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How Jewish leaders tried — and failed — to keep a Farrakhan follower off a Florida city council
(JTA) – When Brother John Muhammad emerged this fall as the leading candidate for a vacant city council seat in St. Petersburg, Florida, local Jews were distressed.
Muhammad is well known in the city as the president of a local neighborhood association and as a frequent advocate for minority groups. But Jewish leaders learned that he was also a follower of Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader who has a long history of antisemitism, and that he had made comments dismissing concerns about Farrakhan’s record.
Jewish leaders tried to stave off Muhammad’s appointment, pushing for more extensive vetting of the seven candidates and, in the case of the local Holocaust museum, actively lobbying against him. But the council confirmed him in a 4-3 vote, leaving local Jews frustrated — before they considered ways to make the situation a learning experience for their city.
“When I see a situation like this, it screams ‘opportunity’ to me,” Michael Igel, chair of the Florida Holocaust Museum, located in St. Petersburg, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
The saga playing out in St. Petersburg, Florida’s fifth-largest city, unfolded during the same period that a handful of Black celebrities, including Kanye West and Kyrie Irving, first became enmeshed in controversy over their own antisemitic comments and social media posts. The coincidence meant a dicey environment for broaching a conversation about the antisemitism of the Nation of Islam, whose rhetoric disparaging Jews overlaps with that of Hebrew Israelites, the ideology that Irving promoted by sharing a link to an antisemitic film.
It also turned St. Petersburg into a window for understanding how ties forged between Jewish groups and others can be tested.
Local Jewish leaders initially sought to stop Muhammad from gaining the city council seat, which was vacated after its previous holder resigned following redistricting and accusations she no longer lived in her district. They learned about Muhammad’s city council application only a week before the council’s vote, leaving them with little time to mobilize. The information came from a political rival of Muhammad, former mayoral candidate Vince Nowicki, who shared information about Muhammad’s Nation of Islam affiliation with local Jewish groups.
Nowicki also shared a comment Muhammad had made about Jews in a 2016 video in which Muhammad interviewed local Black LGBTQ activists. In the video titled “A Conversation About Growing Up Black And LGBT,” which JTA viewed, Muhammad said, “Minister Farrakhan got accused of being antisemitic for a long time because he pointed out and made some corrections about the activity of Jews. And anybody who says anything critical of the Jewish community is labeled as being antisemitic. Good, bad, right or wrong, it doesn’t matter what you say. If you criticize them that’s what you are.”
He continued, saying, “And I’m finding that it happens when you are critical of the gay community, when you say anything critical or anything that doesn’t align with that ideology, now all of a sudden you’re homophobic.” Muhammad’s comments about gay people received some light but friendly pushback from his interview guests.
Muhammad did not reply to multiple requests for comment by JTA, including to questions emailed to him at his request. He said during a public meeting ahead of the council vote that he thought scrutiny of him by Jewish groups had been unfair.
To Jewish leaders, the comments in the video coupled with Muhammad’s Nation of Islam affiliation were clear signs that he should not be appointed to the city council.
“I would sure hope that being antisemitic would be a red line, that you could not be a candidate,” said Rabbi Philip Weintraub of Congregation B’nai Israel, a Conservative synagogue in the city.
Jewish leaders began to take action, issuing statements and launching a letter-writing campaign to the council. They felt so much urgency that some even conducted business on Simchat Torah, a Jewish holiday when Jewish organizations typically pause their activities in accordance with Jewish law.
As a nonprofit, the local federation was constrained in how it could weigh in. Since it could not endorse or oppose specific candidates, it instead pushed for every candidate to be “properly vetted” and informed council members about Muhammad’s affiliations and past comments, according to Maxine Kaufman, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Florida’s Gulf Coast. She said the efforts did not have their intended effect.
“I don’t think anybody said, ‘Well, who is this Farrakhan, what does he stand for?’” Kaufman said. “I don’t think enough was done, personally.”
