Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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WASHINGTON (JTA)—Amid simmering tensions over Iran policy, the Obama and Netanyahu governments appear to have quietly forged common ground in recent weeks on Israeli-Palestinian talks, with the United States accepting that a possible “framework” agreement might not address every outstanding issue in the negotiations. Such an agreement, the United States and Israel seem to agree, would maintain a role for Israel in providing for its security, presumably by maintaining some form of military presence in the West Bank. What’s not clear is if the...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—When it comes to the deal between Iran and major powers, Israel and the pro-Israel community are retreating from a strategy of confrontation and working instead to influence the contours of a final agreement. In a conference call last week, Howard Kohr, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s executive director, advised pro-Israel activists and leaders not to confront the Obama administration directly over the “difference of strategy” between the United States and Israel on Iran. Instead, Kohr said to focus on passing...
WASHINGTON (JTA)— There’s the six-month interim deal on Iran’s nuclear program that trades some sanctions relief for a freeze on Iran’s nuclear program. And then there’s the interim before the interim begins. Little noticed in the wake of the historic pact reached last month by Iran and the major powers is the fact that technically, the deal is not yet underway. A commission of experts from the United States, Russia, Germany, Britain, China and France, working with Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency, first must work out the technic...
WASHINGTON (JTA)-When reports emerged over the weekend that France's hard line was responsible for the failure of negotiations over Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program, supporters and critics of the diplomatic push resorted to familiar stereotypes. Conservatives scoffed that even the conflict-averse French had outflanked President Obama. Leftists accused Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, of doing Israel's bidding. The reality typically is more nuanced. France's posture in the talks between Iran and the major powers-Russia,...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—For 90 minutes in a packed hotel conference room in the heart of Washington, Israel was the colonizer, the settler state, the perpetuator of apartheid. As the annual meeting this weekend of the American Studies Association demonstrated, participants who favored boycotting Israeli universities far outnumbered those opposed. Of 44 speakers, 37 supported the resolution, in which the association would endorse and “honor the call of Palestinian society for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.” The preamble to the resol...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—Bernard Madoff. An unscrupulous contractor. Art that disappeared or was destroyed by fire—it’s not clear which. Bad, bad bookkeepers. And did we mention Bernard Madoff? These were among the causes of “material diversion” of assets—tax-speak for lost funds or property totaling $250,000 or 5 percent—reported by Jewish organizations on their tax returns. Since 2008, the IRS has asked nonprofit organizations to indicate on their tax returns whether they have become aware of such losses in the past year. According to an investigat...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—Armed with a powerful New York public relations outfit and a pledge to commemorate the mass deportation of Hungarian Jewry, the Hungarian government is preparing to challenge what it says is an inaccurate image of a country lax in confronting home-grown extremism. Ferenc Kumin, an adviser to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban who handles international communications, reached out to JTA last week to counter what he says are unfair perceptions of his government’s treatment of Jews and other minorities. “In the American publi...
WASHINGTON (JTA)- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is hoping the enemy of one's enemy truly does become a friend. In recent years, Netanyahu has said the enmity for Iran shared by Israel and the Arab states could become a spur to regional reconciliation. Last week, in a speech to the Knesset, he noted the "many issues" on which Israel and the Arabs have shared interests could open up "new possibilities," including a peace accord with the Palestinians. But while experts say that intelligence sharing between Israel and the Persian Gulf...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—Janet Yellen is soft-spoken, tough, methodological, flexible—and Jewish. President Obama’s announcement last week that he had tapped Yellen, 67, to succeed Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve made news in part because she would be the first woman in the top spot. That very little was made of her Jewishness likely derives mostly from the fact that she would be not the first or second but at least the fifth Jewish chair of the U.S. central bank and the third in a row following Bernanke and Alan Greenspan. For the f...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—The first lawmaker to speak at a closed-door Capitol Hill confab convened by the Republican Jewish Coalition’s women’s affiliate was, naturally enough, a woman. So was the second. Against the background of the current federal budget battle, that’s about all that united Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.). Ayotte has been a leading Republican voice calling on her GOP colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives to stand down in their battle over President Obama’s signature health care law—a fig...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—Meals on Wheels may disappear, Iran sanctions are at risk and yoga is filling in the gaps. This is what the federal government shutdown looks like in Jewish Washington. While national Jewish organizations are sorting through the essential services that the impasse may cut, regional Jewish service providers in the Washington area are dealing with the tens of thousands of furloughed workers in their midst. The Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington, in Rockville, Md., is adding exercise and yoga classes for furloughed g...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—The “credible military threat” against Iran that Benjamin Netanyahu wanted to hear while he was in the United States this week eventually emerged—from his own lips. The Israeli prime minister, in a blunt speech to the United Nations General Assembly, warned that Israel was ready to go it alone against Iran should it come close to obtaining a nuclear weapon. “I want there to be no confusion on this point,” Netanyahu said. “Israel will not allow Iran to get nuclear weapons. If Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will s...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—The good news for Israel in President Obama’s speech at the United Nations was his insistence that any steps Iran might take to solve the standoff over its nuclear program must be transparent and verifiable. The bad news was that Obama wasn’t clear about what those steps should be. