Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 351 - 375 of 478
TEL AVIV (JTA)-The assassin's bullet that killed former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin 20 years ago on Nov. 4 also stunted the center-left party that championed peace: Rabin's once-mighty Labor. In the two decades since Rabin's slaying at the hands of a Jewish extremist, Yigal Amir-the killer opposed a peace deal with the Palestinians-Labor has fallen from being Israel's founding party and moderate-left flagship to competing among a handful of opposition factions, a perennial loser in...
(JTA)-"What's the deal with emails, anyway?" Sounds like a line on a "Seinfeld" episode (or Modern Seinfeld, anyway). But last night we heard it on the "Saturday Night Live" spoof of the first Democratic debate. The speaker was Bernie Sanders' doppelganger, "Seinfeld" creator Larry David. David is a Jewish curmudgeon who also plays a Jewish curmudgeon on his HBO show, "Curb Your Enthusiasm." So when Sanders, another Jewish curmudgeon, decided to run for president, it was clearly the role David...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-In assigning blame for the recent wave of violence in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has turned to the usual suspects-Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. But he has also accused a lesser-known group that operates within Israel's borders: the Islamic Movement, a religious political group and social service organization. Netanyahu has seized on the inflammatory rhetoric of the movement's northern branch, which claims the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem is "in danger" and...
JERUSALEM (JTA)-"No pepper spray, no tear gas, no nightsticks," sighed Itzhak Mizrahi to three disappointed men, as if it were a mantra he'd recited dozens of times. The glass-topped display case in Magnum, the central Jerusalem gun shop Mizrahi has owned for three decades, featured a wide variety of pistols last Thursday. The pepper spray compartment, however, was empty, stormed earlier in the week by nervous Israelis hoping to defend themselves from stabbing attacks. The country is suffering...
JERUSALEM (JTA)—Israelis seeking an escape from last week’s daily terror attacks couldn’t fly to the moon, but they had a chance to hear from someone who did—Buzz Aldrin. In Israel’s terror-riven capital, the Israel Space Agency—the country’s version of NASA—is hosting this year’s International Astronautical Conference, the premier confab for all things space. An exhibition hall shows off a range of gadgets and robotics, and talks fill the schedule this week with titles like “The State of Space Situational Awareness, Conjunction Warning...
JERUSALEM (JTA)-Israelis have become accustomed to dismal news in the past few weeks-mornings and evenings punctuated by stabbings, car attacks and rock throwing. The cycle of random violence has left dozens of Israelis and Palestinians dead, and many fearing the worst: The start of a third intifada, or armed Palestinian uprising, that could claim hundreds more lives. But since the second intifada started in 2000, fears of a repeat have proved unfounded. Conditions in Israel and the Palestinian...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas took plenty of shots at each other. But in their dueling speeches to the United Nations General Assembly, the Israeli prime minister and Palestinian Authority president directed much of their fire at the same target: the assembled world leaders. Netanyahu blamed world powers and international bodies for enthusiastically supporting what he sees as a misguided Iran deal. He began and ended his speech by calling on the U.N. to correct its record...
(JTA)-In Israel, American stores dot shopping malls and McDonald's branches proliferate. But one chain you won't see is Starbucks. Starbucks has franchises around the world, but its brief experiment with Israeli stores lasted just two years, from 2001 to 2003. Maybe, as some have suggested, Starbucks pulled out of Tel Aviv to appease an anti-Israel market in the Arab world. Or maybe pumpkin spice lattes didn't catch on in a country with no discernible fall season. Or maybe Starbucks just...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-First it was clashes on the Temple Mount. Then a mother and father were shot before the eyes of their four children. Then two men were killed in a stabbing attack in Jerusalem's Old City. Now Israelis fear the wave of conflict will only rise. Here's why the violence began, how it's escalated and what might be next. Four Israelis have died in two terror attacks over three days. The slow-burning Israeli-Palestinian conflict has flamed up in the past week with a series of terrorist...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-For Israelis, the Ten Days of Repentance from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur have turned into days of violence. Unrest has swelled in Jerusalem following an Israeli ban on a protest group at the Temple Mount, the holy site known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif. The clashes have left one Israeli dead and dozens of Israelis and Palestinians injured. The clashes have been matched by a war of words, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declaring "war" on Palestinian stone...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—With hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring across the borders of the European Union, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced a landmark change in policy last month: Germany would begin to accept Syrian refugees, no matter how they got there. Four days later, Israeli Interior Minister Silvan Shalom made a statement on the same topic, but with a different tone: Israel would do everything possible, he said, to remove migrants from its borders. “I continue to fight, with all my effort, against the phenomenon of illegal inf...
ASSADS, Morocco (JTA)-We had to cross the gorge, and the only way was to walk single file on a narrow concrete gutter, maybe a foot wide, that bridged the two cliffs. Below us was a long, perilous drop onto the rocky depths. I was traveling deep into the rural communities of Morocco's Atlas Mountains, and so I'd expected to get a little dusty. But no one readied me for this afternoon trek in the desert sun. I was wearing a button-down shirt, slacks and dress shoes, and I was carrying my iPad,...
(JTA)—Tired of hearing about Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians or the machinations of a certain Islamic Republic? There’s plenty of other news happening in Israel, from uproars over the country’s enormous natural gas reserves to a growing push to legalize marijuana. Here are eight newsy items you may have missed in 5775 — and stories you should watch out for as the new year begins. 1. Israel’s controversial gas drilling increases Since the discovery of two huge offshore fields of natural gas in the Mediterranean Sea, Israel has turned...
