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ESPN’s Jeff Passan opens up on his Hebrew school upbringing, interviewing Sandy Koufax and Jewish baseball history
(JTA) — For tuned-in baseball fans, Jeff Passan is everywhere. As ESPN’s senior MLB insider, he frequently breaks some of the sport’s biggest news and appears on several of the global sports network’s television, radio and podcast programs.
After two decades of reporting, can anything make him nervous? There is one athlete who does: Jewish legend Sandy Koufax.
“Generally speaking, when I’m talking to people, I’ll call them by their first name. He was Mr. Koufax,” Passan told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the pitcher he once wrote a paper about for Hebrew school.
While a columnist for Yahoo! Sports, Passan spent about four years reporting his 2016 New York Times best-selling book “The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports,” a deep-dive into pitching and the epidemic of what’s known in the sport as Tommy John surgery, or ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction.
Koufax, known for his on-the-field dominance and his refusal to pitch on Yom Kippur during the 1965 World Series, walked away from baseball at only 30 years old because of injury. So as Passan began work on his book, he knew he needed to talk to Koufax.
Koufax is famously private, and securing a rare interview wasn’t easy — Passan enlisted fellow Jewish writer Jane Leavy, Koufax’s biographer, who put in a good word for him. When the time came to talk, Passan said it was the most nervous he’s ever been for an interview.
“I was in awe the whole time,” Passan said in a phone interview from Arizona, where he’s covering spring training.
Koufax’s pitching prowess aside, Passan praised the principled stance the former Dodger took all those years ago.
“The way that he represented himself, the way he honored Judaism, and, when it was an incredibly difficult thing, stuck by what mattered to him, I think that’s applicable across religions, across cultures, across backgrounds,” Passan said. “If you feel passionate about who you are, and something is important to you, even when it’s uncomfortable, you should stand by it. That’s exactly what he did. I have an undying amount of respect for him for both doing that and just for the way that he has and continues to carry himself.”
A Cleveland native, Passan fell in love with both baseball and writing at a young age. His father, Rich, worked at the Plain Dealer for 42 years, and Passan said he got his first byline at 14 years old. He would go on to cover sports at Syracuse University, the Fresno Bee, the Kansas City Star, Yahoo! Sports and, since 2019, at ESPN.
Passan, 42, grew up in a Conservative Jewish household, attending Hebrew school three times a week. He said he considers himself a “cultural Jew” — noting that his wife is Catholic and they are raising their kids without religion.
“I look at religion now as being a really important thing for lots of people, but the sort of thing that for me and my family, we’d like for our children to be a little more worldly until, or if, they decide to choose to go the religious route,” he said.
Jeff Passan at his bar mitzvah, Oct. 9, 1993. (Courtesy of Passan)
Passan said he and his family celebrate Hanukkah — he’s a big fan of latkes — and he fasts on Yom Kippur. And then there’s Jewish geography.
“When I run into someone who’s Jewish, even though I’m not particularly religious, and he or she may not be particularly religious, there’s still a connection there because of how we were raised and the things that you learn growing up a Jew,” he said. “If there’s one thing that I look at with regret that my kids don’t have, because we’re not raising them Jewish, it’s that.”
That instant connection is present in the press box, too.
“We know who we are,” Passan said. “There was one World Series where I think there were like seven or eight Jewish writers sitting in a row. And we said all we need is a few more and we got a minyan here.”
Passan said he also feels that camaraderie with Jewish players — especially those who play for Team Israel during the World Baseball Classic, which is coming up next month.
“It’s different than Team USA or the Dominican Republic or Venezuela,” he said. “It’s a cultural team. It’s a team that’s often based around your religion or the religion in your family, and I think that makes it a unique group of players who may not have that same connection or that same feel to Israel, but they have that shared experience of being Jewish and knowing what that entails.”
The presence of Jewish talent in Major League Baseball — and on Team Israel, which features more big leaguers this year than ever before — is noticeably greater than it has been in years. The 2021 World Series, which featured four Jewish players, is a prime example.
“I think it’s just another way to illustrate that we can be everything,” Passan said. “If you are growing up and you want to be a rabbi, that’s wonderful. If you’re growing up and you want to get into media, that avenue is there for you. And if you’re growing up and want to be a baseball player, there are no limitations. The history of Jewish baseball players, while not extensive, is nevertheless rich.”