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a one-minute video posted online Tuesday after the Obama speech to the General Assembly, welcomed the parameters outlined by the president and made clear he wanted to know more. But he also reite...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—Jewish groups backing President Obama’s call to strike Syria militarily are citing moral outrage and U.S. national security as primary considerations, but concern for Israel—however muted—also looms large in their thinking. A lingering sensitivity over misrepresentations of the role of the pro-Israel community in the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2003 kept Jewish groups from weighing in on Syria until it was clear that President Obama was determined to strike. Now that same sensitivity is leading them to downplay any mention of Is...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—Israeli settler leader Dani Dayan has made it his mission over the years to warn members of Congress, particularly Republicans, of the perils of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Dayan has been a regular visitor to Washington, his trips often coinciding with developments in the peace process. During the Annapolis talks in 2007-08, Dayan would watch Israeli officials as they met with the media in the lobby of the venerable Mayflower Hotel, just blocks from the White House, and then move in to offer his own spin. In June, Dayan m...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—The election for Massachusetts governor is still 16 months away—too soon to know what the issues are or who the viable candidates will be. But apparently it’s never too soon for tikkun olam. Four of the declared candidates are Jewish, and all are grounding their campaigns in the religious imperative to repair the world. Steve Grossman, the state treasurer and a past chairman of the Democratic National Committee, quotes from Isaiah in describing his ambition to close the gap between rich and poor. “I received my Jewish heritag...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—After 20 years of stops, starts and a bloody intifada in between, John Kerry believes he can pull out a final status Israeli-Palestinian peace deal in nine months. What clock is the U.S. secretary of state trying to beat? According to his aides, the one ticking down as Syria and Egypt roil into unknowable futures and Palestinians fume at the prospect of never achieving sovereignty. “It’s becoming more complicated on the ground, and a feeling of pessimism is settling in among Israelis and Palestinians,” said a State Departm...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—The guy with the socks up. The guy with the pants down. The guy with the headlocks. The guy who tweets and deletes. What is it with these male politicos? And why are they all Jewish? The cloistered community that is Washington’s Jewish elite collectively choked a little July 20 as it progressed through a column in which Gail Collins of The New York Times named the protagonists of what she dubbed the “Weiner Spitzer summer.” “Ever since the Clinton impeachment crisis, we’ve been discovering how much personal misbehavior...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—Michael Oren was deep inside the State Department, relaxed and taking on all comers: He had the facts on his side. It was 2004 and the department was reviewing newly declassified National Security Agency evidence reinforcing Israel’s longstanding claim that its 1967 air attack on the USS Liberty spy ship was a mistake. The attack killed 34 American personnel. Oren, a preeminent historian of the Six-Day War, was not suffering gladly those at the State Department conference who continued to insist, despite all evidence to the...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—Days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed the incoming Iranian president’s plea for engagement with the United States and called for ratcheting up military pressure, a bipartisan letter circulating in the U.S. House of Representatives is urging President Obama to test Hassan Rohani’s offer. The letter, spearheaded by Reps. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.) and David Price (D-N.C.), had garnered 118 signatures by the afternoon of July 18, more than a quarter of the House. The bulk of the signatories are Democrats, but 1...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—“I was with him when” Ron Dermer laced his address to the 2009 American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference. Dermer used the phrase five times in the first five minutes of the speech—the “him” being Benjamin Netanyahu. “I can shed a little insight into the mind of the Israeli prime minister,” Dermer told the crowd, “because on that I’m something of an expert.” Two elements of the address, made just weeks after Netanyahu assumed office, explain Dermer’s ascension last week to the country’s most important diplomatic post...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—Mikey Weinstein couldn’t be happier to have an amendment in his honor approved by the U.S. House of Representatives. Yes, the amendment, passed June 13 and designed to keep Weinstein and his Military Religious Freedom Foundation as far away from the Pentagon as possible, is more in his “dishonor.” But Weinstein is the kind of guy who revels in the dislike of his adversaries. “How terrified are these little pu***es in Congress that they have to pass an amendment about me?” he shouted in a phone interview from the foundation...
TARRYTOWN, N.Y. (JTA)—The new HIAS is not your grandmother’s Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, and it’s certainly not the one that brought her mother over from the Pale of Settlement. After decades as the Jewish community’s foremost voice on immigration—first in leading the resettlement of Jews who arrived here at the turn of the 20th century, then in absorbing hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews in the 1980s and ‘90s—HIAS is making formal its shift to refugee care and resettlement overseas. The vast majority of its work will not be with Jews, and...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—When it comes to foreign assistance, American law couldn’t be clearer: A coup d’etat suspends funding, period. But the directive, which has persisted for years in federal appropriations bills, is clashing with another congressional priority: the apparent desire to foster an alternative to Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s democratically elected Islamist president who was removed from power this week by the Egyptian military. In recent months, Congress has intimated that it would be happier if Morsi’s secular foes in the military...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—It’s almost boilerplate: The American Jewish community asks a foreign leader with whom it has cultivated a close relationship to kindly tell firebrands in the leader’s government to pipe down and fall in with an established policy that happens to be embraced by the U.S. government. Greece? Romania? Hungary? Russia? Try Israel. In a rare rebuke of a sitting Israeli minister, three major centrist Jewish groups in recent weeks have criticized Naftali Bennett, the economics chief in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governm...
