Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JTA) — Criticism is mounting over the firing of a Jewish professor who accused his Oregon university’s leadership of making antisemitic comments, with the local branch of the Anti-Defamation League joining calls for the president of the school to resign. Students as well as fellow academics are also protesting the decision by Linfield University, a Baptist-affiliated school with some 2,000 students, to fire Daniel Pollack-Pelzner. According to The Oregonian, the university has hosed down sidewalk-chalk messages supporting Pelzner, thr...
(JTA) — Linfield University, a small school in Oregon, has fired a Jewish professor who accused the university president of making antisemitic remarks. Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, a tenured professor who taught English literature, has accused Linfield President Miles K. Davis of making multiple antisemitic remarks in recent years. The antisemitism, he said, was partly a backlash to Pollack-Pelzner demanding that the school do more to address allegations of sexual assault against multiple university trustees, including Davis. Pollack-Pelzner and a...
(JTA) - At least 45 people were crushed to death and at least 150 wounded Thursday night in a stampede during a celebration that drew tens of thousands of haredi Orthodox Jews to the northern Israeli mountain village of Meron. Meron is home to the grave of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, an ancient sage associated with the Jewish holiday of Lag B'Omer, which began Thursday night. More than 100,000 people had reportedly traveled to the town, in the largest gathering in Israel since the onset of the...
(JTA) - Bernie Madoff, the fraudster who ran a $17.5 billion Ponzi scheme ensnaring thousands of investors, including a long list of Jewish organizations and families, has died at 82. The Associated Press reported Madoff's death Wednesday, April 14, at a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina. Madoff was known as a selective money manager who made fantastic yet consistent profits for his clients until his entire operation was exposed as a scam amid the 2008 financial crisis. Madoff's...
(JTA) — In Tucker Carlson’s response to accusations that he endorsed one white supremacist talking point, the Fox News anchor appeared to echo another — this time about Israel. Last week, the popular right-wing talk show host said there was a coordinated Democratic plan to “replace” the existing population of the United States with immigrants from the “Third World.” White supremacists refer to the idea as a “Great Replacement” orchestrated by Jews, and that claim has fueled attacks like the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. After the segment,...
(JTA) - Following yet another Israeli election, voters are getting to know an unlikely kingmaker: Mansour Abbas, an Arab-Israeli lawmaker who might be the one to break Israel's two-year political stalemate. Abbas, head of the United Arab List political party, is not the kind of politician who usually wields power in the Jewish state. He's an Islamist who has more in common ideologically with Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood than with any of Israel's establishment political parties. But through...
(JTA) — Political activists, including Rep. Madison Cawthorn and the ambassador to Germany under Donald Trump, are comparing the idea of “vaccine passports” to Nazi Germany, with many invoking the yellow Stars of David that Nazis forced Jews to wear during the Holocaust. Other opponents of public health restrictions have suggested or implied that the idea of opening recreational spaces only to those who aren’t at risk of COVID is similar to the Nazis’ persecution of Europe’s Jews, which culminated in genocide. The trend is the latest inst...
(JTA) — After years of contention and revisions, California’s State Board of Education approved a curriculum meant to guide the state’s schools in teaching ethnic studies, an effort that sparked waves of criticism from Jewish groups. The Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum aims to teach students about the histories, experiences, contributions and struggles of minority groups in the state. Jewish activists had vehemently criticized the first draft of the curriculum, which schools are not required to use, for both excluding and discriminating again...
(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...
