Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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Let us forget for a moment that Israel is not the nation-state of the Jewish people. Let us fantasize that it is not engaged in an intractable conflict with Palestinian Arabs who refuse to recognize or make peace with the legitimacy of an indigenous people who historically, biblically, legally, and irreversibly have reestablished their homeland in the Land of Israel. The realty of course is that despite numerous efforts and generous concessions over the last 73 years by Israel to make peace with the Palestinian Arabs, the Palestinian Arab...
(JNS) — “Build Back Better” was Joe Biden’s campaign slogan. How different is that, really, from “Make America Great Again”? Both BBB and MAGA suggest the need for restoration, for reversing deterioration and decline, for fixing what’s broken. In foreign and national security policy, President Donald Trump —following eight years of President Barack Obama’s unwillingness to bolster the credibility of American power against America’s enemies — achieved some significant successes. He also suffered some significant failures. In other areas, he ma...
In the year of the pandemic, it’s no wonder that horrible things continue to come back in ways that are threatening and objectively wrong. This year, maybe because of the virus and people being stuck at home with nothing better to do, a gross lie has resurfaced as it does every year at this season, undermining truth and the foundation of Judaism and Christianity. Each year around Christmas, efforts to propagate this malicious lie get stronger and more brazen. It’s part of a slanderous campaign of deception, whose end goal is to erase Jew...
(BESA Center via JNS) — While the number of anti-Semitic incidents worldwide increased in 2020, there were several positive developments in the fight against this hatred. The decision this year by the European Court of Justice that the Flemish and Wallonian governments can only allow ritual slaughter of animals after stunning was a major anti-Semitic act. It also affects part of the Muslim population. When Adolf Hitler came to power, the Nazi government introduced a similar measure in Germany, as it fit their anti-Semitic policies. Though t...
I recently read with dismay two opinion pieces in the Heritage, both of which dealt with the “Uprooting Prejudice” exhibit at the Holocaust Memorial Research and Education Center. Pardon the pun, but the exhibit obviously got under their skin, in Rabbi Bernard Rosenberg’s case because it didn’t deal specifically with the Holocaust, and in Alan Kornman’s because, supposedly, the Black Lives Matter movement is anti-Semitic. Let’s peel these back one at a time. The mission statement of the HMREC i...
(JNS) — Anyone who cares about Israel’s security and future should be concerned by the initial buds of an attempt to return to the dangerous path of reliance on international forces to protect the country. These poisonous seeds have begun to crop up with a renewed discussion about the evacuation of Jewish towns in the Jordan Valley and Judea and Samaria. The phenomenon is particularly worrisome, given the approach of the next administrations in Washington. A blatant example of such seeds can be seen in Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gan...
(JNS) — The news that Israel and Morocco are about to “normalize” their relations has been met with jubilation in Israel — and in the Moroccan diaspora. The first direct flight has taken off for Rabat from Tel Aviv, and liaison offices will be opened in both countries, to be upgraded to embassies in due course. A wave of nostalgic affection has swept over Jews born in Morocco. “There’s a special place in my heart for Morocco,” gushes Casablanca-born columnist David Suissa, president of Tribe Media/Jewish Journal, who now lives in California. O...
In the past month, no less than three opinion editorials were generated as a result of an article written by Christine DeSouza for the Dec. 4 edition of the Heritage Florida Jewish News. Her article was to highlight a particular exhibit by John Noltner, titled “Uprooting Prejudice: Faces of Change.” However, what DeSouza uncovered was the depth of conflicting feelings toward the appropriateness of the exhibit’s display within the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center. Lisa Bachman, HMREC’s assistant executive director provide...
(JNS) — The Israeli-Palestinian conflict did not erupt in 1967, nor in 1948. In November 1917, the Balfour Declaration called for the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish People” in Palestine, which was the accepted international name of the Land of Israel since the fifth century BCE. The declaration, by the British foreign minister, stated that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities [Arabs] in Palestine.” The declaration acknowledged the ancient national Jewish r...
For 72 years, U.S. presidents sought to achieve peace between Israel and the Arab world. For 72 years, they largely failed. What for so long eluded presidents from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Barack Obama seems to have come effortlessly to President Donald Trump. In the space of just four months, together with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump has achieved four peace deals between Israel and Arab states—twice the number achieved by all his predecessors combined. Last Thursday, Trump announced Morocco has joined the United Arab Emirat...
In past years I have written about the dichotomy between Chanukah and Christmas in terms of their intersectionality and convergence in secular terms; even though not related at all in terms of religious significance and observance. This intersectionality is created by the fact both holidays fall very closely in the month of December and in some years actually overlap. This year the eight days of Chanukah, based on the Hebrew calendar, occurred from Thursday evening, Dec. 10th through Friday, Dec. 18th. While the Christmas season pretty much...
(JNS) — I have questions about the New York Times’ parenting article, “Saying Goodbye to Chanukah,” published on Dec. 4, 2020. The piece was written by children’s book author Sarah Prager, a self-described non-Jewish woman whose Jewish father and Catholic mother raised her Unitarian. Throughout her life, she has never observed any Jewish holidays. She recounts how she (like the rest of her extended family) has chosen not to continue her family’s holiday tradition of eating latkes, lighting a menorah on Chanukah, reciting Hebrew prayers (wh...
A Muslim-American extremist has been disinvited from a Jewish-organized civil rights panel, and Jewish liberals are denouncing his removal as a suppression of free speech. But the real outrage here is that he was invited in the first place. Salam Al-Marayati, longtime president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, was invited by a group called Jews United for Democracy to speak as part of its panel on “After Four Years of Division, Tension and Bigotry — Now What?” Yet Al-Marayati himself is a promoter of division, tension and bigotry. Bigot...
