Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS) — Why is Amalek considered the archenemy of Israel? We’ve had no shortage of vile and murderous enemies in our time. What makes Amalek so fiendishly unique that even the Nazis were symbolically referred to as Amalekites? In last week’s Torah reading, Ki Tetze, we find no less than 74 biblical commandments, the highest number of any parshah. It represents some 12 percent of the 613 commandments of the Torah in this one weekly reading. The final item on the agenda is about the nation of Amalek—specifically, the obligation to remembe...
(JNS) — Israel is bringing light to the world when it is out front confronting evil, as it is doing with its war with Hamas. The ultimate future of the Middle East rides on Israel not only winning the war in Gaza but successfully battling the demonic leadership of Iran which controls every move of its surrogates as a well-trained puppeteer. Let’s be clear, this is a regional war. The complexity of that confrontation may well override the immediate demands of individuals and transform the horizon. Israel faces an existential threat to its ver...
As an Iranian American, having lived most of my life under the misogynist evil extremism of the Islamic regime, there are many things that bring me back to the traumas in the land of my birth. Waking up to the news this week of six Israeli hostages being executed by Hamas in cold blood reminds me of the period I served a death sentence in Evin prison when Islamic regime agents massacred thousands. The solution for peace in Gaza is not negotiating with the terrorists, but to cut off the head of the octopus in Iran, and to eliminate its...
(Jerusalem Strategic Tribune via JNS) — The principal product of Washington, D.C., is words. They come in three different kinds of packages: memoranda, by which government departments and organizations communicate internally; op-ed articles, by which these various groups communicate with each other and the public; and reports, usually compiled under the auspices of people with expertise in the subject being addressed. All three types are highly perishable. Almost none reaches a broad audience or is read more than a few days after it appears. E...
(JNS) — Israel’s enemies have a sinister proclivity to attack on sacred holidays. Many expected the Iranian retaliation for the murder of Hamas terror leader Ismail Haniyeh to come on Tisha B’Av, the Jewish holiday commemorating the destruction of the First and Second Temples. Astonishingly, that night, I had a most restful sleep, although disturbed by a foreboding dream. I envisioned the destruction of modern-day Israel, the 75 years of Israel’s miraculous splendor standing in ruins and ash, as it was after the devastation of the ancient...
(JNS) — Turning out for a barbecue is nice; showing up for Israel is essential. The University of Maryland Hillel rightly took pride in hosting a back-to-school barbecue that attracted 1,500 Jewish students. However, the event was partly overshadowed by the university administration’s unconscionable decision to allow Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace to hold an affair on Oct. 7. After facing significant backlash and unfavorable publicity—the only thing besides money that moves administrators—UMD reversed its approva...
Recently, my social media has been overwhelmed with videos filmed by people on safari in Africa, capturing the moment when carnivorous animals attack, kill, and devour their prey. It’s fascinating to watch the instincts of the animals, as if they have taken a course in survival but, in fact, are intuitive. Projecting what it seems to me, sometimes the suffering of the animal being attacked and torn into pieces looks particularly cruel. While I have thought about human parallels this week, that cruelty seems so particularly relevant. This w...
(JNS) — As we mark one year since the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, it’s impossible not to reflect on the profound implications of that day—not just for Israel, but for the 7 million Jews in America that make up half of the world’s Jewish population. The attack, often described as “the largest pogrom since the Second World War,” is a grim reminder of the persistent threats that the Jewish people face, no matter where we reside. The public response in America, where the Jewish community’s mourning was met with “protests” ac...
Funerals and mourning are always difficult to experience, especially the last few days with the murder of the hostages and the police officers. The personal pain of the families is a horrible, wrenching pain for all Jews. Hamas has standing orders to kill any hostage if liberation is near. The left has turned the meaning of funerals and mourning upside down. They have transformed the war crimes of the murderers into War Crimes committed by the victim’s own Government. Murdering POWs and hostages is a War Crime. No one is saying that. As the l...
(JNS) — “Let reason go before every enterprise and counsel before any action.” Ecclesiastes 32:23 At time of writing, negotiations between Israel and Hamas on a potential “ceasefire” are seemingly set to continue despite Hezbollah’s attempted attack on Israel followed by massive rocket fire and statements by officials that the ceasefire talks are near collapse. Even if an agreement is reached, however, it will almost certainly fail because Hamas still regards all of Israel as “Occupied Palestine.” For both Israel and the “international...
(JNS) — It’s very troubling that President Joe Biden said during his Democratic National Convention speech that “those [anti-Israel] protesters out in the street, they have a point.” Similarly, during her interview with The Nation in July, Vice President Kamala Harris stated that the anti-Israel “protesters” “are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza. … I understand the emotion behind it.” What exactly is the point of anti-Israel, anti-American terror-affiliated rioters? (“Protesters” is way too mild a term f...
(JNS) — On Aug. 18, a Palestinian Arab male blew himself up in central Tel Aviv with enough explosives to murder hundreds of Israelis but managed only to end his own life. Hours afterward, Hamas claimed responsibility and pledged more such attacks. For us, almost 23 years to the day when a Palestinian suicide bomber murdered our teenage daughter, Malki, this served as a jolting reminder that the scourge of Palestinian human-bomb attacks is still here. For Israelis and Americans, the “failed” bombing is a wake-up call, a harbinger of fresh...
(JNS) — Are you into the TV show “American Idols?” Do you enjoy watching all that talent on television? What about other “idols?” In last week’s Torah reading, Re’eh, Moses warns the Jewish people not to follow the pagan ways of the Canaanite nations when they inherit the Land of Israel. There is to be zero tolerance for idolatry and paganism. Those nations practiced the most outrageous forms of idolatry, including child sacrifice and other depravities. The great Torah scholar Rashi quotes Rabbi Akiva as saying he’d witnessed a pagan man tie up...
