Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 3513 - 3537 of 3730
NEW YORK (JTA)—Belief in God is at the core of my very being. But that belief is sometimes challenged by the scores of innocents killed over the millennia in God’s name, from biblical times to the present day. Last month, dozens were killed at a shopping mall in Kenya by terrorists demanding to know if those they were confronting were Muslim. If Muslim, they were spared; if not, they were murdered. One man who claimed to be Muslim was asked to name Muhammad’s mother. When he could not, he was summarily shot in the head. The day after the mall... Full story
Israel and Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority (PA) are engaging in negotiations refused for years by the PA. Yet, only weeks ago, the PA Minister of Religious Affairs Mahmoud Al-Habbash delivered a paean to Shekih Ahmad Yassin, founder and leader of Hamas, the terrorist organization that has murdered hundreds of Israelis in scores of suicide bombings, calling him a Palestinian “icon.” How can peace talks and glorifying a terrorist chieftain coexist in the PA? Al-Habbash gave us the answer this summer, when he justi... Full story
A decade ago, Jewish parents worried that their children wouldn’t marry Jewish or bar and bat mitzvah their own children. Today, however, we see a younger generation that is marrying within the faith and looking to raise their children Jewish, while maintaining a strong bond to Israel. Taglit-Birthright Israel’s free educational trip, offered to young Jewish adults between the ages of 18 and 26, is largely responsible for creating the change we believed only a decade ago to be impossible: The younger generation is not only more connected to... Full story
In the important new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, American Jews overwhelmingly (by 94 percent) say they are proud to be Jewish. And yet, one of the most significant trends cited by the survey is the growing percentage (32 percent) of younger, “Millennial Generation”Jews, who identify themselves as Jews with no religion, considering themselves Jewish solely on the basis of ancestry, culture, or ethnicity. This stands in sharp contrast to my parents’ generation—the “Greatest Genera... Full story
One of the unintended highlights of this year’s Conversation—the annual Jewish Week-sponsored two-day retreat for a wide variety of Jewish leaders and future leaders from around the country—was the emerging friendship between two participants with seemingly little in common besides their names. Actually, their name. You see, the small team that helps put together the list of about 55 participants each year had intended to invite David Ingber, the dynamic and popular rabbi of Romemu, a growing congregation on the Upper West Side. When his posit... Full story
Years ago, Grandma told me, for the nth time, that God helps them who help themselves. It’s a message she should have directed to the Palestinians, as well as to her lazy grandson. Once more, the Palestinians are blaming others for their problems, while their most obvious roads to progress remain unused. This time it is Khalid Amayreh, writing in what he labels “occupied East Jerusalem” about what he claims to be “institutionalized discrimination against non-Jews in Israel.” I received the article from my friend Muhammad, with whom I often dis... Full story
Throughout the Jewish communal world, there is no hotter topic this month then the Pew Research Center Study called “A Portrait of Jewish Americans” released in early October. The study confirmed what most of us have been watching over the past several years—a shift in the way Jews see themselves and the way they relate to the Jewish community. While American Jew overwhelmingly say that they are proud to be Jewish and have a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people, the study shined a light on the changing nature of Jewish identity in th... Full story
NEW YORK (JTA)—The leaders of the Jewish Federations of North America are calling for free Jewish preschool for every Jewish family in America. In an Op-Ed published Thursday on the Huffington Post and in the Forward, Jewish Federations CEO Jerry Silverman and board chairman Michael Siegal said free Jewish preschool would “dramatically widen the pipeline of families entering Jewish life through this critical early gateway.” The idea was one of four proffered by Silverman and Siegal to “intensify—and make affordable—the most effective v... Full story
Dear Editor: I’ve found that some of life’s most interesting paradoxes reside in some of its biggest trivialities... like why are gas tanks on the driver’s side of some cars but the passenger side of others; or why are they called stairs inside and steps outside; and why is a Heritage column that promises “The Good Word” so often the bearer of bad? I don’t know David Bornstein well enough to know if he’s a naturally negative person or if he has to work at it, but I find another paradox in the question of how a family (David’s) that historical... Full story
