Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS) — The organized Jewish community—whether local Jewish community relations councils or national groups like the Jewish Council on Public Affairs, the American Jewish Committee or the Anti-Defamation League—and the religious denominations say they’re committed to two positions. On the one hand, all of them purport to be strong supporters of social justice, which is to say that they are, at least in principle, in favor of helping poor children and families, regardless of their background, race or religion, break the cycle of poverty and succ...
(JNS) — The bullet that the Palestinian Authority handed over to U.S. officials may or may not have been the one that killed Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh in Jenin earlier this year. The bullet may or have been too damaged to determine conclusively whose gun it came from. The bullet may or may not have been fired by an Israeli soldier. All that matters is who bears responsibility—legal and moral responsibility—for Akleh’s death. And it has been indisputably clear from day one who the guilty parties are: the Palestinian Arab terrori...
(JNS) — A disparate group of Islamist clerics has been busily predicting that the State of Israel will disappear in 2022, citing the Koran for support. The prediction has been circulating in earnest since March, when Muslims around the world marked the holy month of Ramadan. According to an article on the pro-Hamas MEMO website by Mohammad Makram Balawi, a Palestinian writer living in Istanbul, the belief that Israel will be removed from the map at some point this year “is widely spread by some Muslim religious scholars, Palestinian and non...
(JTA) — For years I worked in an office where, in order to make an outside phone call, you had to dial 9 plus 1 plus your number. At least once a week, the police would show up in the lobby because someone had accidentally dialed 9-1-1. The head of HR would scold us for not being more careful, and I would think, just change the system! In Jewish law there is a name for rules or actions that would tempt even the innocent to make a mistake — or worse, a sin: “lifnei iver.” It comes from Leviticus 19:14: “You shall not … place a stumbling b...
(JTA) — Agudath Israel of America, the national Orthodox Jewish organization for which I work, welcomed the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. Predictably, we were immediately cast into an “enemy” or “ally” box, depending on who was doing the casting. The first group assumed that we don’t care about women; the second, that we were embracing the Christian evangelical agenda. Neither is remotely the case. We care about Judaism and embrace only it. From a Jewish perspective, to be sure, the contention that there can be entirely prop...
Dear Editor: The Jewish Federation of Greater Orlando website outlines the details of the Jewish Community Relations Council directives. Nothing within those directives mandate a response to the Supreme Court’s recent ruling. Specifically, under the Social Action directive, the Supreme Court ruling is hardly an issue that affects global Jewish issues. Under the Issues Advocacy section, neither religious practice nor “…. support on behalf of Israel and oppressed communities….” fall within the scope of the Court’s ruling. Perhaps one might stret...
Dear Editor: As of late, there has been a lot of publicity concerning the location of many of the Jewish related organizations within the greater Boston area. The “Mapping Project” with the assistance of the BDS movement has created quite some interest both pro and con. I would like to suggest that someone or some group in the Greater Orlando area do the same for the associated Muslim mosques in Central Florida — Orange, Lake, Seminole and Osceola counties. I did a quick search and found 16 mosques located in Kissimmee alone. How many more...
The Florida Holocaust Museum responded to a request from the Heritage Florida Jewish News for a statement concerning the mapping project in Massachusetts. Solomon Howard, FHM senior account executive, replied that they are “as alarmed as any by the Mapping Project” and sent the following statement: There is a healthy debate about when criticism of Israeli policy becomes antisemitism, but no such debate exists with The Mapping Project. Its authors turn their antizionist political crusade into a wholesale allegation of collective guilt against Je...
(JNS) — Joe Biden’s first eight years in the U.S. Senate (1973-1981) overlapped with the final years of his colleague Sen. Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, a fellow Democrat. Biden and Ribicoff were friends and political allies, and the newcomer benefited from the wise counsel of the elder statesman. So I wonder what the late Sen. Ribicoff would think about now-President Joe Biden visiting a foreign region where there are numerous public sites named after the terrorist who murdered Ribicoff’s niece. Next month, Biden will become the first...
(JNS) — Despite managing to raise $160 million in New York on Thursday, at a pledging conference of the Ad Hoc Committee of the U.N. General Assembly, the head of the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestine Refugees was not pleased. Trying to sound grateful for the ill-deserved windfall, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini simultaneously boasted about the international community’s “firm commitment” to the organization and bemoaned that the funds pledged were far from sufficient to keep the place running past the end of the...
In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court decision that reversed Roe v. Wade, the five justices of the United States Supreme Court who voted in favor of the reversal embraced Mississippi’s statutory definition of a fetus as an unborn human being. This definition is not an accredited scientific definition, but is based on religious doctrine. It gives the Court leeway, however weak, to exclude the right to abortion from constitutional protection afforded to other rights, which the Constitution is obligated to secure. In...
Speaking to students at Hebrew University in Jerusalem recently, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made a foolish, unnecessary, and strategic mistake of opening an antisemitic battle as another front distracting from his very real war against Russia. Though Zelensky himself is Jewish, doing so he continues the antisemitic tradition that has marred Jewish life in Ukraine for generations. This is not Zelensky’s first time calling out Israel for not doing enough to help Ukraine in their war with Russia. By singling out Israel to standards b...
