Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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Here are some late night thoughts as I approach my 89th year. God knows (he or she, assuming of course...) that I am not a theologian, or for that matter—in the eyes of many who are—a religious person. A Jew? Oh yes—first and foremost and for at least the last two thirds of my life. If I am a Jew, certain things become self-evident. I have a DNA that is consistent with millions and millions of people both living and dead. Many of those dead of course, not of natural causes. I am a descendent of a people who in essence invented a belief syste...
My dad was not a big believer in religion. I found some of the reason when I studied the life of my grandfather, Abraham Shiplacoff. Abe was a devout Socialist of the “Old School.” And, while he believed passionately in his Judaism—he was skeptical of all rabbis and any others in positions of power. His early years in what are now Ukraine and a stern father helped fashion his distaste for the status quo. So, my dad grew up with little regard for the religious structure of Judaism. As I reached the age of 12, the subject of Bar Mitzvah came...
Some years ago, the French actor Robert Clary appeared on a television interview. He was famous for another television program—Hogan’s Heroes, a comical take on a prison camp in Germany during the Second World War. In the interview, Clary, for the first time, told the story of his experience with the Holocaust. How he, as a young Jewish actor in Paris was rounded up along with his Jewish neighbors and Jewish contemporaries by the Paris police and eventually sent to Buchenwald. The rest of his family was also taken to German Concentration Cam...
The Jewish Community is divided. Oh my, what a shock. There was a time that we were one Tribe. As the Community grew, the kids moved on, just like today. And so, as each family grew we became 12 tribes –The tribes split—and not harmoniously. Supposedly, although the rabbis can spend yet another millennium arguing about it, it was because of an economic dispute. Jewish families fighting and splitting up over family money and inheritance? Well, yeah! The State of Israel? Surely we all agreed on that! Wrong. Many Jews in the 1800s thought tha...
I wrote a column about the extreme left and the extreme right. I did that before Charlottesville, the chants of “Jews will not replace us” and the murder of a 32-year-old woman. Still there is some validity to the following: The late Eric Hoffer, the “Longshoreman Philosopher,” in his book “The True Believer” wrote that if you push the philosophies of the Far Left and the Far right to their extreme there is little difference between them. Picture a circle. Start at the top and take one curve and go to the left—pull it around that circle to the...
There is an interesting documentary on YouTube about a recent archeological expedition in Iraq and Iran—what was ancient Persia and before that Babylonia. In ancient texts and evidence in excavations there are stories about Sodom, Gomorrah and the big flood. That area of Persia/Iran was and is susceptible to flooding. They use round bottom boats of the type described in Torah in the story of Noah. But, there is no history of a great flood—plenty of floods, but not one big enough to bring penguins from Antarctica and giraffes from Africa. A lot...
In the fabulous opening of “Fiddler on the Roof,” Tevye engages in a uniquely Jewish argument: taking two dissenting opinions and agreeing that they are both right. This is possible because of Talmudic study; an exercise in which only Jews can engage and whose twisted logic all Jews are born to innately understand. Jews are used to debate. Debating (okay—arguing) is built into our DNA. We will argue over the best bagels, the age of the universe and the best shortstop the Yankees ever had. The best of friends can go toe to toe with rising decibe...
A disagreement between Jews? Whoda thought? That three Jews in a room could not agree on much—except that they disagree. It is part of our DNA. Look to any Orthodox Study Group and you will see the same arguments dealing with Torah interpretation that have been going on, probably since the original authors sat down in Babylonia. We like to argue. Maybe that’s why the world is so full of Jewish lawyers. We argue about the best Deli in New York or LA or even, God Forbid, Lynchburg, Virginia. Best baseball player ever? Fahget about it! But sometim...
YouTube is one of the marvels of the Electronic age. You can play eight hours of the singers and jazz artists of the 1940s. You can take a Friday and play Yiddish and Israeli music all the way up to Shabbat. And then there are the other sites. Rachel and I were scrolling and typed in “History of the Jews.” The first video that came up was a vile attack on the Jews from some obscure group that shall remain nameless. Basically it said we had a chance given to us by God and blew it by not recognizing the Messiah and then killing Jesus. It the...
You would think by this point in the 21st century we would have learned. But we delude ourselves into thinking it doesn’t exist. It does. Anti-Semitism is alive and well and growing—right here in the good old U.S. of A. There was a wave of positive enthusiasm when President Obama was elected—that we were entering a “post racial” era. The truth is the opposite. There is a wonderful song from the show “South Pacific” titled “You’ve Got to be Taught to Hate.” It’s true. We thought that racism in general and anti-Semitism in particular was “generat...
In 1950, my family moved to Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. It was a lovely, leafy area with stately homes and a storied history. Once my parents bought their home we were shocked to find that just shortly before we moved, a law was struck down that prevented Jews from owning homes in that lovely, leafy suburb. They actually had a LAW that prevented Jews and African Americans from buying a home in their town. We’ve come a long way, baby. Restrictive covenants have practically disappeared in the United States. You have the w...
Well, what happens if they don’t? This month, a bunch of Europeans and others walked into a room in Paris to decide what actually had already been decided in 1947 and discussed continually since then: That the best solution for the Holy Land of Israel was to whack it up into two states: One for the Jews, one for the Arabs. As we all know, all the way back in ’47, the Jews agreed, the Arabs did not. The distinguished gentlemen at this latest meeting represented the U.N., a number of nations, a sprinkling of Arabs as well as John Kerry who, by...
While as Jews we celebrate our own New Year with a religious flourish for 10 days, usually in the fall, tell me you won’t do at least a little family and friends this weekend. What a year, right? It looks mightily like we will, in this country of ours have four political parties by the end of 2017. The Democrats are split between the “Regulars” and the “Progressives”; the Republicans between the “Regulars” and the “Tea Party.” Not to worry—we are one of the last developed nations on earth to have only two “major” parties. Will things wo...
