Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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While international attention continues to focus on the Iranian nuclear program and diplomatic efforts to address it, the Israeli Navy's March 5 interception of an Iranian ship full of Syrian-made missiles bound for Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza sheds new light on other dimensions of the Islamic Republic's strategy. "The nuclear program is the fast mover in international discussions, but the delivery capabilities are extremely important," Ilan Berman, vice president of the American...
With the Winter Olympics underway in Sochi, Russia, the Jewish debate on the games mirrors the discourse taking place in the broader international and athletic communities. While some Jews say they view the games purely as sport-with social or political issues not factoring into their evaluation-not all can ignore Russia's controversial "gay propaganda" legislation, political detentions, allegations of Olympic corruption, and the recent terrorist threats against the games. "I personally don't...
When recent rabbinical school graduate Rabbi Benjamin Frankel began a part-time clerical position in 1923 working with students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), little could he have imagined that within less than a century, the small Jewish student program would balloon into a national and international organization with a presence at 550 colleges and universities. Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life is celebrating its 90th anniversary in November, the organiza...
As of 2005, German gynecologist Dr. Frank Hoffmann was no longer allowed to send women under the age of 50 to get mammograms without first finding a breast abnormality during his routine examination. Since some breast lumps can be very small, Hoffmann wasn’t certain he could discover something during the few minutes he had to spend with each patient. That’s when he decided to launch an innovative program, Discovering Hands, hoping to give blind women an opportunity for a life-changing car...
Shira Kaiserman remembers her 2010 Taglit-Birthright Israel trip like it was yesterday. While the New Yorker’s group was visiting Mount Herzl, the guide began to tell them the story of Hannah Senesh, an Israeli national heroine who was caught and killed by the Nazis after parachuting into Europe to help rescue Holocaust refugees in 1944. “As a woman you don’t really hear about a lot of modern-day Jewish women who made such a strong contribution to the Jewish people,” Kaiserman told JNS.org...
Twitter [has] agreed to release data identifying users to French authorities in response to a January ruling by a French court regarding anti-Semitic tweets posted last October under the hashtag #unbonjuif (#agoodjew). Users had jumped on the chance to tweet phrases like “a good Jew is a dead Jew,” ultimately forcing the French Jewish students’ union (UEJF) to file a lawsuit against Twitter for allowing that content to appear. [The] decision by Twitter was “a great victory in the fight against...
The script reads like this: Israel treats wounded Syrian refugees in its own hospitals. Syria produces a report alleging an “acute shortage of primary and tertiary health care services” in the Golan Heights region. A United Nations agency, citing the Syrian report rather than acknowledging Israel’s actions, condemns Israel. On the surface, this storyline contains several plot twists, but it is not surprising for Dr. Daniel Pipes, president and founder of the Middle East Forum. “The U.N. is a par...
Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), on June 4 is releasing his new book ‘Viral Hate: Containing Its Spread on the Internet,’ co-written with attorney Christopher Wolf, a pioneer in Internet law. The book discusses how racists and anti-Semites are using the Internet to disseminate their hateful information and poses tough questions about the responsibility of the public to fight against this phenomenon in the U.S., whose laws highly protect free speech. Fox...
CHICAGO—By the time Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Captain Ziv Shilon realized an explosive device had detonated near him while on patrol near the Gaza border, his left hand was torn off and his right hand was still hanging on by just a few pieces of skin. Ten surgeries and months of rehabilitation later, his left hand has been replaced by a hook prosthesis and his right hand is paralyzed. That’s not going to stop him, he insists. Despite his injury, Shilon plans to enroll in law school and to late...
Since the Boston Marathon explosions in April, the largely Muslim Russian territory of the North Caucasus has come back to the forefront via Chechnya, where the family of the Boston bombers’ father originated, and nearby Dagestan, the native land of the bombers’ mother. Flashbacks to the wars of the 1990s between Russia and Chechen separatists, and alerts of Islamic insurgency spilling out of Chechnya, appear more prominently in news outlets. Just a couple of weeks ago, a bomb exploded and kil...