Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JTA) — The Christian Zionist pastor of a major church asked forgiveness for allowing the church to host an event where Michael Flynn said that the United States should only have one religion. “Last week I allowed an event to be held at Cornerstone Church by an outside organization,” Pastor Matt Hagee said in a statement Thursday. “Regrettably, the organization was not properly vetted. It was not appropriate to allow this event at our church. The church is not associated with this organization and does not endorse their views.” Hagee’s f...
(JNS) — Democratic consultant Aaron Keyak, 36, has been appointed to serve as U.S. Deputy Envoy to Monitor and Combat anti-Semitism after recently directing U.S. President Joe Biden’s Jewish outreach during the 2020 election campaign. As first reported in The Forward, Keyak’s role will not require Senate confirmation, allowing him to begin serving immediately as acting envoy until the Senate moves on the nomination of Holocaust historian and Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt to serve as the U.S. Envoy for Monitor and Combat anti-...
(JTA) — When Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, picked a favorite memory from the last year for a reflective Thanksgiving-themed tweet on Thursday, he didn’t turn to the day in January when his wife was sworn in or mention their first diplomatic trip together this week. Instead, he shared pictures from the day his family affixed a mezuzah on the doorframe of the vice president’s mansion. Mezuzahs are tubes containing the text of the Shema prayer that Jews traditionally attach to their doorposts. Emhoff is the first Jew t...
(JTA) — In what some are heralding as a watershed moment in the Orthodox world, reports of sexual abuse by a prolific author of children’s books have now led multiple booksellers to stop making his work available. Meanwhile, advocates and at least one leading rabbi are urging Orthodox parents to remove books by Chaim Walder from their homes. Many are doing so. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an investigation last week alleging that Walder, a therapist as well as a writer, psychologically groomed multiple minors before proceeding to abu...
(JTA) - The only Jewish kicker in the NFL for years now, Greg Joseph is used to how mentally taxing the position can be. On Sunday, he found himself in another one of its do-or-die situations. With two seconds left to go in a tied game against the division-leading Green Bay Packers on Sunday, Joseph kicked his Minnesota Vikings to victory with a 29-yard field goal, keeping the team's playoff hopes alive. He was carried off the field by his teammates. Joseph, who attended Jewish schools in...
(JNS) — U.S. President Joe Biden held an outdoor ceremony at the White House on Monday to sign the hard-won Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, otherwise known as the infrastructure bill, joined by legislators and politicians from all over the United States who helped craft and promote the legislation. Nathan Diament, executive director of Orthodox Union Advocacy Center, was there celebrating the inclusion of another part of the bill — a $50-million pilot program for nonprofit organizations to apply for a grant to reduce energy con...
(JTA) — A rally is set to take place at George Washington University Monday after a fraternity on campus said a small replica Torah used in its initiation process was damaged during a vandalism spree. The president of Tau Kappa Epsilon, a fraternity on George Washington’s campus, said the vandalism took place early Sunday morning, according to a report in the university’s student newspaper. He said hot sauce was poured throughout the house and many objects were thrown around, the newspaper reported. The damage that most caught the public eye w...
(New York Jewish Week via JTA) — In what was billed as her first speech to a Jewish audience as New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul vowed to fight hate crimes and criticized fellow Democrats over their positions on Israel. The speech, delivered virtually to the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York on Wednesday night, hit the usual notes sounded by Hochul’s predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, who resigned in August in the face of sexual misconduct allegations. Hochul pledged to fight antisemitism and help bolster security at Jewish institutions....
(JTA) — Republican Glenn Youngkin, a businessman, has defeated former Gov. Terry McAuliffe to become Virginia’s governor in a race that was fraught with charges of antisemitism. Local and national media organizations called the race, which was widely viewed as a barometer for Republican electoral strategy in the post-Trump era, early Wednesday morning. Youngkin embraced former President Donald Trump in the primary but distanced himself from Trump in the general campaign, while still managing to retain the support of Trump’s core const...
(JNS) Addressing supporters with a "heart filled with hope purpose and love for this city," Eric Adams accepted his win as New York City's mayor-elect with a nod to strong support from the Orthodox Jewish community, especially in Brooklyn, N.Y. Adams, a Democrat, received 66.5 percent of the vote to Republican Curtis Sliwa, 67, founder of the Guardian Angels, who won 28.8 percent with nearly 78 percent of precincts reporting as of Wednesday afternoon. In the district that includes the Crown...
(JNS) — Long well-documented on college campuses, pro-BDS and anti-Semitic sentiments are now gaining traction in kindergarten through 12th-grade public-school systems. The United Educators of San Francisco in May became the first teachers’ union in the country to pass a resolution supporting BDS. In September, while United Teachers Los Angeles voted to postpone a pro-BDS resolution, San Diego’s American Federation of Teachers Guild stated that “condemning Israel for its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, occupation, apartheid and war crimes is...
(JTA) — The Republican Jewish Coalition’s 2020 conference was one of the last Jewish conferences to be canceled as the pandemic set in: The group had gone so far as to order branded hand sanitizer. Now, it’s one of the first to resume, and it’s doing so amid a great deal of change relevant to the group’s agenda. There was the election of President Joe Biden last fall and the tumultuous transition as Donald Trump exited the White House while remaining a looming figure in the Republican Party. Then there was the death, in January, of Sheldon A...
