Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JTA) - Michelle Williams is one of the only non-Jewish actors with a starring role in "The Fabelmans," director Steven Spielberg's autobiographical film based on his Jewish family. But it turns out that Williams, who plays the Spielberg character's mother, has a Jewish family of her own. She told the Wall Street Journal that she and her Jewish husband, director Thomas Kail, are raising their two young children with Judaism and that she is studying the religion herself. "I can't teach it to...
(JTA) — Itamar Ben-Gvir, the right-wing Israeli politician called a “pyromaniac” by his critics because of his penchant for inflaming his country’s deep tensions, will head Israel’s police forces, under the terms of a deal inked with Benjamin Netanyahu early Friday. The deal would expand the ministry of internal security, the old name of the cabinet position in charge of the police, into the ministry of national security and would also give Ben-Gvir authority over border police in Palestinian territories, according to the terms reported...
(JTA) - Two bombs rocked bus stops at crowded entrances to Jerusalem early Wednesday morning, killing a teenager and sending about 20 people to the hospital, some in serious condition. The fatality was a 16-year-old yeshiva student named Aryeh Shtsupak from Har Nof, a largely Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem. He may have held Canadian and American citizenship, according to local media reports. The attacks represented the first time in years that terrorists used bombs in a deadly assault...
(JTA) — It was unseasonably cold on Sunday morning when thousands of rabbis crowded on risers in front of Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters in Brooklyn to snap a photograph. The group photo is a signature moment during any gathering of the Orthodox movement, allowing the movement to create a visual record of its growth: Unique among Hasidic movements, Chabad is known for sending rabbis and their wives to far-flung locations around the globe to minister to local Jews, regardless of denomination or beliefs. (A picture taken at a smaller gathering o...
(JTA) — The Orthodox Union has endorsed federal legislation that would enshrine the right to same-sex marriage, marking a reversal of its previous positions. When more than 100 Jewish groups endorsed the Respect for Marriage Act this summer, the OU, an umbrella group representing Modern Orthodox synagogues, was not among them. The group had previously sat on the sidelines as well when the U.S. Supreme Court weighed Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, in which the court ruled that same-sex marriage was protected under the Constitution. But things c...
(JTA) — Students at one of Chicago’s most selective public high schools are calling for improved Holocaust education after a classmate goose-stepped across the stage of a Halloween costume contest while wearing a German military uniform. The principal of Jones College Prep, which draws high-performing students from across Chicago, has already been suspended over his handling of the incident, which he initially downplayed. The Chicago school district has launched an investigation into whether the school followed “protocols for processing bias-ba...
(JTA) — Since Feb. 24, when Russian troops invaded Ukraine, Jewish groups from around the world have flooded the country with support, from food to medical care to evacuations. Now, as temperatures fall and Russian attacks on Ukraine’s power grid ramp up, those groups are directing their efforts toward making sure that Ukrainian Jews can remain warm and safe in the coming months. A Ukraine response group organized by the Orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch movement, whose rabbis are the Jewish leaders in many Ukrainian cities, is raising funds to buy...
(JTA) — Brooklyn Nets guard Kyrie Irving is defending his decision to promote a movie that argues that Jews were responsible for the transatlantic slave trade, despite criticism from his team’s owner. “I’m disappointed that Kyrie appears to support a film based on a book full of anti-semitic disinformation,” Nets owner Joe Tsai tweeted on Friday, shortly after Irving tweeted a link to the Amazon listing for a 2018 film called “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America!” The film is based on an earlier book by the same name advancing the oft-rep...
(JTA) — As Kanye West extended his antisemitic spree by tweeting about Jewish agents in Hollywood, the rocker John Mellencamp took the stage at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and said this about his longtime lawyer: “Allen is Jewish.” The line began an impassioned speech about the importance of non-Jews standing up for Jewish people at a time of antisemitism and anxiety for many of them, especially as white supremacists have taken up West’s comments as a rallying cry. Mellencamp was speaking on behalf of Allen Grubman, a prominent music i...
(JTA) — The athletic wear company Adidas is ending its relationship with Kanye West, days after the rapper boasted that he could “literally say antisemitics — and they cannot drop me.” The brand had faced growing criticism of its continued relationship with West, who is known as Ye, as other brands affiliated with West broke ties with him. Adidas reportedly brings in $2 billion a year through its Yeezy brand, accounting for about 10 percent of the company’s revenue. Now, the brand will stop making Yeezy products and stop all payments to West a...
(JTA) — Australia’s new left-leaning government is reversing the decision made nearly four years ago under a conservative administration to move the country’s embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced in December 2018 that Australia would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The move put him in line with then-U.S. President Donald Trump, who had made a similar announcement a year earlier, pleasing his base, and had already opened an embassy in Jerusalem. But it made Morrison an outlier among the vast ma...
(JTA) — Since March, Rabbi Daniel Litvak has been required to appear three times a week at the magistrate’s office in Porto, the Portuguese city where he is accused of submitting fraudulent citizenship applications for Sephardic Jews. His passports were confiscated and he was barred from contacting the lawyer who is the other defendant in the criminal case against him. Now, an appeals court in Lisbon has ruled that Litvak does not need to abide by the stringent restrictions. The court also criticized Portuguese prosecutors for how they hav...
(JTA) — An Israeli soldier very likely fired the gunshot that killed Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May, an analysis released by the Israel Defense Forces Monday concluded. But no one present during the killing, including the soldier considered likely to have fired the fatal shot, will be punished, military officials said, and the army released a statement saying it was still possible that Abu Akleh had been killed by Palestinian gunfire. The official conclusion marked a shift from the Israeli government’s previous pos...
