Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JTA) — It’s been days since Hurricane Helene struck her community, and the CEO of Jewish Greenville still doesn’t know who is OK and who still needs help. “It’s very much a crisis situation for many people here,” Courtney Tessler told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, about the Jewish community she serves in South Carolina’s upstate region. “Our focus right now is just confirming the safety and identifying the immediate needs,” she said. “Without power and without Internet, and with spotty cel...
(JTA) - The mayor of Muslim-majority Hamtramck, Michigan, has endorsed Donald Trump for president after meeting with him in private. The endorsement comes amid a wave of anger among local Muslims over the Biden-Harris administration's support for Israel. A recent poll from the Council on American-Islamic Relations found that Kamala Harris has the support of just 12 percent of Muslim voters in Michigan, compared to 18 percent for Trump and 40 percent for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, a harsh...
(JTA) - In 1993 the film critic Shawn Levy was working on a biography of Jerry Lewis when, sitting down with the comedian on his yacht, Levy gingerly asked him about "The Day the Clown Cried." Levy knew the film, Lewis' unreleased Holocaust movie, was likely to be a touchy subject for the legendary funnyman. Even so, the response was apoplectic. "I've never been yelled at like that in my entire life," Levy recalled to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency three decades later. He recited the string of...
(JTA) — The University of Maryland has revoked a permit for pro-Palestinian groups to hold an event on the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, following concerns from Jewish groups that such an event could glorify the Hamas killings. According to the campus Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, the planned event was a “vigil” to be held jointly with the school’s chapter of the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace. University President Darryll Pines announced the change in a letter to the school on Sunday, writing...
(JTA) — Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who injected outlandish comments about Jews into the national dialogue and also vocally supported Israel, suspended his campaign Friday and said he would support Donald Trump. Kennedy, who had previously run in the Democratic party and had gained attention in recent years as an anti-vaccine activist, dropped his bid Friday during an extended press conference in Phoenix, shortly before a scheduled Trump rally nearby. Kennedy’s lon...
(JTA) - A Russian court has sentenced the decorated Russian-Jewish writer Masha Gessen to eight years in prison in absentia over comments made about the country's conduct in the Ukraine war in 2022. The sentence makes Gessen at least the fifth prominent Jewish writer to be targeted by Russia for dissenting comments since the outbreak of war. Gessen, a New York Times columnist and former New Yorker writer who fled the Soviet Union as a teenager and has written and commented extensively on...
(JTA) - TV's most Jewish comedy has one more chance to grab some statues on its way out the door. The 12th and final season of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," Larry David's long-running HBO sitcom, was nominated for four Emmy awards Wednesday, including best comedy and best actor for David. Since premiering in 2000 the show has received a total of 55 Emmy nominations, but only two competitive wins (for directing and editing). David finally wrapped "Curb" in April with an appearance from his buddy Jerry...
(JTA) — Months after Jewish students and Hillel and Chabad staff lambasted the Anti-Defamation League’s “report cards” for campus antisemitism, the group has released an updated version. The new report cards — published this week, after nearly all schools had finished their academic year — incorporate seismic events on campus, such as the widespread and contentious pro-Palestinian encampment movement, but don’t contain major changes. Some schools went up a letter grade in how the ADL viewed their response to antisemitic incidents; ot...
(JTA) - They wanted to capture a growing Jewish generational divide over Israel. The Jewish makers of "Israelism" accomplished that - and then some. Over the last seven months, the documentary critiquing the American Jewish relationship to Israel has become something closer to a foundational text for the campus pro-Palestinian movement. It's been screened at more than 100 colleges, including several encampments. It has toured overseas and won support from an array of Jewish groups on the left,...
(JTA) — Columbia University has settled a lawsuit brought against it by a Jewish student alleging a hostile environment as a result of the pro-Palestinian encampment movement. The settlement is a major development in Jewish groups’ efforts to hold universities accountable in light of a reported increase in campus antisemitism since Oct. 7. As part of the settlement, Columbia has promised to provide walking escorts and safe campus entrances at all hours of the day, as well as accommodations for students who were unable to complete exams owi...
(JTA) — Pro-Palestinian encampment protesters at dozens of universities have called for their administrations to divest from Israel. But on two campuses, activists are asking their schools to split from organizations closer to home that they say are complicit in Israeli crimes. At Drexel University in Philadelphia and the University of California, Santa Cruz, pro-Palestinian protesters have demanded their universities cut ties with, or “terminate” the presence of, the schools’ Hillel chapters. The Drexel protesters also demand that the univers...
(JTA) – The student encampment at Cornell University is disbanding, in a rare instance of a campus pro-Palestinian protest dissolving on its own. Encampments at a series of other schools have ended only after schools made agreements with protesters or called in police. Police action has led to thousands of arrests, chaotic scenes of violence and accusations of suppressing free speech. Agreements with protesters have incurred the wrath of many in the organized Jewish community, who argue that the encampments should face consequences for e...
(JTA) — Pulitzer Prizes were awarded to reports on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that have become steeped in controversy since their publication, including a nonfiction book by Jewish author Nathan Thrall and breaking-news reporting and photography of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks by Reuters and The New York Times. The Pulitzer board also presented a special citation to journalists covering the war from Gaza, noting that “an extraordinary number have died” while doing so. Thrall, a Bard College professor based in Jerusalem whose work is often h...