(Jewish News of Greater Phoenix via JTA) — An antisemitic tirade at a school board meeting in suburban Phoenix last week has spurred an extensive response among local officials and Jewish leaders — some of whom say they were distressed that board members did not rebut the comment at the time. During the public comment portion of the meeting of the Chandler Unified School District board, a woman who identified herself as Melanie Rettler spoke for over a minute about critical race theory and vaccines — topics not listed on the meeting agend...
LAS VEGAS (JTA) - The Republican Jewish Coalition conference was about 2022, and also 2024. It was about how a near Republican sweep in state and local races last week revealed a way back to GOP control of the federal government. It was about moving more Jews from D to R. What the conference this weekend was not about, the organizers wanted you to know, was Donald Trump. "It's about the here and now, it's not about President Trump or anybody else," Ari Fleischer, an RJC board member, told...
(JTA) — A third of Jewish college students say they have personally experienced antisemitism in the last year, according to a new survey conducted jointly by Hillel and the Anti-Defamation League. The two groups recently announced a partnership aimed at combating antisemitism on college campuses; the survey represents one of the first fruits of the relationship. The results add data and texture to the picture of Jewish life on campus that has been built in recent years in large part on anecdotes and firestorms. They suggest that the majority of...
(JTA) - The World Series just ended with the Atlanta Braves winning four to two against the Houston Astros, and there were more Jewish players in this year's edition than there have been in decades. The American League champion Houston Astros, who ousted Chaim Bloom's Boston Red Sox, feature star slugger Alex Bregman. The National League champion Atlanta Braves boast an impressive duo of Jewish play-ers: pitcher Max Fried and outfielder Joc Pederson. (The Astros did not include Jewish backup...
(JTA) — Jewish ace pitcher Max Fried delivered his Atlanta Braves to their first World Championship since 1995 with six shutout innings in Tuesday’s Game 6 of a World Series heralded as the most Jewish in base-ball history. The 27-year-old lefty held the Houston Astros to four hits, overcoming a potentially serious injury to strike out six without surrendering a run or a walk. The game contained what might have been the most Jewish play in any Major League Baseball matchup ever: In the bottom of the second inning, Astros star third baseman Ale...
(New York Jewish Week via JTA) — Sunrise NYC, the local chapter of a national youth environmental group, rejected a decision by the Washington, D.C. chapter to shun cooperation with “Zionist” groups. “Sunrise NYC rejects antisemitism in all its forms, and condemns the choices made by the DC hub,” Sunrise NYC tweeted Friday, aligning itself with a statement made by the national organization. “We stand with our Jewish members and the Jewish community against prejudice, and we will continue to stand arm in arm together during this urgent mome...
(JTA) - Demonstrators posed as the antisemitic white supremacists who led a deadly rally in Virginia in 2017 in a stunt protest against the state's Republican candidate for governor, a sign of the increasing role charges of antisemitism are playing in the close race. The protest Friday against Glenn Youngkin, who is running for governor against former governor Terry McAuliffe, was organized by the Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump Republicans. Youngkin and other Republicans condemned the...
(JNS) — A Jewish civil-rights group is calling on the University of Massachusetts Boston to investigate an incident that occurred this summer, where pro-Palestinian activists targeted and accosted a journalist over his views on Israel. The event took place on June 24 in front of the Anti-Defamation League’s New England Regional Office in Boston. Dexter Van Zile, a journalist with the watchdog group CAMERA, was “accosted, spat at, shoved, and called a Nazi and a pig solely based on his perceived identity as a Zionist,” by members of the UMass B...
(JTA) — Fear of antisemitism spurred 40 percent of American Jews to change their behavior over the past year, according to a new survey about antisemitism in America. The survey, released Monday, is the latest in an annual series commissioned by the American Jewish Committee to understand how Jewish Americans and the general public experience and perceive antisemitism. A survey of American Jews found that over the last year, 17 percent said they “avoided certain places, events, or situations,” 22 percent avoided making themselves visua...
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Washington D.C. branch of a national climate action group turned down a role at a voting rights rally because a “number of Zionist organizations” will be taking part. “Given our commitment to racial justice, self-governance and indigenous sovereignty, we oppose Zionism and any state that enforces its ideology,” Sunrise DC said in a statement it posted Tuesday on Twitter. The group named the National Council of Jewish Women, the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs as...
(JNS) — The pro-Israel student group Maccabee Task Force organized its first three-day conference to help strengthen the relationship between Black and Jewish communities. Roughly 100 people from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) attended the Black Student Leaders Summit, which was held from Oct. 1-3 in Atlanta, where many of the student leaders were based. The goal of the summit was to help re-establish an alliance that has increasingly split in the last decade as a result of politics and various social movements in the U...
(JTA) — The statue of Thomas Jefferson that will be removed from the chambers of the New York City Council at the urging of Black lawmakers was a gift in 1834 from one of the first Jewish officers in the U.S. military. The city’s Public Design Commission decided to remove the statue following complaints from Assemblymen Charles Barron, Councilwoman Inez Barron and others that Jefferson was a slaveholder. The statue, which has stood in the city council’s chambers for over a century, was commissioned by Uriah Phillips Levy, a lifelong fan of Je...
NEW YORK (JTA) — Three rabbis and six Jewish teenagers were among those arrested Monday at a climate protest at the Manhattan headquarters of BlackRock, the largest investment management company in New York. The demonstration, organized by the Jewish Youth Climate Movement with support from the interfaith organization GreenFaith, demanded the firm stop its investments in and cut ties with companies that fund the fossil fuel industry, which include Enbridge, Inc., Formosa Plastics and Shell. Rabbis Rachel Timoner and Stephanie Kolin of Congregat...
