Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS) — Testimonials and photo and video footage on social media showing men donning tefillin and women wearing Stars of David or lighting Shabbat candles have emerged amid a Jewish great awakening after the Oct. 7 terror attacks. Add Shai Davidai, the Columbia Business School professor who has been one of the most prominent defenders of Israel on campuses and beyond, to that trend. Davidai, 41, who is Israeli-American and a self-described atheist, told JNS that he has largely stopped using his phone on Shabbat since the Oct. 7 attacks, and i...
(JNS) - Majed El Shafie, founder and president of the Canadian nonprofit One Free World International, didn't mince words when he spoke about Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, at a "Rally for Humanity" at the Toronto-area synagogue Sephardic Kehila Centre on Sunday evening. "Let me not sugar coat it. We have an idiot of a prime minister. The only prime minister who didn't go to Israel of the G7," said Shafie, whose nonprofit supports persecuted religious minorities. "The only one who...
(JNS) - Phil McGraw, better known as Dr. Phil, isn't Jewish. But the trained clinical psychologist and host of the popular eponymous talk show told JNS exclusively that his staunch support of Israel is "really not anything other than just duty to me." "Everybody should be doing what I'm doing," he said. Dr. Phil has denounced Jew-hatred on his show, in interviews and in filmed segments. He told JNS that he was "appalled at the silence from so many people," including colleagues and fellow...
(JNS) - Amid a sharp increase in Jew-hatred after Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack in southern Israel, many elected officials and university presidents stood silent. That's why Shurat HaDin-Israel Law Center gathered Jewish groups to "find ways to start fighting back," Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, the Israeli nonprofit's president, told JNS. Shurat HaDin aimed "to retake the streets, to retake the campuses, to retake the social media, to combat antisemitism in a way that we haven't,"...
(JNS) - As the Good Book says ... The musical "Fiddler on the Roof" first proclaimed Shalom Aleichem to Broadway audiences in 1964, with Zero Mostel belting out the iconic "If I Were a Rich Man" song as Tevye the Dairyman, the father of seven daughters (five of whom have roles in the play). Bea Arthur played Yenta in the production, whose Boris Aronson-designed sets evoked Marc Chagall's shtetl paintings. Sixty years later, Tevye's misquotations muddying the Torah, coupled with his witty...
(JNS) — Shai DeLuca, a Canadian-Israeli interior designer, won a defamation suit on Dec. 22 against an anti-Israel Toronto restaurant owner who called him a terrorist and killer. “As much as this was my personal suit against Foodbenders, and Kim Hawkins, the win is a collective win and belongs to the Jewish community as a whole,” he told JNS. “What we are witnessing—the trampling through the streets of Western countries—is reminiscent of Europe in the 1930s. Instead of ‘Sieg Heil,’ we’re...
(JNS) - Rabbi Mendel Kaplan still remembers the day in 2016 after morning prayers when congregants were talking about a woman, whose video of herself laughing while wearing a Chewbacca mask had gone viral on YouTube. Kaplan, 52, the religious leader of the 25-year-old Chabad Flamingo in Thornhill, a suburban district in southern Ontario, Canada, figured that it was ridiculous for a clip of someone wearing a "Star Wars" accessory to garner so much attention. "If people can watch narishkeit like...