(JTA)-During my four months studying in Italy in the fall of 2007, you could say I had more than my fair share of strange Jewish experiences. Running late for a train one morning in Florence, I decided the best course of action would be to lay tefillin in the janitor's closet at the station, only to have a policeman threaten to arrest me for trespassing. Lost in Rome one Friday afternoon, a Smart car pulled up alongside me, a 17-year-old leaned out the window and, in Hebrew, invited me to jump i...
CASTELNUOVO BERARDENGA, Italy (JTA)-Up a windy road in the tranquil Tuscan hills, down a gravel path and past acres of grapevines, a visitor will come across a stainless steel door frame secured with a piece of clear packing tape. The Hebrew scrawled on the adhesive reads: "David Solomon." Almost no one may remove this tape, open the door or use the winemaking equipment in an expansive room on the other side. Another door to the same room, sealed with a white plastic strip bearing a K inside a...
NITZAN B, Israel (JTA)-Ask Aviel Eliaz and Itzik Wazana about their evacuation from Gaza 10 years ago this month and both will tell you it's like a tree. For Eliaz, it's an olive tree sitting in a large pot in his front yard. He planted the tree in 2000 at his former home in the Gaza settlement of Nisanit, only to uproot it when Israel withdrew from the coastal strip. Uprooted, too, were the strip's 8,000 residents. His family was resettled along with hundreds of others in this city of cheap...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-Few communities were as battered during last summer's conflict between Israel and Hamas as Nahal Oz, a kibbutz of some 350 people located just a mile from the Gaza border. At one point in the fighting, 40 missiles landed on the community in a single day. Hamas militants attempting to infiltrate the kibbutz through a tunnel killed five Israeli soldiers. For much of the war, families with young children were evacuated to other communities far from the fighting. And just four days...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—The murder of a 16-year old girl at Jerusalem’s gay pride parade has sparked calls for LGBT-rights legislation—as well as pushback from those who oppose it. Shira Banki died Sunday after being stabbed while marching in the parade on Thursday night. Five others were wounded in the stabbing. “It never crossed our mind that Shira would be murdered as a symbol,” her parents said in a eulogy Monday, according to a copy of the text on the Israeli news site Ynet. “An unnecessary death of a young girl, innocent and full of good intent...
TEL AVIV (JTA)—When the United States frees convicted spy Jonathan Pollard in November, many in Israel will celebrate the moment for which they have fought and hoped. What Pollard’s release won’t do, officials and analysts say, is make most Israelis feel any better about the nuclear deal with Iran. Pollard, who was convicted in 1985 of sending classified information to Israel while working at the U.S. Department of Defense, will be released on parole in November, The Associated Press report Tuesday. A report last Friday in The Wall Stree...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has decried an agreement over Iran's nuclear program hundreds of times-most notably in a March speech to a joint session of Congress. Now that the agreement is signed, experts say Netanyahu has one way left to block it: Go to Congress again and persuade it to reject the deal. The agreement finalized Tuesday morning in Vienna will relieve Iran of crippling international sanctions in return for Iran limiting its uranium enrichment, ridding...
KFAR QASIM, Israel (JTA)-The group of Jewish-Israelis sat in a semicircle on the thick, red carpet of the mosque. The women wore headscarves; everyone's feet were bare. They had come to this Arab town in central Israel to experience a slice of Ramadan, the monthlong daytime fast observed by Muslims that ends this week. But before they left the mosque to visit Kfar Qasim's Ramadan market-a nightly, open-air food bazaar-tour guide Shawkat Amer sounded a note of reassurance. Amer told the crowd...
JERUSALEM (JTA)-The scent of hamburgers and beer wafted over the field. The fans were bathed in barbecue smoke. The bleachers were cut out of Jerusalem stone, the field was made of artificial turf. The spectators who had come to greet a tour of Pro Football Hall of Famers sat in plastic armchairs that blocked off the red zones and end zones, with nothing separating them from the game being played at midfield. The players-diminutive by National Football League standards-wore shorts and no...
TEL AVIV (JTA)-For months, France has considered taking a more active role in advancing Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Israel wants no part of it. The French peace proposal reportedly would have three components: a return to direct Israeli-Palestinian talks, a committee of representatives from world and regional powers to facilitate the negotiations, and a United Nations Security Council resolution that would set a timetable for the process. "We don't want to replace the role of the sides,"...
UMM EL-KHEIR, West Bank (JTA)-They dig their fingers into the dirt, their knees bearing into the ground as they embed sprigs of thyme in identical rows. The sun beats down on the small plot, and the work can be tedious, but these volunteers-most of them American, most of them Jewish-plant with a purpose. They had met early Friday morning in Jerusalem and set off on an hour long bus ride through the terraced, rocky hills south of the city. Upon arriving at their destination, a Palestinian...
UMM EL-KHEIR, West Bank (JTA)-They dig their fingers into the dirt, their knees bearing into the ground as they embed sprigs of thyme in identical rows. The sun beats down on the small plot, and the work can be tedious, but these volunteers-most of them American, most of them Jewish-plant with a purpose. They had met early Friday morning in Jerusalem and set off on an hour long bus ride through the terraced, rocky hills south of the city. Upon arriving at their destination, a Palestinian...
