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The History of the Jews of South Florida: Antisemitism, Resilience, and Hope (PART ONE)
The University of Florida campus. Photo: Wiki Commons.
The Jewish population of South Florida is about 650,000. It has the third largest concentration of Jews in the country and the single largest concentration of Jews (13 percent of the total population of South Florida) outside of Israel.
The story of Florida is a surprising one, with visions becoming dreams, and antisemitism in places we would not have expected.
Here is the history of one of the most popular Jewish vacation spots, which is home to growing, vibrant communities in Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties.
Florida’s Early History
In 1513, Juan Ponce de León discovered Florida for Spain, making it the first American territory to be discovered and settled. Under the Spanish Inquisition, only Catholics could live in Florida, although it is believed that Jewish Conversos were among the early settlers and soldiers of St. Augustine.
Under the Treaty of Paris in 1763, England acquired Florida from Spain, and Jews were permitted to reside there. The first-recorded Jews to settle in Florida, Alexander Solomons, Joseph D. Pallaccios, and Samuel Israel, arrived in Pensacola.
More Jews moved to northern Florida over the next few decades, though the Jewish population still comprised only a dozen individuals.
In 1783, England returned Florida to Spain. Once again under the rule of the Inquisition, Spain ordered a census that revealed Jews, including a Polish Jew, David Moses, who had a hide store in St. Augustine. Remarkably, Spain decided to allow the few Jews to remain, as the area needed settlers.
Florida became an American territory in 1821, and between 30 and 40 Jews lived in the northern part of the state.
Samuel Myers, a lawyer, settled in Pensacola in 1821. In 1822, his wife, Louisa, gave birth to Virginia Myers, the first documented Jewish child born in Florida.
A Vision for Florida: Moses Elias Levy
Moses Elias Levy was born in Morocco in 1782 to an influential Jewish merchant who served in the sultan’s court. Levy was fluent in five languages and was a man of many talents. He was a successful merchant, a social activist, an abolitionist, and a supporter of universal education.
In 1818, Levy began work on an ambitious project. His vision was to create a Jewish settlement that would give oppressed Jews from Europe an agrarian community where they could freely practice their religion and preserve their culture.
He purchased over 50,000 acres in Alachua County, Northern Florida, in 1820, which eventually grew to 100,000 acres. He constructed three properties: A sugar cane plantation on the Matanzas River, the Hope Hill plantation in present-day Astor, and Pilgrimage, a few miles from Micanopy. Levy’s dream started to come to fruition in 1823 when his business partner, Frederick Warburg, arrived with 21 settlers.
Historical roadside marker, Micanopy, Fl. (Photo by Jrryjude – Own work, Wiki Commons)
However, the community lasted only 13 years before the Second Seminole War broke out in 1835. At that point, the community dispersed.
Although it was a financial failure for Levy, it was successful in that it was the first Jewish farming settlement in the United States and created possibilities for persecuted Jews from Europe. The Jewish colony he built in Micanopy is today home to the University of Florida. In an interesting turn of history, this University has the largest Jewish population of any public university in the United States.
Florida Becomes a State
On March 3, 1845, Florida became the 27th state of the United States. Out of a population of 66,500, there were fewer than one hundred Jews living there.
Yet their numbers did not diminish their influence. Moses Levy’s son, David Levy Yulee, served as the first US Senator from Florida, making him the first Jew to serve in the US Senate. He is known as the Architect of Florida Statehood, having helped write the state’s Constitution and organizing the first cross-state railroad in 1853.
Even his very name remains associated with the state. Levy County, on the Gulf Coast in Northwest Florida, and the town of Yulee in Nassau County, are both named in David Levy Yulee’s honor.
David Levy Yulee
In the second half of the 19th century, Florida’s Jewish population continued to slowly grow, and Jacksonville was at the center of that growth. It was there that a Jewish cemetery, the first Jewish institution in Florida, was established in 1857, and the first synagogue was formed in 1876. By 1900, six congregations had been established in Northern Florida.
A 1591 map of Florida by Jacques le Moyne de Morgues.
