Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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WASHINGTON (JTA) — President Joe Biden’s concerns about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned overhaul of Israel’s courts system should be taken into account by the Israeli parties seeking a compromise, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said after meeting Biden. Herzog’s advice, effectively aimed at Netanyahu and appearing only in his comments in Hebrew to Israeli media after his White House meeting on Tuesday, was unusual in a foreign leader insisting that the United States had a role to play in a matter of internal debate. “It’s not...
PITTSBURGH (JTA) — Jurors in the trial of the gunman who killed 11 Jewish worshipers in a Pittsburgh synagogue took less than two hours to find him eligible for the death penalty, setting up a final phase of the historic proceedings in which the gunman may be sentenced to death. On Thursday morning, the seven women and five men on the jury unanimously found that Robert Bowers, who attacked the Tree of Life building on Oct. 27, 2018, met all four thresholds of intent necessary for capital punishment. The jurors also agreed with the g...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Harvard’s 20th-century antisemitic Jewish quotas were a key part of the Supreme Court’s decision to gut affirmative action on Thursday, as the winning litigant and two conservative justices cited them in the landmark case. The 6-3 decision Thursday, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, bars universities from using race as an explicit factor in considering admissions, but allows race to be cited by applicants in essays describing their life experiences. Students for Fair Admissions, the conservative advocacy group that...
(JTA) – Jeff Nitz, a social worker and lay leader at his church, sees himself as a trained listener. But beginning in 2020, his congregation — Mosaic Church in the evangelical Christian hub of Lynchburg, Virginia — started becoming riven by fierce COVID-era fights over masking, distancing and vaccinations. Used to bridging divides among his fellow parishioners, Nitz was at a loss. “I’m used to doing active listening, but there were times where it felt like I would much rather just avoid this person than having the deeper conversat...
WASHINGTON (JTA) —A congressional committee approved an increase in funding for the office of Deborah Lipstadt, the State Department’s antisemitism monitor, from $1.5 million to $2.5 million. The U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee approved the bill, which pays for State Department and foreign operations, late Wednesday. It now goes to the full House and must be reconciled with parallel Senate legislation. Senators who focus on antisemitism hope to get similar language into the corresponding Senate bill. This week, a bip...
WASHINGTON (JTA) - President Joe Biden blamed increasing tension in Judea and Samaria on the "lost credibility" of the Palestinian Authority as well as on "extreme" ministers in Israel's government. In a televised interview on foreign policy with CNN host Fareed Zakaria on Sunday, Biden also again declined to say when he would invite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House. Biden has pushed off scheduling that meeting due to friction between the two men regarding...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — In a case that drew support from a broad array of Jewish groups, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that employers had to show a “substantial” burden to deny workers religious accommodation. In a decision released Thursday, the court sided with Gerald Groff, an evangelical Christian mail carrier who asked not to work on Sundays, his Sabbath. Jewish groups that do not often line up on the same side of church-state issues before the court were of a single voice in this case. Justice Samuel Alito, writing the opinion, sought to...
(JTA) - A Palestinian gunman killed an Israeli soldier when security forces stopped the gunman while he was driving near the Kedumim settlement in northern Samaria. The gunman was killed after the attack. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack on Thursday, noting that Kedumim is where Bezalel Smotrich, the minister responsible for Judea and Samaria, lives. "Tell the criminal Zionist Minister Smotrich that al-Qassam almost knocked on your door," the Jerusalem Post quoted Qassam Brigades, a...
(JTA) - The moment when Sheldon Harnick realized that his new musical might be something special came when he sang the lyrics he had just composed for a new song: "Sunrise, Sunset." He was sitting in the basement studio of his friend and collaborator, the composer Jerry Bock, in New Rochelle, New York. It was 1961, and they were in the throes of writing "Fiddler on the Roof." Bock had originally meant for the melody to be used for one of the flirtations between Tevye's three older daughters and...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Some 65 U.S. senators from both parties have urged the Biden administration to finalize Israel’s entry into the Visa Waiver Program by Sept. 30. Israel has sought to join the program, which enables citizens to travel to the United States without a visa, for decades. Currently, Israelis who do not hold citizenship in any of the 40 countries in the waiver program must apply for permission to travel to the United States, a process that typically results in a visa but can be extensive. The letter, sent to Secretary of State Ant...
(JTA) — The Arkansas House of Representatives approved a resolution encouraging trade with Israel that specifically mentions “Judea and Samaria,” the biblical name for the West Bank favored by Israel’s government. The resolution, approved last month by the Republican-led chamber, declares that “the State of Arkansas, which lies in America’s heartland, has a special kinship with Judea and Samaria, Israel’s biblical heartland” and notes that “cities across Arkansas bear the names of biblical cities throughout Judea and Samaria, such as Bethel, He...
PITTSBURGH (JTA) - The gunman who committed the worst antisemitic attack in U.S. history is guilty of all charges he faced, according to the verdict delivered by a federal jury on Friday morning. Robert Bowers, who killed 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Oct. 27, 2018, was charged on 63 counts in total. Those include 22 capital charges - two for each of his victims: 11 charges of the federal crime of "obstruction of the free exercise of religious beliefs resulting in death," and 11 ch...
