Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 3681 - 3705 of 3706
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... Full story
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... Full story
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... Full story
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... Full story
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... Full story
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... Full story
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... Full story
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... Full story
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... Full story
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... Full story
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... Full story
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... Full story
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... Full story
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... Full story
NEW YORK (JTA)—As of 2012, one in 20 Americans is identifying themselves as an atheist, agnostic or unbeliever. According to the research done by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released last year, nearly 33 million Americans list themselves with no religious affiliation. While it’s not specified in the Pew study how many Jews are among the ranks of the nonbelievers, doubtless the cultural landscape of Judaism is also impacted by these larger trends in Western culture. Part of the reason for this shift is the co-opting of what is perc... Full story
I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about my great-grandfather, Moses Strouse. Not because I am interested that deeply in family trees or have ever visited ancestry.com, but because I am drawn to sociology and am deeply disturbed about the 21st century transitions to large, faceless franchises and stores. Moses Strouse was a Jew from Germany, and he and his sons wound up—of all places—in Columbia City, Ind., not far from Fort Wayne. In all likelihood, they were wondering where to live in between trains from Ellis Island to Chi... Full story
Nervous Jews are worrying if Barack Obama is intent on forcing Israel into a peace process. Leaving aside the issue that being nervous is a chronic condition of being Jewish, an appropriate response to Obama and all the others who think that Israel is not doing enough to make peace with the Palestinians is that peace is already upon us. It is a Jewish peace, to be sure, but peace none the less. Peace is, after all, more a semantic issue, or a matter of comparison, than anything absolute. No one in the world lives in absolute peace. Americans le... Full story
(JTA)—Israel’s State Archives recently released the previously classified minutes of a 1983 Cabinet meeting during which the government debated the Kahan Commission’s recommendation to fire Defense Minister Ariel Sharon on account of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. The killings had taken place some months before, on Sept. 16, 1982, when 150 fighters of the Lebanese Christian Phalanges entered two Palestinian refugee camps and massacred 700 to 800 residents. The Israel Defense Forces, which controlled the area, allowed the Lebanese forces access... Full story
NEW YORK (JTA)—In 1993, one of the great scholars of Russian Jewry, Zvi Gitelman, noted that “since the 1880s, no group of Jews has migrated as often, in as great numbers, and with such important consequences as the Jews of Russia and the FSU. The mass immigration of Russian/Soviet Jews played a great role in shaping the character of the two largest Jewish communities in the world, those of the United States and Israel. American Jewish and Israeli politics, religion, culture, and economics have been, and are still, profoundly influenced by tho... Full story
NEW ORLEANS (JTA)—“Hillel’s not really my thing. That’s not me.” This is not what you want to hear as a first-year Hillel director acclimating to a new campus. Yet when I arrived at Tulane University four years ago, that’s the refrain I heard as I tried to figure out how a Jewish student population that comprised more than 30 percent of the school’s student body could barely turn out 100 students for its largest events. Hillel at Tulane had been built on Jewish communal best practices, but it was not actually reflective of the social and re... Full story
And so the day has come. Our youngest child. Our last family bar mitzvah. I’m thinking less and less about what I’ll say to my son, more and more about remembering every moment as deeply as possible, because events like these don’t come around again. They are bookmarks, reference points, times that are easy to look back to and say yes, I recall that time in our lives. Gabriel will do just fine. He’s ready. Now all he has to do is be himself, enjoy the celebration along with his friends and fam... Full story
One of the best-kept secrets in the New York Jewish community most certainly is the Museum of Tolerance in Midtown —and not by design. Opened a decade ago by the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center and located on East 42nd Street, between Second and Third Avenues, the museum features exhibits and interactive programs challenging visitors to confront issues of bigotry and racism, with the Holocaust as a backdrop and tragic example of the price paid for passivity. There is much to engage the mind and emotions, but on the day I was there t... Full story
In all the blather from politicians and media personalities following Israel’s indecisive election, it is possible to see two ideas that might provide a map to the country’s future. One is the equalizing of the burdens between the haredim and the rest of us. Prominent in the explanation of Yair Lapid’s 19 Knesset seat victory are the mass demonstrations that occurred during the summer of 2011. That was hardly a united movement. Chants and signs demanded too great a variety of injustices to be corrected. What was clear, however, was that there w... Full story
WASHINGTON (JTA)—Jewish identity and connection are the birthright of every Jew. So why do so many Jewish institutions discriminate against Jews with disabilities? It keeps happening because we let it happen. We make excuses by saying there isn’t enough support or enough dollars, or because we value children going to Harvard over those who won’t. With February being Jewish Disability Awareness Month, it’s time to ask how long we plan to provide the pearls of our heritage only to those capable of receiving them in the rote methods they are pre... Full story
When I went to Hebrew school in the 1970s, we were still using textbooks from the 1950s. The girls in the illustrations wore short dresses and Mary Janes; the boys wore pie-sized yarmulkes, shorts, and neckties—in their homes! Somehow I grew up to live a highly engaged Jewish life, but not until I shook off a perception that Judaism was for, well, prim little girls and nerdy boys with neckties and gigantic yarmulkes. Apparently I wasn’t the only one. Lately I’ve noticed a number of Jewish organizations and individuals marketing thems... Full story