The Barrier to Jewish Migration from Northern to Southern Florida: Antisemitism
South Florida’s Jewish community lagged behind the Northern and Central Florida Jewish communities for decades. In 1928, roughly 40 percent of the Jewish population of 10,000 lived in Jacksonville. Yet in the second half of the 20th century, Jews moved south, building communities in Miami and Miami Beach, and then spread to Broward and Palm Beach Counties.
The primary reason for the small Jewish population in South Florida was the very visible antisemitism.
It was common to see signs in Miami and Miami Beach that read “Gentiles Only” or “No Jews or Dogs.” Wealthy and influential developers, including highway builder and entrepreneur Carl G. Fisher, refused to serve Jewish customers, and oil and railroad mogul Henry Flagler (1830-1913) prohibited land sales and hotel lodgings to Jewish clients.
By the 1930s, advertisements for some of Miami Beach’s oceanfront hotels said, “Always a view, never a Jew.”
In Miami Beach, Jews were only permitted to live south of Fifth Street, as developers placed restrictive covenants in their land deeds prohibiting the sale of Miami Beach lots to Jews north of Fifth Street. Resourceful Jews made purchases of modest hotels and apartments on property south of Fifth Street, but the overall feeling was one of antisemitism.
The discriminatory laws began easing up in the 1930s and officially ended in 1949.
Miami’s Jewish Foundation
The first Jew to arrive in Miami was Samuel Singer, who migrated from northern Palm Beach in 1895.
By 1896, Jews owned 12 of the 16 businesses in the pioneer town of Miami, and the Jews held religious services in Miami that year. Yet, when the city was damaged by fire and struck with a yellow fever epidemic, the community fell apart. By 1903, the Jewish population had declined to a single person: Isidor Cohen.
In 1904, Isidor Cohen married Ida Schneidman, and when they had a son in 1907, the first documented bris was celebrated in Miami. In 1913, the death of a Jewish tourist forced the still tiny Jewish community of 35 to create the first congregation and a cemetery.
Advertising, combined with abundant land, new roads, automobiles, and commercial aviation, created a tourist and real estate boom in Miami in the 1920s. The population of 100 Jewish families grew to 3,500 during this period of prosperity. Yet, due to the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926, the stock market crash, and the failure of five local banks, the city’s population decreased significantly again.
In the mid-1930s, Jewish Miami began a steady recovery. The hotel, banking, and construction industries flourished thanks to Jewish contributions. The post-war economic boom brought additional tourists and settlers to Miami, many of whom were Jews. By 1950, there were 55,000 Jews in Miami, and in the coming decade, almost ten thousand Jews arrived yearly.
In 1952, Abe Aronovitz became Miami’s first (and, to date, the only) Jewish mayor. In 1963, the first two Jews from South Florida were elected to the state legislature, and in 1973, William Lehman (1913-2005) was elected to the United States House of Representatives for the first of 10 terms. In this period, large groups of Jews began moving to North Miami and North Miami Beach.
Initially, Jews were economically based in tourism, building industries, or real estate. Eventually, many began moving into medical, legal, and financial professions, and these trends continue to this day.
Three Jewish men, Miami, 1898. Isidore Cohen (center) is believed to be the first permanent Jewish resident of Miami. State Archives of Florida.
Rabbi Menachem Levine is the CEO of JDBY-YTT, the largest Jewish school in the Midwest. He served as Rabbi of Congregation Am Echad in San Jose, CA, from 2007 to 2020. He is a popular speaker and writes for numerous publications on Torah, Jewish History, and Contemporary Jewish Topics. Rabbi Levine’s personal website is https://thinktorah.org
A version of this article was originally published at Aish.
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Piers Morgan is what’s wrong with media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and I can’t stop watching him
Piers Morgan’s online debate about Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times op-ed containing allegations of Israeli dog rape was loud, chaotic and unenlightening — and I couldn’t stop watching it.
That’s a problem. Morgan’s format is a trap. On his YouTube talk show, Piers Morgan Uncensored, he pits people holding intransigent, often extreme positions against each other, goads them to yell at one another across Zoom, and positions himself as the voice of reason in the middle. It’s hateporn — addictive, and not reflective of reality.
And yet Piers Morgan Uncensored and many similar YouTube- and social-media based news programs are where people increasingly get their information and engage with controversial issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
These programs rack up views by persuading viewers there is no middle ground, no moderate position, no alternative to conflict. And their strategy is working.