And what is it, exactly, about baseball that has endeared the sport to American Jews for so long? Passan has some theories.
First, he noted the historical significance New York has held in both baseball and American Judaism. For a period in the early-to-mid 20th century, New York was home to three MLB teams — the Yankees, Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants.
“As Jews, we really gravitate toward things that have history and substance,” Passan said. “Baseball being so big in the emergence of sporting culture in the United States, there’s a gravitas to that, there’s an import to that, that I think Jews really are attracted to.”
The other aspect that has bonded Jews and baseball, Passan said, is its shared culture of family tradition.
“It’s something that can be passed on from fathers and mothers to sons and daughters,” he said. “Family is such a vital part of being Jewish. Just as we pass down customs and traditions, sports are among those customs and traditions and baseball is a generational sport.”
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The post ESPN’s Jeff Passan opens up on his Hebrew school upbringing, interviewing Sandy Koufax and Jewish baseball history appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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What I learned from 180 pounds of Yiddish books, one ‘interesting and complicated’ Jewish man, and Jorge Luis Borges
I’ve never met Harris Saltzberg, but one day last summer, I went to his house to abduct 180 pounds of his Yiddish books. He lived in a sturdy brown-brick co-op in Chelsea. In the lobby, there was Roz Chastian aroma of long-simmered onions and mothballs, with a subtle undertone of feet.
I took the elevator to the eleventh floor. Once I’d infiltrated Harris’ apartment, I began to get a sense of his personality. From the posters on the kitchen walls, I deduced that Harris liked Van Gogh and Martha Graham. From his box of cassette tapes, I got a taste of his cultured, klezmer-forward musical palate: Puccini Famous Arias sat next to Miriam Kressyn’s Yiddish Folk Songs. Pavarotti and Marilyn Horne kept company with Sidor Belarsky and Jennie Goldstein.
Before I go further, I should clarify: I did not burglarize Harris’ house. I was there as a “zamlerin,” a volunteer collector and schlepper of Yiddish books for the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass. I joined the international legion, some 160-zamlers-strong, at the end of a summer internship at the Center two years ago. Since then, every few months or so, I get a call or an email from an older Jew. Some Yiddish books have fallen into their hands, or maybe the books have been in the family for a long time. We tend to meet at their houses. (Once, though, I met a guy at his synagogue and sat through a full service for the first time in Hashem-knows-how-long.)
Wherever we meet, the pass-off process always feels ceremonial, more like the adoption of a child than the transfer of objects. We schmooze a bisl in Yiddish, a bisl in English while we load up the books, stacking them inside cardboard boxes like a game of 3D tetris. Sometimes, like a Yiddish-speaking Neanderthal, I’ll sound out the title of a book, and my host will light up like an electric menorah, turn the book over, rub its spine up and down, and tell me all about it. This? Oh, that’s Di Yeshiva. See, you can even see Chaim Grade’s autograph on the inside flap. That? Oh, that’s the Yiddish Kalevala. Naturally.
But zamling for Harris was different from zamling for other people, because for one thing, Harris was dead. His niece told me that Harris’ close friend, Andy, would be there to help me pack up the books. Andy was waiting in the lobby when I got there. He was a tall and weathered man of Irish extraction, about 75. His hooded blue eyes and the smoke on his deep, gravelly voice gave me the impression that he’d seen a lot in his time, like a hardbitten reporter in a noir novel. Except, Andy clarified, he was actually in publishing.
He didn’t say much after that.
Harris’ Yiddish bookshelf was right by the front door, so while I did a preliminary inventory, ooing and cooing in a way that would have annoyed me if another person were doing it, Andy shuffled through Harris’ living room and kitchen, shifting his chairs, stacking his dishware, emptying his cabinets. Even with Harris gone for months, the apartment hadn’t lost the ascetic spareness that only monks and longtime bachelors seem capable of cultivating. Dust had already settled over the few wooden tables and shelves. The rugs looked frayed, and a thin white light seeped into the room from in between the vertical blinds. There was a bottle of Cinzano Rosso sitting on the kitchen counter, forever half-finished. It seemed like a place Bernard Malamud might have cooked up for a story about an erudite bachelor character.
