Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(Jewish Journal via JNS) — We’re seeing again how Israel can fight so well with weapons but so badly with words. Take the death of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, which has turned into an international incident. She was fatally shot during an Israeli anti-terrorist incursion into Jenin. An initial autopsy by Palestinian coroners found that it was “not possible” to tell whether she was killed by Israeli or Palestinian gunfire. Of course, that didn’t stop Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas from treating Israel as a murderous...
(JNS) — Supporters of the BDS movement against Israel claim they are not antisemitic. I have co/ncluded that they are correct in the sense that the word “antisemitism” is too weak to capture their depravity. It is not necessary to go into the myriad examples of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance to define “antisemitism,” the word means hatred of Jews. Lots of individuals and groups hate Jews and have for centuries. More recently, a new form of anti-Semitism emerged in which “Israel” or “Zionist” is used as a euphemism for “Je...
A new study conclusively shows multiple benefits of a faith-based life to working-class adolescents – particularly males. As a child living in communist Russia, Ilana Horwitz knew nothing about religion. But after her family emigrated to the United States when she was seven years old, Horwitz attended a Jewish school and began teaching some Judaism to her parents. Years later, as a graduate student in sociology, education, and Jewish Studies at Stanford University, she chose to focus on religion as an academic interest. Horwitz realized that m...
(JNS) — Whether you even know what a picture postcard is will immediately put you in a certain age bracket. Just recently, I asked a group of teenagers if they knew what a postcard was, and they had absolutely no idea. It reminded me of a video posted last year of two teenagers being challenged to operate an old-fashioned telephone where you dialed the number with that circular dialing system. They were completely flustered and just could not work it out. I’ll get to the picture postcard soon. I intended procrastinating, but I never got aro...
(JNS) — The job of defenders of democracy would be easier if opponents of free speech never sought to disguise their efforts by portraying their goal as the preservation of the very ideals that they are suborning. It’s a lot harder to recognize the nature of the threat when those who seek to silence dissent say they are doing it for our own good because those guilty of wrongthink are bad people. It’s even worse when a group whose mission is to fight anti-Semitism, like the Anti-Defamation League, joins in this effort. And it creates a genui...
(JTA) — Last week, Israeli Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz responded to the draft U.S. Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, “A woman’s rights over her own body are hers alone.” It might seem odd that the Israeli health minister was commenting on American abortion law, but his response, contained in a tweet, addresses a theme common to the abortion discussion in Israel and America that I research as an ethicist and scholar of reproduction among Jews. In the 1970s, the Israeli Knesset debated the legalization of abortio...
(JNS) — Who in the Middle East has not been traumatized by the upheavals of the last century? All of us celebrate the history of our families and treasure the places where we have lived, yet only the Palestinian leadership has weaponized the memory of displacement and transformed it into an ideology of genocide. “Nakba Day,” which occurs every year on May 15, was established in 1998 by former Palestinian Authority leader and international terrorist mastermind Yasser Arafat to turn Israel’s Independence Day into a festival of grievance. The ver...
The United States was founded by deeply religious Christians, and its tradition is rooted in what’s known as Judeo-Christian values. Other countries also are founded on, and embrace, biblical values as well. It should go without saying that Israel, as the Jewish state, was re-established on biblical Jewish tradition that is played out in almost every aspect of Israeli society. When soldiers are inducted into the IDF they are given a Bible. Shabbat is not just the cornerstone of the weekend, it’s a weekly affirmation of God’s creation and the n...
(CAMERA via JNS) — On April 30, MSNBC host Ali Velshi delivered a lengthy rant against the Jewish state that was as dishonest as it was rabid. The monologue was riddled with false statements and exaggerations that betray Velshi’s willingness to twist the facts to fit his preferred narrative. During the segment, Velshi claimed: “The map of the Palestinian Authority, sometimes described as Swiss cheese, has been carved up by Israel over the past century.” The P.A. did not exist until 1994, a mere 28 years ago, so the reference to the “past c...
(JNS) — It was one of the first things President Joe Biden did once he assumed office in January 2021. Though it has gotten almost no notice, it is almost certainly one of the most consequential acts of his presidency, and its impact will likely be felt long after he leaves office. But while the administration is boasting of it as proof of their devotion to civil rights and bettering the lot of the disadvantaged, it may do far more damage to American society than anything else that happens during Biden’s time in office. Considering that his...
(JNS) — Arab riots on the Temple Mount in opposition to any Jewish presence on the Jewish people’s most holy site have exposed what the Arab-Israeli conflict is all about. It’s not about the lack of a Palestinian state or Israeli concessions to the PLO, Hamas or other terrorist organizations. It’s about what makes the Temple Mount a holy place and who is the legitimate sovereign power over the entirety of the homeland of the Jewish people. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan—represented by the Waqf, the religious authority on the Temple Mount—sup...
(JNS) — The world has entered a very challenging period due to various factors that enhance pre-existent undercurrents and allow them to boil over. The perceived weakness of the current United States government on the global stage has allowed rogue nations to push their agendas without fear. The botched execution of the U.S. military disengagement from Afghanistan, the compromised security on its southern border, local inflation and economic instability, a self-inflicted dependence on foreign oil and social unrest are all factors in the rise o...
(JNS) — The Biden administration has announced that its titular head will be visiting Israel within a few months. Biden’s last high-profile visit to the Jewish State in 2010 ended with him staging a diplomatic incident and refusing to leave his hotel room for an hour to attend an event with Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israelis have little reason to be optimistic about this Biden expedition. After Muslim rioters disrupted Passover by engaging in violence at the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, the administration urged “all sides to exerc...
