Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS) — California Gov. Gavin Newsom just announced the formation in his state, and allocation of millions of dollars, towards the Governor’s Council on Holocaust and Genocide Education. This seems commendable on its face, but it’s not that simple. If Newsom wants to be on the right side of history, he has to pick a side. He can’t simultaneously advocate for both Holocaust education and antisemitic ethnic-studies curricula. Nor should he advocate for lessons that bundle the Shoah with other genocides. Newsom should learn from the challen...
(JNS) — Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz has designated six major Palestinian NGOs as terrorist organizations. This means that their bank trades and the movements of their leaders and affiliates are now monitored and barred from operating in the country. The evidence supporting Gantz’s move is astounding. The organizations in question — Addameer, al-Haq, Defense for Children Palestine, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, Bisan Center for Research and Development, and the Union of Palestinian Women Committees — serve as the civilia...
(FLAME via JNS) What seemed a few months ago like just another whim of the overzealous “New Guard” now running the U.S. State Department seems today like a determined effort to take Israel down a peg. Since day one, the new administration has talked about reestablishing warm relations with the Palestinian Authority by reopening its Palestinian consulate in Jerusalem. Ha, ha, very funny, thought many of us: There’s no state of Palestine, Jerusalem is the U.S.-recognized capital of Israel, the Palestinians are still paying terrorists to kill...
(JNS) — When Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz announced on Friday that he is listing six Palestinian NGOs as terrorist groups, all hell broke loose on the left. The outcry, which emanated not only from Washington and Brussels, but from the halls of the Knesset in Jerusalem and Muqata in Ramallah, could have been anticipated. There’s no sacred cow as holy as a self-described “humanitarian organization,” especially when it’s associated with and financed by equally untouchable foundations. Thus, though the impetus behind Gantz’s move was perfe...
Growing up with one foot in Mexico and one foot in the United States, I am no stranger to the idea of straddling two cultures. In religious studies, we call this idea liminality. Vampires, centaurs and even Jesus Christ (as both divine and human) are all liminal beings. To be liminal is to be half and half — not quite one, not quite the other. Though born in Mexico, I grew up in the Northeastern United States with my mother. The changing of the seasons from summer to fall was marked by a kaleidoscope of changing leaves, the smell of apple c...
(JNS) — Some Jewish liberals say that they saw this coming. There were those who believed that the movement to stop the teaching of critical race theory in the schools was bound to negatively impact teaching about the Holocaust. They claim that those fears were vindicated by the comments of a Texas educator in Southlake, Texas, who was taped telling teachers in a training session that “make sure that if … you have a book on the Holocaust, that you have one that has opposing, that has other perspectives.” The context for this absurd suggest...
Domestic antisemitism has a new tactic. The present wave of antisemitic drivel comes not from the Right (“Jews will not replace us”) but from the Left. Now, in clearing up who and what is the Right and the Left, we have to shift our ideas from just a few short years ago. We knew that the Far Right was antisemitic, yet seemed to favor Israel. Confusing? Of course. The Left for the most part in its early configuration was Liberal, in favor of most minorities, fought for voting rights, etc. Today however, in the Democratic party, there is a “Far L...
(JNS) — I am the child of Holocaust survivors, who lost their homes and families because a Nazi regime implemented the “Final Solution” to eradicate the Jewish people. There are no gravestones to mark the place where all my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins were murdered and buried. This week, I spoke to Lawdan Bazargan, an Iranian Muslim woman whose brother Bijan was murdered in another more recent attempt at a Final Solution, and who does not know where her brother or the thousands of others who were massacred with him rest today...
(JNS) — A state-by-state survey of young Americans last year showed that more than half in Texas could not name a concentration camp or ghetto where Jews were imprisoned and tortured during the Holocaust, despite there being more than 40,000 sites in Europe. The Claims Conference survey of 18- to 39-year-olds discovered that more than 60 percent did not know that 6 million Jews were brutally murdered, and almost a third of those students believed that the number was less than half that. Some believed that Jews caused the Holocaust and nearly h...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) —The greatest threat to the survival of the Jewish community is neither Iran nor intermarriage. Rather, it is our increasing political and cultural isolation, and the resulting hostility that we face from both ends of the ideological spectrum. The fringes of the nationalist hard right continue to traffic in Charlottesville-style blood-and-soil anti-Semitism, and such ugly racism will always constitute an intolerable threat to Jews around the world. But the growing anti-Zionism of the far-left fringe represents a less o...
(JNS) — Each day, it becomes clearer that the Israeli Civil Administration is one of the greatest dangers to the Jewish people’s realization of the goal to resettle the Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria. Since the signing of the 1993-1995 Oslo Accords, the Civil Administration has lost its way. Despite being a branch of the Israeli Defense Ministry/Israel Defense Forces, the Civil Administration is more concerned with facilitating the creation of the “State of Palestine” than it is with ensuring the rights of the Jewish people in its anc...
(JTA) — Actress and comedian Sarah Silverman, in comments on her Sept. 30 podcast, railed against the practice of casting non-Jews as Jewish characters in TV and films. She referred to the castings as “Jewface,” a play on the historically racist practice of donning “blackface.” Silverman pointed to a series of Jewish women portrayed by non-Jewish actresses, including Rachel Brosnahan in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” Felicity Jones as the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in “On the Basis of Sex” and Kathryn Hahn’s upcoming t...
