Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 201 - 225 of 1886
(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...
(JNS) — The late Dianne Feinstein is often described as a fierce supporter of Israel throughout her more than 30 years serving as a California senator. The Democrat was proud of her “strong Jewish heritage” and did all she could “to stop the United States from selling weapons to Israel’s enemies,” Raleigh Resnick, rabbi and director of Chabad of Tri-Valley in Pleasanton, Calif., told JNS. (Feinstein attended Chanukah menorah-lightings that Chabad led in San Francisco’s Union Square.) “On the world stage, she presented herself as a proud Jew...
(JTA) - The United States Postal Service has released a new series of Forever stamps honoring Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late Jewish Supreme Court justice and liberal icon who died in 2020. The stamp, which became available for purchase on Monday, shows Ginsburg wearing her black judge's robe and signature white collar. It was announced last year as part of the postal service's 2023 lineup of new stamps, reflecting a jump on the service's standard timeline for honoring deceased people. The...
(JNS) — In the first Republican candidate debate on Aug. 24, Israel became the center of a heated exchange between two of those vying for the presidency in 2024. The Jewish state did not come up at all during the two-hour second debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, Calif., a month later, on Sept. 27. Instead, the seven candidates focused largely on domestic issues, including urban crime, illegal drugs, immigration and the Southern border. Throughout the e...
(JNS) — Dalia al-Aqidi secured 4.7 percent of the vote in the 2020 Minnesota Republican primary in an unsuccessful bid to unseat Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). The Iraqi-born media adviser announced on Monday that she is again running for the Republican nomination in the state’s 5th Congressional District. “Many people assume that because Ilhan and I are both female, Muslim refugees, we must think alike,” al-Aqidi, who immigrated to the United States in 1993, told JNS. “We couldn’t be further apa...
(JNS) - Sen. Robert "Bob" Menendez (D-N.J.), a longtime supporter of Israel and critic of the Iran nuclear deal, is facing widespread calls for his resignation following charges from the U.S. attorney's office that he accepted bribes. The Democrat "allegedly agreed to use his official position to benefit" three New Jersey businessmen "and the government of Egypt in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes to Menendez and his wife, Nadine Menendez, which included gold bars, cash...
(New York Jewish Week) — When a small group of people convened next to an inconspicuous plaque steps from the entrance to the Staten Island Ferry’s Whitehall Terminal, they weren’t there to catch a boat leaving the island. Instead, they had come to the southern tip of Manhattan to celebrate a ship that had arrived on its shores centuries before. The gathering was the 369th anniversary of an event most New Yorkers don’t know about, let alone celebrate: the arrival of the first Jewish community to the United States in 1654. That lack of awarene...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Biden administration is aiming to counter antisemitic discrimination in federally-funded transit systems, housing, food programs and other areas — one of the most major actions the White House has taken since it unveiled a far-reaching strategy to combat antisemitism in May. On Thursday, the administration announced that it is instructing eight cabinet departments to extend civil rights protections to victims of antisemitism and other forms of religious bigotry. The decision marks a broad expansion of the 1964 Civil Rig...
(JNS) — U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland is facing criticism following his testimony for a Judiciary Committee hearing on Sept. 20 titled “Oversight of the U.S. Department of Justice” during which he was visibly emotional on several occasions. The committee, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), sought in the hearing to examine how the U.S. Justice Department “has become politicized and weaponized under the leadership of Attorney General Merrick Garland.” Garland noted his Jewish ancestry in his opening statement. “My family fled religi...
When actor and director David Schwimmer stood up last November to talk about his experience with hate and the importance of building alliances to combat racism and antisemitism, the “Friends” star emphasized the importance of speaking up. “One of the biggest problems is silence. As I’ve said, silence is complicity, and so I try to urge people to speak out,” Schwimmer said at the annual ADL summit on antisemitism and hate, called Never Is Now. “I think it’s my responsibility. I don’t do enou...
(JTA) — A middle school teacher in a district outside Houston, Texas, has been fired reportedly for reading a sexual passage from Anne Frank’s diary out loud to eighth-grade students, the district told local news. The passage came from a 2018 graphic version of the diary by the world-famous Jewish Holocaust victim that restored some portions of the initial book that had been cut from the most well-known editions. “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” has also been at the center of several other recent book-related controver...
(JNS) — Nearly every notable U.S. State Department official is on pilgrimage to New York this week for the United Nations General Assembly’s annual general debate. Barbara Leaf, the Biden administration’s top diplomat for the Middle East, and Dan Shapiro, senior adviser for regional integration and former U.S. ambassador to Israel, have been spotted in the Big Apple, as has Amos Hochstein, the Israeli-American U.S. energy envoy, who brokered an Israeli-Lebanese maritime border agreement. Deborah Lipstadt, U.S. special envoy for monit...
(J. Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — Two months after proclaiming that July would henceforth be known locally as “American Christian Heritage Month,” the board of supervisors in El Dorado County, California has reversed course. The county’s elected governing body unanimously rescinded the proclamation Tuesday following backlash from local Jews, the American Civil Liberties Union and others who said it inappropriately advanced the idea that the United States is a Christian nation. “I commend the board for reflecting on and revis...
(JNS) — Two congressmen put forward a bipartisan bill proposing a new annual holiday on Sept. 11. Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) have introduced the Patriot Day Act. “By formally recognizing 9/11 as Patriot Day, we will make sure that we always honor the memory of those who lost their lives that day—and never give up our fight against terror,” Gottheimer said. “I am proud to lead bipartisan legislation to recognize those who lost their lives on that day. We must never forget those who made the ultimate...
