Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 433 - 457 of 1886
(New York Jewish Week) - A family Torah belonging to a New York City jeweler was reported stolen at the Venetian Resort hotel in Las Vegas last month. Jack Abraham, who has run a jewelry business under his name since 1962 in Manhattan's Diamond District, told the New York Jewish Week that the Torah was taken on Sunday, June 12, during the Luxury JCK trade show at the Venetian Hotel. "I've been going to the expo since its inception for 25 years," Abraham said. "I organize Shabbat services there....
WASHINGTON (JTA) - An array of Jewish groups across the country are kickstarting into action to protest and potentially challenge the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that had enshrined the right to an abortion in the United States. The 6-3 decision released Friday has many Jewish activists buzzing about how to respond to the bombshell ruling that they find a major setback to women's rights and in some cases an infringement on religious Jewish law. The...
(JTA) - Vladimir Zelenko, the doctor from an Orthodox enclave near New York City who rose to fame early in the COVID-19 pandemic for promoting a drug cocktail, has died of cancer at 48. The foundation that Zelenko launched to advance his theories after he left his family medical practice amid controversy in May 2020 announced his death on Thursday, saying that it would accept donations to continue his work, which included opposition to COVID-19 vaccines. Zelenko, who went by Zev, was born in...
(JNS) — More than 80 scholars of Jewish and Israel studies have joined together to form an initiative to combat on-campus anti-Zionism: The Jewish Studies Zionist Network. The organization is the brainchild of Jarrod Tanny, an associate professor of Jewish history at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. The scholars who signed up for the initiative include Israeli political philosopher and author of The Virtue of Nationalism Yoram Hazony of the Herzl Institute, the University of Florida Holocaust historian Norman J.W. Goda and G...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Seattle-area football coach who lost his job after leading prayers on the field following his team’s victories, in a decision that could have ramifications for Jews in public schools and the military. A number of Jewish groups say the 6-3 ruling in Kennedy v. Bremerton, issued Monday, could roll back church-state separations that have protected schoolchildren from religious coercion for decades. “This is a significant change in how we approach prayer in public schools, and one that will h...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Pam Scheininger and J. David Bleich have this much in common: They are Orthodox Jews who are preoccupied with Jewish ethics and teach at New York City law schools. But when Scheininger looks at an American map, she sees 16 states where Orthodox Jewish women would not be able to have an abortion otherwise sanctioned by Jewish law. Bleich sees a different number — zero. Disagreements among Jews over where Jewish and state laws intersect on abortion, once theoretical, have taken on urgency in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Cou...
(JTA) — In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist leader and influential figure among the rightmost flank of the Republican Party, told his followers that “Jews stood in the way” of Catholic Supreme Court Justices who “were put on the court to overturn” the 1973 decision that guaranteed the right to an abortion in the United States. Fuentes, who founded the America First Political Action Committee and the”groyper army,” a radical fringe group, made the comments on his website’s lives...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Maine parents seeking funding to send their children to religious schools, a development that a dissenting Jewish justice, Stephen Breyer, suggested could open the door to broad public funding of parochial schools. Ruling Tuesday in Carson v. Makin, the 6-3 majority favored parents in Maine who objected to a state policy that funded private school education for students who lived in districts without public schools, but explicitly excluded religious schools on church-state grounds. T...
(JTA) — On Tuesday, the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision prohibiting government from excluding religion and religious institutions from government funding programs. This decision in Carson v. Makin follows on the heels of two other high court decisions in the last five years emphasizing that such exclusions constitute religious discrimination prohibited under the First Amendment. But what makes this decision important is its rejection of the so-called “status-use” distinction: government may not discriminate based on the mere relig...
(New York Jewish Week) — Seeking the endorsement of Borough Park Orthodox leaders in his run for Congress, former mayor Bill de Blasio apologized for a 2020 tweet berating Jews for large gatherings held during the pandemic. In a video of Sunday’s meeting, called by an activist of the Bobov Hasidic movement, de Blasio is seen being asked about the tweet. In the tweet, he blasted “the Jewish community” following the packed funeral for a rabbi who died of COVID-19, and said the NYPD had been instructed to “summons or even arrest those who gathe...
(JNS) — There was little time for a period of transition for Julie Platt. But with her experience, there was little need for one. Announced in February as the incoming chair of the Jewish Federations of North America Board of Trustees, Platt was unanimously confirmed for the role. Only the second woman to lead the organization, Platt is a former banker who has focused on promoting Jewish education and helping to rescue the Jewish camp movement during the pandemic. Platt served as JFNA’s national campaign chair and chair of LiveSecure, the org...
(New York Jewish Week) - At the Brooklyn Amity School, a majority-Muslim private school in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, high school students are taking part in a new Holocaust education initiative with an unlikely ambassador: NBA center and free agent Enes Kanter Freedom. Kanter Freedom, who is Muslim, grew up in Turkey and played for five different NBA teams between 2011 and 2022. Over the last couple of years, he has become outspoken about human rights violations in Turkey and other parts of the...
(JNS) — Yeshiva University in New York is the latest academic institution to acquire the unabridged version of the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, a collection of audiovisual interviews comprising 54,000 eyewitness testimonies of witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust, as well as genocides in Nanjing, Rwanda, Armenia, Guatemala and Cambodia. The archive was established by film director Steven Spielberg in 1994 to videotape and preserve interviews with survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust. It allows users to learn about the...
