Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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Dear editor: The big news is that the Reconstruction Movement has a new leader who is gay [Heritage Florida Jewish News, April 5]. Rabbi Klein does not think that synagogue worship is all that important, and he was disappointed to find the College Hillel wasting valuable time with religious services on Saturday mornings. The students could be doing more important things to save the world. Really? It is interesting that the article about Mr. Klein points out that there are 100 Reconstructionist congregations and 300 Reconstructionist rabbis....
Many, many years ago a dear friend sent me a story in the mail. This was before the advent of email or text messages. It was old style, hard copy, stapled and folded and sent in an envelope. She worked in New York City at the Atlantic Monthly. My wife and I had moved to Orlando, so the gap was great, and where we had once carpooled together into work in Detroit, now we talked occasionally and saw one another less and less frequently. Today we are barely in touch at all, but for some reason I...
A major reason for observing Holocaust Remembrance Day is to recognize when a Holocaust is in the making. With the drastic escalation of anti-Semitism in the world, history could be repeating itself. Many Jews fought in the German army during the First World War. And doing so they felt a strong allegiance to Germany. However, once in power, Hitler moved quickly to end German democracy and was permitted to suspend freedoms of the press, speech and assembly. Presently in many countries throughout Europe, in Canada and, particularly, in the...
The news reminds me of a Kingston Trio ballad that begins with They’re rioting in Africa, They’re starving in Spain. There’s hurricanes in Florida, And Texas needs rain The whole world is festering With unhappy souls. Take your pick for what is most festering this week: The North Korean threat to bombard the United States, and maybe South Korea and Japan with nuclear weapons. Pundits are doubting the reality, but worrying about a repeat of what Barbara Tuchman described in The Guns of August, i.e., a move toward catastrophe that none of the p...
Is Nate Silver destroying our ability to argue? When I was a kid, my parents would have what I would call “encyclopedia” arguments. Say, did FDR die on April 12 or April 13? They would marshal personal history (“My cousin’s birthday was April 12”), dubious logic (“If I remember our anniversary, how would I forget a date like Roosevelt’s yahrtzeit?”), and ad hominem attacks (“Oh, you can never admit when you’re wrong….”). This could go on for an entire evening, while I was thinking, “Just look it up in the World Book, for God’s sake.” Of course,...
During a recent interview in my office with Mark Borovitz and Harriet Rossetto, the guiding lights of Beit T’Shuvah: The House of Return, a unique coåmmunity in Los Angeles that combines spiritual and psychotherapeutic approaches to addiction recovery, I became increasingly impressed with their work and their own life stories. But that was just the start. Rossetto, a handsome, forthright woman in her 70s, was a social worker and self-described misfit, adrift and at a low point when she found her calling in the mid-1980s, helping recently re...
Dear Editor: Islam is a religion like no other. It is both political and religious. It aims to take over the whole world. It is already doing that all across Europe and Africa. Islam has no tolerance for any other religion. In fact, Muslims are killing Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Jainists, Hindus, and all other religions everywhere. Unfortunately, very little appears in the press or on TV about persecution of other religions by Muslims because many media outlets are owned by Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia also funds many colleges across the world...
Some months back, Charles and Roz Schwartz were coming home from a trip to Israel when they found themselves surrounded by young adults who were returning from a Birthright Israel mission. Charles was smitten, instantly enamored, impressed with the enthusiasm every single one of the young men and women expressed. By the time he got off the plane, he’d made a vow to himself to help Birthright in some way. For those of you who don’t know, Birthright Israel began with a simple, if bold con...
We did not intend to flee Jerusalem when the great man arrived, but we saw no reason to change our plans when we heard about his trip. On the basis of previous presidential visits, we knew that the city would be dysfunctional. Our visit to Greece provided insights into the functioning of empires, even if it kept us away from the flood of interpretations about what Obama said and did not say None the less, it is possible to conclude from a number of sources about as much as it is possible to know at this point. At least to some extent, the...
As we mark Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) on April 8 for the 60th consecutive year—this somber day was first placed onto the Jewish calendar in 1953, at the instigation of Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion—we again ask ourselves a deceptively simple question: Why do we still remember the 6 million Jews who perished in the Nazi Holocaust, along with millions of others? There is no better day than Yom HaShoah to explore these issues. Unlike the various other Holocaust Memorial Days that take place during the year, most...
There is a narrative that has been gaining adherents in America, that it is within Israel’s control to make peace with the Palestinians. If only it were so. The story says that the issue is territorial, and the “occupation” and/or settlements are the root cause of the conflict. Unfortunately it is the Palestinians who need to be confronted with a reality check. The same people, who feel that Israel can magically create peace by itself, also feel that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is a man Israel can trust and is a partner for p...
NEW YORK (JTA)—Three weeks ago, JTA reported on a new alliance between Jewish leaders and domestic gas and oil companies. Called the Council for a Secure America, the alliance is based on a “common interest” between American Jews and domestic energy companies to “increase domestic oil and gas production and to decrease U.S. reliance on imported oil from the Middle East,” the report said. But the alliance represents neither the Jewish community nor its interests. To say that reducing our dependence on foreign oil is our No. 1 priority is not onl...
Every now and then I like to take a break from dissecting the Jewish world’s problems and solving the Middle East crisis by writing a humor piece. I can’t remember the serious columns I write from one week to the next, but I’ll never forget having compared the Muslim Brotherhood with the Temple Brotherhood, or having composed the award-winning poem “I’m a Jew Who Went to State School and I Don’t Care What You Think.” I write a lot of humor for my blog, JustASC; this week I had fun with President Obama’s visit to Israel and wrote a respons...