I have begun re-reading Menachem Begin’s book “The Revolt—The Story of the Irgun.” It still makes fascinating reading some 60 to 70 years after its original publication. The book opens with Begin having a spirited discussion with his Soviet interrogator. Begin was imprisoned in Russia having been captured as a member of the Polish Army at the beginning of WWII. The interrogator insists that Zionism is a fraud perpetrated by the British to have an excuse to remain in the Middle East. Begin, in what even then was a professorial manner, explains t...
I wrote some thoughts down, posted them on my Facebook page and wrote a truncated version to the Orlando Sentinel, which was printed as a letter to the editor. So, here are some further ramblings. 9/11 was a tragedy. We have had a few in our history. The greatest war toll of American dead happened within our own borders between 1861-1865. Dec. 7th, 1941 was a tragedy. We went to war against two sovereign nations: Japan and Germany. We won. They both are functioning democracies today. You cannot go to war against a Movement. A Movement has no...
When he was younger, our son Adam (now in his 50s) asked me “Dad, what will happen when the last old Jewish guy dies?” What he meant, metaphorically, was what do he and his generation do when they no longer have access to the stories, the culture and the warmth of that first generation that had that accent, loved that food and cried when they heard Ha Tikva. Memories fade. Young people will be voting in this year’s presidential election for the first time who were three years old when Saudi terrorists took out the Twin Towers. Their parents and...
There is an old Jewish joke (are there any new Jewish jokes?) about a young man rushing in to his grandmother’s kitchen in 1969 and exclaiming “Bubbe! We just landed a man on the moon!” The grandmother stopped chopping liver and looked up. She asked “Is that good for the Jews or bad for the Jews?” There was a time for us as a people where everything was measured against that standard. Supposedly, less than a century after the Holocaust, a little less than 70 years after the founding of the Third Jewish Commonwealth in Israel, that should no...
There is a war going on in the United States. It is being fought on college campuses across the nation. This battle is not about Affirmative Action or the ridiculous costs of a college education. Not even about Bernie and Hillary—that’s a different one with its own dynamics. No, this is about a well-funded, well-organized movement to discredit the State of Israel and by proxy every Jew in the world. Of all the injustices piled upon the peoples of the world, why should so much attention be paid to tiny Israel? Why not Russia with its aby...
Bernie Sanders drew a reported 28,000 people to a rally in Brooklyn. That’s a lot of folks for a 74-year-old man to draw to a speech. But, it doesn’t seem to translate into wins in primaries. Bernie has struck a chord with unhappy Democrats (and Socialists) who feel the odds stacked against them in the present system of politics and big business. And, pretty much they are right. The five biggest financial institutions issue 75 percent of the credit cards in this country as well as most of the car loans and mortgages. So, what to do about it?...
Joe Biden visited Israel in the past few weeks. He had a little better dinner with Bibi—last time he left before dinner was served because the Shas Housing minister decided to stick his thumb in the eye of Israel’s number one ally by announcing new Jerusalem settlements while Biden was in town. This trip, Biden went to visit the offices of the Palestine Authority in Ramallah, where he heard the old saw that the present terror attacks against civilians by Palestinians (which, in addition to over 40 Israelis, has killed two U.S. citizens so far...
Why are we involved in a 12-centuries-old war? Shiites and Sunnis have been at it since the death of Mohamed. I have written before about “Sykes-Picot” the agreement that whacked up the Middle East between England and France during WWI and how their placement of dictators and kings (mostly Sunni) in the countries they “invented” brought some stability; albeit with horrible human rights abuses to the people of those so-called countries. So, George Bush broke the covenant, the Arab Spring has become a winter of death and destruction. Let’s f...
Usually, most people don’t take a real interest in politics until at least spring of an election year. Admittedly this year is different. The rise of The Donald continues to amaze. Obviously Bernie Sanders has touched a nerve. Jews have been almost solidly Democratic for over a hundred years. The reasons are simple. The Democratic Party stood by the unions. The Jews who became citizens in the early 1900s and beyond knew that their only chance against the “Stinking Bosses” was to organize. My grandfather, Abraham Shiplacoff (go ahead, Googl...
In 1948 I was in high school. Okay, now you have a pretty good idea of how long I’ve been around. Point is—I was in a high school of 1500 kids, of whom about 12 were Jews. When the State of Israel declared its independence, let’s just say there was not dancing in the halls. I was plumb ignorant of the situation. Ours was not a kosher home. My family was not active in the Jewish Community and while we had been impacted by the Holocaust as every Jew alive had to be, we had not lost any family members of whom we were aware. Two years later we move...
In 1967, shortly after the Six Day War, Yigal Allon, a respected Israeli archeologist and at the time, Minister of Immigration, offered a plan for creating the borders of the Third Jewish Commonwealth. He drew a convoluted map, dividing the Jewish homeland north and south, but keeping Jerusalem what it had always been, the capital of the Jewish State. It was revised by the Knesset, but never executed. The reasons were many, including the fact that getting over a hundred Jews in an assembly to agree on something is a massive undertaking. But,...
The High Holy days are designed as a time for reflection, repairing and making ready. A new year, a new set of ideas and a determination to do better than last year. Really? One day leads to another, time goes on. I hit a BIG birthday a couple of months ago (really?). I had decided that I would cut back on my physical workouts when I hit that number. But, the next day I said to myself “Hey! I’m only a day older”—and went back to the routine. We all live life one day at a time. Jews have been doing this for millennia. Our history is that we...
