Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS) — Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla was scheduled to arrive in Israel on Monday to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other officials. One ostensible purpose of the visit — slated to coincide with the completion of the delivery of 10 million doses of BioNTech — was to examine the possibility of Pfizer building a vaccine-production plant and R&D center in Israel. On Thursday, however, Pfizer announced that it was postponing the trip. According to the pharmaceutical giant, Bourla and the members of his team who were part of his entou...
(JNS) — Reading a biography about a friend is a mixed experience. On the one hand, the protagonist is familiar. On the other, he’s a complete stranger, whose story unfolds like that of a fictional character being introduced in a novel. This is the sense of duality that I had while curled up with “Lone Voice: The Wars of Isi Leibler,” a tome by renowned Australian-Jewish historian Suzanne D. Rutland. Before meeting Leibler in person 20 years ago, I knew about the human-rights activist from Australia and his long-standing fight on behalf of Sovi...
(JNS) — In an open letter posted last week to his website, young-adult novelist Barry Lyga called for like-minded colleagues in the industry to join him in blocking the publication of bodies of work written by anyone associated with the outgoing administration in Washington. Titled “No Book Deal for Traitors,” the letter begins, “We all love book publishing, but we have to be honest—our country is where it is in part because publishing has chased the money and notoriety of some pretty sketchy people, and has granted those same people both the...
(JNS) — If George Orwell is spinning in his grave these days, he’s likely rolling so hard with laughter that it’s bringing him and the rest of us to tears. An upcoming webinar on Jew-hatred is but one of many recent examples of phenomena that even the prescient social critic, whose essays and novels predicted with chilling accuracy the world that has unfolded since World War II, couldn’t have anticipated. The Dec. 15 event—called “Dismantling Antisemitism, Winning Justice”—is being hosted by the left-wing, anti-Israel NGO Jewish Voice fo...
(JNS) — Peter Beinart’s latest attack on the Jewish state that he opposes as vehemently as he professes to have its best interest at heart is a work of remarkable sophistry. In a lengthy op-ed in the radical-leftist quarterly Jewish Currents, the author of “The Crisis of Zionism” — recently hired by the equally ill-intentioned New York Times as a “contributing opinion writer” — bashes Israel by denigrating the Muslim-majority countries with which it is forging warm peace treaties. That the Abraham Accords and Sudan agreement were brokered b...
(JNS) — The apoplexy on the part of Democrats in general and Jewish liberals in particular to the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court was to be expected. Anything that President Donald Trump does drives them crazy. But the fact that he decided to fill the seat vacated by the Sept. 18 death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg before the fast-approaching election has been more than they can tolerate. How dare the president exercise his right to do so, they have been moaning, when his days in office are numbered? Or so they h...
(JNS) — Two weeks after Israel gradually reopened its education system, students and teachers around the country came down with the coronavirus, forcing thousands of their peers and family members into quarantine. The main hotspot has been the Jerusalem high school, Hagymnasia Haivrit, in the capital’s Rechavia neighborhood, which had to shut down due to the more than 130 adults and teenagers who tested positive to COVID-19. More than 17 additional schools also closed, some by ministerial order, and a few by parental decree. If the trend con...
(JNS)—Holocaust survivors do not need annual ceremonies to remind them of the Nazi atrocities that they endured or of the family members that Adolf Hitler’s henchmen slaughtered during World War II. No, those memories are just as inked in their hearts and minds as the numbers tattooed on their forearms. Indeed, it is not those people who require the admonition “Never Forget,” but rather the rest of the world. It is also a mantra for subsequent generations of Jews to repeat and forge a collective memory of events that we did not experie...
(JNS)—The carry-on about the dangerous spread of COVID-19 within the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community in Israel is understandable. While the rest of us are cooped up at home, with increasingly severe limitations on our freedom of movement, certain ultra-Orthodox towns and neighborhoods have been conducting business as usual. Indeed, the contrast between Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood and the city of Bnei Brak near Tel Aviv with the shuttered shops and empty playgrounds of cities from Metula to Eilat naturally causes rage on the part of a...
(JNS)—U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo returned fire on Monday to a large group of House Democrats who lambasted him last month for declaring that Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria are not illegal. In a letter to Michigan Rep. Andy Levin, who led 106 of his colleagues to sign a joint complaint against what they called the “State Department’s unilateral reversal on the status of settlements, without any clear legal justification,” Pompeo picked apart each false claim lobbed by the likes of “Squad” members Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.),...
(JNS)—At its three-day board of governors meeting in Jerusalem this week, the Jewish Agency for Israel, which recently turned 90, revealed a new plan of action. Addressing the Jewish leaders who convened in the Israeli capital on Sunday, Jewish Agency chairman Isaac Herzog announced that the organization, which “founded the State of Israel and brought 3 million Jews on aliyah,” is now “refining our strategic mission for the coming decade, based on the challenges Jews are facing today.” Herzog, who kicked off the event with a ceremony to honor...
(JNS)—After spending six months in jail on the outskirts of Moscow, a young Israeli woman named Naama Issachar was sentenced on Oct. 11 to seven-and-a-half years of imprisonment in Russia. Both the extreme sentence and trumped-up charges of drug-smuggling not only have traumatized the 26-year-old from Rehovot—and inflicted great anguish on her family and friends—but also has spurred the entire Israeli legal and political system into action. Israeli President Reuven Rivlin sent a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin, pleading with him to p...