The Kristof episode, which racked up 340,000 views in a day, is titled, “Torture Does NOT Work!” — all Morgan show names have one word in all caps and end in an exclamation point.
It begins with people shouting. “You are not a journalist!” Ana Kasparian, a commentator on another YouTube show, shouts at podcaster and online anchor Emily Schrader — before Morgan comes on to introduce the segment.
He quickly recaps the lurid details from Kristof’s New York Times oped, “The Silence That meets the Rape of Palestinians,” and a newly issued nearly-300 page Israeli report on Hamas sexual violence.
“As far as I’m concerned, the only cause is basic human decency,” Morgan says in his cool British accent, “If your first instinct about either report is to look for ways to smear them, you might have run out of that yourself.”
Yet the six deeply partisan guests spend the next 45 minutes smearing the reports, and each other.
Morgan’s introductory call for human decency is not a plea, it’s a ploy. He plays the mature voice of reason standing between the extremist pro-Israelis and the pro-Palestinians — not to persuade them to come to a moderate position, but rather to exploit the most virulent voices in order to generate clicks, while still claiming the cover of journalism. This approach causes real harm by giving extremists a megaphone, and a degree of exposure that all but guarantees that people actually trying to build a better future go unheard.
A recipe for drama
Morgan repeats this formula over and again. In an episode entitled, “Netanyahu CONNED Trump!” Dave Smith, a sidekick to Joe Rogan, accuses Israel of dragging the United States into the Iran war. In “I’m SICK of it!” commentator Megyn Kelly launches into a similar attack on Israel.
Morgan has had long interviews with white supremacist and proud antisemite Nick Fuentes (“What a crock of S***!”). In “STAND for Dead Soldiers!” Morgan hosted four Israelis at the extreme ends of the political spectrum and watched them fight when one refused to stand as a siren sounded to honor Israel’s fallen soldiers.
Not extreme or dramatic enough? How about the time Morgan hosted Crackhead Barney, a Black pro-Palestinian street activist, to explain why she harasses celebrities to get them to say, “Free Palestine.”
“I’m truly shocked/disgusted that @piersmorgan would have this nutjob & clearly unwell person to go on his show and even remotely try to talk about Palestine or the war,” wrote the Gazan-born activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib.
Alkhatib is a moderate Palestinian who works for a peaceful solution to the conflict. He has, unsurprisingly, not been on Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Instead, Morgan’s choice of guests is calculated for maximum friction, a function of an attention economy that monetizes the time people like me spend watching the fights.
From ‘Animal House’ to Piers Morgan
Luring viewers this way isn’t exactly new. President Ronald Reagan called The McLaughlin Group, a current affairs program that ran on public television for 34 years beginning in 1982, “the political equivalent of Animal House”— more drunken frat house than graduate seminar. McLaughlin begat Crossfire, a CNN political debate program hosted by a younger Tucker Carlson that Jon Stewart once compared to pro-wrestling.
In 2025, Morgan, who came up in British tabloids before a long stint at CNN, moved away from traditional broadcast TV and went all in on social media and his YouTube channel.
His success on that platform is part of a larger shift in media from major institutions to independent personalities, and from actual news — the dutiful and expensive process of finding out and relaying what’s actually happening in the world — to opinion that spins itself as reporting, which is far cheaper and more entertaining.
That shift has come as audiences have moved from loyalty to long established institutions to following enterprising, independent personalities. The podcaster Joe Rogan has 20.9 million subscribers; Carlson has 5.6 million; Morgan’s show has 4.42 million subscribers and over 1.36 billion total views.
In other words, Morgan is not some guy some people watch now. He is what people will be watching in the future.
A bias toward extremes
That prospect should alarm us. Morgan’s shows rarely feature people working toward compromise or reconciliation. A Piers Morgan Uncensored discussion spotlighting the many civil society groups in Israel working toward coexistence? A show where he sits down with Arab and Jewish Israelis who share a vision for a common future? A segment that highlights the actual, albeit rare, instances of cooperation?
Pipe dreams. All that is also happening in Israel and the West Bank — but Piers Morgan Uncensored effectively censors it.
