Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(Jewish Journal via JNS) — In today’s cultural void, created by all-consuming political ideology and profound shallowness (cartoonishly filtered selfies, vapid “influencers,” incessant Instaporn), a soul of beauty has emerged to show the world that women still do have brains; creativity still exists; and Israel is still a light guiding us back to sanity. Israel’s Eurovision entrant Eden Golan seemed to emerge on the international stage fully formed, exuding not just immense talent but dignity, poise and almost ethereal grace. She made it to the...
(JNS) — For some time, right-wing Jewish activists have called for a “Jexit” from the Democratic Party. They believe that the Democrats are now an anti-Israel and increasingly antisemitic party. Thus, for Jews to continue their monolithic support for the Democrats is suicidal. American Jews have resisted the call, but post-Oct. 7 things may have changed. While President Joe Biden and much of his party strongly supported Israel after the massacre, many Democrats did precisely the opposite. The Red-Green Alliance between the progressive left and...
(JNS) — With polls indicating that U.S. President Joe Biden’s re-election chances are getting slimmer, his campaign advisers have been pushing him to the left and seeking to mollify progressives by more bellicosely criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and punishing Israel by suspending arms deliveries. The more voluble demonizers of the Jewish state are drowning out the pro-Israel majority within his base. If he doesn’t listen to them, perhaps he will heed the advice of veteran Democratic pollster Mark Penn, who expla...
(JNS) — Growing up, I was not one of the cool kids and was bullied a fair amount of the time. In middle school, one such bully used to incessantly pick on me. He was the weakest of the tough kids, so he had to make an example out of someone, so he chose the 60-pound sack of skin and bones that I happened to be in those days. “You better stop it, Jeff,” I warned him one day, as he kicked me. “Oh yeah, what are you going to do about it, wimp?” Something inside me snapped. I hauled off and punched him in the face. I remember the line of blood dri...
(JNS) — To the Columbia Community: Over the past six months, many have spoken in our name. Some are well-meaning alumni or non-affiliates who show up to wave the Israeli flag outside Columbia’s gates. Some are politicians looking to use our experiences to foment America’s culture war. Most notably, some are our Jewish peers who tokenize themselves by claiming to represent “real Jewish values,” and attempt to delegitimize our lived experiences of antisemitism. We are here, writing to you as Jewish students at Columbia University, who are conne...
As a Palestinian human rights activist, I feel compelled to weigh in on the ongoing military operation in Rafah, which has been often misrepresented in various circles. This operation, led by the Israel Defense Forces, is not merely a response to aggression but a crucial rescue mission aimed at freeing hostages, including U.S. citizens. The responsibility for this escalation lies squarely with the terrorist group Hamas, which has continuously rejected multiple ceasefire proposals and escalated violence against civilians. Hamas, entrenched in...
President Joe Biden’s decision to “pause” the delivery of smart bombs, artillery shells and other kinds of ammunition to Israel as a form of punishment for Israel’s sin of ignoring the president’s admonition not to invade Rafa fails to take into consideration a number of factors all of which are critical to U.S. national interests. The president based his decision on humanitarian concerns for the displaced citizens of Gaza who have relocated to Rafa, the only remaining city in Gaza not under Israel’s military control; and that there have alread...
(JNS) — I’m sure you’ve heard commentators describe the Islamic Republic of Iran and Israel as “rivals” engaged in a “tit-for-tat” conflict. That misinterprets reality. Ali Khamenei, Iran’s “supreme leader” since 1989, seeks to establish a new Middle Eastern empire. Israelis, by contrast, only want to survive as an independent nation within a slice of their ancient Jewish homeland. They would like nothing better than to enjoy amicable relations with Iranians, as they did prior to Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979. I should add: Substanti...
(JNS) — Some years ago, I heard Rabbi Manis Friedman tell a story about a man who overheard his friend telling his wife on the phone, “Drop dead!” “How can you speak that way to your wife?!” he demanded. The friend smiled and said, “She just asked me if her new dress was gorgeous, and I answered, ‘Yes, drop-dead.’” Hearing only half a conversation and drawing conclusions can be dangerous. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard stories about others that I didn’t want to believe; and indeed, upon investigation, they turned out to be either...
(JNS) — U.S. President Biden’s suspension of weapons deliveries to Israel places Deborah Lipstadt, the most prominent Jewish member of his administration, in quite a bind. How will she respond? Let us recall the example set by Mark Siegel in 1978. He was the Carter administration’s liaison to the Jewish community when President Jimmy Carter decided to provide deadly fighter jets to Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The president expected Siegel to convince American Jews to accept the weapons deal. In early March 1978, Siegel addressed 900 young leaders o...
Antisemitism is on the rise across America and all over the world. What are Orlando Jews feeling and what can we do about it in these tumultuous times? I’ve realized since Oct. 7, with the massacre in Israel and the terrible war raging in the Middle East, I’ve been living with terrible feelings of disbelief, anger, frustration, depression and angst. These emotions are all related in a vicious cycle. First disbelief. It’s difficult to conceive of the level of evil perpetrated by Hamas on Oct 7 and painful to witness the death of civilians in Ga...
(JNS) — U.S. President Joe Biden’s approach to Israel since the start of the Oct. 7 war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip has my head spinning. His approach has been marked by a delicate balancing act that attempts to support a key ally on one hand while addressing humanitarian concerns faced by Gazan civilians on the other. However, this balancing act—some might call it “nuanced”—has led to contradictions that impact the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip. Remember that it began after a horde of Hamas terrorists invaded Israeli communities along the G...
