Gordon Haber

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Yuri Foreman: Future Rabbi, Present World Champion

By Gordon Haber

Boxing is a sport for immigrants, for tough young men looking to make a living. Which is why it used to be a sport for American Jews. Before World War II, there were a number of superior Jewish fighters, like Benny Leonard, Barney Ross and Maxie Rosenbloom. But these days, the Jews in boxing tend to be promoters.Read More

Israeli Trainee Rabbi Wins World Boxing Title

By Gordon Haber

On Saturday, November 14 Yuri Foreman, 29, walked from his hotel to the MGM Grand Garden Arena to avoid breaking the Sabbath. After sundown, Foreman beat three-time world champion Daniel Santos for the WBA Super Welterweight title. Upsetting the form books, Yuri Foreman won a unanimous decision against the three-time world champion Daniel Santos. From Haifa, but based in Brooklyn, N.Y., Foreman was the faster and better boxer of the night. Santos looked sluggish against the sprightly Israeli and was down in both fourth and seventh rounds although the latter was adjudged an inadvertent clash of heads.Read More

The Kosher Contender

By Gordon Haber

Professional athletes lead interesting lives. Yuri Foreman’s life has been really interesting. Foreman was born in 1980 in the Soviet Union and started his boxing training at 7 years old. He kept it up when his family immigrated to Israel in 1991, eventually winning three national championships. To further his career, Foreman came to the United States in 1999 and worked a full-time job while training at night. In 2002, he became the New York Golden Gloves champion.Read More

Six Takes on God

By Gordon Haber

Regular readers of the book review pages (or even of books) are no doubt familiar with the so-called New Atheists — Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, in order of increasing shrillness — and how they’ve been raising hackles with their screeds. After reading their books last year, I could see why people were ticked off. The New Atheists like to conflate any kind of religion with extremism, as if all believers were boneheaded fundamentalists. Similarly, they rail against a cruel, straw-man God, as if the fundamentalist projection of brutality onto the Creator is the only way to conceive of Him.Read More

High-Tech and Haimish

By Gordon Haber

Recently, in pursuit of a story about Christians who have become interested in Judaism, I stumbled across QualityLifeNow, an outreach program organized by a pair of genial Lubavitcher Hasidim. Every Wednesday evening in midtown Manhattan, these “Hassidic motivational speakers” lecture about an aspect of Jewish law that pertains to non-Jews. The proceedings are a mixture of high-tech and haimish: Chunks of homemade cake are passed around, while the lectures are recorded for Internet video. If the men behind QualityLifeNow could not be described as slick — their Web site is a little wonky, and one of the speakers pans his camera by rotating his laptop — they are astute when it comes to technology, and they seem to be acquiring a following.Read More


 

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