Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 26 - 50 of 54
Some years ago, just as social media began to explode in popularity, a sensitive young man living in New York City had a decision to make. Every day he was bombarded by people’s acts of unkindness. He witnessed pregnant women standing on the subway, and no one offering them a seat. He saw the elderly rudely jostled as they tried to cross busy streets. He watched men shout out disgusting profanities as young women walked by. He picked up after people who dropped their garbage beside garbage c...
I was walking out of Publix the other day, my arms full of groceries, my head tilted down as I looked at the pavement, deep in thought, when I heard someone call my name. “Mr. Bornstein,” a woman said. “Can you stop and talk?” I recognized her immediately, a member of my congregation and one of my mother’s peers. She spoke with the vestiges of a long-ago foreign accent, with all the seriousness and focus of someone intent on making an important point. “Mr. Bornstein,” she began. “I was just t...
We live in an age of clichés. They surround us, influence us, often controlling the way we speak and think. They are nefarious in their ability to suck meaning out of important statements and events. And they are, in general, dead wrong (which, by the way, is a cliché.) A few painful examples: If you work hard you can achieve anything. Dreams really do come true. If you’re not first, you’re last. Which goes with winning is everything. True love. Love at first sight. You’re comparing apples...
Dear God, If I were Christian and under age 10 I suppose I’d be writing to Santa Claus, but I’m not. I’m Jewish and 58 years old and I don’t know who else (what else?) to turn to, so I’m writing you, and hoping you read the Heritage. I’m not asking for much. Just eight simple requests, one for each night of Chanukah. Which brings me to my first ask. God, can you please tell me the correct spelling for Chanukah? I’m so confused. Is it Hanukah, or Hanukkah, or Chanukkah, or Chanukah? Is...
What it means to be a Jew today may be far less significant than the question, “Why be a Jew tomorrow?” My generation, and my parents’, had concrete, fully realized reasons to be Jewish. World War II, the Holocaust, and the drive to survive after a near-extinction event. The birth of the State of Israel and the rise of modern Jewish pride, Jewish heroism, and Jewish hope. Success and acceptance in contemporary Diaspora society, in virtually every aspect of American culture, politics, and busines...
In conjunction with the JCRC's Grits and Bagels Brunch, over the next few weeks, The Heritage is running a series of articles about local Jewish community members who made an impact on the Civil Rights movement. This is the first in the series. While many civic leaders select an organization or a cause to champion, Jerome J. Bornstein (Jerry to his friends) selected many. Known in the Jewish community as a visionary-president of both the Jewish Community Council and Jewish Federation of Greater...
Space-time compression. Globalization. Expansion diffusion. These are terms my son just had to define and learn in his ninth grade human geography course. Though each has a different meaning, they all have an underlying connection. As technology improves, as travel is made easier, and ideas and culture and products are exported with greater ease, while the database we share may grow, the world shrinks. It is the rare individual now who is not connected. It is the unique community that does not h...
Charles Schwartz, of blessed memory, was a challenging man. On first impression the words many people chose to describe him were often couched in cautious criticism. Reserved. Opinionated. Controlled. Condescending. But if you were part of his circle, or had the opportunity to know him for a long period of time, and thus were able to peel back the layers, you knew that first impression was entirely misleading. Charles held himself in check because he was, by nature, one of the most rational men...
I had a dream that I was attending a political convention with my wife. I wore one of my favorite wool jackets from my college days, and glasses (this was pre-Lasik), and I had hair on top of my head. As speaker after speaker traipsed to the podium, I grew more and more impatient. I felt my anger heat up, the bile in my throat rise. Finally, I couldn’t stand it. I stood in the center of the group and started lecturing them, as if they were children. “This is all wrong!” I told them. “All...
When the taped conversation between Donald Sterling, billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Clippers and his friend/girlfriend/mistress V. Stiviano was leaked recently, a righteous uproar rose from National Basketball Association players, coaches, owners, media, down to people on the street, who rightly denounced his racist epithets against African Americans. Even though the released conversation was supposedly only a snippet of more than an hour of talk between the two, it contained statements...
Giants did exist, at least at one time. Trust me, I know. And I’m not referring to dinosaurs, or childhood fantasies or fairy tales or even NBA players. I’m talking about giants. I grew up with them, and now one of the last great ones has passed away. There are many who consider my father a giant, and in some ways, in this community, he was. A builder of institutions. A leader. A visionary. But he was my father, and as such I saw and understood his failings and foibles and missteps as well as...
I came in on the middle of an interview on National Public Radio recently. I didn’t catch the name of the interviewee, but he did catch my attention. “Religions,” he said, “are too beautiful to be abandoned to those who believe in them.” And early last year another program cited statistics that showed more and more young people moving away from religion. But why? Was the next generation really moving away, or merely cherry picking the aspects of faith they liked? And what did the speaker m...