(JNS) — “Why not?” Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank asked that simple question last week after the normally publicity-mad Council on American-Islamic Relations told him it had nothing to say about a Boston BDS organization’s promotion of a “mapping project” that has been condemned as antisemitic and possible incitement to violence. The interactive map posted online earlier this month “mapped” the addresses of dozens of Jewish institutions and organizations in Massachusetts. Its stated goal was “to reveal the local entities and netw...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — Now that Roe v. Wade has been officially overturned and it becomes clear that the pro-choice community doesn’t have any more of a plan on how to protect abortion rights than it did to protect Roe from its critics, it might be a good time for pro-choice believers to look for guidance from the strongest abortion rights advocate and most prominent feminist voice to ever serve on the Supreme Court. So, the question to ask now is WWRBGD? — What Would Ruth Bader Ginsburg Do? Given Ginsburg’s strong credentials on this is...
(JNS) — Much has been written in recent days about a Boston BDS group’s online map of Jewish sites across Massachusetts. The “Mapping Project” ostensibly revealed the monstrous connections between Massachusetts institutions and the alleged evils of Zionism and Israel, which would have been bad enough, but it also gleefully included synagogues, Jewish sites and Jewish schools at best tangentially related to the Jewish state. The takeaway was clear: Jews equal Zionists. And since Zionism is evil, the Jews are evil. And now, says the map, you kno...
(JNS) — This week, the U.N. Human Rights Council published an 18-page report on the May 2021 conflict between Hamas and Israel. From the outset, Israel knew the report’s conclusion was predetermined and rightly refused to cooperate with a biased investigation, labeling it “a moral stain on the international community and the U.N.” This assessment has proved correct. The inquiry that led to the report — the first such inquiry to be open-ended — is led by Navi Pillay, a former UNHRC high commissioner who has spearheaded more investigati...
(JNS) — The moment that some Israelis have been dreading and others happily anticipating finally arrived on Monday. Though the announcement by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid of a call for the disbanding of the Knesset was virtually a foregone conclusion, it came as a bit of a surprise. Earlier in the day, it was reported that Bennett had bought his teetering coalition an additional week. This was attributed to the fact that Likud Party and opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu was postponing a no-confidence m...
(JNS) — As I was researching the Six-Day War fought 55 years ago, I stumbled across an article written by Christopher Sykes, the son of Sir Mark Sykes, the British diplomat who negotiated the Sykes-Picot agreement with François Georges-Picot. Christopher was a diplomat, soldier and foreign correspondent who wrote about the war in the February 1968 issue of Encounter. He made several keen observations that are relevant today. Sykes said that he had firm convictions about “the rights and wrongs of the opening of the June war; the need for a unit...
(JNS) — According to the Washington, D.C.-based White House Historical Association, the 1978/79 U.S. policy on Iran, that embraced Ayatollah Khomeini, betrayed the pro-U.S. shah and failed the pro-U.S. Sunni Arab regimes, was based on a superficial view of Middle East political, religious, cultural and historical reality. “In January 1979, the Shah fled into exile, and the theocratic regime of Khomeini took power. There was little informed understanding in the U.S. government about the political implications of this fundamentalist regime. Gar...
(JNS) — On the face of it, the “Mapping Project” undertaken by Boston BDS was a disaster for the antisemitic movement. In recent years, many on the political left had begun drifting from the sort of harsh critiques of Israel championed by groups like J Street towards the openly anti-Zionist stance of Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. But the colorful map published by the group that targeted the entire Jewish community was enough to shock even many of those on the left-wing of the Democratic Party into condemning the project. Indeed, the M...
It’s summer. Time for vacation. Maybe the beach. Maybe that foreign trip postponed the past couple of years? One thing for sure, books will be part of the agenda. Summer = books. It is a time when we naturally just chill. Why do book sales escalate in the summertime? Why are new releases always scheduled for this time of year? It is traditional that be it the beach, the mountains or a local hangout, books get packed to tag along. For some reason we allow ourselves the liberty wherever we vacation to read. That’s why book publishing booms in...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — It was January 2020, in a small cafe in Givatayim, that I last met with the celebrated Israeli author A. B. Yehoshua, who passed away on June 14 at the age of 85. That was January 2020 B.C. — Before COVID — so there were no discussions of pandemics, viruses or vaccines (those were the days). The only health issue we talked about was the difficult battle with cancer that Yehoshua was facing. This wasn’t the first time we had met, but due to his health issues, this meeting felt different. When we sat down for that cu...
(CAMERA via JNS) — If further proof were needed that the BDS campaign against Israel is deeply antisemitic, a venomous “mapping” campaign defaming and targeting Boston-area Jews provides stunning evidence of it. A Boston BDS group recently publicized an online map that lists the addresses of Jewish institutions across Massachusetts. The group called on followers to use the addresses to “dismantle” and “disrupt” the institutions in question. Although the project was slammed as antisemitic and dangerous by members of Congress, the city’s leadin...
(JNS) — It was in 1896 that Theodor Herzl published his groundbreaking book, “The Jewish State,” which launched the modern Zionist movement. Though his project was, as he noted in his book, “very old” and indeed rooted in the prayers of Jews for nearly 2,000 years, it would only be 52 years later that his vision was brought to life with the birth of modern-day Israel in May 1948. That state turned 74 years old this week, and as Israelis observe Yom Ha’atzmaut — Israel Independence Day — they have much to celebrate. The country that came to li...
(JNS) — The United Nations has declared an existential war on the state of Israel. Last year, the U.N. Human Rights Council contrived a unique “Commission of Inquiry” after Israel responded to another round of Hamas rocket attacks. The Inquiry has just issued its first report. Now emanating from the U.N.’s top human-rights body is a brazen attempt to resurrect the old 1975 lie that a Jewish state is a racist state. The report’s allegation that discrimination by Jews against non-Jews lies at the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict is actually at t...
