Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(Jewish Journal via JNS) — President Theodore Roosevelt is known for the saying, “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.” The presidencies of Barack Obama and Joe Biden will be remembered for a very different aphorism: “Speak in apologetic whispers and defund your sticks; you will go backwards in retreat.” Those are two very different approaches to diplomacy and the realities of international affairs. It explains why both Obama and Biden were among the least capable foreign policy leaders our country has ever known. A good exam...
(The Forward) — The prospect of President-elect Donald Trump return to power has unsettled many American Jews, who traditionally vote Democratic. Memories of his first term — marked by polarizing rhetoric, controversial policies, and the perception of flirtation with extremist elements — still loom large. Please, let’s all take a deep breath. American democracy is tough and resilient, and the fears about Trump himself, and his policies, are vastly overblown. Nobody is saying Trump’s second term will be a cakewalk — politics never is. But rea...
(The Forward) — Many pieces have been written comparing the story of the hit-Broadway musical “Wicked” — a riff on the backstory of “The Wizard of Oz” — to that of the Jewish people. The musical, which was just adapted into a blockbuster film by John Chu, explains how Elphaba, who was born with unnaturally green skin, came to be known, unjustly, as the Wicked Witch of the West. And since the movie came out, numerous writers have argued that Elphaba’s story of persecution and discrimination is particularly Jewish. However, the similarity goes...
(JNS) — Do you remember when universities were institutions that taught us how to think critically rather than telling us what to think and when journalism schools emphasized ethics and the importance of truth-seeking? If those days ever existed, they seem long gone, particularly regarding coverage of the Middle East. Amnesty International is mistaken for a human-rights organization when it is nothing more than a media whore engaged in National Enquirer-like sensationalism. It has mastered the art of generating headlines and stirring outrage w...
(JNS) — Strong winds are blowing around us — to the north, south, east and west. Regimes are wavering or collapsing, and new ones are rising. We must not be passive because what they all have in common is a fervent hope for our destruction. Protecting our lands and stabilizing our borders is a clear and present necessity. We must immediately apply sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, Gaza and the Jordan Valley, and broaden our hold on the Golan Heights and Lebanon. Thank God, while writing these lines, we have been informed of Israel’s liber...
(JNS) — As chaos envelops Syria — with one gang of terrorists overthrowing the other gang of terrorists who ran the government — the question needs to be asked: Can you imagine the danger Israel would now be facing if it had surrendered to U.S. demands in the 1990s to give up the Golan Heights? This isn’t some theoretical what-if scenario. During the first Clinton administration, a team of State Department negotiators led by Dennis Ross spent several years trying to pressure Israel to give over the Golan to Syrian dictator Hafez Assad (father...
(Investigative Project on Terrorism via JNS) — Anti-Israel students have always sought convenient, effortless ways to demonstrate their hatred for Israel. In the past, this has meant trying to remove Sabra brand hummus from campus food services. Starting at DePaul University in 2011, efforts to embargo Israeli-made food spread quickly to other campuses (the University of Ottowa in 2014, Swarthmore College in 2018, Dickinson College in 2019 and Harvard University in 2022), but after Oct. 7, student boycott demands grew more expansive. It’s no...
(JNS) — With the ink dry on the International Criminal Court’s phony arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the chorus of European village idiots is already clamoring for more. In addition to imprisoning Israel’s prime minister, they wish to expand France’s Oct. 5 arms embargo of Israel to all of Europe. The effort is gaining traction. The ICC’s endorsement of “war crimes” gives cover to supporters of terror, antisemites and the willfully ignorant. A crescendo is coming. This is not the first French embargo of Israel or...
(JNS) — As soon as U.S. President-elect Donald Trump announced the nomination of Sebastian Gorka to the post of senior director for counter-terrorism in his new administration, the anti-“Make America Great Again” crowd dusted off an old smear campaign against the former West Wing staffer. One enduring attack centers on his association with Vitézi Rend, a Hungarian merit organization established in 1920. Critics have sought to tie the group to Hungary’s fascist Arrow Cross regime, despite the International Commission on Orders of Chivalry...
By Orit Arfa (JNS) — Since the Amsterdam pogrom of Nov. 7, in which Arab and North African youth chased and assaulted Israeli soccer fans who came to the Dutch capital for a game, I’ve heard more calls for Jews to leave a dying Europe. Dedicated Zionists warn us: Time to come home! They bemoan how the Dutch police ignored warnings about the attacks. To make matters worse, the Amsterdam mayor resents calling the Jew-hunt, which injured several dozen Jews, a “pogrom” because it fosters “Islamophobia.” Aayan Hirsi Ali, an ex-Muslim from Somali...
(JNS) — They say that the definition of a successful man is one who can earn more than his wife can spend. And the definition of a successful woman is one who can find such a man. It’s been more than a thousand years since polygamy was prohibited in Jewish life. One can only wonder how they managed it. Today, we have difficulty satisfying just one spouse. How on earth did people handle multiple marriage partners? This week in Vayetze, Genesis 28-32, we read of Jacob going off to Haran to find a wife. In the end, due to his father-in-law Lab...
Dear Editor: No one really knows what is going on in Syria. The latest is that Israel has taken over the Syrian part of the Hermon Mountain, which overlooked a great part of Israel. Also in the news is that Assad fled to Russia. The big question is: Will the ICC now declare Assad a war criminal. He murdered half a million of his own citizens, used gas to choke some of them, caused about 7 million people to flee Syria and become refugees all over the world. The answer of course is, it’s not going to happen for two very good reasons: 1) He is n...
