ukraine). It will involve the new world too. Yiddish made...
Regardless of how Jewish Americans feel about U.S. President Donald Trump—whether they view him as a menace to democracy (I do), or whether they feel deep gratitude to him as a defender of the Jewish state (I do)—one thing is certain: Tiny though Jews may be in number, their undying loyalty to the Democratic Party, coupled with the disproportionate imprint they are having on these impeachment proceedings, is both a perfect storm and a winning recruitment pitch for anti-Semites everywhere. Hopefully, it won’t disrupt the otherwise frien...
(JNS)—With Michael Bloomberg’s announcement that he will be running for president as a Democrat, the former New York mayor may have given American Jews a reason not to decamp for the GOP en masse. Yes, I realize that the Democratic Party has been home to American Jews since the New Deal. So cozy has this domestic arrangement been that nearly 80 percent self-identify as Democrats. Even pro-Israel Republican presidents—the current incumbent, especially—have been exasperated by this staunch party solidarity. But apparently, American Jews are not...
By Thane Rosenbaum (JTA)—The young nation of Israel has witnessed in recent years a dwindling of its founding generation—from the passing of statesmen like Shimon Peres to the death last week of novelist and political activist Amos Oz. Oz was 79; Israel is but 70. Oz was old enough to witness Israel’s fight for independence, and now his death turns the page on yet another chapter of its improbable resurrection—with an old language that became new again. Oz had a lot to do with that. He imbued Hebrew with a literary style and gave it a novelis...
NEW YORK (JTA)—Arguably the world’s greatest writer of fiction about the world’s foremost nonfiction atrocity, the Holocaust, died Thursday in Israel. Aharon Appelfeld, a Holocaust survivor himself and one of the icons of Israel’s first generation, was 85. No writer captured and reclaimed the lost world of European Jewish life with as much imaginative intensity and heartfelt longing. The author of over 40 books, written in Hebrew and translated around the world, he was the recipient of the State of Israel Prize for Literature in 1983, and a f...
