Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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LANSING, Michigan (JTA)-Tom Dalton could be the poster boy for Elissa Slotkin's path to a second term and, she would argue, to Democrats keeping the U.S. House of Representatives. The 67-year-old Vietnam navy vet routinely votes Republican-but says he would not hesitate to vote for Slotkin, a Democrat, if he had the opportunity. "Seeing what's happening today in the news, all you hear is negative this and negative that, I would love to know if there's a lot more of what I saw today," he said,...
(JTA)—Not long after news that a shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, left at least 22 people dead, reports started swirling that the suspect had posted a manifesto on 8chan, an online forum. Law enforcement officials are investigating a document posted there that is believed to be authored by the suspect, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius. The text contains racist rhetoric, blaming immigrants and Latinos for taking away jobs from Americans. It was uploaded fewer than 20 minutes before the shooting, according to CNN. This isn’t the first tim...
(JTA)—Before he killed at least 22 people at a Walmart on the southern border, the gunman in El Paso posted a white supremacist manifesto on the fringe social network 8chan denouncing a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” The U.S. Justice Department announced that it would treat the shooting as a “domestic terrorist case.” “It appears to be designed to intimidate a civilian population,” U.S. Attorney John Bash said at a news conference Sunday, referring to the shooter’s motives. “And we’re going to do what we do to terrorists in this country, which i...
(JTA)—The gunman who killed nine people in Dayton, Ohio, showed an ex-girlfriend a video of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting on their first date. A woman who briefly dated Connor Betts, 24, earlier this year wrote about his troubling behavior in an essay posted Tuesday on Medium. Betts opened fire outside a bar early Sunday, killing his sister and eight others before being shot dead by police. Adelia Johnson wrote that the pair had bonded over mental health problems after meeting in a college course in January. Betts said that he suffered f...
(JNS)—Media watchdog organization CAMERA is raising questions about an upcoming HBO series, “Our Boys,” about the brutal murder of a Palestinian teenager Muhammad Abu Khdeir by a Jewish gang in 2014. “When HBO released the trailer for the series, several news publications promoted the show as a story about the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers by Hamas operatives just prior to the 2014 Gaza war,” said Andrea Levin, CAMERA’s executive director. “However, the trailer spends less than a minute on the killing of the Israeli boys....
DETROIT (JTA)-For any reporter, careening in a year from reviewing restaurants to covering the presidential debates would be a pretty fast rise. But then again, Jefferson Henry Kraft is only 10 years old. Kraft is the KidScoop Media correspondent covering the Democratic presidential debates, taking place here last Tuesday and Wednesday night. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency was fortunate enough to be assigned the "spin room" seat right next to his, and in one of those conversations typical of the...
There will not be a new Hanukkah stamp for this year. This means that individual post offices will have to order them. Previous history has shown that many local post offices do not order Hanukkah stamps on “off” years. If you want to purchase Hanukkah stamps, you will have to go to your local post office and tell them to order Hanukkah stamps now so they will have them in stock in time for this year’s holiday....
(JNS)-Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, a libertarian, was the only member of the Republican Party to vote against last week's resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives condemning the anti-Israel BDS movement. Massie, 48, explained his decision in a statement: I voted against H. Res. 246 because it calls for the full implementation of a bill I voted against back in 2014. That 2014 bill spends taxpayer dollars on "green" energy subsidies for another country, despite the fact that we face a debt...
(JNS)—A bipartisan group organized a private, after-hours tour of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., for members of Congress on July 16. Jewish Insider first reported the upcoming tour. An invitation was released on Thursday by the organizers: Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), Ted Deutch (D-Fla.), Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), Susie Lee (D-Nev.), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) and Elaine Luria (D-Va.). “Now, more than ever, it is important to rededicate ourselves to the work of remembering the Holocaust and learning the lessons of the att...
NEW YORK (JTA)—The Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s editor in chief, Andrew Silow-Carroll, and its opinion editor, Laura E. Adkins, shared their thoughts on a recent New York Times article answering “some of the most difficult questions” about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel. Andrew Silow-Carroll: Hey Laura, I wonder what you thought about The New York Times explainer on BDS. The Times usually hears it from both sides when they set out to provide what they consider a balanced view of a controversial aspect of the Isr...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—The U.S. House of Representatives this week approved a nonbinding resolution that condemns the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel. Much was made of the 398-17 vote, one that earns the hoary journalist adjective “overwhelming.” Democrats and Republicans at long last could bond on an issue, rejecting attempts to boycott Israel. “It’s that bipartisan support for Israel that means the world understands that the United States is strongly in support of Israel,” Rep. Brad Schneider, D-Ill, the resolution...
(JTA)—Jewish leaders in Baltimore have come to the defense of Rep. Elijah Cummings, the African-American Democrat who has come under withering attack from President Donald Trump. Trump used Twitter over the weekend to attack Cummings, whose 7th District includes over half of the city of Baltimore. On Saturday, the president called Cummings “a brutal bully” for criticizing conditions at border detention camps for migrants. “Cumming [sic] District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” the president wrote on Twitter, following a “Fox &...
