Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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Unlike many Israelis, I am not spiking the ball or dancing in the end zone today. (Forgive the exclusive American cultural reference for those who don’t follow U.S. football.) Prime Minister Netanyahu, Bibi, is not public enemy No.1. But his time to step down has passed, and that’s why this week Israel announced a new “unity” government, after four elections in two years. It gives me no sense of pride that we’ve come to this point, particularly how this has transpired. As prime minister, there’s no question that Bibi deserves enormous cr...
(JNS) — Whenever I get asked about Israeli politics on the radio, the first thing I do is point out that Israeli politics isn’t American, it’s European. Israel was controlled by the British. More of its founders were European than American. That means the same messy coalition parliamentary politics without even the benefit of regional representation and direct elections. It’s a terrible system that serves all the wrong people. The last few years have been a grinding disaster of repeat elections because: 1. A huge chunk of Israel’s political...
Next Sunday, June 20, is Father’s Day. In the more than 30 years I have been writing this column I have never devoted an entire column to my dad. I have often thought about it, but my feelings of loss for him have always overwhelmed my ability to write about him. This year in November will be half a century since his passing when I was 27 years old. He had not quite reached his 61st birthday when cancer took him from me. He was the oldest of six sons of an immigrant father and mother. Himself an immigrant arriving in the U.S. at 16 years of a...
(JTA) — The cease-fire agreement announced last week between Israel and Hamas conjures up the wisdom often, if dubiously, attributed to Albert Einstein: “If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.” Unfortunately, ever since the Israeli government withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005 with the naive expectation that it would achieve peace and quiet, the broad brush strokes of the smoldering conflict became all too familiar. Hamas launches large-scale rocket barrages targeting Israeli cities. Since Hamas embeds...
(JNS) — There is little point at this stage of the game in mentioning the depths of moral depravity and treachery into which Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked have descended. Now, as the two self-proclaimed “leaders” of the ideological right defect from the nationalist camp and form a leftist government supported by pro-Hamas Arab parties, the time has come to discuss the strategic and national consequences of their actions. The place to begin the discussion is by noting that ministers that support the Biden administration’s Middle East po...
(JTA) — “Rabbi Adar, is it dangerous to wear my Jewish star?” In 12 years of teaching “Introduction to the Jewish Experience” through HaMaqom | The Place in the San Francisco Bay Area, no student ever asked me that question in those words. This year three students have asked it of me. The first student who asked it was a young woman, a conversion candidate, and she made an appointment to talk to me outside of class. I answered with a question: “Why are you asking this right now?” She talked about reading about attacks on Jews in New York City...
Obviously these past few weeks have been difficult for so many people, mainly the Palestinians and Israelis who have been enmeshed in conflict and under fire. Thankfully there’s now a cease-fire that everyone hopes will hold — but the aftermath of the conflict lingers. I’m not Israeli and I’m not living in Israel. I’m a Jew, I live in the U.S., and these past few weeks have made me extremely uncomfortable in a way that will persist long after the smoke of the most recent destruction has cleared. Some would say it’s unseemly to talk about these...
It’s not the most talented who succeed. It’s those who never stop trying. Congratulations graduates! I remember being where you are today and looking out across the future, which seemed unlimited in its possibilities. I thought I knew so much about life back then. I thought my skills and my knowledge had prepared me for life. But my degree only taught me how to succeed. It didn’t teach me how to fail and learn from pain itself. We try to run from pain and wish it away. But it finds us no matter where or who we are. We’ve all had moments...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — Words have meaning. And in fraught times, in matters of life and death, it is critically important to use the right words. To resolve our disputes, to solve our problems, we must accurately describe what is happening, so that we can respond to facts, not to rhetoric. Which brings me to the recent fighting between Israel and Hamas. Rep. Rashida Tlaib has said that Israel “is practicing ethnic cleansing.” The foreign ministry of Qatar put out a statement urging Israel to end the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestini...
How bad is substance use in the Jewish community? Well, it is worse than many people think. And that’s probably because substance use — whether recreational or prescribed pain medication — is so commonplace. Not to mention, getting drunk or getting high on pot or other depressants or stimulants is considered (by many) as fun. What many do not realize is that some of these people are genetically programmed to take the “high” further. Prescription pain pills can go from “needed for the pain” to “needed.” B’ri’ut held an excellent meeting, sp...
(JNS) — “Operation Guardian of the Walls” may have been the most targeted and accurate precision-bombing campaign ever facilitated by any military, anywhere, in the history of conflict and war. In the 11 days before the ceasefire, more than 4,100 rockets and mortars were launched at Israel from the Gaza Strip by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other groups. In response, the Israel Defense Forces targeted more than 1,000 sites across the Strip with complex surgical strikes that stunned militaries and defense establishments around the world...
Dear Editor: According to members of Congress Israel started the latest Gaza War and T’laib, Omar and Bernie Sanders are leading the charge to defund Israel just as the left wing governments of many of our cities and states are defunding the police. Much is made of the deaths of Palestinian children in Gaza. Nothing is made of the deaths of Israeli children in Israel. Fox News Geraldo Rivera decried the deaths of the little Palestinian children but didn’t utter one mention of the deaths of Israeli children who were the victims of an attack beg...
In the The New York Times (May 14), U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders wrote an essay entitled “The U.S. Must Support an Evenhanded Approach in the Middle East” (and, unusually, 24 hours later, retitled “The U.S. Must Stop Being an Apologist for the Netanyahu Government”). Whatever the title, the thrust of the senator’s comments remains exactly the same. Given the timing, this presumably means an appeal to the United States to move to the 50-yard line in the latest round of Hamas-triggered conflict with Israel. Forgive me, an evenhanded approach?...
