Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JTA)—The “fear itself” thing? FDR was on to something. The rash of JCC bomb threats and cemetery desecrations, combined with a general sense that the country is becoming more intolerant, has Jews on edge in ways they haven’t been in years. The head of a major American Jewish organization wrote to me that the recent outbreak of anti-Semitic activity “is the worst America has seen since the 1930s.” (It’s not.) Ronald Lauder of the World Jewish Congress has declared that “in recent weeks and months we have witnessed an unprecedented a...
(JTA)-Last year I joined some 3,000 people at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark for a wide-screen showing of Mel Brooks' 1974 Western parody "Blazing Saddles." In the onstage interview that followed, Brooks, then 89, was beside himself in his delight at sharing his 42-year-old comedy with a real live audience. There was only one awkward moment in a joyous and hilarious evening, and it came when Brooks asked if anyone in the audience actually lived in Newark. One person, in the...
(JTA)—Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign never recovered after he was caught on video telling a group of millionaires that 47 percent of Americans will always vote for Democrats because they don’t take “personal responsibility” for their lives and are “dependent upon government.” The incident has become a case study not only in watching one’s words (and being nice to your waiters), but in spin control. Hammered by the media and the Democrats for sounding elitist and insulting half the country, Romney first blamed the listeners, sayi...
(JTA)—Last week Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) said that if Hillary Clinton asked him to be her running mate, he’d take the job. “If Hillary Clinton came to me and said, ‘Al, I really need you to be my vice president, to run with me,’ I would say yes, but I’m very happy in the job that I have right now.” Although Franken, 64, has spent seven years in the Senate and proven himself to be a conscientious lawmaker—championing decidedly unfunny issues like health insurance, mental health services in schools and net neutrality—some still find it har...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—I am trying to imagine a conversation between Donald Trump’s people and a delegation of Reform rabbis and lay leaders. Rabbi Jonah Pesner, the Reform movement’s man in Washington, told me that Trump’s people have agreed to a “staff-to-staff” meeting to discuss Jewish concerns about Trump’s policies on immigration, Muslims and women, to name a few. Pesner hopes it is the start of a long process of repentance—“teshuvah,” in Hebrew—for the real estate mogul and Republican front-runner. “Teshuvah is not a quick thing,” Pesner to...
Two of my favorite television shows are about what I think it’s fair to call the “New America.” In Master of None, on Netflix, Indian-American comedian Aziz Ansari plays a struggling actor in a very real and recognizable New York. His best friend is the son of Chinese immigrants. His girlfriend is white. And the plots have revolved, pointedly but never heavy-handedly, around the portrayal of minorities in mainstream media, and the struggles of immigrants chasing the American dream. In Transparent, on Amazon, an alarmingly and hilariously dysfu...
December 22, 2015 I didn’t cry when I first saw the Western Wall, but I bawled like a baby when I first visited Ellis Island. I thought about this over the weekend as I watched Brooklyn, director John Crowley’s emotionally devastating adaptation of Colm Toibin’s 2009 novel about an Irish woman who comes to the United States as an immigrant in the early 1950s. I cried when she said goodbye to her mother and sister at the docks in Ireland. I cried when she passed through a door into her new world. Mostly, I cried over each of the kindnesses paid...
From the attacks in Paris to the deadly toll of terror in Israel, events of the past week have reminded us of the wide gap between Jews and the rest of the world. As if we needed any reminding. Following the rampage in Paris, which left over 140 dead, Jewish organizations, Israeli officials, and everyday Jews rushed to condemn the murders and express their solidarity with the people of France. Friends adopted the Tricolorefilter on their Facebook pages; the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City were illuminated in blue, white, and red. But even in s...
Let’s assume—despite evidence that polling on the issue was at best “quick and dirty,” according to one prominent analyst—that the Jewish establishment was out of step with most American Jews in opposing the Iran agreement. And let’s agree with other polls suggesting American Jews as a whole are to the left of the biggest Jewish organizations, especially, if not exclusively, when it comes to Israel. Who cares? Various op-eds lamenting this gap note that the Jewish vote remains overwhelmingly Democratic and that most American Jews support rev...
