Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 3508 - 3532 of 3706
It’s funny how the American Jewish community has a way of getting all breathless and excited when a new study comes out, as is happening right now with the new Pew survey. As if we needed all this sophisticated evidence to remind us that Judaism in America is in trouble, and that we must find ways to make it more attractive and relevant if we want a healthy, pluralistic Judaism to survive over the next century. When it comes to the decline of Judaism in America, we have this habit of getting bogged down with research specifics and losing the b... Full story
Above all, [the new Pew survey of American Jews] vindicates a thesis championed by the late sociologist Gary Tobin. He argued that calling up a random stranger and asking right off the bat about their religion is a sure way to get a false reading. Many people regard the matter as private. That will be especially true of Jews.... Well, the Pew folks say they started off by asking respondents about the quality of life in their neighborhoods and then came around to bringing up religion...—J.J. Goldberg, writing in The Forward Caller One: Hello, c... Full story
‘Words of hate can easily turn into acts of hate,’ says Foxman in new book on perils of Internet. Last Thursday, a 5-year-old British girl, April Jones, who had been raped and murdered, was buried in London after her funeral was televised nationally. She and another young girl were victims of men apparently addicted to online pornography. And although England, like the U.S., bans child pornography, Prime Minister David Cameron plans to take measures to further restrict pornography on the Internet, making Britain “the most family-friendly democ... Full story
It’s been almost 40 years since I moved from the U.S. to Israel. I still write about the country where I was born, had my formal education, and spent about one-third of my professional career. Internet friends, some of them not so friendly, attack me from both left and right, claiming that I do not understand their country. Although I am not current about many details, I look at a number of prominent US media each day, and I feel that enough remains from what I wrote and taught when I was in the middle of things American to be comfortable in w... Full story
Terror has been rearing its ugly head throughout the world lately. In Kenya, a Somalia-based, al-Qaida-linked rebel group, al-Shabab, burst into Nairobi’s Westgate shopping mall and murdered dozens of victims in cold blood. In Nigeria, at least 160 people were massacred in two attacks by the radical Islamist organization Boko Haram. In Pakistan, a terrorist blew himself up outside a church in the city of Peshawar, killing more than 80 members of Pakistan’s Christian minority. In Israel, terror struck as well. Over the holiday of Sukkot, two... Full story
NEW YORK (JTA)—Since the release of the Pew report about American Jews, the question I’ve been asked most often is what surprises me about it. What surprises me most is that anybody is surprised. The Pew report points to a series of phenomena that are well known in the world today: identity fragmentation, radical free choice, embracement of diversity, and the breakdown of organizational and ideological loyalties. Jews are, as Tolstoy said, like everybody else, only a little more so. For many of these phenomena we are the canary in the coal min... Full story
NEW YORK (JTA)—Last week, the Pew Research Center released the first national demographic study of Jewish Americans in more than a decade. Like all such studies, there are disagreements at the edges about the accuracy of some of the results, but the study’s most significant findings have been generally accepted. The big news is that one in five self-identified American Jews does not identify as Jewish by religion (one in three among younger Jews), and that even among Jews by religion, the intermarriage rate since 2005 is 55 percent. Loo... Full story
This article originally appeared at forward.com, Oct. 1, 2013, reprinted with permission. There’s a classic story in my family about the time many years ago when we sat around the table at Aunt Sarah’s house loudly debating what it meant to be a Jew in America. Bubbe Esther, my husband’s grandmother, sat quietly in the corner until someone thought to ask her. How do you define being a Jew, Bubbe? I’ll never forget her answer: A Jew is what a Jew does. For the religiously observant, Yiddish-speaking immigrants of her generation, the outline... Full story
Dear Editor: I have just heard of the passing of Abe Wise. My heartfelt condolences go out to Tess and their kids. Abe was a kind, gentle, mensh who will always be remembered as being the father of the Orlando JCC. But he was also the reason Orlando residents today are able to read Heritage Florida Jewish News. It happened back in 1976. I knew both Abe and Tess before I moved to Orlando. They both attended family functions in Youngstown, Ohio, where Tess had relatives. That’s where I first met Abe. When I moved to Orlando in 1973 I went l... Full story
A few weeks ago, I ventured the theory that rather than the so-called “Israel Lobby” controlling the administration, it’s the administration that controls the Israel Lobby. As evidence, I cited two recent episodes. Firstly, Secretary of State John Kerry’s much-vaunted effort to revive Israeli-Palestinian conflict negotiations, which, to this date, have gone nowhere for much the same reason that past efforts have failed: the Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel’s historic legitimacy by abandoning the so-called “right of return.” Nonetheless,... Full story
It is too early to comment with any certainty about the policy of the United States, or any other country with respect to Syria’s chemical weapons or its civil war. There are likely to be twists and turns before us heavy thinkers can pass on to other topics. Nonetheless, there are hints of interesting developments. My concern is with the United States and Barack Obama more than with the morass of Syria. His waffling was not impressive. Sending Kerry to make an impassioned speech, then making a very forceful half speech of his own before turning... Full story
It is estimated that there are at least 120 million fanatic Muslims around the world who want, and frequently chant, “Death to America!” Unless we Americans wake up to what they are doing, these fanatics will achieve their goal “Death of America!” Are you willing to give away our way of life? Hezbollah’s secretary general, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, stated, “We consider the United States to be an enemy because it wants to humiliate our governments, our regimes, and our peoples, because it is the greatest plunderer of our treasures, our oil, an... Full story
