Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JTA) — Israel must grant citizenship to Jews who converted to Judaism in Israel under non-Orthodox auspices, its Supreme Court ruled Monday, possibly igniting another round in the long-running government battle over who the state should recognize as Jewish. The decision, written by Chief Justice Esther Hayut, comes less than a month before national elections. Israel’s Law of Return offers automatic citizenship to anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent. The state also generally recognizes those who converted to Judaism under Orthodox sta...
(JTA) — A school board member in Lowell, Massachusetts, called a former school district leader a “kike” on live television, spurring calls for his resignation. Bob Hoey should step down from the Lowell School Committee, the mayor of the Boston suburb said. “We lost the kike, oh, I mean, the Jewish guy,” Hoey said Wednesday morning on “City Life,” a news opinion show, according to video posted by the local Jewish Journal. “I hate to say it, but that’s what people used to say behind his back.” Hoey, an elected official in the city of 111,000, wa...
(JTA) — On the third anniversary of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, parents of the shooting’s Jewish victims shared their memories and hopes for the future. Several of the 17 students and faculty who were killed in the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School were Jewish. In the years since the attack, some of the victims’ Jewish parents have become prominent activists for gun control and school safety. Fred Guttenberg shared a letter on Sunday that he wrote to his daughter, Jaime, on Twitter. Jaime was 14 when she was k...
(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pleaded not guilty in his ongoing trial for corruption charges, then left the courtroom while the hearing was still underway. Later on Monday he dismissed the charges, as he has in the past, as “fabricated.” Netanyahu is on trial for fraud, bribery and breach of trust — the first time a sitting prime minister has stood trial in Israeli history. The investigations of allegedly illicit payments and favors stretch back years. Netanyahu was officially indicted about a year ago, and his trial b...
(JTA) — Btselem, a leading Israeli human rights group, says that the entirety of Israel should be considered an apartheid state. Left-wing Israeli groups for years have deemed Israel’s West Bank occupation, or aspects of it, to be an apartheid system. A former prime minister warned in 2017 that Israel was approaching apartheid if it maintained its occupation of the Palestinian territories. But this is perhaps the first time a prominent Israeli human rights group has applied the term to all of Israel. “A regime that uses laws, practices and o...
(JTA) - In about two months, Israelis will vote in a national election. Seem familiar? It is. Israel will be holding its fourth election in just two years - the latest sign that in a country known for volatile politics, the government is more unstable than ever. Like the past several votes, this one is mainly a referendum on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been in power for more than a decade. But unlike in the previous elections, most of Netanyahu's chief rivals this time are on the...
(JTA) - As of Wednesday afternoon, one of the first results in a Facebook search for "Holohoax" - a term popular with Holocaust deniers - was a post decrying "Zionist White Jewish Supremacist Child murdering Apartheid State, Talmudic Satanic Holohoax promoters." Right below it was a video, posted by a group with more than 6,000 followers, captioned "Research: Holohoax and Jew world order." These results showed up six weeks after Facebook announced that it was banning Holocaust denial and...
(JTA) — Israel’s government has signed an agreement with the Pfizer pharmaceutical company to acquire 8 million doses of its vaccine. “This is a great day for the State of Israel and a great day on the way to our victory over the coronavirus,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement Friday, adding that he is working “to ensure that we will receive the vaccine together with the leading countries around the world and that we will not get pushed back in line.” The announcement came days after Netanyahu said in a video address tha...
(JTA) — Two weeks ago, Twitter banned Holocaust denial. Or did it? The company announced earlier this month that it would ban posts that “deny or diminish” violent events, including the Holocaust. But in a Senate hearing Wednesday, CEO Jack Dorsey appeared to say that Twitter did not have a policy of removing content denying the Holocaust. Responding to a question from Republican Sen. Cory Gardner, Dorsey said Holocaust denial is not included among the types of misinformation Twitter bans. “We have a policy against misinformation in three c...
By Ron Kampeas, Ben Sales WASHINGTON (JTA) — In an unusual move, the State Department is planning to formally identify three large international human rights organizations as anti-Semitic, citing disputed aspects of the groups’ agendas. Elan Carr, the department’s anti-Semitism monitor, is planning to release a statement calling on governments not to support Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Oxfam, congressional sources told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The planned statement was first reported by Politico on Wednesday, just as as...
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...
