Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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For the first time, the U.S. State Department has explicitly accused the Palestinian Authority (PA) of promoting anti-Semitism, a signal Jewish groups are hoping will lead to change in U.S. policy. According to a newly released State Department annual report on international religious freedom, official PA media "carried religiously intolerant material," citing Palestinian television programs that called Jews "evil" or "denied a historical Jewish presence in Jerusalem." Previously, U.S....
The omission of Palestinian statehood from this year’s Republican Party platform is neither a radical change nor a departure from immutable U.S. policy, as some critics are claiming. In fact, both parties’ platforms have repeatedly changed positions on Israel-related issues over the years, in keeping with the preference of the presidential nominee or the changing mood among their rank and file. The first time the Republican platform mentioned a Palestinian state was in 1980. In that year’s race, GOP nominee Ronald Reagan positioned himse...
Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas must be surprised at the international outcry over his accusation this week that Israeli rabbis are plotting to poison Arab wells. After all, Abbas and his colleagues have been making similar allegations for more than 30 years, yet the international community has hardly said a word. The best-known allegation was the declaration by Yasser Arafat’s wife, Suha, at a 1999 press conference that Israel was engaged in the “daily and intensive use of poisonous gas” against Palestinians, as part of a pl...
The U.S. State Department’s admission that it altered an embarrassing video exchange about its nuclear negotiations with Iran is disturbing—but it’s not the first time that the Obama administration, or some of its predecessors, have tampered with words that it deemed politically inconvenient. State Department spokesman John Kirby confessed this week that part of a 2013 video recording in its archive had been deliberately removed. In that portion of the video, then-State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki confirmed to a reporter that the depar...
The current American presidential campaign features candidates who seem all too willing to set aside ethics for the sake of greater profits. One presumptive nominee proudly made large donations to politicians “so they would do what I want” to facilitate his business goals. The other took actions that benefited special interest groups, which then “coincidentally” donated large sums to her family’s private foundation. It’s clear that their approaches to accumulating wealth have worked. According to Forbes, Donald Trump is worth more than $4.5 b...
As recently as the 1940s, anti-Semitism was so common in the United States that even the president privately told offensive jokes about Jewish immigrants in a faux New York Jewish accent. Yet in the past few months, a candidate who is the son of Jewish immigrants and has a pronounced New York Jewish accent has won 18 presidential primaries and caucuses, and more than 6 million votes. He has received donations from more than 4 million Americans—the largest number of individual contributors to any political campaign in U.S. history. Have A...
Brazil says it will not confirm the Israeli ambassador-designate to the South American nation, Dani Dayan, because it does not want to “show support for the settlement enterprise,” for which Dayan has been an activist. But anyone familiar with Brazilian history knows that it has an extensive “settler” history of its own. The Portuguese settler leader Pedro Alvares Cabral is said to have “discovered” Brazil in the year 1500, although the indigenous tribes living there since time immemorial no doubt saw things differently. The natives num...
Examining America’s response to the Holocaust can help us avoid repeating the mistakes of that era, so applying the lessons of the Nazi years to contemporary concerns—including the plight of the Syrian refugees—certainly is appropriate. But those who are invoking the memory of the Jewish refugees are choosing the wrong analogy for today’s Syrian refugees. One problem with the analogy is that it distorts the nature of what happened—and what is happening now—to the victims. The Jews fleeing Hitler were the targets of religious and racial pers...
Fifty years ago this week, two prominent figures in the American Jewish community startled their colleagues by calling for democratic elections to choose Jewish leaders. The occasion was a two-day conference in New York City, in November 1965, on “Planning for the American Jewish Community of Tomorrow—1975.” Jewish organizational professionals, rabbis, and scholars came together to discuss what should be done to ensure the wellbeing of American Jewry 10 years hence. Most of the speakers confined themselves to generalities and platitudes. But t...
Did jailed Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard’s actions provoke anti-Semitism in the United States? In the days leading up to the July 28 revelation that the U.S. has granted Pollard parole and that he will be released from federal prison on Nov. 20, that charge was made by former State Department counsel Abraham Sofaer. Commenting on then-unconfirmed reports that Pollard would be paroled, Sofaer—who was part of the U.S. team that investigated the Pollard affair in the 1980s—claimed Pollard “created a terrible situation for American Jews who then ob...
Ralph Nader, the famous crusader against fraud and corruption, believes he has uncovered a horrific new injustice—and the perpetrators are “the Jews.” “You never avoid using the word anti-Semitism when Arabs and Arab-Americans are discriminated against, are arrested without charges, are exposed to all kinds of swears and bars against employment and all kinds of discrimination that goes on, and that is anti-Semitism. The Semitic race is Arabs and Jews and the Jews do not own the phrase anti-Semitism,” Nader declared at the recent annual co...
“The great powers had photographs of the railway routes that the trains took to... Auschwitz,” Pope Francis remarked this week. “Tell me,” he asked, “why didn’t they bomb them?” The pontiff’s question is not merely a matter of historical curiosity. It raises issues of morality, diplomacy, and American foreign policy with profound implications for our own times. The reason the Allies had photos of the railways leading to Auschwitz is that throughout the spring of 1944, Allied planes conducted surveillance of the area in preparation for...
The world-famous Louvre art museum stands accused of discriminating against Israeli students, after being exposed by some clever amateur investigative journalism that echoes a 1940s incident involving the father of Israel’s current prime minister. The episode began last month when Prof. Sefy Hendler, who teaches art history at Tel Aviv University, contacted the Louvre’s reservation department to arrange tours for 12 of his students during their trip to Paris in late June. Hendler proposed three different dates that his students would be ava...
