Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JTA) - Kamala Harris' presidential campaign has named Ilan Goldenberg, an Israeli-born former peace negotiator, as its liaison to the Jewish community, sources say. Three people with close ties to the organized Jewish community and the Harris campaign confirmed the pick to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The campaign did not return a request for comment. Goldenberg, who has served as Vice President Harris' adviser on Middle East issues, has previously been an acerbic critic of both Israeli...
(JTA) — Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar won her Democratic party primary on Tuesday, securing a victory for the hardline-left “Squad” member who is one of Israel’s fiercest critics in Congress. Omar defeated her challenger, Don Samuels, in Minnesota’s 5th District by a margin of 56 percent to 43 percent with nearly all votes reported. Samuels is a centrist, pro-Israel Democrat who narrowly lost a primary vote to Omar in 2022. This time around, Omar’s campaign said it had learned from the close call and worked harder to shore up support. Omar’s win...
(JTA) — Pennsylvania’s Jewish governor, Josh Shapiro, hasn’t had the easiest week when it comes to, well, being Jewish. So, when it came to speaking publicly about Vice President Kamala Harris and the man she chose over him to be her own running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Shapiro had a point he wanted to make. “I lean on my family and I lean on my faith which calls me to serve,” Shapiro said at a rally Tuesday in his hometown, Philadelphia. “And I am proud of my faith!” Shapiro was among the top two or three contenders that Harris, the D...
(JTA) — J.D. Vance, the Ohio senator who is Donald Trump’s running mate, said he “feels bad” that Josh Shapiro, the Jewish Pennsylvania governor who was in contention to be Kamala Harris’ running mate, has to “run” from being Jewish to get the job. Harris, the vice president who is the Democratic presidential nominee, on Tuesday named Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate. Shapiro was in the top two or three in contention and was also subject to a campaign from the progressive left to keep him off the ticket because of his views on Isra...
(JTA) — WASHINGTON — The White House condemned as “inflammatory” a pledge by Missouri Rep. Cori Bush to AIPAC that she would “tear your kingdom down,” implying that heated rhetoric like hers could inspire political violence. Bush, a member of the “Squad,” the group of far-left Democrats that is harshly critical of Israel, lost a costly primary on Tuesday to St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell. Political action committees allied with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spent more than $9 million against Bush, making the election th...
(JTA) — Democratic Rep. Cori Bush, a member of the hardline left-wing “Squad” that is harshly critical of Israel, was defeated in a St. Louis-area primary race by an opponent who attracted millions of dollars in pro-Israel money. The Associated Press called the race for Wesley Bell, the St. Louis County prosecutor, Tuesday night as Bell led Bush 51.2 percent to 45.6 percent with more than 96 percent of the vote counted. It was the second Democratic primary win for pro-Israel political action committees against a member of the Squad. In June, a...
(JTA) - One day after President Joe Biden ended his campaign, leading Democrats have coalesced around Vice President Kamala Harris - and begun speculating about her running mate. At least two Jewish governors are thought to be top contenders. Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro and Illinois' J.B. Pritzker were both floated as potential presidential candidates when pressure began mounting for Biden to drop out. Now, one of them could join Harris on the ticket if she wins the nomination. Another...
WASHINGTON — In her first statement on Israel as a presidential candidate, Kamala Harris struck a markedly different tone than President Joe Biden, saying after a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that she “will not be silent” in the face of what she called the “devastation” in Gaza. The vice president met on July 25 for 40 minutes with Netanyahu, who had met with Biden earlier in the day for more than an hour. The differences between the public statements made before and after the meetings illustrate where the president...
(JTA) — WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden said ending Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip would be one of his highest priorities as he ends his presidency. Biden addressed the nation Wednesday evening for the first time since he announced Sunday that he would drop his reelection bid and endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris. He said he was dropping out to unify the Democratic Party, which has been divided since his disastrous debate performance against Trump last month. “I revere this office, but I love my country more,” he said. “Th...
MILWAUKEE - Shabbos Kestenbaum remembers the first time he felt lonely because he held an unpopular political opinion. The year was 2008, and Kestenbaum was 9 and a student at a Modern Orthodox Jewish day school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where he lived. In a school journal, he decried the Iraq War and extolled a young senator running for president on a platform of opposing it. "I remember with my dad, we bought a yard sign saying 'Barack Obama' in Hebrew," Kestenbaum recalled in an...
(JTA) — Jewish and Israeli leaders and lawmakers condemned what officials are investigating as an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, as did Gabrielle Giffords, a Jewish former congresswoman who survived an assassination attempt. A number of top Jewish lawmakers, many of them Democrats who oppose Trump’s bid to return to the presidency, immediately condemned the attack. “I am horrified by what happened at the Trump rally in Pennsylvania and relieved that former Presi...
(JTA) — WASHINGTON — Vandals tore down Israeli hostage posters hanging outside the Capitol Hill office of Rep. Brad Schneider, an Illinois Democrat, a week after pro-Palestinian activists used megaphones and drums to protest outside his home in the middle of the night. “My Capitol office was vandalized yesterday in a vile act of hate in which the posters of the more than 100 people still held hostage in Gaza (including 8 Americans) were ripped from the wall, shredded and tossed across the hallway,” Schneider, who is Jewish, posted Friday...
