Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(New York Jewish Week via JTA) – Steadfast listeners of "Borscht Beat" - a weekly FM radio show featuring Jewish music, old and new - will be thrilled to hear of host Aaron Bendich's latest project: a new Jewish record label of the same name. On his hour-long radio program, the 27-year-old plays a wide variety of Jewish recordings - songs from the heyday of Yiddish theater, as well as a mix of contemporary klezmer, Yiddish and Jewish music from around the world. On Friday, Bendich's label announced their first release: The second album from t...
(JTA) - Steven Spielberg's remake of "West Side Story" drew seven Oscar nominations Tuesday, including best picture and best director. Spielberg's best-director nomination makes the Jewish Hollywood legend one of only four filmmakers in history to ever be nominated at least eight times for best director. (Two of the others are also Jewish; the third is Martin Scorsese.) He has won the award twice before, for "Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan." With this nomination, Spielberg also makes history as the only director to have ever been...
(New York Jewish Week via JTA) - Jessica Seinfeld's parents were true children of the '60s. They did yoga before it was cool and served their three daughters brown rice, tofu and wholesome cereal purchased in their local food co-op in Burlington, Vermont. The young Jessica, embarrassed by their focus on healthy eating, "always wanted regular cereal that you could buy on the shelves of typical supermarkets." These days Seinfeld, 50 - the wife of comedian Jerry, of course, and a mother of three - is known for being a devotee of healthy food. Her...
(JNS) — After a two-year hiatus due to the coronavirus pandemic, the annual Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations Mission to Israel kicks off Sunday in Jerusalem. The umbrella group, which represents more than 50 Jewish communal groups spanning from the right to left flanks of American Jewish life, gets unprecedented access to Israel’s top leaders. Scheduled to speak at this year’s conference are Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett; President Isaac Herzog; Foreign Minister and Alternate Prime Minister Yair Lapid...
(JTA) - Spoiler alert: This story contains details from "Seeing the Light," the season finale of HBO's "And Just Like That," which first aired Feb. 3, 2022. The previews for the season finale of "And Just Like That," the "Sex and the City" reboot airing on HBO, suggested that viewers would get to see a "they mitzvah." And for most of the episode, which began streaming Thursday, that's exactly what seemed like was happening. Charlotte (Kristin Davis), who converted to Judaism in the original series, is busy arranging the details for a...
(JTA) — Emma Saltzberg knew she might invite criticism by competing on “Jeopardy!” From her years of experience in progressive Jewish groups, including IfNotNow, a group founded in 2014 to galvanize American Jews to oppose Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, she knew that her appearance on one of the most popular TV shows in the United States would likely generate negative comments from those who believe criticizing the occupation is antisemitic. So when those comments started to appear on social media, especially after IfNotNo...
(JTA) — Tinder says it has banned Shimon Hayut and all of his known aliases. But it’s hard to imagine anyone swiping right on the Israeli who masqueraded as a son of the Russian-Israeli diamond dealer Lev Leviev while allegedly defrauding women he met on the dating app, now that millions of people have seen a Netflix documentary about his crimes. “The Tinder Swindler,” released last week, offers a dramatic reconstruction of the shocking story that emerged in early 2019. Under the alias Simon Leviev, Hayut would wine and dine Scandin...
(JNS) — Yet again, those who wanted to learn about Maus had to leapfrog obstacles. This time, it wasn’t the limitations of parental consent. It was the limitations of technology. More than 10,000 viewers flooded into an online discussion with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Art Spiegelman on Monday to hear him speak about last month’s removal of his iconic Holocaust graphic novel Maus from a Tennessee school board’s curriculum. The public response to the Zoom session, hosted by the Jewish Federation of Greater Chattanooga, was greater than th...
Memories ... Memories ... My late mom, born in Canada, once told me that she was a terrific dancer and even won a silver cup for winning a Charleston contest! Okay! That's where I got my dancing talent. (I was a professional dancer in New York before I became a mom ... then gave it up and became a singer.) I was successful in each field ... working with very famous people. As a dancer living in Brooklyn, N.Y., I performed on Broadway. As a singer, I worked in Las Vegas and all over the States and the world. I often performed with the late Eddie...