The entrance to the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, Nov. 27, 2016. (Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The Florida Holocaust Museum took another approach, circulating information about Muhammad to the wider community, along with a statement opposing the candidacy of anyone who would support Farrakhan’s antisemitism. Their goal, Igel said, was to educate the community about the severity of these views.
“There’s nothing else to talk about when somebody is supporting Louis Farrakhan,” Igel told JTA. “Particularly when you are seeking a position representative of a city, particularly one like St. Petersburg that is so known for its inclusivity and its openness.”
Igel praised some members of the city council who asked Muhammad pointed questions about his views at the vote, giving him the opportunity to refute Farrakhan’s comments about Jews. One council member who voted against Muhammad, Lisset Hanewicz, said her stepfather is Jewish and read Farrakhan’s past antisemitic statements into the record, saying, “I think people need to understand why a certain part of this community is upset.”
Igel acknowledged that getting involved in a city council appointment was an unusual move for a Holocaust museum. He said museum leaders had held a meeting beforehand to determine how to proceed but made a decision fairly quickly to weigh in.
“In this case, we don’t consider this to be a matter of politics,” Igel said. “This is a matter of morality. And this is what we teach.” If the candidate had been a white supremacist, Igel said, “that person would have been disqualified out of the gate.”
The Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center, two hate watchdogs, define the Nation of Islam as a group that propagates antisemitism and other forms of bigotry, not a religion. Founded in 1930 by Wallace Fard Muhammad, the Black nationalist group is not the same as traditional Islam and is rejected by most Muslim clerics; it entered mainstream prominence in the 1960s after civil rights leader Malcolm X and boxer Muhammad Ali publicly joined the movement. (Both later left the group, with Malcolm X publicly denouncing its leadership; he was assassinated shortly after, and two Nation of Islam members who were wrongfully convicted of his murder recently received a large settlement from New York City.)
The Nation of Islam entered its current era after Farrakhan took over the group in 1977. Now 89, he has used his platform to issue a steady stream of antisemitism, including calling Jews “wicked” and the “synagogue of Satan,” saying they have “wrapped your tentacles around the U.S. government,” and calling Hitler “a very great man.” Only a few years ago, the Women’s March progressive activist collective was nearly derailed over some of its founders’ associations with Farrakhan.
It is rare, but not unheard of, for public officials to have current or former associations with the Nation of Islam. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a practicing Muslim, was dogged by accusations that he had formerly been a member of the group when he first ran for Congress in 2006; he apologized for his past associations with the group. Trayon White, a Washington, D.C. council member and onetime mayoral candidate who has spread antisemitic conspiracy theories, has donated to the group in the past. Former President George W. Bush once praised the group, and a photograph showing Barack Obama in the same room as Farrakhan was fodder for Obama’s critics during his presidential run.
Muhammad, who is referred to on the city council website as John Muhammad and whose legal name is John C. Malone, declined to condemn Farrakhan at the city council meeting.
“I am not willing to denounce the leader of my faith no more than a Catholic would be willing to denounce their pope,” he said.
Muhammad’s reaction to questions about Farrakhan particularly concerned the federation and other local Jewish groups. Kaufman told JTA she didn’t know whether Muhammad himself is antisemitic, but she said his refusal to disavow Farrakhan was alarming.
“I do have issue with his reverence of someone who is blatantly antisemitic, and he won’t disavow him, he won’t reject him,” she said, echoing the the federation’s official statement on the vote.
At the meeting, Muhammad did say that he had reached out to the Florida Holocaust Museum but had not heard back — and that he thought the museum’s criticism of him was unfair.
“What I found when we reached out to have dialogue with the Holocaust Museum director, they did not want to talk to me,” he said. “They wanted to evaluate and disqualify me based on the association that I have as an individual. I don’t think that that’s just.”
