By Rabbi Yoseph Kahanov Jax, FL
When Robert A. Rockaway, a recognized authority on Jewish-American history, decided to chronicle the story of the Jewish mob, he sought out Jewish old-timers in order to gather information on this less than reputable element.
Rockaway even interviewed his own mother, a native of Detroit, Michigan, who personally knew some friends and family members of the nefarious subjects of his research.
Once, while talking to his mother about the reprehensible conduct of a particular mobster, his mother stopped him short in his tracks: “All that you say may be fine and good, no one said the guy was a saint. Between you and me, he was known to have made a few people disappear. . . But you shouldn’t rush to judgment. Don’t forget that he was always kind to his mother! Does that count for nothing? Trust me; the man was a real Mentch!”
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No great, inspiring culture of the future can be built upon the moral principle of relativism. For at its bottom such a culture holds that nothing is better than anything else, and that all things are in themselves equally meaningless. Except for the fragments of faith (in progress, in compassion, in conscience, in hope) to which it still clings, illegitimately, such a culture teaches every one of its children that life is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing – Michael Novak