Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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There are certain stories that just never go away. They don’t get swallowed up by the 24-hour news cycle. They grind away at your soul, drop by drop, day by day, hour by hour. In Israel, that story looks at you wherever you go. From the moment you land at Ben Gurion Airport, you’re greeted by images of hostages captured by Hamas ten months ago. All over the country, billboards and posters carry their faces. In the cosmopolitan city of Tel Aviv, you see those faces everywhere, on city streets, on the ocean promenade, on Dizengoff Square, whe...
It makes no sense. Why would Donald Trump pick as a running mate a white man from Middle America who’s just like him? Wasn’t Trump supposed to broaden his base to increase his chances of winning in November, and pick someone like a woman or a person of color or a more classic conservative? Instead of expanding his reach, Trump has doubled down on his ideology, choosing J.D. Vance, someone who once called him “cultural heroin” for Middle America while musing that he may be “America’s Hitler.” Evidently, Trump must have been so eager to buil...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — On the surface, it makes little sense. How can the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust lead to the biggest rise in antisemitism in modern times? Wasn’t it supposed to be the other way around? The more Jews die, the more they like us? Like that famous book said, “People Love Dead Jews.” How does one explain that on Oct. 8, right after 1,200 Jews were massacred, mutilated, butchered and raped by Hamas terrorists, 33 Harvard student organizations co-signed a statement holding Israel “entirely responsib...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — I’ve only been in Israel for 48 hours but I can already feel the angst. I asked a prominent thinker what is different about the current crisis, and he immediately replied: “The enormous gap between the level of our problems and the quality of our leadership.” Among other concerns, there’s a genuine fear that a war in the north with Hezbollah– a terror army equipped with tens of thousands of guided missiles that can disable critical infrastructure– will make the Gaza war feel like kid’s play. Meanwhile, ther...
(JNS) — “Understand that they want you all dead. You are the only threat to them. When you are gone, all the races will be under the great Jewish heel forever. Fight back white man!!!” This is an excerpt from one of several tweets promoting or inciting violence against Jews that, according to a March 2023 report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), X declined to remove or sanction. The report concluded that “despite purported changes to its policy enforcement and the stated intent of its management, Twitter continues to host antisem...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — We attach ourselves to narratives because they comfort us. It’s comforting to think that the terrorist who murdered seven Jews coming out of a Jerusalem synagogue on Friday evening was striking a blow against “the civilized world,” as President Joe Biden asserted. But he wasn’t, Mr. President. Alqam Khayri, 21, a resident of eastern Jerusalem, was specifically going after Jews. His Palestinian brethren who celebrated his murderous act by dancing in the streets and handing out candies were not thinking about the civili...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) - I hope the Jew haters who bully a young Steven Spielberg in his new movie "The Fabelmans" get a chance to see the film. In fact, I hope Kanye "Ye" West, Kyrie Irving, Jew-hating white supremacists and any sect who believes American Jews are not the "real Jews" also see the film. I want them to see the film for many reasons, but primarily because of the young Spielberg's reaction to being called a "kike" and a "Christ killer" and getting beaten up by ignorant,...
(JNS) — What is the mainstream expression of Jewish power? When superstars with millions of followers like Kanye West and Kyrie Irving exhibit anti-Semitic behavior, more often than not it revolves around a sinister view of Jewish power. Jews are the bosses. They own the record labels, the movie studios and the sports teams. They run the world. These stereotypes are not just sinister and anti-Semitic, they are also insultingly materialistic. They overlook a whole other view of Jewish power, one that has little to do with material wealth and e...
(JNS) — Some people are surprised that the terror regime in Iran has been more conciliatory of late in the negotiations to return to the 2015 nuclear deal. Because the process has taken so long, they assumed that the mullahs were serious, rather than bluffing, with their prolonged intransigence. It’s only when the West recently held their ground that the mullahs softened their demands and made a deal closer at hand. Why? Because the mullahs need the moolah. The nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, pro...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — While much of the conversation around Israel revolves around its conflict with the Palestinians, the BDS movement against the Jewish state, Iran’s nuclear threat and political elections that never end, there’s a whole other story that doesn’t get much attention: Israel is becoming a country for humanity. That thought was on my mind this week after spending time in Jerusalem with my friend Jonathan Medved, who runs an innovation investment platform called Our Crowd. Over a late afternoon coffee at the King David H...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — We’re seeing again how Israel can fight so well with weapons but so badly with words. Take the death of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, which has turned into an international incident. She was fatally shot during an Israeli anti-terrorist incursion into Jenin. An initial autopsy by Palestinian coroners found that it was “not possible” to tell whether she was killed by Israeli or Palestinian gunfire. Of course, that didn’t stop Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas from treating Israel as a murderous...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — The conventional wisdom is that Vladimir Putin’s naked aggression toward Ukraine is taking us back to more primitive times. Indeed, for most of human history, it was raw power that ruled. If a tyrant wanted something, he just took it. The establishment of international norms and institutions in the wake of World War II was an attempt to regulate and minimize this gratuitous application of power. It didn’t always work, of course, but at least there was a sense that the world was headed in a more civilized direc...
(JNS) — On Feb. 24, 2020, former Indian Supreme Court justice Deepak Gupta delivered a lecture to the Bar arguing that “the right to dissent is the most important right granted by the Constitution.” Gupta took the ancient idea of challenging authority and gave it dignity: “To question, to challenge, to verify, to ask for accountability from the government is the right of every citizen under the constitution,” he said. “These rights should never be taken away otherwise we will become an unquestioning moribund society, which will not be able to...
