Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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The French, to the casual observer, are a real enigma when it comes to foreign policy. Sometimes it seems like they can be truly helpful, whereas other times they are truly awful. Take Iran. On the question of the mullahs’ nuclear ambitions, France has retained a healthy skepticism regarding the current negotiating process being pushed by the Obama administration. In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius was crystal clear that any deal with Iran that didn’t grant international inspectors unfette...
In the background of this note is the recent one about the misadventures of great powers, and producing unintended outcomes. It could have employed Barbara Tuchman’s title, “The March of Folly.” Here the focus is on the diplomatic maneuvers, proclamations, politely announced policy preferences, along with the yelling, screaming and chanting of the unwashed. At issue is what stands for international politics focused on Israel and the Palestinians. It includes Barack Obama’s comments that it may not be possible for his government to protect...
NEW YORK (JTA)—In the last 48 hours, rockets from Gaza were again fired at innocent civilians. This cannot be tolerated. The Israel Defense Forces must respond swiftly and without hesitation. We, as the opposition, will support strong government action. Yet such action cannot stand alone. We need to initiate and be proactive in order to restore quiet and start the painful but necessary process of separating from the Palestinians to reach a two-state solution. I’m going to argue that the only way to achieve the two-state solution is to give up...
“It is a fantastic commentary on the inhumanity of our times,” journalist Dorothy Thompson wrote at the height of the 1930s European Jewish refugee crisis, “that for thousands and thousands of people a piece of paper with a stamp on it is the difference between life and death.” Seventy-five years ago this month, president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s newly appointed assistant secretary of state sent his colleagues a memo outlining a strategy to “postpone and postpone and postpone” the granting of that “piece of paper” to refugees. Breckinridge Long...
Victories aren’t usually depressing, but recent headlines about Israel include those such as: “Israel Left Off U.N. List of Parties That Kill, Injure Kids,” “Palestinians Abandon Bid to Ban Israel From FIFA,” and a couple of headlines about failed motions for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement on college campuses. Surely all of these “victories” are better than the corresponding defeats. But still, we can and should do better. The problem with these victories is that they reflect a much deeper problem in the strategy of pro-Is...
The cemetery in Jerusalem’s Givat Shaul neighborhood was bathed in the fading sunlight of a late May afternoon. Silently and steadily, the column of mourners wound their way toward an open grave, surrounded by glinting white headstones, inhaling the heady scent of the cypress trees that flourish on the adjacent hillsides. As the mourners came to a halt, a rabbi recited the Jewish memorial prayer, El Male Rachamim, his sorrowful tones punctuated by the crunch of the gravel underfoot and the gentle sobs of the family of the deceased. The m...
NEW YORK (JTA)—Let’s be clear from the outset: the BDS movement, the effort to support boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, is sinister and malicious and is having a negative effect on Jewish students on some campuses and on the wider Jewish community. The origins of the movement lie in the highly organized and well-financed activities of anti-Israel activists who oppose the very concept of a Jewish state. They have cloaked their campaign in the language and imagery of human rights and looked to the efforts to isolate apa...
It’s not easy. Perhaps it’s not wise, to comment on someone else’s politics. American officials, and lots of American Jews, especially those to the right and left extremes, often sound like loonies when expressing themselves about Israeli politics. Israelis have also blundered, at high cost. The greatest was Ariel Sharon’s certainty about the bridges he thought he was building with the Christians of Lebanon. We should remember Sabra and Shatilla, and everything else the Israelis did not get from the Christians. With all the appropriate reserva...
As Jewish media far and wide started picking up on the story of this week’s devastating flood in Houston, which hit Jewish-heavy neighborhoods particularly hard, JNS.org has been (in my own estimation) conspicuously late to join the reporting. That is by design. I am both our editor and a resident of Houston, and in the days after the May 25-26 storm, the flood was a life event rather than a news story. But as I type these words on this Thursday (May 28) morning, while my local Jewish community continues to engage in inspirational relief e...
The four hours of discussion on U.S.-Israel-diaspora Jewry relations was winding down as the dinner hour approached at the annual JPPI (Jewish People Policy Institute) Brainstorming Conference last Monday afternoon in Glen Cove, Long Island. That’s when the fireworks started. Most of the 25 breakout-session participants sitting around the table, Israelis and Americans, were board members of the Jerusalem-based global think tank, chaired by Stuart Eizenstat, former U.S. ambassador to the European Union. The people in the room included Mideast p...
I always had a soft spot for the comedian Anne Meara, in large part because she looked a lot like my mother, of blessed memory. Similar cheek bones, the wide smile, a deep dimple in her left cheek. My mother was usually there, too, on her side of the striped love seat, when we’d watch Meara and her comedy partner and husband Jerry Stiller on a talk or variety show in the 1960s and ’70s—Carson, or Mike Douglas, or Ed Sullivan (where the pair were said to have performed 36 times). So it felt sort of personal when Meara died last week at age 8...
I will be interesting to see if Saudi Arabia’s King Salman gets the “Bibi treatment” from the news media this week. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, you’ll remember, was accused of snubbing President Barack Obama when he addressed Congress on the Iranian nuclear threat back in March. Contrastingly, King Salman can be said to have snubbed the president by not coming to Washington for his May 14 summit with Gulf Arab leaders. In any case, supporters of Israel should feel some relief at the political heat being directed, if only tempora...
