Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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As many of you know, almost two years ago Rachel and I moved to New Orleans. As you also probably know, we lost her a little over a year ago to dementia. And, the “Let the Good Times Roll” city shut down shortly after we arrived due to Covid. Well, times change. For the first time in two years the town opened up for Mardi Gras and the Good Times are rolling once again. The question for me again was, okay — what now? I had that same question when we came to Orlando from Cleveland. My first project was to build and create a radio station, which...
(JTA) — Seventy-nine years ago this month, crowds twice filled Madison Square Garden for a pageant, “We Will Never Die,” meant to draw attention to the slaughter of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis. Screenwriter Ben Hecht organized the spectacle and wrote the script; German refugee composer Kurt Weill wrote the score. A young Marlon Brando had a leading role. Two million Jews had already been killed. The performance included the lines, “No voice is heard to cry halt to the slaughter, no government speaks to bid the murder of human millions end. But...
(JTA) — After decades of fearing that we would forget the horrors of our recent past, I am starting to fear the opposite possibility: that we Jews remember our history all too well but feel powerless to act on its lessons. The Russian invasion of Ukraine invites analogies to our traumatic past. History begs us to learn from what came before. These analogies to the past are never perfect. Seeing analogies between past and present does not mean we think that anything that happened in the past would be identical to anything happening in the p...
(JNS) — The news coming out of Russia these days sounds taken from a particularly gloomy dystopian novel, or perhaps from the Soviet era. The state — far from a model of democracy to begin with — has deteriorated in a matter of weeks into a genuine dictatorship, punishing citizens not just for their actions, but for their thoughts. Employees who refuse to support the invasion of Ukraine are fired. Students who do not support Putin’s “special operation” are expelled. Border control agents check the phones of Russians heading overseas fo...
(JNS) — Speaking after the recent meeting of the Palestinian National Council, its deputy chairman, Ali Faisal, clarified that there is a binding Palestinian decision to “renounce… all agreements with Israel.” He added that from the point of view of the Palestinian leadership, the Palestinians “have entered a path of resistance in all its forms”—a phrase that clearly includes the use of violence and terror. “The decision of the [Palestinian] National Council was a recommendation to the [PLO] Central Council to renounce all the commitments of...
(JTA) — I’ve always believed in living life to the fullest. When you grow up with a disability, you are faced with a choice of whether or not to let it define you as a person. People often find it easy to say no to someone with a disability, “no, we can’t accommodate that, no we aren’t set up for that,” and so on. But I always wanted to hear “yes, don’t worry, we’ll find a way.” I grew up in Montgomery County, Maryland, just north of Washington, D.C. When I was seven years old, a close friend of my parents was running for the Maryland House...
Russian President Vladimir Putin justified his current invasion of Ukraine by asserting the country needed to be denazified. It was a rather odd assertion, to say the least. Ukraine is led by a proud, democratically-elected Jew, Volodymyr Zelensky, chosen by nearly three-quarters of the voters in 2019. Meanwhile, Ukrainian Jews were enjoying a vibrant religious and communal life until the Russian assault, and the government had adopted one of the toughest measures anywhere against antisemitism. Ironically, this was a perfect example of “the p...
(JNS) — When responding to global crises, states must balance the tensions that arise between their moral values and strategic interests. The recent conflict between Russia and the West has seemingly cornered Israel into a thorny dilemma between protecting its immediate interests vis-à-vis Moscow and its moral obligation to align with other democratic states that have united against President Vladimir Putin’s demolition of international norms. From a moral and values perspective, there is no doubt which side Israel must be on. Ukrainian soci...
As Russia has invaded Ukraine my feelings are mixed, contradictory, and contradictory to that of many others. For me, and many Jews, anything regarding Ukraine brings with it thought of our history and persecution there. In modern times we recall Babi Yar where 34,000 Jews were murdered in Kiev over three days in September 1941. The Nazis orchestrated and many Ukrainians were enthusiastic partners. Ukraine was part of the Pale of Settlement, the area in which Jews were permitted to live, meaning that we were prevented from living in the rest...
(JNS) — “Promise me, Danny, that you will always believe more in the threats of our enemies than in the promises of our allies.” Those were the words of the late Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel as he held my hands tightly at one of my final meetings with him in my role as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. The very tragic situation in which Ukraine finds itself must be a lesson to all of us, and for Israel, above all. I took on board Elie’s comment then, and I believe him more than ever now. Assurances from the international community...
(JNS) — Ever since biblical times, the people of Israel have had to navigate the harsh terrain between clashing global powers. Now, here we are again, in Ukraine, having to maneuver between Russia and the West. The terrain this time around is exceedingly difficult, with significant security and ethical pitfalls along the way. On one hand, our security situation requires us to keep all channels with Russia open. For the past seven years, ever since Russian forces entered the Syrian civil war, the IDF has managed to avoid any head-on c...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — The conventional wisdom is that Vladimir Putin’s naked aggression toward Ukraine is taking us back to more primitive times. Indeed, for most of human history, it was raw power that ruled. If a tyrant wanted something, he just took it. The establishment of international norms and institutions in the wake of World War II was an attempt to regulate and minimize this gratuitous application of power. It didn’t always work, of course, but at least there was a sense that the world was headed in a more civilized direc...
(JNS) — The onslaught against Ukraine by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is a horrific tragedy for all Ukrainians as well as a crisis for Europe and the west in general. Nevertheless, for the Jewish people, it has special and deeply troubling resonance. During the Holocaust, an estimated 1.2 million to 1.4 million Ukrainian Jews were slaughtered. Volodymyr Zelensky, the country’s heroic president who is inspiring its resistance, is a Jew who lost relatives in that cauldron. Now Ukraine’s Jewish community, which carries a long history of trau...
