How One Rabbi Made Florida a Financial Capital and Reformed U.S. Criminal Justice

He escaped the Soviet Union in a suitcase

Rabbi Shalom Lipskar visiting a prisoner as part of his work with Aleph. Via YouTube.

One of the running themes here at The Editors is about capital and talent (Ken Griffin, Sylvester Stallone, Sean Hannity, Jeff Bezos, Billy Joel, Tom Brady, Lionel Messi, Carl Icahn, Paul Tudor Jones, Donald Trump; many of these links are to FutureOfCapitalism.com, which was a predecessor site to The Editors) moving to zero-state-income-tax Florida from higher-tax New York, Illinois, Washington, California, and Massachusetts. I have a Google alert set up to scour the news for “move to Florida” and send me the headlines.

The Florida story, though, isn’t just about taxes and regulations or weather. It’s about people and culture and community. And so while the world’s religious-news attention is focused on the new pope in Rome, it’s worth pausing, too, to remember Rabbi Shalom Ber Lipskar, who died earlier this month at age 78 after a remarkable and consequential career. He deserves some of the credit for helping to establish South Florida as a new financial capital. He also played an important role in criminal justice reform.