The president recently announced that the United States will shift American foreign policy strategy from military intervention to “relentless diplomacy.” Translated into the jargon of the foreign policy establishment, this means a downgrading of “hard power” capability to an emphasis on “soft power” persuasion in negotiations By announcing this general diplomatic strategy beforehand however, the president has weakened both the hard power and the soft power impacts to our foreign policy strategy. Without question, diplomacy is the preferred p...
(JNS) — We live in a formative time, with fewer and fewer survivors who can tell us what happened, which calls for intensified efforts to commemorate the Holocaust. Deniers should never be allowed to falsify the history of the worst crime against humanity. On Oct. 13, Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven will be hosting the Malmö International Forum on Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism, Remember ReAct, with Israeli President Isaac Herzog as one of the main speakers. The forum aims to jointly take concrete steps on Holocaust rem...
(JNS) — Comedian Dave Chappelle’s latest Netflix special, “The Closer,” is making the rounds but not for its hilarity. No, its high ratings can be attributed to the venom that it has elicited from the mainstream press and social media. Nothing piques curiosity more than public outrage, after all. There’s no doubt, then, that a huge portion of viewers tuned in just to see what all the fuss was about. As a longtime fan of the irreverent performer, I would have watched the show anyway. But many of my peers hadn’t paid the slightest attention to Ch...
(JNS) — A fundamental constitutional right in the United States, embodied in its first amendment, is the freedom of religion. Freedom of prayer is clearly part of freedom of religion. Part of freedom of prayer is the freedom to pray in public spaces. Anyone opposing the right of Jewish prayer, therefore, would be deemed antisemitic in America. This brings us to Israel. Before the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, I helped organize the first Jewish afternoon prayer service there, with no concern that it would spark any kind of c...
(JNS) — U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris outrageously responded on Sept. 28 to a George Mason University student accusing Israel of committing “ethnic geocide” by saying, “… [Y]our voice, your perspective, your experience, your truth, should not be suppressed.” Conservative Rabbi David Wolpe aptly reacted: “Madame Vice President, the idea that Israel has committed genocide against the Palestinians is not someone’s truth; it is someone’s lie, whether they know it or not. And it is pernicious, destructive and should not be elided or ignored by t...
Wait, what? Jews and Christians can pray on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Why is that news? At the conclusion of the 1967 Six Day War, Israel negotiated a cease fire with the Arab countries that had gone to war against it. A cease fire, not peace. Israelis believed that after the crushing defeat of the Arab armies and loss of vast territory, the Arabs would finally realize that they could not win militarily, and that Israel was a reality to live with, not fight against. Many believed that all that was needed was to negotiate to return the...
(JNS) — After the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved the supplemental spending bill for the Iron Dome program, everyone from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the Biden White House to Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, quickly proclaimed bipartisan support in Washington for the U.S.-Israel alliance to be as strong as ever. Unfortunately, even before the bill passed, it was clear that the opposite was the case. Eight House members from the leftist edge of the political spectrum voted against the Iron D...
(JNS) — Last week, Kamala Harris spoke to students at George Mason University, where a “part-Yemeni, part-Iranian” student challenged her with the false claims that Israel commits “genocide” and that money is being taken from providing health care to Americans to fund Israel’s Iron Dome defense system. These two intertwined smears, that Israel’s self-defense against actual genocide is genocidal, and that the Jewish state is taking money from “public healthcare … affordable housing” and that “all this money ends up going to inflaming Israel,...
(JNS) — The Iron Dome missile-defense system has long been one of the least controversial aspects of the U.S.-Israel relationship. Funding for the idea was approved in principle by the George W. Bush administration in 2007 after the Israel Aerospace Industries and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems conceived the project. It was an answer to the heavy missile fire from Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza that Israel faced in 2006. The Iron Dome would give Israel the ability to shoot down the rockets and missiles shot at its villages, towns a...
As the pandemic extended into the second year of the High Holidays I found myself teetering between attending religious services in person or virtually as a participant in a live-streaming congregation. Last year, as a senior citizen and unprotected by vaccination it was a no-brainer to avoid services in person. Unfortunately, it was not a pleasant experience for me to “attend” live-streaming services. I felt completely disconnected. The online services were heavy into English with Hebrew being almost a second language. The music acc...
(JNS) — It’s the ultimate case of biting the hand that feeds you. Americans for Peace Now has launched a public assault on the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations — the very organization that risked its good name and credibility by welcoming Peace Now into its ranks, despite plenty of reason to turn them away. And just to make this whole episode even uglier and more ironic, the attack by APN on the Presidents Conference is over the issue of Jerusalem — the very issue that nearly torpedoed APN’s admission to the co...
I followed reports of Vice President Kamala Harris’ recent exchange with a student at George Mason University with great interest, and dismay. In many ways, she reminded me of an incident with Hillary Clinton, not in a good way. Harris addressed students at George Mason to mark National Voter Registration Day. Following her remarks, she opened the floor for questions. During questions, one student commented to Harris, “You brought up how the power of the people and demonstrations and organizing is very valuable in America. But I see that over t...
(JNS) — On Sept. 23, 2021, Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich.) introduced the “Two-State Solution Act” to “to preserve conditions for, and improve the likelihood of, a two-state solution that secures Israel’s future as a democratic state and a national home for the Jewish people, and a viable, democratic Palestinian state.” Yet, news coverage of Levin’s proposed legislation omitted crucial details and relevant history. POLITICO, hours before the bill dropped, offered an “exclusive look.” Writing for the magazine’s National Security Daily brief, report...
