Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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Tasking themselves with the lofty idea of making peace through drama, Jerusalem’s Y Theater attempts to embrace Jerusalem’s beauty and conflicts to enable a public discourse that is self-critical. Y Theater’s latest production is called “Take Away.” Developed by an Israeli and Palestinian over two years of workshops with Israelis, Arab and Jewish, Palestinians and foreign theater types, the play evolved into a metaphor for the city of Jerusalem, which is built on a hill. They were influence... Full story
There are still about 10 minutes until the match starts, but the noise from the sellout crowd inside the Oakland (Calif.) Convention Center has reached a dull roar. As the anticipation builds, referees in zebra-striped shirts amble around the track, making sure everything’s up to regulation standards. Groups of tattooed 20- and 30-somethings make their way to the concession stands for tequila shots, beer and tamales; one biker couple in their 60s scopes out the bleachers for any remaining seats.... Full story
TEL AVIV (JTA)—It was supposed to be the car of the future, a near-silent, battery-powered vehicle that would wean the West off its dependence on Middle Eastern oil and save the environment in the process. And an Israeli company seemed destined to build it. Better Place, founded in 2007 by the exuberantly confident entrepreneur Shai Agassi, was trumpeted as the king of Israeli startups, a company that would keep the air clean and the streets quiet while saving money for its users. Six years a... Full story
OK, let’s face it. One of the burning questions of the day, if you happen to be a Jewish parent, is: How do I get my kids to grow up like those Emanuel boys? You know: Ari, the wealthy L.A. talent agent who inspired an iconic sitcom character; Ezekiel, the bioethicist at The Hastings Center; and Rahm, former right-hand man to a president and now mayor of Chicago. Hurry to your local independent bookstore. Ezekiel has provided a how-to guide. Sort of. Don’t get too excited. “The Brothers Emanuel:... Full story
JERUSALEM (JTA)—Here are some stories out of Israel that you may have missed: Record-setting Shabbat table? The central Israeli city of Bnei Brak set what is believed to be the world’s longest Shabbat table. At 197 feet long, the table set with china plates, crystal goblets and silver candlesticks, as well as traditional Shabbat foods, comfortably seats more than 300, Ynet reported. The municipality, in conjunction with the Bnei Brak-based Coca-Cola Co. and the haredi Orthodox advertising agency... Full story
JERUSALEM—For a tiny country, Israel has a lot to offer: sacred sites, archaeology, beaches, mountains, food, wine—and even eco- and medical tourism. So officials are puzzled and concerned that the number of tourists visiting Israel has not grown much in recent years, topping out at 3.6 million per year. At a conference on tourism held in the capital, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat said that in the near future he hopes to increase the number to 10 million tourists annually. But a lack of hotel rooms, Israeli bureaucracy and the ongoing vio... Full story
BANI ISRAEL, Senegal (JTA)—He will welcome you into his earthen-floor home, introduce you to his three wives, and let you sample their cooking. But Dougoutigo Fadiga does not want foreigners to come near the sacred tree of his village deep in the Senegalese bush. “The tree is holy grounds,” says Fadiga, president of this remote settlement of 4,000 souls. “Our Jewish ancestor, Jacob, planted it when his people first settled here 1,000 years ago.” The lush kapok tree towers over the parched s... Full story
Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), on June 4 is releasing his new book ‘Viral Hate: Containing Its Spread on the Internet,’ co-written with attorney Christopher Wolf, a pioneer in Internet law. The book discusses how racists and anti-Semites are using the Internet to disseminate their hateful information and poses tough questions about the responsibility of the public to fight against this phenomenon in the U.S., whose laws highly protect free speech. Fox... Full story
By Dan Pine j. the Jewish news weekly of Northern California As a professor of Jewish religion, Steve Weitzman studies the lives of biblical figures from Abraham to Zipporah. Now, thanks to his collaboration with genetics researcher Noah Rosenberg, he may be able to examine their DNA as well. The two Stanford University professors teamed up last semester to offer a course they called “From Generation to Generation: The Genetics of Jewish Populations.” The San Francisco-based Koret Fou... Full story
Heritage Florida Jewish News is accepting nominations for the 2013 Heritage Human Service Award, which will be presented in August at the annual meeting of the Jewish Federation of Greater Orlando. “For more than 25 years, individuals who have made major, voluntary contributions of their talent, time, energy, and effort to the Central Florida community have been honored with the selection and presentation of this award,” says Jeff Gaeser, editor and publisher of the Heritage. Last year’s recipient was Dr. Zena Sulkes. The Heritage is accep... Full story
Sean Penn speaks out for Brooklynite’s freedom Sean Penn’s social activism usually conjures images of the Academy Award-winning actor on a wind-rocked boat rescuing victims of some kind of natural disaster. But on May 20 he was in a congressional hearing room in Washington with a haredi Orthodox Jewish family from Brooklyn pushing for the freedom of a man who has been held for nearly two years on house arrest in Bolivia. Jacob Ostreicher, a haredi father of five, invested money in a rice-growing venture in the South American country and was... Full story
TEL AVIV—Television characters from mob boss Tony Soprano to Liz Lemon on “30 Rock” suggest that power is a gateway to loneliness, corruption and unhappiness. But new findings from two Tel Aviv University researchers are challenging this perception. In a quest to discover whether power inevitably brings misery and emotional devastation, Ph.D. candidate Yona Kifer and her supervisor professor Daniel Heller of TAU’s Department of Organizational Behavior at the Faculty of Management have shown that power can actually make people happier. In thei... Full story