But what sort of erudite bachelor, exactly? Before I’d come over, I’d found a few clues on the internet. A Facebook obituary from Camp Kinderland described Harris as “an interesting and complicated person,” adding that he was “often very funny, often thoughtful and generous and warm.” He sounded prickly-sweet, not unlike a jackfruit. I’d also found a LinkedIn profile for one Harris Saltzberg who described his job as “Observer of aging,” employed at “Life.” That sounded about right.
But it was the books that brought Harris into focus. On the shelf, I found at least three Yiddish textbooks. “Harris was insecure about his Yiddish,” Andy told me later, when we were lugging boxes to the lobby. But from the looks of it, he shouldn’t have been. He had the big names on his shelf — Y.L. Peretz, Mendele Mocher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem (who, by the way, is so abundant at the Yiddish Book Center that you can sometimes get a copy of his collected works for free). But Harris was hardcore. He was a proper Yiddish junkie; he’d bought books that would have been challenging to get through even in English, like Klassenkamfn in Altertum, Class Struggles in Antiquity, by a man named Kalman Marmor. He’d collected landsmanshaft periodicals from tiny Besarabbian shtetls, school almanacs from 1929, an instructional book on Yiddish stenography, song books, and one baffling, proto-woke rhyming tale about a white thug with notably sharp elbows (“sharfn elboygn”) who torments a Black boy with sad eyes (“troyerike oygen”).
Sometimes, I would find signs of a bygone reader— maybe Harris, maybe somebody else —scrawled on a book’s inside cover, or tucked away on a scrap of paper. “To Rivke with Love — May you two get well acquainted!” wrote Manya on Jan. 30, 1959. I found grocery lists, and one detailed pencil sketch of a dog. I found a scrap of paper where Harris had scrawled in cursive ciphers, “Tammy Baker,” “Uniforms,” and something that might have been “human want,” or maybe “human meat.”
I had never met Harris and never would. But even as I stuffed the boxes to busting, I felt reluctant to throw anything out. When somebody is alive, odd bobs like scratch paper are replaceable junk. But when somebody is gone, everything becomes evidence that they lived. Maybe that is why Harris saved all those periodicals from towns that could no longer be found on any map, advertisements for pamphlets of essays and satire by long-dead Jews in the Bronx, stenography manuals, children’s books. So long as even one witness to a fading world remained, that world wouldn’t truly be gone.
There is a story by Jorge Luis Borges called “The Witness,” or “El Testigo” that I have thought about several times since visiting Harris’ apartment. It is about the last pagan in England. As church bells ring, he lies dying in a stable in the shadow of a new stone church. This man is the last living person to remember worshipping the wooden idol of the pagan god Woden. “Before dawn he would be dead and with him would die, never to return, the last firsthand images of the pagan rites,” Borges writes. “The world would be poorer when this Saxon was no more.”
In the moment, though, I was not thinking much about books beyond how many of them I could cram into one box. As Andy and I hauled the book boxes down to an extremely patient Uber driver — six boxes total, around 30 pounds each — he told me how Harris had loved opera. He talked about his own two brothers, and about his upcoming trip to the motherland, Donegal, which he taught me to pronounce “Don-ee-GAL.” In the car to the UPS store, we kvetched about how hungry we were. At the curb, he helped me unload the boxes. Then he bent down and hugged me goodbye. I was sorry to see him go. I wondered if we would ever see each other again.
It’s been over a year since that day. Harris’ apartment probably belongs to someone else now, and as for the books, they are living a literally chilled-out retirement in the temperature-controlled vaults of the Yiddish Book Center. I wonder whose fingers will touch those pages next. And whose will be the last. After all, Borges muses, there is a last for everything. There was a day when the last eyes to see Christ closed forever. When the last man to have loved Helen of Troy died. When the last person to remember the Battle of Junín was buried. “Something, or an infinite number of things, dies in each death,” he writes. “What will die with me when I die?”
The post What I learned from 180 pounds of Yiddish books, one ‘interesting and complicated’ Jewish man, and Jorge Luis Borges appeared first on The Forward.
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With Marine Le Pen on the right and Defiant France on the left, French Jews face an impossible choice
Marine Le Pen is back. And once again, the French Republic and the democratic values it represents, has its back against the wall.
On Wednesday, the judges of a French appeals court reached something of a Solomonic decision. On the one hand, they confirmed the ruling of a lower court that Le Pen, for more than a decade, oversaw the funneling of several million euros, meant for her European Parliament staff, to her political party, the extreme-right National Rally. On the other hand, they shortened the length of her ineligibility to run for political office, thus allowing her to join the fray for next year’s presidential election.