Muhammad also defended his record with Jews by claiming that they were among the “diversity of those who support me.” He added, “And if you look at those who oppose me, they’re coming from one particular group.”
Since the vote, a local Black newspaper condemned the scrutiny on Muhammad, calling it a “perusal into his faith practice.”
Igel said the museum had no record that Muhammad had reached out but encouraged him to come and learn more about the Holocaust and the nature of antisemitism. Stuart Berger, head of the local Jewish Community Relations Council, acknowledged at the city council meeting that Muhammad “has made himself available to us” at the federation, but that none of the federation staff “had been in direct contact with him.”
The federation’s involvement in Muhammad’s case became its own issue at the council vote, when the candidate referenced an email Berger had written to the county commissioner. In the email, Berger wrote that Muhammad’s vetting process had been “good enough for me!”
While Muhammad took the email as proof that the federation believed him to be fit for office, Berger and Kaufman maintain that it meant nothing of the sort. Berger had not been speaking on behalf of the federation, they say, and had not intended for his email to be shared publicly.
Now that Muhammad is on the council, attention has turned to building relationships with him. Kaufman has been meeting with individual city council members, and hopes to eventually meet with Muhammad himself. She also aims to have the federation make a presentation to the council about the dangers of antisemitism and push them to make a statement about it.
She doesn’t think it’s complicated. “I think hate’s hate,” she said. “Many different colors.”
Weintraub’s congregation is celebrating its 100th anniversary in March, and one of its congregants, Eric Lynn, is also involved in politics: he was the Democratic nominee for Florida’s 13th Congressional district in the midterms but lost his race to Republican Anna Paulina Luna, who said she was raised as a Messianic Jew and campaigned with far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Weintraub himself is a member of an interfaith ministerial dialogue group with Black churches and says he’s “a professional optimist” when it comes to managing conflict between different communities. He sent JTA an episode of the public radio podcast “Hidden Brain” about how to keep conflict from spiraling, saying it “describes what I’ve tried to do.”
Since Muhammad was appointed, Weintraub has met with him; the pair had what Weintraub described as “a pleasant conversation.” The two talked about parenting and “shared traumas,” he said. They did not discuss Muhammad’s comments supporting Farrakhan, but the rabbi couldn’t help but think about him.
“I thought I was a termite, according to Farrakhan,” Weintraub said. In contrast, Muhammad “said I was a person, so that was nice.”
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Civil war’s nothing new for Jews. How do we survive this one?
I’ve perhaps arrived early to an older man’s fixation: Civil War. Not the American one. (At least not the one that took place in the 19th Century.)
This week I returned to Westeros for House of the Dragon Season 3, in which various platinum-haired nobles born of incest fight for a throne made of swords with lizards that breathe fire. I chased it with the Public Theater’s fine production of Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays, in which branches of the same family pledge their allegiance to a white or red rose corresponding to their preferred ruler of England.
Before I saw any of that, I was in the Berkshires to see S. Asher Gelman’s play The Zionists, about a Jewish house divided by (what else): Israel. In that play, there was no kingdom to inherit, but our common inheritance as Jews is a tendency to disagree that, if not approached with mutual respect, can yield disastrous results.
Jewish tradition has its own version of these stories: Last week’s parshah was Korach, in which Moses faces rebellion — and the rebels face the fate of being swallowed by the ground and dragged down to Sheol.
A while later in Tanakh time, the House of David and Saul had their factions. Then the sons of David, and on and on.
Jewish civil war, as chronicled by Josephus and other historians, most recently Barry Strauss, was perhaps at its most bitter circa 63 BCE, when the Romans intervened in a succession dispute between the Hasmoneans (leading to the end of the dynasty and the beginning of Judea as a Roman client state) and 70 CE, when rival factions among the Zealots, confronting the common foe of Rome, couldn’t put their differences aside long enough to quell the siege of Jerusalem.
In the Talmud account, it is baseless hatred between two men that sets the temple ablaze.
