Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JTA)-In August, Liad Goldberg visited her sister in a Russian jail. It had been four months since Naama Issachar had been arrested at a Moscow airport while on a layover and accused of drug smuggling, and Goldberg was seeing her sister for the first time since the arrest. The sisters spoke through a glass partition that prevented them from touching. Later, Goldberg watched as Issachar was led into a courtroom for a hearing. "They had her in handcuffs," Goldberg recalled. "It's really sad." Iass...
(JTA)-Since announcing his presidential run in May, Michael Bennet has been polling between zero and 1 percent. He didn't qualify for the latest Democratic debate and he's a long shot to make the next one. The Colorado senator raised only $2.1 million in the third quarter of 2019, less than a tenth of the total brought in by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. But Bennet isn't ready to give up yet, believing he's got what it takes to beat President Donald Trump in 2020. "I'm unconvinced that...
(JTA)-Bernie Sanders was one of only two Democratic presidential candidates to address the Islamic Society of North America Convention in August, the largest annual gathering of Muslim Americans in the country. Organizers invited the 10 highest-polling contenders at the time to the Houston event, but the Vermont senator and Julian Castro were the only ones to accept. Sanders received loud applause and a standing ovation for a speech that repeatedly invoked his refugee father's flight from...
(JTA)-Rep. Elijah Cummings, a longtime Baltimore congressman who worked to build ties between the African-American and Jewish communities in his district, died Thursday in his home city. He was 68. A spokeswoman, Trudy Perkins, said in a statement that he died of "complications concerning longstanding health challenges." As the head of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Cummings was a leading figure in the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump. He used his role to...
LAS VEGAS (JTA)-Congregation Ner Tamid is located a half an hour drive away from the Las Vegas Strip, where each luxury hotel seems more extravagant than the next and even on a Sunday morning people can be found crowding around blackjack tables and sitting in front of slot machines in the glitzy casinos. But at the synagogue, located in the suburb of Henderson, people are lining up for something quite different. Kids are grabbing slices of pizza as they wait for Hebrew school to start. Some are...
(JTA)—Two reports of anti-Semitic bullying at schools in Australia are receiving widespread media coverage. A photo that allegedly shows a 12-year-old Jewish student being forced to kneel to kiss the shoes of a Muslim classmate was circulated on social media. The incident occurred at the Cheltenham Secondary College in the town of Cheltenham, a Melbourne suburb, according to The Age, a Melbourne-based newspaper. The report did not make it clear if the Muslim boy’s religion had anything to do with the incident. A second incident took place at...
(JTA)—As votes were counted following the election in Israel, many saw the results as a loss for longtime Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. After all, Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party won fewer seats than the Blue and White party of his main competitor Benny Gantz. So it came as a surprise for many on Wednesday when Israeli President Reuven Rivlin decided to give Netanyahu, rather than Gantz, the first shot at forming a ruling government. The Sept. 17 election wasn’t just a battle between Netanyahu and Gantz, or Likud and Blue and White...
(JTA)-For "Borat," his 2006 film, Sacha Baron Cohen went undercover as a made-up Kazakh journalist who travels America and gets unwitting targets to share his boorish and sometimes bigoted opinions. In "Who Is America," the Jewish actor creates a variety of characters who manage to get prominent Americans to say shockingly offensive things. In "The Spy," he once again goes undercover, but in a very different way. The Jewish actor and filmmaker portrays the real-life Eli Cohen, a daring Israeli a...
(JTA)—Israel’s decision on Aug. 15 to ban Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar from entering the country has quickly prompted a wave of impassioned responses from across the Jewish community. Pro-Israel groups, including AIPAC, and prominent Democratic lawmakers are already objecting to the move. AIPAC’s statement, along with others from establishment Jewish groups, criticized Omar and Tlaib’s support for the movement to boycott Israel. But like others who have their differences with the two House reps, AIPAC said that Israel should nonethe...
(JTA)—Not long after news that a shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, left at least 22 people dead, reports started swirling that the suspect had posted a manifesto on 8chan, an online forum. Law enforcement officials are investigating a document posted there that is believed to be authored by the suspect, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius. The text contains racist rhetoric, blaming immigrants and Latinos for taking away jobs from Americans. It was uploaded fewer than 20 minutes before the shooting, according to CNN. This isn’t the first tim...
(JTA)—The gunman who killed nine people in Dayton, Ohio, showed an ex-girlfriend a video of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting on their first date. A woman who briefly dated Connor Betts, 24, earlier this year wrote about his troubling behavior in an essay posted Tuesday on Medium. Betts opened fire outside a bar early Sunday, killing his sister and eight others before being shot dead by police. Adelia Johnson wrote that the pair had bonded over mental health problems after meeting in a college course in January. Betts said that he suffered f...
(JTA)—Richard Stone, Florida’s first Jewish senator since the Civil War and an adviser on the Camp David Peace Accords, has died. Stone died on Sunday at the age of 90, his son-in-law Joel Poznansky told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an email. He was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Miami Beach. He graduated from Harvard College and Columbia Law School and worked as a lawyer in Florida prior to entering local politics there. In 1975, he became the state’s first Jewish senator since the Civil W...
