Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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There are certain stories that just never go away. They don’t get swallowed up by the 24-hour news cycle. They grind away at your soul, drop by drop, day by day, hour by hour. In Israel, that story looks at you wherever you go. From the moment you land at Ben Gurion Airport, you’re greeted by images of hostages captured by Hamas ten months ago. All over the country, billboards and posters carry their faces. In the cosmopolitan city of Tel Aviv, you see those faces everywhere, on city streets, on the ocean promenade, on Dizengoff Square, whe...
Dear Editor: My sincere congratulations to Christine DeSouza and Marilyn Shapiro on winning awards from the Florida Press Association. It is exciting to be recognized for a job well done. Marilyn’s award for her Feature Story-Profile demonstrates a journalistic excellence in both research and writing. Christine’s award for best Serious Column takes op-ed writing to a whole new level of addressing the topic of antisemitism. I know that Jeff is extremely proud of your accomplishments. Wishing you both continued success. Marilyn Wat...
(JNS) — On paper, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro looks like a more or less perfect Democratic vice-presidential candidate: He is a generally well-liked moderate from a swing state and, following the recent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, displayed remarkable gravitas and compassion on a national stage. Shapiro is also Jewish, meaning he might help the Democrats shore up its Jewish support, which despite the conspiracy of silence imposed on the issue is fraying. However, many of us feel there was little to no chance t...
(JNS) — As a lawyer who spends his days defending the civil rights of Jews in education—usually public education, sometimes private schools or universities, but never Jewish institutions—reading about the triumph of anti-Zionism at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College is in some sense an unsurprising experience. I see in these accounts all of the same hateful rhetoric I see from pro-Hamas agitators everywhere else—that Israel “is committing apartheid, ethnic cleansing, settler colonialism,” that the urban combat in Gaza is really “gen...
The fundamental theme of the Democratic Party throughout the now concluded primary electoral season was that the former president Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party under his leadership, presented a great danger to our freedoms and the democratic process. Therefore, Trump had to be defeated in the 2024 presidential election in order for our Republic to survive as a democracy. According to the Democratic Party’s electoral playbook only Joe Biden, and now Kamala Harris and the Democrats could save the nation from this alleged potential d...
(JNS) — With the dramatic assassination of Hamas political chieftain Ismail Haniyeh while a “guest” of Ayatollah Khamenei in Tehran; preceded by the assassination 12 hours earlier of Hezbollah kingpin Faud Shakr in Beirut; the confirmation of the death of Hamas military strategist Muhammad Deif from Khan Younis; the death of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps commander Amir Hajizadeh near Damascus; and the attack on the Houthi stronghold at the port of Hodeida, Yemen, the world has learned that there are no limits to the long arm of...
(JNS) — The killing of senior Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on July 31 is just another in a long line of anti-terror activities that take place outside the borders of Israel. For a country that struggles to manage mail delivery within its borders, delivering a concealed bomb to a hotel 1,000 miles away in Tehran didn’t seem to be a problem. Haniyeh’s and other recent assassinations are not one-off events, as Israel’s long arm of retribution for harm against its citizens has been seen before. Following the massacre of 11 members of the Israeli ath...
(JNS) — There have been several moments of celebration for Zionists over the past 150 years. The first Zionist Congress held in Basel, Switzerland in 1897 showed Zionists that their movement had fire in it. The Balfour Declaration signed in England in 1917 was one of the first public declarations of the right of the Jewish people to their own homeland. The United Nations’ Partition Plan vote in 1947 gave international validation to the establishment of a Jewish state. On May 14, 1948, Israel declared its independence. On June 10, 1967, the Six...
While it’s not always appropriate to criticize a politician for something they don’t say, during the past several months, given the vile antisemitic protests that have taken place across the U.S. under the veil of “anti-Zionism,” one might have assumed that as a self-declared Zionist, President Biden would have shut down threats against Jews by affirming that he is also a Zionist. “When you vilify Zionists, you vilify me,” he could have said. A modern JFK “Ich bin ein Berliner” (I am a Berliner) moment. One can consider that an oversight, a la...
(JNS) — Forget her awkward off-putting personality and habit of speaking like a dim-witted kindergarten schoolteacher. Those are public-facing problems, and public-facing problems have to be pretty extreme for them to be disqualifying. Dems stuck with Biden until he had a total debate breakdown. Dems would like another Obama, and Kamala isn’t that, but they’d settle for a normal human being who isn’t some nightmarish hybrid of Chauncey Gardiner, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama with none of the positive aspects and all of the negative ones. B...
This article was previously published in the Dec. 22, 2023, issue. It garnered the Sally Latham Memorial Award for Serious Column in the FPA Weekly Newspaper Contest. (Portions of this article are very graphic.) I was talking with my daughter on the phone Friday evening. “What did you do this week?” she asked. I mentioned that I attended a private briefing and screening by the Consulate General of Israel in Miami to see the raw footage of what happened in Israel on Oct. 7. “What are you talking about?” she asked. She hadn’t heard of the Oct....
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — On Saturday, the Golan Heights came under global scrutiny when Hezbollah bombed a soccer field in the Druze village of Madjal Shams, killing 12 children. This is an unspeakable tragedy. It is also a reminder of the terrible and worsening condition of Israel’s north, which has been under attack since Oct. 8. In January, a mother and son were crushed to death when Hezbollah fired an anti-tank missile into their home. In early July, a married couple were killed by a direct hit, leaving their three children par...
