Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 16 - 40 of 1999
(JNS) — When the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform announced that it is investigating manipulation of information on Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, co-founder of the encyclopedia, welcomed the news. “I am glad that Congress is investigating the use of foreign and U.S. government funds to pay for biased editing on Wikipedia,” Sanger, who has criticized Wikipedia frequently in recent years, told JNS. Sanger told JNS that he asked U.S. President Donald Trump and billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who led the U.S. Department of Gover...
The United States Postal Service announced a new series of stamps honoring Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. Wiesel, who died in 2016 at the age of 87, is the 18th person to be honored in the USPS' Distinguished Americans stamp series. "The 18th stamp in the Distinguished Americans series honors humanitarian Elie Wiesel (1928-2016), a survivor of Nazi concentration camps whose dozens of works bore witness to the Holocaust and whose resilience and compassion continue...
The Reform movement’s Washington-based advocacy arm is urging Attorney General Pam Bondi not to seek the death penalty for the man accused of killing two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., in May. Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, the director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, called on Bondi to forgo the death penalty in the trial of Elias Rodriguez in a letter sent Wednesday. “Despite the pain of Sarah and Yaron’s murders and despite the hateful motivation behind their deaths, we believe that the death penalty is a stain...
(JNS) — The U.S. Department of Justice is pursuing the death penalty and hate crime charges against Elias Rodriguez, who it accuses of shooting and killing two Israeli embassy staffers as they left an event at a Jewish museum in Washington in May, CNN reported. “The charges, if approved by a grand jury, would position the case as a centerpiece of the Trump Justice Department’s fervent approaches toward both violent crime and targeted hate against the Jewish community,” per CNN. The news organization said it sought comment from the Justice...
(JNS) — The University of Wisconsin-Madison has suspended its Students for Justice in Palestine chapter after the group was “found in violation of multiple rules” after an April protest. The SJP chapter announced its suspension on social media on Sunday. In its statement, the group wrote that the decision was made in response to the chapter›s protest of a speaking appearance by Linda Thomas-Greenfield, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, in April. John Lucas, officer of strategic communication for the university, told JNS that “f...
(JNS) — Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, stated on Aug. 1 that the Jewish state is guilty of the “mass starvation of innocent civilians” and of inflicting “heartbreaking and inexcusable” trauma on children and families. The word “Hamas” appeared nowhere in her LinkedIn post, titled “Thoughts and updates: standing in solidarity with Palestine.” “As you all know, Teach for Palestine, our network partner operating in the West Bank, is continuing its vital work despite escalating violence, severe restrictions on fundamental freedom...
(JNS) - A night of speeches ended in dance. By design, nearly 2,000 teenage Jewish athletes at the JCC Maccabi Campus Games fulfilled the promise of former hostage Mia Schem, who, upon release from Hamas captivity, declared: "We will dance again." Those words, which Schem inked on her arm with the date Oct. 7, 2023, were referenced by social-media influencer Montana Tucker during her address to attendees of the Opening Ceremonies of the JCC Maccabi Campus Games. "From the Maccabees who fought...
(JNS) — Hundreds of pro-Israel students met in Washington last week for the Israel Campus Coalition’s national summit. Jacob Baime, the group’s CEO, told JNS that the 21 months since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel and subsequent rise of anti-Israel and antisemitic protests on campus marked a “new moment” for students who support the Jewish state. “As horrible as everything has been, as horrific as it’s all been since Oct. 7, there’s the silver lining of a huge surge in Jewish pride and interest in the issue,” Baime said. “This is a...
As images of starving children in Gaza continue to circulate and the international outcry grows louder, a number of American rabbis used their pulpits this past Shabbat to speak up about the humanitarian crisis, some with sorrow, others with moral urgency, and many with a sense that silence was no longer tenable. The sermons came amid growing pressure on Jewish institutions to reckon with the consequences for Palestinian civilians of Israel’s war against Hamas as it nears the end of its second year. In recent days, more than a thousand r...
A record number of Senate Democrats, representing a majority of the caucus, voted in favor Wednesday of two resolutions blocking U.S. military sales to Israel. The vote tally, including several senators who had not previously voted against such aid, underscores an apparent decline in support for Israel within the party. The vote comes as Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza, and amid a humanitarian crisis in the enclave that is drawing widespread condemnation. The resolutions were sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Jewish Vermont I...
By (JTA) -A Muslim democratic socialist state lawmaker in his 30s defeats the establishment candidate for mayor of his city, setting up a showdown in advance of November's general election. The scenario played out last month in New York City - and again this week in Minneapolis, where Omar Fateh won the endorsement of the state's Democratic Party in his bid to unseat the city's Jewish mayor, Jacob Frey. Fateh, 35, is the latest progressive candidate to ascend amid a shift away from...
(JTA) — The first athlete to notch a Manischewitz endorsement is transferring from a university with just a handful of Jewish students to a school with one of the highest proportions of Jewish students in the United States. Jake Retzlaff will play for Tulane University, according to reports in sports media. Neither Retzlaff nor Tulane has confirmed the move, but Retzlaff retweeted an article about it. Retzlaff announced earlier this month that he would leave Brigham Young University, the M...
(JNS) — The U.S. State Department announced on Wednesday that it is investigating Harvard University’s participation in the exchange visitor visa program. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested that Harvard’s continued use of the program might undermine U.S. national security. “To maintain their privilege to sponsor exchange visitors, sponsors must comply with all regulations, including conducting their programs in a manner that does not undermine the foreign policy objectives or compromise the national security interests of the United...