(JTA)—Jewish leaders in Baltimore have come to the defense of Rep. Elijah Cummings, the African-American Democrat who has come under withering attack from President Donald Trump. Trump used Twitter over the weekend to attack Cummings, whose 7th District includes over half of the city of Baltimore. On Saturday, the president called Cummings “a brutal bully” for criticizing conditions at border detention camps for migrants. “Cumming [sic] District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” the president wrote on Twitter, following a “Fox &...
NEW YORK (JTA)-In the 1960s, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and John Glenn were household names, idolized as god-like figures by a public enraptured by NASA's forays into space. There was also Jules Bergman, who almost attained the same fame despite never actually going into space. The charismatic television reporter covered all of NASA's 54 manned space flights during his lifetime. One of those was Apollo 11, which, 50 years ago, on July 20, 1969, became the first manned spacecraft to...
NEW YORK (JTA)-There are fans of Philip Roth who enjoy his books. Then there are the fans who want to own his typewriters. The latter have their shot: Some of the late Jewish author's typewriters are among the 129 items from his estate going up for auction via Litchfield County Auctions. Online bidding was held July 20, with the profits going to charity (the specific charities have not been disclosed by the Roth estate). The starting bids for most of the items are not high relative to other...
(JTA)-It's Emmy season again and Jews in the TV industry have plenty of reason to celebrate. Out of all the nominees announced Tuesday, here's a roundup of the Jewish picks on the list. Winners will be announced on Sept. 22 at Los Angeles' Microsoft Theater. "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," which follows the life of feisty comedian Midge Maisel from the very Jewish 1950s Upper West Side, was nominated for outstanding comedy series. Rachel Brosnahan was nominated for best comedy actress for her role...
(JTA)—Women served as combat soldiers during Israel’s War of Independence, when the fledgling country needed all the fighters it could get. But following the 1948 war, it took half a century before they were allowed back in combat. Since the late 1990s, when some units started allowing female recruits, the number of women serving in combat has rapidly increased. Last summer saw a record 1,000 female combat soldiers inducted. Debbie Zimelman, a U.S.-born photographer who has lived in Israel for 30 years, spent five years with young women ser...
NEW YORK (JTA)—In his most recent novel, “kaddish.com,” Nathan Englander imagines a website that a character—encumbered by Jewish guilt—uses to hire someone to say the traditional mourner’s prayer for his late father. In interviews, the author has said the idea was inspired by the very real fact that Judaism allows mourners to hire a proxy to recite the Kaddish prayer for the dead on behalf of a loved one. Englander said he had tried unsuccessfully to buy the rights to the domain name from t...
(JTA)-Jessica Meir has been preparing to go into space since the age of 5. She attended her first space camp after finishing middle school and a training program at the Kennedy Space Center following her sophomore year at Brown University. It took Meir three tries to be chosen for NASA's highly selective astronaut training program, which she started in 2013 and from which she graduated two years later. Last month, NASA announced that Meir will be participating in her first mission. It still...
(JTA)—Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein said his Chabad of Poway could not afford to hire an armed guard. Had it been able, or if the government had helped the synagogue bring in one, he believes the deadly attack there Saturday could have been averted. “If I had the funding, we may have been spared. How many more dead bodies will we have to see before we act?” he told The New York Times. But hiring a security guard should not be the only priority in terms of security, said Jason Friedman, the executive director of the Community Security Service, an or...
NEW YORK (JTA)-Special counsel Robert Mueller's report about Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election was released to Congress and the public Thursday, adding new details to what had been disclosed about its findings by Attorney General William Barr when Mueller concluded his investigation last month. The 448-page document, released after a nearly two-year long inquiry, says Mueller's investigation did not establish the Trump campaign "conspired or coordinated" with the Russian...
OCEANSIDE, N.Y. (JTA)-Nine years ago, Ellen Grossman wanted to do something special for her birthday. "I said we've had enough parties and enough pocketbooks and enough jewelry-do something different," the Great Neck resident recalled. So she decided to organize a Passover seder for Holocaust survivors, many of whom who had no actual seder to go to during the holiday. That was in 2011. When the first seder was a success, Grossman decided to keep going. On Wednesday, some 85 guests-Holocaust...
(JTA)—Add Beto O’Rourke to the already crowded field of Democratic candidates hoping to unseat President Donald Trump. The El Paso native and former congressman hopes to build on the buzz that accompanied his unsuccessful but oh-so-close campaign against Republican incumbent Ted Cruz in last year’s Texas Senate race. O’Rourke, a Roman Catholic, has clashed at times with the local Jewish community, particularly his vote in 2014 against funding for Israel’s Iron Dome rocket defense system. H...
(JTA)-John Hickenlooper is the latest Democrat who thinks he can win back the White House in 2020. The former Colorado governor and self-described "extreme moderate" announced his candidacy on Monday and is holding his first campaign rally this week. "Ultimately I'm running for president because I believe that not only can I beat Donald Trump, but that I am the person that can bring people together on the other side and actually get stuff done," he said on "Good Morning America." During his...
(JTA)—With the announcement last month that it had picked Robert Kraft as its 2019 laureate, the Genesis Prize seemed poised for a calmer year. Last year the foundation that awards the “Jewish Nobel,” as it’s called, picked actress and director Natalie Portman as an example of someone who provides “inspiration to the next generation of Jews through their outstanding professional achievement along with their commitment to Jewish values and the Jewish people.” The selection backfired, however, when Portman refused to attend the prize ceremony in...
