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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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AI, Judaism and what to do about ‘Fully-Automated Luxury Communism’
In the mid-2010s, journalist Aaron Bastani coined the phrase “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” arguing that automation, AI, and synthetic biology would eventually make work and material scarcity essentially obsolete. Eventually this idea became a manifesto envisioning a post-scarcity, post-capitalist world.
The Internet took notice, and by the summer of 2015, Bastani’s earnest manifesto had spawned millions of trollish variations (including my personal favorite, “Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism” — the ‘gay’ and ‘space’ parts pointing to different ways to deal with overpopulation on Earth). As such things usually are, the memes were half-joking, half-serious, pointing both to a utopian vision of the future and to the impossibility of ever achieving it.
Eleven years later, though, the utopia may be at hand — though, as we’ve all heard by now, it could be more of a dystopia.
We’ve all read the takes: AI is taking our jobs, data centers are polluting the heartland, and, oh yeah, there’s a 10% chance that rogue AI agents will wipe out life on Earth. Of these three very different risks, Mira Fox recently wrote about the third from a Jewish perspective, and many pundits have commented on the second. I want to focus on the first one — on what happens to society when the value and availability of work changes so radically,and on how Jewish traditions may end up being of value.
On, in other words, Fully Automated Luxury Jewish Communism.
Let’s start in the present, when, as AI boosters are fond of saying, LLMs are the least-capable that they will ever be, yet have already radically altered the fields in which my husband and I both work. Jobs are already disappearing and highly qualified “white collar” workers are finding it harder and harder to get new ones. I’d guess that 90% of the work I did as a young lawyer could be done by 2026-level LLMs, with review by a senior attorney. And that’s today.
It is, at best, extremely unclear how our society is supposed to cope with the economic and social-spiritual-psychological consequences of this.
Economically, most AI-boosters say we’ll need some kind of Universal Basic Income (UBI) to support all those laid-off actuaries, coders, call center operators, researchers, and technical writers. Never mind that many of these same AI boosters are libertarians opposed to the state doing anything at all, and that many others are contributing mightily to Republican politicians who are opposed even to raising the minimum wage or expanding healthcare coverage. These are the politicians who will usher in UBI socialism for all?
But the question is deeper than economics. When the work you do is done by a machine, who are you?
After all, work isn’t just about putting food on the table; our identities are often tied to our jobs, and, more generally, to our capacity to provide for ourselves and our families. (For traditionalists, much of this is still gendered — men do the providing — but not for most progressives.) Even if our material needs are somehow met by UBI and the explosion in productivity that AI is supposed to bring about, what about our non-material needs: our need for purpose, meaning and identity?
Lest this sound vague or ‘soft,’ consider that what philosopher Jon Vervaeke has called the ‘Meaning Crisis’ animates much of our contemporary politics today. MAGA populism is, in large part, a response to the erosion (real or perceived) in American conceptions of communal identity, economic opportunity, gender roles, and religion – i.e., the Meaning Crisis. Yes, much of MAGA’s resentment is driven by economics: by the hollowing out of the American middle class in the wake of globalization and other factors. And a lot of it is driven by racism. But much of it is also about meaning: what it means to be an American, to be a man, to be white, to be Christian. And Donald Trump has brilliantly, intuitively channeled the rage at those societal changes into a hopeless, nihilistic patriotism — the Lost Cause for the 21st century.
The point is, “soft” concerns often drive our politics. Sure, it’s the economy, but also what economic dislocation means to people who experience it. And that meaning is as much spiritual, for lack of a better term, as it is financial.
From my vantage point, as a rabbi/journalist/psychedelics scholar/meditation teacher, it seems obvious that we are headed for a collective crisis even more massive than the ones we have already experienced. In a sense, AI is to white-collar work what globalization, de-unionization, and technology was to blue-collar work. Twenty years ago, it was the factories that were closing. Now, it’s the law offices cutting back on hiring. What is supposed to happen next?
