Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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WASHINGTON (JTA) — President Joe Biden is bringing a Jewish High Holiday celebration to the White House for the first time. His White House is hosting a Rosh Hashanah reception tonight, Sept. 30, Jewish Insider reported on Monday. As vice president during the 2009-2017 Obama administration, Biden hosted Rosh Hashanah and Sukkot receptions at the Naval Observatory, the official vice presidential residence, the first vice president to do so. President Bill Clinton was the first president to host a Chanukah party for staff, and President George W....
(JTA) — Yair Lapid called the people around the table “family” and “brothers and sisters.” The vibe was unusual for the 50 or so Jewish leaders who convened Wednesday to meet the Israeli prime minister, and who were used to being lectured at by the man Lapid hopes to keep from returning to office, Benjamin Netanyahu. That was the point: Ahead of what is likely a close election on Nov. 1, Lapid, who is in New York to address the United Nations General Assembly, wants to draw distinctions between himself and the leader of Israel’s Likud Party, am...
(JTA) — Israel’s government advanced a plan to build as many as 700 new apartment units in a suburb of Jerusalem that opponents say encroaches on a Palestinian village that straddles the country’s pre-1967 lines. The Jerusalem planning and building committee on Monday approved a plan for a new neighborhood called Givat Shaked, which would include high-rise buildings that come right up to the edge of Beit Safafa — a village that was split from 1948 until 1967, when Israel captured eastern...
(JTA) - Last week, the chances that the United States would rejoin the Iran nuclear deal seemed higher than they had been in years. CNN and Reuters reported that Iran had dropped multiple demands in the ongoing negotiations over a new accord that would update the original reached in 2015. Senior U.S. officials were confident that the new deal would be sealed in days. Then on Monday, Iran's government said it wanted more time - extending into September - to examine the U.S. response to a recent...
(JTA) - Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader whose reforms, including allowing massive numbers of Jews to emigrate to Israel, changed his country and the world, died at 91. Russian media said Gorbachev died Tuesday in a Moscow hospital. "Michail Gorbachev has died," Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, Moscow's chief rabbi from 1993 until this year, said Tuesday on Twitter. "3 million Soviet Jews owe him their freedom." It was clear when Gorbachev rose to power in 1985 that he would be different from his...
(JTA) - For nearly a millennium, 17 Jewish children and adults lost to history at the bottom of a well kept a secret about the genetic markers that distinguish Ashkenazi Jews. In 1190, in Norwich, a riverside city perched near England's eastern coast, crusaders on their way to the Holy Land massacred 17 Jews and threw them down a well. The town was already a locus for antisemitic fervor: In 1144, its people originated the first known blood libel, blaming Jews for the ritual murder of a child....
(JTA) — A Jewish Google employee who led activism against a major contract with Israel’s government resigned, citing what she said was retaliation. “Due to retaliation, a hostile environment, and illegal actions by the company, I cannot continue to work at Google and have no choice but to leave the company at the end of this week,” Ariel Koren said in a statement posted Aug. 30 to Medium. “Instead of listening to employees who want Google to live up to its ethical principles, Google is aggressively pursuing military contracts and stripping away...
(JTA) — Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of committing “Holocausts” at a press conference after meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin, and Scholz’s muted initial response is spurring criticism. Abbas used the term in response on Tuesday to a reporter who asked if the Palestinian leader would apologize for the murder 50 years ago of 11 Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics. An arm of the Palestine Liberation Organization carried out the attack, and the PLO and the Palestinian Authori...
WASHINGTON (JTA) - It has become a kind of mantra in Washington and Jerusalem: Integrate much of the Middle East, including Israel, into a single security system to keep Iran in its place. The issue came up as soon as President Joe Biden landed Wednesday at Ben Gurion airport in Israel for his first visit as president and his 10th since 1973. "We will discuss building a new security and economy architecture with the nations of the Middle East, following the Abraham Accords and the achievements...
WASHINGTON (JTA) - An array of Jewish groups across the country are kickstarting into action to protest and potentially challenge the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that had enshrined the right to an abortion in the United States. The 6-3 decision released Friday has many Jewish activists buzzing about how to respond to the bombshell ruling that they find a major setback to women's rights and in some cases an infringement on religious Jewish law. The...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Seattle-area football coach who lost his job after leading prayers on the field following his team’s victories, in a decision that could have ramifications for Jews in public schools and the military. A number of Jewish groups say the 6-3 ruling in Kennedy v. Bremerton, issued Monday, could roll back church-state separations that have protected schoolchildren from religious coercion for decades. “This is a significant change in how we approach prayer in public schools, and one that will h...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Pam Scheininger and J. David Bleich have this much in common: They are Orthodox Jews who are preoccupied with Jewish ethics and teach at New York City law schools. But when Scheininger looks at an American map, she sees 16 states where Orthodox Jewish women would not be able to have an abortion otherwise sanctioned by Jewish law. Bleich sees a different number — zero. Disagreements among Jews over where Jewish and state laws intersect on abortion, once theoretical, have taken on urgency in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Cou...