The brouhaha around Whoopi Goldberg has been hijacked by the red herring of race. Instead of focusing on the horrific murder of 6 million Jews strictly because they were Jews, we’re arguing over whether these murdered Jews should be considered a race. Since Hitler himself saw the Jews as an “inferior race,” Goldberg has come under attack for challenging that categorization. “The Holocaust was not about race,” she said, implying in subsequent comments that the Jews shouldn’t be considered a race. Even when she apologized on the Colbert Sho...
There are bad people in this world who do bad things. Sometimes they’ll blow up buildings or shoot people in schools or burn down a police precinct or even violently riot at the U.S. Capitol. When these horrible crimes are committed, some of the questions we ask, especially with assaults on public buildings, are: How could we have prevented it? Was our security sufficient? Did we take the proper precautions? And yet, no one seems to be mentioning any of these crucial concerns as we review and analyze the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the Capitol by T...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — While tens of millions of poor souls are dying and starving under brutal regimes in places like Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan, Congo and Somalia, among others, the United Nations decided last Thursday that only one country merits an open-ended investigation. If you haven’t been living on Mars the past few decades, you’ve already guessed the name of that country — Israel — the recipient of more U.N. condemnations than all other countries combined. So, what did the world’s only Jewish state do this time to deserve...
(JNS) — Just as things were returning to normal, and rabbis across America were eagerly anticipating a full reopening for the High Holy Days, the Delta variant showed up. Oh no, not again. Need I remind you that nearly every synagogue and Jewish center in America pretty much shut down during last year’s High Holidays because of COVID-19? That the great American Jewish ritual of scoring High Holiday tickets succumbed to a deadly, global virus? That rabbis had to scramble for alternatives, from Zoom services to backyard and porch minyans? Those d...
(Jewish Journal, JNS) — Five months ago, with his back to the wall and facing calls from his own allies to resign, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had a ready answer to the accusations of sexual misconduct that were engulfing him: Let’s wait for the investigation. “I ask the people of this state to wait for the facts from the attorney general’s report before forming an opinion,” he pleaded. It almost sounded reasonable. It bought him precious time. So, New York Attorney General Letitia James promptly called Cuomo’s bluff by initiating the investi...
(The Jewish Journal via JNS) — Whose job is it to define who I am? Is it an institution’s job or is it mine? In all the brouhaha over critical race theory, this question is rarely asked. That may be because much of the controversy over CRT has been about defining a nation and a system. CRT is a theoretical genre within the larger realm of critical theory that has become a mainstream movement. It teaches that the United States was founded on racism, oppression and white supremacy — and that these forces are still rooted in our society. What...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — Palestinian terror groups such as Hamas have a surefire strategy to win over the world’s sympathy: fire rockets into Israeli territory, trigger an Israeli response and wait for the global outrage against Israel’s response. The strategy is effective because Israel is so darn good at protecting its citizens from missile attacks, thanks to ubiquitous bomb shelters and a sophisticated Iron Dome missile defense system. So, if the terror rockets don’t kill any Jews, but the forced retaliations kill Palestinians, anyone...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — When the top editor of the world’s newspaper of record flips and flops and flips again on a subject as sensitive as the use of the N-word, you know things are getting messy at The New York Times. And when a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist claims that the paper “spiked” his column on the subject, well, it just gets messier. This sad story started when longtime New York Times science reporter Donald McNeil was accused in 2019 of using a racial slur while on an overseas trip chaperoning high-school students. At the time...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) - Before World War II, there were about 50,000 Jews living in Salonica (or Thessaloniki), the largest Jewish community in Greece. Between March and August 1943, the Germans deported more than 45,000 Jews to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing camp. Most of the deportees were gassed on arrival. Because this represented the decimation of a community, it would go down as an especially dark moment in the darkest chapter of Jewish history. But a few Jews managed to survive the...
Israel-haters must not be very happy these days. All of a sudden, the big lie that nourished their anti-Zionist venom for so long is slipping away. For more than 50 years, diplomatic geniuses kept telling the world that “the key to peace in the Middle East is to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” The convenient corollary was that the solution was all in Israel’s hands, which kept the Jewish state constantly on the receiving end of global condemnation. This brilliant maneuver sought to camouflage the plain truth that the deepest ills...
I grew up worshipping The New York Times. To this day, I live on the paper’s home page. Only lately, as much as I still enjoy much of its cultural reporting, my jaw drops when I see the homogeneity of opinion. Virtually every op-ed and regular columnist goes in the same narrow, progressive direction. The net effect is mind numbing. You could strongly agree with every opinion and still feel the same way. When it comes to diversity of thought, The Times has become all the boredom that’s fit to print. That’s why it was fascinating to read Bari Wei...
(Jewish Journal via JNS)—On Thursday night, as sundown falls on the holiday of Passover, Sephardic Jews everywhere will celebrate the centuries-old tradition of Mimouna. This is the night when Jews open their doors to their neighbors, offering tables lavish with sweets to usher in a year of sweetness and good fortune. If there’s a Jewish ritual that calls for maximum social connection, Mimouna is it. As I wrote in a column years ago, “Mimouna represented the love and intimacy of a neighborhood. There’s nothing like popping in to see 10, 20,...
