Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS) — It’s very troubling that President Joe Biden said during his Democratic National Convention speech that “those [anti-Israel] protesters out in the street, they have a point.” Similarly, during her interview with The Nation in July, Vice President Kamala Harris stated that the anti-Israel “protesters” “are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza. … I understand the emotion behind it.” What exactly is the point of anti-Israel, anti-American terror-affiliated rioters? (“Protesters” is way too mild a term f...
(JNS) — On Aug. 18, a Palestinian Arab male blew himself up in central Tel Aviv with enough explosives to murder hundreds of Israelis but managed only to end his own life. Hours afterward, Hamas claimed responsibility and pledged more such attacks. For us, almost 23 years to the day when a Palestinian suicide bomber murdered our teenage daughter, Malki, this served as a jolting reminder that the scourge of Palestinian human-bomb attacks is still here. For Israelis and Americans, the “failed” bombing is a wake-up call, a harbinger of fresh...
(JNS) — Are you into the TV show “American Idols?” Do you enjoy watching all that talent on television? What about other “idols?” In last week’s Torah reading, Re’eh, Moses warns the Jewish people not to follow the pagan ways of the Canaanite nations when they inherit the Land of Israel. There is to be zero tolerance for idolatry and paganism. Those nations practiced the most outrageous forms of idolatry, including child sacrifice and other depravities. The great Torah scholar Rashi quotes Rabbi Akiva as saying he’d witnessed a pagan man tie up...
(JNS) — It is clear that opposition to the ability of Jews to peacefully pray on the holiest site in Judaism and the site of the first two Jewish Temples, namely the Temple Mount, is prompted by the virulent antisemitism of the Palestinian Authority and the Kingdom of Jordan. Their opposition is based upon the antisemitic view that there is no Jewish connection to the site. The previous uniform Muslim view of the Temple Mount was expressed in 1925 by the Supreme Muslim Council in their published guide to the Temple Mount for tourists. It s...
(JNS) — Now that the Democratic National Convention has ended, the dust is just beginning to settle. Maureen Dowd, who is a fixture at the very left-wing New York Times, titled an Aug. 18 article on President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris, “The Dems Are Delighted. But a Coup Is Still a Coup.” Dowd wrote: “It wasn’t exactly Julius Caesar in Rehoboth Beach. But it was a tectonic shift and, of course, there were going to be serious reverberations.” She called Biden’s removal “a jaw-...
By Jonathan Feldstein During my freshman year in college, my Hillel rabbi asked me a question: “If you have a decision to make with two bad options as the outcome, what do you do?” 19-year-old wise Jonathan answered, “You choose the least bad option.” His response is a lesson that still guides me today. “No, you come up with a good option.” Since the inhuman Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas terrorists, murdering 1200 people, systematic rape and sexual mutilation, incinerating people alive, and kidnapping over 250 people, 109 of whom are still in ca...
(JNS) — I remember well when Alabama Gov. George Wallace in 1963 barred entry of two students, James Hood and Vivian Malone, to the University of Alabama because of their race. The response from President John F. Kennedy and his brother Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was electric. First, Deputy U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach personally confronted the governor at the University of Alabama and sought in vain to convince him to desist. Kennedy reacted by federalizing the Alabama National Guard. The two students returned to the u...
(JNS) — We Jews have been called lots of things. Some of the less offensive appellations are “stubborn” and “obstinate.” Yes, we can be stubborn, obstinate or davka. Call it what you like. But, curiously, not all the rabbis see stubbornness as a fault. In last week’s Torah reading, Ekev, Moses continues his recap of the events of the last 40 years and speaks of the terrible sin of the Golden Calf: “Then, G-d spoke to me and said: ‘I have observed this people and behold, it is a stiff-necked people.’” The phrase first appears back in Exo...