By Shira Hanau (JTA) - More than 3,000 people are expected to attend a Zoom talk by Art Spiegelman, the author of "Maus," and hosted by the Jewish Federation of Chattanooga as well as a number of other Jewish and non-Jewish organizations Monday night. The event is the latest aftershock to follow the earthquake unleashed by a Tennessee school district's decision to ban Spiegelman's graphic memoir about the Holocaust from its classrooms. The books - published in two volumes in the 1980s and 90s - tell the story of the author's father during the H...
NY Times best-selling author Kristin Harmel will be the guest speaker at the 20th Annual Literary Luncheon on March 5 at the Interlachen Country Club in Winter Park. Doors will be open at 10:15 am. so guests may peruse the Silent Auction items and make bids. Lunch will be served at 11:30 a.m. The event is sponsored by the Orlando/Winter Park American Association of University Women and its proceeds go to benefit scholarships and legal advocacy for women and girls. Favorite author and Orlandoan Harmel will discuss her latest historical fiction...
(JNS) — Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman was warned by a U.S. State Department staffer in 2017 not to be “so Jewish,” Breitbart has revealed. Friedman reportedly recounts the anti-Semitic episodes in his new book, Sledgehammer: How Breaking With the Past Brought Peace to the Middle East, set to be released on Feb. 8. The book centers on how the White House under former President Donald Trump successfully achieved the Abraham Accords and a new era of peace in the region. The excerpt from the book that was shared by Breit...
(JNS) - For Eli Lunzer, the road to Super Bowl Super LVI started weeks before the team match-ups were determined. Lunzer will arrive in Los Angeles for a nonstop week of work before the Cincinnati Bengals and Los Angeles Rams players even get to SoFi Stadium for kickoff, scheduled for Sunday at 6:30 p.m. EST. And he will work around the clock, except for Shabbat, for a solid week. "I am a shadchan," says Lunzer, using the Yiddish word for "matchmaker." Meaning, he explains, "I connect brands, athletes, influential talents and celebrities." The...
I visited Ephraim Kholmyansky in Moscow in October 1987. It was my second trip to the USSR to help encourage Jews, bringing hope, make personal connections, and smuggle in a small amount of things to help them but that could have had me in some big trouble with the KGB. I knew about Kholmynasky before as I spent much of my early adulthood engrossed in the movement to free Soviet Jews. So, for me, when we met, I was meeting one of my heroes. But as much as I thought I knew Kholmynasky through my activism and due to his prominence and having...
Hollywood has a lot of Jews! ... For instance, while watching the STEPHEN COLBERT television show recently, his guest was actor ADRIEN BRODY. I first saw Adrien in the movie "The Pianist" and I fell in love with him and his rare talent. He won an Academy Award for that performance as Best Actor. Of course he has appeared and acted in other movies but "The Pianist" stood out for me. Of course, Adrien Brody is Jewish, the son of a Polish-Jewish man and a mother who was half Catholic from her dad, and Czech-Jewish from her mother. Adrien was born...
By My Jewish Learning The prevailing stereotypes of Jews as bookish, nerdy, or business-minded have led to a widespread assumption that, on the whole, Jews are not good at sports. Some may be surprised to learn, therefore, that Jews have in fact frequently been well represented in the Olympics where many have medalled. For example, between 1968 and 2016, a total of 41 Jews won olympic medals (27 of them gold) - in swimming alone! This was thanks in no small measure to swimmer Mark Spitz, the most successful athlete in the 1972 Olympics in...
Rachel B., a 37-year-old Jewish mother of four, endured years of emotional and physical abuse from her husband. She hoped that ending her marriage was the answer but was afraid of the unknown. She knew that she needed a Jewish divorce, a GET — but she didn’t know her legal rights to obtain a Divorce - could her husband take the kids away from her, how would she support herself, would she be able to re-marry one day, should she proceed through the civil courts or a Beis Din (Jewish court of law) first? In Rachel’s close-knit Jewish community, th...
