Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 686 - 710 of 1886
(JNS) — The Biden administration has come under withering criticism in the United States and Israel for its poor handling of the current situation in the Middle East. On Tuesday, U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price failed to mention Hamas or Islamic Jihad as terrorist organizations targeting Israeli civilians in his statement to the press. “Israel has the right to defend itself and to respond to rocket attacks,” Price said in his daily briefing. “The Palestinian people also have the right to safety and security just as Israeli...
(JTA) — Tensions among Jewish groups allied with the Biden administration blew into the open this week when a Democratic pro-Israel group briefly called a longtime Jewish leader an enabler of antisemitism — a sign of how potent a debate over a definition of antisemitism has become. Nancy Kaufman led Boston’s Jewish Community Relations Council for 20 years, from 1990 to 2010. She has also led the National Council for Jewish Women. Many progressive Jewish leaders have said she would be a good choice for President Joe Biden’s antisemitism monitor...
By Emily Alhadeff (The Cholent via JTA) - Nearly 100 years after Seattle's first Jewish school opened, an effort is underway to restore its crumbling building - as a multi-faith center that can unite Jews and Muslims in the city. So far, the effort has netted more than $40,000 toward a new roof for the building that once housed Seattle Talmud Torah. But that's a drop in the bucket for what a growing collective of Seattleites are hoping to generate to turn the Cherry Street Collective into a...
(JNS) — The American Jewish Committee released on Tuesday an updated and expanded edition of Translate Hate, the group’s widely used glossary of common antisemitic terms and tropes. According to AJC, the date of the 2021 edition’s release commemorates the second anniversary of the fatal attack on Chabad of Poway, Calif., and includes more than 40 terms and expressions that are examples of antisemitism, explaining their nature when used in certain contexts and their origins. The illustrated glossary has been widely downloaded and disse...
(JTA) — Despite COVID-related restrictions that kept Americans inside for significant portions of last year, the number of reported antisemitic incidents barely decreased in the United States in 2020, according to the Anti-Defamation League. The number of antisemitic assaults fell sharply, however, and for the first time in three years, no one was killed in an antisemitic attack. The ADL’s annual audit, published Tuesday, tallied 2,024 incidents of antisemitism in the U.S. in 2020, a decline of only 4 Percent from the 2,107 recorded in 2019. Th...
(JNS) — Saying that the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees has outlived its mandate, a group of Republican members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sent a letter last week to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressing concern over the United States providing funding to the organization. The authors wrote that the original intent of UNRWA was to address the needs of Palestinian refugees in the aftermath of the 1948 Israeli-Arab conflict, but in the past 60 years, it has changed its definition of refugee away f...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — One Wednesday in October 2007, seven Jewish lawmakers on the House Foreign Affairs Committee did something extraordinary: They ignored the pleas of the Jewish establishment. Jewish politicos were often happy to advance the agenda of the Jewish groups because it lined up with their ideals. On this occasion, several powerhouse lobbying groups in the Jewish community were pressing the committee not to advance a bill that would recognize as a genocide the 1915 Ottoman massacres of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians during W...
(JTA) — Criticism is mounting over the firing of a Jewish professor who accused his Oregon university’s leadership of making antisemitic comments, with the local branch of the Anti-Defamation League joining calls for the president of the school to resign. Students as well as fellow academics are also protesting the decision by Linfield University, a Baptist-affiliated school with some 2,000 students, to fire Daniel Pollack-Pelzner. According to The Oregonian, the university has hosed down sidewalk-chalk messages supporting Pelzner, thr...
(JNS) — An official in California’s Department of Education accused of promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories about the Holocaust and the Sept. 11 terror attacks has recently been reinstated, reported The Sacramento Bee. California state superintendent of public instruction Tony Thurmond said during an April 23 call with reporters that a third-party investigation into Craig Heimbichner, who works as an administrator in the Department of Education’s charter-school oversight division, determined that there was no basis for disciplinary actio...
WASHINGTON (JTA) - Washington's National Cathedral, known for its role during presidential inaugurations and other days of national import, is honoring Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Laureate and Holocaust memoirist with a bust, making him the first Jew to be so honored. Or maybe not the first, depending on where you sit. "I would say he is the first 20th-century Jewish person," the cathedral's dean, Rev. Randy Hollerith, said when asked how Wiesel came to be the first Jew to earn a sculpted depiction at the cathedral. Asked if he was referring...
(JTA) — Linfield University, a small school in Oregon, has fired a Jewish professor who accused the university president of making antisemitic remarks. Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, a tenured professor who taught English literature, has accused Linfield President Miles K. Davis of making multiple antisemitic remarks in recent years. The antisemitism, he said, was partly a backlash to Pollack-Pelzner demanding that the school do more to address allegations of sexual assault against multiple university trustees, including Davis. Pollack-Pelzner and a...
(JNS) — Jewish groups reacted to the verdict on Tuesday of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who was found guilty of murder and manslaughter in the death of George Floyd. Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020, touched off massive worldwide protests, violence and an examination of U.S. race relations and police conduct in the last year. The Jewish community—active in civil rights and with a long history of black-Jewish ties—reacted with outrage over Floyd’s death, one of a number of high-profile cases nationwide. Some groups, however,...