(JTA) - The Jewish Agency's nominating committee recommended Doron Almog, a storied retired general and a longtime advocate for people with disabilities, to lead the body that bridges Israel and the Jewish Diaspora. The nomination Thursday of Almog, 71, now goes to the Jewish Agency's Board of Governors, where it is all but assured of approval. The nomination follows an extended period of consideration since May 2021, when the last chairman of the agency, Isaac Herzog, announced his successful...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Maine parents seeking funding to send their children to religious schools, a development that a dissenting Jewish justice, Stephen Breyer, suggested could open the door to broad public funding of parochial schools. Ruling Tuesday in Carson v. Makin, the 6-3 majority favored parents in Maine who objected to a state policy that funded private school education for students who lived in districts without public schools, but explicitly excluded religious schools on church-state grounds. T...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — President Joe Biden will visit Israel, the West Bank and Saudi Arabia next month in a visit that will emphasize reestablishing U.S. ties with the Palestinians. The Biden administration on Tuesday morning posted the dates for Biden’s Middle East tour, July 13 to 16, after weeks of reporting that such a trip would take place this summer. The visit to Saudi Arabia will include attending a summit of the “GCC+3,” a body that brings together the Gulf Cooperation Council, the umbrella for Gulf Arab states, plus Egypt, Iraq and Jorda...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — A bipartisan slate of lawmakers launched a bill that would establish an “integrated air and missile defense capability” joining the United States, Israel and Arab countries in a bid to deter Iran. Senate and House members of the Abraham Accords Caucus rolled out the bill, called the DEFEND Act, in a press conference Thursday outside the Capitol and described it as means of advancing the U.S.-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and four Arab countries that collectively bear that name. “The full potential of the...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — A bipartisan slate of 25 Congress members, including a number who are close to the pro-Israel community, called on the Biden administration to pressure the Palestinian Authority to release the bullet that killed a Palestinian reporter for an independent investigation. “We urge you to ask the Palestinian Authority to provide access to the forensic evidence in [Shireen] Abu Akleh’s death for an independent investigation so that all parties can reach a definitive conclusion about the events leading to her death, and hold all p...
(JTA) — Jewish extremists shouted racist slogans and clashed with Palestinians during a heavily policed Jerusalem Day march, but there were no major injuries at an event that last year was among the spurs to a deadly conflict. Police said 50,000 Jews marched through the Old City on Sunday, Jerusalem Day, the Hebrew calendar anniversary of Israel’s capture of the area in the 1967 Six-Day War. A record 2,600 Jews visited the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, which is also the sight of a mosque enclave among the holiest in Islam. A num...
(JTA) — A Pew Research Center survey released Thursday found that American adults are just not paying attention to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel. A whopping 84 percent of adults surveyed said they have heard “not much” or “nothing at all” about the movement, which seeks to pressure Israel into changing its policy towards the Palestinians by promoting boycotts and economic sanctions. Only 5 percent of the surveyed adults — who were of diverse religious backgrounds — knew “some” about it, and only 2 percent st...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Biden administration has suspended assistance to Sudan, including assistance related to its normalization deal with Israel, and wants Israel to call out the bloody coup that removed the country’s civilian government last year. “The United States is not moving forward at this time with assistance originally committed to Sudan’s civilian-led transitional government in connection with its efforts to improve Sudan’s bilateral relationship with Israel,” a State Department spokesman said in an email Friday in response to...
(JTA) — Among the many Jews on Russia’s latest list of Americans banned entry are three Chabad rabbis, in possible retaliation for Chabad’s decades-long effort to recover texts and artifacts that the Soviets took from the movement. The list of 963 Americans posted Saturday, first reported by Axios, includes three leaders of Chabad’s umbrella body, Agudas Chassidei Chabad. They are Rabbi Avraham Shemtov, the chairman of the executive of the umbrella body, a founder of the Washington office of the movement; Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, the umbrell...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — In an unusual public broadside against dozens of Congress members, Israel’s ambassador to Washington said a letter calling for a U.S. investigation into the killing of a Palestinian American journalist was not a “fair” representation of the event. Michael Herzog was responding to a letter sent Thursday by 57 House Democrats to Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, and Christopher Wray, the FBI director. It called for an investigation into the death last week of Shireen Abu Akleh, a venerated Al Jazeera reporter killed...
(JTA) — The Minnesota Republican Party apologized for screening a video that depicted liberal Jewish billionaire George Soros as a puppet master controlling two Jewish Democrats, saying that those responsible were not aware that the imagery had antisemitic connotations. “We understand that the use of imagery depicting Mr. Soros as a puppet-master at our state convention raised concerns that the imagery perpetuated an antisemitic trope,” state GOP chairman David Hann said Thursday in a statement, noting that the Jewish Community Relations Counc...
WASHINGTON (JTA) - Antisemitism is often not taken seriously until it becomes deadly, said Deborah Lipstadt, the Holocaust scholar whose nomination to be the State Department's antisemitism monitor was delayed as she tangled with Republican senators who were peeved at her criticisms of their side of the aisle. Lipstadt chose the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum for her first talk Thursday since her Senate confirmation in March after contentious hearings. She made good on her pledges to skeptical...
(JTA) - In a purge following accusations that textbook publishers were trying to "indoctrinate" students in allegedly liberal concepts, Florida rejected dozens of math books from being used in the state's schools. One of them contained a string of Jewish jokes - including one that a conservative activist flagged as antisemitic: "Why do Jewish divorces cost so much? Because they're worth it." The joke is attributed to Henny Youngman, the late Jewish comedian, and was included in the book...
