Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JTA) — Brandeis University is revoking recognition of the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, saying the group “openly supports Hamas.” Brandeis informed the student group on Monday about its decision, which means that the group will no longer receive university funding or be able to hold activities on campus. The group canceled a “Vigil for Palestine” that had been scheduled for Monday night as a result. “This decision was not made lightly, as Brandeis is dedicated to upholding free speech principles,” the university wr...
(JNS) — Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced his intention on Monday to pursue a $1 billion surge in funding for the federal Nonprofit Security Grant Program, which helps bolster security for synagogues, day schools and other at-risk locations. The legislation would more than triple the existing $305 million in annual funds available for the program, which the Federal Emergency Management Agency administers. Speaking at a press conference, Schumer said that that level of funding was necessary in response to the spike in a...
(JTA) — A Jewish billionaire investor and philanthropist quit the board of Columbia Business School, saying the campus had become unsafe for Jews since the launch of the Israel-Hamas war. “With blatantly anti-Jewish student groups and professors allowed to operate with complete impunity, it sends a clear and distressing message that Jews are not just unwelcome, but also unsafe on campus,” Henry Swieca said in an Oct. 30 letter obtained Tuesday by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “My resignation is an expression of my deep concern for the directi...
(JNS) — Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) sits on the House Foreign Affairs, Intelligence and Armed Services Committees, giving him a 360-degree perspective on both the context surrounding Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre in Israel and its aftermath. “At the end of the day, this administration has an Iran policy problem,” Waltz said of the White House’s reported efforts to appease Iran in exchange for restarting the 2015 nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action from which the Trump administration withdrew in 2015. “It has been obsessed wi...
(JTA) — Three Ivy League universities have announced steps to fight antisemitism after weeks of turmoil on their campuses and others. Harvard University has put together a group of advisors to address antisemitism on campus, and both the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University announced that they would convene task forces on antisemitism. The announcements come as those schools and many others have contended with complaints that their administrations have not taken sufficient action to protect Jewish students or condemn Hamas f...
(JTA) — The White House denounced “antisemitic messages being conveyed on college campuses” in a statement Thursday, condemning students groups that have praised Hamas’ attack on Israel or “call for the annihilation of the state of Israel.” The statement is the most direct critique President Joe Biden’s office has yet made about inflammatory rhetoric surrounding Israel on college campuses, which has spiked following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s war in Gaza against the group, which the United States has designated as a terrorist o...
(JNS) — Following a series of anti-Israel protests on campus—some which have turned violent—and a lack of adequate responses by university administrations, Jewish students are now turning to the U.S. legal system. “There has been an explosion of antisemitism on college campuses around the country and we had been looking at this issue prior to the massacre on Oct. 7,” said Mark Ressler, the Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP lawyer leading the effort. “We’re going to show that the universities had notice of acts of hatred and bigotry towards Jewis...
(New York Jewish Week) - In front of a long U-shaped table in Times Square, set for 224 people, a crowd began to sing "Happy Birthday" for a 12-year-old boy named Erez. Thursday was Erez's birthday, but the gathering was no celebration. Erez, along with his sister, Sahar, and father, Ofer Calderon, are three of the more than 200 hostages taken by Hamas in the terror group's Oct. 7 invasion of Israel. Erez's grandmother and cousin were killed. The song was led by Omer Lubaton-Granot, an Israeli...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Biden administration convened a meeting with Jewish leaders on Monday on what it says is an “alarming” rise in reports of antisemitism on college campuses in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war. Doug Emhoff, the Jewish Second Gentleman who launched a task force on antisemitism last year along with the Biden administration’s plan to counter anti-Jewish bigotry, will convene the meeting, which will take place at the Department of Education. “The Biden-Harris Administration is taking multiple actions to address the alarming...
(JTA) — Police at Cornell University were called to the school’s kosher dining hall, and the campus Hillel warned students to stay away from it, after anonymous antisemitic posts on a Greek life website that included threats to “shoot up” the building and kill and rape Jewish students. The posts, whose text has circulated widely on social media, were published Saturday and Sunday under pseudonyms including “hamas,” “jew evil,” “jew jenocide,” “hamas warrior” and “kill jews.” The posts have titles such as “jewish people need to be killed,” “e...
LAS VEGAS (JTA) - Mike Pence chose a Jewish gathering to announce his exit from the presidential race, with a veiled warning that his onetime boss, Donald Trump, posed a threat to a robust American foreign policy that he said was vital to Israel's interests. Pence, the former vice president, elicited gasps and cries of "We love you!" when he addressed a presidential forum at the annual Republican Jewish Coalition conference in Las Vegas. "I came here to say it's become clear to me this is not...
(JNS) — A little more than a week before Hamas terrorists attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, the White House hosted a roundtable with Islamic groups that have since expressed sympathy for Hamas and blamed Israel for the murderous assault, according to an article in Focus at Western Islamism. “These red flags have been waiving right out in the open for years, and yet these groups were able to get a seat at the table—in the White House no less,” wrote Dexter Van Zile, managing editor of the publication, which is part of the Middle East Forum....
(New York Jewish Week) — Hundreds of protesters were arrested as they crowded Grand Central Station in New York City on Friday afternoon for a rally sponsored by a Jewish group calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. The rally came a day ahead of a series of other pro-Palestinian rallies worldwide. It was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist group that has accused Israel of genocide and blamed its policies for Hamas’ massacre of Israel on Oct. 7, which killed and wounded thousands. While the protest on Friday inconvenienced rus...