Compare that to Jon Stewart, who on The Daily Show last month conducted a long interview with the Palestinian and Israeli co-authors of The Future Is Peace, a book that calls for moving beyond violence and stalemate to a shared future. Same approach — a streaming interview on a hot-button topic, with an eye toward entertainment — but radically different editorial choices.
That episode garnered a mere 400,000 views. Morgan’s comparative millions of eyeballs may, in his mind, justify his guttersweeping approach to international conflict. And in his defense — and mine, for watching — it’s never boring. He can be a thoughtful and provocative interviewer, and his not-ready-for-primetime, self-created show allows him, when he so chooses, to platform voices that more mainstream venues overlook, like former Israeli Speaker of the Knesset and longtime peace activist Avrum Burg.
Alas, he stuck the erudite former statesman with a diehard evangelical and a firebreathing American Jewish conservative pundit. That episode is called, “A SHAME on Judaism!”
Whatever this is, it’s not journalism. But it is the future.
The post Piers Morgan is what’s wrong with media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and I can’t stop watching him appeared first on The Forward.
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Rashida Tlaib Introduces Resolution ‘Recognizing Ongoing Nakba’
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) addresses attendees as she takes part in a protest calling for a ceasefire in Gaza outside the US Capitol, in Washington, DC, US, Oct. 18, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Leah Millis
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) on Thursday reintroduced a congressional resolution recognizing the 78th anniversary of what she described as the “ongoing nakba,” using the Arabic term for “catastrophe” deployed by Palestinians and anti-Israel activists to refer to the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948.
The resolution, introduced on the anniversary of Israel’s independence, accuses the Jewish state of carrying out “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid,” and “genocide” against Palestinians, language that many pro-Israel lawmakers in Congress and advocacy groups strongly reject as inflammatory and inaccurate. The measure also calls for renewed US support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), an agency that has faced mounting scrutiny from Israel and several Western governments over allegations that employees participated in or supported Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
In a statement announcing the resolution, Tlaib argued that the so-called nakba “did not end” with the Arab-Israeli war in 1948 and continues today through Israeli military operations and settlement expansion.
“War criminal Netanyahu and his cabinet have repeatedly threatened to ethnically cleanse the entire Palestinian population in Gaza, annex the land, and permanently occupy it. Today, they are extending these same threats towards southern Lebanon,” she said, referring to Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and military operations against US-designated terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. “As we mark the 78th anniversary of the Nakba, we honor all of those killed since the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began and all those who have been forced from their homes and violently displaced from their land.”
Activists often invoke the term “nakba” when discussing the displacement of some 750,000 Palestinian Arabs following Israel’s War of Independence, many of whom left the nascent state for varied reasons, including that they were encouraged by Arab leaders to flee their homes to make way for the invading Arab armies. At the same time, about 850,000 Jews were forced to flee or expelled from Middle Eastern and North African countries in the 20th century, primarily in the aftermath of Israel’s declaring independence.
Tlaib’s resolution is co-sponsored by several prominent progressive Democrats, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Ilhan Omar (MN), Ayanna Pressley (MA), and Summer Lee (PA).
The move is likely to draw fierce criticism from pro-Israel lawmakers and Jewish organizations, many of whom argue the resolution ignores the historical context surrounding Israel’s founding and the 1948 war. Israel accepted the United Nations partition plan in 1947 to create two states, one Jewish and one Arab, while neighboring Arab states rejected it and launched a military invasion after Israel declared independence.
The resolution also calls for a so-called Palestinian “right of return,” a demand insisting that potentially millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees should be able to return to the land of Israel, a step that, according to proponents, would result in the abolition of the world’s only Jewish state.
“This immense trauma, including the loss of their loved ones and connections to the communities they grew up in, needs to be repaired. True peace must be built on justice and the inalienable right of return for Palestinian refugees,” Tlaib said in her statement.
While refugees are generally defined as those who flee a country out of credible fear of persecution, UNRWA uniquely defines Palestinian refugees to include all descendants of those who left the land, regardless of where they were born.
Tlaib, the only Palestinian American member of the US Congress, has emerged as one of Israel’s loudest critics on Capitol Hill, repeatedly accusing the Jewish state of genocide and drawing rebuke from fellow lawmakers.