You’re aware of the phrase “history repeating itself” but I want to share a story of how history is being turned upside-down as millions of Ukrainians try to flee the Russian siege of their country. It’s especially appropriate to do so from a Jewish perspective, and especially this month as we celebrate Purim, commemorating the salvation of the Jewish people in ancient Persia, at a time when all Jews were threatened with murder by the evil Haman, a plot that was also turned around. As recounted in the Book of Esther, rather than the Jewish...
(JTA) — Jared Armstong has an emotional story to tell, and he told it in an oped I edited last week for our opinion section (Heritage ran it last week as an article). Armstrong made headlines recently when the Israeli government refused his application for citizenship. Armstrong, a recent college graduate from Philadelphia, says he grew up Jewish, as did his mother. His grandmother, he said, embraced Judaism as an adult. For all those reasons he was shocked when Israel’s Foreign Ministry rejected his initial application for aliyah, but he agr...
(JNS) — A New York congressman has withdrawn his support for a pro-Israel bill, saying that J Street, which labels itself as the “home of pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans” convinced him to change his position. This development reveals a great deal about the reasons for the ongoing tension between American Jewish critics of Israel and the rest of the Jewish community. The congressman in question is Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a first-term Democrat who represents a district that covers part of New York City (the north Bronx) and much of Westchester Count...
(JNS) — Let’s face it: The raging debate about Jews having white privilege is a bit absurd. Jews are basically a historical Rorschach depiction of a people. In other words, we take the form; we are regarded through the eyes of those who perceive us. For most of the past two millennia, Jews were certainly not regarded as being like other people. In Europe, we were first the Christ-rejectors/killers who per Augustine, were being kept around in order to bear witness to our own degradation and supersession by the Church. Not too much privilege ther...
(JNS) — On Feb. 24, 2020, former Indian Supreme Court justice Deepak Gupta delivered a lecture to the Bar arguing that “the right to dissent is the most important right granted by the Constitution.” Gupta took the ancient idea of challenging authority and gave it dignity: “To question, to challenge, to verify, to ask for accountability from the government is the right of every citizen under the constitution,” he said. “These rights should never be taken away otherwise we will become an unquestioning moribund society, which will not be able to...
(JTA) — If I have learned anything over the past month, it is that racist tropes are not harmless words. They must be actively and consistently challenged. You know them and so do I. The racist tropes peddled about Jewish people are plentiful. What you may not know is that antisemitic tropes caused my friends and me to be held hostage at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas. Our Shabbat morning service on Jan. 15 began normally. I had just sat down after the morning Amidah. Within a few seconds, I heard that unmistakable sound of a...
Dear Editor: It is interesting, though nauseating, to read about the “spiritual leader” (Presbyterian) who hates Jews and Israel (accusing the Jewish State of slavery); Amnesty International who finds no country other than the Jewish State needing their concern; and the Anti-Defamation League who hires an outspoken antisemite for “outreach purposes.” The first two are well-funded and known enemies of the Jewish people. The third is an organization that merely tabulates anti-Jewish activities but initiates nothing that would signifi...
(JNS) — It’s difficult to know where exactly the crisis over a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine will end. Yet no matter whether Russian President Vladimir Putin seizes more of the former Soviet satellite nation, conquers it entirely or winds up leaving it alone, the shock to the international system that his threats have caused isn’t limited to the future of Eastern Europe. That’s not easy for many Americans to comprehend. The reaction to the possibility of a country whose independence was guaranteed less than 30 years ago by both the Uni...
(JNS) — In an interview published on Wednesday, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Thomas Nides again used his phony assertion that he is “trying not to do things to agitate people” as a pretext for boycotting (“not visiting”) Jewish communities in the lawful and historic Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria where more than 500,000 or almost 10 percent of Israel’s Jews live. The only people who are “not agitated” by Nides’ boycott are the terrorist dictatorship of the Palestinian regime, Israel-haters and Jew-haters and extremist leftists. Yet his...
Poor Whoopi Goldberg performed “Foot-in-Mouth” once again. The argument (only maybe three centuries old) is about antisemitism. When is it real? When is it imagined? Now, poor Whoopi added some fuel to the fire. And as such things do, here we are weeks later and people are still all over her and the subject. She said: “Antisemitism is not about Race, it’s about man’s inhumanity to man.” Okay – so? What is Race? Well, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, Race is pretty much a matter of personal choice – BUT divided along Color lines. When it...
(JNS) — According to an old Israeli quip, the way to remove 500 Canadians from a swimming pool at closing time is to whisper, “Everybody out of the water, please.” The implication is both clear and amusing to each group. Israelis are famous for and proud of being disobedient and unruly; Canadians are considered and view themselves as well-mannered and orderly. But the joke, apparently, is on all concerned, now that the latter’s truckers have entered the picture. These guys aren’t exiting the proverbial premises with a subservient bow. On the co...
(JTA) — Is it appropriate to call an ancient rabbi a “legendary hottie”? To translate one Talmudic voice replying to another as, “Oh my God, what the actual f–k is wrong with you, you misogynistic ageist dips–t”? Miriam Anzovin, an ex-Orthodox artist in Boston, ignited debate over those questions this week after making headlines in both North America and Israel for her series of TikTok videos responding to passages in the Talmud, the central text of rabbinic Judaism. Anzovin’s way of talking about Talmud has been shocking for some. “This is...
