Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 313 - 337 of 1890
(New York Jewish Week) — American Eagle Outfitters now has a mezuzah on the front door of its flagship Times Square location, courtesy of Chabad, the Hasidic outreach movement. The parchment with Jewish holy text in an oblong metallic case, traditionally a marker of a Jewish home or establishment, was affixed on the apparel brand’s door as part of the recently concluded convention of CTeen, Chabad’s youth group. At a concert in Times Square on Saturday night, thousands of teens from more than 30 countries gathered to sing Jewish songs — and...
(JTA) — A “National Day of Hate” against Jews planned by white supremacists that triggered sweeping warnings from law enforcement and Jewish security officials came and went without significant incident on Saturday. Synagogues and Jewish institutions across the United States had spent the preceding days shoring up their security procedures, reassuring their congregants and requesting extra patrols from local police. Reports from synagogues suggested that the pews were crowded on Shabbat with Jews who said they would not be deterred by hate. In...
(JNS) — Accusations of Islamophobia came almost immediately after the U.S. House of Representatives voted earlier this month to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from its Foreign Affairs Committee. The vote followed repeated promises from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to remove the congresswoman due to her history of antisemitic and anti-Israel remarks. Omar took to CNN’s State of the Union show, saying “it is politically motivated, and in some cases, motivated by the fact that many of these members don’t believe a Muslim refugee...
(Washington, D.C.) — The Israeli-American Coalition for Action, the legislative and policymaking sister organization of the Israeli-American Council, today applauded the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear a challenge to an Arkansas law against boycotting Israel. The high court declined to hear a challenge by the Arkansas Times weekly newspaper and the ACLU, based on the newspaper’s refusal to comply with a state university advertising contract because it required a pledge not to join the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel. A...
(JTA) - Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who became a pro-Israel favorite during her two years as the Trump administration's ambassador to the United Nations, announced her bid for the presidency, becoming the first Republican to challenge the former president ahead of 2024. In a video released Tuesday, Haley did not name Donald Trump, but alluded to him as a polarizing figure, emphasizing her efforts as governor at tamping down racial tensions and also suggesting that the Republi...
WASHINGTON (JTA) - Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Jewish Democrat from California who has been in office for more than three decades, will not run in 2024. "I am announcing today I will not run for reelection in 2024, but intend to accomplish as much for California as I can through the end of next year when my term ends," she said Tuesday in a statement. Feinstein, 89, has been in the Senate since 1992 and has been closely watched in recent years because of concerns about her health and declining...
(JTA) — Florida Republican Anna Paulina Luna beat a Jewish Democrat to represent her district in Congress last fall, but she had Jewish ancestry, too — or so she claimed at the time. The freshman representative told Jewish Insider during her campaign that she was “a small fraction Ashkenazi,” in addition to having been “raised as a Messianic Jew by my father.” While mainstream Judaism does not consider Messianic Jews, who believe in the divinity of Jesus, to be Jewish, Luna’s additional claim of...
(JNS) - One interpretation of a mishnah in Chapters of the Fathers is that Jews must prepare answers with which to respond to those who hate Torah scholars. Hating those who cherish the Torah is one sense many readers may get from recent reporting in The New York Times on Orthodox schools. A new, 6-and-a-half-minute Fox News documentary - which Kassy Dillon, a former JNS news editor, reported - turns the camera on Orthodox leaders and scholars. "We resent that the Times are engaged in what...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — One Jewish Democrat wants to replace a fellow Jewish Democrat as California senator. Rep. Adam Schiff, who rose to prominence during Donald Trump’s presidency as one of the top critics of the former president, announced a Senate run on Thursday. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who is 89 and was first elected to the seat in 1992, has yet to announce she is retiring, but insiders say it is increasingly difficult for her to handle the job. Schiff, a solid pro-Israel Democrat who gets consistent backing from mainstream pro-Israel pol...
(JTA) – A university in Oregon that fired a Jewish professor after he reported several incidents, including purported antisemitic remarks made by its president, has settled with the professor. Linfield University, a private school in McMinnville, will pay $1 million to English professor Daniel Pollack-Pelzner for his wrongful termination in 2021. Pollack-Pelzner had accused the school’s president, Miles K. Davis, of making antisemitic remarks in front of him, including jokes about gas chambers and comments on the size of Jewish noses. He was...
(JTA) — Jews made up nearly half of America’s biggest philanthropic donors last year, according to a calculation by Forbes of who gave the most money away in 2022. In a year that saw their fortunes take a hit amid declines in the stock market, America’s 25 “most generous givers” donated a collective $27 billion, up from $20 billion in 2021, for a lifetime total of $196 billion, according to Forbes. They included 12 billionaires with Jewish backgrounds — a dramatic overrepresentation when compared to the proportion of Jews in the overall U.S...
(JTA) — Within two weeks, a series of Bay Area billboards equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism were targeted by activists. In the first incident, an unknown group of culprits wrote “Free Palestine” on them, leading the billboards’ sponsor to replace them and call the graffiti “a hate crime.” The second time they were targeted, a group of Jews took the credit. On Tuesday night, a group of self-proclaimed “anti-Zionist Jews” papered over three billboards paid for by the New Jersey-based group JewBelong. It was a further escalation in a nationa...
(JTA) — A New Jersey synagogue is crediting recent safety improvements after a Molotov cocktail thrown at its door overnight caused little damage. Still, Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield canceled activities on Sunday as the police investigated, marking the second time in recent months that the suburban congregation suspended activities because of an antisemitic incident. Last November, the Reform synagogue of about 500 families near New York City briefly closed its doors while the FBI investigated a “credible threat” against New Jersey synag...