(JNS)—The slaughter of 19-year-old yeshivah student and Israel Defense Forces’ recruit Dvir Sorek from the Judea and Samaria community of Ofra was not exceptional. Palestinian terrorists with hatred in their hearts and weapons in their hands are integral to the Jewish state’s otherwise vibrant landscape. But this particular tragedy struck a nationwide nerve even among those who blame the so-called “occupation” for Palestinian violence, and consider citizens like Sorek to be illegally and immorally living in territory that should become pa...
(JNS)—If further proof were needed to illustrate the futility of diplomatic overtures to the Palestinian Authority, Monday’s attack on a pro-Israel Saudi in Jerusalem is a good example. As part of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s regional strategy to forge ties with formerly hostile Muslim-Arab states, the Israeli Foreign Ministry invited a delegation of six media personalities from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt to see the Jewish state for themselves. Up close and personal. As a precautionary measure...
(JNS)—When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared, during the lead-up to the country’s March 31 municipal elections, that “whoever wins Istanbul, wins Turkey,” he couldn’t have imagined that the catchy campaign slogan was going to energize his rivals and bode ill for his own continued reign of terror. Even the initial mayoral victory of Ekrem Imamoğlu—the opposition Republican People’s Party candidate challenging Binali Yıldırım, a former prime minister from Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party—three months ago in Turkey’s...
(JNS)—Given the nationwide response to the brutal rape of a 7-year-old Israeli girl by the Palestinian janitor at her elementary school, while two other accomplices egged him on, it’s no wonder that her parents waited weeks before complaining to authorities. Indeed, since the story was reported on Monday, it has become the subject of a political debate. As painful as this must be for the child’s traumatized family, it is not surprising. With three months to go before the “do-over” Knesset elections, no issue is off-limits in the fray. And...
(JNS)—Palestinian and leftist Jewish leaders called for America’s Israel ambassador to be fired for telling The New York Times in a recent interview that the Jewish state has, “under certain circumstances, the right to retain some, but unlikely all, of the West Bank.” Yes, for daring to suggest that Israel has the right even to “some” of its land, David Friedman was called a “settler” by Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas, who had previously dubbed him a “son of a dog.” And the P.A. Foreign Ministry announced that it would weigh fili...
(JNS)—In response to the publication of an anti-Semitic cartoon in last Thursday’s International New York Times, protesters gathered outside the Manhattan office of the “Gray Lady” on Monday evening to demand that those responsible for the blatant display of Jew-hatred be fired. Among the speakers at the rally were former New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind and eminent law professor Alan Dershowitz, both Jewish Democrats. Hikind led the crowd in chanting, “Shame on The New York Times.” Dershowitz decried the paper’s bias against Israel, and i...
(JNS)—The Palestinians have been busy for the past week demonstrating in word and deed that U.S. President Donald Trump’s “deal of the century” will be dead on arrival. In an op-ed on Sunday in the official, Palestinian Authority-controlled daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Omar Hilmi Al-Ghoul, who served as national-affairs adviser to former P.A. Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, launched an assault on the White House. While he was at it, he offended all people with special needs. As Palestinian Media Watch reported, Al-Ghoul wrote, “Anyone who looks at...
(JNS) The Israeli security cabinet decided on Sunday to put into effect a law passed in July to deduct half a billion shekels (approximately $138.2 million) from the annual tax revenues it transfers to the Palestinian Authority each year. The purpose of the legislation—like its precursor, the Taylor Force Act, which was approved by the U.S. Congress in May—is to coerce the P.A. to cease rewarding terrorists with hefty “pay-for-slay” stipends. Initially, Israeli security officials opposed cutting the funds on the grounds that doing so could e...
(ISRAEL21c) -Meet Moshe Hogeg, the Israeli venture capitalist and entrepreneur tagged by Forbes magazine as one of the 10 "Start-up Nation movers and shakers you need to know." The 33-year-old founder and chairman of Singulariteam (a private investment fund and incubator formerly called Genesis Angels)-with an extensive network of companies he has created, technologies he has invested in, or both-is making an international name for himself. His illustrious list of backers and partners includes...
(ISRAEL21c)—A first-in-class pocket-sized metered-dose cannabis inhaler helps patients and doctors control, monitor and fine-tune dosages. As medical marijuana debates heat up across the globe, a government-backed Israeli startup has developed the first device of its kind to administer cannabis as a pharmaceutical. Unlike the current methods—smoking joints, imbibing oil, rubbing in a salve or eating laced brownies—this medical device enables the patient to inhale metered doses of vaporized cannabis granules. The Syqe Inhaler is the brain...
Renen Schorr explains how Jerusalem’s Sam Spiegel Film and Television School saved Israel’s film industry and propelled it to international acclaim. On December 12, audiences across the world will mark the 10th anniversary of the passing of David Perlov, an Israeli filmmaker most of them haven’t even heard of. In 39 different countries at 50 arty venues, 5,000 people will watch a movie inspired by one of Perlov’s masterpieces and produced by graduates of and students at the Sam Spiegel Film & TV School in Jerusalem. This simultaneous screeni...
