Heritage Florida Jewish News - Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice

By Sarah N. Stern (JNS)—Sitting in the East Room of the White House last week, I experienced an emotion as close to euphoria as I have ever experienced perhaps in my lifetime. I was finally beginning to witness that moment in history when some...

A few years back when my son was working toward his MBA at Tel Aviv University, he and I decided to do a father/son trip around Israel over a break in his studies. It was about this time of the year when the temperature was mild and Israel was relati...

TEL AVIV (JTA)—President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan will probably not achieve its stated goal of bringing peace between Israel and the Palestinians, but it might just bring about peace between Israel and more of its Arab neighbors....

I do believe we woke up the children. You think the Flower Children of the 1960s were revolutionary? Just wait!  Full confession. Outside of wearing bell-bottom pants and trying marijuana once, I was not a flower child. My first vote for a president...

(JNS)—Leave aside, for the moment, the deepening rows about U.S. President Donald Trump’s “vision” for ending the Middle East conflict. Leave aside the question whether the plan’s lead author, Jared Kushner, and the U.S. ambassador to...

KFAR TAPUACH, West Bank (JTA)—Put simply, President Donald Trump’s “deal of the century” is bad news for Israel. In a historic event last week, Trump revealed his vision for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which he says has been...

(JNS)—Bernie Sanders and Michael Bloomberg both want to be the nation’s first Jewish president. But they couldn’t possibly be more different. Sanders is a Socialist who is hoping to lead America on a lurch to the left that many of his more enth...

(JNS)—With the presentation of its peace plan, titled, “Peace to Prosperity: A vision to improve the lives of the Palestinian and Israeli people,” the United States has essentially shattered the once-holy Oslo paradigm, having learned from the...

With the release of the Trump Middle East peace plan, the “Deal of the Century,” there have been many questions and challenges posed about whether it’s good or bad, politically motivated or not, has potential to do anything toward achieving...

(JNS)—The Trump administration has just released the long-anticipated “deal of the century,” designed to resolve the seemingly intractable Arab-Israeli conflict. Before commenting on the plan, everyone should actually read it. It is a...

(JNS)—We have now seen and heard the primary official details of the “deal of the century,” and it is, indeed, a bad deal for Israel. Presumably, the intentions that led to the formulation of the plan, the formal title of which is “Peace to...

(JNS)—Predictably, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech to last week’s World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem raised hackles among the responsible guardians of Holocaust memory. The Russian dictator claimed that 40 percent of the 6 million...

(JNS)—Once again, talk of regime change is in the air inside Iran. Not since the crushing of the 2009 student-led protests has the Islamic Republic, as of this year entering the fifth decade of its existence, looked so vulnerable. The immediate...

Betty is a very ordinary American name. The Betty I am writing about was born more than 92 years ago in the small scenic town of Ruskova, nestled in the Carpathian mountains in the Southeast corner of Romania. Ruskova was for the most part a...

(JNS)—If you want to understand the true obstacle to Mideast peace, look no further than the Jordanian parliament’s unanimous approval last week of a bill to ban natural-gas imports from Israel, just days after the gas began arriving....

By Terri Susan Fine, Ph.D. and Jesse Benjamin Slomowitz, B.A. One core value promoted at the University of Central Florida is the emphasis on the individual within a very large institution. UCF aims to be both enlightened and diverse. Students of all...

(JNS)—I’ve never been worried about my reputation. Maybe I should have, maybe I should be. But the fact of the matter is that I represent what I believe in with pride, and I learned long ago from my mother that it’s important to stand up for wh...

Dear Editor: Needless to say I was quite disappointed to learn only a couple of days before the presentation by well-known speaker Laurie Cardoza-Moore, to be held at The Roth Family Jewish Community Center, that it was cancelled. No reason was...

(JNS)—There’s no escaping controversy any time that Israel or the Palestinians are mentioned. That’s a lesson the producers, writers and star of the long-running “Jeopardy!” television game show learned to their detriment when a clue...

NEW YORK (JTA)—Thirty years ago, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality as a way to help explain the oppression of African-American women. The theory of how different forms of discrimination interact is a useful tool to recognize the...

(JNS)—The Boycott, Divest and Sanctions zealots targeted yet another academic institution to promote their hate-filled agenda against the Jewish state. It began in August 2019, when a group of professors within the “Foundations of Political...

Confronting anti-Semitism requires empowering the next generation with knowledge and Jewish wisdom that engenders Jewish pride and strength. There was an attack on Jews in New York almost every day last week. I hear about children crying that they...

NEW YORK (JTA)—For centuries, anti-Semites have fetishized Jewish appearance. Using tedious racist tropes—be it smell, hooked noses, curly hair or traditional garb—anti-Semites label Jews as grotesque and have constructed a particular Jewish...

(JNS)—A horrific attack on the Jewish community in Monsey, N. Y., took place on Saturday, the seventh night of Chanukah, when a machete-wielding assailant entered and began wildly stabbing at worshippers during a crowded holiday celebration in a...

(JNS)—For many in the Middle East, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force, the Islamic Republic’s elite extraterritorial black-ops arm, embodied Iran’s desires, aspirations and directives with respect to the country’s operations...