Much can be said about the consequences of this decision. First, there is the stunningly brazen legal dimension. Just as Donald Trump was the first convicted felon to be elected president of the United States, Le Pen — who leads other announced candidates by at least 10% in opinion polls — stands a very good chance to be the first convicted felon, on far more serious charges than Trump’s, to become president of France. (Two earlier presidents of the Fifth Republic, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, were also found guilty of embezzlement, but only after their presidential terms ended.)
No less significant are the political ramifications. Le Pen’s announcement that nothing will stop her from running in turn stopped Jordan Bardella, her young protégé and president of the National Rally, dead in his tracks. Dismissed as an empty, though always svelte and shiny suit, Bardella proved to be, to Le Pen’s growing discontent, more popular in opinion polls than his mentor. Poised to run in her stead, this young man in a hurry, and with neither practical experience nor university education, was suddenly benched.
It is too early to predict how this will play out. On Wednesday, in their first public appearance together since the court’s ruling, Bardella, standing a few steps behind Le Pen, looked less like a partner than a prop while she bathed in the crowd’s attention. Adding to the tension are policy differences that had begun to appear between Le Pen and Bardella, with the former hewing to her populist image and Bardella leaning towards the traditional right. Tellingly, Le Pen supports the recent rollback of the retirement age to 62, while Bardella seems, like others on the traditional right, to prefer raising the age as high as 67.
More important, Le Pen’s entry may well turn the 2027 election into a choice between equally dismal options. For months, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the turbulent tribune of the extreme-left Defiant France, has portrayed himself as the one figure who can save the republic from Le Pen. In the latest IFOP poll, Mélenchon stands an even chance to finish in second place in the first round of the election. This will mean that for the two-thirds of French voters still allergic to Le Pen, they will have nowhere to go after the second round except to the leader of a party that has repeatedly flirted with antisemitism.
This brings us, finally, to the historical significance of this event. The National Rally is, of course, the party formerly known as the Front National. Equally obvious, the latter, founded by Marine’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was a gaggle of goose-steppers, antisemites, and apologists for Vichy, the collaborationist regime which did its bit for the Final Solution. (By the time he died last year, Le Pen père, who coined the infamous line that the Final Solution was a “detail of history,” had racked up multiple guilty verdicts for Holocaust denial and inciting race hatred.)
Her father’s notorious verbal dérapages, or excesses, finally led his daughter, who had slapped a new coat of paint on the party by renaming it soon after her father gave her the keys, to banish her father from its fold. Undeniably, Le Pen’s relentless pursuit of a policy of “dédiabolisation” or “detoxification,” has largely rid the party of its Nazi-adjacent followers. (As part of this renovation, the more than one hundred National Front representatives who sit on the far-right in the National Assembly — by far the largest parliamentary party — always wear business attire. This makes for a striking contrast with their Defiant France colleagues, who tend to dress as my students do.)
But a bespoke suit does not mean one is not still beholden to racism. Le Pen and Bardella have labored to distance their party from its rancid and racist origin, most recently reflected in the latter’s controversial visit last year to Israel, where he spoke at a sparsely attended conference on antisemitism. (Many of the invitees, upon learning that Bardella would attend, snubbed the event.)
No less contentious was Le Pen’s decision for her party to join the march against antisemitism two years earlier in Paris, along with her vow that the National Rally would serve as the “bouclier,” or shield to protect French Jews. She did not say against whom her party would shield French Jews, but there was no need to: All of France understood who she meant. For her party, the Jew is no longer, if only for now, the dreaded other who threatens the unity and purity of the French people. The Arab or Muslim now fills that role. Hence the party’s insistent demand for a constitutional amendment for “la préférence nationale,” which would limit an array of social privileges to French citizens, as well as the consistent drumbeat of racist and xenophobic declarations on the part of its rank and file.
Apologists for Marshal Philippe Pétain, the leader of Vichy France, insisted that he too served as his nation’s shield against Nazi Germany. They conveniently forgot, of course, that this shield was used to separate French Jews from their non-Jewish compatriots. Between now and next year’s presidential election, the French will have time enough to reflect on the promise, or threat, of a party whose origins warn us against those who use shields to clobber those they decide do not belong to a nation.
The post With Marine Le Pen on the right and Defiant France on the left, French Jews face an impossible choice appeared first on The Forward.