Self-help books encourage us to be optimists. If we don’t actually try new challenges, we’ll never know if it’s possible to accomplish something new or different. The writers of these works assume that the results of our actions will be positive. Of course, there is another point of view, one that sees change and hope as dangerous. This idea can be found in a philosophy offered by a character in Shalom Auslander’s latest novel “Hope: A Tragedy.” Auslander makes a profound statement that intrigued me because it was the opposite of what one mi... Full story
It looks eerily similar… I’m not that old, but I do remember photos of the devastation after the bombing of Berlin near the end of World War II. (I was merely a toddler). I just saw the photos on television of the devastation caused by a monster tornado that hit a town in Oklahoma. It looked eerily similar! Of course, the first thought that comes to mind is that we must help. But where do we start? What should we do? Let me suggest: The Jewish Federations of North America have opened a mai... Full story
Taking classic ’60s-era Jewish comedy albums and turning them into a modern-day musical? That’s a pretty big matzah ball hanging out there. Nothing actor Jason Alexander can’t handle. Best known now and forever as George Costanza from “Seinfeld,” he’s been a man of the theater throughout his long career. Alexander directs “When You’re In Love, the Whole World is Jewish,” a new musical revue that was set for its Bay Area debut with a three-day run starting May 24 at San Francisco’s Marin... Full story
In 1976, Steve Silberman, then a 19-year-old freshman at Oberlin College, took a bus to New York City to see Allen Ginsberg read. With Silberman was his first boyfriend. Silberman had been in the closet throughout high school, one of many reasons he drew inspiration from the outspokenly gay Ginsberg. “I sat in the front row, and Allen comes out, and I had never seen a middle-aged man look so happy and fully present and awake and authentic, and there was just no bullshit about him,” recalls Silberman, 55, now a San Francisco writer and con... Full story
In June 1965, during the most violent days of the civil rights movement, 21-year-old Paul Saltzman drove from Toronto to Mississippi to become a freedom fighter with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Just a year before, Klansmen from Neshoba County, Miss., had assassinated the young activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, and the year before that, civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot to death outside his Mississippi home. Within hours of arriving in the Delta, Saltzman—a Canadian Jew whose uncles were p... Full story
BALTIMORE (JTA)—Four generations of Lieberman boys stare out from a collage that hangs from a corridor wall in Johannesburg, South Africa. Each boy is 7—a significant number in the life of the first boy, from whom the others descend photographically and genealogically. An ordeal that befell Israel Lieberman at that age would spur him to safeguard his sons against disaster, and they have done the same for their sons. The collage attests to Lieberman’s scars, but also to his mother’s unquenc... Full story
JOSHUA TREE, Calif. (JTA)—In 1968, only six years after founding the AEPi chapter at his Long Island University campus, Steven Silberfein took one of the thousand names of the Hindu god Vishnu and became Sridhar Silberfein. A year later, the one-time Jewish fraternity brother escorted the Hindu teacher Swami Satchidananda to the stage at Woodstock to deliver an invocation in front of 500,000 flower children. Surveying the crowd, Silberfein turned to the cotton-bearded swami and said, ... Full story
NEW YORK (JTA) —Over the past half century, intermarriage has become increasingly common in the United States among all religions—but among Jews at the highest rate. Why that is the case is one of the questions Naomi Schaefer Riley probes in her new book, “‘Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage is Transforming America” (Oxford University Press). One of the main reasons, Riley finds, is that the older people get, the more likely they are to intermarry—and Jews tend to marry older than A... Full story
With about 40 games gone by— one quarter of the season—here’s a look at how the JMLs are faring as of May 19: Like last year, New York Mets first baseman Ike Davis has gotten off to a horrible start, so much so that fans and media are clamoring for his demotion to the minor leagues. In 39 games, Davis is batting just .156 with four home runs and nine runs batted in. The New York Yankees signed Kevin Youkilis to fill in for third baseman Alex Rodriguez, who was due to miss at least half the s... Full story
When reading a novel, I focus more on plot and character analysis than the author’s writing style. Yet, when considering two recent works by Israeli writers, the differences in their prose was impossible to ignore. In her first novel, “The People of Forever Are Not Afraid” (Hogarth), Shani Boianjiu, who wrote in English, employs very blunt language in order to portray a young, disaffected generation of Israelis. A.B. Yehoshua, in his latest work, “The Retrospective” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), offers very lush writing and complex sentences... Full story
CHICAGO—By the time Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Captain Ziv Shilon realized an explosive device had detonated near him while on patrol near the Gaza border, his left hand was torn off and his right hand was still hanging on by just a few pieces of skin. Ten surgeries and months of rehabilitation later, his left hand has been replaced by a hook prosthesis and his right hand is paralyzed. That’s not going to stop him, he insists. Despite his injury, Shilon plans to enroll in law school and to late... Full story
Israel has more museums per capita than anywhere else in the world. With 230-plus museums (and counting), visitors and locals have the luxury of choosing which topic—art, science, history, design, architecture, technology—appeals to them most. Every year since 1977, the International Council of Museums has celebrated the importance of these cultural institutions in the development of society with an International Museum Day on or around May 18. Some 32,000 museums in 130 countries par... Full story
Heritage Florida Jewish News is accepting nominations for the 2013 Heritage Human Service Award, which will be presented in August at the annual meeting of the Jewish Federation of Greater Orlando. “For more than 25 years, individuals who have made major, voluntary contributions of their talent, time, energy, and effort to the Central Florida community have been honored with the selection and presentation of this award,” says Jeff Gaeser, editor and publisher of the Heritage. Last year’s recipient was Dr. Zena Sulkes. The Heritage is accep... Full story
