Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 2251 - 2275 of 3636
There ain’t much anybody can do. It’s one of our insoluble problems. For those of us outside areas of the Middle East and Africa where one or another radical movement established itself, the problem may grow with the defeat of the extremists in areas they had once controlled. The worry comes not only from individuals that had served in Syria or Iraq and then go home to wreck havoc among the infidels. Those can be identified and watched. Even that is difficult. Europeans have been killed by those who slipped through the cracks. And scr... Full story
We live in a time when, as the U.S. State Department has noted, a “rising tide of anti-Semitism” has swept across the globe. Anti-Semitism has crept into the mainstream from the margins of society in the West, as a coalition of intellectual elites and Muslims has produced a surge of venom against Israel and Jews who identify with it. That movement has found a foothold on American campuses and among left-wing groups, resulting in Jews being stigmatized and isolated in the public square, and students being subjected to violence and int... Full story
Jews are asking if we’re back in the 1920s. To me, the scene outside a Charlottesville synagogue is more like Odessa in 1905. Across from the synagogue stood three white supremacists with semi-automatic weapons. During the Friday night torchlight parade that passed the synagogue, the alt-right marchers, hands in the salute formation, hurled slogans reminiscent of the Nazi era. The armed men in fatigues looked as if they were ready to carry out the threats. The police were called. They did not show. Did the city council want blood spilled to adv... Full story
The stinging heat of anti-Semitism is being felt, yet again, around the world. Whether you live in Miami, Rome or Santiago, the goosebumps we all got when we heard the chants of the white supremacists in Charlottesville—“Jews will not replace us”—are the same. The lump in my throat when I learned that the pedestrians who were mowed down in Barcelona Aug. 17 were standing outside two kosher restaurants is the same feeling felt by Jews in Brussels, Sydney and Toronto. These feelings remind me of Robert De Niro’s character in the 1995 movie, “H... Full story
The newly appointed Middle East director at the State Department has a long record of criticizing and pressuring Israel. Isn’t anybody at the White House paying attention to who’s being hired over at Foggy Bottom? David Satterfield, who is slated to become assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs next month, played a significant role in U.S. policy and diplomacy concerning Israel and the Palestinians in the late 1990s and early 2000s. A look at some of his comments from that period reveals he repeatedly suggested a moral equ... Full story
Many Americans know that the sickness at the heart of our political culture stems from a spirit of intolerance that has become the keynote of discourse. Liberals blame it on President Donald Trump and his supporters. But few of us seem able to recognize this behavior when it comes from those who share our views—which means that if you think Dennis Prager must be boycotted or believe Morton Klein is as much of a threat to American Jewry as Islamist terrorists, then don’t blame Trump for how bad things have gotten. Prager, a Los Ang... Full story
I wrote a column about the extreme left and the extreme right. I did that before Charlottesville, the chants of “Jews will not replace us” and the murder of a 32-year-old woman. Still there is some validity to the following: The late Eric Hoffer, the “Longshoreman Philosopher,” in his book “The True Believer” wrote that if you push the philosophies of the Far Left and the Far right to their extreme there is little difference between them. Picture a circle. Start at the top and take one curve and go to the left—pull it around that circle to the... Full story
(JTA)—I was in Charlottesville on Saturday. I felt called to go because white supremacy is a hateful ideology that has murdered millions throughout history and continues to kill. I went because my family and ancestors suffered at the hands of anti-Semites throughout history, because I bear their scars on my DNA, because the Jewish day school where I teach received a bomb threat this spring, and I cannot let Nazi flags fly in my state without response. I needed to go as a rabbi because I am tired of conservative white Christians controlling t... Full story
NEW YORK (JTA)—There was a moment in his “neo-Nazi, neo-Shmazi” news conference where you might have found yourself thinking, maybe President Trump is right. On the narrow question of who was responsible for the violence in Charlottesville, a prosecutor might note that punches were thrown by white supremacists and left-wing activists, neo-Nazis and members of the Antifa resistance. “I think there’s blame on both sides,” is how Trump put it in his news conference Tuesday in New York. It’s the right answer if this is the question: “Who threw pu... Full story
On Aug, 11, an estimated 100 white supremacists marched through the University of Virginia campus with their tiki torches full of citronella and their hearts filled with hate. They were recorded shouting racist, anti-Semitic Nazi slogans—such as “Blood and Soil” and “Jews will not replace us.” The next day, counter protesters showed up to face the over 4,000 white supremacists who were gathered. The situation devolved into one of the saddest days for American democracy. Citizens were beating each other bloody, and the National Guard was ultimat... Full story
The newly appointed Middle East director at the State Department has a long record of criticizing and pressuring Israel. Isn’t anybody at the White House paying attention to who’s being hired over at Foggy Bottom? David Satterfield, who is slated to become assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs next month, played a significant role in U.S. policy and diplomacy concerning Israel and the Palestinians in the late 1990s and early 2000s. A look at some of his comments from that period reveals he repeatedly suggested a moral equ... Full story
As far as they are concerned, the U.S. Congress is just doing what it always does: pandering to the “Israel Lobby.” That’s how the foreign policy establishment and the left regard the bipartisan support for the Taylor Force Act, a bill named after a non-Jewish U.S. Army veteran slain in a Palestinian terror attack last year. The legislation would cut off American aid for the Palestinian Authority (PA) unless the PA stops funding terrorism. The bill passed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Aug. 3 in a 17-4 vote, with all the commi... Full story
The latest acts in the long running saga of Elor Azaria emphasize the deep divisions among Israeli Jews. There are also sharpening gaps between Israeli Jews and those of the Diaspora. Especially prominent are those separating us from the large Jewish community in the United States. The Azaria problem is closer to home, but it’s not without overseas Jews signing on to one or the other side in our verbal warfare. Azaria is the young man, who when stationed with his IDF unit in Hebron, shot and killed an inert Palestinian who had been severely inj... Full story