(JTA) — Amichai Chikli, the Israeli Diaspora minister who has antagonized some liberal segments of American Jewry, called J Street “hostile” to Israel after it retweeted a photo of the minister from New York City’s Celebrate Israel Parade. Chikli was photographed at the June 4 parade making what appeared to many to be an obscene gesture toward a group protesting the Israeli government. He and his staff said he was gesturing to the protesters to smile and did not intend to make the obscene gesture. Either way, the picture, taken last week by...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Biden administration is fully invested in Israel-Saudi normalization, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC on Monday. He also said he does not see a breakthrough in Israeli-Palestinian peace happening anytime soon. “The United States has a real national security interest in promoting normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia,” Blinken said Monday to applause at a policy summit of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He said it was critical not to escalate the Israe...
WASHINGTON (JTA) - The Biden administration has joined the chorus of American voices criticizing Israeli Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli. A photo in which Chikli is making a face at a pro-Israel parade in New York City, and his unapologetic defense of the incident, is evidence that he is out of touch with the U.S. Jewish Diaspora, a senior Biden administration official told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. "The fact that a senior Israeli official came to the United States and did not have a...
WASHINGTON (JTA) - Until the certification of the electoral vote on Jan. 6, 2021, Mike Pence made sure to stay on the same page as Donald Trump - except, sometimes, when it came to the Jews. Both men delighted the pro-Israel establishment - Trump by fulfilling a long wish list of Israel's right-wing government, Pence by proving himself as a stalwart Christian Zionist through years in elected office. But just weeks after Trump assumed office, the difference in how each man approached Jewish...
(JTA) - Pat Robertson was trying to pay Jews a compliment. "They'd rather be polishing diamonds than fixing cars," he said in 2014 on his show on the Christian Broadcasting Network, the station the Southern Baptist minister founded in 1960 that had grown into an evangelical Protestant powerhouse. Robertson made his observation - while chuckling - in a conversation with a rabbi who was sympathetic to his conservative beliefs, Daniel Lapin. He clearly thought that diamond polishing was a good...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Speaking before one of the leading architects of the Israeli government’s judicial overhaul, Vice President Kamala Harris stressed the importance of independent courts in a democracy. Harris’s speech on Tuesday came after a week in which opponents of the judicial overhaul — which would significantly weaken the Israeli Supreme Court — protested Israeli right-wing politicians at a series of events in New York City and elsewhere. Simcha Rothman, a far-right lawmaker who is a leading proponent of the judicial overhaul, was in at...
WASHINGTON (JTA) - Washington, D.C.'s new Jewish museum features at least two notorious women from history. One is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the first Jewish woman to serve as a Supreme Court justice, who was dubbed "Notorious RBG" late in her life by a cluster of fans. When the Capital Jewish Museum opens next week, it will launch with Ginsburg at its center when a traveling exhibit on her life has its final stop here. The other is the 19th-century figure Eugenia Levy Phillips, whom the museum chara...
(JTA) - As he has launched his long-shot campaign for the Republican nomination, Chris Christie has taken aim squarely at the man he once enthusiastically endorsed: Donald Trump. But alongside portraying the former president as a danger to democracy, Christie has singled out another person for criticism who is not running for president, and who may not even work on a campaign: Jared Kushner, Trump's Jewish son-in-law and senior adviser. The Christie-Kushner feud goes back two decades, dating bac...
This is an ongoing article. Heritage will print articles as JTA reports them. Day 1: 911 dispatcher and rabbi take the stand PITTSBURGH (JTA) — When Shannon Basa-Sabol was asked to recount the events of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in court on Tuesday, what stood out was her memory of the death of Bernice Simon. Basa-Sabol, a 911 dispatcher, took the stand for close to an hour, describing the ins and outs of her job. But when the crowded courtroom heard a recording of Simon’s 911 call from the Tree of Life Congregation, Basa-Sabol pau...
(JTA) - An Egyptian security officer opened fire on Israeli soldiers on a routine patrol, killing two, and hours later killed a third before being felled in a shootout, the Israeli army said, in what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called a "severe and extraordinary incident." The Egyptian military said the shootout occurred while the officer, who has now been identified as Mohamed Salah Ibrahim, was pursuing drug smugglers across the border. Cross-border attacks are rare between...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Biden administration said a visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount by Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister, was “provocative” and cautioned against changes at the contested holy site. Ben-Gvir visited the Temple Mount, which Muslims revere as the Noble Sanctuary, on Sunday morning, and declared that Israel was “in charge” of the sensitive site. The visit came days after Thursday’s annual “Flag March” through Jerusalem’s Old City, a right-wing parade that celebrates Jerusalem Day and perennially featu...
(JTA) - Tom Nides, the gregarious U.S. ambassador to Israel, is resigning this summer, at a time of unresolved tensions in the U.S.-Israel relationship he strove to uphold. An administration official confirmed to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Nides would be gone by this summer. The report first appeared in Axios on Tuesday morning. Axios quoted Secretary of State Antony Blinken as saying that Nides wanted to spend more time with his family. "Tom has worked with characteristic energy and...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — After being thwarted by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Rep. Rashida Tlaib succeeded in spotlighting Palestinian perspectives on Israel’s founding in an event on Capitol Hill — with help from one of Congress’ most powerful Jewish members, Sen. Bernie Sanders. The Palestinian-American Democrat from Detroit also introduced a congressional resolution calling on the suspension of some aid to Israel. Tlaib’s event on Wednesday, called “Nakba 75 & the Palestinian People,” featured the Arabic word for “catastrophe” that Palestinians u...
