Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 1879 - 1903 of 1939
NEW YORK (Forward)—Does Jewish culture need a central address in order to thrive? Not according to the people who work there. The Foundation for Jewish Culture, a New York-based organization that has given more than $50 million to Jewish scholars and artists since 1960, will cease its operations in the coming year. According to the FJC’s president and CEO, Elise Bernhardt, the organization will wind down its activities in 2014, work with attorneys to distribute its assets and seek new homes for its programs. “Our operating model isn’t really...
NEW YORK (JTA)—Nine months ago, Natalia Demidova crouched on the second floor of her Staten Island home and watched her neighbor’s SUV race a 10-foot wave down the street. The wave crashed through Demidova’s quiet residential block in the South Beach neighborhood and flooded her home with more than two feet of water. Demidova is among the many residents of South Beach still struggling to restore the life she had before Hurricane Sandy hit the northeastern United States last October. For most...
With the start of a new school year, there’s reason to be concerned: Anti-Semitism is a serious problem on some college campuses, causing Jewish students to feel threatened and even fear for their safety. Yet the U.S. government is not enforcing the law to protect them. Legal protection exists, at least in theory. After a six-year battle by ZOA and others, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issued a 2010 policy that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act would be enforced to protect Jewish students and students of oth...
The first comprehensive nationwide study of Jewish and religious giving, “Connected to Give,” finds that social engagement with Jewish community is a key predictor of giving to all causes, not just Jewish ones Jumpstart released Connected to Give: Key Findings Today, the first in a series of reports detailing the giving habits and motivations of American Jews across all ages, economic groups and geographies. Findings are based on a survey of nearly 3,000 American Jewish households plus 2,000 households from other religious groups, as well as...
By Josh Lipowsky NEW YORK (JTA)—It started when she was 13. “Sarah” became involved with a man 10 years her elder. He began setting her up with his friends for sex. She knew they would sometimes pay him, but she always thought she could trust him. He became her world. Even though he would beat her, Sarah internalized it as affection. When she tried to leave, threats to her family kept her coming back. “I didn’t realize I was a sex-trafficking victim until I got out,” said Sarah, who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home and is now in her 20s. “I...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—Secretary of State John Kerry and National Security Adviser Susan Rice briefed Jewish leaders on Palestinian-Israeli peace talks. The Aug. 8 evening meeting at the White House lasted 90 minutes, participants said, and was characterized mostly by Kerry’s enthusiasm for the resumed talks and the serious commitment he said he saw from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Kerry appeared bullish about talks he has worked assiduously to revive since becoming secretary of state i...
In a major new report on “next-gen” Jewish giving whose findings are likely to produce a collective sigh of relief among nervous communal professionals, young Jews of means appear seriously committed to donating to Jewish causes. And they are often moved to do so by a strong sense of Jewish and secular values passed down from their families. Yet the report, “Next Gen Donors: The Future of Jewish Giving,” a collaboration among the nonprofit group 21/64, the Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and the Jewish Funders Network, finds that yo...
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 b...
JTA—It wasn’t so long ago that Ryan Braun was just a rookie phenom, racking up numbers that had Jewish sports junkies rushing to put the Milwaukee Brewers’ slugger in the pantheon with Greenberg and Koufax. These days, not so much. The news is that Braun has accepted a suspension from Major League Baseball for the rest of the season, all but admitting to using performance-enhancing drugs. I say “all but admitting” because in accepting the time he still hasn’t explicitly acknowledged the crime:...
On June 1, 2010, the day after the Gaza flotilla incident in which nine Turkish militants were killed after attacking Israeli soldiers aboard the Mavi Marmara, famed reporter Helen Thomas didn’t hide her opinions about Israel in a briefing with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. “The initial reaction to the flotilla massacre, deliberate massacre, an international crime, was pitiful. What do you mean you regret something that should be so strongly condemned? And if any other nation in the...
WASHINGTON, DC—Sam Bain knew that life could be dangerous in southern Israel, with rockets fired indiscriminately across the border from Gaza. But it wasn’t until the Ohio college student visited an Israeli day care center near the Gaza border that the reality truly hit him. This day care center was a bomb-safe facility. “We don’t have bomb-safe day care centers in America,” Bain told JNS.org. “It was almost a wake-up call” about the reality of life in Israel, he said. Bain visited the Jewish st...
NEW YORK (JTA)—If you want to lead a major Reform Jewish organization, here’s a piece of advice: Go to the Westchester Reform Temple. With this week’s announcement that Rabbi Aaron Panken will be the new president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the temple in suburban New York now has produced two major Reform leaders in two years. (The other is Rabbi Rick Jacobs, who two years ago ceded the pulpit of the Scarsdale synagogue to become president of the Union for Refor...