We are now two years into the deeply controversial Iran nuclear agreement that roiled our community. And, like everything connected to the deal and the Mideast, it’s complicated, as even Jared Kushner would attest. During the many months leading up to the historic 2015 agreement between Tehran and the U.S. and its P5+1 partners—United Kingdom, France, and China, plus Germany—I was deeply critical of President Barack Obama’s approach, which I thought was too narrow and timid. I felt the U.S. wasn’t acting like the superpower it is in the negot... Full story
The Israel angle on McMaster’s purge of Trump loyalists from the National Security Council is that all of these people are pro-Israel and oppose the Iran nuclear deal, positions that Trump holds. McMaster in contrast is deeply hostile to Israel and to Trump. According to senior officials aware of his behavior, he constantly refers to Israel as the occupying power and insists falsely and constantly that a country named Palestine existed where Israel is located until 1948 when it was destroyed by the Jews. Many of you will remember that a few d... Full story
Imagine eating stomach lining on your first date, served up by your future mother-in-law hoping to impress you with her choice of protein. That was David Shapiro’s introduction to my Sephardic family in the late 1970’s, as he began dating my sister Kathy. For many decades after that, he would remind me of that first date. My mother had served him a Moroccan delicacy– tripe seasoned in a spicy tomato sauce– and he would joke that he should have brought a blow dryer to handle the weird dish. For a straight-laced Ashkenazi Jew whose idea of a go... Full story
As much as President Donald Trump enjoys taking a metaphorical sledgehammer to even the merest of slights against him, there is no reason to repeat the commander-in-chief’s behavior in judging his administration. That there is so much darkness around Trump, his character and his intentions should not obscure the occasional rays of light emanating from his administration. In foreign policy, one can list a few achievements on this score. There was the appointment of Nikki Haley as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In a few short months, s... Full story
As a child, I spent my summers at Camp Solomon Schechter, a Conservative Jewish camp in Tumwater, Wash., set on the shores of Lake Joshua Stampfer. My experiences at Camp Schechter were central to the development of my Jewish identity and eventual decision to immigrate to Israel. Each day began at “the flagpole.” Kicking off every morning, hundreds of sleepy-eyed campers and counselors from all around the Pacific Northwest strolled to the flagpoles, where we would circle up around the American, Canadian and Israeli flags. Just as everyone cir... Full story
It’s not yet clear that the commotions surrounding the Temple Mount and the incident in Amman are behind us. An optimist’s view is that two weeks of demonstrations, nastiness from the pinnacle of the Jordanian government as well as the Palestine National Authority, a few deaths and perhaps a couple of hundred injuries were nothing more than blips on a troubled history, now seemingly back to what’s been the normal range of manageable tensions. Those few days also invite some comparisons with minorities elsewhere, and especially African Ameri... Full story
When presidential adviser Jared Kushner said in a recent private discussion that “there may be no solution” to the conflict between the Palestinian Arabs and Israel, he was just stating the obvious. For nearly a century, self-appointed wise men have been claiming to have the solution, but every such proposal has proved to be a mirage. The British thought they had the solution in 1922, when they sectioned off the eastern part of Mandatory Palestine—78 percent of the original mandate territory—and set up an Arab kingdom there, which came to be k... Full story
PARIS—It took too long for the French people to recognize the Jewish victim of a brutal April 4 murder by name. After weeks of indifference by media outlets and politicians, French President Emmanuel Macron demanded publicly that the judiciary shed light on the nature of the crime. Significantly, Macron spoke of Sarah Halimi during the ceremony marking the 75th anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv, the roundup of more than 13,000 French Jews during the Holocaust in 1942. “Despite the denials of the murderer, our judiciary must bring total clari... Full story
The last two weeks was not a good time to be prime minister of Israel. A series of unfortunate events led Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make decisions that wound up being blasted from both the left and the right. Those decisions were, at best, debatable. But the resulting tsunami of disparagement that accused him of simultaneously being intransigent and a weakling may tell us more about the nature of the conflict between Israel and its enemies than it does about his shortcomings. Though he deserves criticism, the most important... Full story
The monthly salary of approximately $3,000 that the Palestinian Authority will pay to terrorist Omar al-Abed could be a powerful spur to a pending U.S. legislative bill that would slash aid to the PA over its “martyr payments” policy, a leading Middle East expert told The Algemeiner on Tuesday. “This is definitely going to put wind in the sails of the Taylor Force Act,” said Jonathan Schanzer, an expert on Palestinian politics at the Washington, DC-based Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) think tank. Named in memory of former... Full story
The pressure has begun. The State Department’s “evenhanded” statement regarding the Temple Mount. The U.S.-backed Middle East Quartet’s call for “restraint.” The announcement that President Donald Trump’s international negotiations representative is going to the region to “mediate” between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA). It all adds up to one thing: American pressure on Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians. The July 14 terror attack that killed two Israeli policemen at the Temple Mount is a clear-cut case of Palestinian ag... Full story
An article by a former Israeli Ambassador to Greece details the breakdown in peace talks meant to reunite the Island of Cyprus, and suggests a parallel to frustrations at brokering a peace between Israel and Palestinians. In both Cyprus and Israel, the status quo is neither war nor formal peace. There remain unresolved issues of property ownership, and families who left, and cannot return to what they used to call home. Movement between the two sections, whether on Cyprus or Israel-West Bank has at times been easier for foreign tourists than... Full story
