Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS) — Diaspora Jews worry about how to deal with the current tsunami of antisemitism that is washing through the world. They also worry about how to deal with the anti-Zionism and demonization of Israel that are now the default position for “progressives” in the West. Most painful of all, they observe with horror that Jews themselves are increasingly involved in the onslaught against Israel. However, there’s a problem that’s even more fundamental to the well-being of the Jewish people. It’s that Diaspora Jews are increasingly turning awa...
When he took the oath of office, Governor Ron DeSantis promised to be the most pro-Israel governor in the nation and he has delivered. Our governor has proven time and time again his commitment to combatting antisemitism and standing with Florida’s Jewish communities. Governor DeSantis allocated millions of dollars to guard and protect Jewish schools, synagogues, and other institutions all across Florida. He has also worked to ensure the next generation of Floridians never forget the evils of the Holocaust. Fighting antisemitism in Florida ...
(JNS) — From the moment it began operations, the left-wing lobby J Street’s assertion that it’s mantra of “pro-Israel and pro-peace” better represented the true sentiments of American Jews than the position of mainstream groups was disingenuous. While its leader, Jeremy Ben-Ami, claimed that the new organization’s efforts provided a way for Americans to support peace in the Middle East, its goals were really always more about the politics of the United States than that of the Jewish state. That has been never more apparent than lately as J...
(JNS) — In an interview last week at the White House with Israeli Channel 12’s Yonit Levi, U.S. President Joe Biden reiterated his administration’s desire to return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran from which his predecessor, Donald Trump, withdrew in 2018. “The only thing worse than the Iran that exists now is an Iran with nuclear weapons,” he said during the one-on-one chat that was taped on the eve of his trip to the Middle East and broadcast in Israel after his arrival in the country. “And if w...
(JNS) — The Community Security Trust, an organization in the United Kingdom that prevents and records anti-Semitism, found a worrying spike in anti-Semitic activity last May and June, when some pro-Palestinian campaigners verbally and physically assaulted Jews. This was during and after Israel’s 11-day conflict with Hamas in the Gaza Strip when the terror group launched more than 4,000 rockets into civilian areas in Israel. Violence was also incited by the Palestinian Authority, whose leaders incited widespread violence in Jerusalem and cities...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — While much of the conversation around Israel revolves around its conflict with the Palestinians, the BDS movement against the Jewish state, Iran’s nuclear threat and political elections that never end, there’s a whole other story that doesn’t get much attention: Israel is becoming a country for humanity. That thought was on my mind this week after spending time in Jerusalem with my friend Jonathan Medved, who runs an innovation investment platform called Our Crowd. Over a late afternoon coffee at the King David H...
On March 26, 2022, with much fanfare and staging in the Polish capital of Warsaw and with the whole world watching, the President of the United States and the leader of the Free World, made a speech which can only be described as, employing the Shakespearean line, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” In October of 2021, when the Russians were increasing their verbal and actual threats directed to Ukraine, and were increasing their military buildup along several strategic points along the Ukrainian border, including Ukraine’s share...
(JTA) — It’s been over 20 years since my predecessor as editor of the New York Jewish Week, Gary Rosenblatt, first exposed the predations of Rabbi Baruch Lanner. His powerful investigation led Lanner’s bosses at the Orthodox Union to issue a report describing the sexual, physical and emotional abuse carried out by Lanner against dozens of teenagers in his charge. It’s been exactly 20 years since Lanner was convicted of sexually assaulting students at a Jewish high school in New Jersey. It’s been 14 years since Lanner, then 58, was released afte...
(Israel Hayom via JNS) — President Biden, an American president’s visit to our country is always a day of celebration. It is an authentic expression of the sense of closeness between our two peoples and the brave partnership between our two countries. This friendship does not depend on our leaders’ identities or party affiliations, and takes precedence over any dispute. The special relationship between our countries is multifaceted and serves common interests, but it is also based on common values—our commitment to democracy, liberty, justice...
(JNS) — On the eve of President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel and Saudi Arabia, Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the left-wing lobby J Street — which bills itself as “pro-Israel” and “pro-peace”— advised the president to “address the coming crisis between Israel and Palestine.” Writing in The Washington Post, Ben-Ami expressed concern for the Palestinians alone. They are, he claimed, burdened by occupation, violence, injustice, settler violence, demolitions, evictions, annexation and so on. Out of the entire article, six words pointed a finger at...
(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...
