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Jerry Izenberg covered 53 Super Bowls. His memoir covers his Jewish Newark upbringing.
(JTA) — Over the course of an illustrious 72-year career as a newspaper reporter, Jerry Izenberg has just about seen it all.
The longtime columnist for The Star-Ledger in Newark, New Jersey, Izenberg covered the first 53 Super Bowls. He’s been to 58 Kentucky Derbies, not to mention numerous Olympics, World Cups and boxing matches. He considered Muhammad Ali a close personal friend.
But the fiery 92-year-old, who still contributes to the paper as a columnist emeritus from his home in Nevada, doesn’t approve of the term “journalist.” He’s a newspaperman.
He dropped the name of Samuel Pepys, the 17th-century British diarist, as a contrast.
“Every day he took his big diary, and he wrote what he did this day, what he was planning to do later — that’s a journalist,” Izenberg told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I’m not in my world. I’m in the world of other people trying to interpret and to repeat what values they have or what lack thereof they have.”
Izenberg’s latest story breaks that rule. His 17th book, which hits shelves on Monday, is a memoir about his Jewish upbringing in Newark. Titled “Baseball, Nazis, and Nedick’s Hot Dogs: Growing Up Jewish in the 1930s in Newark,” the memoir centers on Izenberg’s relationship with his father Harry, a World War I veteran and former minor league baseball player who passed on his love of the sport to his son.
Izenberg’s father emigrated to the United States as a child, leaving Lithuania with his family to escape anti-Jewish pogroms. As his sportswriter son recounts it, Harry discovered baseball even before he could speak English.
The Izenbergs’ love of baseball transcended all. When Jerry got his first baseball glove at ten years old, it was a milestone that in his father’s eyes surpassed even his bar mitzvah. (Maybe unsurprisingly, Izenberg would later skip bar mitzvah tutoring to play baseball after school.)
“He had given me a lifetime gift — a simple game and a simple shared love for it,” Izenberg writes in the memoir. “It remains there, bright and shining in memory eighty-three years later. In the soul of my memory, I see our kind of shared love of baseball again. It never fades.”
Jerry Izenberg and his father Harry shared a bond over baseball. (Book cover courtesy of The Sager Group, LLC; photograph courtesy of Jerry Izenberg)
The pair’s passion for baseball was closely intertwined with their Judaism. Growing up in Newark in the 1930s and 40s, Izenberg was a fan of the New York Giants baseball team (which left for San Francisco after the 1957 season). They featured a lineup filled with Jewish players: Harry Danning, Harry Feldman and Sid Gordon.
But in the pantheon of Jewish baseball during Izenberg’s childhood, there was a clear king, and — much to the chagrin of Izenberg’s father — he played in Detroit. Hank Greenberg, the greatest Jewish hitter in baseball history, was at the peak of his Tigers career from 1935-1940, winning two most valuable player awards on his way to the Hall of Fame.
At the Izenbergs’ dinner table, there were only a few select topics that were allowed to be discussed: baseball and the Nazis.
In 1938, Greenberg was chasing all-time great Babe Ruth’s single-season record of 60 home runs, which Ruth had set in 1927 with the Yankees. Greenberg would ultimately reach 58 homers, falling just short of history, while drawing several walks in the season’s final games.
“My dad was convinced that was antisemitism,” Izenberg said. “And I said to him, later on when I got into the business and I knew people, ‘did it ever occur to you that the guys who pitched against him didn’t want to be the guy who threw his 60th home run ball? They’d be linked to him forever.’ My father said, ‘That’s an interesting theory, but you’re full of crap.’”
Of all the anecdotes Izenberg shares of his memories with his father, one non-sports related scene stands out. And it has to do with that second dinner table topic.
One Saturday in 1939, Izenberg and his father went to the Newsreel Theatre in Newark, where audiences gathered to watch news and sports highlights of the week. That day, the theater showed footage of the infamous Madison Square Garden rally held by the German-American Bund, the American Nazi organization.
Izenberg remembers leaving the theater with his father, who was visibly angry. His father talked about how the Nazis — or, as he called them, mamzers, Yiddish slang for “bastards” — had to be stopped.
“I’m an 8-year-old kid, and I say, ‘But dad, they’re in Germany,’” Izenberg recalled. “And he looks at me, he says, ‘They’re not in Germany, they’re here.’ And he was right.” Indeed, following Hitler’s rise to power, Nazi-sympathizers could be seen marching down Newark’s streets.
The move theater incident is illustrated on the book’s cover — and was followed by a frequent father-son ritual: getting hot dogs at the popular chain Nedick’s.
To Izenberg, the virulent antisemitism of his youth — including the Bund, the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan and the rise of Father Charles Coughlin, the antisemitic “radio priest” — is a corollary for the current state of antisemitism, which is again on the rise in the United States, punctuated, he said, by the 2017 antisemitic white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, which he blames on former President Donald Trump.
