Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS) — In a hyper-partisan, highly polarized red vs blue America, the politics of Israel and the Middle East in general have always been complicated. Rather than breaking down neatly along party lines, there are profound divisions within both Republican and Democratic ranks on issues relating to the U.S. role in the Middle East. We’ll discuss the intramural GOP fight at another time, but it’s beginning to look like the early action in next year’s election cycle will be in Democratic House primaries. The great majority of Democrats in Congres...
(JNS) — On his way out the door, the retiring U.S. ambassador to Israel, Thomas Nides, has belatedly acknowledged that he “screwed up” in one of his last major actions. He’s just the latest in a growing line of U.S. diplomats who have admitted—when it was too late—that they made significant errors in their treatment of Israel. So why does anybody still listen to them when they offer advice on the Arab-Israeli conflict? In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, Nides was asked about his outrageous tweet commenting on the June 20...
(JNS) — Do blessings and curses come from heaven or do we bring them upon ourselves by the way we live our lives? Last week’s Torah reading, Re’eh, from Deuteronomy 11, begins with blessings and curses. Moses is continuing his sermonic messages before he takes leave of his people. The great leader waxes philosophical: “Behold, I give you this day a blessing and a curse. The blessing: that you hearken to the commandments of God that I command you this day. And the curse: if you do not hearken to the commandments of God and you stray from th...
(JTA) — For those following the judicial reform crisis in Israel, this week’s Torah portion is almost too on the nose. For months now, Israel has been convulsed by protests in response to a plan by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “reform” Israel’s Supreme Court by stripping it of much of its powers of oversight and shifting the balance of power heavily in favor of the legislature. Defenders of the reform call it a corrective measure meant to rein in a high court that too often flouts the will of the democratically elected Knesset. Critics...
(JNS) — Palestinian society is in disarray. In two major West Bank towns—Jenin and Nablus—the Palestinian Authority has lost control, and rogue gangs rule the land. Last week, thousands of Gazans protested in the streets—risking brutal backlash from the Hamas regime. Meanwhile, talks in Egypt meant to reconcile the P.A. and Hamas after 17 bitter years have again hopelessly failed. All this takes place as the Biden administration tries to pressure Israel and Saudi Arabia into a “normalization” deal contingent on concrete steps toward a Pa...
(JNS) — The heady excitement over the Abraham Accords overlooked Israel’s core strategic problems. The United Arab Emirates deal may have led to business ties and a certain amount of (mostly one-way) tourism, but then rockets from the terrorist territories once again began raining down on major Israeli cities. The covert price for the Abraham Accords appeared to be the end of any talk of Israel annexing its own territory. And being able to visit Emirati hotels is a poor exchange for the failure to permanently secure Israeli territory. Now the...
(JNS) — I am not a comic book fan. I am not a superhero fan. I think comic book films are slowly demolishing whatever remains of American cinema. But, if I may be slightly hypocritical, I am a huge Superman fan. My love for the character goes back to my earliest childhood, when my family gathered before a black-and-white television to watch the first network broadcast of the classic 1978 film “Superman,” starring the immortal Christopher Reeve as the title character. Even without its vibrant colors, the film transported me to another world...
(JNS) — “Sound of Freedom” is the film that the chattering classes are encouraging you not to see. NPR says its success is due to support from the shadowy QAnon extremist group. It’s been blasted by The Guardian as “QAnon adjacent” and was linked to blood libels and conspiracy theories by a JTA article. A CNN segment labeled it as a crude and fraudulent piece of agitprop that is the product of a “moral panic.” It’s the kind of movie that enlightened and educated people are supposed to avoid at all costs. And yet, somehow in this season of Ho...
The next day our positive energy experienced on the March of the Living quickly dissipated as we arrived at the site where an estimated 800 Jewish children are buried in a mass grave in the Zbylitowska Góra Forest. The gravesite is located deep in the forest on the outskirts of the Polish village of Tarnow, which also once included a sizable Jewish community. The site was only discovered after the war. According to our guide and my own research, these Jewish children, many of whom were outed by their non-Jewish neighbors, were taken from the to...
(JNS) — In response to public outrage over the pervasive, systemic, years-long scandal of antisemitism at CUNY, the university formed its inaugural Advisory Council on Jewish Life. At first, Chancellor Matos Rodríguez refused the demands of Jewish faculty and student victims at CUNY to be represented on the council, stating, “… [T]he advisory council on Jewish life will be comprised of Jewish leaders in New York who are external to the university” [emphasis added]. But in late May or early June of 2023, secretly and behind the scenes, Rodrígue...
(JTA) — The Orthodox Jewish community boasts a wide array of creative services providers. And, in keeping with the Jewish religious tradition over millennia, those vendors cannot, in good conscience, buy into elements of “progressive” social developments. They do not accept, for instance, that it is proper to identify as a different sex from one’s biological one, or that a same-sex union is proper. That is why my organization took a particular interest in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, in which the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Lorie Smith,...
(JNS) — Once again, we are seeing Hezbollah threatening us, encroaching on the demilitarized area and daring us to retaliate. In Southern Lebanon, Hezbollah has positioned thousands of rockets aimed at Israel in direct violation of the stipulations of the pact Israel agreed to after the Second Lebanon War. At the end of the hostilities, Israel was in possession of Southern Lebanon south of the Litani River. Israel retreated to its previous border based on an international agreement, which Hezbollah immediately violated. Notice to the Israel D...
