The Story Behind the SI Burkini | What Happens When Your Face Gets Hacked?

Brooklyn native Avi Feldman is hoping to revive a population that, in official terms, does not legally exist.

Estimates of Iceland’s Jewish population range from zero to a couple hundred. The logic behind the exactness of zero is straightforward: Officially and legally, the government of Iceland doesn’t recognize Judaism as a religion. So, in the census tally, zero gets the final word.

Rabbi Avi Feldman, a tall, lanky 27-year-old with a tawny beard who hails from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, has made it his mission to raise the tally. It’s part of the fight against rising anti-Semitism, which flared up again last weekend at a California synagogue shooting, killing one and injuring several others on the final day of Passover. Feldman moved to Iceland late last year along with his wife, Mushky, and their three young daughters, and took up residence in a medium-size condo a block from Reykjavík Harbor.

Feldman’s move is historic because, since World War II, Iceland has not had a rabbi. Reykjavík was the only European capital to lack a permanent rabbi. Passover and the High Holidays, to the extent that they were celebrated at all here, were presided over by visiting rabbis.

Sports mutual funds and innovative peer-to-peer betting exchanges are offering a whole new asset class.

When sports betting mutual funds the Nevada Sports Investment Group and Contrarian Investments had complaints filed against them in September 2018 by the Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly violating federal securities laws by taking on unaccredited investors, it appeared to be a setback for a nascent industry. It was only two years earlier, in 2016, when more than a dozen sports betting mutual funds popped up in Nevada following the industry’s legalization there through the state’s Senate Bill 443 the previous year. But the funds’ run-in with the SEC was merely a blip for a larger industry that’s emerging in the form of new investment platforms and tools that are turning to sports gambling as a viable financial market for their clients across the country.

When you see model Halima Aden, everything you had heard that might have confused you before you saw her suddenly makes sense. You see, Aden, on first blush, is a 21-year-old former semi-finalist in the Miss Minnesota USA beauty pageant. This, in and of itself, is not especially noteworthy in an age that feels well beyond these types of contests.

But add in the fact that Aden is Somali-American, immigrating here when she was a kid from a United Nations refugee camp in Kenya, and things are a little more interesting. Mix in her scoring a gig in the also almost-past-it 2019 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and you have a pretty cool hand. Until the final card is played, and you see that she’s done so in a hijab and full-coverage burkini because she is Muslim, and boom — you have a royal flush of genius.