Amid the Democratic National Convention taking place in Chicago, there’s legitimate excitement seeing a woman heading a major political party’s ticket this year. Women are being encouraged to vote for Kamala Harris as a woman. But as a Christian, Iranian American woman, I will not be voting for Kamala because she represents exactly the values that endanger women in the Middle East and around the world. And neither should you. For my first 33 years I lived under the harsh rules of the extremist Iranian Islamic regime. I have countless scars of...
(JNS) — In the summer of 1982, following the attempted assassination of Shlomo Argov, Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Israel launched Operation Peace for Galilee, also known as the First Lebanon War. In so doing, Israel reacted to the continual Katyusha rocket fire being lobbed into northern Israel that disrupted the lives of its citizens for many years. At the time, the Palestine Liberation Organization led by Yasser Arafat broke every ceasefire arranged by Philip Habib, a senior State Department diplomat sent to the region by the...
Dear Editor: At last the Heritage had good news about Israel’s winnings at the Olympics and Cori Bush’s loss in her primary thanks to AIPAC. The less cheerful news, admirably discussed by Jerome M. Marcus (Heritage Aug. 6, 2024), is the activity of the Reconstructive “Rabbinical College” trying to outdo the “Radical Liberal Rabbis” in appeasing the narrative of the “Islamic superiority” condemning the existence of the Jewish State of Israel. In reviewing the current state of antisemitism, I considered the neo-Nazis consisting of well-funded...
(JNS) — Mark was preparing for his bar mitzvah. Besides the excitement of the Shul event, to be perfectly honest, he was also looking forward to receiving lots of gifts and money, as is the “tradition.” He was particularly anticipating a large monetary gift from his Uncle Abe, a very wealthy and generous man. How shattered and disappointed Mark was when Abe presented him with his bar mitzvah gift: It was … a pair of tefillin! It was only many years later that Mark happened to check his tefillin and discovered that inside lay a check from Un...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — Rabbi Shai Held’s latest book Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life is the culmination of a career spent correcting a great misconception, namely that “Christianity is the religion of love” while “Judaism is the religion of law.” “My aim is to tell the story of Jewish theology, ethics, and spirituality through the lens of love,” Held writes, “and thereby to restore the heart—in both senses of the word—of Judaism to its rightful place.” A similar point could be made about Zionism. Over the past yea...
(JNS) — Iran’s propaganda mills are falsely claiming that they have not attacked Israel in retaliation for Israel’s targeted assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh because they do not want to interfere with ongoing ceasefire talks. With this excuse, Iran is trying to garner legitimacy in world politics. So, once again, it has to be pointed out that Iran is the “head of the snake”; the cause of all of the instability in the Middle East. Oct. 7 could never have happened if it weren’t for Iran. Hezbollah would not have one missile if...
(Israel Hayom via JNS) — Cynthia Nixon, John Oliver, Chef José Andrés; an award-winning writer with an essay in The London Review of Books; protesters outside the Nova exhibit in Manhattan; celebrities, faux-academics, and activists. These are some of the people who have been engaging in a particularly noxious form of antisemitism since the Oct. 7 massacre. Lesley Klaff explained this particular phenomenon in 2014. “What has been called ‘Holocaust Inversion,’” she wrote in Fathom, “involves an inversion of reality (the Israelis are cast as the...
There are certain stories that just never go away. They don’t get swallowed up by the 24-hour news cycle. They grind away at your soul, drop by drop, day by day, hour by hour. In Israel, that story looks at you wherever you go. From the moment you land at Ben Gurion Airport, you’re greeted by images of hostages captured by Hamas ten months ago. All over the country, billboards and posters carry their faces. In the cosmopolitan city of Tel Aviv, you see those faces everywhere, on city streets, on the ocean promenade, on Dizengoff Square, whe...