Izenberg said he doesn’t believe any law can force people to love or even like one another, but that “you could legislate people and pressure people into keeping their damn mouth shut.”
He went on: “And for 30 years, we had that. We got relief from antisemitism… And then one day in Charlottesville, that son of a bitch gave them the license to say whatever they want. And that was a trigger that lit the flame of antisemitism, which then began to grow all at once. It was always in their minds. But it was not fashionable. They made it fashionable.”
Despite the anti-Jewish sentiment that was ever-present in his youth, Izenberg said he has not faced antisemitism in his journalism career. As a columnist who has covered just about every sport, Izenberg has received his fair share of criticism — most notably having his car windows smashed by two men who did not approve of Izenberg’s defense of Muhammad Ali, when at the height of his career the boxer stirred controversy with his support for the Nation of Islam and his refusal to enlist in the military.
Jerry Izenberg, right, and boxer Muhammad Ali were close personal friends. (The Private Collection of Jerry Izenberg)
Izenberg has written about social issues frequently throughout his career — especially race relations — a tendency that he said is inspired by the value of “tikkun olam,” or repairing the world. It’s an idea he learned from Rabbi Joachim Prinz, the famous activist leader who spoke just before Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington.
After leaving Nazi Germany, Prinz settled in Newark, on the same block as the Izenbergs. He would become a close family friend, and even offered to help Izenberg prepare for his bar mitzvah, despite the fact that his family belonged to a different synagogue.
Izenberg said he is guided by tikkun olam, “because I know [Prinz would] want me to keep it in the back of my mind, and my father would, too.”
“I’ve always tried not to fix the world — I don’t overrate myself that much — but I could fix the little part of it, the space that I take up,” he added. “And my job was a pathway to that.”
Izenberg’s decades-long career in sports journalism has earned him numerous accolades, including induction into 17 different halls of fame, among them the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame and the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame.
Along the way, he’s worked with and alongside a number of notable journalists, including ESPN reporter Jeremy Schaap, who previously hosted “Classic Sports Reporters,” for which he invited veteran sportswriters like Izenberg on the show to discuss various topics from sports history.
“For someone like me who really treasures that art form, Jerry was one of its master practitioners, and he’s still doing it, which is amazing,” Schaap told JTA.
Schaap hailed the breadth of Izenberg’s career, which he said epitomized the kind of big-city sports columnist that has become increasingly rare in the digital age.
“He’s a maniac, there’s no other way to put it,” Schaap said with a laugh. “All those Super Bowls, all those fights… the energy, the enthusiasm, the passion, all those things, in addition to the skills, makes him unique and has made him unique for decades.”
Schaap added that he and Izenberg shared a sort of unspoken bond over their Jewishness, and that Izenberg has taught Schaap a few Yiddishisms over the years. Izenberg’s tendency to slip Yiddish into his prose is evident in the memoir, from a comical retelling of his bris in the prologue to the frequent frustrated “genug” (“enough”) he heard from his mother as a child.
Ultimately, Izenberg said his parents represent the tachlis — the bottom line — of the memoir, and what he hopes readers take away from it. Izenberg said writing the memoir was cathartic for him, and that it even serves as a sort of love letter to his father.
“We were not, you know, ‘I love you dad,’” Izenberg said. “We were very respectful, but we didn’t express it. I tried to express it in this book. I hope I did.”
The release of Izenberg’s memoir is in no way a sign that the nonagenarian is slowing down. Even though he claims he works less than he used to, Izenberg said he plans to write six columns about next weekend’s Kentucky Derby.
He already has plans for his next few books, too — including a biography of New Jersey’s own Larry Doby, who was the second Black player in the MLB and first in the American League.
“I’ve had a great life, and I’m having a great life, but I ain’t done yet,” Izenberg said.
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The post Jerry Izenberg covered 53 Super Bowls. His memoir covers his Jewish Newark upbringing. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Netanyahu reveals prostate cancer treatment, says he hid diagnosis during Iran war
(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed on Friday that he had recently undergone treatment for early-stage prostate cancer, adding that he kept the diagnosis private amid the war with Iran.
“I requested to delay its publication by two months so that it would not be released at the height of the war, in order not to allow the Iranian terror regime to spread even more false propaganda against Israel,” Netanyahu wrote in a post on X.
The Israeli leader said the treatment “removed the problem and left no trace of it” and he was now in “excellent physical condition.”
The director of the Sharett Oncology Institute at Hadassah Medical Center, Aron Popovtzer, said in a video statement, that a routine medical examination following Netanyahu’s December 2024 prostate removal surgery had uncovered a 0.35-inch, early stage adenocarcinoma. Popovtzer said that Netanyahu had undergone radiation treatment “two and a half months ago,” ahead of the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran in late February, and that he had recently undergone a medical test that found the cancer had “disappeared.”
