Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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WASHINGTON (JTA) — The political action committee affiliated with AIPAC, the pro-Israel powerhouse lobby, has in less than six months of existence become the biggest pro-Israel PAC, delivering $6 million to 326 candidates. It is also now endorsing 109 of the 147 of the Republicans who refused to affirm President Joe Biden’s election on Jan. 6, 2021. “The AIPAC PAC is now the largest bipartisan, pro-Israel political action committee in the country — and it is quickly emerging as a leading force in American politics,” the lobby said Wednesday...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — President Joe Biden named as his next press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, a former official of the activist MoveOn group who endorsed its call on Democratic presidential candidates to boycott the annual AIPAC conference. Jean-Pierre will be the first Black woman in the job and succeeds Jen Psaki, who has reportedly accepted an offer from MSNBC as a commentator, as the lead voice for the Biden administration with the media. She has been principal deputy press secretary after starting in the Biden administration as a senior a...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Several dozen members of Congress joined Holocaust survivors to mark Yom Hashoah, the Holocaust remembrance day marked by Jewish communities worldwide, by reading out the names of the dead and hearing testimony in the Capitol building on Wednesday morning. Rep. Brad Schneider, a Jewish Illinois Democrat who spearheaded the event, said in remarks that the need to commemorate now was made more acute by the atrocities taking place in Russia’s war against Ukraine. “A million and a half children died in the Holocaust,” Schneid...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The good news for Joe Biden is that a majority of U.S. Jews approve of the job he is doing. The bad news is that the number in a new poll, 63 percent, is a sharp double-digit drop from where he was last year. A poll released Wednesday by the Jewish Electorate Institute, a group led by prominent Jewish Democrats, showed Biden’s approval rating down from 80 percent in a poll by the same organization last July. His disapproval rating this year is at 37 percent, up from 20 percent last July. Both polls were carried out by GBA...
(JTA) - An Israeli astronaut made a decidedly low-tech delivery to the International Space Station: handmade matzah. Eytan Stibbe, 64, is one of three astronauts who paid for the privilege of launching into space on April 8, in an initiative of Axiom Space, a private company based in Houston. Chabad of the Space and Treasure Coasts in Florida delivered Stibbe a Passover food package, noting that he would be on the space station when Passover started on the evening of April 15, Chabad.org...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The director of Amnesty International’s U.S. branch apologized to Jewish lawmakers for claiming to speak on behalf of American Jews. “I regret representing the views of the Jewish people,” Paul O’Brien said in a March 25 letter, first reported by Jewish Insider, to all 25 Jewish Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives, who had joined to condemn his remarks at a Washington, D.C., luncheon in which he rejected polling that showed the vast majority of U.S. Jews are pro-Israel. “What I should have said,” he added, “is th...
WASHINGTON (JTA) - The Senate in a voice vote unanimously confirmed Deborah Lipstadt, the Holocaust scholar who endured delays and a contentious hearing in her nomination to be antisemitism monitor. The vote late Wednesday took mere seconds. "The ayes appear to have it," Sen. Tammy Baldwin, the Wisconsin Democrat who was presiding over the session, said after calling for a vote. "The ayes do have it. The nomination is confirmed." There were no "Nos." It was not clear from the C-Span video,...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — President Joe Biden wants to increase federal funding for security for nonprofits from $250 million to $360 million, a key request advanced by Jewish organizations in the wake of attacks on Jewish institutions. Biden included the funding in the homeland security section of the $5.8 trillion federal budget he released Monday. Presidential budgets function as wish lists, and not every component will likely pass congressional muster, but including the request gives its chances of adoption a significant boost. “In prior years, be...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Security officials are reporting a spate of bomb threats targeting Jewish institutions in a number of states. The threats came into Jewish community centers around the country in recent weeks, most recently in Pennsylvania and Missouri, according to Michael Masters, who directs the Secure Community Network, a consultancy that works with national Jewish groups. Other JCCs targeted have been in Oklahoma, Arizona and New Jersey. The threats come through online contact forms and have similar language. The two most recent t...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — When Secretary of State Antony Blinken cited his family’s Holocaust-era history in explaining a matter of U.S. foreign policy on Monday, it was far from the first time he has done so. “One of my responsibilities as Secretary is determining, on behalf of the United States, whether atrocities have been committed,” Blinken, who is Jewish, said Monday at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he announced that the Biden administration had determined that the Burmese military had committed genocide against the Rohingy...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — An Amnesty International official said that the organization is opposed to Israel continuing to exist as a Jewish state. “We are opposed to the idea — and this, I think, is an existential part of the debate — that Israel should be preserved as a state for the Jewish people,” Paul O’Brien, the human rights monitor’s U.S. director, said in a luncheon this week with the Women’s National Democratic Club in Washington D.C. Jewish Insider first reported the remarks. O’Brien said late Friday on Twitter that his remarks had been...
