Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JTA) — Whoopi Goldberg apologized for upsetting people by starting a debate on Monday over whether the Holocaust was “about race,” writing that she is “sorry for the hurt I have caused.” But in an appearance that aired that same night on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” she elaborated on some of her views on the Holocaust. On “The View,” a show that Goldberg co-hosts, she said “the Holocaust isn’t about race,” but rather about “man’s inhumanity to man.” As she explained in an apology that she tweeted that evening, and on Colbert’s sho...
(JTA) - A Tennessee school board voted unanimously to remove "Maus," Art Spiegelman's graphic memoir about his father's Holocaust experience, from its curriculum after board members raised objections about curse words, nude drawings and "not wise or healthy" content within it. Spiegelman, who won a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for the book, told CNBC that the decision was "Orwellian" and said he doubted that the McMinn County school board's decision to stop teaching his book had only to do with his choic...
(JTA) - The New York City rabbi who spoke twice to the man who held Jews hostage in their Texas synagogue last week detailed the experience in a sermon Friday night. Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of Central Synagogue also outlined her anxiety as an American Jew and exhorted her congregants to heed a prayer that the Reform movement has made part of its liturgy on Tisha B'Av, the Jewish day mourning the destruction of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem and other traumatic events in Jewish history: "Blessed...
(JTA) — In Orlando, neo-Nazis yelled antisemitic slurs from a highway overpass. In Chicago, a Jewish school and a synagogue were vandalized. In Washington, D.C., a man was arrested and charged with spray painting swastikas on a train station. The turbulent weekend — which also included a rally in Ottawa against COVID-19 vaccine mandates that featured swastikas — comes just a few weeks after the hostage situation at a Texas synagogue left American Jews feeling vulnerable in their synagogues. A video of the Orlando rally that spread on socia...
(JNS) — Pro-Israel groups working on campus agree that the situation for Jewish students is growing steadily worse. Just this fall, antisemitic incidents erupted at campuses across the country — from vandals desecrating a Torah scroll at George Washington University to a student at the University of New Mexico hospitalized after being attacked by a group shouting antisemitic slurs. “Recently at USC, we saw a member of student government threaten to ‘kill Zionists’ without repercussion while a Jewish member of student government was harassed int...
(JTA) — A rural Tennessee school board’s decision earlier this month to remove “Maus,” the celebrated graphic novel about the Holocaust, from its curriculum has attracted fierce backlash from other pockets of the state and beyond. A nearby comic-book store is pledging to give away the book for free to every student in the county, an area church plans to hold a discussion on its themes and a college professor intends to offer free classes on the book to students in the county. Nirvana Comics, a comic-book store in Knoxville, announced Thursda...
StandWithUs is proud to announce that it recently opened a Holocaust Education Center. The purpose of the center is to create a toolbox of user-friendly Holocaust education presentations and materials for public or private schools that have experienced Holocaust denial, lack of information, or simply want to proactively teach their teen and/or young adult students about the organized persecution and murder of six million European Jews in the Holocaust. The center’s presentations can be given by Matt Lebovic, who is the founding director of the...
(JTA) — Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, the man at the center of the Colleyville, Texas, synagogue hostage crisis last weekend, says that he is looking for another job, but wants the world’s focus to remain on his congregation’s trauma and healing process rather than his career. “My congregation, Congregation Beth Israel, and Colleyville have just undergone a traumatic experience. I’ve just undergone a traumatic experience,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “And that’s where the focus needs to be.” Cytron-Walker was responding to an...
\(New York Jewish Week via JTA) — Almost exactly 18 months ago, as the U.S. settled into its first pandemic summer, the Upper West Side’s flagship Jewish community center delivered some bad news to its staff: more than a third of them would be laid off or furloughed. The Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan joined JCCs nationwide in cutting staff when in-person programming abruptly shut down that spring and summer. Facing the devastating wave of COVID that hit the city at the time, the JCC Manhattan found itself unable to offer the range of services...
(JNS) - "I'm grateful to be alive," wrote Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker on Facebook shortly after he emerged unscathed from his synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, where he was held hostage for nearly 11 hours, along with three congregants. "I am grateful that we made it out." The world watched in shock on Saturday as yet another antisemitic incident threatened to take the lives of innocent people - their only crime praying in their synagogue. On Sunday, the FBI named Malik...
(JTA) — Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker has publicly described for the first time the moment he and two other hostages escaped a gunman in his synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, on Saturday “The last hour or so of the standoff, he wasn’t getting what he wanted,” Cytron-Walker told CBS in an interview posted on Monday morning. “It didn’t look good. It didn’t sound good. We were very, we were terrified. “And when I saw an opportunity where he wasn’t in a good position, I made sure that the two gentlemen who were still with me that they were ready t...
(JNS) — A dozen major Jewish organizations spanning the religious and political spectrum are urging the U.S. Senate to quickly approve funding for the replenishment of Israel’s Iron Dome air-defense system. The House of Representatives overwhelming approved (420-9) legislation last September to provide $1 billion in funds, but the legislation has since stalled in the Senate. The letter, which was spearheaded by the American Jewish Congress and Jewish Council for Public Affairs, calls on Senate leaders Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Mitch McC...
(JNS) — After the University of Southern California was included in the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Global Anti-Semitism 2021 Top Ten list, the school responded on Wednesday by condemning both anti-Semitism in all its forms and the threatening tweets by a student leader that led to the distinction. USC board of trustees Chairman Rick Caruso said that “the board of trustees together with [University] President [Carol] Folt unequivocally rejects antisemitism. We explicitly condemn and denounce tweets calling for the killing of Jews. This kind of ha...
