Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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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...
(JNS) — On May 25, President Joe Biden announced a plan to combat antisemitism and declared that “the venom and violence of antisemitism will not be the story of our time.” Yet Biden is underwriting antisemitism. In 2018, Congress passed the Taylor Force Act, which stopped economic aid to the Palestinian Authority as long as the P.A. continues its “pay-to-slay” policy of stipends for terrorists who kill Jewish Israelis and for the terrorists’ families. Such stipends, determined according to the number of Jews killed or injured, have amount...
(JTA) — Earlier this month, as the jury in Pittsburgh handed down the verdict in the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in American history, I found myself walking into Shabbat services at a Berlin synagogue that had been destroyed on Kristallnacht. Despite the odds, the Fraenkelufer Synagogue reopened in time for the High Holidays in September 1945, turning the former youth sanctuary into its main prayer space for the small number of Jews that remained. The community never rebuilt the original main sanctuary that had been destroyed by t...
(JNS) — The malevolent scapegoating of Israel by the United Nations has long been a scandal. These abuses are regularly highlighted by tireless U.N. watchdogs such as Hillel Neuer, the executive director of UN Watch, and Anne Bayefsky, president of Human Rights Voices and director of Touro’s Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust. Last week, Neuer testified before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee. He described how Israel is routinely demonized by the U.N. General Assembly, the U.N. Human Rights Council and the World Health Org...
(JNS) — How could the notoriously antisemitic Council on American-Islamic Relations have ended up — embarrassingly — as a “resource” in President Biden’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism? CAIR was launched in 1994 by a Muslim Brotherhood-related Hamas support group called the Palestine Committee. The organization was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a 2007 trial that convicted five former officers of the Holy Land Foundation for funneling millions of dollars illegally to the murderous terror group Hamas. Moreover, CAIR’s stat...
(JNS) — After decades of vacillation, the Supreme Court of the United States has finally and firmly declared that the Constitution does not permit publicly funded universities to consider race, as such, in their admission processes. This is a decision that many, including this author, have been advocating for since the 1970s, when my first law review article appeared, calling for affirmative action to be based on non-racial criteria and individual accomplishments. The Supreme Court has been moving in this direction for some time now, but it h...
The bus ride to Birkenau took only 15 minutes since the two facilities were less than two miles apart. The next day we would be marching that same route from the gates of Auschwitz to the entrance of Birkenau as part of the March of the Living. Birkenau was built closer to the main rail line; and a train track spur was added from the main rail line directly into the Birkenau death camp, bringing it very close to the gas chambers and crematoria. The intent was to divert the freight trains carrying their human cargo directly into the camp so as...
(JNS) — The international reaction to the recent surge in Palestinian terrorism and Israel’s operation in Jenin to take out the gunmen and infrastructure of the groups responsible for the bloodshed has been as predictable as it is depressing. Though the Biden administration has paid lip service to the notion that Israelis have the right to defend themselves, the general tone of press coverage and commentary from Washington and the international community has been the usual mantra about a pointless “cycle of violence” and worries about the dec...
(JNS) — “If necessary, just as we prevented the fall of Assad, we will prevent the fall of Putin.” This brazen claim was posted to a Telegram channel linked with the Iranian regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps last Saturday, as an amazed world watched a mutiny unfold in Russia that was quickly snuffed out before any significant violence unfolded. The IRGC has every reason to remain loyal to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has deepened his military alliance with Iran in tandem with his aggression against Ukraine. Russia has bee...
(JNS) — In response to former President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from his predecessor Barack Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden announced that, if elected, he would reenter the deal and “work with our allies to make it longer and stronger.” This, Biden claimed, would curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions and moderate its malign behavior. He was and is wrong. The mere fact that Biden claimed to be seeking a “longer and stronger” deal puts the lie to Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry’s repeated claims t...
As we stepped through the entrance gate of Auschwitz I, marked with its overhead sign, “Arbeit Macht Frei,” “Work shall set you free,” I was trying to figure out how I was going to emotionally handle what I was about to experience. Our group was not alone, dozens of other visitors were already there when we were introduced to our personal docent, an English speaking, albeit difficult to understand, middle-aged Polish gentleman at least one generation or more removed from World War II and the Holocaust. Not surprisingly, his explana...