(JNS) — It is clear that opposition to the ability of Jews to peacefully pray on the holiest site in Judaism and the site of the first two Jewish Temples, namely the Temple Mount, is prompted by the virulent antisemitism of the Palestinian Authority and the Kingdom of Jordan. Their opposition is based upon the antisemitic view that there is no Jewish connection to the site. The previous uniform Muslim view of the Temple Mount was expressed in 1925 by the Supreme Muslim Council in their published guide to the Temple Mount for tourists. It s...
(JNS) — Now that the Democratic National Convention has ended, the dust is just beginning to settle. Maureen Dowd, who is a fixture at the very left-wing New York Times, titled an Aug. 18 article on President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris, “The Dems Are Delighted. But a Coup Is Still a Coup.” Dowd wrote: “It wasn’t exactly Julius Caesar in Rehoboth Beach. But it was a tectonic shift and, of course, there were going to be serious reverberations.” She called Biden’s removal “a jaw-...
By Jonathan Feldstein During my freshman year in college, my Hillel rabbi asked me a question: “If you have a decision to make with two bad options as the outcome, what do you do?” 19-year-old wise Jonathan answered, “You choose the least bad option.” His response is a lesson that still guides me today. “No, you come up with a good option.” Since the inhuman Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas terrorists, murdering 1200 people, systematic rape and sexual mutilation, incinerating people alive, and kidnapping over 250 people, 109 of whom are still in ca...
(JNS) — I remember well when Alabama Gov. George Wallace in 1963 barred entry of two students, James Hood and Vivian Malone, to the University of Alabama because of their race. The response from President John F. Kennedy and his brother Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was electric. First, Deputy U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach personally confronted the governor at the University of Alabama and sought in vain to convince him to desist. Kennedy reacted by federalizing the Alabama National Guard. The two students returned to the u...
(JNS) — We Jews have been called lots of things. Some of the less offensive appellations are “stubborn” and “obstinate.” Yes, we can be stubborn, obstinate or davka. Call it what you like. But, curiously, not all the rabbis see stubbornness as a fault. In last week’s Torah reading, Ekev, Moses continues his recap of the events of the last 40 years and speaks of the terrible sin of the Golden Calf: “Then, G-d spoke to me and said: ‘I have observed this people and behold, it is a stiff-necked people.’” The phrase first appears back in Exo...
Amid the Democratic National Convention taking place in Chicago, there’s legitimate excitement seeing a woman heading a major political party’s ticket this year. Women are being encouraged to vote for Kamala Harris as a woman. But as a Christian, Iranian American woman, I will not be voting for Kamala because she represents exactly the values that endanger women in the Middle East and around the world. And neither should you. For my first 33 years I lived under the harsh rules of the extremist Iranian Islamic regime. I have countless scars of...
(JNS) — In the summer of 1982, following the attempted assassination of Shlomo Argov, Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Israel launched Operation Peace for Galilee, also known as the First Lebanon War. In so doing, Israel reacted to the continual Katyusha rocket fire being lobbed into northern Israel that disrupted the lives of its citizens for many years. At the time, the Palestine Liberation Organization led by Yasser Arafat broke every ceasefire arranged by Philip Habib, a senior State Department diplomat sent to the region by the...
Dear Editor: At last the Heritage had good news about Israel’s winnings at the Olympics and Cori Bush’s loss in her primary thanks to AIPAC. The less cheerful news, admirably discussed by Jerome M. Marcus (Heritage Aug. 6, 2024), is the activity of the Reconstructive “Rabbinical College” trying to outdo the “Radical Liberal Rabbis” in appeasing the narrative of the “Islamic superiority” condemning the existence of the Jewish State of Israel. In reviewing the current state of antisemitism, I considered the neo-Nazis consisting of well-funded...
(JNS) — Mark was preparing for his bar mitzvah. Besides the excitement of the Shul event, to be perfectly honest, he was also looking forward to receiving lots of gifts and money, as is the “tradition.” He was particularly anticipating a large monetary gift from his Uncle Abe, a very wealthy and generous man. How shattered and disappointed Mark was when Abe presented him with his bar mitzvah gift: It was … a pair of tefillin! It was only many years later that Mark happened to check his tefillin and discovered that inside lay a check from Un...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — Rabbi Shai Held’s latest book Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life is the culmination of a career spent correcting a great misconception, namely that “Christianity is the religion of love” while “Judaism is the religion of law.” “My aim is to tell the story of Jewish theology, ethics, and spirituality through the lens of love,” Held writes, “and thereby to restore the heart—in both senses of the word—of Judaism to its rightful place.” A similar point could be made about Zionism. Over the past yea...
(JNS) — Iran’s propaganda mills are falsely claiming that they have not attacked Israel in retaliation for Israel’s targeted assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh because they do not want to interfere with ongoing ceasefire talks. With this excuse, Iran is trying to garner legitimacy in world politics. So, once again, it has to be pointed out that Iran is the “head of the snake”; the cause of all of the instability in the Middle East. Oct. 7 could never have happened if it weren’t for Iran. Hezbollah would not have one missile if...
(Israel Hayom via JNS) — Cynthia Nixon, John Oliver, Chef José Andrés; an award-winning writer with an essay in The London Review of Books; protesters outside the Nova exhibit in Manhattan; celebrities, faux-academics, and activists. These are some of the people who have been engaging in a particularly noxious form of antisemitism since the Oct. 7 massacre. Lesley Klaff explained this particular phenomenon in 2014. “What has been called ‘Holocaust Inversion,’” she wrote in Fathom, “involves an inversion of reality (the Israelis are cast as the...
