Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 4364 - 4388 of 4518
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
Barbara Walters retiring NEW YORK (JTA)—After 37 years at ABC, Barbara Walters is calling it quits, the network announced. “It’s time,” said Walters, 83. “I keep thinking of the line from ‘Cabaret’: ‘When I go, I’m going like Chelsea.’ When I go there is not going to be any, ‘Please can I have another appearance?’ I don’t want to do any more interviews. I don’t want to do any other programs. I’m not joining CNN. This is it.” Over the course of her 50-year career, Walters did more than interview an endless list of VIPs. As the nation’s first... Full story
NEW YORK (JTA)—“You have night blindness,” the Israeli army doctor announced unsympathetically at my pre-service medical examination. “You’re dismissed from your IDF mandatory army service by law,” he said and called the next soldier-to-be. I was frightened by the diagnosis. I had worn glasses since I was 3, but I never thought I would lose my vision at 18. It turned out not to be as serious as it sounded: My eyes just didn’t get used to darkness as quickly as they should. It took me time to digest the enormity of the news: I didn’t need t... Full story
”Oy am I fahklempt” department… You know what fahklempt means… eyes tear up and a lump in the throat. That’s how I felt after just seeing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” on television with James Cagney. (I know very few actor’s names these days. It feels great to see a name I recognize.) Anyway, although I know that Hollywood movies take liberties with the whole truth, it was still nice to hear the story of George M. Cohan, who at the turn of the last century, wrote songs like “Give my regards to Broadw... Full story
Becoming a reviewer has made me a better reader. Instead of dismissing works I don’t enjoy, I now analyze why they didn’t appeal to me: Is it something personal, for example, did a character or plot line trouble me? Does the author’s prose or writing style enhance the telling of the story for me or distract from it? Would other readers relish the book even if I didn’t find it to my taste? Two recent novels—“The Middlesteins” by Jami Attenberg (Grand Central Publishing) and “A Town of Empty Rooms... Full story
“I don’t think I’m in any way a sociopath,” said Ariel Vromen, the Israeli-born filmmaker behind “The Iceman,” inspired by the true story of one of America’s most notorious mob hitmen, Richard Kuklinski, who died in prison in 2006. Yet Vromen remembers watching an HBO documentary about Kuklinski in 2007 and feeling a kind of empathy, even a connection, to the 6-foot-5, 300-pound killer who claimed to have whacked at least 100 men between the 1960s and the 1980s, all while maintaining his double life as a devoted family man in suburban New Jerse... Full story
On a warm Sunday morning last month in Washington Square Park, parents were leisurely pushing strollers, sunbathers were strewn about on the grass, and people of all ages were lounging on the wooden benches and sipping coffee. Meanwhile about 15 sixth graders darted around in groups of two or three, their heads bent over iPhones and iPads, shouting out things like, “I just found the foreman. He gave me the money!” “We have to go back to Rose,” and “The shtarkers are after us!” The kids, students at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue’s religious sch... Full story
