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Fighting antisemitism—and loving Star Trek—were Henry Wolfond’s rocket fuel to reach outer space

JL;DR SUMMARY Henry Wolfond, a Canadian Jewish business executive, recently fulfilled his lifelong dream of becoming an astronaut by flying on a Blue Origin commercial space flight. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski.

  • At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself.
  • This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude.
  • Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from.
  • But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
  • And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.
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Tags

HolocaustJewish IdentityJewish HeritageCommunity EngagementIsraeli HostagesBlue OriginHenry WolfondSpace FlightCommercial Space Travel

Places mentioned

Guelph, Ontario, Canada
"Wolfand grew up in Guelph, Ontario, where his grandparents helped found the synagogue Beth Isaiah."
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
"It was actually on Amazon owner Jeff Bezos' ranch, and they accelerated to nearly three times the speed of sound, rocketing 100 kilometers above the Earth just into outer space, past what's known as the Karman Line, where they had enough time for a few minutes for Wolfand and the others to take off their seatbelts and float around the cabin, experiencing weightlessness and taking in the view of the glowing Earth below."
Texas, United States
"That's what it sounded like last Friday in a patch of desert in Texas when a spacecraft capsule carrying Toronto businessman Henry Hank Wolfand and five other paying passengers in the capsule blasted off from the launch pad."
Israel
"Wolfand spent a year in high school studying in Israel, arriving the night before the 1973 Yom Kippur War broke out."
This podcast episode was indexed and curated by Cairo, JL;DR's web crawler.
Cairo Item ID 37208
Cairo Source ID 72
Retrieved 2024-11-28 05:30:40 UTC
Curated 2024-11-28 06:04:06 UTC