Does Your Rabbi Know You're Here?

In Books Do Furnish a Room, the novelist Anthony Powell wrote: ‘It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.’

Such was his fame as a prize-fighter, newspapers reported one of his victories ahead of the storming of the Bastille in 1789.

‘a review of the halakhic opinions from Talmudic to contemporary authorities regarding the permissibility of playing ball on shabbat and yom tov.’ The article’s author, Rabbi Saul J. Berman, concluded that ‘while contemporary custom is to refrain from playing ball on those days, normative legal opinion holds that such activity is permitted’.

The eternal debate about whether Jews are a race, religion, nationality or ethnicity is of little interest here.