Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JTA) - It seemed like the last keg had been tapped for Shmaltz Brewing Company, until a rabbi-in-training stepped in for a Jewish renewal project. The Jewish craft beer label, best known for its He'Brew: The Chosen Beer line of drinks, shut down last year after 25 years when its founder, Jeremy Cowan, said he wanted to focus on his other businesses. But now it's been sold to a new owner: Jesse Epstein, a 26-year-old Reform rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College who first got into home...
(JTA) — Bucking weeks of public pressure from Jewish groups, celebrities and the Brooklyn Nets, Amazon will not stop selling an antisemitic documentary on its service that was promoted by NBA star Kyrie Irving. The company’s CEO Andy Jassy, who is Jewish, said Wednesday that Amazon had no plans to remove or add a disclaimer to “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America,” whose Amazon link Irving ignited a firestorm by tweeting about it earlier this month. Amazon had previously considered whether to add a disclaimer. “As a retailer of content to...
(JTA) – At one point in John Boyne's new novel "All The Broken Places," a 91-year-old German woman recalls, for the first time, her encounter with a young Jewish boy in the Auschwitz death camp 80 years prior. "I found him in the warehouse one day. Where they kept all the striped pajamas," she said. The woman, Gretel, quickly realized her mistake: that "this was a phrase peculiar to my brother and me." She clarifies that she is referring to "the uniforms. ... You know the ones I mean." Boyne's r...
(JTA) – Birthright Israel is drastically cutting back on the number of free trips it plans to offer to Jewish young adults, scaling back its operations by up to a third, the organization announced Monday. The cuts come amid what the organization said is a mix of financial pressures: inflation, heightened travel expenses in a post-COVID world and dwindling fundraising support. It plans to make added appeals to its top donors but still expects to heavily reduce its Israel trips in 2023 to as few as 23,500 participants, down from 35,000 this y...
(JTA) – The foundation overseeing the rebuilding plans for the site of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh has selected its first director, and her aims are nothing less than the total end of antisemitism. Carole Zawatsky, a longtime veteran in Jewish nonprofit leadership, was announced as the first new Tree of Life CEO Tuesday. Her appointment came as the nonprofit, which includes a planned memorial, museum and education center, revealed its grand plans for what its leadership hop...
(JTA) – On "Saturday Night Live" last weekend, Dave Chappelle really wanted his audience to know there are a lot of Jews in Hollywood. "I've been to Hollywood, this is just what I saw," he said during his widely dissected monologue. "It's a lot of Jews. Like, a lot." While suggesting that it might not be fair to say Jews run the industry, the comedian said that coming to that conclusion is "not a crazy thing to think." Chappelle's "SNL" episode drew a season-high 4.8 million viewers when it aire...
(JTA) — Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” along with six books about the Holocaust geared toward young readers, are among the hundreds of books that a handful of school districts in Missouri have reportedly removed from their shelves since the start of this school year. The list of books pulled from shelves was published Wednesday by the literary free-expression advocacy group PEN America, along with a letter of protest signed by Spiegelman and other authors. “This is what happens when we are operating in a climate of fear,” Jonathan Friedman, P...
This piece contains spoilers. (JTA) – At the fancy private school where he has just started his first day, Jewish sixth-grader Paul Graff (Banks Repata) is asked by a major donor what his last name means. Sheepishly, he admits that it was shortened from the longer family name - one that ends in "-stein." The donor who asks him about it, sneering at his name, turns out to be none other than Fred Trump (John Diehl). The scene, filled with quiet menace, is a defining moment in "Armageddon Time," a...
(JTA) — Jewish groups thought Elon Musk was listening to them about antisemitism on Twitter. Then Kanye West came back. In the week after the rapper who now goes by Ye lost most of his endorsements due to his antisemitic rants, and amid an apparent uptick in broader antisemitic content on the platform, the Anti-Defamation League met with Musk, the social media giant’s mercurial new owner, about keeping hate speech off the site. Three days later, all goodwill from the meeting has devolved, as anti-Jewish content on Twitter is experiencing a “pr...
(JTA) — A feud between two Jewish bagel shop owners in Columbus, Ohio, has spilled out of the oven and into full public view, resulting in a lawsuit and restraining order. The Columbus Jewish News reports that the owner of Block’s Bagels, a local Jewish deli mainstay since 1967, last week sued former business partner Jeremy Fox, owner of the Fox’s Bagels & Deli chain, after the latter moved to rebrand two shops the parties had been operating jointly. In court earlier this week, the judge in the case ordered two Fox’s locations to continu...
(JTA) – Trish Adlesic was visiting her father in Pittsburgh on the day a gunman walked into the city's Tree of Life synagogue building and murdered 11 people. Almost immediately, the director started filming her surroundings with the aim of producing a documentary about the tragedy, bringing on a Tree of Life congregant, Eric Schuman, as an editor and producer. Drawing on her own experiences conducting "trauma-informed" interviews, Adlesic reached out to survivors hoping to create "a platform fo...
(JTA) - As rap star Kanye West continually refuses to back down from his antisemitic rants, some of the many institutions he has ties with have begun to jump ship. The fashion tastemakers Balenciaga and Vogue have announced they will no longer be working with him. Hollywood talent giant CAA has dropped him, and a planned documentary about him has been scrapped. But one formidable company remained, until recently, in West's corner: Adidas. Despite the German sportswear conglomerate's...