(New York Jewish Week) — Jewish students at a New York City college were locked in their school’s library for 20 minutes as pro-Palestinian demonstrators pounded on the doors and shouted slogans. The incident at Cooper Union, a private college in downtown Manhattan, occurred after pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel students held dueling rallies. It came on a day when, at a New York University protest nearby, a protester waved a sign depicting an Israeli flag, its Star of David prominent, in a trash can. Meanwhile, further uptown at Columbia Univers...
(JNS) — Capitol police took into custody more than 300 people under charges of illegally protesting, with three also accused of assault, on Oct. 19 after a rally in the U.S. Capitol building led by far-left groups. Participants wore black shirts and chanted “Jews say ceasefire now” and “Let Gaza live” while sitting in the Cannon Rotunda waving banners. Organized by IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace—two of the most prominent leftist anti-Zionist Jewish groups—the activists received warnings about the criminality of Capitol protests. Aft...
(JNS) - Excerpts from a recent CNN interview with Nikki Haley are being shared on social media with the claim that the Republican presidential candidate endorses a "plan to house up to one million Palestinians from Gaza." Fla. Gov. Ron DeSantis said that Haley "shows an instinct on her behalf" to "cater to elite opinion," per his presidential campaign, which cited Haley's supposed "openness to admitting Gaza refugees to the United States. "I do think she's still suffering under the...
(JTA) — One of the candidates on the ballot for an upcoming Minnesota school board election is an avowed Holocaust denier who has called for all Jews to be sterilized and tattooed with the Star of David, all synagogues to be closed and all Jewish children to be forcibly removed from their parents. Vaughn Klingenberg is one of seven candidates on the ballot for three open seats in Roseville, a suburb of the Twin Cities. In addition to his views on Jewish people, which he recently published under his own name on a blog, he also visited two a...
(JNS) — With the advent of COVID-19 came technology to help isolated individuals get together, the most popular being Zoom. Those meeting publicly and privately still use the platform, though it has brought with it another scourge: antisemitism. It turns out that viewers and commentators sometimes use question-and-answer sessions to spread hatred of Jews, as well as conspiracy theories. Early in the pandemic, there was also the case of “Zoom-bombing.” For reasons not yet clear, a number of incidents have clustered around the San Franc...
(JNS) - Ronald S. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress since 2007, has told the University of Pennsylvania that it must work harder to counter campus antisemitism to continue benefiting from his philanthropy. He pointed to the recent "Palestine Writes" literary festival the last weekend in September, over the Rosh Hashanah holiday, as a point in case. "The conference has put a deep stain on Penn's reputation that will take a long time to repair," wrote Lauder, referring to the event...
(JNS) - It was partly a celebration of life and partly an outpouring of anger. Several hundred Israel supporters-religious and secular, Israeli and American born-joined together in tight, barricaded quarters at the corner of Second Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan on Monday afternoon, countering an ugly pro-Hamas rally across the intersection outside the Israeli consulate. A rally supporting the terror group's massacre of Israelis and foreign nationals turned violent in Times Square on...
PLAINVIEW, N.Y. - Nora Leeds had lived alone for many years in her Long Island home, but it wasn't until the pandemic that she started to feel isolated. She was used to working in a large office with coworkers, but then her work went fully remote. For four months, Leeds, now 69, could not see her daughter. She became increasingly depressed. "I felt like my whole world was falling apart, like I no longer had the skills to interact with people because we were told to stay at home," Leeds said....
(JTA) – The Biden Administration’s new point person for combating book bans at school districts and public libraries across the country is a gay, Jewish progressive activist who has served as a government liaison to the Jewish and LGBTQ communities. The appointment of Matt Nosanchuk comes as the thousands of book challenges nationwide have focused on books with LGBTQ as well as Jewish themes, in addition to works about race. Nosanchuk was named a deputy assistant secretary in the Department of Education’s civil rights office earlier this month...
SAN FRANCISCO (J. Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) - Dianne Feinstein was an eshet chayil, the Hebrew term for a woman of valor, Rabbi Jonathan Singer proclaimed in his opening remarks at a memorial service for the U.S. senator who died Sept. 29 at 90. The event outside San Francisco City Hall was attended by about 1,500 invited guests, all gathered to remember a pathbreaking politician who spent a decade as the city's first woman mayor. Singer, the co-senior rabbi of Congregation...
(JNS) — The Harvard Divinity School student group Jews for Liberation doesn’t mince words in its description on the school’s site. The group “offers warm, creative spiritual and political space for anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jews, as well as Jews questioning their relationship with Zionism,” it states. Student groups must register annually with the school’s Office of Student Life, which “prioritizes anti-racist and anti-oppressive practices” and “reflects the rich diversity and plurality of our community,” but evidently doesn’t consider av...
(JNS) - In the days after Senator Dianne Feinstein's death, the California political community's attention has been divided between commemorating Feinstein's remarkable career and speculating about who Governor Gavin Newsom would appoint as her replacement. The mourning had not yet concluded on Sunday night when word of Newsom's selection of former union leader and Democratic fundraiser Laphonza Butler as the state's new senator became public. But in all the commotion, an obscure but critically...
