Author Archives: Jew of the Week

Jew of the Week: Andrés Cantor

World’s Greatest Sports Commentator

Andrés Cantor (b. 1962) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina to Jewish parents of Romanian and Polish heritage. His grandparents fled to Argentina during the Holocaust. Cantor spent the latter half of his youth in California, where he played soccer for his high school team and edited the sports section of the school paper. After interning at the 1982 FIFA World Cup in Spain, he officially became a sports journalist. Cantor got a job as a play-by-play sports commentator for Spanish-language TV in America. Soon, he became famous for his long and loud “goaaaaaaal” calls. Though he did not come up with it, he has been credited with making it world-famous. He first used it during the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy, and introduced it to English-speaking audiences during the 1994 World Cup that was held in the US. By the 1998 World Cup, Cantor was featured making the goal call in a popular Volkswagen commercial (also in 2014), and the Telemundo network has since turned it into a ringtone. Aside from the goal call, Cantor is famous for his deep knowledge of sports and his excellent and insightful overall commentary. He was the main Spanish commentator for the 2004 and 2012 Olympic Games, and also did English commentary during the 2000 and 2008 Olympics, and commentary in both languages in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. He is currently Telemundo’s lead announcer at the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. He also hosts a daily radio show called Futbol de Primera, broadcast across 100 different stations, and has written a book, Goooal! A Celebration of Football. Cantor voiced himself in a 2014 episode of The Simpsons (see the clip here). In 1994, he was America’s “Sports Personality of the Year”, and has received an award from the National Soccer Hall of Fame. He has won a whopping six Emmy Awards for broadcasting. FIFA described him as one of the greatest sports commentators of all time.

The Mexican Rabbi Giving Out Free Kosher Burgers in Qatar

Words of the Week

Slowly and by degrees, science is being brought to recognize in the universe the existence of One Power, which is of no beginning and no end; which existed before all things were formed, and will remain in its integrity when all is gone – the Source and Origin of all… This sum total of scientific discoveries of all lands and times is the approach of the world’s thought to our Adon Olam, the sublime chant by means of which the Jew has wrought and will further work the most momentous changes in the world.
– Waldemar Haffkine, renowned scientist and “saviour of humanity”

Jew of the Week: Jacques Spreiregen

The World’s Coolest Hats

Yakov Henryk Spreiregen (1894-1982) was born to a Jewish family in Warsaw. The family immigrated to France when he was a young man—where he changed his name to Jacques—and then to England to escape the First World War. Spreiregen found a job working for a hatmaker, but was soon called up to serve in the military. After returning to England following his service, he started importing military-style berets from France. He then began making his own hats from high-quality angora wool. In 1938, Spreiregen leased an old thread factory in northwest England and founded Kangol (a name he made up from “knitting angora wool”). The company initially struggled to turn a profit, and many of the first employees were his own family members. Eventually, the hats did become popular, and earned a reputation for quality and durability. During World War II, Spreiregen won a contract to outfit the British army with berets. By the end of the war, he was making a million hats a year! Kangol later outfitted the English Olympic team, and the crew of British Airways. The company went public in 1952. Two years later, Spreiregen started a new division to produce helmets and seat belts. Kangol went on to become the largest seat belt manufacturer in Europe. In 1964, Kangol made a deal with The Beatles to make their branded hats. Soon, Kangol hats were popular among American hip hop artists, too, and have since been sported by the likes of Grandmaster Flash, Madonna, Brad Pitt, and Princess Diana. The most famous wearer of Kangol hats is undoubtedly Samuel L. Jackson, who has said that it’s a family tradition going back to his grandfather. Spreiregen retired from the company in 1972. Just a few years later, it would officially become the world’s largest hatmaker. Because Americans would often ask for the “kangaroo” hats when shopping, Kangol made their logo a kangaroo in 1983, a year after Spreiregen passed away.

14 Facts You Should Know About the Book of Psalms

The Caesar Who Saved Judaism

Words of the Week

The real danger of antisemitism is not what others think of us, but what it makes us think of ourselves.
– Rabbi Manis Friedman

Jew of the Week: Milton Friedman

The Great Liberator

Milton Friedman (1912-2006) was born in Brooklyn to poor Jewish immigrants from what is today Ukraine (then part of Hungary). He graduated high school at just 15 and earned a big scholarship to Rutgers University. Initially wishing to be a mathematician, the Great Depression inspired Friedman to become an economist instead. After post-graduate studies at the University of Chicago, and a fellowship at Columbia University, Friedman headed to Washington to work as an economist for the government. To help pay for World War II, it was Friedman who introduced the payroll withholding tax system (“pay-as-you-earn”), where income taxes are deducted automatically from an employee’s paycheck. (Friedman later regretted it very much and said he wished it hadn’t been necessary.) He also spent much of the war working on weapons design and military statistics. He finally earned his Ph.D from Columbia after the war, following which he took a professorship at the University of Chicago, where he taught for the next 30 years. He wrote a popular weekly column for Newsweek, for which he won a prestigious award. His 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom was an international bestseller and made Friedman world-famous, while his A Monetary History of the United States became the standard textbook for understanding the Great Depression and the effects of monetary policy. Friedman argued passionately for a free-market economy and for the government to stay out of business. He proposed such important concepts as the permanent income hypothesis, the quantity theory of money, floating exchange rates, sequential sampling, and the natural rate of unemployment. He also argued for abolishing the Federal Reserve, whom he blamed for many economic ills. He was opposed to minimum wages and foresaw that they would actually lead to increases in unemployment. He is also credited with bringing an end to America’s military draft, transitioning the US military into an all-volunteer paid army. He believed conscription was unethical and prevented young men from choosing their own life path. Friedman later said abolishing the draft was his greatest and proudest accomplishment. Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976. After retiring from the University of Chicago the following year, he continued to do research in San Francisco, and also worked on a popular ten-part TV show called Free to Choose (the companion text of which was the bestselling nonfiction book of 1980). Friedman was an economic advisor to Ronald Reagan, and was called the “guru” of the Reagan administration. In 1988, he won a National Medal of Science and a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Friedman stayed busy until his final days, and his last article for The Wall Street Journal was published a day after his death! He has been called “the Great Liberator” and has been compared to Adam Smith. The Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty is named after him. He is widely considered one of history’s most significant economists. Today was his yahrzeit.

The End of World War I and the Beginning of the Jewish State

Words of the Week

A society that aims for equality before liberty will end up with neither equality nor liberty.
– Milton Friedman