Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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JERUSALEM—Within the past year, three student-run legislative bodies at University of California (UC) state schools—UC Berkeley, UC Irvine and UC San Diego—passed resolutions urging divestment from Israel. These votes occurred amid allegations of the harassment of pro-Israel students on UC campuses. Yet at the same time, such resolutions were defeated at UC Riverside, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Santa Barbara, as well as outside the UC system at Stanford University. Who has the upper hand in the o...
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced last Sunday that former Bank of Israel Governor Prof. Jacob Frenkel, who headed the central bank between 1991 and 2000, will replace outgoing Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer, whose term ended this week. The new governor’s nomination is pending the approval of the Public Service Nominations Committee, headed by Judge (ret.) Jacob Turkel, as well as a cabinet vote. The nomination faces a legislative hurdle, as the Bank of Israel Law of 1...
PARIS (JTA)—With scooter helmets in hand, a man called Yohan and six buddies stroll around Paris’ 20th arrondissement. The seven look much like a typical group of French students—until they locate a group of Arab men they suspect of perpetrating an anti-Semitic attack the previous day. Using their helmets as bludgeons, members of France’s Jewish Defense League, or LDJ, set upon the Arabs and beat them. Several of the Arabs attempt to escape in a blue sedan, but the LDJ members pursue the veh...
Edward Schnitzer remembers his father dropping him off every week for Sunday school and hanging out at the men’s club while the kids sat in a classroom. “I don’t remember any of it with the family together,” he says. But for his daughters, who are 10 and 7, Hebrew school is family time: Schnitzer and his wife, Cindy, join the girls—and about 30 other families in Temple Shaaray Tefila’s Masa program—in the basement social hall for a two-and-a-half-hour session, participating in activities and discussions, singing and sitting together for...
CAIRO, Egypt—Political satire apparently knows no borders, based on the recent appearance of Jon Stewart, host of America’s hit political satire program “The Daily Show,” on Egyptian television’s “Al Bernameg,” (The Program) that is frequently described as “the Egyptian Jon Stewart program.” Host Bassem Youssef introduced his special guest dressed as a captured spy, with a black hood covering Stewart’s head. The move was a jab at recent calls by Egyptian military and political officials to be wary of foreign spies seeking to spread chaos thr...
By Ben Sales SDEROT, Israel (JTA)—A thick concrete bomb shelter sits by the side of a central street in this embattled southern Israeli town, but Naomi Moravia can’t get inside. Shelters like this one are crucial in Sderot, which is about a mile from the Gaza Strip and is the frequent target of cross-border missile attacks that send residents running for cover. But Moravia can’t run. She can’t even get up on the sidewalk. Pushing a lever on her wheelchair, she rolls down the street looking...
David Baker doesn’t exactly agree that he has the toughest job in Israel, but he doesn’t deny it either. As the media front man for the Prime Minister’s Office, that kind of ducking and weaving comes with the territory, but Baker—a New Yorker by birth and rearing—can take it. “I’m from the boroughs—I’m a cool New Yorker,” he said, half-kidding, on a recent phone interview from Jerusalem, a few days before heading to the United States for one of his frequent visits. Baker, the senior foreign...
Some agunot, observant Jewish women trapped in unwanted marriages, wait many years for a Jewish divorce. Meanwhile, a number of activists after having devoted decades to the cause, have begun to wonder whether a solution to the agunah crisis is possible. Rivka Haut, for one, who 30 years ago helped found Agunah Inc., admitted that when Blu Greenberg—a magical name in Orthodox feminism since the 1960s—telephoned recently, suggesting an international agunah summit, “I was not so eager to come… Blu knows that. I said to her, ‘Why? We’ve had...
JERUSALEM—Israeli President Shimon Peres confessed to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel that during Peres’ first visit to the Windy City, he felt profound jealousy when he saw the outstanding beauty and size of Lake Michigan and Chicago’s abundant water resources. Which is one of the reasons why the Land of Milk and Honey and the City by the Lake have joined forces to work to make fresh drinking water more plentiful and less expensive by the year 2020. In a ceremony at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Israeli...
TOPANGA, Calif. (JTA)—Few world musicians get to play with rock bands, but 15 years ago, Hani Naser christened his new electric oud performing “Blister in the Sun” with The Violent Femmes. In May, when the 1980s folk-punk band reunited at the Bottlerock Music Festival in Napa Valley, Calif., Naser joined in again, strutting his stuff alongside Femmes front man Gordon Gano, this time playing the hand drums. A master percussionist and oud player, Naser has made music with the likes of Ry Coode...
Seated cross-legged in the sunny backyard of her north Oakland home, wearing loose, tie-dyed pants, beads around her neck, her hair in tousled braids and sipping kombucha tea—her drum is tucked away for now—Taya Shere brings a few different stereotypes to mind: Hippie. Earth mother. Hebrew priestess. Hebrew priestess? It might not be a familiar archetype, but it is an absolutely accurate term, says Shere. No one bestowed this title upon her at birth; she grew up in Washington, D.C., where she...
JERUSALEM—The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, affirmed Israel’s “right to exist in security and peace” during his visit to the Jewish state last Thursday. Welby, on a five-day tour of Egypt, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories last week, met with members of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem, visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, and prayed at the Western Wall. “The clear policy of the Church of England, [and] my own very clear and very fluent feeling, is that the...
NEW MILFORD, NJ—When Yitayish “Titi” Ayenew, the first black Miss Israel, was a young orphan who moved from Ethiopia to Israel, it was learning the Hebrew language that turned around her fortunes. “Then, I was a scared child,” Ayenew, 22, told students at Solomon Schechter Day School of Bergen County, N.J., last month. “I did not know what would be my future, or that I would do the things I am doing today. For me, an inner change occurred when I overcame the obstacle of learning Hebrew. I a...