(JTA) — Barbara Goldberg Goldman, a lay leader in Democratic Party, resigned as deputy treasurer of the Maryland Democratic Party after questioning the viability of Black candidates for governor. Goldberg Goldman apologized for an email she sent in December, revealed over the weekend by Axios. “Consider this: Three African-American males have run statewide for governor and have lost,” she wrote to other party leaders in the email. “This is a fact we must not ignore.” Goldberg Goldman was strategizing over how best to defeat Kelly Schulz, t...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — All 25 Jewish Democrats in the House, a fractious caucus that rarely unanimously agrees on issues of Jewish interest, signed onto a statement slamming recent comments by Amnesty International’s U.S. director, who said he believes polls showing overwhelming U.S. Jewish support for Israel are inaccurate. “As Jewish Members of the House of Representatives, we represent diverse views on a number of issues relating to Israel. However, we are in full agreement that Mr. [Paul] O’Brien’s patronizing attempt to speak on behalf of...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — After months of maneuvering over $1 billion to replace Iron Dome batteries Israel lost in last year’s Gaza conflict, the money is to be included in a bipartisan spending bill Congress will consider this week as it looks to avoid a government shutdown. Also included in the $1.5 trillion Omnibus Appropriations Agreement announced early Wednesday by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is substantially increased funding for nonprofit security, a key request by major Jewish groups over the last yea...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — In an emotional call with American Jewish leaders, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky characterized the Russian invasion of his country as “pure Nazism.” Zelensky also invoked his Jewishness in an appeal for assistance while speaking Monday via Zoom with the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. On the call, Zelensky angrily rejected claims by Russian President Vladimir Putin that Russia launched the war to “denazify” Ukraine, saying that it was the Russians who were acting like Nazis. “This is...
(JTA) — It seemed a slam dunk: The popular conservative cause of banning “critical race theory” in schools, being taken up for a vote in one of the country’s most lopsidedly conservative legislatures. Then a Democrat, one of just seven in the 60-member Wyoming legislature, stood up Thursday and said he could not support the bill because he was Jewish. “In this bill, page 9, line 19 states, ‘The teaching of history must be neutral, without judgment,’” state Rep. Andy Schwartz said during debate. “Now, how can that be possible? If I were a Native...
WASHINGTON (JTA) - Julie Platt is a one-time banker who has become a leader in promoting Jewish education and helping to rescue Jewish camping from the ravages of the pandemic. Now, she's about to make history as the second woman to chair one of the largest Jewish fundraising powerhouses in the United States, the Jewish Federations of North America. She's also musical star Ben Platt's mom. The JFNA on Tuesday said that Platt would assume the leadership of the umbrella body for Jewish federations...
(JTA) –When Rabbi Larry Sernovitz was asked to deliver the morning devotion to the Georgia state legislature, he came armed with an ancient alarm: A shofar, the ram’s horn blown in synagogues during the high holy days. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Sernovitz made history Tuesday when he blew a shofar in the legislature, a first for the state legislature — and, according to Howard Mortman, an author who has tracked rabbinical benedictions in legislatures, probably the first in any U.S. legislature. Sernovitz, the rabbi of Kol E...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Less than a week after the Jewish Federations of North America removed hot button items such as addressing gun violence and defending LGBTQ rights from their annual priorities list, the umbrella group added them back into a subsequent and more detailed policy document. The JFNA’s Working Public Policy Agenda, released late Friday, includes more than a hundred words on gun violence prevention. It encourages Congress to double funding for research into the causes of gun violence and calls for increased funding for the enf...
(JTA) — Police in Orange County, Florida, arrested three men accused of violence and theft during a neo-Nazi rally in Orlando that made national headlines. Local media identified the men as Joshua Terrell, 46; Jason Brown, 47; and Burt Colucci, 45. Terrell and Colucci are charged with battery, but officials said that charge could later be elevated to a hate crime. Brown is charged with theft. The rally on Jan. 29 at an overpass drew about 20 people identifying with the neo-Nazis, who shouted slurs at passersby. The arrests appear to be r...
(JTA) — Some members of Congress are openly hostile to Israel. But it was Rep. Andy Levin, a Detroit-area Michigan Democrat and a scion of a storied Jewish political family, whom a former AIPAC president identified in an email earlier this month as “arguably the most corrosive member of Congress to the U.S.-Israel relationship.” David Victor, a former president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, made the comment in an email Jan. 19 to pro-Israel donors in the Detroit area, where he is from. Victor, who led AIPAC in the late 2000s...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Sen. Chuck Schumer, the most senior Jewish elected official in U.S. history, recited the Shema prayer at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday. The New York Democrat added a reading from Leviticus that emphasized unity, echoing the message President Joe Biden emphasized in his remarks at the same event. Biden in his remarks referred to the recent synagogue hostage crisis in Texas as an example of courage in the face of divisiveness. Schumer, the majority leader in the Senate, appeared with Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., t...
WASHINGTON (JTA) - Stephen Breyer, the oldest justice on the Supreme Court and one of its minority of three liberal justices, is set to retire, multiple reports said Wednesday. The move would leave Elena Kagan as the only Jewish justice left on the court. Breyer, 83, has come under pressure to retire ever since President Joe Biden assumed office a year ago. Liberals and Democrats do not want to deny Biden the chance to replace a liberal justice with another liberal. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.,...
(JTA) — Esther Pollard, who spent decades fighting to see her husband live free in Israel after being convicted for spying on the United States, has died at 68. Pollard died in Jerusalem Monday from complications related to the coronavirus, the Times of Israel reported. She had also been battling breast cancer. Pollard, née Elaine Zeitz, became acquainted with her husband while leading the Canadian branch of the movement for his release. They married at Butner prison, in North Carolina, in 1994, and she assumed leadership of the worldwide mo...
(JTA) - U.S. Jewish groups slammed a top Presbyterian Church official for Martin Luther King Day remarks that equated Israel's West Bank "occupation" with slavery and implied that American Jews have the influence to get the U.S. government to end it. "The continued occupation in Palestine/Israel is 21st-century slavery and should be abolished immediately," Rev. J. Herbert Nelson, II, the stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church USA said in remarks released Monday. "Given the history of Jewish...