Oy such talent! ... I'm referring to all the stars I write about. For instance, SARAH SILVERMAN. SARAH is an American comedian, actress, and writer. Her comedy addresses social taboos and controversial topics, including racism, sexism, homophobia, politics (politics gives me heartburn!) and religion, sometimes having her comic character endorse them in a satirical or deadpan fashion. Sarah was a writer and a performer on "Saturday Night Live" and also she starred and produced "The Sarah Silverman program on "Comedy Central." Sarah also wrote an...
(New York Jewish Week via JTA) – The historic New York City synagogue that controls the equally historic Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Is-land moved to terminate the lease of the congregation that worships there. But don’t call it an eviction, leaders of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York say: They describe the filing as an effort to restructure the board of Congregation Jeshuat Israel, which has met at Touro for 120 years, and install a new slate of officers who will “ensure that Touro Syn-agogue is properly maintained into the f...
Mel Pearlman sent the Heritage two photos from days gone by. The first photo is of Heritage columnists (left to right) Mel Pearlman, Jim Shipley and Wolf Blitzer — yes Blitzer was once a syndicated regular Heritage columnist. With them on the far right is Heritage publisher Jeff Gaeser. The date of this photo is not known. The second photo is another undated, unknown event. Some of the men are Rabbi Larry Halpern, Dick Appelbaum, Mel Pearlman and Charles Schwartz. If anyone knows when this event took place, what it was about and who the o...
“Jonathan Feldstein did an excellent job of the overall history of Gush Etzion [Heritage, Jan. 21 issue ‘The rise and fall and rise again of Gush Etzion’],” a Heritage reader wrote. He continued, “There’s just one thing I thought might be interesting and that is how it got the name Gush Etzion.” The reader explained that Gush means “block” so it’s the “block of Etzion.” Where did the word “Etzion” come from? The reader went on to explain it comes from Shmuel Yosef Holtzman (or Holzman). Holtzman was a Jewish businessman of German extra...
(JTA) - "P.O. Box 1142" was the only name the Jewish GIs were given as to their destination. The American World War II soldiers, many of them refugees from Europe, assumed they would be flying overseas to fight Nazis. Instead, they were taken to an off-the-grid compound in rural Virginia - to look after Nazis. "Camp Confidential: America's Secret Nazis," an animated documentary from Israeli directors Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan, tells the story of a group of Jewish American veterans whose sole experience of WWII was guarding a secret Nazi POW...
(JTA) - Golden Globes fans may have noticed something different this year: The annual entertainment awards were not announced on TV, and not for COVID-19 reasons. NBC dropped the broadcast over the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's diversity problem - none of the 87 members of the Globes' awards body are Black. (The one celebrity to release a video referencing involvement in the awards this year was Jewish actress Jamie Lee Curtis, who highlighted the HFPA's charity efforts.) But the winners were still announced Sunday night, mostly via...
Before I write any further: let me say OOPS! ... I wrote in a recent column that Amy Schneider, a contestant on "Jeopardy" was Jewish. She claims not to be. So sorry! (She also claims not to be a man.) Great Jewish talent ... The Marx Brothers were an American family comedy act that was successful in vaudeville, on Broadway, and in motion pictures from 1905 to 1949. Harpo, Groucho, Chico and Zeppo were the names we knew them by. All have since passed away. (I loved them all ... but especially Groucho, who had a television show of his own.) More...
(JTA) — There’s a good chance that when you logged on to Twitter today, you were met with tweets showing off grids of yellow, green and black squares. There’s also a good chance that you posted a similar grid. Many of the more than 2 million people who have taken to playing the Wordle word game online have been posting their results, either boasting of their victories or lamenting how they’ve been stumped. The suddenly and wildly popular game, an invention of Brooklyn-based software designer Josh Wardle, asks players to guess a five-le...