From that same vantage point, it seems equally obvious that, as a society, there will need to be significant reorientation toward non-economic forms of value. Of course, these exist already: people find meaning in family, religion, culture, creativity, sports, hobbies, and a thousand other interests. It’s not like we’re starting from scratch. But consider how many people in your life (present company included) also derive meaning from work, and what will happen when that is taken away.
Religion, in its broadest possible sense, will almost certainly grow in response. Already, we’ve seen some of this in conservative quarters — converts to Catholicism like JD Vance and Peter Thiel, for example, or even the broad religiosity of Joe Rogan. But Capital-R Religion’s price of admission may be too high for many people: belief in God, conservative ideas about gender and sexuality, and all the myths and stories that seem preposterous if taken literally.
But there is also what I’ve called lower-case-r religion: forms of communal, ethical, and spiritual cohesion that are less about God, dogma, and obligation and more about the sacred in everyday life, rituals that bring us together, and practices that help us to grow ethically and spiritually.
In other words, what a lot of liberal Judaism, at its best, is already about.
A majority of non-Orthodox Judaism is already what Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie has called “God-optional” — it may have some general notion of the universe as sacred (I once wrote a book about that), and may maintain traditional God-language in liturgy and text, but it’s not focused on belief in an old man in the sky or obedience to Him for fear of punishment. Rather, as I wrote about in these pages in 2009, it’s focused on what religion does: how it can nourish the soul, teach ethical values, mark the passages of time, and bring people together in communities of meaning.
DZ Kalman, a leading theorist on Judaism and artificial intelligence, told me that “neither Judaism nor any other religion has a ready-to-hand answer for what to do when a chunk of the world’s jobs is suddenly no longer necessary. We have thoughts about the value of work, but those ideas are premised on a world where human labor is necessary to keep society running. We are not yet ready for a ‘time that is wholly Shabbat,’” a metaphor for the messianic age.
Yet, Kalman continued, “Shabbat is fundamental here. Humans can simply be; AI (for the moment) cannot. We as a society are not good at championing the value of presence, which is core to the Shabbat experience.”
But soon, we are going to have to be. Because what is “fully-automated luxury Jewish communism” if not a time that is wholly Shabbat?
What “religion” looks like in its particulars will vary with every person who experiences it. For some, it may mean a recommitment to seemingly non-religious activities: rescuing animals is ‘religious’ in this sense, as is throwing elaborate parties, seeing films, writing poetry, or, of course, raising a family. For others, it may well be the full traditional package, which excels at providing holistic systems of meaning. And for me, it will continue to mean a combination of spiritual practice (meditation, psychedelics, ritual), family life and political activism. Judaism and Jewishness already encompasses all of these things; just peruse the weekly schedule of a mainstream suburban synagogue, and you’ll find most of them already.
Personally, among those various possibilities, I’m interested in whether we’ll see a Jewish ‘archaic revival’ — a term coined by psychedelic theorist Terrence McKenna to describe a resurgence in ‘primitive’, non-rational ways of relating to the great mystery of the human condition. I’m excited by that possibility, which will likely be accelerated by psychedelics in particular (if you haven’t yet, please read the ‘Jewish Journeys’ study which showed how psychedelic experience super-charged people’s interest in spirituality). There are plenty of risks as well: Contrary to hippie myths, spirituality does not make one more politically liberal, and often makes people more particularistic. But I’m intrigued by an embodied Judaism newly revitalized to meet the needs of a post-work future.
Of course, that’s only one Jewish path, and not the most popular one. The broader point is that as work recedes in importance and society faces radical and destabilizing changes, we are going to need more and better ways to understand ourselves, our communities, and our world.
Which, for all its shortcomings, Judaism has been exploring for around 3,000 years.
The post AI, Judaism and what to do about ‘Fully-Automated Luxury Communism’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel-bound flight diverted to Saudi Arabia after terror attack on board
(JTA) — A Flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia after passengers reported that an altercation broke out between two pilots. Israeli officials are describing the incident as a terrorist attack and passengers say they intervened to restrain a man who had attacked one of the pilots.