Recently I spoke with the historian Laura Arnold Leibman. We were discussing early American Jewry, which — surprise — was split on whether to support the Patriots fighting for independence or remain loyal to the British Crown.
Reviewing this more recent history, she remembered teaching a course on antiquity and telling the story of First Century Jerusalem.
“One of my non-Jewish students said, ‘This is so fascinating to hear that there were these different sects of Jews and that they disagreed with each other. Is it like that today?’” Leibman told me. The student, she said, had “clearly never been to a bar mitzvah.”
In Game of Thrones, Shakespeare and the Bible, internecine fighting ends — that is, when it doesn’t begin — when someone dies. Someone is crowned and gets to write the favorable history.
Looking at American Jewry today, we are relitigating the past and revisiting old arguments.
Bundism in the key of anti-Zionism is hot again — though critics say its ideas were tested and failed to the tune of millions of dead Jews between Hitler and Stalin. Supporters of Zionism cite scripture for our claim to the land, archaeology to establish our continued presence or a massacre of Jews that predated an attack on Arabs to point to who’s to blame for ongoing violence.
Given a turbulent present, we too often retreat into familiar narratives, so locked into our views that we shut out perspectives that might challenge us. The history of Am Israel, really a family story, teaches that when we close ourselves off to dissent, we face a kind of doom.
Leibman told me another story that signals a different approach.
After the Revolutionary War, Moses Seixas, the lay leader of the Jewish community in Newport, Rhode Island, paid an early morning visit to his brother-in-law Hiam Levy, accompanied by the local sheriff. Levy was a Tory, and Seixas came to confiscate his belongings for the Revolutionary government.
This all had the makings of a family feud, but researching her book Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism, Leibman found a letter Levy wrote to Moses, conveying his safe arrival in Amsterdam and thanking him for his support getting him set up financially there.
“They may have had political differences,” Leibman said, “but those kin connections trumped other sorts of problems.”
In this, there’s a model to be emulated.
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Israel presses on with settler-fueled archaeology expansion, crippling Palestinian communities
JERICHO, WEST BANK — Israel’s ultranationalist government and its backers are undertaking a major drive to develop and expand archeological sites in the occupied West Bank, with leaders stressing that it is incumbent upon Jewish citizens to connect to their history and heritage.
“He who doesn’t understand the importance of an archeological site for the preservation of the nation doesn’t understand where his future is going,” Israel Ganz, head of the Yesha Council representing more than 500,000 settlers, told the Forward in an interview on Sunday.
Funding to accelerate the push emerged in May, when the cabinet allocated 250 million shekels (approximately $86 million) to preserve, upgrade and make accessible heritage sites that show ancestral Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria — lands the settler movement contends Jews are entitled to claim.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, linking the drive to Israel entering the 60th year since its victory in the Six Day War, told the cabinet that the funds are an investment “in preserving our past in order to secure our future, strengthen our hold on the Land of Israel and pass on to future generations the heritage, identity and historical truth of our people.”
But Palestinians and left-wing Israeli groups see this as not an innocent educational drive, but rather an intensification of efforts to displace Palestinians and annex the territory.
The archeology drive, reflected in robust budgeting and ambitious planning, including of new roads and wide expropriations of Palestinian land around sites, is moving ahead despite Netanyahu’s decision early this month not to advance a bill creating a separate antiquities authority for the West Bank, both supporters and opponents of the push say. That decision, reportedly to avert international diplomatic fallout, does not affect the allocation of funds. And Ganz notes the Judea and Samaria authority can still be created in the future.
“For sure now we are seeing the largest-scale effort ever to use archeology for annexation,” said Alon Arad, director of the organization Emek Shaveh, a left-wing group watchdogging the use of archeology by settlers as a tool for expansion. The momentum stems from plans made when the coalition took power in 2022 now coming to fruition, and a sense among right-wing parties that promoting Jewish heritage is a way to impress voters for upcoming elections, he added.
