Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS) — Franz Kafka would feel right at home in northern Israel. Life here has a surreal, absurdist character with the indivisible mix of the mundane and the potentially catastrophic. A quiet day has only a handful of rocket or drone attacks and we have become used to incessant plane noise and to looking up and around after a boom or two. Israelis are resilient, but resilience is often the product of being able to maintain one’s routine and “normalcy” within one’s familiar surroundings. Anywhere from 60,000 to 80,000 people have been stripped o...
(JNS) — We are witnessing a strange and troubling historic inversion. It has become part of the lore of the Israeli left that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was the victim of growing calls for retribution and punishment due to his perceived sin of signing the Oslo Accords, ultimately leading to Rabin’s assassination. The left holds that the unindicted abettors and provocateurs of this act were, of course, those on the right, especially Benjamin Netanyahu. That political figures were implicitly responsible for the assassination, the left bel...
(JNS) — King David’s plaintive and eternally mysterious question ad matai? (until when?), which we recite daily with heads bent or in deep self-contemplation, has a particularly searing relevance when I look at the recent terror attacks unleashed upon our innocents. The murder of two young children invokes the exact inverse of the Talmudic wisdom that he who saves a life has saved the world. With these murders, the world has been destroyed; the world of decency, of compassion, of any kind of empathy—gone. Furthermore, the murder of the Yaniv...
(JNS) — Let’s face it: The raging debate about Jews having white privilege is a bit absurd. Jews are basically a historical Rorschach depiction of a people. In other words, we take the form; we are regarded through the eyes of those who perceive us. For most of the past two millennia, Jews were certainly not regarded as being like other people. In Europe, we were first the Christ-rejectors/killers who per Augustine, were being kept around in order to bear witness to our own degradation and supersession by the Church. Not too much privilege ther...
(JNS)—A critical function of the Israel Defense Forces is to secure borders and sensitive locations, in addition to the transition points in and through such areas. Guard duty is deceptively routine and simple. Like other military functions, most of the time there is a familiar routine that can seem mind-numbing to the casual observer. However, the trained soldier knows all too well that the seemingly mundane and insignificant can be a ruse—a cover for something intended to be deadly. Therefore, vigilance and skepticism are part of a che...
