Five-and-a-half-feet tall, weighing 160 pounds, and never having played the sport on a varsity team, Sam Salz in no way fits the mold of a college football player—especially at a NCAA football powerhouse like Texas A&M University. Even more unusually, Salz is an Orthodox Jew, who, because of the Sabbath, must sit out the majority of games. He was nonetheless able to convince the school’s coaches to let him on the team, having won them over with his enthusiasm and sense of commitment. Ari Wasserman writes:

Salz never hid his faith, proudly wearing his yarmulke and tzitzit, the head covering and the knotted fringes or tassels on the Jewish prayer shawl that serve as reminders of the 613 commandments in the Torah. But he was initially worried that the coaching staff wouldn’t be understanding of the time constraints of his religion and his need to eat only kosher food.

Texas A&M, though, accommodated Salz. He isn’t expected to participate in team activities on Jewish holidays. The first practice after he was invited onto the team fell on Yom Kippur, and he didn’t attend. The team nutritionist Tiffany Ilten makes sure Salz has access to kosher meals, which they get from a distributor in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. A microwave in the team facility reads “kosher food only.”

Added the former A&M wide receiver Ainias Smith, a fifth-round pick of the Eagles in the 2024 NFL draft: “We needed somebody like that on the team. Once people get here, it seems like everybody feels like they made it. His story motivates us to keep going.” Salz believes he is the only Orthodox Jewish player in college football. It’s not something that is tracked by the NCAA.

With so many ugly stories coming out about Jews’ experience on college campuses, it’s nice to have a good one.

At the moment, Hizballah’s superiors in Tehran probably aren’t giving much thought to the militia’s next move. More likely, they are focused on the fact that their country’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, along with the foreign minister, may have been killed in a helicopter crash near the Iran-Azerbaijan border. Iranians set off fireworks to celebrate the possible death of this man known as “butcher of Tehran” for his role in executing dissidents. Shay Khatiri explains what will happen next:

If the president is dead or unable to perform his duties for longer than two months, the first vice-president, the speaker of the parliament, and the chief justice, with the consent of the supreme leader, form a council to choose the succession mechanism. In effect, this means that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei will decide [how to proceed]. Either a new election is called, or Khamenei will dictate that the council chooses a single person to avoid an election in time of crisis.

Whatever happens next, however, Raisi’s “hard landing” will mark the first chapter in a game of musical chairs that will consume the Islamic Republic for months and will set the stage not only for the post-Raisi era, but the post-Khamenei one as well.

As for the inevitable speculation that Raisi’s death wasn’t an accident: everything I have read so far suggests that it was. Still, that its foremost enemy will be distracted by a succession struggle is good news for Israel. And it wouldn’t be terrible if Iran’s leaders suspect that the Mossad just might have taken out Raisi. For all their rhetoric about martyrdom, I doubt they relish the prospect of becoming martyrs themselves.