(JNS) — Now that President Joe Biden has finally bent to the will of his party’s leaders and donors, the praise for his presidency is nearly universal on the left. The paeans to his personal greatness and acclaim for his time in the White House accelerated once his infirmity became clear in the June 27 debate with former President Donald Trump. Liberal corporate media spent years covering up the president’s cognitive decline, including accusing any journalists who brought up the subject of spreading “misinformation.” But once the lies were...
(JNS) — There has been a major shift among Jewish and Jewish-allied peoples. There has been a “great recalibration.” People have rethought many assumptions they believed were facts. There has been a recognition amongst individuals and organizations that doing things in the same way does not suffice. This extends to the secular and the religious as well as the conservative and the liberal. Before Oct. 7, the Jewish community was deeply fragmented along political lines. Conservatives struggled to understand why some Jewish people would support po...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — America reached a new low this past week simultaneous with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of Congress. Thousands of pro-Hamas activists rioted outside the Capitol Building and scuffled with the Capitol Police. The dress rehearsal for this anti-American hatefest took place in Dearborn, Michigan, where protesters shouted “Death to America!” on April 5. That’s the date when the United States finally joined Europeans in realizing that there is an Islamist belief system wholly incomp...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — The biggest winner of Europe’s recent elections was the Islamist-leftist alliance. For those who still find an alliance between the left and homophobic, misogynistic Islamists incomprehensible, please keep in mind that the global left is no longer liberal. Leftism has become a big tent for all varieties of illiberalism, including Islamism. Post-election videos showed Islamists celebrating leftist wins, praising Sharia Law, and bashing Western democracy. They carried signs like “Sharia will dominate the world...
(JNS) — At what point does angry political discourse cross the line between legitimate impassioned advocacy and direct incitement to violence? It’s a question that’s been all too common in both the United States and Israel for the past generation. That is why acts of political violence—such as the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump this past weekend—can just as easily exacerbate the tensions within societies rather than help heal them. In seeking to understand how Americans can transcend their political divisions...
(JNS) — “The week that was” started with an assassin’s bullet missing former President Donald Trump. As Trump said: “It was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.” In his speech at the Republican National Convention, he asserted: “I’m not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be dead.” Trump has not only internalized the profound and unmistakable providential intervention that saved him but has been brave and courageous enough to bring God back into the world. Unlike most politicians, who rarely if ever speak about God, Tr...
(JNS) — In the wake of the Hamas hostage crisis, a central and often-heard rallying cry has emerged from the Israeli and Diaspora Jewish communities: “Bring them home.” While this phrase is rooted in the profound desire to see our Jewish brothers and sisters safely returned, it inadvertently misplaces the onus of responsibility. Instead, the call should be: “Let them go.” This nuanced difference is critical, as it rightly places the burden on Hamas, the terrorist organization that took the hostages, rather than on the Israeli governmen...
It makes no sense. Why would Donald Trump pick as a running mate a white man from Middle America who’s just like him? Wasn’t Trump supposed to broaden his base to increase his chances of winning in November, and pick someone like a woman or a person of color or a more classic conservative? Instead of expanding his reach, Trump has doubled down on his ideology, choosing J.D. Vance, someone who once called him “cultural heroin” for Middle America while musing that he may be “America’s Hitler.” Evidently, Trump must have been so eager to buil...
(JNS) — One of the ways to tell apart moderates and extremists is checking the brakes. The other is the constant infighting. And the two are connected. Extremists have no brakes so their movement is always going to new extremes. In my book “Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against The Left,” I quote a telling line about the French Revolution. “‘As the revolution becomes radical, the Right disappears, and the Left of one assembly becomes the Right of the succeeding assembly,’ Mignet explained, describing how each new political inc...
I visited Israel for the second time recently. The first time was approximately six weeks after the Oct. 7th massacre by Hamas. The country is still working to eliminate Hamas and the country will be forever changed by the evil attack. On this trip I tried to focus mostly on the children of Israel and what their future will look like. The future of any culture is dependent on their ability to remember the past without the bias of the media and for the culture to remember what their core beliefs are. In Israel, the children seem to have a very...
(JNS) — On July 11, actor, director and producer George Clooney was featured in The New York Times calling for a new Democratic nominee for president. His credentials for an opinion piece in the newspaper that still claims to publish only “All the News That’s Fit to Print” are that “I have led some of the biggest fundraisers in my party’s history” and “last month I co-hosted the single largest fundraiser supporting any Democratic candidate ever, for President Biden’s reelection.” George Clooney does himself in when he writes, “We don’t a...
(JNS) — Franz Kafka would feel right at home in northern Israel. Life here has a surreal, absurdist character with the indivisible mix of the mundane and the potentially catastrophic. A quiet day has only a handful of rocket or drone attacks and we have become used to incessant plane noise and to looking up and around after a boom or two. Israelis are resilient, but resilience is often the product of being able to maintain one’s routine and “normalcy” within one’s familiar surroundings. Anywhere from 60,000 to 80,000 people have been stripped o...
(JNS) — The Biden administration, as well as almost every nation in the world, is pressuring Israel to create an immediate pathway for a Palestinian state. In theory, separating from the Palestinian Arab population—if it could be done with all security safeguards in place—accepting Israel as a Jewish state and signing an end-of-conflict agreement would be a reasonable alternative to the present situation, if it were possible. But does anyone look at what a Palestinian state would be and how faithful its leadership would be to any signed agree...