(JTA) — Last fall, Mo Husseini wrote a series of propositions — what he called “50 Completely True Things” — about the Israel-Hamas war and posted it on the social media site Threads. Identifying himself as “a Palestinian American who is tired of stupid people,” Husseini set out to puncture myths on both sides of the conflict, suggesting that neither Palestinians nor Israelis had a monopoly on truth, justice or the moral high ground. “This isn’t an essay in Foreign Affairs, you know? This is an idiot shit posting on the internet in tryin...
(New York Jewish Week) – Columbia University announced Monday that it would be canceling its commencement ceremony following weeks of pro-Palestinian protest, campus turmoil and hundreds of student arrests. Beginning nearly three weeks ago, the pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia sparked a protest movement at dozens of campuses across the country. The Ivy League school, like other colleges, has struggled to contain the demonstrators. “These past few weeks have been incredibly difficult for our community,” Columbia said in a statement Monda...
(JTA) – A pro-Palestinian protest at Yale University allegedly turned violent with dozens of arrests. The University of Southern California canceled all its planned commencement speakers. Encampments have sprung up at campuses from Boston to Ann Arbor and Chapel Hill. It’s not just Columbia. The unrest that has overtaken the Ivy League university in New York City, and upended life for Jewish students and everyone else, is spilling over into the rest of the country. The spread of the demonstrations is being promoted and celebrated by pro...
(JTA) – A Holocaust research center founded by Steven Spielberg has gotten embroiled in a drama over campus Israel speech that is dividing the University of Southern California, where it is housed. The USC Shoah Foundation is downplaying its role in the school’s academics after the university’s valedictorian, a pro-Palestinian student who earned a minor in “resistance to genocide,” touted her ties to the center. After USC announced last week that Asna Tabassum would be the valedictorian, pro-Israel groups mounted a campaign against her, citi...
(JTA) – A school district in suburban Virginia is drawing backlash for announcing that middle school students could opt out of a talk by a Holocaust survivor on Monday. Critics of the school connected the announcement with widespread reports of spiking antisemitism in K-12 schools following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war. But the school and the local Jewish Community Relations Council denied those claims, later announcing that the opt-out was specifically intended to help Jewish students. Fairfax County Public Schools, in a populous a...
(JTA) – Authorities in Newton, Massachusetts, said they are investigating a string of seven recent instances of vandalism targeting homes with pro-Israel signs as individual hate crimes. In one incident this week, more than 100 posters displaying Israeli hostages who are being held in Gaza were destroyed, in what the Jewish homeowners said had been a site of communal memory since shortly after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Most of the reported incidents in the heavily Jewish Boston suburb over the past month involve the defacement or removal...
(JTA) - Early in the new drama "Origin," the Pulitzer Prize-winning Black author Isabel Wilkerson (played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) calls her cousin from Berlin to share that, as part of her research into American racism, she intends to learn more about the Nazis' treatment of Jews. Her cousin is unimpressed. "Leave Jewish folks alone," Marion (Niecy Nash) advises Isabel. "They don't need you. Write about us." But this movie's version of Wilkerson can't abide by that. In her mind, the fates of...
(JTA) – The year’s biggest movie phenomenon was a one-two punch of blockbusters with Jewish roots — and they both came up big at Tuesday’s Oscar nominations. “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s biopic of the Jewish “father of the atomic bomb,” led the year’s nominations with 13, including best picture and director, and is favored by many prognosticators to win the big prize. The film’s rendition of J. Robert Oppenheimer covers a fair amount of Jewish ground, including his personal animus toward the Nazis; his recruitment of expelled European...
(JTA) – A federal judge in Iowa has blocked much of a state law forbidding school libraries from stocking books depicting “sex acts,” in part because he said it was keeping a classic Holocaust memoir off shelves. U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Locher granted a preliminary injunction against the law, Iowa Senate File 496, on Friday, just before a Jan. 1 deadline for schools to begin enforcing it. The “staggeringly broad” law, he wrote in his opinion, would prevent public schools from stocking “non-fiction history books about the Holocaust....
(JTA) – Harvard University President Claudine Gay has resigned in the wake of plagiarism allegations and months-long criticism of her response to allegations of antisemitism at the school. Gay is the second Ivy League university president to step down following congressional testimony on campus antisemitism last month that drew intense criticism. University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill resigned her post on Dec. 9. Gay had also faced criticism over the school's initial statement on Hamas'...
(JTA) — A global bestseller by a Jewish Holocaust victim; a novel by a beloved and politically conservative Jewish American writer; a memoir of growing up mixed-race and Jewish; and a contemporary novel about a high-achieving Jewish family are among the nearly 700 books a Florida school district removed from classroom libraries this year in fear of violating state laws on sexual content in schools. The purge of books from Orange County Public Schools, in Orlando, over the course of the past semester is the latest consequence of a conservative m...
(JTA) - The bright, colorful movie musical "The Color Purple," which opens in theaters on Christmas, tells a story that has by now become a familiar part of the American canon - of a young Black woman's self-empowerment and discovery of her own sexuality amid the horrific, abusive conditions of her life in the early-1900s rural South. It's far from the first time Americans have heard the story of Celie, the protagonist of Alice Walker's novel "The Color Purple." Walker's novel debuted in 1982...