(JTA) — In Tucker Carlson’s response to accusations that he endorsed one white supremacist talking point, the Fox News anchor appeared to echo another — this time about Israel. Last week, the popular right-wing talk show host said there was a coordinated Democratic plan to “replace” the existing population of the United States with immigrants from the “Third World.” White supremacists refer to the idea as a “Great Replacement” orchestrated by Jews, and that claim has fueled attacks like the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. After the segment,...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations are by their nature calls for accountability for atrocities past and present. Antony Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, used the occasion to take his own department to task for its neglect of Jews during the Nazi era, and to call for action on behalf of the persecuted today. Blinken, delivering the keynote address Thursday at the event organized by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, savaged the World War II-era assistant secretary of state, Breckinridge Long, for blocking the entry...
(JTA) - New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens has taken on a side gig as the editor of a new limited-run journal of essays about Jewish issues. The journal, titled Sapir, is an initiative of the Maimonides Fund, an increasingly influential force in Jewish philanthropy that supports Jewish identity-building through media, education and Israel engagement. Over the past year, the fund has also become known for its leadership on COVID relief efforts. The first of four print issues...
The Center for Israel Education and the Emory Institute for the Study of Modern Israel will be presenting their 20th annual Enrichment Workshop on Modern Israel from June 13 to 17. Topics to be covered across 23 hours of presentations, panel discussions and breakout sessions include Jewish connection to the land of Israel, origins and development of Zionism, formation of Israel identity and politics, Israeli music and culture, Hebrew language and literature, the U.S.-Israeli relationship,...
(JTA) — The Biden administration removed sanctions that President Donald Trump had imposed on International Criminal Court officials while continuing to decry the ICC’s work targeting U.S. and Israeli personnel. “These decisions reflect our assessment that the measures adopted were inappropriate and ineffective,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday in a statement. “We continue to disagree strongly with the ICC’s actions relating to the Afghanistan and Palestinian situations,” Blinken said, referring to separate investigation...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Nancy Kaufman, the former CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women, said this week that she had been in touch with the Biden administration about becoming this country’s newly empowered anti-Semitism monitor. Kaufman revealed her contact in the Forward in a story about how progressive Jewish groups appear to be coalescing around her candidacy. She confirmed it on Wednesday to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, saying that a number of people outside the administration urged her to apply for the job, so she made her int...
(JTA) — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sat down for a public interview with a top New York City Jewish group, ending what some had considered a snub of Jewish leadership since the progressive New York Democrat’s election in 2019. In her April 1 talk with Michael Miller, head of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, Ocasio-Cortez acknowledged that she hadn’t engaged with national and citywide Jewish groups, saying “I was really focused on our backyard.” But she did say she worked on projects with local Jewish groups, including...
(JNS) - Hillel at the University of Rhode Island has created its annual "Field of Flags" memorial in honor of Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, which begins on Wednesday night. The exhibit is set up on the Hammershlag Mall, a walkway between the Multicultural Student Services Center and the Carothers Library, on the university's Kingston Campus. The flags were planted on Monday and will remain in place until April 12. The university's Hillel has planted the "Field of Flags" in memory of...
(J. the Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) - Calling California Gov. Gavin Newsom a "friend and ally" to the Jewish community, members of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus spoke out in a unified show of support for the governor on Tuesday as he faced an increasingly likely recall vote. With just under 1.5 million valid signatures needed to trigger a recall vote, the petition against Newsom had nearly 1.2 million authorized signatures as of March 19, according to the secretary of...
(JTA) — After years of contention and revisions, California’s State Board of Education approved a curriculum meant to guide the state’s schools in teaching ethnic studies, an effort that sparked waves of criticism from Jewish groups. The Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum aims to teach students about the histories, experiences, contributions and struggles of minority groups in the state. Jewish activists had vehemently criticized the first draft of the curriculum, which schools are not required to use, for both excluding and discriminating again...
(JTA) — There was virtual wine spilled and nostalgia for gefilte fish, as well as a serious message to consider the role of women in the bible. Doug Emhoff, Vice President Kamala Harris’s Jewish husband, hosted the White House’s first-ever online Passover seder on Thursday, two nights before the holiday formally begins. “We are gathered today for the first Passover celebration of the Biden Harris administration, and I’m excited to join you as the first-ever second gentleman, married to the first woman to serve as Vice President of the Unite...
(JTA) — Every Sunday growing up in northwest London, Simon Joseph would arrive home after playing football (American soccer) with friends and feast on toasted bagels with cream cheese and smoked salmon. It was a beloved ritual, one of the only times during the week that the whole family gathered around the table to eat. The salmon — thinly sliced, mild in flavor and buttery on the tongue — was a delicacy he sorely missed when he moved to New York a little over a decade ago. The local lox, even with the best bagel and schmear, was too salty...
Stars of the binge-worthy Israeli Netflix hit series Fauda will be joining Jewish National Fund-USA, the Orlando community and thousands of supporters across the country for the organization's annual Breakfast for Israel on April 18 at 10:30 a.m. While participants may have to BTOB (bring their own bagel) to this year's virtual "breakfast," JNF-USA promises to deliver the same high-quality, star-studded complimentary event that community members have become accustomed to since the first annual...
