Sundown: The Florida Files
Emerging communities, reverse discrimination, and the loneliest graduation
June 22, 2009
• A synagogue in Pompano Beach, Florida, has placed personal ads looking for gay couples who want to marry in a bid to be the first in the county to hold a “Jewish Covenant of Love” ceremony. [Sun Sentinel]
• Elsewhere in the Sunshine State, Jacksonville has been declared an “emerging community” for Orthodox Jews. They’ve got a mikveh! [Florida Times Union]
• Meanwhile, that mainstay of the Jewish community, Boca Raton, plans to expand a turnpike, leaving Orthodox Jews angry about the infringement on their Sabbath walking path. [CBS]
• In order to take a stand “against discrimination,” a new bar in Tel Aviv bans Israeli soldiers in uniform from entering. [Haaretz]
• A Jewish girl in Harlem has opted to miss her high school graduation ceremony because it is being held on the Sabbath. She also turned down the school’s generous offer to let her march alone down an aisle in the library. [WPIX]
• “The notion of a Jew who looks like an Indian and lives in a poor house in a small city in the middle of the jungle is, at best, an exotic footnote to the official history of Peru’s Jewry as Lima sees it,” says one historian. What about hundreds of these Jews of the jungle? [NYT]
Hadara Graubart was formerly a writer and editor for Tablet Magazine.
