Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 651 - 675 of 3672
(JTA) — My synagogue sent out a cautiously anxious email yesterday about an event coming this Shabbat, a neo-Nazi “Day of Hate.” The email triggered fuzzy memories of one of the strangest episodes that I can remember from my childhood. Sometime around 1990, in response to local neo-Nazi activity, some Jews from my community decided to “fight back.” I don’t know whether they were members of the militant Jewish Defense League, or perhaps just sympathetic to a JDL-style approach. When our local Jewish newspaper covered the story, it ran on its...
(JNS) — One of those Palestinians who the U.S. State Department keeps telling us wants a two-state solution murdered yet another Israeli, this time an American citizen. Elan Ganeles, a 27-year-old in town to attend a friend’s wedding, was shot dead by a Palestinian terrorist on a highway between Jericho and the Dead Sea. I’m not sure how many people are aware of the number of American victims of Palestinian terror. Since 1970, at least 80 Americans have been killed and 87 wounded in Israel and the disputed territories. During that time, nearl...
(JNS) — Several days ago, I returned from attending the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (“CoP” or the “Conference”) leadership mission in Israel, along with the leaders of approximately 20 other American Jewish organizations that are Conference members. The mission’s sole purpose was supposed to be to learn directly from Israel’s key elected leaders about vital and serious issues that confront Israel so that American Jewish leaders can be better informed when they address their communities, the media and Con...
(JNS) — King David’s plaintive and eternally mysterious question ad matai? (until when?), which we recite daily with heads bent or in deep self-contemplation, has a particularly searing relevance when I look at the recent terror attacks unleashed upon our innocents. The murder of two young children invokes the exact inverse of the Talmudic wisdom that he who saves a life has saved the world. With these murders, the world has been destroyed; the world of decency, of compassion, of any kind of empathy—gone. Furthermore, the murder of the Yaniv...
(JNS) — Elan Ganeles of Connecticut was murdered by Palestinian Arab terrorists this week, thus becoming the 147th American citizen to be killed by Palestinians since 1968. Yet not a single Palestinian Arab terrorist has ever been brought to the United States to stand trial for any of those crimes. Think about that: 147 dead Americans and not one prosecution. The problem is not that we can’t find the suspects. The whereabouts of some of them are already known to the authorities. In fact, the Israeli government has publicly identified some of...
(JNS) — There are many issues worth having an argument over; then again, some are better left alone. For example, a debate about whether or not the actress who is hired to play Golda Meir in a movie is Jewish is not worth a moment of anyone’s time. By contrast, the discussion about whether the current nearly unlimited powers of Israel’s Supreme Court should be checked and balanced by giving more power to the Knesset elected by the country’s voters is of utmost import. As it so happens, the British actress Helen Mirren is the focus of an unim...
(JTA) — Ever hear Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” sung in Yiddish dialect? It used to be a regular bit performed by comedian and actor Richard Belzer, who died last week at 78. He also used to do a routine about Bob Dylan’s bar mitzvah in which he recited a Hebrew prayer in the singer’s distinctive tone. A similar Elvis bar mitzvah bit was also part of his routine. Surprisingly, Belzer performed these niche routines in numerous comedy venues and even on the nationally televised “The Late Show with David Letterman.” In addition to a v...
(JNS) — One of the mysteries of the war against Israel is the extent to which a monstrously twisted narrative about Israel and the Palestinian Arabs — casting the former as evil and the latter as sanctified victims — has been absorbed by so many people. Still stranger, this narrative seems to be the driver of progressive politics. It’s not just that “intersectionality” demonizes the Jews, but that it is driven by an obsession with Palestinianism. As Corinne Blacker wrote in Tablet, “In queer and women’s studies programs, the topic of Palest...
(JNS) — For all intents and purposes, the Iranian nuclear deal, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, is dead. In December, Iranian officials said they had doubled their capacity to enrich uranium. International Atomic Energy Agency monitoring cameras were shut down by the regime last May, and IAEA inspectors have been banned from checking on the program. IAEA officials say Iran has enriched 154 pounds of uranium to 60% purity. According to the head of the IAEA, Rafael Grossi, that is enough to produce several weapons. Iran can now enrich i...
Dear Editor: “JCRC’s thoughts on antisemitism” reminds me of a sixth-grade paper I would be required to write in Delaney Park Elementary School sixth grade English class. Having lived in the Greater Orlando area for over 80 years, I have seen the pendulum swing in both directions. Having been on the receiving end of blatant antisemitism throughout my school days, I can tell you today’s antisemitism is child’s play. “Jesus loves me yes I know for the Bible tells me so”… “Hey Jew Boy, did you eat your pork sandwich at lunch today?” and so fo...
(JNS) — When the spokespersons for the U.S. State Department and the foreign ministries of America’s Western allies churn out press releases condemning the building of homes for Jews, it’s all a matter of finding a similar document in the archive, and just cutting and pasting the text and slapping a new date on it. Their joint statement denouncing Israel’s announcement of approval for the planning and building of 10,000 new homes in Judea and Samaria, as well as the government authorization of nine “outpost” settlements, was strictly by...
I have mentioned before that I volunteer twice a week at the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience here in New Orleans. I love the experience of guiding people through over 430 years of the American Southern Jewish Experience. Did you know that the first Jews in America came from Spain in the 1500s? Did you know that they settled in the Caribbean Islands before coming to the U.S.? And that they came through Galveston, Texas as their port of entry some 300 years before the great Northern European Migration to New York? As I guide these...