The flight, carrying more than 100 Israeli passengers, was diverted while flying over Jordanian airspace and eventually landed at Tabuk Airport in northern Saudi Arabia, an Israeli official to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
An Israeli official briefed the media and was quoted by Israel’s Channel 12 as saying that one pilot stabbed the other and attempted to “do a 9/11” — either by hijacking the plane and flying it toward Israel or crashing it. The official said that a “dramatic disaster was prevented.”
According to accounts from passengers posted on social media and reports by Israeli media, the co-pilot attacked the captain and attempted to take control of the aircraft. At least two people were injured in the incident. The entire incident lasted about an hour and a half.
“We are on the flight from Dubai. We took control of the flight. There was an attacker with a knife who stabbed one of the pilots,” passenger Itzhak Liber said in a Facebook video. “A few of us jumped in and pulled him out of the cockpit. Everything is OK now. The terrorist is neutralized. There is a pilot who is seriously injured.”
“It was tough. Everything is covered in blood,” Liber added.
Another passenger, appearing in a video posted to social media with blood visible on his face, said the passengers were in the middle of a hijacking and had restrained the attacker as the plane prepared to land. In another video, several passengers said they were protecting the pilot.
A third passenger told Israel’s Channel 12, “There were moments when we were sure this was the end.”
Saudi authorities said the two pilots were taken to a hospital after sustaining injuries, according to international media reports. Flydubai, which is owned by the United Arab Emirates, has acknowledged that there was an “incident” that led to the diversion of the flight. It stressed that the plane landed safely and that all passengers were safe. UAE officials had not commented on the incident as of publication.
Data from Flightradar24 showed the aircraft descending roughly 14,000 feet in less than 30 seconds during the incident. The plane subsequently diverted from its route and landed in Tabuk.
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had held consultations and was monitoring developments. “Following concerns over an aviation incident, the prime minister held consultations on the matter and followed developments,” Netanyahu’s office said. “The incident is under control, and all measures are now being taken to return the Israeli passengers safely to Israel.”
Israel and Saudi Arabia do not have formal diplomatic relations, but the two countries maintain ties. This is not the first time a flight carrying Israeli passengers has landed in Saudi Arabia.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in a post on X that there had been an attempt to “crash” the aircraft and “murder 180 Israelis.” He called for Israel to hold accountable the “state or terrorist organization” responsible for the incident.
This is a developing story.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israel-bound flight diverted to Saudi Arabia after terror attack on board appeared first on The Forward.
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Far-right Israel critic James Fishback likens abortion to the Holocaust
(JTA) — James Fishback, a fierce critic of Israel and a far-right politician, offered scathing remarks about the Jewish state and likened abortion to the Holocaust during an address at the University of Mississippi on Tuesday evening.
Fishback, a former GOP gubernatorial candidate in Florida, recalled that earlier this summer the Combat Antisemitism Movement flagged as antisemitic one of his X posts describing abortion as a holocaust.
“Abortion is a holocaust, and by every single historical metric available, it was worse than the other one,” Fishback said, claiming that “61 million children have been killed in the womb since Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided in 1973.”
He also had harsh words for the state of Israel. “It is time for President Trump to call [Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu and cut him off. We must decouple from Israel to save America,” he added.
Fishback was speaking at a Turn Up the Mic forum arranged by members of the University of Mississippi chapter of Turning Point USA, the organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk.
Slamming immigration policies on both sides of the aisle — Republicans for too few mass deportations and Democrats for an influx of foreign workers — Fishback declared, “It’s time to stand up and tell both parties that no, American jobs are for Americans only.”
He noted, however, that making such demands could result in a person being labeled a racist or misogynist, and that “if you’re really bad they’ll call you an antisemite.” Stressing that he condemns “all forms of religious hatred,” he maintained that “the most virulent” type is the hostility “against Christians in this country.”
Fishback blamed Israel and the inability of the U.S. to “tell them no” for drawing the country into the war with Iran. That war, he argued, has pushed gas prices and Treasury yields higher.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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