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Observant and proud to wear blue-and-white
By Ben Baruch, JNS Adam “AJ” Edelman — who expects to bobsleigh for Israel in this month’s Olympics in Iraly and is thought to be the first Orthodox Jew to compete in the Winter Olympics — started his Olympic journey in 2014 in Lake Placid with skeleton, a single-person sliding sport, not bobsleigh. “Skeleton was [a] bobsleigh qualification,” Edelman recalled. “No one was ever going to join me on the bobsled road or help fund it if I didn’t have a background to say ‘I’ve done it’.” Jewish bobsledders have competed, and won, for the United States at the Olympics. “They had such phenomenal success, but the impact could only be felt if it was [for] Israel,” he said. Edelman’s initial scouting report from his trial run at Lake Placid said that he would never make the Olympics. He would “get down the track, but that’ll be the most of it,” the report said. That lit an internal fire to qualify anyway. Despite saying how much he disliked skeleton, he qualified for the 2018 Olympics and finished 28th. He then quit the sport. But he had proven that Israel could qualify and compete in an Olympic sliding event. See Israel saved him on page 2
Adam (AJ) Edelman of Israel slides into the finish area during the men’s skeleton heats on day six of the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympic Games in South Korea. Matthias Hangst, Getty Images via JNS
YU student asks: How long will we be silent? YECHIEL AMAR YU Senior This column was published in The Commentator, a student newspaper at Yeshiva University. It was written before the fatal shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. et me paint you a picture: Masked soldiers conduct arrests with no warrants, based purely on the race or ethnicity of the victims. Said victims are then taken to mysterious facilities where they can be held for days, weeks or months in inhumane
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US Customs and Border Protection field officers guard a federal building during ICE deportation protests in Downtown Los Angeles. Matt Gush, Adobe
conditions with no access to any legal representation. No one who knows them is aware of where they are or what is being done to them. How long these people have been in the United States does not matter; neither does their criminal record or lack thereof. Their legal status to be in this country also does not count — even a citizen can fall victim. Journalists and protesters are vulnerable as well — the state will do anything to obfuscate and eliminate the truth. These acts are performed with impunity by the state. We are told they are national security measures necessary to make our nation great again. This description sounds like it might apply to events in a foreign au-
thoritarian state — North Korea or Russia, perhaps. But it’s happening right here, right now. Since Donald Trump returned to the presidency last year, his Department of Homeland Security, employing both ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and Border Patrol, has been working to achieve his goal of deporting 3,000 illegal immigrants a day, which adds up to over one-million a year. To achieve this, the DHS has engaged in a cruel and ruthless campaign to capture and deport as many people as they can in whatever way they can. They arrest parents picking up their children from schools, lay See YU student asks on page 3