As I sat down to write this opinion, I realized that there are four things really bugging me. Number one. I have not read one single article that puts the blame on Hamas for the inhumane conditions in Gaza — food and water shortages, destroyed homes with refugees everywhere, etc. Hamas was elected by the people in Gaza to be their governing body. All the money sent to Gaza since 2007 has not been used to build a prosperous area that, I’m told, could have been like Dubai or Singapore. Hamas used the money to build tunnels and stockpile wea...
(JNS) — Back in December, the eminent historian Niall Ferguson wrote an essay in The Free Press that, it’s now apparent, presaged the tidal wave of demonstrations now inundating college campuses around the country. It was called “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” which also was the title of a 1927 publication by French philosopher Julien Benda. Ferguson noted that while that piece was written six years before Hitler came to power, German universities—then the world’s best—already were transitioning from scholarship to “the intellectual or...
Dear Editor: I am appalled that someone has not taken up an organized move to get George Soros out of this country. I am aware he has been thrown out of six countries already for doing exactly what he is doing now, destroying the economy, destroying civil rights, and attempting to destroy religion. He needs to go. Also, Blinken works for him and the Blinken family has worked for Soros for years and this is a conflict of interest. I can only assume people are afraid of what will happen to them. — Anonymous...
(JNS) — Faculty and students are proudly protesting Israel’s existence and praising Hamas for the slaughter of Jews. Not satisfied, they call for an intifada, and the erasure of Israel and its population from the Middle East. Some of the protesters cannot identify the river or sea they want to be “free” but chime in with other virtue signalers. Individually, they may not all be antisemites, but their views are antisemitic. Note to antisemites: Stop complaining that even as you block roads, occupy buildings, hold rallies, propagandize in clas...
The great universities are now paying the price for allowing woke professors to indoctrinate their students with idealogical and political dogma instead of offering them a critical thinking and intellectually honest education. The result is a vulnerable and naive student body on many of America’s prestigious colleges and universities, egged on by radical outsiders supported by questionably legal funding sources, violently protesting the war against the Arabs in Gaza, and endorsing the delegitimization of the Jewish State. The attempted t...
(JNS) — Hamas is a sanctioned Islamic terrorist organization. It’s illegal to provide aid to it. And for non-citizens, especially foreign students on visas, supporting terrorists is a deportable offense. And yet after six months of pro-Hamas rallies on college campuses and in major cities, not a single foreign student appears to have been deported. The latest Hamas occupations at Yale and Columbia have stopped even pretending to be anything other than outright support for an illegal terrorist group and its ongoing murder of Jews. Jewish stu...
(JNS) — There he was, the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas, lying on the floor kicking his feet in anger over the U.S. veto of a resolution for Palestinian statehood at the U.N. Security Council. Of course, I am exaggerating about the 88-year-old on the floor, but his reaction to the American veto was not too far from a 2-year-old’s tantrum. Notwithstanding that the Biden administration pressed Abbas not to go ahead with the bid for statehood, the administration’s veto must have come as somewhat of a shock to the Plestinians because...
(JNS) — I recently had the freedom to rush to my bomb shelter as Iranian drones and missiles targeted Israel. As Israel’s defense systems and help from its allies protected me and millions of others, I was especially thankful for the past two years of refuge I have found in the Jewish state. After refusing to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I fled Moscow. The awareness that I am free while others are not grows more intense around Passover, the holiday of freedom. But this year, it is especially heavy. More than 100 hostages are still...
(JNS) — U.S. President Joe Biden began his Earth Day speech at Prince William Forest Park in Virginia on Monday by singling out a few prominent climate-change figures in attendance. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who introduced him, was one of them. “You know, I learned a long time ago: Listen to that lady; listen to that lady,” he said. “We’re going to talk more about another part of the world, too, real quickly.” It doesn’t take a genius to guess what region he had in mind. AOC—as the member of his party’s radical...
(JNS) — Few Jews still believe that the Jewish establishment has done a good job defending and protecting the community from the rhetorical onslaught against Israel that has morphed into a full-on assault against American Jewry. From the start, the “establishment” — the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Federation system, the Jewish Community Relations Councils and many rabbis—failed to understand that the obsessive, intense, continuous “criticism of Israeli policies” that appeared almost daily in the media was...
Visiting Israel for the first time a year ago was not only a spiritual pilgrimage and fulfillment of a dream, but an experience that allowed me to look at my own experiences as a persecuted Christian in Iran — arrested, and sentenced to death because of my faith, through a different prism. I went to Israel to impart a message to the Israeli and Jewish people that Iran is not your enemy, that Iranians support Israel and the Jewish people, and that the Iranian and Israeli (and Jewish) people have a common enemy in the terrorist Islamic regime. On...
(JNS) — The words you are looking for are, “Thank you, Mr. President.” I have not hesitated to criticize many of U.S. President Joe Biden’s policies before and after Oct. 7, but I have also consistently maintained that he has been the most pro-Israel president ever during any of Israel’s wars. That should have been obvious this past weekend when the United States coordinated a regional air defense that helped Israel avoid suffering any serious harm from a barrage of more than 300 Iranian drones and missiles. It was the first time U.S. forc...
(JNS) — One of the many ways last weekend’s drone and missile attacks on Israel could have been worse: If Iran’s rulers had instructed their U.S.-based operatives to simultaneously carry out a terrorist attack, and our intelligence agencies had failed to learn about it. Preventing such a catastrophe requires that those intelligence agencies have the ability and authority to surveil—think wiretap—terrorists abroad and their communications with operatives in the United States. Which gets me to a little good news: Last week, the House, on a bipa...
