Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 690 - 714 of 3730
(JNS) — In a tactic straight out of Barack Obama’s playbook, President Joe Biden has put serious daylight between the United States and Israel with his decision not to invite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House. During previous administrations, such an invitation was a customary gesture when a new Israeli prime minister assumed office. Netanyahu has met with Britain’s prime minister in London and traveled to Germany to meet with the German chancellor, but has no meetings scheduled with the leader of Israel’s closest all...
(Gatestone Institute via JNS) — An anti-Israel group called Palestinian Solidarity Forum (PSF) on March 20 invited officials from the Iranian-backed Palestinian terror groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to speak at an event at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. The two terror leaders, Khaled Qaddoumi of Hamas and Nasser Abu Sharif of PIJ, addressed students during the annual “Israel Apartheid Week,” a one-sided propaganda event smearing Israel that takes place every year on a number of university campuses in the United State...
(JNS) — Second gentleman Doug Emhoff had never shown any interest in his Jewish identity until his wife, Kamala Harris, was elected vice president of the United States. But though it would be an exaggeration to treat him as the Biden administration’s point person on anything, he has, almost by default, become one of its leading spokespersons on Jewish issues. It was understandable that he emerged from Harris’s recent trip to Eastern Europe with some Jewish anecdotes along with his comments seeking to bolster the administration’s stand on the wa...
(JNS) — After months of increasingly strident mass protests against his government’s plans to reform Israel’s out-of-control and highly partisan judicial system, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have given in to the pressure. He said he was going to be “delaying judicial reform to give real dialogue a chance.” But it’s highly doubtful that this will merely be a timeout that will help his supporters regroup and enable opponents to calm down and accept a compromise on the issue. On the contrary, Netanyahu is waving the white flag...
(JNS) — We have just seen an insurrection that shut Israel down being hailed as a “peaceful” pro-democracy movement. A movement that is proud of having used BDS/antifa tactics against their own state in order to further “de-Judaize” the country. Israel is the one and only Jewish state, but what does that mean? What is “Jewish” about Israel? Is it protecting gay rights, trans rights, Arab rights, women’s rights, refugee rights, the rights of a Supreme Court over and above the rights of a democratically elected government? Is this what is me...
One of the disturbing things about watching the judiciary food fight in Israel is that the supporters of the most extreme reform proposals act as though those changes were inscribed on a tablet by God that Bibi brought down from Sinai, and that all of the protesters are worshiping a golden calf. I’m not concerned that Israeli democracy is in danger, because what I am watching is the best of the democratic nature of Israel in the streets, where hundreds of thousands of citizens believe they are acting to protect their democracy. Bibi’s loy...
(JNS) — Whatever one thinks about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, any true Israeli patriot will surely react viscerally to U.S. President Joe Biden’s outrageous attack on Israel’s right to govern itself without foreign interference. On Monday, Netanyahu announced he was suspending his coalition’s judicial reform legislation in order to negotiate a compromise with the opposition. The next day, Biden told Netanyahu to “walk away” from the legislation, saying he was “very concerned” about the health of Israeli democracy. Warn...
(JNS) — Israel is undergoing many challenges since the new government was formed, internally and externally. Terror has accelerated, and on the international scene, Israel’s internal judicial reform initiatives have been met with criticism from around the world. Many of these challenges have been created by extreme left-wing Israelis who understand the international political landscape and are abusing it to take away legitimacy from this new government and its plans. Immediately coming off the right’s election victory, Israel’s politic...
(JNS)— I can no longer keep silent. I may be sitting in Manhattan, but my heart is in Jerusalem and my heart is very heavy. I may not be a lawyer or a legal scholar, but I have been an organizer, an activist, a leader who has acted on behalf of civil and human rights — especially women’s rights. But I have never acted in the way that Israeli rioters are now acting: Not stopping, threatening to continue until they’ve brought down an entire country. These leftists/progressives/“good people” (my former people) seem to be behaving the same way th...
(JTA) — Earlier this month the New York Times convened what it called a “focus group of Jewish Americans.” I was struck briefly by that phrase — Jewish Americans — in part because the Times, like the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, tends to prefer “American Jews.” It’s seemingly a distinction without a difference, although I know others might disagree. There is an argument that “American Jew” smacks of disloyalty, describing a Jew who happens to be American. “Jewish American,” according to this thinking, flips the script: an American who happens to...