Two months remain before Donald Trump takes office and a lot can happen in the Middle East during that time. Israel dodged one imminent bullet when the Biden administration decided to ignore the calls for it to cut off arms deliveries to Israel. Though aid agencies and critics insisted Israel did not meet the requirements set out by the administration for increasing humanitarian aid to Gaza, Biden decided Israel had done enough to satisfy his demands. More likely, he did not want to enrage the incoming president by withdrawing support for...
(JNS) — After the International Criminal Court issued warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Israeli defense minister, Yoav Galant—on the basis of malevolent falsehoods and serial abuses of its own processes—people said in outrage that it was high time the ICC was defunded and dismantled. After the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees was found to be working hand in glove with Hamas, with UNRWA teachers and other workers moonlighting as Hamas terrorists and with virtually every...
May 14, 1982, is a day that I will never forget. That's the day I took ownership of the Heritage Florida Jewish News from the former owner, Gene Starn. I was 25 years old with an advertising degree from UF and a couple of years of experience under my belt, working for the Florida Alligator and the Orlando Sentinel. I had huge aspirations of turning the then eight-page Heritage into one of the largest Jewish newspapers in the country. After struggling for those first six months - trying to pay bi...
(JNS) — In the face of rising antisemitism, public schools, secular organizations and well-meaning institutions often turn to Holocaust education as their primary tool for addressing hatred against Jews. The reasoning seems sound: by teaching about the atrocities of the Holocaust—the worst massacre of human beings in modern history—students and the public at large will grasp the dangers of prejudice and the moral imperative to fight antisemitism. While Holocaust education is indeed crucial, it is not enough. Worse, in some extreme cases, it can...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — As if legal systems, and international bodies like the United Nations, needed any assistance in further damaging the public’s perception of them, the International Criminal Court has sullied the name of the rule of law even more. It’s really time for the United States to withdraw its funding to kangaroo courts like the ICC and the International Court of Justice. The names of these institutions are laughable misnomers (“justice”?), not unlike the Human Rights Council of the United Nations, which occasionally features...
Dear Editor: My friends Tova Teitelbaum and her husband live in Haifa, which is currently under siege receiving rockets sent by Hezbollah. In her greetings to me, I wanted to share with our community what she wrote: “Many Israelis have high hopes that Trump will help Israel. They are certainly relieved that Kamila Harris didn’t win. I personally thought that Trump should have won the Nobel Prize for Peace. He brought about the Abraham Accords which are still holding despite the war in Israel. If Arafat won the peace prize which resulted in the...
(JNS) — Israel’s detractors believe that America’s unwavering support for Israel is driven by the mythologically omnipotent “Jewish lobby.” The truth is it is the Arab lobby, entrenched within the deep state, which has been adversely affecting U.S. policy since the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia in the 1930s. The Arabists fought first to prevent the establishment of Israel, then to strangle the nascent state at birth, and ever since, have sought to drive a wedge between the two countries despite their shared values and interests. This trad...
(JNS) — One of my favorite stories of the Jewish American experience begins in the early days of Hollywood. Jewish immigrants, newly rich from the success of their movie studios, were denied entry to Los Angeles’s elite country clubs. So, of course, they built their own. Shortly after the Hillcrest Country Club was opened in 1920, oil was discovered on the club’s grounds. As a result, among Hollywood’s elite, the Jews were the only ones whose club paid them for their membership. Today, we face a growing list of entities that—openly or surreptit...
(JNS) — It was an ideal opportunity to get opinions and reactions, and elicit what they think and feel beyond their words. After all, people from all over the world flock to Las Vegas for this specific market. But it wasn’t just any universal gathering of people coming to buy and sell their wares; it was the annual American Film Market. The movie industry. An industry that carries exceptional weight and influence on vast, diverse audiences. Despite being part of that industry years ago, I was now writing about it from a specific Jewish fra...
(JNS) — Before the first Trump administration upended nearly every piece of common knowledge about the Middle East, figures like former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry set the tone. In its relentless pursuit of a peace process that would end the Israel-Palestinian conflict—viewing Israeli concessions as the key to peace in the entire region—that tone was often quite negative. As in, “No, no, no and no,” Kerry’s infamous conclusion about the possibility of Israel reaching out to its other Arab neighbors. Trapped in a mindset shaped by a...
(JNS) — Rolling Stone, a magazine once renowned for its solid investigative journalism, is planning to publish a reckless, unsubstantiated attack on two of my heroic sons serving in the Israel Defense Forces. Doing so is not just journalistic negligence but a grotesque blood libel and a nauseating, stomach-turning display of antisemitism. Rolling Stone is legitimizing the Hind Rajab Foundation, a minuscule joke of an organization that claims to represent Palestinian interests. The foundation, which has fewer than 1,000 followers on social media...
(JNS) — An Israeli broadcast journalist reporting on world leaders who condemned the pogrom in Amsterdam paused after quoting tweets by U.S. President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to ask a snide rhetorical question. “And guess who hasn’t responded to the antisemitic attacks in The Netherlands?” she said, sneering with unadulterated schadenfreude. “Donald Trump,” she answered, enunciating each syllable for effect, adding sarcastically that “he must be preoccupied with other matters.” Unlike this media figure and so many of...
(JNS) — If you search for “Zionism,” you’ll quickly find this bizarre definition on Wikipedia: “Zionism is an ethnocultural nationalist movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century and aimed for the establishment of a Jewish state through the colonization of a land outside Europe.” In other words, Israel is an ethnonationalist colonial movement—precisely what they scream in pro-Palestine demonstrations on university campuses all over America. Zionism is apparently not the self-determination struggle of the Jewish people to rep...
