Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 2951 - 2975 of 3712
For those who have been confused by the incredible amount of verbiage that has surfaced on the Iran nuclear agreement since it was signed, the best analysis I have read appeared in this morning’s Ha’aretz written by Ari Shavit, titled “The Iran deal: From Thriller to Horror Story.” While I often disagree with Shavit’s politics, his analysis, which is totally bereft of political commentary but is based on his detailed reading of the entire 159-page document, is worthy of perusal and a short précis follows: The good news: The Iranians agreed not... Full story
Despite years of our warnings, the United States and the P5+1 powers reached a nuclear agreement with Iran. As we had feared, the deal is indeed extremely dangerous. Billions of dollars will soon flow into Iran and quickly make their way to the rockets and missiles of Hamas and Hezbollah. At the same time, the arms embargo that has stopped Iran from further developing its ballistic missile program will be lifted, threatening not just Israel, but also Europe and the U.S. Most importantly, in 10 years, when my daughter is called up for duty in... Full story
This week, a bunch of journalists, foreign policy wonks, and assorted pundits received an email from the White House that began with the legendary words, “Hey, I’m Ben Rhodes, a Deputy National Security Advisor to President Obama. For the past few years, I’ve been working closely with America’s negotiating team, which was tasked with finding a way to achieve a diplomatic resolution that prevents Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” Don’t you just love that “Hey,” greeting? So informal, so accessible, so confident, so quintessentiall... Full story
The history of Jewish democracy is scattered with congresses, parliaments, unions, councils, sejms, and kahals—all attempts to govern or speak for an unruly body of people who shared a common culture but lacked genuine political autonomy. Various groups claim to speak for the “community,” but they tend to be membership organizations that can only pretend to be broadly democratic. Federations, the North American Jewish fund-raising umbrellas, stake a claim to this territory, with some justification: Like governments, they collect revenue (in t... Full story
Dear American Jewish leadership, I have read your statements on the Iran nuclear deal, and as a Jew, I am deeply disturbed by your response. A combination of reticence, apathy and naivety seem to be all at play, and as the beacons of our people, I find that wanting. You talk of mobilizing and urging Congress to fulfill their mandate. You talk of ensuring that elected representatives hear our concerns. You organize rallies for “peace,” such as the one in New York on July 22. Are these real concrete steps that will protect the Jewish people fro... Full story
Dear Editor: This letter is in response to Andres Silow-Carroll’s op ed, “Should Federations wade into the Iran nuke debate?” (in this issue of Heritage). In the days when the federations REALLY understood there responsibilities, and when there were strong national umbrella organizations like UJA and CJF, this question would never have even been asked. The Feds would have, alongside AIPAC, pulled out all the stops to block this deal. How can any Jew, or Jewish organization support this deal ESPECIALLY since both the Israeli prime minister AND t... Full story
Last week—and please forgive me for the graphic nature of this metaphor—Russian President Vladimir Putin pulled down his pants and urinated over the graves of the 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys exterminated by Serb forces in the enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995. Twenty years after Bosnia was torn apart by the genocide committed by both Serb and Croatian forces, the Russians—who were the main backers of the regime of the late tyrant of Belgrade, Slobodan Milosevic—are still playing the insidious role of denying the most monstrous crime t... Full story
There aren’t any in the realms of politics or public policy, except in the books written for children, or childish adults. The world is too complex. We know too much to be heroic. There may be heroes on the field of battle, some of who survive their heroism, but that is a different story. Wise people, and perhaps most of those elected to high office, do not aspire to solve the big problems. They’ve learned to cope. That is, managing the problems, doing little things that make the big things less threatening. That leaves a lot of work for the... Full story
By what form is a nation born? What makes its nationhood and citizenry stand out from all the others? Having just celebrated a birthday on July 4th, I am acutely aware of the rebellious group of British Subjects who declared independence from England and how and why they did it. Jews have a national identity that goes back a bit farther than 1776. Near as we can tell, we were a people almost six thousand years ago. We formed a nation a little over two thousand years ago (sorry, creationists). We built our capital city from the ground up on the... Full story
By Alan Kornman The role of man in this world is to work, create, innovate, accumulate wealth, and elevate the material world while caring for those in need. Israel and Jews have a long-standing tradition of extending aid to alleviate hunger, disease and poverty, in the wake of natural disasters and terrorist attacks beyond its borders. Israel’s 200-strong relief team was the first on the scene after a devastating earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, saving thousands of lives. In March 2011, Israel was one of the first countries to set up field c... Full story
By Chava Shervington NEW YORK (JTA)—When I was 24, an Orthodox matchmaker tried to set me up on a date with a man older than my parents. When I objected, she told me, “Stop being so picky. Not many guys are willing to consider a black girl.” As an African-American Orthodox Jew, this was hardly my first encounter with the questionable treatment I and my fellow Jews of color endure. “Why is the goy here?” one black Jewish parent overheard when taking her child to a Jewish children’s event. At one yeshiva in Brooklyn, the mother of a biracial st... Full story
An Israeli soldier who shot back at an Arab who was trying to murder him is now under investigation, following protests by self-described human rights activists. Given the focus of the activists’ concern, perhaps it would be more accurate to call them terrorists’ rights activists. The activists, from the B’Tselem non-governmental organization, have released a highly edited five-second piece of security camera footage (from a nearby gas station) that shows part of the incident. Even with the selective editing, you can clearly see the terro... Full story