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...
WASHINGTON—Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life announced that Eric Fingerhut will serve as its president and CEO. The appointment was approved unanimously on Sunday by the Hillel Board of Directors, who met in New York. “Eric is an ideal fit for Hillel at this important time in our history,” said Sidney Pertnoy, Chairman of Hillel’s Board of Directors. “He has a passion for Hillel’s mission and a proven innovative record of successes in both the public and private arena. We are conf...
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 s...
For 90 years, Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life has provided what many call a “tent” welcoming students of every Jewish background and denomination on campus. But as Hillel prepares to nominate its next president and CEO, questions persist over how open that tent should be when it comes to opinions about Israel. Hillel was created in 1923 at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and was adopted by B’nai B’rith International in 1924 until the 1990s. The organization has grown to more than 500 campuses across North America. In...
NEW YORK (JTA)—In his letter announcing he was stepping down as Yeshiva University’s chancellor and rosh yeshiva, Rabbi Norman Lamm acknowledged his failure to respond adequately to allegations of sexual abuse against Y.U. rabbis in the 1980s. Lamm, now 85, became the school’s third president and head of its rabbinic school, the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, in 1976. He stepped down as president in 2003, becoming chancellor, but stayed on as the head of RIETS. His resignation July...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—Reps. Eric Cantor and John Lewis stood together recently at a Montgomery, Ala., memorial to martyrs of the civil rights struggle, joining hands to sing “We Shall Overcome.” With the Supreme Court decision two weeks ago gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act—one of the landmark pieces of legislation from that era— Virginia’s Cantor, the Republican majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, and Georgia’s Lewis, a Democrat and civil rights hero, now have that to overcome....
WASHINGTON (JTA)—A slight bump up on affirmative action, a plunge on voting rights, and on gay marriage, the mountaintop: federal legitimacy. It’s been a week of roller-coaster highs and lows at the Supreme Court for liberal Jewish groups. Their collective pledge: Stick it out. “These are critical decisions and it’s going to be a fight” on voting rights, said Sammie Moshenberg, the director of the National Council of Jewish Women, one of several groups that had weighed in on the recent ca...
Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah remarked when he was sworn-in to succeed Salam Fayyad at the helm of the Palestinian government last month that his government’s life will by necessity be short-lived. It was intended to last until August, at which time it would be dissolved in order to pave the way for a long-awaited national consensus government comprised of both Fatah and Hamas loyalists. Doubtless, not even Hamdallah expected his tenure to last merely 18-days. Following intense back-and-forth between the recently appointed prime minister and P...
McROBERTS, Ky.—The morning mist hovers over the narrow valley in the lush Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky. A creek rushing by the side of the main road passes through the town of Neon in once prosperous Letcher County, deep in the state’s coal mining region. The empty storefronts reflect the industry’s losing battle with mechanization, depleted coal deposits and cheaper-to-mine western coal. Up the road a piece, people sit in rocking chairs on the porches of mostly rundown homes watch...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—Liberal Jewish groups fired a verbal barrage against a restrictive abortion bill passed by the Republican-dominated U.S. House of Representatives, calling it “egregious,” “outrageous,” “an affront,” and “deeply disappointing.” Such strong language is unusual in any case for groups that must engage with Congress, but especially when a bill is dead in the water. The bill, passed last Tuesday in a 228-196 vote, would ban abortions after 20 weeks, a time when the bill’s sponsor, R...
JERUSALEM (JTA)—For much of the past two years, Israel has taken a singular approach to the Syrian civil war: Stay as far away as possible. But with a recent string of victories by forces loyal to President Bashar Assad and the crumbling of the U.N. peacekeeping force that has kept the peace along the border for four decades, the tack is becoming considerably harder. Assad’s statement that he had decided to engage in military action against Israel, published June 10 in an interview with a Lebanese paper, was followed by a terse warning fro...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—Dianne Feinstein and Ron Wyden have much in common. Both are longtime U.S. senators, Democrats, Jewish and fiercely independent West Coasters. They’ve also both been members of the Senate Intelligence Committee since before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and privy to classified materials that describe how the government systematized radical changes in intelligence gathering in their wake. Now the two lawmakers are on opposite sides of the debate over the massive inf...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—Susan Rice has said that a “huge” portion of her work at the United Nations was defending Israel’s legitimacy. Her new job will likely be no less Israel-centric. President Obama named Rice June 5 his national security adviser and replaced her at the U.N. with Samantha Power, one of his top White House advisers. Rice succeeds Tom Donilon, who has been in the post since 2010. Rice has scored mostly high marks from Jewish groups for her defense of Israel at the United Nations...