(JTA) — MILWAUKEE — “Beautiful prayer!” the woman shouted out from the floor of the massive Fiserv Forum. The delegate to Donald Trump’s coronation was responding to a benediction led by Leora Levy, a Jewish Republican from Connecticut, to close out the first day of this year’s Republican Party convention. Levy’s comments included one of the rare mentions of Israel on the convention’s first day, as she led a hushed and somber crowd in praying for the release of hostages abducted by Hamas on Oct. 7. “O Lord our God, we pray for the peace of...
(JTA) — MILWAUKEE — Three Jewish organizations dealing with immigration and community relations said they were alarmed by the Republican Party’s plans to launch mass deportations, saying they are steeped in a racist conspiracy theory that at times has veered into antisemitism. The Republican platform, published this week, pledges to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.” “President Trump and Republicans will reverse the Democrats’ destructive Open Borders Policies that have allowed criminal gangs and Illegal Alien...
(JTA) — WASHINGTON — The 2024 Republican Party platform pledges to fight antisemitism and to keep Israel safe. It promises to fight anti-Christian bias as well as “gender insanity.” And it vows, in all-caps, to “DEPORT PRO-HAMAS RADICALS AND MAKE OUR COLLEGE CAMPUSES SAFE AND PATRIOTIC AGAIN.” Parties traditionally publish platforms in election years ahead of their national conventions, as a statement of the party’s values and a wish list of policies should their candidate win the White House. The Republican platform, posted Monday and su...
(JTA) — WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden said Israel had been “less than cooperative” with the United States in its efforts to deliver assistance to Palestinian civilians, adding to pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept the terms the Biden administration has brokered to bring about an end to the war. “I met with most of the Arab leaders to try and get a consensus going as to what had to be done to get more aid and food and medicine into the Gaza Strip,” Biden said at a press conference on Thursday following a...
(JTA) — WASHINGTON — Calls for President Joe Biden to relinquish his presidential nomination have proliferated since his disastrous debate performance last week. On Tuesday, for the first time, a Democratic elected official, Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas, echoed the demand; Aside from Doggett, most of the appeals have come from a range of liberal-leaning publications and pundits. Biden insists he’s going nowhere and has sent out campaign surrogates to make the case that the 81-year-old president is up to the job. Nonetheless, chatter about poten...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — One day before their university’s president was due to appear before Congress, hundreds of Jewish Rutgers University staff and students decried what they described as an intimidating campus environment for Jews. “The entire university community has suffered through the disruption of normal university operations and an often chaotic and intimidating environment on our campuses,” said one letter released Wednesday by Rutgers Jewish Faculty, Administrators, and Staff, with 208 signatures. A separate letter from close to 160 Jew...
(JTA) — The Republican Jewish Coalition leapt to the defense of Donald Trump after he was found guilty on 34 charges related to falsifying records to conceal that he paid an adult film star to cover up a sexual liaison just before the 2016 presidential election. The verdict makes Trump, who is seeking to return to office this fall, the only U.S. president ever to have been convicted of a felony. “Without question this is a political prosecution of a political opponent,” Matt Brooks, the group’s CEO, said after jurors in Manhattan deliver...
(JTA) — The share of Israeli Jews who believe an Israeli and a Palestinian state can peacefully coexist has plummeted since Oct. 7, according to a new survey. The figure of 19 percent, reported in a study published Thursday by the Pew Research Center, was the lowest since Pew started surveying Israelis in 2013. It is down from 32 percent in a survey released just weeks before the war broke out. In 2013, according to Pew, nearly half of Israeli Jews — and a majority of Israelis overall — supported a two-state solution. In 2005, another polli...
(JTA) – For months, Zoe Buckman, a Brooklyn artist with more than 72,000 followers on Instagram, has posted about the hypocrisy she sees in critics of Israel who downplayed atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7. On Monday, she again decried hypocrisy. But this time, she aimed her criticism in large part toward fellow supporters of Israel. "Folks who do not condemn loss of civilian life in Palestine are akin to the many who refuse to condemn 10/7, h@mas and what is being done to the h...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — President Joe Biden told a Jewish gathering that he will ensure that Israel will have “everything it needs” to fight Hamas, a pledge that comes after weeks of tension between the governments over his pause on the delivery of large bombs. “I’ll always ensure that Israel has everything it needs to defend itself against Hamas, and all its enemies,” Biden told a White House reception on May 20, marking Jewish American Heritage Month. The crowd of several hundred in the Rose Garden cheered and applauded. Biden also denounced t...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Before sending the letter she knew would ricochet around the world, Lily Greenberg Call gave her parents a heads-up and said goodbye to her colleagues. Then she went home and prepared for the storm that she correctly predicted would be unleashed Wednesday night, May 16, when she was revealed to be the first Jewish staffer to resign from the Biden administration to protest President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Speaking to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency after watching her story unfold in public, Green...
(JTA) — The prosecutor for the International Criminal Court is seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant as well as the leadership of Hamas for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The charges Karim Khan announced Monday against Netanyahu and Gallant — the first ever to charge Israeli leaders by name — echo accusations Israel’s critics have made for months surrounding the war in Gaza: They include starvation as a means of war, willful killing and intentionally targeting civilia...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — At least twice while campaigning in the small towns of the western stretch of Maryland’s 6th District, Joe Vogel headed to Shabbat services. Synagogues in Cumberland and Frederick were only too happy to accommodate when his campaign called ahead and said the Jewish candidate wanted to stop by on a Saturday morning. In fact, the Frederick congregation had a favor to ask of the young elected official: Could he lift up a Torah scroll? “It’s a slightly older congregation and they needed someone that could do the hagbah,...