Netanyahu, 76, added that the tumor was “very common among men my age,” and that, upon examination, “it turned out to be a very early stage of a malignant tumor, with no spread or metastases whatsoever.”
The announcement of the Israeli leader’s diagnosis, which follows online rumors falsely speculating that he had died in March, comes as Israel approaches an election cycle expected in the next six months. Netanyahu’s approval ratings have remained volatile amid the Iran war, with Hebrew University reporting earlier this month that 10% of Israelis viewed the war as successful, while support for Netanyahu was at 34%.
Netanyahu signaled in his post that his health revelation should not cause anyone to doubt his ability to lead.
“You already know me,” Netanyahu wrote. “When I’m given information in time about a potential danger, I want to address it immediately. This is true on the national level and also on the personal level. That’s what I did.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Netanyahu reveals prostate cancer treatment, says he hid diagnosis during Iran war appeared first on The Forward.
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US Legal Adviser Says Iran War Justified by Tehran’s ‘Aggression’ Over Decades
US President Donald Trump points as he delivers a speech during the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) annual fundraising dinner in Washington, DC, US, March 25, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Ken Cedeno
The US State Department’s top lawyer has argued that President Donald Trump’s war with Iran was launched in self-defense and to defend US ally Israel, arguing the bombing campaign was not the start of a new war but the continuation of an ongoing conflict.
State Department Legal Adviser Reed Rubinstein made the arguments in a statement released days before a May 1 deadline for the Trump administration to obtain approval for the war from Congress under the 1973 War Powers Act or move to end it.
The US and Israel began air strikes on Iran on Feb. 28, killing Iran‘s then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and much of the country’s leadership in the initial attacks. Trump said at the time the strikes, which happened just days after inconclusive talks between US and Iranian negotiators, were aimed at destroying Iranian missiles and annihilating its navy and preventing Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Trump also urged Iranians to overthrow their government.
Many legal experts say the attacks were unjustified under the United Nations Charter, which states that member states must refrain from using force or the threat of force against other states except when force is authorized by the UN Security Council or used in self-defense.
The U.S. was “engaged in this conflict at the request of and in the collective self-defense of its Israeli ally, as well as in the exercise of the United States’ own inherent right of self-defense,” Rubinstein said, citing what he called “Iran‘s malign aggression over decades” since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, including attacks by Iranian proxies on US forces and Israel, Iranian missile strikes against Israel in 2024, and Tehran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.
“In truth, the United States is acting well within the recognized contours of international law relating to the use of force and self-defense,” he added.
Iran has long denied accusations by Western powers that it is seeking to develop nuclear weapons.
The statement, entitled “Operation Epic Fury and International Law,” was posted on the State Department’s website on Tuesday but, unlike most of the department’s statements, it was not sent to the media or published on official social media channels.
Iran responded to the US and Israeli attacks by launching missiles and drones against US targets, its Middle East neighbors, and shipping, snarling the vital Strait of Hormuz waterway. The war, which has sparked an energy shock and concerns about wider economic fallout, has been paused since an April 8 ceasefire.
Opinion polls show the war is unpopular with Americans, who have seen the prices of fuel, food, and other products jump during the past eight weeks. Reuters/Ipsos poll results released on Friday showed a clear majority of Americans blame Trump for surging gasoline prices, which are weighing on his Republican Party ahead of the midterm elections in November.
Rubinstein concluded the campaign that began in late February was “part of an armed conflict with Iran that has been ongoing for years” and said it was unnecessary to assess whether an Iranian attack on the US or an ally was imminent.
“The US has acted well within its international law obligations with respect to its use of force since operations began in late February. Iran, by contrast, has acted as any reasonable observer would have expected – lashing out against its neighbors, targeting Israeli civilians, murdering its own people, unlawfully closing the Strait of Hormuz, and wreaking havoc throughout the region,” Rubinstein said.
Congressional aides said Rubinstein’s statement was issued by the Trump administration likely to get ahead of a May 1 deadline to ask Congress to authorize the war. The War Powers Act says the US president must end any ongoing conflict after 60 days until he obtains that authorization to continue. A president can obtain a 30-day extension if he certifies in writing, to Congress, that the continuing use of armed force is necessary.
Democrats, who are in the minority in both chambers of Congress, have tried repeatedly since the war began to pass resolutions ending the conflict until Trump obtains congressional approval, but almost all Republicans have voted to block them.
