The Lubavitcher Rebbe won the Triple Crown at Belmont last Saturday when American Pharoah romped home in the Belmont Stakes at Belmont, New York, by five lengths, becoming the first horse to win the Triple Crown in 37 years. The owner is one Ahmed Zayat, once known in Cairo as an Egyptian Muslim, but now in the USA he is…
General Topics
FIFA Corruption
You know someone is unsavory if Vladimir Putin defends him. Thank goodness Sepp Blatter, the recently reelected president of FIFA, has finally resigned. Or so it seems at the moment. On a scale of values, running a corrupt soccer cartel and stacking it with family and friends surely is not the worst crime of all. What he represents is not…
Zimbabwe & ISIS
In 1966 I was sitting in yeshiva in Jerusalem studying hard and all but oblivious to the outside world, when I was summoned to see Rabbi Louis Rabinowitz, former Chief Rabbi of South Africa, then retired to Jerusalem. He was a contemporary and friend of my late father and a mentor to me. He told me I should get a…
Prophets
Shavuot is the festival that commemorates not just the encounter between Moses and God on Mount Sinai but also the “revelation” of Torah. There are traditionally 70 ways of explaining (70 faces of) Torah. So how we understand what actually happened is, of course, subject to almost infinite variations, from fundamentalist literality through academic reconstruction on to absolute denial. And…
The Ronson Name
The name “Ronson” once meant shavers and nowadays, thanks to social media, is associated primarily with vapid “personalities” who achieve little more than notoriety. But to me it conjures up someone I knew since our school days together in England—Howard, who died far too early from cancer in 2007. I was thinking of him recently when I read an article…
Racism
The riot of Ethiopian Jews in Israel protesting against racism is a sad reflection on Israeli society. It must not be exaggerated but it should come as no surprise. There has always been a disconnect between the ideals of Israel’s state institutions and the petty prejudice and fighting against and between its minority communities. There has always been a distinction,…