My wife and I, and five of our children, had a discussion over Shabbat dinner recently about giving up our U.S. citizenship. Five of my six children were born in the U.S. On my father’s side, I’m a second generation American. On my mother’s side, fourth or fifth. When we moved to Israel, our children’s ages ranged from 11 to 3. A year later our youngest son was born in Jerusalem. He’s an American because we are. Some are surprised to know that we choose to keep our U.S. citizenship or that we’re even allowed to. Others ask why we’d want t...
(JNS) — Discerning the truth about diplomatic activity is often a matter of sifting out what’s real from amid the surrounding noise of governmental spin. That means that at the moment, an accurate assessment of the possibility of a new American nuclear deal with Iran, as well as the state of U.S.-Israel relations may require one to ignore most of the headlines. If so, the optimism currently prevailing in Jerusalem about the prospects of the Biden administration betraying the security interests of Israel, the Arab states as well as the West cou...
(JNS) — The “West Bank” is “occupied” by Israel. Wait, no, only part of it is. The Palestinian Arabs are “stateless.” Wait, no, a large segment of the region actually is “governed by the Palestinian Authority.” These and other contradictory statements all appeared in a single article in The New York Times on April 17 by news correspondent Raja Abdulrahim. I almost feel sorry for her; she seems so confused. It’s not, however, a confusion based on facts that are perplexing or unclear. It’s based on the blatant contradictions betwee...
(JNS) — Earlier this week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the breakout time for Iran to produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon had now come down to “a matter of weeks.” This is clearly deeply alarming news. But why did Blinken choose to announce this to the world? After all, it invites the question, “So what are you going to do about it?” Blinken told the hearing that renewing the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, which lifted sanctions in return for limitations on its nuclear program,...
Earlier this month I was watching a U.S. report about the war in Ukraine, which I have been following with a degree of obsessiveness. It’s hard to imagine that an unprovoked war is happening at all, much less destroying entire communities. The human tragedy is underscored with more than five million, over 10 percent of Ukrainians, having fled their country. Because I am Jewish and Israeli, I tend to look at this through a Jewish/Israeli prism. This relates to common experiences of war, which Ukrainians are suffering and which Israel has s...
(JNS) — The defeat of the Nazis in World War II ended the Holocaust, but the war against the Jews continued. Muslims and the British administration in Palestine sought to prevent Israel’s establishment, and in 1948, five Arab armies invaded the newly established Jewish state with the intention of wiping it out. Egypt, Syria and other countries planned to attack again in 1967, but were stopped when Israel launched a preemptive strike. The war against the Jews still went on, however, led by the PLO and, more recently, Hamas and other ter...
(JNS) — In February, the Anti-Defamation League announced that it had developed what it called an “online hate index” to monitor antisemitism on social-media platforms. The effort was conceived as a way to adequately measure the amount of hate speech being posted on sites like Twitter and Reddit, which the group thinks are not vigilant enough about detecting and removing such offensive material. ADL CEO and national director Jonathan Greenblatt conceded that Twitter had “made substantial strides” towards shutting down those posting vile cont...
(JNS) — One Tuesday night in February, a small group of Jewish students at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where I serve as a shaliach (Israeli emissary) for the Jewish Agency for Israel, logged into the weekly Zoom meeting of the Student Union Assembly to support the adoption of a working definition of antisemitism. The resolution referenced the definition written by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which has been endorsed by countless governments and organizations. The IHRA definition maintains that, among other thi...
If there was ever proof that Israel is not an apartheid state actively discriminating against its Arab minority, all one needs to do is look at the recent statement of Israeli Arab Knesset member Ayman Odeh. Not only does this reflect the reality that Israeli Arabs are equal parts of Israel’s democracy, that he can make statements that go against the interest and security of the state shows what a hyper-democracy Israel in fact is. As all this has unfolded, the thought I cannot shake is how much Israel’s Arabs deserve better. Odeh used the occ...
(JNS) — Sadly, it is again time to mourn for more murdered innocent Jews and pray for the wounded in Israel. On April 7, a Palestinian Arab gunman from Samaria slipped through a hole in the security fence, traveled to Tel Aviv, murdered three Israeli Jews and injured another 11 people, several of whom are fighting for their lives. The three who diedwere were Barak Lufan, 35, a father of three, Olympic kayaker, Paralympics coach and head Olympic kayaking team coach; Tomer Morad, 27, a recently graduated mechanical engineer; and Tomer’s rec...
(JNS) — According to the February annual Gallup poll of country favorability, 71 percent of Americans accord Israel a “very favorable” and “mostly favorable” rating. This matches Israel’s average favorability since 2013, compared to 58 percent in 2002, 71 percent in 2012, 69 percent in 2019 and 75 percent in February 2021. Israel’s all-time high favorability was in February 1991 (79 percent) in the aftermath of the January-February Iraqi Scud missiles striking Tel Aviv. Israel is ranked seventh among countries rated by Gallup, trailing Cana...
(JNS) — It turns out that The Atlantic magazine did a better job explaining the problem of disinformation than even those planning its recent conference on the subject held at the University of Chicago could have hoped. The magazine modestly described the event, titled “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy,” as “groundbreaking,” and in one sense, it was. It was hosted by an institution that is one of the pillars of the liberal Washington establishment and had a list of speakers that was filled with well-known talking heads regularly...