In what was a precedent-setting event, the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) sponsored a recent conference titled “People of the Land: A Twenty-First Century Case for Christian Zionism” in Washington, D.C. It was reportedly the first-ever event specifically devoted to presenting academic arguments in support of Christian Zionism. The content presented at the April 17 symposium—11 academic papers—comprised a long-overdue contribution to the dialogue about Zionism in the Christian world. The combined presentations made a theolog...
Prior to the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, public opinion on a Jewish Homeland was divided—even among Jews. Some, especially in the United States felt that we shouldn’t make a fuss. After all, wasn’t life here pretty good? Well, yeah, it was—compared to from where most of the immigrants came. But we were a People without a country. A People, not just a religion. We had mutual DNA with many others of our flock. We had a language, not much used, but we had one. The stirrings of nationalism had begun with Herzl, but it was Adolf H...
WASHINGTON (JTA) – When considering the Vatican’s creep toward recognition of Palestinian statehood, think “Israel-Vatican” and not “Jewish-Catholic,” say Jewish officials involved in dialogue with the church. A May 13 announcement on an agreement regarding the functioning of the church in areas under Palestinian control raised eyebrows in its reference to the “State of Palestine.” The upset was compounded by confusion over whether Pope Francis, in a meeting over the weekend with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, praised him as...
Recent ordeals for Jews on college campuses include being probed on their religious identity in student government hearings, seeing swastikas sprayed on fraternity houses, and the presence of a student-initiated course accused of anti-Semitism. Pro-Israel voices are fighting back, but who is winning this war of ideas? An episode at Columbia University, a historic hotbed of anti-Zionism, illustrates the complex dynamics at play. Last month, Christians United for Israel (CUFI), America’s largest pro-Israel organization with more than 2 million me...
With another Jerusalem Day (May 17) passing us by, we are once again witnesses to the usual platitudes from our leaders. We again hear the speeches about the unity of our capital and how it will never be divided again. These notions are of course all true, but Jerusalem is much more than an idea. It is a living city that must be safe for its inhabitants, and it must continue to grow and expand in a manner befitting of Israel’s largest city. Over the past year we have seen an unfortunate rise in rioting and violence by Arab extremists in J...
For two weeks in June, Washington, DC will play host to a group of pro-Palestinian activists who have assembled an exhibit about the dispersion of the Palestinians during Israel’s War of Independence. The exhibit takes place under the auspices of the “Nakba Museum Project of Memory and Hope”—“nakba” is the Arabic word for “catastrophe,” which is how Palestinians and their supporters typically refer to the 1948 upheaval that accompanied the war launched against the nascent state of Israel by five Arab armies. It’s a clever idea that require...
My eye was drawn this week to one of those little news items that appear in the Israeli media, but never make it into the American press. I call them the near-misses: the bomb that was discovered just before it went off, the bullet that struck just inches from its intended target. No casualties? That apparently dictates that the news is not fit to print. This time it was a shower of rocks that were hurled at an Israeli automobile on the afternoon of May 8. Chen Borochov made the mistake of driving through an Arab neighborhood of Jerusalem known...
Archbishop Pietro Sambi, who served as the Vatican ambassador and Papal Nuncio in Jerusalem from 1998 until 2006, died four years ago. In the wake of current developments between the Holy See and the Palestinian Authority, it would be instructive to review the writings of Archbishop Pietro Sambi, of blessed memory. His advice to the Church concerning the reality of the Palestinian Authority, especially PA education, should be studied. Had Archbishop Sambi, still been alive today, he would have expressed another view of the current pope’s b...
“We are so used to bombs and the sound of firing guns that we don’t get upset anymore.” In choosing those words, Florence Bar Ilan probably hoped to convey that there was a certain stability to her daily life, but one can imagine her parents, Rachel and Samuel Ribakove, back in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, trembling as they read the letter their daughter sent from besieged Jerusalem during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. “Dear Florence, Dear Mother and Dad,” a collection of letters between Florence and her American relatives f...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—Obama administration officials have long contended that the friction between the U.S. president and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not personal and that American support for Israel remains as robust as ever—and arguably even more robust by some metrics. But a year of tense and angry exchanges between President Barack Obama and Netanyahu has yielded an atmosphere of deep mistrust, with each side insinuating the other is acting in bad faith. Conversations with current and former officials from both countries, as...
By Alden Solovy JERUSALEM (JTA)—On a sunny morning last month, I was swept into the women’s section of the Western Wall in Jerusalem in a flurry of aggression directed at the Women of the Wall, the Israeli group fighting for women’s prayer at Jerusalem’s holiest site. One of the group’s male supporters, Charlie Kalech, was strangled and thrown to the ground. I was stomped on in the stomach by an enraged man. Nearly three weeks after this brutal attack, I’ve finally woken up from the shock and horror of fellow Jews inflicting bodily harm on me,...
A potentially ugly row is brewing in the United Kingdom over an academic conference, due to be held at the University of Southampton in April, which carries the title, “International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism.” Given that a sentence construction like that one will leave most people with their eyes glazed over, let’s just cut to the chase here. The real title of this conference is, “Does the State of Israel Have a Legal Right to Exist? No, Of Course it Doesn’t.” Hence the growing volley of c...
The president of a normal, civilized country naturally is anxious to distance himself from any suspicion of ever having had a connection to a terrorist. That’s how President Barack Obama reacted when the Bill Ayers controversy erupted. But the recent decision by the Palestinian Authority’s president to give awards to three Arab terrorists reminded us that some governments are neither normal nor civilized. Ayers, the co-founder of the 1960s Weather Underground terrorist group, was involved in planting bombs at New York City police hea...
