Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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The president, Morton Schapiro, said it could be. The activist group said it was not. The ensuing debate has divided Northwestern’s campus just north of Chicago this week, with the school’s Hillel offering students the opportunity to reflect on the incident virtually in small groups Wednesday. The activist group, called NU Community Not Cops, chanted “piggy Morty” outside Schapiro’s home over the weekend, according to an open letter Schapiro wrote on Monday. The group is calling for the abolition of the Northwestern University Police Departmen...
(JTA) — Facebook announced that it will now ban any posts that deny or distort the Holocaust, a landmark change from its previous policy. For years, Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, had defended Holocaust denial as a misguided but legitimate form of expression. In 2018, regarding Holocaust denial, he said, “I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong.” That approach garnered widespread outcry from scholars and anti-Semitism watchdogs. On Monday, Zuckerberg wrote...
(JTA) - You may know Michael Oren as a cable news commentator on Israel and the Middle East. You may know him as the Israeli ambassador to the United States during Barack Obama's first term, when he had the fraught task of managing a rocky American-Israeli relationship, or later as a member of Israel's Knesset. Perhaps you're acquainted with Oren as the author of three bestselling history books. What you may not have known is that he also writes fiction. At least I didn't. I've interviewed Oren...
(JTA) — A new report from the Department of Homeland Security names white supremacists as the biggest domestic terror threat in the United States. The Homeland Threat Assessment, released on Tuesday, details an array of violent domestic threats in the United States. It also notes that, among other qualities, white supremacists are characterized by their hate of Jews, or by “their perception that the government is controlled by Jewish persons.” It comes a week after President Donald Trump declined to denounce white supremacists from the presi...
(JTA) — An exchange Wednesday on a Fox News show struck many as remarkable: Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker, blamed “George Soros’ money” for violence in American cities before being shut down by two other panelists on “Outnumbered.” The next day saw an apology — from the show for not letting Gingrich finish. Depicting Soros — the Jewish American Holocaust survivor, financier and liberal megadonor — as President Donald Trump’s chief opponent and the source of America’s ills has become increasingly common among Republicans. He...
(JTA) — More than one in 10 American adults under 40 believes that Jews caused the Holocaust. That’s one finding from a survey published Wednesday trying to gauge Holocaust knowledge among millennials and Generation Z, a cohort ranging in age from 18 to 39. The survey found that most respondents had heard of the Holocaust and 37 percent knew that 6 million Jews died. Slightly more than half could name at least one concentration camp or ghetto. But 11 percent of the respondents believed the Jews were responsible for the Holocaust, 15 per...
(JTA) - About one-third of American Jews live in just 20 of the country's congressional districts. Nearly half of those districts are in New York, and all but one of them is represented by a Democrat. Meanwhile, the district with the most Jews in the country is also the site of Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump's Florida estate. Those are among the findings from a recent study analyzing Jewish voting patterns. Key findings from the study, which was conducted by the Jewish Electorate Institute...
(JTA) - Like many synagogues, Temple B'nai Hayim used to rely on the High Holiday season to survive financially. The small Conservative synagogue in Southern California would receive the lion's share of its revenue in the run-up to the holidays: Members sent in their annual dues, which included entry to High Holiday services, and non-members purchased tickets just for the High Holidays. But with the option of holding regular in-person High Holiday services off the table due to the coronavirus,...
(JTA) — In early June, as anti-racism protests swept the country in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, Beth Hillel Temple in Kenosha, Wisconsin, signed onto an interfaith letter supporting peaceful protest and condemning “a broken societal system which disproportionately affects communities of color.” This week, Kenosha became an epicenter of renewed protest after a police officer shot a Black man, Jacob Blake, seven times in the back. And on Wednesday night, the 93-year-old synagogue’s driveway was graffitied with the words ...
(JTA) — When reports emerged two weeks ago about federal agents seizing protesters from the streets of Portland and putting them in unmarked vans, Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum sued to get federal officers off the street. A judge rejected Rosenblum’s request for a preliminary restraining order against the agents last week. But the lawsuit is ongoing, as is a criminal investigation Rosenblum opened into federal agents who injured a protester. On Wednesday, the Trump administration made an agreement with local officials to withdraw the...
(JTA) - This week, as he prepares to open Camp Modin and administer coronavirus tests to its hundreds of campers and staff, Howard Salzberg is still fielding 50 calls a day from parents who want to send their kids. That's because Modin, a small, unaffiliated Jewish camp in Maine, is one of the only Jewish overnight camps to open in the United States amid the coronavirus pandemic. So Salzberg and his wife, Lisa, who co-own and run the camp, must deal with a continuing deluge of interest from...
(JTA) — The Anti-Defamation League, along with the NAACP and other civil rights groups, is calling on corporations not to advertise on Facebook in July because of the social media platform’s unwillingness to police hate speech. The campaign, which launches Wednesday with a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times, charges that Facebook has not done enough to combat hate and disinformation on its platform. It points to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s repeated refusal to moderate posts for misinformation, even as extremists have used the platform to incit...
(JTA) — More than 800 rabbis and cantors, including the leaders of three major denominations, signed a statement in support of peaceful protest against racism and in memory of George Floyd. The statement invoked Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, an iconic Jewish civil rights activist who marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. It was written and distributed by the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center, a political advocacy organization that has a long history of civil rights activism. “Mr. Floyd was a victim of the nation’s long history...