(JTA) – David Brog has overseen pro-Israel organizations with significant Republican backing for more than two decades, but his own attempt to make inroads for himself as a GOP candidate fell short Tuesday in Nevada. Brog lost his Republican Congressional primary race in the state’s 1st district to former Army colonel Mark Robertson, in a spirited eight-way race to represent the GOP in what’s likely to be a competitive general election for the recently redrawn Las Vegas-area district. Brog finished with just over 17 percent of the vote, a dis...
LOS ANGELES (JTA) - When Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff sat down for a Zoom conversation with Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter on Wednesday, he opened by saying, "I feel like I already know you!" Though the two had never met, Emhoff did, to an extent, know Gutter. Just moments before the video call, Emhoff had engaged with Gutter's interactive biography, asking him questions about his experience in concentration camps and even listening to Gutter sing "Shir Hama'alot," the song that begins...
(JTA) - A Jewish arts group. A Jewish high school. A Jewish newspaper. A synagogue network. A major Jewish philanthropy that directs funds to mental health, homelessness prevention and refugee resettlement initiatives. These are a few of the locations on a dense interactive map of "Zionist leaders and powerhouse NGOs" in Massachusetts created by an activist group that says it aims to expose "local institutional support for the colonization of Palestine" and reveal how support for Zionist causes...
(JTA) — Massachusetts’ two Democratic Senators have joined at least four Democrats in Congress, including one vocal critic of Israel, in speaking out against a Boston pro-Palestinian activist group’s initiative mapping “local institutional support for the colonization of Palestine,” saying the map, which includes the names, addresses and staff members of many Jewish organizations, could incite violence against the Jewish community (See page 1 article). “At this moment of rising antisemitism, racist attacks, and political violence, this ‘mapping...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — A bipartisan slate of lawmakers launched a bill that would establish an “integrated air and missile defense capability” joining the United States, Israel and Arab countries in a bid to deter Iran. Senate and House members of the Abraham Accords Caucus rolled out the bill, called the DEFEND Act, in a press conference Thursday outside the Capitol and described it as means of advancing the U.S.-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and four Arab countries that collectively bear that name. “The full potential of the...
(JTA) — In the summer of 2020, Gabe Kapler, then in his first season as manager of the San Francisco Giants, joined figures across sports in taking a knee during the national anthem to protest police brutality. Now, two years later, Kapler has announced that he will not take the field at all for the anthem out of broad dismay over the United States’ direction, spurred by the mass murder of 19 children at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. “When I was the same age as the children in Uvalde, my father taught me to stand for the pledge of al...
(JTA) - A new super PAC led by "Black and Jewish" leaders has endorsed five Black Democrats who have positions that are friendly to AIPAC, the latest sign that pro-Israel donors are determined to stem erosion of support for Israel among African Americans. In its May 27 launch statement, first reported by Politico, the Urban Empowerment Action PAC does not mention Israel, instead saying that it "will support pragmatic, solutions-oriented congressional candidates dedicated to the educational...
(JTA) — More than half of bankruptcies in the United States are connected to medical debt. For some families in the Chicago area, however, that debt is being erased in accordance with the Jewish law of shmita, the sabbatical year. The Torah’s shmita laws prescribe that, every seven years, all agricultural activity in the Land of Israel is forbidden, and the land must be left fallow. There are many specific rules, including prohibition against plowing, pruning and planting. But a lesser-known custom in observance of the shmita year is the rel...
(JTA) — The Minnesota Republican Party apologized for screening a video that depicted liberal Jewish billionaire George Soros as a puppet master controlling two Jewish Democrats, saying that those responsible were not aware that the imagery had antisemitic connotations. “We understand that the use of imagery depicting Mr. Soros as a puppet-master at our state convention raised concerns that the imagery perpetuated an antisemitic trope,” state GOP chairman David Hann said Thursday in a statement, noting that the Jewish Community Relations Counc...
(JTA) – An unusual scenario played out in Arizona recently: The son of a Jewish woman who fled the Nazis was asked if he wanted to be executed by the same gas the Nazis once used. Frank Atwood, who was convicted of murdering an 8-year-old girl in 1984, has been on death row for decades. For his method of execution he was given the choice between lethal injection, Arizona’s default method, or a gas chamber — which the state had refurbished last year in preparation for possibly killing Atwood and one other death row inmate. Arizona’s intent...
(JNS) - American Jewish organizations are divided in their reception of the new White House press secretary who has a history of taking anti-Israel positions. U.S. President Joe Biden nominated Karine Jean-Pierre, a Haitian American who currently serves as principal deputy press secretary, to be the first Black and LGBTQ person to hold the position. Jean-Pierre is slated to take over for outgoing White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Friday, though some Jewish organizations are pushing back...
WASHINGTON (JTA) - Antisemitism is often not taken seriously until it becomes deadly, said Deborah Lipstadt, the Holocaust scholar whose nomination to be the State Department's antisemitism monitor was delayed as she tangled with Republican senators who were peeved at her criticisms of their side of the aisle. Lipstadt chose the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum for her first talk Thursday since her Senate confirmation in March after contentious hearings. She made good on her pledges to skeptical...