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Pentagon Email Floats Suspending Spain From NATO, Other Steps Over Iran Rift, Source Says
Spanish soldiers take part in Exercise Dynamic Mariner 25 military drill training, which involves naval forces from several NATO members, at Retin beach, in the Atlantic Ocean, in Barbate, Spain, March 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jon Nazca
An internal Pentagon email outlines options for the United States to punish NATO allies it believes failed to support US operations in the war with Iran, including suspending Spain from the alliance and reviewing the US position on Britain’s claim to the Falkland Islands, a US official told Reuters.
The policy options are detailed in a note prepared by Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon‘s top policy adviser, who expressed frustration at some allies’ perceived reluctance or refusal to grant the United States access, basing, and overflight rights – known as ABO – for the Iran war, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the email.
Colby wrote that ABO is “just the absolute baseline for NATO,” according to the official, who added that the options were circulating at high levels in the Pentagon.
One option in the email envisions suspending “difficult” countries from important or prestigious positions at NATO, the official said.
President Donald Trump has harshly criticized NATO allies for not sending their navies to help open the Strait of Hormuz, which was closed to global shipping following the start of the air war on Feb. 28.
He has also declared he is considering withdrawing from the alliance.
“Wouldn’t you if you were me?” Trump asked Reuters in an April 1 interview, in response to a question about whether the US pulling out of NATO was a possibility.
But the email does not suggest that the United States do so, the official said. It also does not propose closing bases in Europe.
The official declined to say whether the options included a widely expected US drawdown of some forces from Europe, however.
Asked for comment on the email, Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson responded: “As President Trump has said, despite everything that the United States has done for our NATO allies, they were not there for us.”
“The War Department will ensure that the president has credible options to ensure that our allies are no longer a paper tiger and instead do their part. We have no further comment on any internal deliberations to that effect,” Wilson said.
Asked whether it is possible to suspend a NATO ally, a NATO official said that “NATO’s founding treaty does not foresee any provision for suspension of NATO membership.”
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION SEES EUROPEAN ‘SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT’
The US-Israeli war with Iran has raised serious questions about the future of the 76-year-old bloc and provoked unprecedented concern that the US might not come to the aid of European allies should they be attacked, analysts and diplomats say.
Britain, France, and others say that joining the US naval blockade would amount to entering the war, but that they would be willing to help keep the strait open once there was a lasting ceasefire or the conflict ended.
But Trump administration officials have stressed that NATO cannot be a one-way street.
They have expressed frustration with Spain, where the Socialist leadership said it would not allow its bases or airspace to be used to attack Iran. The United States has two important military bases in Spain: Naval Station Rota and Morón Air Base.
The policy options outlined in the email would be intended to send a strong signal to NATO allies with the goal of “decreasing the sense of entitlement on the part of the Europeans,” the official said, summarizing the email.
The option to suspend Spain from the alliance would have a limited effect on US military operations but a significant symbolic impact, the email argues.
The official did not disclose how the United States might pursue suspending Spain from the alliance.
“We do not work off emails. We work off official documents and government positions, in this case of the United States,” Spanish Prime Minister Sanchez said when asked about the report ahead of a meeting of European Union leaders in Cyprus to discuss topics including NATO‘s mutual assistance clause.
POSITION ON FALKLAND ISLANDS COULD BE RECONSIDERED
The memo also includes an option to consider reassessing US diplomatic support for longstanding European “imperial possessions,” such as the Falkland Islands near Argentina.
The State Department’s website states that the islands are administered by the United Kingdom but are still claimed by Argentina, whose libertarian President Javier Milei is a Trump ally.
Milei was upbeat about the prospects.
“We are doing everything humanly possible so that the Argentine Malvinas, the islands, the entire territory return to the hands of Argentina,” Milei said in a radio interview he posted on his X account on Friday.
“We’re making progress like never before.”
Britain and Argentina fought a brief war in 1982 over the islands after Argentina made a failed bid to take them. Some 650 Argentine soldiers and 255 British troops died before Argentina surrendered.
A spokesperson for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the sovereignty of the islands rests with Britain.
“Sovereignty rests with the UK and the islands’ right to self-determination is paramount. It’s been our consistent position and will remain the case,” the spokesperson told reporters on Friday.
Trump has repeatedly insulted Starmer, calling him cowardly because of his unwillingness to join the US war with Iran, saying he was “No Winston Churchill” and describing Britain’s aircraft carriers as “toys.”
Britain initially did not grant a request from the US to allow its aircraft to attack Iran from two British bases, but later agreed to allow defensive missions aimed at protecting residents of the region, including British citizens, amid Iranian retaliation.
Addressing reporters at the Pentagon earlier this month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said “a lot has been laid bare” by the war with Iran, noting that Iran‘s longer-range missiles cannot hit the United States but can reach Europe.
“We get questions, or roadblocks, or hesitations … You don’t have much of an alliance if you have countries that are not willing to stand with you when you need them,” Hegseth said.