(JTA) — Right-wing conspiracy theorists are increasingly claiming that George Soros is funding recent protests and riots across the United States in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing. According to the Anti-Defamation League, “aggressive language towards Soros has exploded on social media” this week. Negative tweets about the billionaire Jewish philanthropist rose from 20,000 per day on May 26 to 500,000 per day on May 30. The posts, according to the ADL, mostly allege (without evidence) that Soros is funding riots across the country, an...
(JTA)—At the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, and as recently as a couple weeks ago, some Jewish camps had hoped they could run for part of the summer. For a growing number of camps, that hope now appears to be vanishing. Two Conservative Ramah camps look increasingly likely to cancel their sessions this year. And two state governments—Georgia and Connecticut—have, for now, prohibited overnight camps from running in their states. Each of the states is home to several Jewish camps. While neither of the Ramah camps—in Wisconsin and California...
(JTA)—The network of 10 Conservative Jewish Ramah camps in North America will lose approximately half of their collective annual revenue if they all need to cancel camp and refund tuition—a total shortfall of $27 million. But Ramah leadership is confident that even without the 2020 season, the camps will be around for 2021. “If we don’t run our camps, we’re going to mitigate about half of our expenses, but that leaves a lot of money to be raised,” said Rabbi Mitchell Cohen, the director of...
(JTA)—The Conservative Jewish youth group United Synagogue Youth is canceling its summer travel programs for teens, the latest in a string of canceled Jewish summer programs. The announcement comes as several Conservative Ramah summer camps are set to announce that they are canceling their sessions amid the coronavirus pandemic. Some two-dozen camps, including those run by the Union for Reform Judaism, already have announced that they will cancel this summer. “It is with a heavy heart that we share this news with you, that due to the cur...
(JTA)-Nearly all Reform Jewish summer camps, and at least one Conservative camp, will remain closed for the 2020 summer due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency has learned. The landmark decision, made Thursday afternoon, will affect 15 Reform overnight camps across the country, which collectively served some 10,000 campers in 2019. The Reform movement, the largest in the United States, is the first to suspend its official summer camp network. It's the first time...
(JTA)-Every summer, JCC Ranch Camp in Colorado gives hundreds of kids an outdoorsy Jewish experience. There's hiking, mountain biking, ropes courses and horseback riding, along with the traditional camp staples of team sports, arts and crafts, meals in a communal dining hall and hours of hanging out on acres upon acres of green space. Crucially, the kids enjoy independence from their parents-and the same for parents from their kids. Not this year. Like a growing group of Jewish camps across the...
By Ben Sales NEW YORK (JTA)—In the weeks after it became clear that the coronavirus pandemic would spark a lasting economic crisis, the Jewish world’s leading funder group put together a memo with some back-of-the-envelope projections for how much Jewish nonprofits stood to lose. The tally: at least $650 million, according to the internal document from the Jewish Federations of North America, which was based on estimates from several American Jewish umbrella organizations, such as the Foundation for Jewish Camp and the JCC Association of North...
(JTA)-Rena Munster was looking forward to hosting a Passover seder for the first time. In past years, her parents or another relative hosted the meal. But this year she had invited her parents, siblings and other extended family to her Washington, D.C., home. Her husband, an amateur ceramics artist, was making a set of dishes for the holiday. And she was most excited for her family's traditional day of cooking before the seder: making short-rib tzimmes, desserts that would pass muster...
NEW YORK (JTA)—Some 38,000 people work at Jewish community centers across North America, staffing preschools, camps, gyms, classes, activities for seniors and more. Because of the coronavirus crisis, a lot of them are going to lose their jobs. “The cuts are going to be painful and deep,” said Doron Krakow, CEO of the JCC Association of North America. “They are going to go into what I would call a hunker-down mode, which means that they’ll be subject to the kind of staff reductions that we are reading about affecting other industrie...
(JTA)—Aboud Dandachi isn’t Jewish. Or Israeli. Or Italian. Or sick with coronavirus. He’s a Muslim from Syria living in Canada. But when he read the Jewish Telegraphic Agency story about an Italian boy whose bar mitzvah was curtailed because of the rapidly spreading virus, Dandachi responded in a way he figured Jews might appreciate: He donated $18 in honor of Ruben Golran to the Canadian branch of the Jewish National Fund to plant a tree in Israel in the teen’s honor. “This is what I know how to do,” said Dandachi, 43, of Toronto. “I’ve had f...
JERSEY CITY, N.J. (JTA)-Two months after his wife was murdered in the attack on this city's only kosher grocery store, owner Moshe Ferencz was back behind the counter this week. The store, which has partially reopened in a new location, still doesn't have regular hours. But the reopening signals an important moment for Jersey City's small but growing community of Orthodox Jews. "Everyone was shocked beyond belief," said Chesky Deutsch, a member of the local Hasidic community who acts as an...
This is a developing story. NEW YORK (JTA)—More than 50 Jewish community centers in 23 states have received emailed bomb threats since Saturday. None of the threats have been found to be credible, though local law enforcement agencies have been notified. Officials do not know who sent the threats. They targeted Jewish community centers in New York, New Jersey, California, Texas and elsewhere throughout the country. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency has learned from officials familiar with the threats that most of the JCCs affected received identica...