The history of Jewish democracy is scattered with congresses, parliaments, unions, councils, sejms, and kahals—all attempts to govern or speak for an unruly body of people who shared a common culture but lacked genuine political autonomy. Various groups claim to speak for the “community,” but they tend to be membership organizations that can only pretend to be broadly democratic. Federations, the North American Jewish fund-raising umbrellas, stake a claim to this territory, with some justification: Like governments, they collect revenue (in t...
There’s a lovely Jewish tradition of honoring the dead by engaging in Torah study. You can devote any number of mitzvot in the memory of the departed, but studying Torah is said to have particular mystical power. Tradition says it elevates the neshama, or soul, of the dead, helping them reach a higher connection to God in the world to come. I can’t vouch for what happens in the world to come, but I can testify to the power of study for those of us left behind. Group Torah study creates a particularly intimate fellowship, where both vet...
I always had a soft spot for the comedian Anne Meara, in large part because she looked a lot like my mother, of blessed memory. Similar cheek bones, the wide smile, a deep dimple in her left cheek. My mother was usually there, too, on her side of the striped love seat, when we’d watch Meara and her comedy partner and husband Jerry Stiller on a talk or variety show in the 1960s and ’70s—Carson, or Mike Douglas, or Ed Sullivan (where the pair were said to have performed 36 times). So it felt sort of personal when Meara died last week at age 8...
At some point in the life of the average adult, the conversation shifts from “How are the kids?” to “What’s happening with your parents?” If you’re lucky, you can talk about two silver-haired retirees, enjoying their relative good health, their Road Scholar vacations, and their time with the grandkids. But no matter how lucky you or they are, the conversations will one day become less pleasant and more fraught. Mom or dad will inevitably decline, and you’ll start to talk about “options”: perhaps an aide to help around the house, or maybe a...
I once heard a rabbi, a noted proponent of a Greater Israel, make a plea to his congregation for bipartisan empathy. This was just a few years after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, when both the Right’s dreams for an unchecked settlement movement and the Left’s dreams of a two-state solution appeared dashed. “Friends,” he said, “whether we are on the right or the left, I think we can all agree that our dreams have died.” “Except,” whispered a left-leaning friend, “his dream killed my dream.” That’s the problem when rabbis talk about Isr...
On Monday night I clicked over from a nail-biting, extra-innings Mets game to CNN’s coverage of the crisis in Israel. In short: Mets win, Israel loses. While SNY.tv kept showing a did-he, didn’t-he replay of a disputed play at second, CNN looped a video of the beating of an Arab-American teen by two Israeli police. It’s awful to watch: The boy is being held down by one helmeted cop, his hands apparently cuffed behind his back, while another aims swift kicks at his torso and head. It’s painful to admit that this wasn’t even the worst blow to I...
During the wedding scene in Fiddler on the Roof, Perchik, the student revolutionary, breaks with tradition by crossing from the men’s side to the women’s side to dance with Tevye’s daughter Hodel. On stage it plays like a breakthrough; even the rabbi joins in the mixed dancing. So each time I see the film, why do I want to yell, “Don’t do it, Perchik!” I should explain. I am not an Orthodox Jew. I am a committed egalitarian. I belong to a synagogue where men and women have the same opportunities on the bima, in the pews, and in the study hall....
n 1906, Abraham Cahan was looking to boost the circulation of the Forward, the Yiddish daily that he edited. Warheit, a rival for the affections of Yiddish-speaking immigrants, had begun to publish letters from readers seeking advice. Not to be outdone, Cahan began publishing readers’ letters, but with a twist: He would answer them himself. Cahan was a novelist, a political activist, and an all-around man of letters. You might think that writing advice for the lovelorn or comforting lonely immigrants might have seemed beneath him. But Cahan h...