(JNS) Fifty-one years have passed since the establishment in Rabat, Morocco, of one of the most hostile organizations toward Israel ever. One of the more prestigious committees in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, formerly known as the Organization of the Islamic Conference, is the Jerusalem Committee. Morocco’s kings, the “defenders of Islam’s holy sites in Jerusalem,” have led this committee for decades. From Morocco’s standpoint, normalization of ties with Israel is not just a renewed embrace of the Moroccan Diaspora in Israel, b...
(JNS) — A group of 122 Palestinian academics, journalists, writers and filmmakers signed a letter last month taking issue with the widespread adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of anti-Semitism. Their statement has gotten a lot of attention and been rightly criticized as both disingenuous and illegitimate since it is absurd for a group that is the object of prejudice, as is the case with the Jews, to be denied the right to define the hatred that is directed at them. But as much as the Palestinian p...
(JNS) — The divisive organization Jewish Voice for Peace co-hosted a panel on Dec. 15 headlined “Dismantling Antisemitism, Winning Justice.” The panel — which featured figures such as U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill, who have themselves engaged in extensive anti-Semitic rhetoric, alongside outspoken Israel critic Peter Beinart — has been received with a mixture of shock, dismay and outright bewilderment. The inclusion of these participants in a panel on anti-Semitism is both comically counterpr...
(JNS) — Open question: Is there any enemy nation or power, from Communist China to Qatar, that isn’t buying up academia? It’s one thing when wealthy enemy nations like China and Qatar do it, but the whole thing reaches a new level of obscene absurdity when it’s a terrorist entity that we fund with our tax dollars that’s doing it. It’s not often that I’m surprised, but Mitchell Bard’s research in The Spectator turned up something I didn’t even imagine existed: “A new study that I compiled for the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise found tha...
The Uprooting Prejudice exhibit, at the Maitland Holocaust Center of Florida, is in part promoting the Black Lives Matter movement, which is irrefutably anti-Semitic and responsible for targeting synagogues and destroying Jewish-owned businesses during the George Floyd inspired riots. This exhibit, occupying the hallowed halls of our Holocaust Memorial Center has resulted in well-deserved negative national attention. The Aug. 28, 2020, Jerusalem Post reported, “On Wednesday night, the 93-year-old Los Angeles synagogue’s driveway was gra...
(JNS) — The Washington Post is at it again. The editorial board of the newspaper just cannot refrain from attacking Israel. Its Dec. 6 commentary, “Netanyahu’s reaction to Biden’s victory is appalling,” offers more proof of the board’s anti-Israel bias. Jackson Diehl, the Post’s deputy opinion-page editor, is upset. The reason? “When U.S. media designated” former U.S. Vice President Joe “Biden the winner on Nov. 7,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “delayed until the next day before publicly congratulating him.” Worse still, Dieh...
Dear Editor: I protest an exhibit at the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center in Maitland, Florida, honoring George Floyd. My parents, Jacob and Rachel Rosenberg, were survivors of the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. A George Floyd Exhibit has no place in a Holocaust Museum which should be dedicated to memorialize and remember the lessons of the Holocaust, namely that Hitler wanted to wipe out an entire people simply because they were Jewish. Anti-Semitism cannot be tolerated. The museum claims to use the lessons of...
I recently read with dismay two opinion pieces in the Heritage, both of which dealt with the “Uprooting Prejudice” exhibit at the Holocaust Memorial Research and Education Center. Pardon the pun, but the exhibit obviously got under their skin, in Rabbi Bernard Rosenberg’s case because it didn’t deal specifically with the Holocaust, and in Alan Kornman’s because, supposedly, the Black Lives Matter movement is anti-Semitic. Let’s peel these back one at a time. The mission statement of the HMREC i... Full story
(JNS) — The end of the great injustice to Jonathan Pollard has finally come. The video of the call from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to him displayed the warmth that the convicted spy whose parole restrictions were just lifted deserved to receive from Israel after suffering terribly for 35 years. The small studio apartment in which he and his wife, Esther, reside shows that even during his past five years of “freedom,” Pollard was still being punished with onerous parole conditions. It is a great relief that the Justice Depar...
(JNS) — Some 850,000 Jews have been deported from Arab countries and Iran, but their stories are not heard in E.U. meetings and their photos cannot be found hanging in exhibitions in the corridors of the United Nations. Their names are not mentioned in the thousands of U.N. resolutions of recent decades, and the international community has not earmarked an annual date to mark their plight. The United Nations may see them as “negligible” refugees — but we do not. After their failure to prevent the establishment of the State of Israel, and as...
The recent per curium (unsigned) decision by the U.S. Supreme Court granting a temporary injunction prohibiting the governor of New York from enforcing a poorly drafted, over-bearing and constitutionally defective executive order has been misrepresented by the media to the American public. The Executive Order under legal attack issued by Governor Cuomo restricted religious gatherings to 10 persons in so-called “red zones“ and 25 persons in so-called “orange” zones where Covid-19 infections were increasing, and was mostly directed against...
What is a good museum? A good museum serves its entire community. A good museum speaks to society. A good museum challenges you, sparking a social and cultural conversation. That means that a good museum will, from time to time, face controversy. Are Holocaust museums an exception? Must they avoid tough conversations about contemporary society? Is their sole purpose to memorialize the past? Of course not. On Nov. 2, the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida, near Orlando, opened a new exhibit. “Uprooting Prejudice: Faces o...