(JNS) — Earlier this month, Israel’s Foreign Minister Eli Cohen paid a diplomatic visit to Khartoum, where he met with the leader of Sudan’s transitional government, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. They finalized the terms of a normalization agreement between the two countries, which will be signed later this year following Sudan’s official transfer of power to civilian authority. On the same day as Cohen’s visit, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood alongside the President of Chad, Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno, as they inaugurat...
(Israel Hayom via JNS) — Many official reports and media accounts speak of heavy Russian casualties in the Ukraine war, both economic and military, especially in terms of the estimated number of Russian army casualties. The New York Times, in a recent report citing U.S. and Western officials, put these losses at nearly 200,000 Russian soldiers. These losses, incurred in only about 11 months, exceed U.S. losses in Afghanistan over two decades by a factor of eight. Other reports have addressed Russia’s economic and strategic losses. An obj...
(JNS) — The tough stuff is what makes the news right now: Israel is in the midst of an exceedingly distressing situation. But we are so much more than this. We are more than angry demonstrations, communication failures and even the occasional shocking call for violence. In order to provide a heartening balance, I share a story: At the beginning of February, I received an urgent phone call from my 15-year-old grandson who attends a yeshiva high school. It is a small and modest yeshiva, built on the heights of a tiny yishuv (settlement) in the w...
Dear Editor: I notice that most of your opinion pieces and world news briefs come from the right-wing Jewish News Service. Perhaps you should balance these articles with an equal amount of material from center and center-left Jewish publications. When writers like Jonathan Tobin and Mitchell Bard (see Heritage Jan. 20, 2023) accuse Jewish Democrats and liberals of being “Jewish antisemites,” one has to wonder, since the majority of Jews are Democrats and liberals, who the “Jewish antisemites” really are. Burt Whiteman Endicott, N.Y....
(JNS) — Like the proverbial old soldiers, anti-Jewish lies never die. But they don’t fade away either. No matter how often they are proven false, they come back to incite hatred and murder. Today, the focus of antisemitism is Israel, although the old forms of Jew-hatred remain. So, there are contemporary blood libels like the media accounts of the shooting of 12-year-old Muhammad al-Durah, an exercise in what scholar Richard Landes has called “lethal journalism.” One of the most pernicious and persistent lethal narratives has been the myth of...
(JNS) — Come on. Be honest. Surely someone reading this is hoarding a keepsake from the Eisenhower administration, stashed away in the attic. Better check, because you might be in violation of the Espionage Act. It seems that anyone who’s anyone, and even a few nobodies, is in possession of state secrets with classified markings and fuzzy provenance. Secure facilities are so yesterday. Nowadays, top-secret documents apparently have feet and simply slip away to improbable locations. That’s the only conclusion one can reach now that we know...
(JNS) — The names Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, Johan Voskuijl, Bep Voskuijl, Jan Gies and Miep Gies should be well-known, but very few Jews know them. They were Otto Frank’s friends who, during the Holocaust, prepared a secret apartment at 263 Prinsengracht Street in Amsterdam for his family to hide from the Germans. They smuggled food and clothing to the Franks, including their daughter Anne, during the family’s two years in hiding. Miep Gies also had the presence of mind to keep Anne’s diary and presented it to her father upon his ret...
(JTA) — In January, 24-year-old Damar Hamlin of the Buffalo Bills collapsed on the field after experiencing cardiac arrest. His team and the entire NFL community rallied around him. His first words upon awakening: “Who won?” Although Hamlin’s medical crisis was a rare on-field occurrence, the trauma surrounding his collapse stirred up age-old questions for me, and for many of us, about the toll football takes on the bodies of its players. What are we allowing to happen to these young men, in the name of sportsmanship, entertainment and nationa...
(JNS) — International Holocaust Remembrance Day has put me in mind of a famous poem by German clergyman Martin Niemöller about the rise of Nazism: First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew Then they came for me And there was no one left To...
(JNS) — Seen only in the context of the struggle between America’s two major political parties, the House of Representatives’ vote to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from the Foreign Relations Committee is not a historic turning point. It is merely the latest evidence that the once largely polite battles between Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill have escalated into a full-blown culture war. But while it is possible to frame House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s making good on his pledge to oust Omar from her seat on Foreign Relatio...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — We attach ourselves to narratives because they comfort us. It’s comforting to think that the terrorist who murdered seven Jews coming out of a Jerusalem synagogue on Friday evening was striking a blow against “the civilized world,” as President Joe Biden asserted. But he wasn’t, Mr. President. Alqam Khayri, 21, a resident of eastern Jerusalem, was specifically going after Jews. His Palestinian brethren who celebrated his murderous act by dancing in the streets and handing out candies were not thinking about the civili...
(JNS) — If CNN needs to flirt with antisemitic tropes to report on controversial Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, what does that say about the network? In an article dated Jan. 25, 2023, titled “As Israel bans Palestinian flags, one artist protests with his brush,” CNN’s Abeer Salman seemed to go out of her way to not just include ahistorical swipes at the Jewish state, but also—borrowing from centuries of antisemitic blood libel—associated the holiday of Passover with Jews benefiting from the shedding of blood of non-Jews. The focus of th...
(JNS) — The left-leaning Israeli media is disseminating news articles transmitting the discontent of American Jewish leaders with the new Israeli government and the policies it wishes to implement. A good example of this genre is the recent Times of Israel headline that blared, “169 liberal U.S. Jewish leaders sign letter expressing concern over Israeli government.” These leaders headed non-Orthodox rabbinical seminaries, federations, AIPAC, the Conference of Presidents and others, and they decried accusations of “antisemitism” directed...