Dear Editor: My sincere congratulations to Christine DeSouza and Marilyn Shapiro on winning awards from the Florida Press Association. It is exciting to be recognized for a job well done. Marilyn’s award for her Feature Story-Profile demonstrates a journalistic excellence in both research and writing. Christine’s award for best Serious Column takes op-ed writing to a whole new level of addressing the topic of antisemitism. I know that Jeff is extremely proud of your accomplishments. Wishing you both continued success. Marilyn Wat...
(JNS) — On paper, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro looks like a more or less perfect Democratic vice-presidential candidate: He is a generally well-liked moderate from a swing state and, following the recent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, displayed remarkable gravitas and compassion on a national stage. Shapiro is also Jewish, meaning he might help the Democrats shore up its Jewish support, which despite the conspiracy of silence imposed on the issue is fraying. However, many of us feel there was little to no chance t...
(JNS) — As a lawyer who spends his days defending the civil rights of Jews in education—usually public education, sometimes private schools or universities, but never Jewish institutions—reading about the triumph of anti-Zionism at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College is in some sense an unsurprising experience. I see in these accounts all of the same hateful rhetoric I see from pro-Hamas agitators everywhere else—that Israel “is committing apartheid, ethnic cleansing, settler colonialism,” that the urban combat in Gaza is really “gen...
The fundamental theme of the Democratic Party throughout the now concluded primary electoral season was that the former president Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party under his leadership, presented a great danger to our freedoms and the democratic process. Therefore, Trump had to be defeated in the 2024 presidential election in order for our Republic to survive as a democracy. According to the Democratic Party’s electoral playbook only Joe Biden, and now Kamala Harris and the Democrats could save the nation from this alleged potential d...
(JNS) — With the dramatic assassination of Hamas political chieftain Ismail Haniyeh while a “guest” of Ayatollah Khamenei in Tehran; preceded by the assassination 12 hours earlier of Hezbollah kingpin Faud Shakr in Beirut; the confirmation of the death of Hamas military strategist Muhammad Deif from Khan Younis; the death of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps commander Amir Hajizadeh near Damascus; and the attack on the Houthi stronghold at the port of Hodeida, Yemen, the world has learned that there are no limits to the long arm of...
(JNS) — The killing of senior Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on July 31 is just another in a long line of anti-terror activities that take place outside the borders of Israel. For a country that struggles to manage mail delivery within its borders, delivering a concealed bomb to a hotel 1,000 miles away in Tehran didn’t seem to be a problem. Haniyeh’s and other recent assassinations are not one-off events, as Israel’s long arm of retribution for harm against its citizens has been seen before. Following the massacre of 11 members of the Israeli ath...
(JNS) — There have been several moments of celebration for Zionists over the past 150 years. The first Zionist Congress held in Basel, Switzerland in 1897 showed Zionists that their movement had fire in it. The Balfour Declaration signed in England in 1917 was one of the first public declarations of the right of the Jewish people to their own homeland. The United Nations’ Partition Plan vote in 1947 gave international validation to the establishment of a Jewish state. On May 14, 1948, Israel declared its independence. On June 10, 1967, the Six...
While it’s not always appropriate to criticize a politician for something they don’t say, during the past several months, given the vile antisemitic protests that have taken place across the U.S. under the veil of “anti-Zionism,” one might have assumed that as a self-declared Zionist, President Biden would have shut down threats against Jews by affirming that he is also a Zionist. “When you vilify Zionists, you vilify me,” he could have said. A modern JFK “Ich bin ein Berliner” (I am a Berliner) moment. One can consider that an oversight, a la...
(JNS) — Forget her awkward off-putting personality and habit of speaking like a dim-witted kindergarten schoolteacher. Those are public-facing problems, and public-facing problems have to be pretty extreme for them to be disqualifying. Dems stuck with Biden until he had a total debate breakdown. Dems would like another Obama, and Kamala isn’t that, but they’d settle for a normal human being who isn’t some nightmarish hybrid of Chauncey Gardiner, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama with none of the positive aspects and all of the negative ones. B...