Whether this is in Israel’s interest or not is in the eye of the beholder. The flagship site of the archeology drive, the Hasmonean Palaces near Jericho, reflects all that is wrong with Israel’s harsh rule over Palestinians, critics say: settler violence, violation of international law, dispossession of helpless people and a hierarchy in which Israelis have all the rights and Palestinians none.
Digging as a tool
When the Forward visited the site recently, its most striking ruins were those of Palestinian Bedouin homes, 13 of which were destroyed by a settler bulldozer driver during a day-long raid on Feb. 10 by an estimated 50 settlers according to witnesses. Haaretz reported that at least 15 homes were destroyed.
Only 200 meters from the excavations, families are living inside the ruins of their homes. Among them is Ali Kaabnah, his wife Najiba and six children, staying in a house missing one side and with a large hole in the bedroom.
It is half a house, looking as if the driver had been interrupted in the middle of his task. Somehow a refrigerator survived, still plugged in.
“The house doesn’t have supports, it is without pillars. If there is a tremor it will collapse,” Kaabnah said. His and other families have no other place to go and remained even though settlers struck again in late April and last week warned him to leave, he said. “I do not sleep because we do shifts to see if settlers are coming,” he said.
Kaabnah said that he had repeatedly called Israeli police during the bulldozing raid but they did not come. The Israel police did not respond to an inquiry from the Forward about the incident.
Ali’s brother, Yusuf, said he had to be taken to hospital with head injuries during the first attack. and that settlers severely beat his wife, Shikha, 46, during the second attack, resulting in her being treated at a hospital in Nablus. His son Aliyan, 20, was “beaten with clubs without mercy” and his youngest son, 11-year-old Ali, was also attacked, he said: “Until now he screams at night in terror that ‘they are coming.’”
Arad views the settler violence as a state-backed method, along with demolition of homes on the grounds they were built without permits, to drive Palestinians away from the area of the site. The IDF denies siding with settlers and says troops are expected to detain Israeli citizens perpetrating violent acts.
Violence is not the only threatening aspect of the archeology uptick for Palestinians. Land expropriations around sites, which include swaths well beyond the antiquities themselves, are pulling the territory from underneath the Palestinians’ feet, critics say. In the last half year, there have been three land expropriations around sites, the largest at Sebastia in the northern West Bank; plans for roads on land seized from Palestinians to enable easier access, and forays by settlers to establish a presence or control of sites on Palestinian property.
Dror Etkes, a veteran monitor of Israeli policies in the West Bank, says the Sebastia expropriation — said by the government as intended to develop the site for visits by the public — includes the vast majority of the olive groves of the Palestinian village of Sebastia. Emek Shaveh says the expropriation separates the village from antiquities, breaking an ancient attachment central to the identity of locals and harming them economically.
“The goal of Israel’s colonial project is to dispossess and settle,” said Etkes, who heads the West Bank land monitoring group Kerem Navot. “Archeology provides an effective way of doing this.”
Ganz and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu — who famously raised the idea in November 2023 of dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza — are particularly enthusiastic about developing the Hasmonean palaces site. Harkening back to the days of Joshua, Eliyahu terms the Jericho vicinity “the gateway to the land of Israel.”
He does not appear to view the settler violence at the site as a problem. In a social media post released the day of the bulldozer raid, he declared that “in every place where there is building on Jewish heritage, we will destroy it.” Speaking from the site, he promised a mass infusion of funds to achieve the perceived revival of its past glory.
Claims of vandalism
At present the Hasmonean Palaces site looks unimpressive, lacking signage, explanations or a path. Only some of the antiquities are roped off. But Ganz describes the site as being on a par with Israel’s most important ones. “I can’t say what the breadth of the site is but it certainly doesn’t fall short of Masada,” Ganz said.
