Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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LOS ANGELES (JTA)-Can the essence of Passover fit into a box? Fans of Manischewitz and Streit's will undoubtedly answer, "Yes, in a matzah box." But a successful Kickstarter campaign called Hello Mazel aims to reinvent that box, promising a package filled with Passover-related "Jewish awesomeness" that will be delivered to your door (or someone else's). The project was a smash on Kickstarter, to the tune of more than $152,021 with 1,395 backers. Investors who pledged a minimum of $50 will...
(JTA)-If you're like me, you blog, read and share a lot of political stuff. But who really reads these posts and articles all the way through? Especially with the longer stories, who has time to look up the sources, or check if that odd photo was first posted on some sketchy partisan website? Instead, we click and we skim; we copy and we paste. But then comes Yom Kippur. If we accept the accounting in the Talmud that says "Evil gossip kills three: the one who says it, the one who listens and...
LOS ANGELES (JTA)—As the new Superman movie “Man of Steel” flies to an opening on Father’s Day weekend, we earthbound Jewish men have the superhero’s creators—Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Jewish teenagers from Cleveland—to thank for setting such a super high bar. Especially if Superman, the ultimate immigrant, is a member of the tribe, as cultural commentators like Harry Brod in his book “Superman is Jewish?” maintain. Finally, then, we have an explanation as to why Jewish men are expected to f...
LOS ANGELES (JTA)—On Shavuot, we celebrate being given the Five Books of Moses by opening the gift and reading from the scroll. But first we need to find the place. How do we find our place in the Torah? Newbies to the ways of a Torah scroll will soon realize that unlike the mass-produced technological marvels that bring order and wonder into their lives, this handmade inspiration comes without an operating manual. As I discovered the first time I tried to find my place, the perfect columns o...
Get out your squeegees and glass cleaner. In Berlin, Jews are being put on display in a transparent box, and you might want a clear view. Called “Jews in a Showcase,” the exhibit, which runs through August, invites a Jew to sit and answer questions. It’s part of an exhibition called “The Whole Truth … everything you always wanted to know about Jews” that opened at the Jewish Museum Berlin last month. “At selected times, a Jewish guest will take a seat in a showcase and will—if desired—react to visitors’ questions and comments,” says the...
LOS ANGELES (JTA)—In a dark glass building here, Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter shows that his memory is crystal clear and his voice is strong. His responses seem a bit delayed—not that different from other survivors I have known who are reluctant to speak openly about their experiences—but he’s doing just fine for a 3-D image. In the offices of USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies, Gutter, who as a teenager had survived Majdanek, the German Nazi concentration camp on the outskirts...
LOS ANGELES (JTA)—If the Passover haggadah seems like hieroglyphics to you, it could be a good thing. Though the Israelites left Egypt presumably to escape the ankhs and eyes of Horus of the ancient written language, recently I discovered that hieroglyphics—a system of pictorial characters—had a way of writing me into the haggadah. Considering that on Passover we are commanded to re-enact an event of which we have no memory, perhaps adding some details from the Egyptian point of view might...
