Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 890 - 914 of 3730
(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...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — “Zionism is racism” is indeed a pernicious lie. Propagation of this lie has led to both random and organized violence against Jewish people and the marginalization of Jews in their respective nations, from the Soviet Union to Great Britain. Should the claim that Zionism is akin to racism, white nationalism and Nazism penetrate mainstream American circles, it would be a crisis for our community. It would be used to justify hatred against us, isolate us from progressive movements and imperil our status as prote...
(JNS) Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) recently tweeted to her eight million Twitter followers that the U.S. should cut aid to Israel. “It has to stop,” she said, claiming without evidence that the IDF killed Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh “with U.S. funding.” It is worth pointing out that a large number of war reporters — including some from Al Jazeera — have been killed or wounded on the job. It’s a risky career path. But few have been mentioned in such fervent terms by congressmen and congresswomen. When Israel is involved, it...
(JNS) — For the past three months, I have resisted the urge to write about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was just too disturbing. Covid wasn’t bad enough, so we needed a war too? War is ugly, cruel, terrible and barbaric. I have watched the genocide and devastation of Ukraine along with everybody else. I am sickened and distressed by it like everybody else. And I am most disturbed because I see very few diplomatic efforts to end the war. I ask myself, as Michael Goodwin put it in the New York Post, “Are we on the verge of sleep...
(JNS) — The May 24 slaughter of 19 children and two adults at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, provided fresh ammunition for the rhetorical and ideological battle over gun control. Combatants in this ongoing war tend to be diehards on the left and right. The former hold firearms and those who champion the constitutional right to bear them responsible for such horrific acts of violence. The latter hail the Second Amendment and support the National Rifle Association, which backs the right of law-abiding citizens to defend t...
On the day when the shooting happens, I finally unlock what some say is the most vital part of the American dream. My husband and I have a house in the suburbs now, big trees towering above — no picket fence, but a wide expanse of green and room for the pattering of tiny feet. As we sign the paperwork, we each take turns rocking our baby on our legs. This house is for our children. We say it over and over again. If it were just he and I, we would be content with the walls of a small Brooklyn apartment, with the city streets as a backyard. I...
(JNS) — Conspiracy theories cast a shadow over the 75th World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the World Health Organization (WHO), as hundreds of health officials and diplomats converged on Geneva last week. One of the assembly’s key goals—to draft a new agreement that would “strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response”—opened the U.N.-affiliated world body to accusations that it was attempting to usurp national governments’ powers to make health decisions. The conspiracy caught fire online as cultural, media and pol...
Dear Editor: Listening to the man who lost us Afghanistan along with the 13 dead American soldiers and the loss of 80 billion dollars in armaments, I felt sick to my stomach while he spoke at Arlington Cemetery on Memorial Day. The man has no shame. Hunter Biden’s lap top almost never existed with all the pornography and the evidence of the Biden Crime Family with Joe as the Big Man that we have a criminal speaking to the nation on this hallowed day. He’s not ashamed of what he’s doing to our nation to make it weaker than our enemies both...
Dear Editor: I had the opportunity to pick up the May 13, 2022 issue of Heritage. Not having read it in many months, I was impressed at the many articles, which were on top of critical issues facing Jews in America today. One article, however, raised more questions for me than it answered: “What do Jews say about abortion?” by Phillissa Cramer via JTA Cramer does not explain what overturning Roe v. Wade means. “Jewish women in dozens of states will almost certainly become unable to access care that they might well decide is required relig...
(JNS) — Resolutions proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives mean nothing. They give members an opportunity to pay lip service to various causes favored by their constituents but don’t commit the government to action. They are almost always not worth noticing. But every once in a while, a resolution is put forward that demands attention. This week that is exactly what happened when Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) proposed House Resolution 1123, “Recognizing the Nakba and Palestinian Refugee Rights.” The word nakba means “catast...
(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...
