Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 1501 - 1525 of 3636
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 relatively past its major winter storms. Having survived the flight, I was met by my son carrying a hand made cardboard sign with my English name emblazoned in Hebrew letters. I speak, read and write a little Hebrew, but for me the hardest Hebrew words to read are those that phonetically spell out English... Full story
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. Here’s why. Over the past several years, Israel has become an appealing partner to Arab states for two main reasons. Ever since the revolutions known as the Arab Spring toppled several regimes and undermined and threatened the stability of others, Israel’s stability in the region has become ever more ap... Full story
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 was in 1968, and I voted for Nixon. When fellow friends and professors marched against the Vietnam War after Kent State, I joined in. But during that entire day, I was more scared than passionate. Looking back, I wish I had done more. Been more. But it was not who I was at the time. I wasn’t much o... Full story
(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 Israel, David Friedman, backtracked on an “immediate” Israeli declaration of sovereignty over the Jordan Valley and the “Triangle” of disputed territory (they didn’t; the need to first map out and agree on the details was stated from the start). Leave aside the uproar among Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria,... Full story
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 one of the most difficult and complex problems to solve. He claims that his plan offers “the most detailed proposal ever put forward by far,” and that it’s a “‘win-win’ opportunity for both sides.” As a Jewish Israeli who has lived in the heart of the Shomron area of the West Bank for the past 30 years, as... Full story
(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 enthusiastic supporters are calling a revolution. And he hopes to be elected on the strength of a mass movement of small contributors and activists. Bloomberg is a billionaire capitalist who, as he likes to joke, is the Jewish candidate for president who “doesn’t want to turn America into a kibbutz.” And he p... Full story
(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 peace process’s failures and establishes a new path forward to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, Israel and the Palestinians have been locked in a diplomatic holding pattern conditioned on future Israeli withdrawals from territories central to its... Full story
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 peace or make things worse, and much more. One thing it does do is that it changes the paradigm from the decades old mantra and largely failed policy of two states along the pre-1967 armistice line (the boundaries following the 1948-49 War of Independence) and makes people look at Israel and the Middl... Full story
(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 remarkably comprehensive document spelling out the concrete steps necessary to bring to reality the long sought-after two-state solution to the conflict. We shall not see another such prospect for peace and prosperity in the region in our lifetime. Unfortunately, this creative proposal is dead on arrival. Altho... Full story
(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 Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People,” were good; however, the plan displays a lack of basic understanding regarding the essence of the Land of Israel. The Land of Israel is the sole homeland of the Jewish people. The Land of Israel belongs to us—to the generations... Full story
(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 Jewish victims of Nazi slaughter were citizens of the Soviet Union—a vastly overinflated figure that can be arrived at only if you include those Jews who resided in countries that were occupied by the USSR. Putin’s manipulation of Holocaust numbers—historians generally agree that about 1 million of the 6 mi... Full story
(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 cause of the latest spate of protests was, of course, the shooting down by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of a Ukrainian International Airlines flight from Tehran to Kiev on Jan. 8, killing all 176 passengers on board—more than 100 of whom were Canadian citizens intending to catch a con... Full story
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 peaceful town where Jews and their gentile neighbors got along very well. Betty’s father worked for the railroad in the next town down the road, where the railway station was located. Life was pretty uneventful for Betty and her family in her early childhood days. Then beginning in 1940, Betty and her f... Full story
(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. Energy-poor Jordan needs a stable, affordable fuel supply, which the Israeli deal provides. When it was signed in 2016, the Jordanian government said it could save the country $500 million a year—almost 4 percent of Jordan’s 2019 budget and more than half its projected deficit for that year (the actual deficit... Full story
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 religions are welcome at UCF, and like any public university, UCF has established policies supporting religious observance. We believe, as well, that people of any culture and religion should not feel marginalized from the university community because of who they are. There are so many wonderful op... Full story
(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 what you believe in. She used to tell me stories about her grandmother working in Israel, building the land and doing whatever it took to make a dream become reality. My grandmother didn’t have social media, but we do. We can share/post/like/tweet our messages far and wide. The World Jewish Congress #WeReme... Full story
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 given. I have had the opportunity to hear Laurie speak locally several times. Each was a very educational and enlightening experience. I know there is a group of influential locals within the Jewish community that are afraid to hear the truth; afraid to learn about the reality of life in the United... Full story
(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 involving the location of the Church of the Nativity was used in an episode that aired on Jan. 10, though it was taped last fall. In a category titled “Where’s That Church?” contestants were asked to identify the location of the house of worship that Christians believe to be the birthplace of Jesus. Katie Ne... Full story
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 way privilege and oppression overlap. It can serve to challenge notions about oppressions and hierarchies, class struggles and racial divides. But the recent spate of anti-Semitism in New York compels us to ask if it also has its demons. Identifying Jews as white in the context of American history is... Full story
(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 Theory” section of the American Political Science Association proposed a resolution for an academic boycott and censoring of Israel. Just a few weeks later, the resolution was struck down at the APSA’s annual conference. In fact, it never made it to a vote and was deemed a “colossal defeat.” Social-medi... Full story
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 had bad dreams and crawling into their parents’ beds. I watch Joseph Gluck describe the trauma of a child who lay hidden under a pile of coats while a madman wildly swung his machete of hate. I read the words from the family of Joseph Neumann, who was savagely hacked in the Chanukah massacre. They a... Full story
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 appearance in an attempt to “otherize” and oppress Jews. An all too personal reminder of this demonization occurred this past summer when we received notification that Maital was among a slew of Jewish professionals, mostly women, pictured on a white nationalist, anti-Semitic website mocking how Jews look... Full story
(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 rabbi’s home. It’s the most recent in a series of attacks on Jews in and around New York City over the past several months. Last week alone, during the festival of Hanukkah, New York City’s Jews were reportedly attacked in hate crimes taking place almost every day. No one seems to know why this is happ... Full story
(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 worldwide. He was also the man who controlled the purse strings with respect to funding the weapons that have so often ignited the region. For Iran’s friends and foes alike, Soleimani was second only to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—an ailing, elderly man who sits in an ivory tower in Tehran, detached fr... Full story
On Jan. 3, 2020, as their motorcade was exiting the Baghdad Airport, Major General Qasem Soleimani, the leader of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, along with other high ranking members of the IRGC were killed by an American drone missile attack. Also killed in the attack was Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy chairman of one of Iraq’s notorious non-state militias, the Popular Mobilization Forces, a group controlled and armed by Iran. Not unexpectedly, the left has been in an uproar, calling the attack and resulting f... Full story