(JNS)—A non-kosher Israeli burger franchise has indefinitely delayed its opening in Dearborn, Mich., after taking heat from the Arab-American community, one of the largest in the United States. The opening of Burgerim (the Hebrew plural for “burgers”) has apparently “stirred up controversy for months, striking at the heart of the charged debate over Israeli-Palestinian relations. The announced restaurant opening has elicited back-and-forth comments on Facebook posts from those spreading the message to boycott and others just hoping for a good...
WASHINGTON (JTA)—The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly condemned the movement to boycott, divest and sanction Israel. The House vote Tuesday, July 23, on the non-binding resolution was 398-17. Opposing were 16 Democrats, including two who back BDS, Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and one Republican, Thomas Massie of Kentucky. The resolution, backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, also enshrines the two-state outcome to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict at a time that the Trump a...
(JNS)-Among the some two-dozen 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper has sought to position himself as a consensus moderate backing long-held positions within the party. But even with a long track record of executive experience, campaigning this way in such a crowded field that seems to be shifting leftward makes it increasingly difficult to stand out. His candidacy also comes at a time when the Democratic Party is facing questions over its bipartisan...
(JNS)-U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a veteran Democratic lawmaker and icon of the civil-rights movement, is currently co-sponsoring a resolution for and against the anti-Israel BDS movement, leading to questions as to whether or not he supports boycotting the Jewish state. Last week, Rep. Ilhan Omar's (D-Minn.) introduced a bill affirming the right to boycott countries. It was widely seen as a bid by Omar, who openly supports the BDS movement, to push back against U.S. laws banning the boycott...
NEW YORK (JTA)-In the 1960s, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and John Glenn were household names, idolized as god-like figures by a public enraptured by NASA's forays into space. There was also Jules Bergman, who almost attained the same fame despite never actually going into space. The charismatic television reporter covered all of NASA's 54 manned space flights during his lifetime. One of those was Apollo 11, which, 50 years ago, on July 20, 1969, became the first manned spacecraft to...
(JTA)-In July 1939, eight months after Kristallnacht and seven weeks before Hitler would invade Poland, Congress killed a bill that would have allowed 20,000 Jewish refugee children into the United States. Opponents of the bill, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, said America should help its own poor people before foreigners, and worried that letting in children could later lead to admitting their parents. "I have nothing against the Jews," said a woman quoted by JTA at the time as Mrs....
(JTA)—U.S. Jews know more about religion in general than their non-Jewish neighbors, a new survey shows. Americans who are not Jewish, meanwhile, don’t know a lot about Judaism. But they like Jews more than any other religious group. And they think there are more Jews in the country than there actually are. The more non-Jews know about Jews, the more they like them. The data comes out of a new survey on what Americans know about religion published Tuesday by the Pew Research Center. The survey asked a group of diverse Americans a set of 32 que...
(JNS)—Williams College has reached a resolution agreement with the U.S. Department of Education in lieu of an investigation over the student government rejecting a new pro-Israel group, Williams Initiative for Israel (WIFI), in an anonymous vote in April. The college administration overrode the student government’s rejection of WIFI the following month. “This Agreement contains no findings of fact, does not constitute an admission of liability on the part of the College, and does not repre...
NEW YORK (JTA)-If you're going to physically block an entrance to an ICE detention center, the handbook says, don't act nice about it. Do chant in Yiddish. Do sing Hebrew prayers. "Defiant, angry, urgent, Jewish," reads the #NeverAgainIsNow Action Toolkit, a six-page Google Doc meant for Jews planning to protest at Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers. "The goal is to actually make it impossible for ICE and/or the Democratic Establishment to do business as usual. Find the...
(JNS)—The U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly on Friday to block U.S. President Donald Trump from militarily striking Iran. The measure was added by a vote of 251-170 to a $733 billion National Defense Authorization Act that would prohibit the Trump administration from utilizing any taxpayer funds for military action “in or against” the regime unless the president gets explicit authorization from Congress, although it would not prevent Trump from retaliating if Iran were to strike on the United States. The Senate rejected such...
BOSTON (JTA)-Two anti-Semitic fliers that deny the Holocaust were posted at a Massachusetts synagogue, with reports of similar incidents at synagogues in two other states. Police are investigating what the Anti-Defamation League described as a coordinated campaign by a national online white supremacist group. The fliers at Temple Emanu-El in Marblehead, a town of nearly 20,000 with a sizable Jewish population on the state's North Shore, were discovered Monday morning by a teacher at its...
WASHINGTON (JTA)-U.S. Attorney General William Barr called anti-Semitism a "cancer" at a Department of Justice summit on the topic notable for its focus on anti-Israel activity and for speeches by the top leaders of the departments of Education, the Treasury and the FBI. Monday's Summit on Combating Anti-Semitism, held at the DOJ headquarters here, featured panel discussions and an audience of about 150, mostly men representing various Jewish organizations and government agencies that deal with...
NEW YORK (JTA)-Bernie Sanders wants you to know that he's not grumpy all of the time. "There are some times I'm not grumpy. Now is not one of those times," he says, a wry smile crossing his face. This might be the most Jewish moment of Sanders' latest interview with NowThis-a progressive social media video site with a following-even though he was asked about what it would mean to be the first Jewish president. The ten-minute interview, titled "Twenty Questions for 2020," was designed to help...