(JNS) — Last week, the Biden administration announced that it will no longer support scientific and technological research at Israeli institutions in Judea, Samaria, eastern Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller declared that “engaging in bilateral scientific and technological cooperation with Israel in geographic areas which came under the administration of Israel after 1967 and which remain subject to final-status negotiations is inconsistent with U.S. foreign policy.” Attempting to at least give the i...
(JNS) — This is a really extraordinary article. All of these months the Israeli left and media have been howling that judicial reform, which means rolling back the unlimited authority of the country’s Supreme Court, is a coup and a threat to democracy. Mostly the media and politicians in the United States have echoed those lies. In “Israel’s Political Crisis,” published on Tuesday, The New York Times breaks from that narrative, admits that judicial reform makes sense, and that the only problem is who’s carrying it out. “In their details, the...
(JNS) — I was born in Syria, grew up in Lebanon and eventually moved to Brazil from where I made Aliyah. After nine months of learning Hebrew in an ulpan, I met my husband and moved to the United States. But I left my heart in Israel. Later, I figured out a way to stay connected to Israel. I introduced a cutting-edge trauma healing technique to the country 25 years ago, created a nonprofit there and have been traveling to Israel four times annually ever since. The crisis we are now witnessing in Israeli society has been simmering for many y...
(JNS) — The night before Monday’s Knesset vote on the first of the government’s proposed judicial reforms, a video filmed on the escalators in Jerusalem’s central train station went viral on social media. It showed a great tide of people holding Israeli flags going down one escalator on their way back from protesting against the reforms in Jerusalem, and a great tide of people holding Israeli flags going up the other escalator on their way back from demonstrating in support of the reforms in Tel Aviv. What was so remarkable and moving was tha...
The Zionist Organization of America strongly supports and praises Israel’s democratically elected Knesset for passing the first part of much-needed judicial reform. The new law prevents the Israeli Supreme Court from striking down or reversing democratically appointed government officials’ actions simply because the Court’s self-appointed, unelected left-wing judges believe that the government’s actions are not “reasonable.” Thus, existing judicial tyranny has been diminished. There were hundreds of thousands of Israelis in Tel Aviv rallyi...
Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz puts Israel’s judicial reforms into proper perspective in this discussion featured on J-AIR 88FM Radio and J-AIR Internet radio Retired US attorney Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz debated Eugene Kontorovich, professor at George Mason’s Antonin Scalia School of Law, specializing in constitutional and international law, and Director of the International Law Department at Kohelet Forum, about Israel’s judicial reform. While Dershowitz starts out critical of the reform, as Professor Kontorovich gives him examp...
(JNS) — Up until now, the legal battles being waged about tolerating dissent against support for gay marriage or gay pride events have been focused on conservative Christians. But a kosher baker in West Orange, N.J., is highlighting the fact that the question of the right to refuse to produce services for causes, ideas or beliefs can not only involve Jews but also create difficult dilemmas for Jewish communities. While all those concerned understand that the baker has the law on his side, synagogues and even the local Jewish Federation seem p...
I have written before about how tough it has been for me to get used to the pace of things here in New Orleans. While publicity and television and the music might lead you to believe that New Orleans is one big party, it just is not so. When all is said and done, this remains at heart, a sleepy small Southern town. Dependent on tourism as its life blood, the city also has had to contend with its threat of hurricanes and a number of problems brought upon themselves. Let’s start with this: The city itself is disappearing. For years, this l...
If weather can ever be a metaphor for emotion and feelings it certainly was so on the two days we visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camps. On the first day, the weather was cold, damp, rainy and overall bleak. It mirrored perfectly the despondent, depressed and mournful emotions of remembering the Jewish victims of the most horrific attempt, and successful genocide of more than one third of the global and ninety percent of the European Jewish population. Our second day visit started out with a tour of the Krakow ghetto, established...
(JTA) — When the U.S. Supreme Court sided last month with a Colorado web designer who refuses to do work for same-sex couples because of her religious objection to same-sex marriage, it risked opening the floodgates to a host of discriminatory acts under the guise of First Amendment freedom of expression. Most of us thought that we had made progress in eliminating government-sanctioned bigotry. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s 6-3 majority opinion in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, saying that her refusal to serve a same-sex couple is “protected speec...
(JNS) — “Welcome to Apartheid.” That was the slogan on a placard brandished by a protester outside a home in Jerusalem’s Old City section, denouncing last week’s removal of illegal Arab squatters from the property. On one level, it was just another ordinary real estate dispute, the kind that is heard in courts every day in every city in the world. Except that this one involves Arabs, Jews and racists who believe that Jews should not be allowed to live in mostly Arab neighborhoods—like the guy with the “Welcome to Apartheid” sign. That’s ri...
(JNS) — They say that diplomacy is the art of the possible. That is why, despite the conventional wisdom that Israel-U.S. relations have reached a dead end, the two sides can still find a way to move forward. There are even precedents for that. In 2010, then-President Barack Obama demanded an immediate 10-month freeze of settlement activity in Judea and Samaria. Despite the misgivings in Jerusalem and the political headache this caused for the coalition, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heeded that request, on the condition that there would no...
(JTA) — In one of its most anticipated cases of the year, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Groff v. DeJoy last month, significantly expanding the federal protections afforded religious employees in the workplace. The decision itself was unanimous, reflecting a broad consensus that employers should be doing more than previously required when it comes to accommodating religious employees. Jewish organizations from across the ideological spectrum — from Agudath Israel and the Orthodox Union to the Anti-Defamation League and the Ame...