I have often tried to imagine how the Israelite slaves in Egypt responded to the Ten Plagues, the midnight flight and sudden Exodus into the unknown desert, the splitting of the Sea of Reeds with Pharaoh’s army in hot pursuit, and the abrupt transition from bondage to freedom. Slavery was all that they and numerous generations before them had known. Suddenly, appearing out of nowhere (actually, the Sinai desert) and without any primary elections or other democratic processes, an Israelite named Moses, speaking like an Egyptian, claimed to h...
Jews are pretty good developers and builders. Look at Lennar Homes, Toll Brothers, KB Homes and others. The basics are easy. The builder-businessman selects a market that looks promising, buys the land, gets his permits. Up go the homes and the owners movie in. Simple? It would seem so. In 1950 we moved to Shaker Heights, Ohio. A lovely suburb at that time on the outskirts of Cleveland. I found out, shortly after we bought a home there, that if we had moved 10 years earlier, we could not have bought a home in Shaker Heights. They had what was...
How much, if any, cooperation and collaboration can there be—or should there be—among Reform, Conservative and Orthodox communities, starting with their rabbis? At times we talk a good game of Jewish peoplehood, Clal Yisrael and Jewish unity; crises still can bring us together, like concern about the fate and security of Israel, threats of anti-Semitism, the need for Jewish education. But when you get down to the practical level, the fact is that there is very little interaction between liberal and Orthodox Jews. We tend to socialize with tho...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—One act, more than any other, is indispensible from the Passover story: If God had not intervened, we would still be slaves. There would have been no Exodus, no Sinai, no bright future for the Jewish people. For the sake of a future nation, God intervened to save 600,000 warriors of Israel. Remember that number. It’s about the same number of mothers and children who will be cut off from nutrition assistance if nothing is done to stop the sequester’s bulldozer-like roll toward the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for W...
WASHINGTON—Opponents of J Street consistently argue that our positions are somehow radical, strange and way out of the Israeli or American-Jewish mainstream. The opposite is true: when it comes to Israeli-Palestinian peace, the two-state solution and the inexorable demographic threat to Israel’s future as a democratic state that remains the homeland for the Jewish people, our position is the same as that of the Israeli government, the Obama administration and the vast bulk of the American Jewish community. It is right-wing critics like Sta...
On Monday evening, March 11, I had a public discussion with Jeremy Ben-Ami, founder and president of J Street, at Temple Isaiah in Los Angeles. The topics included how American Jews should approach pro-Israel advocacy, whether peace is currently attainable between Israel and Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, and what American Jews can do to help the two sides reach an agreement. We agreed that the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement is dangerous and harmful to Israel. We agreed that the Palestinian teaching of...
To all those who lived to see America, In fond memory of all those who didn’t. The train was sliding forward, softly and noiselessly. A train is one of those few places where you are mostly left alone, to sleep or meditate or lazily watch the changing stations and faces outside. You are usually too sleepy in the morning or too tired after work to interact, and the whole crowd around you is as sleepy or as tired as you are, strangely united by that slow synchronized motion, in that familiar state of dreamy hibernation. Nothing in life is as t...
Politics does not operate like a Swiss watch. The image is outdated but remains useful. The overwhelming majority of watches are electronic, run by batteries and tiny programs rather than by springs and cog wheels made and assembled by skilled craftsmen in Swiss villages. Word is that more and more people are doing without watches as well as cameras, and relying on telephones that do those jobs and many others. However, the image of something that ticks along in orderly fashion and does its job with modest efficiency is useful in order to...
I was relieved and not at all disappointed last month when neither of the Israeli entries for Best Documentary at the Academy Awards came home with the prize. I felt badly that the two films representing Israel, “The Gatekeepers” and “5 Broken Cameras,” cinematically compelling as they were, took aim at the country’s alleged faults rather than its miraculous accomplishments, sending a skewed message around the world. “The Gatekeepers” explores why the six living former heads of the Shin Bet are critical of Israeli policy, or lack of one, on th...
NEW YORK (JTA)—Probably no more than the top 10 percent of Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jews will ever shop at Pomegranate, the luxury kosher supermarket recently featured by The New York Times columnist David Brooks in a column titled “The Orthodox Surge.” Brooks chose the upscale kosher version of Whole Foods as the fulcrum of an admiring piece on Orthodox Jewish life in America, writing of the Orthodox “sense of collective purpose” and the “external moral order” that governs Orthodox Jewish lives. It’s nice of Brooks to give Orthodox Jews som...
The following is the winner of the Women of Reform Judaism Centennial Essay Competition. CHARLESTON, S.C. (JTA)—I cried when I found out our new rabbi was going to be a woman. I was in ninth grade and did not like the thought of change. She would change all of our congregation’s traditions. She would not have the same endearing voice as our previous male rabbi. She must be weird: What kind of woman would want to be a rabbi anyway? Four years later, the woman I loathed in one moment would be the same woman I strive to be like every day. She wou...
This article was the winning entry in NFTY’s 2013 Wendy Blickstein Memorial D’var Torah competition. CINCINNATI (JTA)—What do you do when you get up in the morning? You probably have a morning ritual that you could do with your eyes closed. Take a shower, brush your teeth, get dressed, eat breakfast and make your way off to school without a second thought. Parshat Tetzaveh describes the specialized clothing that Aaron and his sons were to wear for their roles as priests. When I read it, I thought it was very interesting that their cloth...