(JNS) — The House of Representatives voted today to oust Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from its Foreign Affairs Committee. The decision followed repeated promises from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to remove her over a history of antisemitic remarks. All but one Republican–218–voted to strip Omar of the assignment, while 211 Democrats backed her. Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio) voted present. Omar has accused Israel of having “hypnotized the world” and Jews of buying control of Congress. She called Israel an “apartheid state” and likened it to...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Republican Party unanimously condemned as antisemitic Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, saying their beliefs have no place in “any political discourse.” The resolution opposes “all forms of antisemitism, antisemitic statements and any antisemitic elements that seek to infiltrate the Republican Party.” It names West, the rapper and designer now known as Ye, saying he “has repeatedly made statements that are antisemitic, shameful, wrong, offensive, bigoted, and contrary to American and Republican principles.” It also names Fuent...
(JTA) — Second gentleman Doug Emhoff extended his focus on Holocaust remembrance by inviting a Washington, D.C.-area survivor to be his guest at President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech Tuesday evening. Ruth Cohen, who survived multiple concentration camps including Auschwitz, joined Emhoff at the annual policy address in Washington. Emhoff first met Cohen last year before International Holocaust Remembrance Day with his wife, Vice President Kamala Harris, according to a press release from the White House. This year, Emhoff spent Int...
WASHINGTON — On Thursday, the CUFI Action Fund released the following statement welcoming the House of Representative’s vote to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) from the House Foreign Affairs Committee: “Antisemitism has no place anywhere in America, including and especially in Congress. The CUFI Action Fund welcomes today’s vote to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) from the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “Rep. Omar has a track-record of trafficking in antisemitic tropes and making bigoted claims concerning pro-Israel activists. Moreover, her posit...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The resolution is called “Recognizing Israel as America’s Legitimate and Democratic Ally and Condemning Antisemitism,” and its cosponsors are a who’s-who of the pro-Israel Democrats, including leading Jewish lawmakers. Also on the sponsor list: Rep. Ilhan Omar, who has been one of Israel’s harshest critics in Congress and who Republicans on Thursday kicked off the Foreign Affairs Committee for past comments that Jewish groups have said were antisemitic. In a press release sent out just an hour ahead of a successful...
(JTA) — The Brooklyn Nets traded Kyrie Irving to the Dallas Mavericks, a team whose Jewish owner had spoken up about the star guard’s antisemitism controversy last year. Mark Cuban, known as one of the NBA’s most outspoken team owners and as a star of the hit TV show “Shark Tank,” did not comment on the trade that was the talk of the league on Sunday. But in the fall, after Irving promoted an antisemitic film on his Twitter account and at first refused to apologize for the tweet, Cuban said the eight-time All-Star was “not educated about the i...
(JNS) — On Feb. 2, John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, shared a joke on his magazine’s podcast riffing on Hunter Biden’s laptop—what Miranda Devine has called the “Laptop from Hell.” So, have you heard the one about the Jew who returns 40 years later to pick up a pair of shoes from the cobbler? “The shoe store owner says, ‘Was they wing tips?’ ‘Yes. They were wing tips.’ ‘Were they black with a brown trim?’ ‘Yeah. You have them?’” Podhoretz said, exaggerating the cobbler’s accent. “‘They’ll be ready Tuesday.’” Clearly, the original owner...
(JNS) — In 2021, a University of Michigan music professor showed a 1965 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Othello,” which featured a white actor in blackface, in class. The professor apologized and stepped down, yet a dean at the university stated that the experience “was hurtful and upsetting to the students in the class,” and the professor’s actions “do not align with our school’s commitment to anti-racist action, diversity, equity and inclusion.” When someone distributed racist fliers on the school’s Ann Arbor campus five years prior, the...
(JNS) — The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Friday to hear a case involving religious accommodations in the workplace. An appeal in the case of Groff v. Dejoy was filed by Gerald Groff, an Evangelical postal worker who refused to work on Sundays, his sabbath, going so far as to offer to work make-up shifts and to transfer branches in order to maintain his day of rest. The Pennsylvania man says he was forced from his job in 2019 after the burden was placed on him by the U.S. Postal Service to regularly find replacements following the service’s agr...
(JNS) — George Washington University responded to the new antisemitism-related complaint against the university, which the Israel education organization StandWithUs filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. “The George Washington University strongly condemns antisemitism and hatred, discrimination and bias in all forms,” the university’s official Instagram account stated. The university further said it was “committed to fostering a welcoming and inclusive environment where all feel safe and free of harassment,...
(JNS) - In a speech on border security and enforcement Thursday, President Joe Biden compared asylum seekers at America's southern border to Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. The remark came in response to a question about whether Biden viewed migration as a human right. "Well I think it is a human right if your family is being persecuted," Biden said. "I thought it was a human right for, you know, Jews in Germany to be able to go [...] escape and get help where they could." Vice President Kamala...
WASHINGTON (JTA) –Republican Party officials in Rep. George Santos’ Long Island district called on the serial fabricator to quit, citing among other lies his claims to Jewish and Holocaust heritage. The call Wednesday by officials of the Nassau County Republican party was significant because the Republican majority in the U.S. House of representatives is precarious — just five members — and the Republican Santos’ 3rd District could easily swing back to Democrats in a special election. “Today, on behalf of the Nassau County Republican Committee,...