“It is a fantastic commentary on the inhumanity of our times,” journalist Dorothy Thompson wrote at the height of the 1930s European Jewish refugee crisis, “that for thousands and thousands of people a piece of paper with a stamp on it is the difference between life and death.” Seventy-five years ago this month, president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s newly appointed assistant secretary of state sent his colleagues a memo outlining a strategy to “postpone and postpone and postpone” the granting of that “piece of paper” to refugees. Breckinridge Long...
“We are so used to bombs and the sound of firing guns that we don’t get upset anymore.” In choosing those words, Florence Bar Ilan probably hoped to convey that there was a certain stability to her daily life, but one can imagine her parents, Rachel and Samuel Ribakove, back in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, trembling as they read the letter their daughter sent from besieged Jerusalem during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. “Dear Florence, Dear Mother and Dad,” a collection of letters between Florence and her American relatives f...
One of the most enduring images from the Baltimore riots was that of the irate mother of a rioter vigorously admonishing and slapping her law-breaking teenage son. Millions of frustrated Americans, watching the televised images of mobs of young people burning and looting at will, no doubt wondered, “Where are their parents?” Toya Graham, dubbed “the Baltimore Riot Mom” by the media, was one parent who refused to stand idly by any longer. Some Israelis are probably wishing there were a few “riot moms” in the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem....
The supposedly unprecedented step taken by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his plan to speak directly before Congress about the Iranian nuclear threat on March 3, rather than working exclusively with the White House on the issue, actually has an interesting precedent—established in 1975 by none other than Yitzhak Rabin and America’s Democratic Party. That spring, Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger undertook a round of shuttle diplomacy aimed at reaching a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. The negotiations quickly ran...
The most notorious living perpetrator of genocide can sleep a little easier. The International Criminal Court (ICC), which five years ago indicted Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for organizing the genocide in Darfur, recently suspended further action on Darfur because of the failure of the United States and other countries to help bring Bashir to justice. Ironically, the ICC’s announcement came just before the 70th anniversary of a long-forgotten double-cross by the Roosevelt administration of its own ambassador to the Allied c...
By The new U.S. policy of rapprochement with Cuba, which was accompanied by the celebrated release of imprisoned Jewish aid worker Alan Gross, probably will give American Jews greater access to a Jewish community with which few are familiar. But visitors will find that the years have not been kind to once-thriving Cuban Jewry. During the centuries of Spanish rule in Cuba, no more than a scattered handful of Jews lived there. Catholicism was the only religion the Spanish colonial authorities permitted. The modern Jewish connection to Cuba began...
A leering, hook-nosed Jew, beginning to disrobe, prepares to pounce upon a helpless non-Jewish woman who cowers in fear on the ground before him. This disturbing image, so common in anti-Semitic propaganda in past centuries, this week made an appearance with a modern twist: the hook-nosed would-be rapist wore an Israeli army uniform, and his intended victim, a weeping Muslim woman, wore a headdress indicating that she represented the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. The cartoon, titled “Al-Aqsa is Being Raped,” would be outrageous even if it were t...
Ex-presidents seldom take an interest in Jewish affairs, with two notable exceptions. One is Jimmy Carter, who has repeatedly clashed with the Jewish community. Another is Herbert Hoover, an unlikely ally of the Jews who passed away 50 years ago this week (Oct. 20, 1964). Most ex-presidents have gone quietly into the sunset, and some have taken issue with the few who have chosen to speak out on current affairs. George W. Bush, for example, last week had some strong words in reaction to fellow ex-president Carter’s public criticism of President...
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan claims Israel is carrying out “systematic genocide” in Gaza. South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), asserts that Israel’s actions in Gaza “remind [us] of the atrocities of Nazi Germany.” Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas is accusing Israel of “genocide,” and the PA’s newspaper is calling the current war “Israel’s Holocaust.” It seems as if every time Israel defends itself, somebody points an accusing finger and yells “Genocide!” Raphael Lemkin, who coined...
Seventy years ago last week, the Allies staged the D-Day invasion, landing some 24,000 troops on the beaches along France’s Normandy coast in one of the major turning points of World War II. What is not widely realized, however, is that the D-Day assault on June 6, 1944, also had an important link to the fate of Europe’s Jews—and in particular to the controversy over the Allies’ refusal to bomb Auschwitz. Apologists for the Roosevelt administration’s failure to bomb the death camps often point to the fact that President Roosevelt and the U.S....
"We know we are going to be bamboozled," a despondent Stephen Wise, the foremost American Jewish leader of his time, confided to a friend before boarding a ship bound for England in early 1939. The British had invited Wise and other Zionist leaders from the United States and Palestine to take part in a "peace conference" with Arab leaders. Wise expected the worst, and he was right. The conference in London's majestic St. James Palace would set the stage for the imposition-75 years ago this...
A faded black-and-white photograph from 1943 shows Private Max Wald enjoying the Passover seder together with hundreds of his Polish army comrades. But a tattered diary entry from the following year describes the “dampness and cold” of the prison cell where Wald spent Seder night in 1944, after he and hundreds of other Polish Jewish soldiers deserted en masse because of rampant anti-Semitism in the Polish army. The photo and the diary provide bookends to a troubling and little-known chapter in Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust. Aft...