In Woody Allen’s Sleeper, the hero wakes up from cryogenic sleep to find out a war has wiped out the world as he knew it. “Over 100 years ago,” a doctor tells him, “a man named Albert Shanker got a hold of a nuclear warhead.” Allen knew this incredibly specific joke would kill in 1970s New York, where it was easy to imagine that Armageddon would be launched by the fiery, bespectacled, Jewish leader of the New York City teachers’ union. The joke came to mind when I read how casino mogul, Jewish benefactor, and Republican bankroller Sheldon Ade...
Above all, [the new Pew survey of American Jews] vindicates a thesis championed by the late sociologist Gary Tobin. He argued that calling up a random stranger and asking right off the bat about their religion is a sure way to get a false reading. Many people regard the matter as private. That will be especially true of Jews.... Well, the Pew folks say they started off by asking respondents about the quality of life in their neighborhoods and then came around to bringing up religion...—J.J. Goldberg, writing in The Forward Caller One: Hello, c...
In the museum attached to Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, there is an exhibit called “Free2Choose.” Videos pose various scenarios: Should YouTube ban Holocaust denial? Should public schools allow Muslim girls to wear head scarves? The visitors are asked to vote, and the tallies are projected on a screen. “There are many lessons to be learned from the past,” the museum guidebook explains. “The fate of Anne Frank, as well as the millions of other victims of the Nazis, shows that violating human rights can have far-reaching effects.” But there i...
My second-favorite joke about Jewish newspapers takes place in New York in the 1930s. Two Jews are sitting on a bench; Leo is reading the Yiddish paper, Morris is reading the Nazi tabloid Der Sturmer. Leo glares at his friend, asking, “How can you read that Nazi rag?” Unabashed, Morris asks, “What’s your Jewish newspaper reporting? In America, there is a depression going on and the Jews are assimilating. In Palestine, the Arabs are killing Jews. In Germany, they’ve taken away all our rights. You read it and just get more and more depressed. “Yo...
“Of making many lists there is no end, and much blogging wearies the eyeballs.” Ecclesiastes doesn’t say that, exactly—but might have had the author lived to see the proliferation of lists ranking the most influential rabbis and other Jews. The latest entry in an increasingly crowded market is the Jerusalem Post’s “50 Most Influential Jews.” According to the newspaper, its honorees have “a proven record of incredible political, social, and cultural influence on the Jewish world and the world at large.” Its top 10 includes a mix of Israeli po...
By Andrew Silow-Carroll New Jersey Jewish News First, let’s take a deep breath. Stephen Hawking’s decision to join the academic boycott of Israel may be infuriating, but it’s not the end of the world. On balance, I’ll prefer to remember it as a week in which Facebook appeared ready to buy its third Israeli company and the Washington Post declared Israel “a major player in the Mediterranean, and perhaps even the European, natural gas market.” Hawking’s decision makes news, after all, because it’s not the norm, and the Boycott, Divestment and...
How much Islamophobia is just enough? That’s probably the least sensitive way to pose a question that has been bothering me lately. The Boston Marathon bombings gave a new boost to the cottage industry of “anti-jihad” activists, like Pamela Geller and Daniel Pipes, who have thrived since 9/11. The anti-jihadis exploit an incontrovertible fact—that a radicalized form of Islam has spawned repeated terrorist attacks around the world—to concoct an indictment of Islam and all of its practitioners. Every good question they ask about, say, the prior...
At a synagogue talk I recently gave, the topic turned to the treatment of Israel’s Arab citizens. A woman in the audience was obviously upset. “You talk about the Israeli Arabs, but how much more should we give them?” she asked. “They have schools, they get health care, they can get jobs. Isn’t that enough?” This, in my business, is known as a “slow pitch.” “You’re right, you don’t have to give the Israeli Arabs anything,” I said. “But the real question is, what kind of country do you want Israel to be? We call it the only real democracy in th...