The “Tonys,” the awards for the Best of Broadway, were really interesting this year. Their diversity, their power and their depth showed a rather new attitude on Broadway towards the acceptance of reality. Most interesting to me was the winner of best Musical. The Tony was awarded to the revival of a show from 1998. It tells, with strong musical accompaniment, the story of Leo Frank, a young Jewish factory manager in Atlanta who was accused of raping and killing a 13-year-old factory worker, Mary Phagan, at the pencil factory he managed. Let...
(JNS) — “Al-Sharif [the Arabic/Muslim name for Jerusalem’s Temple Mount] belongs exclusively to the Muslims,” proclaimed Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas at the United Nations General Assembly on May 15. Notwithstanding a preponderance of biblical, historical and archeological evidence, Abbas, UNESCO and other Israel-haters steadfastly deny any Jewish connection whatsoever to the Temple Mount. Although Israel recognizes centuries of Arab-Muslim presence in the Holy Land, research provides overwhelming proof of a millennia-old Jewish...
(JNS) — Results from a Wall Street Journal-NORC poll released this year confirmed that Americans are deviating from religious faith. The study found 39 percent percent of those surveyed said that religion was “very important” to them, a sharp decline from the 62 percent who felt the same 25 years ago. A schism within the Jewish community appears to be emerging as a result of this trend. According to the Pew Research Center’s latest analysis of Jewish Americans, young adults are much more likely than those 65 and older to identify as either Orth...
(JNS) — In a decidedly unsurprising verdict, the man who murdered 11 Jews in the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh has been found guilty. Now, Robert Bowers faces a second judgment: The court must determine whether he will receive the death penalty. Three congregations were using the Tree of Life facility at the time of the massacre—New Light, Dor Hadash and Tree of Life itself. According to The New York Times, “There has not been agreement among the three congregations or within them about whether Mr. Bowers should be sentence...
(JNS) — In New York, this week’s deadline for submitting changes to individual voter ballots is renewing pressure on Jewish Republicans to switch their party affiliation. New York is one of 12 “closed primary” states in which primary voting is limited to those registered with a specific political party. New York’s reputation as a bastion of deep blue liberalism leaves many conservatives struggling to explain the logic behind backing candidates whose chances of winning, particularly in left-leaning enclaves, are slim at best. Jewish Democrats...
(JNS) — What does Jew-hatred feel like? A punch in the gut. Literally. Let me explain. On May 13, a “Nakba Day” rally was held in Raleigh, N.C. It was only one of many such rallies held throughout the United States, including in Washington, D.C., and New York. These events are notorious for promoting Jew-hatred and genocide, so much so that Berlin banned “Nakba Day” demonstrations this year. Nakba is Arabic for “catastrophe.” The word reflects Arab anguish over the establishment of the State of Israel and the Arabs’ failure to slaughter the J...
(JNS) — Despite their noble-sounding title, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs in American universities and colleges exclude and often attack Jews, already the single most persecuted minority in the United States. Worse still, evidence shows that despite the vast budgets and bloated bureaucracies dedicated to DEI initiatives, they have proven to be ineffective at improving the campus experience of marginalized groups. Studies show the prevalence of antisemitism — largely its anti-Zionism form — is skyrocketing on U.S. college and unive...
(JNS) — We are witnessing a strange and troubling historic inversion. It has become part of the lore of the Israeli left that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was the victim of growing calls for retribution and punishment due to his perceived sin of signing the Oslo Accords, ultimately leading to Rabin’s assassination. The left holds that the unindicted abettors and provocateurs of this act were, of course, those on the right, especially Benjamin Netanyahu. That political figures were implicitly responsible for the assassination, the left bel...
(JNS) — While the United States and Iran have denied ongoing negotiations for a temporary nuclear agreement, Jerusalem isn’t buying it. It is believed that two Arab countries, including Oman, are mediating between Washington and Tehran. Israel is deeply concerned about the potential outcome of these negotiations, even if they take a long time to materialize. According to senior officials in Jerusalem, National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi and Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer expressed their concerns following their recent meeting wit...
(JNS) — I understand why universities boast about their most famous graduates. But should a university boast about a graduate who has claimed that members of U.S. Congress are “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby?” Brandeis University, where my daughter Alisa was a student when she was murdered in a suicide bombing in Israel in 1995 and where another one of my daughters graduated a few years later, recently took out a two-page advertisement in the Sunday New York Times headlined “University Quotas Were a Polite Way of Telling Jews Where The...