For the past decade or so I’ve been having a similar conversation with a friend of mine. Whenever we go out to lunch, he tells me about the latest change in his business as he works to reinvent it with a vision geared toward future relevance and sustainability. “We’ve redesigned the interiors of the restaurants so they appeal more to young families,” he tells me, “and we’re adding a full-service bar.” Or “we’ve gone completely paperless with all corporate records” or “we’re looking at h...
At friendly dinners and agency meetings, on the phone and in emails, the plans outlined in a recent edition of the Heritage, detailing a way to restructure the Maitland campus and reduce if not eliminate the $5.8 million debt hanging over the property’s (and community’s) head, are being discussed with interest and, in some cases, a modicum of panic. Coming to be known as the Schwartz Plan (after Charles Schwartz, a Jewish community leader for decades and one of the prime reasons anything is eve...
By David Bornstein In conversations with many community members, it became apparent that many people blame the Federation for the current crippling debt that encumbers the Maitland campus, while the vast majority don’t understand the situation at all. Having been involved from the beginning, I hope to shed some light on how we got where we are. No biases. Nothing softened or glossed over. Just the facts, and you can form your own opinions from there. Prior to the Maitland community campus e...
I’ve written many times about my mother. My mother who lived alone. My mother who taught me to love literature, my community, and myself. My mother who taught me to give back far more than I received. My brilliant, independent mother. But I’ve never written about her voice. About how she spoke, how she wrote, the words she lived by. And they were magnificent words. I have waited, months after her death, to write about her. It’s because of the difficulty that words have to truly encompass someo...
Two stories were told to me recently by community members, both distinctly different on the one hand, and similar on the other. In both cases the stories are told from the perspective of an elementary school child who was one of the only—if not the only—Jew in his/her class. A mother was trying to explain to her young son why he would be staying home during the High Holy Days. “It’s because we’re Jews and these are very important holidays,” she told him. “We’ll go to synagogue for services an...
My brother died in Seattle early in the evening on Sept. 19, 2006, just before Rosh Hashana. I was sitting in the parking lot of his hospital, taking a moment to listen to an obscure song by an unknown alternative band when I got a call that he had passed away. The song was titled “Brother” by The Annuals. I missed him by minutes. Coincidence that I was listening to that song while his spirit left the earth? Probably. But then the following night, after I had flown back to Orlando with Ray...
When I was much, much younger I desperately wanted to be a musician. It was something my parents never encouraged, and I didn’t have any close friends who missed hanging out in the afternoon because of their music lessons. But I loved music. I loved the piercing sound of an electric guitar, the thrum of a bass guitar, the blast of a saxophone. So I tried. I tried them all—guitar, sax, mandolin, bass. I even went so far as to take harmonica lessons, because I thought, “That at least I can maste...
In the important new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, American Jews overwhelmingly (by 94 percent) say they are proud to be Jewish. And yet, one of the most significant trends cited by the survey is the growing percentage (32 percent) of younger, “Millennial Generation”Jews, who identify themselves as Jews with no religion, considering themselves Jewish solely on the basis of ancestry, culture, or ethnicity. This stands in sharp contrast to my parents’ generation—the “Greatest Genera...
A new mortgage encumbering the Maitland community campus was recently signed. The campus, home to the Jewish Federation of Greater Orlando, The Jewish Community Center, the Jewish Academy of Orlando, and the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center, is truly the jewel of our communal assets. Sadly, this process has revealed flaws in the jewel that run so deep it may be cracked beyond repair. When Bank of America announced that it would not renew the letter of credit for the old...
My wife and I recently took our first vacation in years, a four-day trip to New York City. We caught up on ourselves, on each other. We heard the amazing Emily Wells at an outdoor Lincoln Center concert. We visited museums. We saw the 9-11 Memorial. We walked. And walked. And walked. And we saw two plays—“The Assembled Parties,” a story that spans 20 years in the life of a once-wealthy Jewish family in Manhattan, and “The Book of Mormon,” one of the funniest and most outrageous plays to hit Br...
The girlfriend had been living with her boyfriend for nearly seven years. They lived a good life. He owned a successful business he’d built up himself. She worked at a highly respected international environmental organization. She was extremely cool—bright, funny, well liked by all. Neither was young anymore. They’d both been married once, and though they loved one another, they hadn’t yet gotten over the bad taste their previous, difficult relationships had left. So, while they didn’t...
In a recent article in The New Yorker, John McPhee (one of my favorite authors) writes about the pain and difficulty of, not just writing, but writing well. He recounts all the work a real writer knows: the multiple rewrites, the problems with writer’s block, word selection, subject selection, the constant feeling that your writing is worthy of a second grade reader. And yet this is John McPhee, who teaches at Princeton and has written dozens of books about matters as diverse as tennis and nucle...
My Aunt Rita Levy died last week. Of all the siblings in her family, she was perhaps the least well known. Her sister Dorothy (Dottie) Morrell was considered the gatekeeper to the Orlando Jewish Community for many years, greeting and introducing new residents to those who lived here, and the cultural series at the Jewish Community Center was named after her. Sister Florence (Flossie) founded the Neighborhood Law Center in Orlando that served the poor and indigent for many years. Bea Ettinger...
