Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 1 - 6 of 6
(JTA) — Anyone teaching the past by skipping over the unpleasant parts isn’t teaching history. They are engaged in propaganda. Jewish tradition understands this: Refusing to sugarcoat their own people’s culpability, the Sages themselves teach that the destruction of the Temple by the Romans is a consequence of baseless hatred — among Jews. Yet in nearly two-dozen states, the movement to impose restrictions on the teaching of history is gaining momentum. Incited by a national hysteria over “critical race theory,” advocates of these educational f...
NEW YORK (JTA) - "Pray for the welfare of the state," Rabbi Hanina writes, "for if it were not for the fear thereof, people would swallow each other alive." As cities around the nation burn with righteous indignation over yet another horrific incident of police brutality directed against a black man, Jewish leaders must reflect on our own long and ambiguous history with police as we grapple with our role in what is unfolding today. Historically, Jews have had an ambiguous relationship with the...
NEW YORK (JTA)—Over the course of our millennial history, Jews have had many encounters with contagious diseases. Often we’re blamed for them. Maybe I’m paranoid, but I can’t help feel uneasy with the amount of attention the New York Jewish community is receiving because of the first confirmed cases of the coronavirus. (We are hardly first: Asians around the globe already faced prejudice because of the epidemic’s origins in Wuhan, China.) The ominous flow charts demonstrating the spread of the contagion, featuring silhouettes of unnamed i...
NEW YORK (JTA)-Fans of mainstream Jewish music may find Nissim Black's latest single "Mothaland Bounce" jarring and alien, but they're just not listening with an ear to the rhythm of Jewish history. Set against the aural backdrop of an African basso profundo beat, and framed by scenes of gritty urban blight, the popular African-American-Israeli Hasidic artist boldly intones his rap-staccato credo in a manner that's hard to square with his woolen tzitzit, long Polish bekishe and towering shtreime...
(JTA)-In 1983, the Italian-Israeli professor Sandra Debenedetti Stow stunned the scholarly world with an explosive article that proposed that Jews introduced pizza to the European diet. She cited Yehuda Romano, a 14th-century Hebrew scholar from Italy, who translated Maimonides' use of the word "hararah" (a type of flatbread) in the Mishneh Torah with four simple Hebrew letters: peh, yud, tzadi and heh, or "pizza," arguably the very first time the word was ever used in any language. Before the...
(JTA)—Every year before Purim, my inbox and social media fill up with dire exhortations from rabbis and yeshivas warning against the dangers of celebratory excess—as if drunkenness on the holiday were something new. In reality, the after-Purim regrets have been part of the discourse ever since Rabbah drunkenly attacked and inadvertently killed his dear friend Rabbi Zeira in the Talmud (don’t worry—he was revived in the end). Rabbis and communal leaders across the religious spectrum have condemned drunken revelry on a holiday dedicated to exce...