(JTA) — At a time when many local Jewish news outlets are scaling back or shuttering operations altogether, the Cleveland Jewish News is expanding its footprint for the second time in three years. CJN’s publisher, the Cleveland Jewish Publication Company, announced Dec. 21 its plans to begin serving the Jewish population of Akron, Ohio, after reaching an agreement with the Jewish Community Board of Akron to revamp the current Akron Jewish News as a monthly print newspaper and standalone website, beginning in February 2022. The current Dec...
NEW YORK — Anuradha Mittal, the head of Ben & Jerry’s Board of Directors and vice president of Ben & Jerry’s Foundation Inc. has been crowned 2021 Antisemite of the Year by watchdog group StopAntisemitism. After several weeks of voting, thousands selected Mittal for the distinct dishonor, beating the other two finalists Dua Lipa and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Earlier this year, Mittal spearheaded the effort by Ben & Jerry’s to stop the sale of its ice cream to 800,000 Jews living throughout various parts of Israel. This decision was clearly...
(JNS) — In the estimation of U.S. Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, the future of the Iran nuclear deal “is going to be resolved by Israel” rather than by the world powers who are actually negotiating with Tehran. “The Israelis have sat across the table from me for years, looked me in the eye, and said, ‘Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.’ And I believe them,” he says. In the following interview with JNS, the former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and currently its ranking member also shares his candid views on Israel’s righ...
(JNS) — Winning the lottery usually conjures images of elated people feeling set for life after receiving a check for hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet for five North Shore Hebrew Academy students in the Long Island region of New York, winning the lottery meant being selected to represent their day school on an eye-opening, life-changing relief mission to tornado-devastated Kentucky. On Dec. 10, a tornado with winds of over 166 miles per hour decimated the Kentucky of towns Cayce, Mayfield, Benton, Princeton, Dawson Springs and Bremen, k...
(JTA) — Shimon Peres will soon receive a major honor for a non-New Yorker: the late Israeli prime minister will have a New York City street corner named in his honor. The intersection of West 95th Street and Riverside Drive will be renamed “Shimon Peres Place” after the New York City Council approved nearly 200 new street names last week to honor various people. The news was reported by Patch. Peres, who died in 2016, served three times as Israel’s prime minister in addition to serving as president of the country from 2007 to 2014. In 1949, h...
(JTA) — Students at a Washington, D.C., elementary school were instructed by a staff member to reenact scenes from the Holocaust Friday, according to The Washington Post. When the third-grade students asked why the Germans killed Jews, the staff member said it was “because the Jews ruined Christmas.” The student at Watkins Elementary School were supposed to be working on projects in the library Friday when the staff member told the students to reenact scenes from the Holocaust. The woman reportedly told one student, who is Jewish, to play...
ST. PETERSBURG, FL — A recent story involving a third-grade teacher who made their students simulate episodes of the Holocaust has rightfully sparked comment from around the nation. The incident, which involved a staff member having their students mimic digging mass graves and shooting their peers, highlights the need for proper educational materials surrounding the Holocaust. Students, especially those at a young age, need to understand the atrocities of the Holocaust in a responsible way that teaches them how to recognize and understand t...
(JNS) — Leaders of the Zionist Organization of America warned supporters to be vigilant against what they believe to be increasing anti-Israel positions from leaders, and the trend of encroaching tolerance for anti-Semitic rhetoric masked as anti-Zionism, during the organization’s annual gala on Sunday. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the gala was held as a webcast, highlighted by video addresses from leaders and activists in the ZOA, as well as politicians such as former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Israeli Prime Minister Naf...
(JNS) - The last time Rabbi Shlomo Litvin, co-director of Chabad of the Bluegrass, had been in Hopkinsville, Ky., he was joined by thousands of other people to see a total eclipse. He returned to the area on Monday to find a much-changed landscape after a massive tornado ripped through the western part of the state on Dec. 10, rendering much of it temporarily uninhabitable. The tornado was one of a series of others that struck six Midwestern states on Dec. 10. "The kindness they had shown to...
(JNS) — The Council on American Islamic Relations is backing an organizational leader following a speech that national Jewish organizations are calling virulently antisemitic. During a speech at the American Muslims for Palestine’s 14th annual convention on Nov. 27, Zahra Billoo, the Pakistani-American director of CAIR California-San Francisco Bay Area, told the audience that “polite Zionist” organizations that support a two-state solution, condemn Islamophobia and promote interfaith cooperation, such as the Anti-Defamation League, Hillel...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — It has been for decades a recurring confusion for some in Washington: does AIPAC, the country’s largest pro-Israel lobby, have a PAC? Not until today. The PAC in AIPAC stands for Public Affairs Committee, not political action committee. But after countless explanations over the years, the group is getting into the fundraising business. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee on Thursday launched a regular political action committee, which funnels $5,000 maximum donations to designated candidates per race, and a sup...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — A bill that would create an Islamophobia monitor in much the same cast as the State Department’s antisemitism monitor cleared its first hurdle on Friday, after a House committee debate about antisemitism. The bill, whose lead sponsors were Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., one of three Muslims in Congress, and Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who is Jewish, was approved Friday by the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee along party lines, with the majority of Democrats voting for it. It now goes to the House floor. During an...