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Graham Platner may be gone, but his Nazi tattoo is not fading away
(JTA) — Why did it take sexual assault allegations to collapse Graham Platner’s Maine Senate campaign when the Nazi-linked tattoo was there all along?
Progressive lawmakers, Jewish leaders and conservative commentators posed the question in dozens of exasperated iterations in the hours after Platner announced Wednesday evening that he would suspend his race amid allegations reported by Politico Monday that he had raped a former girlfriend.
“Graham Platner has dropped out of the Maine Senate race amid serious sexual assault allegations,” the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, wrote in a post on X. “But leaders should not have needed another scandal to act. The Nazi tattoo should have been enough.”
Platner, who won his Democratic primary in June on an anti-Israel progressive platform, faced mounting calls to leave the race after the Politico story ran from Democratic groups and progressive leaders who had formerly supported him, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. (Platner has denied the allegations.)
But others argued that those backers should have pulled their endorsements months earlier after it surfaced in October that he had a chest tattoo of a Totenkopf, a Nazi-era skull-and-crossbones design favored by SS officers.
At the time, Platner claimed that he had gotten the tattoo while “inebriated” as a young adult when he was on shore leave from a tour of duty in Iraq, without knowing what it meant. A number of people who knew him before his political ascent, including at least one of the women who accused him of sexual misbehaviour, said he had been aware of the symbol’s provenance. When the revelations emerged, he covered up the skull with a Celtic knot.
His campaign had dismissed as irrelevant noise the backlash the tattoo revelation received, as well as criticism over allegations that he had deployed race and gender stereotypes in the past as irrelevant noise.
“I said, ‘None of this will or should stop him from becoming a U.S. senator,’” Daniel Moraff, a progressive strategist who had headhunted Platner, told The Wall Street Journal last month, before the Politico revelations, about Reddit posts that included homophobic and ableist epithets unearthed in the vetting process. The firm that vetted Platner did not uncover anything about his Nazi tattoo, Moraff said.
The tattoo didn’t seem to be a dealbreaker for voters, either, since he coasted to victory in the June primary after his primary opponent, Gov. Janet Mills, suspended her candidacy in late April, saying her campaign could not afford to continue.
Now the Maine Democratic Party is considering replacements for the disgraced candidate, but the question of why his backers ignored warning signs still looms.
Brian Romick, the president and CEO of the Democratic Majority for Israel, told JTA in a statement that he didn’t understand why progressives had supported “a candidate with so many obvious red flags, including an allegation of sexual assault and a Nazi tattoo.”
And Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, which did not endorse Platner, told the Forward ahead of Platner’s exit that “a lesson for Democrats is that we shouldn’t compromise.”
“There were red flags about Platner from the outset,” Soifer said. “They just continued to compound on each other as more stories came out. But the Nazi tattoo for us alone was one too many.”
On Tuesday, New Jersey Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer argued that warning signs had been apparent long before the latest allegation.
“I said it in June: Nothing about this guy was right. From the first abuse allegations to his Nazi tattoo, the red flags were there. His endorsers just chose to accept them,” Gottheimer wrote in a post on X.
New York State Sen. Julia Salazar, a Democratic Socialist, also argued that supporters had made a mistake by overlooking Platner’s tattoo.
“Sorry to the well-intentioned people who made the mistake of supporting this guy. But: having a Nazi tattoo doesn’t pass the sniff test for running for US Senate, nor did his excuses. And far worse that he faces a credible allegation of rape,” Salazar wrote in a post on X.
Jewish Republicans said the Democratic response to Platner’s campaign was too late.
“I didn’t support Graham Platner as soon [as] we all learned he’s a Nazi,” Republican Max Abrahms, a political scientist focusing on terrorism, wrote in a post on X. “For the Democratic Party his being a Nazi wasn’t disqualifying. They viewed it as an asset. Platner matters politically for what he says about mainstream Democrats.”
The Republican Jewish Coalition also took aim at Democratic leaders who had stood by Platner earlier in the race.
“American Jews will never forget that leading Democrats chose to stand with Graham Platner KNOWING FULL WELL THAT HE HAD A NAZI SS CONCENTRATION CAMP GUARD TATTOO,” the group wrote in a post on X. “There is only ONE party where American Jews can be proudly Jewish and loudly pro-Israel: @Republicans.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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