Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(New York Jewish Week) – On Tuesday, a group of Jewish men gathered to pray under a leaky white tent in the drizzling rain outside the Chabad-Lubavitch movement's world headquarters in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, draping their wet jackets over portable bookshelves and talking about what had happened there the previous afternoon. As for the building itself, it was closed off. Outside the entrance to the complex's main synagogue, a line formed in the rain, with Chabadniks waiting patiently to r...
(JTA) — With the arrival of the Iowa Caucus on Monday, the 2024 presidential primary season is officially underway — and so is the race to win the votes of Jewish and pro-Israel voters. Four Republicans are vying to be the candidate to face off against President Joe Biden. Former President Donald Trump maintains a considerable lead in the polls, while challengers Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis remain firmly in the race. Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson is still in the mix but is polling below 1 percent. The Iowa Caucus has kicked off the Rep...
(JTA) — After Oct. 7, Michael Kahana joined hundreds of his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania in signing an open letter condemning Hamas and expressing support for Israel and its right to self defense. But the psychology professor wanted to do more. So Kahana sent an email to the 340 signatories on the letter, which came amid scathing criticism of Penn’s response to Hamas’ attack on Israel, and invited them on a trip. This week, the 39 Penn professors who took Kahana up on the invitation spent three days traveling in Israel, in th...
Recently, the Heritage brought to its readers’ attention the suspension of Dr. Darren Klugman, a pediatric cardiologist and associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, for sharing his emotional anti-Hamas, pro-Israel comments on social media (see Dec. 29, 2023 issue, “The double standard of free speech may cost one doctor his career”). Since then, the Zionist Organization of America has called on Johns Hopkins University to terminate its investigation into Dr. Klugman and reverse the unjust and unwarranted decision to suspend him. “Dr....
(JTA) — On March 29, 2011, the body of a decapitated woman was discovered in a vineyard in Arvin, a town just over the Los Angeles county line. Earlier this month, nearly 13 years later, the victim was identified as Ada Beth Kaplan, a Jewish woman who was 64 at the time of her death. The tortuous journey to cracking the mystery of Kaplan’s name involved a “long and hard” multiyear effort by a DNA-focused nonprofit, eight generations of family records and the work of two Jewish genealogists who understood just how thorny it can be, sometim...
(New York Jewish Week) — Commuters faced major delays Monday morning as several pro-Palestinian protests shut down traffic on the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges on the East River as well as the Holland Tunnel under the Hudson River linking New Jersey to Manhattan. Organizers said that the goal of the coordinated protests was to escalate disruption and send a message to the city about Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza. “Particularly with blocking main arteries of transit, the idea is to confront New Yorkers — just for a brief h...
(JTA) – A federal judge in Iowa has blocked much of a state law forbidding school libraries from stocking books depicting “sex acts,” in part because he said it was keeping a classic Holocaust memoir off shelves. U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Locher granted a preliminary injunction against the law, Iowa Senate File 496, on Friday, just before a Jan. 1 deadline for schools to begin enforcing it. The “staggeringly broad” law, he wrote in his opinion, would prevent public schools from stocking “non-fiction history books about the Holocaust....
(JTA) – Harvard University President Claudine Gay has resigned in the wake of plagiarism allegations and months-long criticism of her response to allegations of antisemitism at the school. Gay is the second Ivy League university president to step down following congressional testimony on campus antisemitism last month that drew intense criticism. University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill resigned her post on Dec. 9. Gay had also faced criticism over the school's initial statement on Hamas'...
(JTA) — Dean Phillips is running for president. And he wants to talk. Talking runs in the Jewish Minnesota congressman’s family — his grandmother is Dear Abby. And he’s friends with Ilhan Omar, despite their polar opposite views on a range of issues, including Israel, because they like to talk things through. Now, Phillips, 54, is hoping that penchant for dialogue will fuel his latest endeavor — a long-shot bid to defeat Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primary. “The greatest ch...
(JTA) – Earlier this month, a lawyer acting on information from a pro-Israel group of North Carolinians told the federal government that their state’s flagship public university should be investigated for allowing anti-Israel rhetoric on campus. Now the government has acted on it. The U.S. Department of Education announced today that it has opened a new Title VI investigation into the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, along with two others into George Mason University and Newark Public Schools, related to complaints of mis...
(JNS) — The members of Doctors Against Genocide, which calls itself “a global health coalition committed to stopping genocide” and has some 3,100 combined followers on Instagram and X, may have taken their Hippocratic Oaths. But the group first did a good deal of harm. First, the group announced a Dec. 28 gathering at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum at 11 a.m., followed by a 3 p.m. gathering outside the White House. “Urgent call to action,” it announced. “Stop the genocide in Gaza.” The announcement urged attendees to get free tickets to the...
(JNS) — New York Republicans selected Mazi Melesa Pilip, an Ethiopian-born, Orthodox Jew and Israel Defense Forces veteran, on Thursday to run for New York’s 3rd Congressional District. A current Nassau County legislator, Pilip is running for the seat that Republican Rep. George Santos held before being expelled from the U.S. House of Representatives, on Dec. 1, following federal criminal indictments for fraud. It was also revealed that Santos had fabricated his backstory, including his supposed Jewish heritage. Santos’s inventions stand in dr...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The U.S. House of Representatives called on the presidents of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to resign after they declined to say clearly in a congressional hearing that their schools would take action against those calling for the genocide of Jews. The vote Wednesday night was 303-126, with three voting “present.” All but one of the votes against the resolution were by Democrats, including seven of the caucus’ 24 Jewish Democrats. The three voting “present” were likewise Democrats,...
