Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 406 - 430 of 1920
By Jacob Henry (New York Jewish Week) — A worker at a beloved Brooklyn kosher bakery known for its black-and-white cookies was found dead inside a walk-in freezer there early Thursday morning, police said. The death of Mahamadou Dansago, 33, at Beigel’s on Avenue D appears to have been an accident. An immigrant father of five from Mali, Dansago got caught in rotating blades of the machine while working in the freezer and appeared to have been locked inside for some five hours, the New York Daily News reported. “Upon arrival, officers obser...
(JTA) — Jewish groups thought Elon Musk was listening to them about antisemitism on Twitter. Then Kanye West came back. In the week after the rapper who now goes by Ye lost most of his endorsements due to his antisemitic rants, and amid an apparent uptick in broader antisemitic content on the platform, the Anti-Defamation League met with Musk, the social media giant’s mercurial new owner, about keeping hate speech off the site. Three days later, all goodwill from the meeting has devolved, as anti-Jewish content on Twitter is experiencing a “pr...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The daughter of a Holocaust survivor, a gay man in a conservative-leaning area, and a Black woman from California — all are among the nearly two-dozen Jews who are hoping to enter Congress next year. Among the 46 Jewish nominees for the U.S. House of Representatives are 22 incumbents — 21 Democrats and a single Republican. (Five Jewish incumbents retired or lost a primary this cycle.) The remaining 24 are challengers or running in open seats. Using a number of nonpartisan sources, including the Cook Political Report and 2...
A lot of people, including Jaguars’ owner Shad Kahn, New England Patriots’ owner Robert Kraft, Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry, the University of Florida and the University of Georgia spoke out clearly against the antisemitic message posted during the Gators/Bulldogs game last weekend. The message “Kanye was right about the jews [sic]” flashed on the outside of one of the end zones at TIAA Bank Field stadium. The Universities of Florida and Georgia issued a joint statement condemning the hate speech at the stadium as well as in other areas a...
(JTA) — A feud between two Jewish bagel shop owners in Columbus, Ohio, has spilled out of the oven and into full public view, resulting in a lawsuit and restraining order. The Columbus Jewish News reports that the owner of Block’s Bagels, a local Jewish deli mainstay since 1967, last week sued former business partner Jeremy Fox, owner of the Fox’s Bagels & Deli chain, after the latter moved to rebrand two shops the parties had been operating jointly. In court earlier this week, the judge in the case ordered two Fox’s locations to continu...
(JNS) - Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently hosted events with Palestinian activist Mohammed El-Kurd, who has made a series of anti-semitic comments. El-Kurd, who appeared at MIT on Oct. 22 and Harvard on Oct. 24, has described Zionism as a "death cult," "murderous", "genocidal," and "sadistic," according to research compiled by the CAMERA media watchdog. He has also said that Israelis have "an unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood." More than 60 MIT...
(JTA) - As images of the banner held above Interstate 405 in Los Angeles claiming "Kanye is right about the Jews" ricocheted around the internet this weekend, Jessica Seinfeld decided to take a stand A cookbook author and wife of comedian Jerry Seinfeld, Seinfeld posted a simple piece of text on a black background that reads "I support my friends and the Jewish people" and encouraged her 580,000 followers to share the post. Seinfeld, who is Jewish, was weighing in two weeks after West, the...
(JNS) — In response to its student paper’s editorial board endorsing the controversial Boston “Mapping Project” of Jewish sites around Massachusetts, Wellesely College condemned the project for promoting antisemitism. “While it is not my practice to comment on the newspaper’s editorials, I do feel the need to make it clear that Wellesley College rejects the Mapping Project for promoting antisemitism,” Wellesley College President Paula A. Johnson wrote in a letter to the community. Johnson said she is concerned that the project “poses a sign...
(JNS) — Rapper Kanye West’s anti-Semitic social media posts and interviews continued to be condemned on Wednesday. In a statement, the co-chairs of the Bipartisan Congressional Caucus on Black-Jewish Relations called his comments dangerous. “This kind of inflammatory rhetoric and perpetuation of stereotypes fuels violence amid a rise in anti-Semitism and racism throughout our country,” wrote Rep. Brenda Lawrence (D-Mich.), who is African-American, and Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) and Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), who are both Jewish. “Words h...
(JTA) - Three weeks after a prominent pro-Israel activist accused the University of California, Berkeley of creating "Jew-free zones," two trucks rolled into town to address the controversy. One of them displayed a massive picture of Adolf Hitler. "All in favor of banning Jews, raise your right hand," read the billboard on the side of the truck. The truck had been dispatched by a political advocacy group called Accuracy in Media, which has a history of finding ways to provoke liberals and progre...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Donald Trump, the former U.S. president, has once again said he is baffled by the lack of appreciation he feels coming from American Jews. “No president has done more for Israel than I have,” he said on Truth Social, the social media platform he owns. “Somewhat surprisingly, however, our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the U.S.” He added, “U.S. Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel — before it is too lat...
(JTA) — The U.S. Air Force Academy has pledged to “correct” its processes to ensure that it does not schedule key events on major faith holidays after a mandatory training exercise took place on Yom Kippur. “The U.S. Air Force Academy recognizes the importance of the holy days of all faiths. A training event was unintentionally scheduled this week during the Jewish observance of Yom Kippur,” Lt. Col. Brian Maguire, the director of public affairs, said in a statement his office emailed Thursday to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “The Academy’s A...