(JTA) - Three weeks after a prominent pro-Israel activist accused the University of California, Berkeley of creating "Jew-free zones," two trucks rolled into town to address the controversy. One of them displayed a massive picture of Adolf Hitler. "All in favor of banning Jews, raise your right hand," read the billboard on the side of the truck. The truck had been dispatched by a political advocacy group called Accuracy in Media, which has a history of finding ways to provoke liberals and progre...
(JTA) — Couscous lovers who frequent the grocery store Trader Joe’s may have noticed a change in the grain aisle: The chain’s brightly colored purple boxes of “Israeli Couscous” are now simply known as “Pearl Couscous.” The Nosher, a sister website to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, first reported the label change after word of it spread on the popular Facebook group Kosher Trader Joe’s. The move raised questions in the group about whether Trader Joe’s was trying to distance itself from Israel, a move that some companies have made for politica...
(JTA) - When Rabbi Rachel Timoner's dad Eli told his family of his decision to end his life, Rachel knew what would soon be asked of her: to officiate his funeral, something he had told her he wanted since she became ordained. This presented a challenge for Rachel, the senior rabbi at Brooklyn's Congregation Beth Elohim. Being her father's rabbi "wasn't what I wanted," she says in the new documentary, "Last Flight Home," which chronicles Eli's final days from the perspective of his family. The...
(JTA) – It seemed like a headline out of the 19th century: a warning of “Jew-free zones” at the University of California-Berkeley. That’s the phrase being employed by some prominent pro-Israel groups this week to describe a dispute at UC Berkeley’s law school, where nine student groups recently voted to adopt by-laws that state they will not invite any visiting speakers to campus who “hold views in support of Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine.” But is the “Jew-free” label accurate? Not according to Jewi...
(JTA) – Three Jewish women have sued to protest Kentucky’s restrictive abortion laws on religious freedom grounds, arguing that they violate Jewish teachings as to when life begins and place undue burdens on their ability to use in vitro fertilization to achieve pregnancy. The suit is at least the third religious freedom lawsuit to be filed by Jews against a state abortion restriction since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade this summer. It follows a synagogue’s challenge to Florida’s laws and a Jewish pro-choice group’s lawsuit i...
(JTA) — The holiest day of the Jewish calendar couldn’t come at a worse time for Michigan public schools this year. Yom Kippur falls on Oct. 5 — which is also the state’s “student count day,” the one day a year when the number of students who attend school determines how much that district will receive in state funds the following year. By Michigan law, count day is on the first Wednesday of October, and superintendents typically go to great lengths to entice students to attend. Districts have coaxed students to attend on the days using raffles...
(JTA) - In 1944, Faye Schulman, a young Jewish partisan, emerged from the forest into her hometown of Lenin, Poland, on a mission to burn houses the Nazis were using as their wartime offices. One of those houses, she soon discovered, was her own. As she wandered through her childhood home, she spied an old potato peeler still on the floor. Schulman thought of the rest of her family - already murdered by the Nazis by that point - and realized, even if she survived the war herself, that she would...
(JTA) - Israel's tourism minister has threatened a "diplomatic war" with travel site Booking.com over the company's decision this week to display a safety warning on any listings in Israeli-controlled territories in the West Bank. A Booking.com spokesperson told the Associated Press on Monday the company would implement the warning as a reaction to recent unrest in the region, which has included Palestinian attacks on Israeli citizens, attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank and Israeli military raids in the territory that...
(JTA) – The Anti-Defamation League says it will “launch a thorough review” of its educational content to address materials “misaligned with” the organization’s values after Fox News published a story accusing the anti-hate group of including “concepts from critical race theory” and “far-left ideas.” The ADL’s statement, released in response to a Fox News story published Wednesday afternoon, did not specify which of its freely available education materials were cause for review; nor did an additional ADL statement provided to the Jewish Telegra...
(JTA) – Riding a wave of tabloid notoriety after winning his highly publicized defamation lawsuit against ex-wife Amber Heard, Johnny Depp is planning to direct a biopic about a different troubled figure: the Jewish Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani. The "Pirates of the Caribbean" star is partnering with Oscar-winning actor Al Pacino to produce the film, which will be adapted from the 1979 play "Modigliani" by Dennis McIntyre. It will chronicle the life of the artist whose portraits and s...
(JTA) – CNN's Dana Bash has what she calls "a very, very Jewish response" to the question of why she's hosting a special for her network on antisemitism in America. "The bad news is there is antisemitism in America," Bash told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. "The good news is I work in a place that wants to shine a spotlight on it, and allow for an investigation into what is happening, why it's happening and what are the solutions." Bash, a member of Temple Micah in Washington, D.C., is the g...
(JTA) — The Texas school district that ordered a version of Anne Frank’s diary to be removed from its shelves last week says it has added the book back into its schools after igniting a media firestorm, as outside groups prepared to send hundreds of copies of the famed Holocaust text to the district. Keller Independent School District outside Fort Worth had returned “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” as of Friday, along with the Bible and a children’s graphic novel, the district told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The district al...
(JTA) – A school district in suburban Fort Worth, Texas, has ordered its librarians to remove an illustrated adaptation of “The Diary of Anne Frank” from their shelves and digital libraries, along with the Bible and dozens of other books that were challenged by parents last year. The book purge at the Keller Independent School District in Keller, Texas, was requested Tuesday by a district executive in an email, a copy of which was obtained by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. A copy of the email also circulated on social media. “By the end of...