A decade ago, Jewish parents worried that their children wouldn’t marry Jewish or bar and bat mitzvah their own children. Today, however, we see a younger generation that is marrying within the faith and looking to raise their children Jewish, while maintaining a strong bond to Israel. Taglit-Birthright Israel’s free educational trip, offered to young Jewish adults between the ages of 18 and 26, is largely responsible for creating the change we believed only a decade ago to be impossible: The younger generation is not only more connected to... Full story
Life at the top can be lonely. If you became the “Decider”—the one who must make the difficult decisions—taking the best advice of trusted associates, there would come a time in any really important decision when it is on you and you alone. While Dick Cheney gets a lot of the blame for the horrific miscalculations that led to more than a decade of war and hundreds of thousands of lives lost, the fact remains, the president was in the chair and he had the final yeses and noes. Same goes for the head of any democratic society. If you happen... Full story
By Ira Sharkansky Somewhere in the American side of my brain is a memory of hearing that America is safe only when Congress is on vacation. The feeling may not be appropriate this week, when members of Congress are trying to do something along with the White House to loosen their collective hands from the throat of the world’s largest economy, and via globalization on the rest of us. Leaving America aside for the time being, the view of danger when a legislature convenes fits Israel, especially this week when the Knesset returns from its s... Full story
As a young Israeli who had just completed five years of service in the IDF, I looked forward to my new job educating people in the Pacific Northwest about Israel. I was shocked, however, by the anti-Israel bigotry and hostility I encountered, especially in the greater Seattle area, Oregon, and Berkeley. I had been very liberal, a member of the leftist Zionist party, Meretz, but the anti-Semitism and hatred for Israel that I have seen in the U.S. has changed my outlook personally and politically. This year, from January through May, I went to co... Full story
A response to David Bornstein’s “Community held hostage” In last week’s issue, Heritage Florida Jewish News published a column by David Bornstein in which he discussed the refinancing of the Maitland campus debt and used it as a proof of a malaise afflicting our Jewish community. David accurately describes the circumstances of the refinancing process. The Jewish Federation was faced with a potential crisis and did its best to save the Maitland campus for the Jewish community. There was some disagreement regarding certain aspects of that pr... Full story
I’ll confess that when I first read about Israeli Finance Minister Yair Lapid’s disagreement with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, I felt a degree of sympathy. Not for the substance of the argument, but for the manner in which Lapid expressed it. “My father didn’t come to Haifa from the Budapest ghetto in order to get recognition from Abu Mazen (Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas),” Lapid said Oct. 7 at New York’s 92nd Street Y. “Darn right,” I grunted at my Mac... Full story
A new mortgage encumbering the Maitland community campus was recently signed. The campus, home to the Jewish Federation of Greater Orlando, The Jewish Community Center, the Jewish Academy of Orlando, and the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center, is truly the jewel of our communal assets. Sadly, this process has revealed flaws in the jewel that run so deep it may be cracked beyond repair. When Bank of America announced that it would not renew the letter of credit for the old... Full story
Rabbi Ovadia died at noon on Oct. 7, at the age of 93, after more than two weeks in intensive care and hourly reports of his decline, improvement, and final decline. The eulogies were scheduled to begin at 6 p.m., with burial in the small cemetery of Sanhedria about a kilometer distant. The vehicle carrying the Rabbi’s body moved at a rate of inches per hour, and had not approached the cemetery by the time I went to bed. From the time of the Rabbi’s death, the three television channels had little more than coverage of the clogged streets, occ... Full story
NEW YORK—There was a good deal that was wrong and fantastical in President Barack Obama’s address to the United Nations last week—such as the idea that al-Qaeda is “splintering” (actually, it is proliferating) or that Russia and Iran need to “realize that insisting on [Syrian president] Assad’s rule will lead directly to... an increasingly violent space for extremists to operate” (actually, neither Moscow nor Tehran have wish or motive to abandon Syria, their most important Middle East ally). Here, however, we focus on a single issue also misa... Full story
Not surprisingly, there has already been a large wave of reactions to the first major national survey of American Jews in more than a decade, with its sobering, if not bleak, portrait of a community on the fast track toward assimilation. The responses to the Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life Project report, based on interviews with nearly 3,500 Jews, tend to fall into one of three categories: Oy Gevalt, We’re Doomed: With the study indicating that an increasing number of Jews, particularly among the young, are moving away from form... Full story
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