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Toronto Sees 50% Drop in 2025 Hate Crimes, Yet 82% of Religiously Motivated Attacks Target Jews
A member of law enforcement personnel works at the scene outside the US Consulate after shots were fired, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, March 10, 2026. Picture taken with a mobile phone. Photo: REUTERS/Kyaw Soe Oo
Even as Toronto recorded an overall decline in reported hate crimes last year, newly released data shows the city’s Jewish community continued to face disproportionately high levels of targeted antisemitism and violence amid an increasingly concerning social climate.
On Thursday, Toronto Police released its annual hate crime statistical report, showing that Jews accounted for 82 percent of all religiously motivated hate crimes in 2025, compared to 14 percent targeting Muslims.
Even though the Jewish community makes up less than 3 percent of Toronto’s population, officials now warn that Jewish residents are 14 times more likely than other residents to be targeted in a hate incident.
With 81 anti-Jewish hate crimes recorded, Jews and Israelis were the targets of 35 percent of all reported hate incidents in the city.
Despite a 50 percent overall decline in reported hate crimes, from 443 in 2024 to 231 in 2025, Toronto has seen a 40 percent increase in such incidents so far this year compared with the same period last year.
Toronto Police Chief Myron Demkiw noted that, even with the overall decline, the Jewish community continued to be the primary target of hate-motivated offenses.
“We are steadfast in our commitment to confronting hate in all its forms and making it easier for people to come forward and report incidents of hate,” Demkiw said in a press release.
Because police-reported hate crime data only includes incidents that come to the attention of authorities and are later confirmed or suspected to be hate-driven, official figures likely underestimate the true scale of such incidents.
Over the past two years, Toronto authorities have expanded law enforcement capacity and resources to investigate hate crimes by establishing a Counter-Terrorism Security Unit and increasing specialized training for officers, while also strengthening Holocaust education initiatives and introducing digital literacy programs for youth aimed at countering online radicalization.
Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs Vice President Michelle Stock called the latest statistics “deeply alarming,” warning of a broader reality of hostility that Jewish families across the city are confronting on a daily basis.
“Toronto prides itself on being a city where people of all backgrounds can live openly, safely and without fear. Those values are undermined when any community no longer feels secure expressing its identity in public,” Stock said in a statement.
“From synagogues to schools to public displays of Jewish identity, blatant attacks against the Jewish community are becoming more frequent and more brazen,” she continued. “Jewish Canadians are being targeted simply for who they are. No one should have to think twice about wearing a kippah, attending synagogue, sending their children to Jewish schools or participating openly in Jewish life.”
The city’s figures reflect a broader nationwide rise in antisemitism and anti-Israel hostility, with the Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith Canada reporting a record high in anti-Jewish hate crimes in 2025 for the second consecutive year, documenting 6,800 such cases across the country.
According to the latest report, antisemitic incidents nationwide increased by 9.3 percent last year, surpassing the previous record total of 6,219 set in 2024.
With an average of 18.6 incidents per day, this figure represents a 145.6 percent increase from 2022, before the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Early 2026 data already indicate the country is now on track to see its most violent year against the Jewish community in recent memory, with more violent antisemitic attacks recorded so far this year than during all of 2025, B’nai Brith Canada reported.
In total, 11 violent antisemitic incidents have already been recorded across the country since January, surpassing the 10 violent cases documented during all of last year
“These brazen attacks on Jewish Canadians are a sign of a crisis of antisemitism that has spiraled out of control,” Simon Wolle, chief executive officer of B’nai Brith Canada, said in a statement.
“Violence such as this, which has escalated from targeting synagogues to targeting Jewish people directly, does not occur in a vacuum. It is what happens when governments fail to act despite mounting evidence that antisemitism is becoming more normalized and dangerous,” Wolle continued.
Last week, a group of Jewish worshippers standing outside the Congregation Chasidei Bobov synagogue in Montreal was targeted in a drive-by shooting, leaving one person with minor injuries.
A week earlier, three visibly Jewish residents were targeted in a separate antisemitic attack when suspects opened fire with a gel-pellet gun, causing minor injuries.