(JTA) — The Lincoln Memorial closed temporarily on Wednesday after its steps were vandalized with graffiti reading “Free Gaza” in multiple places. U.S. Park Police are investigating the graffiti, which was discovered Wednesday morning at the Washington, D.C. monument, according to ABC News. Crews were dispatched to clean up the vandalism. The steps of the memorial were splattered with red paint and pro-Palestinian messages, which the National Park Service said could take some time to complete. “National Park Service conservators have begun t...
There is a petition circulating, initiated by Defenders of Free Speech, to stand with Dr. Darren Klugman, who is a doctor and professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. On Oct. 7, Dr. Klugman spoke out about the atrocities committed by Hamas that day. As a result of speaking out on social media, he has been suspended by Hopkins with possible termination, and the American Board of Pediatrics has begun the process of revoking his board certifications. His family has received death threats, requiring round-the-clock security. Why...
(JNS) - David Wolpe, rabbi emeritus of Sinai Temple, a conservative synagogue in Los Angeles, joined Harvard University's Antisemitism Advisory Group in the hopes that he could persuade the school to make some serious changes. "I wanted immediate, visible action," he told JNS. "In fact, what I saw was that the anti-Jewish agitation on campus was getting worse, not better." Earlier this month, the Anti-Defamation League's inaugural rabbinic fellow, named by Newsweek as the most influential rabbi...
(JTA) — In Oakland, California, an 11-foot-tall Chanukah menorah was broken and thrown into a lake. In New Haven, Connecticut, a Palestinian flag was planted in a publicly displayed menorah. In Juno Beach, Florida, a menorah made of sand was destroyed. As Jewish communities around the United States celebrated Chanukah over the past week, numerous stories of vandalism and destruction circulated online as public menorahs — many of them sponsored by local outposts of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement — were targeted. Some of the incidents are being...
(JTA) – The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Davis, both of which have recently experienced widely publicized episodes of conflict around Israel, are among six new institutions facing U.S. Department of Education investigations. The department has indicated it is taking a newly aggressive approach to addressing it and Islamophobia on campus since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war and is announcing new investigations at a rapid clip, dramatically increasing the pace of civil rights inquiries that it o...
(JTA) — A 3-0 score is extremely rare in the NFL. But when the Minnesota Vikings beat the Las Vegas Raiders Sunday night in the league’s lowest-scoring game since 2007, the moment held extra significance for the player who scored those three points. Vikings kicker Greg Joseph, one of only a handful of Jewish players in the NFL, had worn cleats before the game that showed support for Israel as part of the league’s “My Cause, My Cleats” program. His shoes displayed Stars of David and the phrases “I Stand with Israel” and “Am Yisrael Chai,...
(JNS) — The Jewish Federation of North America announced recently that its post-Oct. 7 fundraising has surpassed $700 million. The $242 million that it has allocated—of the $711.5 million raised—is going to about 300 partnering organizations, including Jewish Agency for Israel, United Hatzalah, Magen David Adom, ZAKA and Chabad, the Federations stated. Its areas of focus include food security, support for Bedouin Israelis and people with disabilities and rabbinic services and pastoral guidance. Eric Fingerhut, president and CEO of the Federatio...
(JTA) — Rabbi David Wolpe is stepping down from the antisemitism advisory committee at Harvard University, citing “events on campus and the painfully inadequate testimony” of the university’s president, Claudine Gay, during a congressional hearing this week on campus antisemitism. “Without rehashing all of the obvious reasons that have been endlessly adumbrated online, and with great respect for the members of the committee, the short explanation is that both events on campus and the painfully inadequate testimony reinforced the idea that I ca...
(JTA) – Harvard University’s board of directors will keep Claudine Gay as the school’s president despite pressure to force her out after she declined to say outright that calls for the genocide of Jews violated campus rules. The Harvard Corporation, the school’s board, met behind closed doors for hours Monday night before formally announcing it would “reaffirm our support for President Gay.” The board said its decision was unanimous, and the statement was signed by all 11 members, including its senior fellow and former Commerce Secretary P...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The U.S. House of Representatives approved a nonbinding resolution saying that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, with support from all but one Republican and a substantial minority of Democrats. The resolution was introduced by the two Jewish Republicans in the House, Max Miller of Ohio and David Kustoff of Tennessee. It was notable for the number of Jewish Democrats who voted “present,” effectively abstaining, in part because they did not agree with the resolution’s contention that all forms of anti-Zionism were antisem...
WASHINGTON (JTA) - Wearing black T-shirts bearing the photos of their captive loved ones, families of American hostages held by Hamas met face-to-face with President Joe Biden for the first time, part of a high profile U.S. tour by the group to keep the hostages' plight at the front and center of public discussions about the Israel-Hamas war. "We are grateful to President Biden for his steadfast commitment to bringing our family members home and the compassion he demonstrated today," said a...
(JNS) — The U.S. Senate passed H.R. 2670, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024 which outlines how Pentagon’s budget for next year, by a vote of 87 to 13 on Wednesday evening. Six Democrats and six Republicans—including Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Mike Lee (R-Utah) and J.D. Vance (R-Ohio)—voted against the bill, as did Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). “It’s nothing to celebrate,” Hawley wrote of the bill. “Defense contractors get paid billions, while Missourians poisoned by their government get nothing. It...