While the majority of Americans oppose antisemitism, a quarter believe that the recent string of attacks on Jews in the United States were “understandable,” according to a new report released by the Anti-Defamation League on Friday. The report comes in the wake of three recent attacks on Jewish targets by people claiming to act on behalf of the Palestinians: the arson attack on Jewish Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s house in April, the deadly shooting of two Israeli embassy workers in Washington D.C. in May and the firebombing attack on a gro...
The number of antisemitic assaults and acts of vandalism on college campuses fell sharply in the last school year, according to Hillel International. And the pro-Palestinian encampments that ignited fear among many Jewish college students in early 2024 effectively disappeared in the year since, with just nine encampments taking place in the last school year, the Jewish campus group said in its annual tally of antisemitic incidents, released Thursday, July 17. But Hillel International said antisemitic incidents were still on the rise on college...
(JNS) — The U.S. Board on Geographic Names, a 135-year-old federal body, voted on Thursday to change the names of two entities in Alaska, one with Nazi ties and the other a derogatory term for Japanese people. The board’s domestic names committee approved changing Nazi Creek, a mile-long stretch on the state’s Aleutian Islands, to a phrase that means “gizzard creek” in the Unangam Tunuu indigenous language. It also opted to change nearby Nip Hill, an anti-Japanese reference, to a phrase that means “gizzard hill.” Michael Livingston, a...
(JNS) — A final-hour revision to the Trump administration’s reconciliation package, known as the “Big Beautiful Bill” passed on July 1, preserved the Educational Choice for Children Act, a provision that will direct new funding to Jewish schools, Rabbi A.D. Motzen, Agudath Israel of America’s national director of government affairs, told JNS. Motzen told JNS that the school choice provision in the bill, which creates a pool of federal tax credits to fund scholarships for private schools, including yeshivot and Jewish day schools, was initially...
Rabbis and other clergy members in the United States may endorse candidates from the pulpit without jeopardizing their house of worship’s tax-exempt status, the Internal Revenue Service has decreed. The policy change reverses a ban on endorsing or opposing candidates by religious organizations known as the Johnson Amendment, enacted in the 1950s. The IRS made the change in the course of settling a lawsuit brought by two churches and a Christian broadcasting network in Texas that sought to undo the ban for all nonprofit entities. The IRS said e...
By Aaron Bandler (JNS) — The Nysmith School, a private institution in Herndon, Va., discriminated against a Jewish family, which complained about “persistent and severe” antisemitism, by expelling its three children, according to a complaint that the Louis Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed with the office of the Virginia attorney general. The 40-year-old Northern Virginia school, where tuition runs from about $31,500 to $46,600 and which has an enrollment of about 500, refused to act to curb Jew-hatred on its campus and even...
(JNS) — Elon Musk’s X took its Grok artificial-intelligence offline on Tuesday after the program began branding itself “MechaHitler” and spreading antisemitic conspiracies. Users on the social-media platform noted that the newly updated large language model program had begun posting bigoted, pro-Nazi content when prompted. “These dudes on the pic, from Marx to Soros crew, beards n’ schemes, all part of the Jew,” the AI wrote in one post replying to a photo of eight Jewish men, including media host Ben Shapiro and Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y...
(JNS) — Multiple Jewish organizations offered condolences after Karen Diamond, 82, a victim of the antisemitic firebombing in Boulder, Colo., on June 1, died from her injuries. “This horrific act is part of a broader and deeply troubling rise in antisemitic violence across the United States,” the Jewish Federations of North America stated. “It is no longer possible to separate online hate, city hall rhetoric and campus incitement from real-world consequences. Our communities are being targeted—for being Jewish, for speaking out, for simply sh...
(JNS) - Anti-Israel and Anti-Jewish sentiments have been on public display in university classrooms and campuses around the world, especially since Israel responded militarily to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre. According to the CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis) watchdog group, that hatred has also seeped into the classrooms of children from kindergarten to 12th grade. On Sunday night, CAMERA, in partnership with the Menachem Begin Heritage Center, held...
(JNS) - They remembered Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky at the U.S. Capitol Tuesday evening, as lawmakers of both political parties vowed to continue the fight against the Jew-hatred that has led to violence and the deaths of two young, Israeli embassy employees on a Washington street earlier this month. "It's a dangerous time to be a Jewish American," House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said at the beginning of a 30-minute vigil, which drew more than 100 people, on the House steps. "Where is...
(JNS) — A 72-year-old Jewish man in New York City hanging posters of hostages being held in Gaza was punched in the face last week by thugs shouting, “Free Palestine.” Since the Oct. 7 massacre, the campaign to “Globalize the intifada” has exploded with a vengeance, threatening the safety of American Jews as never before on U.S. streets. A couple was shot and killed last month in Washington, D.C., by a radical leftist gunman outside the Capital Jewish Museum. Jews in Boulder, Colo., who were marching for the release of hostages in Gaza befo...
(JNS) - The nearly 100-year-old Boulder County Historic Courthouse, adjacent to the site of June 1's antisemitic attack in Boulder, Colo., was lit up with bluish-purple lights from 6 to 9 p.m. on June 4 in solidarity with the victims and to call attention to Jew-hatred. "With support from the City of Boulder and the Boulder community at large, we know as a Jewish community that there are those who will stand up and walk beside us," stated Dafna Michaelson Jenet, a Tel Aviv-born Colorado state...
