Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 427 - 451 of 1890
(JNS) — The White House’s liaison to the Jewish community Chanan Weissman announced on Wednesday that he was stepping down from the role. In a news release from the White House, Weissman wrote that he was transitioning to a new role in the U.S. State Department and said farewell as point person for the last year. “I am honored beyond words to have served in this capacity on behalf of an administration I so deeply admire and as a link to a community with whom I so deeply identify,” he wrote. “As I wrap up my time, I’m excited to hand over the ba...
(JTA) — The Democratic primary next week in Michigan’s 11th District could end a four-decade Jewish political dynasty — and spending by the country’s biggest pro-Israel lobby is playing a significant role. Because of redistricting, the race pits two incumbent Democrats against each other: Rep. Andy Levin, a Jewish Democrat who favors conditioning aid to Israel and counts some of Congress’s most outspoken Israel critics as his friends, and Rep. Haley Stevens, a non-Jewish centrist whose Israel commitments lie mainly in assuring its military...
(JTA) - When Steve Dettelbach was confirmed last week as the director of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, he became the beleaguered bureau's first head to pass a Senate confirmation in eight years. For some, the confirmation offered hope of a changing tide in America's sea of mass shootings. But a county Republican group in Kentucky saw a different story: that Dettelbach is part of a "Jewish junta" that "is getting stronger and more aggressive." The Bracken...
(JTA) - So many campers were sick with COVID-19 last week at Ramah New England that its director, Rabbi Ed Gelb, put out a call to families: Would any nurses be willing to come to camp for a few days to help? "We have a large and capable nursing staff, but more help would be great," he wrote. Gelb's request came in an extended email about the state of the pandemic at the Palmer, Massachusetts, Jewish camp, in which he said some buildings had been transformed temporarily into infirmaries. But...
(J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — The California State University Board of Trustees voted Wednesday to remove the name of an unrepentant antisemite and Nazi sympathizer from the main library on its Fresno campus, putting an end to the legacy of longtime former librarian Henry Miller Madden at Fresno State after an internal investigation. The building will be referred to as the Fresno State Library until a replacement name is chosen. In a press release sent to the campus community, Fresno State University President Saúl Jimén...
(JTA) — Eric Reyzelman is in a New York state of mind. The New York Yankees selected the Jewish Louisiana State University pitcher 160th overall in the fifth round of the Major League Baseball draft on Monday. Reyzelman told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency he plans to sign with the team and begin his career in professional baseball instead of returning for final year at LSU. He does not yet know what his first stop will be in the Yankees organization. “Unbelievable, unbelievable moment for me and...
(JTA) — So many campers were sick with COVID-19 last week at Ramah New England that its director, Rabbi Ed Gelb, put out a call to families: Would any nurses be willing to come to camp for a few days to help? “We have a large and capable nursing staff, but more help would be great,” he wrote. Gelb’s request came in an extended email about the state of the pandemic at the Palmer, Massachusetts, Jewish camp, in which he said some buildings had been transformed temporarily into infirmaries. But unlike some other camps, he said, Ramah New England...
Kevin and Irina McCarthy were at an Independence Day parade in the heavily Jewish neighborhood of Highland Park with their two-year-old son Aiden when a gunman opened fire on the crowd. Kevin died as he shielded Aiden with his body. Both parents, in their 30s, were among the seven killed. Some 50 others were injured either by gunshots or while fleeing. As of July 6, nine people were still hospitalized. Police arrested 21-year-old Robert Crimo III, who faces seven charges of first degree murder....
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) has made demonizing Israel a central component of her platform since emerging on the scene in 2012, when she tweeted that the Jewish state “hypnotized the world” with its “evil doings.” Understandably, the Jewish community has opposed Omar, who has promoted a variety of antisemitic tropes, accusing the U.S.’ leading pro-Israel advocacy group of paying elected officials to support the Jewish state, promoting the anti-Israel BDS movement, and spreading the dual loyalty canard about American Jews. While the...
Says Jewish students are ‘targets’ and ‘dismissed’ when they see ‘the writing on the wall.’ (JNS) — Two months after The Harvard Crimson’s editorial staff endorsed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, a Jewish Harvard student hit back in the same paper. The Crimson Editorial Board published an editorial on April 29 titled, “In Support of Boycott, Divest, Sanctions and a Free Palestine” wherein they declared that they were “proud” to endorse “Palestinian liberation and BDS.” The Crimson’s associate editor Gemma J. Schneider res...
(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... Full story
(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...
