Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS)—I read in The New York Times this week that German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned that two-thirds of the German population could end up infected by the coronavirus. That would be 55 million people—in one country alone. Meanwhile, all of Italy is under quarantine. I think that’s worth repeating: All of Italy is under quarantine. The World Health Organization has officially labeled the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, meaning a disease spreading in multiple countries simultaneously. A tiny virus is taking on humanity, and so far, it’s...
(JNS)—It was one of those weeks where every day brought another great idea for a column. First, I attended an insightful lecture by Rabbi Meir Soloveichik at Beth Jacob Congregation that connected the festival of Purim with Abraham Lincoln and slavery. Then it was “Comeback Joe” Biden’s resounding primary victory in South Carolina that reset the Democratic primary race. Then it was the AIPAC Policy Conference I attended in Washington, D.C., where the drama and anxiety were at a peak. And, of course, there was how Prime Minister Benjami...
(JNS)—After each anti-Semitic attack, Jews seem to get weaker and more vulnerable. One reason is that instead of taking real action, we prefer to complain and release cliché-ridden statements expressing our “outrage.” If you have a political agenda, such loud condemnations can be useful. If a white supremacist attacks Jews, Trump-hating Democrats will be all over it. If the attacker is Islamic or from the left, Republicans will feast. Remember when anti-Semitism used to bring Jews together by uniting us against a common enemy? What happen...
(Jewish Journal via JNS)—In the midst of all the promises of “coalitions” after the razor-close Israeli elections, who’s doing the actual math? On one side, you have a right-wing bloc that maxes out at 56 seats, and on the other, a center-left bloc that maxes out at 53 seats, both of them agonizingly short of the magic number of 61. Forget all the fancy analyses—right now, all that matters are those numbers. A desperate Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must surely be losing sleep over his missing five seats, which would allow him to stay on t...
(Jewish Journal via JNS)—At a time of rampant assimilation and declining synagogue attendance, how do you get more Jews to connect to their tradition? In recent years, the non-Orthodox streams of Judaism have tackled this challenge with renewed vigor. Much of the innovation has centered on making Judaism more relevant and meaningful. This can take many forms, from a focus on social justice and repairing the world, to musical and uplifting prayer services, to connecting with nature, to online education and entertainment, to radical inclusion a...
(Jewish Journal via JNS)—It’s almost a boring thought these days to observe that we are bitterly divided by our political tribes. Democrats hate Republicans, Republicans hate Democrats. Need we say more? We no longer want to win arguments; we want to crush our political opponents. It’s not enough to disagree with you; I must reject you, as well. Jews have gotten sucked into this tribal warfare, where loyalty to our political tribes has replaced loyalty to our Jewish tribe. For too many of us, “What’s good for my party?” has replaced “W...
(Jewish Journal via JNS)—It’s a sign of how politicized our national discourse has become that nothing is out of bounds—not even the Holocaust. When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) used the charged term “concentration camp” last week to describe migrant detention centers, maybe she didn’t realize that the term, semantics aside, uniquely reverberates with the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust. If she still has any doubt, she ought to walk over to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and check out “The Evidence Room...
Imagine eating stomach lining on your first date, served up by your future mother-in-law hoping to impress you with her choice of protein. That was David Shapiro’s introduction to my Sephardic family in the late 1970’s, as he began dating my sister Kathy. For many decades after that, he would remind me of that first date. My mother had served him a Moroccan delicacy– tripe seasoned in a spicy tomato sauce– and he would joke that he should have brought a blow dryer to handle the weird dish. For a straight-laced Ashkenazi Jew whose idea of a go...
You can make a strong case that President Barack Obama’ s decision to allow United Nations Security Council resolution 2334 to pass was very harmful to Israel. By endorsing the anti-Israel narrative that every square inch of territory captured by Israel in the 1967 war—including the Jewish Quarter in East Jerusalem and the Western Wall—is “Occupied Palestinian Territory,” and that Jewish presence in those areas is a “flagrant violation of international law,” Obama didn’t just throw renegade West Bank settlers to the wolves—he threw all of Isra...
When I was in my late teens, I listened to the second side of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album, pretty much every day for three weeks in a forest about an hour north of Montreal. I was living in a tent with other Jewish wannabe hippies at Camp Bnai Brith, and the camp leaders allowed us to have a turn table outside our tent, where we could spin our vinyls at will. It’s hard to imagine living my life without the second side of Abbey Road. On my way to visit my son at Camp Ramah the other day, I played it in my car, a few times over. Every note is...
It’s not the disputed occupation of the West Bank that convinced a 17-year-old Palestinian teenager to stab a 13-year-old Jewish girl to death while she was sleeping. Rather, it’s the corrosive and longtime occupation of Palestinian hearts and minds with vicious, genocidal Jew-hatred. “Hate has no place in the curriculum of schools, and the glorification of violence has no place in the education of children,” Sen. Hillary Clinton said in 2007, after a Senate hearing on Palestinian Authority (PA) schoolbooks and media presented by the watchdo...
The stunning rise of a narcissistic blowhard like Donald Trump may be absurd, irrational and even embarrassing, but there’s a very rational idea that is keeping the Trump phenomenon alive: A large number of Americans are sick and tired of seeing their country get ripped off. No, it didn’t start with Barack Obama. It was President George W. Bush’s $3 trillion escapade into the quicksand of Iraq that kicked off the rip-off era. Think of what America could have done with that money. For starters, it could have repaired decaying infrastructure, fed...