Recently Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas met with Jewish community representatives in New York during his trip to the United Nations at a special dinner hosted by the S. Daniel Abraham Middle East Foundation for Peace. Guests included former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, and former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer; Alan Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter professor of law at Harvard University; Wolf Blitzer, host of CNN’s The Situation Room; Congresswoman Nita L... Full story
On the first weekday of chol hamoed Sukkot, most years, my wife and I take our four children to Hershey Park. The park, which is in Lancaster, Pa., is closed to everyone but frum Jews on that day. Lancaster is not known as a center of frumkeit—it is most decidedly “out of town”—but on that day Hershey not only makes accommodations for the visitors, but actually reconfigures the whole park to be frum friendly. The food stands, including the kettle corn that draws some of the longest lines, are all kosher. Placards advertise the times for min... Full story
Dear Editor: (In response to front page article titled “Arab Knesset member claims Temple Mount for Muslims only”) “Jews will not be allowed to ‘contaminate’ the Temple Mount and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.” “The Al-Aqsa Mosque is a place of prayer for Muslims alone. Period! Not for the others.” “We repeat: the occupation of Al-Aqsa by the Crusaders was long, but it ended; the same was true of the British Mandate,and the same will be true of the Israeli Occupation of Al-Quds (Jerusalem) and Al-Aqsa.” These vile words were spoken by Ahma... Full story
My wife and I recently took our first vacation in years, a four-day trip to New York City. We caught up on ourselves, on each other. We heard the amazing Emily Wells at an outdoor Lincoln Center concert. We visited museums. We saw the 9-11 Memorial. We walked. And walked. And walked. And we saw two plays—“The Assembled Parties,” a story that spans 20 years in the life of a once-wealthy Jewish family in Manhattan, and “The Book of Mormon,” one of the funniest and most outrageous plays to hit Br... Full story
There has been a flurry of items coming to my in-box describing the latest under the heading of anti-Semitism. It is, alas, a very long story, going back at least to the beginning of the Common Era. For those who aren’t familiar with Jewish ways of recording the dates of the goyim, that’s the year 0. The current wave grows out of the post-World War II and post-Holocaust era, when Christians renounced what they had been preaching for two millennia, and Muslims quickly picked up what Christians discarded after Israel’s War of Independence. Now w... Full story
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana said this in his “Reason in Common Sense, The Life of Reason, Vol.1”... and it’s still true. Look, call it “Arab Spring,” “Uprisings,” “Revolution”—the end result is that some of Africa and most of the Middle East has been stood on its head in the past three years. I listen to some supposedly really smart people parse the situation in Egypt, Syria, Libya and elsewhere. And I keep waiting. Okay? Now, tell us the real problem! Once in a great while, a writer l... Full story
By Ben Cohen JNS.org From the brink of war, the Middle East has moved at dizzying speed to the cusp of peace. Or so we are led to believe. The issues at hand are Iran and Syria—and incidentally, there is good reason to feel some relief from that fact, since it’s a timely reminder that Palestinian opposition to Israel’s legitimacy is not the core dispute in the region, but a sideshow in the larger civil war with Islam that has engulfed much of this neighborhood. In Syria, the regime of Bashar al-Assad claims, under the watchful eye of the Russi... Full story
JERUSALEM (JTA)—At a recent kids-included party in Jerusalem, I spent much of the time either on the floor with my daughter Mari or trailing her around to make sure she didn’t eat anything toxic. A successful American journalist living here chatted with me for a few minutes, and as I left her to intercept my daughter before she reached a stairwell, she told me, “Don’t worry. They get older. You get your dignity back.” Funny, I didn’t even have any spit-up on my clothes. But her words tapped into the part of me that feels inadequate.... Full story
I suspect you are already tired of hearing about Syria. The future path is blurry—even to our president. Assad will still be in power. How many has he killed without chemical weapons? Who is using the chemical weapons? It sounds to me like the real problem is the one issuing the orders in Syria. Americans are now on the verge of committing billions of dollars of money we do not have to impact an area of the world that already hates us. Here at home we have millions who cannot find a job. We have millions more who cannot feed their families w... Full story
Barely minutes after the news broke that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was planning a major effort on Capitol Hill to garner support for the Obama Administration’s plan for a limited military operation against the Syrian regime, the conspiracy theorists were having a field day. As always, it’s instructive to note how the notion that American foreign policy is a prisoner of organizations like AIPAC, the main pro-Israel lobbying group in America, is an idée fixe on both the far left and the extreme right. Juan Cole, a left-... Full story
“A Portrait of American Jews,” a major study due out soon from The Pew Research Center, is said to show that more than 60 percent of the children of intermarriage are raised as Jews. It also notes that only 22 percent are given a Jewish education. What, then, does it mean to be raised Jewish if it doesn’t include a Jewish education? That’s just one question certain to be brought up in a renewed discussion, prompted by the report, over the nature, sustainability and future of American Jewish life in the 21st century. Already in recent days a... Full story
By Ira Sharkansky On the one hand there are these considerations... On the other hand are these... In the light of these conditions, what should be the policy of the United States? Of course there is no clear or “objective” answer. Someone has to decide. Most prominently it will be the president of the United States, with inputs from White House advisers, secretaries and others from the Departments of Defense and State, plus whatever comes out of Congress, what reaches the president from interest groups and commentators in the U.S. and ove... Full story
I’ll never forget the words of my Hebrew school teacher: “While we may have once been the ‘Chosen People,’ now we are the ‘Choosing People.’” This has been a guiding principle throughout all my years as an educator, one that has accompanied me from my tenure in the Soviet Jewry movement in the 1980s and early ’90s right up until my present-day position as the director of America’s oldest Zionist youth movement, Young Judaea. This time of the year is all about evaluating ourselves as the “Choosing People.” What choices have I made this past... Full story