(JNS) — Media pundits spend a lot of time “explaining” to the rest of us why some political or social development just occurred. Last week, The New York Times presented what it claimed are the real reasons behind the controversy over Israeli judicial reform. The recent election results, which brought Israel a new government—and the judicial reform plan—are part of a “rightward drift” that goes back a number of years, according to the Times’ Jerusalem Bureau Chief Patrick Kingsley. “The failure of peace negotiations with the Palestinians in the...
(JNS) — President Joe Biden’s foreign policy has been highlighted by the disaster in Afghanistan and its embrace of Ukraine, whose security it seems to value more than that of America’s own borders. But one consistent theme has been the attempt on the part of the Obama administration alumni back at work in Washington to revive their old boss’s pivot in the Middle East away from longtime allies Israel and Saudi Arabia to a new alignment based on a rapprochement with Iran. That’s the context for the Iran-Saudi pact. The two longtime foes will...
(JNS) — For many decades, during Shabbat services, Conservative and Religious Zionist Orthodox congregations have recited the heartfelt Prayer for the State of Israel, written by Israel’s chief rabbis in 1948. The Conservative movement’s Sim Shalom prayer books seem to solely use the prayer’s first paragraph. Reconstructionist Jews, in their Kol Haneshamah prayer books, have also adopted the prayer’s first paragraph, with minor modifications, and made more modifications to latter portions of the prayer. The prayer’s widely-used first paragraph...
(JNS) — America and Britain claim to be allies of Israel. There is no gainsaying the deep links between them of military assistance, intelligence and trade. Israel is the invaluable strategic asset for America and Britain in the Middle East, a crucial bulwark in the defense of the West. And yet, both America and Britain undermine Israel’s security and defense against existential attack by sanitizing, promoting and funding Palestinian Arabs, whose active cause remains the destruction of the Jewish state. A recent event illustrated this par...
Insights from the Academy-award winning film. There are a lot of ways to explain the multiverse — a concept or theory that our universe is one of many different universes, possibly each containing a different version of ourselves or our world — but the movie “Everything Everywhere All at Once” simplifies it: Every decision in a person’s life is like a fracture point, creating alternate universes where the ramifications of those decisions ripple forward, like the proverbial hurricane blowing after a butterfly flaps its wings. The movie bui...
(JNS) — Don’t expect a flood of Jewish families moving to Arkansas in the wake of the state legislature there passing a bill this week that charts a path towards universal school choice. When Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders affixes her signature to the Arkansas Learns Act, it will make her state the fifth to enact legislation that allows state funds to follow students enabling parents to choose whatever school is the best fit for their children. Arizona was the first state to do so last year and since then West Virginia, Utah and Iowa have als...
(JNS) — As the 2024 election begins to slide slowly into view, it’s now clear that barring an unforeseen health issue, Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee for president. But the Republican field has been unusually slow to develop, mainly because most of the GOP potential candidates have been hesitant to be the first to join Donald Trump on the primary landscape. They remember how Trump eviscerated Jeb Bush and others in the early stages of the 2016 campaign, and they clearly see safety in numbers when it comes to confronting the for...
(JNS) — This week, The Guardian quoted the policy director at J Street, Debra Shushan, as saying, “Christian Zionism, particularly of the variety that has become predominant among American evangelical Christians in recent decades, which sees Jewish control and settlement in the entire land of Israel as a requirement for fulfilling their end-times prophecies, has been extremely detrimental to U.S. politics, and U.S. policy toward Israel.” To emphasize the seriousness of this alleged threat, Ms. Shushan went on to note that in America, Chris...
(JNS) — U.S. Ambassador to Israel Thomas Nides has persisted in interfering in Israel’s internal affairs, egregiously violating the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Affairs, which requires diplomats to “respect the laws and regulations of the receiving state” and “not to interfere in the internal affairs of that State.” While collaborating on foreign matters of mutual interest (such as working together to counter Iran) would be welcome, interfering in Israel’s internal affairs is off limits. Yet Nides regularly makes hostile demands and e...
(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...