(JTA) — Israeli rock star Aviv Geffen, a symbol of the country’s left, announced during a recent concert in the West Bank that he regretted his past criticism of settlers living there — whom he had long denounced as obstacles to peace. “It’s very moving to be here. I went through a personal journey that was not simple and not short and I understand that me and my brothers — you — were made to separate for any number of reasons including my ignorance, which came from a desire to please part of my audience,” Geffen said during a concert Aug. 24...
(JTA) — Hundreds of Jews from around the world have traveled to Basel, Switzerland, to mark the 125th anniversary of a historic gathering of Zionists there. The event was organized by the World Zionist Organization, a group inaugurated during the First Zionist Congress that Theodor Herzl, considered the father of modern Zionism, convened in Basel in 1897. At the 1897 congress, 200 participants from 17 countries voted to adopt as an explicit goal the creation of “a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine” for Jews. “At Basel, I founded...
(JTA) — On Netflix’s “My Unorthodox Life,” both Julia Haart and her older daughter Batsheva said they regretted getting married as teenagers, the norm in their Orthodox Jewish community. So when the family landed a spot on “Celebrity Family Feud,” the star-studded version of the classic TV game show, they said anything they won would go to a group dedicated to opposing child marriage. On the episode that aired Sunday night, the Haarts prevailed over a set of personalities from the Bravo reality-TV show “Summer House” and sent $25,000 to VOW...
(JTA) — When Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel’s prime minister, failed to meet his own deadline to announce a plan to annex portions of the West Bank during the summer of 2020, it wasn’t just his usual critics and advocates for the prompt creation of a Palestinian state who breathed a sigh of relief. The missed deadline was also a relief to insiders at the Trump White House, who knew that annexation would derail their ambitious effort to make peace between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. In fact, the very afternoon of the annexation deadlin...
(JTA) — The Democratic primary next week in Michigan’s 11th District could end a four-decade Jewish political dynasty — and spending by the country’s biggest pro-Israel lobby is playing a significant role. Because of redistricting, the race pits two incumbent Democrats against each other: Rep. Andy Levin, a Jewish Democrat who favors conditioning aid to Israel and counts some of Congress’s most outspoken Israel critics as his friends, and Rep. Haley Stevens, a non-Jewish centrist whose Israel commitments lie mainly in assuring its military...
(JTA) — Yair Lapid might only be Israel’s interim prime minister, but he appears to be determined to maximize the position in the four months he is guaranteed to occupy it. In a speech delivered Saturday night, Lapid laid out a set of beliefs that he said bind Israelis of all ideologies, as well as his diagnosis for why widespread agreement on fundamental ideas hasn’t translated into political harmony. “The answer is politics,” he said in the speech, published in English by the Times of Israel and in adapted form in Hebrew by Lapid on Twitte...
(JTA) - Vladimir Zelenko, the doctor from an Orthodox enclave near New York City who rose to fame early in the COVID-19 pandemic for promoting a drug cocktail, has died of cancer at 48. The foundation that Zelenko launched to advance his theories after he left his family medical practice amid controversy in May 2020 announced his death on Thursday, saying that it would accept donations to continue his work, which included opposition to COVID-19 vaccines. Zelenko, who went by Zev, was born in...
(JTA) — Israelis seeking to end pregnancies will no longer be required to appear before an approval committee, go to a hospital for medication or be asked invasive questions about why they want an abortion. A Knesset committee approved the new regulations on Monday, just days after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 50-year-old Roe v. Wade precedent guaranteeing Americans the right to abortion. The regulations fall short of the full abolition of the hospital-based approval committees that Israeli Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz had said h...
(JTA) — In the summer of 2020, Gabe Kapler, then in his first season as manager of the San Francisco Giants, joined figures across sports in taking a knee during the national anthem to protest police brutality. Now, two years later, Kapler has announced that he will not take the field at all for the anthem out of broad dismay over the United States’ direction, spurred by the mass murder of 19 children at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. “When I was the same age as the children in Uvalde, my father taught me to stand for the pledge of al...
(JTA) — The Jewish Telegraphic Agency and our partner sites at 70 Faces Media have answered the question many times over the years, a testament to its persistence in political life and its significance to American Jews: What do Jews believe about abortion? After a new report that the Supreme Court reviewed a majority opinion in February that would overturn Roe v. Wade, the question is relevant yet again. Here’s what we know: American Jews favor abortion rights, more than any other religious group, according to public polling. And tra...
(JTA) - Let's get one thing out of the way: Elon Musk is not Jewish. But his acquisition of Twitter comes amid longstanding problems with antisemitism and hate speech on the platform - and Jewish users fear his free-speech orientation could make things worse. Musk's purchase of the social media company, for a reported $44 billion, will likely take months to complete and could be derailed in any number of ways. And while the serial entrepreneur is known for acting quickly and decisively - sometim...
(JTA) — When Season 2 of “Russian Doll,” Natasha Lyonne’s sci-fi exploration of identity and trauma, dropped on Netflix Friday, it immediately became clear that teasers of the season’s Jewish content were not overblown. In the season, which features New York City subway-induced time travel, Lyonne’s character zips back to 1982, the year of her birth; 1968 New York City; and 1944, when her grandmother was being pursued by Nazis in her native Budapest. In every timeline, she witnesses how layers of Jewish trauma forged the family in which she e...