If you discriminate against the only Jewish country in the world, is that anti-Semitism? Let’s take the European Union (EU), which routinely discriminates against the Jewish state. Among the numerous “occupied territories” around the world, for example, the EU has singled out only the Jewish state for special labeling of products from those territories. Is that anti-Semitism? A less well-known example of EU discrimination comes from the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR), a group that aims to improve democracy and human...
I didn’t think the Iran deal could get any worse. I didn’t think I would find any more loopholes that would make it even easier for the Iranians to cheat and get away with it. Then, this morning, I read this extraordinary news item from the Associated Press in our Jewish Insider Daily Kick-Off, and I had to find a word that would be stronger than “rip-off.” I found swindle. Here is the news item: “AP Exclusive: U.N. To Let Iran Inspect Alleged Nuke Work Site” by George Jahn: “Iran will be allowed to use its own inspectors to investigate a...
I’ve been thinking for years about the best way to respond to the threat of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. I’ve read pretty much everything on the topic and brainstormed every possible idea, but I’ve never heard anything that really made sense to me. Until I heard from Hillary Clinton. Ironically, Clinton wasn’t trying to provide any answers; she was merely asking for assistance. In a letter this week to a small group of Jewish leaders, including mega Democratic donor Haim Saban, that was made public,...
There’s been a lot of talk lately about how President Barack Obama feels hurt and misunderstood by Israel and by many Jews in the pro-Israel community. The storyline is that those Jews simply don’t appreciate how “Jewish” the president really is and how much he cares for the Jews and for Israel. “He’s deeply offended by the notion that he’s anti-Israel or anti-Semitic,” former diplomat and Washington, D.C., insider Martin Indyk told JTA. “He’s hurt by it now. It’s finally got to him, the ingratitude of Israelis to this president.” In essenc...
“What will you tell the president when you see him?” was my daughter Eva’s first reaction when I told her I’d been invited to the White House Chanukah party (Actually, it was her second reaction. Her first was, “Take me!”). Kids are innocent that way. They don’t realize that when you have over a hundred people crowding the leader of the free world, it’s not so easy to get in a word edgewise. But I got lucky. It’s not what I told the president that mattered, it’s what I heard him say when few people were paying attention. After the president...
I’m repulsed by these anti-Israel groups on college campuses that pretend to care about oppressed people in the Middle East. They don’t. What they really care about is undermining Israel. Groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, for example, have no interest in engaging in a debate about Israeli-Palestinian co-existence. What they live for is to single out Israel and crush it. No wonder UCLA Chancellor Gene Block quickly released a statement last week opposing the vote by anti-Israel students that singled out Israel in a divestment res...
It boggles the mind to think that a determined, Jew-hating terror army would fire more than 1,000 rockets at Israel over seven days and inflict so few casualties. I wonder what must be going through the minds of those Hamas terrorists right now: “We lost half of our arsenal and what do we have to show for it? Where are all the dead Jews? How is this possible?” Well, the answers, my friends, are blowing in the wind. These answers have come in the form of sleek seeing-eye missiles that met up with incoming Hamas missiles and ... killed them. To...
There’s something about war that can make intelligent people look foolish. I’m thinking right now of all those smart people in Tel Aviv who analyzed the subtleties of peace at the Haaretz Peace Conference—only a few hours before Jew-hating terrorists from Hamas began firing rockets all over Israel. I wonder if they even considered having a session at the conference called, “What happens when people want to kill you no matter what you do?” That session might have included, for example, a panel of experts discussing the Hamas Charter, which cal...
We’re so used to seeing the Israeli-Palestinian peace process fail that we often overlook this simple question: How is it possible that so many can try so hard for so long and still fail to make any progress? How can it be that the United States, the most powerful country on Earth, has failed so royally, despite decades of making this conflict a top priority? What I’m especially interested in is this: Why have the Palestinians, in particular, seemed so reluctant to make a deal? As Ari Shavit wrote recently in Haaretz, “Twenty years of fruit...
When I see the earnest and eager John Kerry globe-trotting the world in his sharp business suits trying to convince mullahs not to build a nuclear bomb, I can’t help but have these politically incorrect thoughts that are loaded with stereotypes. The most obvious stereotype is that of the golly-gee American sucker in long shorts and black socks getting ripped off by a wily merchant in a Middle Eastern souk. The first question I ask myself is: Does Kerry realize what this is about? Does he realize that in a region where honor and glory are everyt...
There was so much Jewish outrage in the wake of professor Steven Hawking’s decision to join the academic boycott against Israel, it’s hard to know where to start. The most dramatic expression of that outrage could be found in the many commentaries and Facebook posts suggesting that if Hawking is going to boycott Israel, then why not also boycott the Israeli computer chip that enables him to communicate despite his severely handicapped state? As Rabbi Shmuley Boteach wrote on JPost: “Why would one of the world’s leading academic minds condemn th...
It’s common these days to micromanage what information we receive. Many of us have a list of favorite Web sites and blogs we regularly go to, as well as Facebook pages and mobile apps that reflect our individual tastes and ideologies. It’s a way of maintaining some level of control amid the chaos of the Internet. There’s an opportunity cost, however, to micromanaging this flow of information: We rarely experience the joy of what I call “bumping into knowledge.” That’s why I want to tell you about my all-time favorite Web site, Arts & Letters D...
It’s funny how the American Jewish community has a way of getting all breathless and excited when a new study comes out, as is happening right now with the new Pew survey. As if we needed all this sophisticated evidence to remind us that Judaism in America is in trouble, and that we must find ways to make it more attractive and relevant if we want a healthy, pluralistic Judaism to survive over the next century. When it comes to the decline of Judaism in America, we have this habit of getting bogged down with research specifics and losing the b...