(JTA) — An official investigation by Stanford University released Wednesday confirmed longstanding suspicions that university administrators acted to limit Jewish enrollment in the 1950s while publicly denying that they were doing so. In tandem with the release of the report, Stanford’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, apologized to the Jewish community on behalf of the university. “This ugly component of Stanford’s history, confirmed by this new report, is saddening and deeply troubling,” Tessier-Lavigne wrote. “As a university, we must acknow...
(JTA) — It started with a shirt and ended in a conflagration over antisemitism and Republican politics. Such is the extended news cycle over multiple antisemitic comments during the last week by Kanye West, the artist and provocateur who prefers to go by Ye. On Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, Instagram and Twitter, West made a string of comments reflecting a range of antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories. The spree culminated with West’s vow to “go death con 3 ON JEWISH PEOPLE.” DEFCON is an acronym that refers to the state of alert of Ame...
(JNS) — Pro-Israel organizations in the U.S. are privately voicing their concerns that two Democratic members of Congress may have meddled in Israeli politics by recently calling on opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu to exclude a controversial, right-wing politician in his coalition should he win next month’s election. With just weeks to go until elections both in the U.S. and Israel, the private warning by Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), followed by a public tweet with largely the same message by Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), departed from the c...
(JNS) — Wellesley College’s student newspaper endorsed the controversial Boston “Mapping Project” last week in an article penned by the editorial board, claiming the project provides a “vital service.” The project, published this past summer by BDS supporters, links a range of Massachusetts-based Jewish groups, synagogues, schools, police departments, media and other institutions that the anti-Israel activists claim participate in harmful activities and should be dismantled. The project’s website hosts a map with the locations of their targets...
(JNS) — Between 2017 and 2022, 92.82 percent of the articles in leading U.S. college newspapers that strayed from journalistic objectivity were anti-Israel, according to a report from Alums for Campus Fairness. ACF surveyed 75 leading college and university newspapers. Of all the articles about Israel exhibiting a bias, 181 were biased against Israel and 14 portrayed it positively. Coverage spiked during periods of tension between Israel and Hamas, including in November 2018, May 2019, November 2019 and May 2021. There is an intense fixation o...
(JTA) – It seemed like a headline out of the 19th century: a warning of “Jew-free zones” at the University of California-Berkeley. That’s the phrase being employed by some prominent pro-Israel groups this week to describe a dispute at UC Berkeley’s law school, where nine student groups recently voted to adopt by-laws that state they will not invite any visiting speakers to campus who “hold views in support of Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine.” But is the “Jew-free” label accurate? Not according to Jewi...
(JTA) — October is a busy month for U.S. sports fans. The MLB playoffs get underway, the NBA season begins, the NFL season kicks into high gear and both the women’s and men’s pro soccer leagues start their postseasons, too. Sometimes another milestone gets hidden under the headlines of it all: the start of the NHL season. The first puck drops on Friday, ironically in Prague, in a match between the Nashville Predators and the San Jose Sharks. (The first stateside games start on Tuesday night.) Another phenomenon that hasn’t been widely covered...
(JTA) – Three Jewish women have sued to protest Kentucky’s restrictive abortion laws on religious freedom grounds, arguing that they violate Jewish teachings as to when life begins and place undue burdens on their ability to use in vitro fertilization to achieve pregnancy. The suit is at least the third religious freedom lawsuit to be filed by Jews against a state abortion restriction since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade this summer. It follows a synagogue’s challenge to Florida’s laws and a Jewish pro-choice group’s lawsuit i...
(JNS) — The City University of New York has reversed course after it assigned a former employee of a vehemently anti-Israel NGO to investigate allegations of anti-Zionist discrimination. The probe came at the request of Prof. Jeffrey Lax, chair of the business department at CUNY’s Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn. He alleged pervasive discrimination and harassment against Zionists and Jews on campus, as well as retaliation and a hostile work environment created by Kingsborough President Claudia Schrader. Lax’s complaint came as Kings...
(JTA) — The holiest day of the Jewish calendar couldn’t come at a worse time for Michigan public schools this year. Yom Kippur falls on Oct. 5 — which is also the state’s “student count day,” the one day a year when the number of students who attend school determines how much that district will receive in state funds the following year. By Michigan law, count day is on the first Wednesday of October, and superintendents typically go to great lengths to entice students to attend. Districts have coaxed students to attend on the days using raffles...
By Ron Kampeas WASHINGTON (JTA) — Democrats on the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee voted to name as chairman of its influential Middle East subcommittee Rep. David Cicilline, a Jewish Rhode Islander who is a member of the party’s Progressive Caucus. Cicilline bested Brad Schneider, a moderate Jewish Illinois Democrat, in an 18-6 vote. Cicilline and Schneider are both close to the mainstream pro-Israel community and are both endorsed by the American Israel Public Aff...
(JTA) – Progressive Jewish leaders have launched a new think tank meant to counter what its founders see as an effort by a few billionaires to flood the Jewish world with conservative ideas. Emor, the Institute for Bold Jewish Thought, is a project of T'ruah, an advocacy organization of rabbis dedicated to promoting human rights and social justice. In Hebrew, "emor" is a directive meaning "speak." The think tank will fund research, host events with scholars, and publish essays that draw on J...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The lawmakers thanked the representatives from the social networks giants for attending the Capitol Hill hearing on antisemitism — after all, it was not an official congressional hearing and no one was obliged to turn up. But then, after some tense exchanges last Friday, things got acrimonious quickly: Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Jewish Florida Democrat who convened the hearing, said that the tech reps’ stonewalling on whether and how antisemitism would be treated will lead to congressional action. “We’re all start...