By Jim Shipley Did it start with George Floyd? Back to Michael Brown? Has it been hidden in the police files of dozens of municipalities for years? Statistics are proving as they have for decades that, yes, we are still a racist society at heart. Decades of ignoring it, shoveling it under tons of paper work, claiming that we are better, all turns out is nonsense. Black men, women and even children are being gunned down by uniformed policemen throughout the country. The police forces, specifically in major cities are under tremendous pressure....
As Hamas creates a war crime with every rocket it fires into Israel solely for the purpose of killing civilians, a biased media, along with supposedly creditable human rights organizations, BDS backers, Students for Justice in Palestine and naive progressives including many progressive Jews, are accusing Israel of provoking the current breakout of hostilities by another false accusation of Israeli apartheid of Arabs This latest provocation, according to these purveyors of false accusations against Israel is the alleged attempt to arbitrarily ev...
(JNS) — Everything about the murder of Israeli teenager Yehuda Guetta shatters the myths and lies that are used by groups like J Street to promote the Palestinian cause. In a fair world, the killing and its aftermath would be an utter public-relations disaster for the Jewish left. But in the real world, things likely will turn out rather differently. Let’s start with the ironic timing. Last week, J Street announced its support for legislation by Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) to penalize Israel for arresting teenage Palestinian terrorists. But...
(JNS) — So tell me, what should Israel do? You, who march through the streets of Italy, the U.K. or Germany with Palestinian flags and shout slogans accusing Israel of crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing, as well as being an apartheid state. You, who defend Hamas in Paris, Berlin, London and Rome, hurling countless accusations against Israel on social media, including demented conspiracy theories that suggest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the diabolical Prince of Evil, started the current war — in agreement with Hamas — i...
For the first few days after Hamas started raining thousands of rockets on Israel — all of them aimed at civilians — Biden kept silent. Finally, on Wednesday, Biden said “my expectation and hope is that this will be closing down sooner than later but Israel has a right to defend itself when you have thousands of rockets flying into your territory.” Saying this ought to have been a no-brainer, but it was obviously an effort on Biden’s part. Biden instantly caught flak from the Squad. Even though, thanks to the influx of Ethiopian Jews, the...
(JNS) - Journalists are expressing their outrage that the 12-story Al-Jalaa building housing the Gaza headquarters of Associated Press and Al Jazeera was targeted during retaliatory Israeli airstrikes on Saturday. Al Jazeera Jerusalem bureau chief Walid al-Omari said that by striking the building, Israel was acting "not only to sow destruction and killing, but also to silence those who broadcast it." Not exactly an objective assessment. AP CEO Gary Pruitt released a statement expressing that...
I have been hosting a variety of briefings and doing media interviews this week, putting into perspective many of the complicated, frustrating, and scary things that Israel is undergoing and enduring this week. Today I read a vile comment that Israel’s goal is “dead Palestinians and bombed out buildings.” There are abundant ways that this malice is not the case. If that were the case, rather than only 69 casualties (according to the terrorists in Gaza who typically like to inflate their suffering), there would be 6900, or 69,000 deaths. Israel...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — Palestinian terror groups such as Hamas have a surefire strategy to win over the world’s sympathy: fire rockets into Israeli territory, trigger an Israeli response and wait for the global outrage against Israel’s response. The strategy is effective because Israel is so darn good at protecting its citizens from missile attacks, thanks to ubiquitous bomb shelters and a sophisticated Iron Dome missile defense system. So, if the terror rockets don’t kill any Jews, but the forced retaliations kill Palestinians, anyone...
(JNS) — Throughout the month of Ramadan, the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority and Hamas have been inciting Arab Israelis in Jerusalem and throughout the country to attack Jews. And so it happened that at the outset of the month, Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa and beyond found themselves beset by gangs of Arab thugs who beat them on the streets and light-rail cars just because they were Jews. Last week, Hamas’s leaders announced their detailed plans to open a new campaign against Israel on May 9. May 9 was a conflation of three events: Jer...
I watched the tragedy in Meron on Lag Ma’omer in the wee hours on Friday morning on on-site video broadcast on the Internet from Israel. I grieved and agonized over the loss of life and the enormity of the tragedy, and then it hit me: young members of my family in Israel, could be there. Being religious and very observant, they would go to the place considered to be the grave of the second century Tana, Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, for spiritual enrichment and prayers. It was very early for a telephone call, so I sent a message to my brother a...
(Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies via JNS) — Rarely do politicians have the opportunity to test the implications of their policy within a day. In Israel, the land of miracles, such an opportunity occurred on May 9-10, when the Israeli government and its more than willing officialdom decided on Jerusalem Day to follow in the footsteps of the 1930s British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain: total appeasement of an implacable enemy. This began with the acquiescence of the judicial branch — one that famously doesn’t bow to external press...
As I sit here writing this, my phone keeps buzzing with red alert after red alert. Red alert - incoming rocket! As I check to see where it is, I selfishly breathe just a small sigh of relief that it's not in Jerusalem or Beit Shemesh since that's where some of my kids are (the others are with me). I am grateful that it is not where I am sitting, but the sigh is very small, almost half a sigh. The reality is that no matter where it is, I still feel angry for the people who have no more than 10 se...