I’ve been thinking for years about the best way to respond to the threat of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. I’ve read pretty much everything on the topic and brainstormed every possible idea, but I’ve never heard anything that really made sense to me. Until I heard from Hillary Clinton. Ironically, Clinton wasn’t trying to provide any answers; she was merely asking for assistance. In a letter this week to a small group of Jewish leaders, including mega Democratic donor Haim Saban, that was made public,... Full story
The Iran deal is the worst agreement in U.S. diplomatic history. The devil is not in the details. It’s in the entire conception of the Iran deal, animated by President Obama’s fantastical belief that he, uniquely, could achieve detente with a fanatical Islamist regime whose foundational purpose is to cleanse the Middle East of the poisonous corruption of American power and influence. In pursuit of his desire to make the Islamic Republic into an accepted, normalized “successful regional power,” Obama decided to take over the nuclear negotiations... Full story
We should pity them, as well as oppose their wildest demands. Those claiming to speak for them (the terms “leader” or “leadership” are too grandiose for their history) have brought them to blind alleys. Demanding too much (it would not be an exaggeration to say “demanding everything,” or “everything imaginable”) have led them to one failure after another. You can start with their rejection of the British proposal to divide the area between Jews and Arabs, which would have provided the Palestinians (then calling themselves, for the most part,... Full story
CHARLESTON, S.C. (JTA)—My father died a few weeks ago. The hardest part of the shiva was when it ended. Friends and family were, by and large, no longer visiting. I was alone in pain and agony. I thought of this reality during my visit to the Emanuel AME Church in this city merely two weeks after the racially motivated massacre that killed nine people. Joined by Rabbis Shmuel Herzfeld and Etan Mintz, we approached the front of the church. The cameras, which had been everywhere for days, were gone. Only a couple dozen people were milling a... Full story
Ralph Nader, the famous crusader against fraud and corruption, believes he has uncovered a horrific new injustice—and the perpetrators are “the Jews.” “You never avoid using the word anti-Semitism when Arabs and Arab-Americans are discriminated against, are arrested without charges, are exposed to all kinds of swears and bars against employment and all kinds of discrimination that goes on, and that is anti-Semitism. The Semitic race is Arabs and Jews and the Jews do not own the phrase anti-Semitism,” Nader declared at the recent annual co... Full story
I had looked forward to my year in seminary with great anticipation because I knew that living and learning in Israel would open up a whole new world to me. In fact, everyone I encountered informed me that my “gap year” would consist of one life-altering experience after another and that I needed to make the most of every opportunity that came my way. But I was a little anxious about my ability to truly maximize the year. After all, I had only a few short months to achieve so many important things. In addition to increasing my Torah knowledge a... Full story
Back in 2003, as some readers will recall all too clearly, the noted historian Tony Judt penned a searing critique of Israel in the New York Review of Books. Titled “Israel: The Alternative,” Judt, whose impressive scholarship was largely focused on Europe, depicted the Jewish state as a reactionary outpost of 19th century nationalism that bucked the trend elsewhere—exemplified most of all by the European Union (EU)—toward “individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. Judt’s argument struck a wide-ranging, resonant chord. Inso... Full story
Does it matter how we define our words? Sometimes it does. The U.S. Department of Education understands this point, as do the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Universities need to learn it, too. Last year, the Education Department paid CDC to develop a uniform definition of the word “bullying.” Both agencies recognized that a uniform definition was needed to assist schools to understand what bullying is, when it occurs, and whether efforts to prevent it are successful. This is a basic point, and yet it is lost on many peo... Full story
In January 2011, with the U.S. trying hard to convince the Palestinians to withdraw or moderate a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements, President Obama called Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to make a deal. The White House did not want to find itself in a position of having to veto its own settlement policy. In the course of a 50-minute conversation, Obama offered to support a U.N. investigation regarding settlements, renew a U.S. demand for a full-scale freeze on Israeli construction in the West Bank an... Full story
NEW YORK (JTA)—My father passed away nearly 13 years ago, and while I think about him daily, every so often there are moments when I especially miss him. Last week’s Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage was one of those moments. You see, my father, Rabbi Steven Dworken, was the longtime professional leader of the Rabbinical Council of America, the country’s main modern Orthodox rabbinic association, until his untimely death in 2003. While perusing my Facebook feed after the Supreme Court decision, I belatedly came across the RCA’s... Full story
(JTA)—Michael Oren is my friend. During his nearly five years as Israel’s ambassador to the United States, we’d speak on an almost daily basis. Often those phone calls would come at 3 or 4 a.m., Washington time, and Michael, enduring another sleepless night, would share his fears about how the Obama administration was compromising Israel’s safety. While too discreet to reveal confidential information, he’d repeatedly say: You won’t believe what the administration is doing. It’s worse than you can possibly imagine. But I can’t talk about it..... Full story
Sheldon Adelson’s goal to “put more boots on the ground” to fight BDS on college campuses is right on, and his recommendation to form an army of college students, dubbed “Campus Maccabees”, is essential. However, the only way to rapidly recruit and train an army of Campus Maccabees is for Birthright Israel to lower age of eligibility to 16, thereby attracting teens, en masse, to go to Israel. Just as an army needs boot camp to prepare for active duty, so, too will Adelson’s Campus Maccabees. Providing teens with an Israel experience... Full story
By Ben Cohen JNS.org Bear with me, please, while I attempt an answer at the following question: What is a conspiracy theory? Generally speaking, a conspiracy theory is a theory that directly challenges the conventional, widely accepted, or official account of a particular event or series of events. If a politician is murdered, or if a public figure dies in an accident, you can be certain that someone, somewhere, will insist that what occurred was the work of a shadowy, unseen cabal. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, to... Full story