According to the IDF body dealing with civilian affairs in the West Bank, called the civil administration, the site is “of great importance to Jewish heritage as well as to the architecture of the early Roman period.”
“It was built as a winter palace for the Hasmoneans in the first century BCE and served the Hasmonean dynasty for approximately 200 years,” the civil administration wrote in a statement. Subsequently during the reign of Herod there was also significant construction including a fortified palace, a bridge and a sunken garden, it added.
Ganz says the site needs to be safeguarded from what he claims is deliberate and systematic destruction by the Palestinian Authority, which he alleges has targeted it and other sites in a bid to erase evidence of Jewish ties to the land. The Civil Administration statement also cited vandalism as a major problem, though it did not specify involvement of the Palestinian Authority.
Palestinian Authority assistant deputy minister of tourism and antiquities Jehad Yasin said in remarks to the Forward that allegations of PA culpability aim to enable Israel to take over West Bank sites. “We haven’t done that. We do our best to keep our sites and if someone does something it doesn’t mean you have the right to take this site,” he said.
Yasin stressed that for an occupying power to expand sites and carry out anything other than salvage excavations violates international law. Referring to the Israeli plans at the site near Jericho, he said: “They don’t have the right to make an archeological park or an excavation. It’s a Palestinian site.”
Arad agrees Hasmonean Palaces is an important site but stresses that this in no way justifies harming Palestinians.
Ganz’s vision for the site includes new excavations, touching up finds to preserve them and steps to “absorb the public.” A new access road is seen as essential for tourism, and he wants to see a convenience store along with state-of-the-art scanning capability enabling visitors to explore information about the site.
The land for the road has already been seized by military order from Palestinians, Etkes said, adding that when it is paved it will take less than a half hour to drive from Jerusalem to the site. What’s more, according to Etkes an illegal outpost overlooking the site and situated next to an army intelligence base is on the way to becoming a full-fledged settlement.
Arad says all of this amounts to Israel turning the site into a “touristic settlement,” something he stresses has been done previously on a large scale at the popular City of David site in occupied East Jerusalem.
“You change the identity so that from a village on the outskirts of Jericho it becomes a palace of a dynasty. You don’t need actual settlers there, it’s enough to build an access road, put up a fence and whatever comes with tourist development-a kiosk, a parking lot, someone to guard it.” Arad said.
The goal, in his view, is to woo the public to the settler view that the West Bank is part of Israel. “You start bringing in tourists and it’s a normalizing process for people to go inside the West Bank and return to Haifa or wherever they are from,” he said. “They go in and out and it was fun for them and you create the idea that this is part of Israel.”
As for the possibility of there being an Arab presence at the Hasmonean Palaces site, Ganz said: “If they don’t harm the site they will be allowed gladly. But if, God forbid, there are security incidents or harm to the site, then they can’t be there.”
Ganz stressed that the homes at the site needed to be destroyed for being illegally built, but that the demolition should have been done by the state and not what he depicted as a lone deviant. “No one is permitted to take the law into their own hands,” he said.
Etkes predicts that based on the experience of other sites, local Palestinians face an extremely bleak future. He termed the sight of Palestinians living in what is left of their houses “one of the worst things I have ever seen in the West Bank.”
But that is by no means the end of the harm Israel will cause to Palestinian civilians in the vicinity of the archeological site, he said. “We will see an area completely disconnected from its surroundings,” said Etkes. “Palestinians won’t be able to enter the area. Two roads [for Israelis] will lead to this area. Settlers will be very violent, it will be very restricted for the Palestinians, construction in the area [by Palestinians] will be completely banned, the construction that already exists is without a permit and a large part of it will be demolished by Israeli authorities.”
He declared: “It will be another national park that will tell one story — the story the Israeli radical right wants you to hear.”
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The eternal summer question that no rabbi can answer: Will I finally hit a home run this year?
I was six or seven years old when I first dared to dream of hitting a home run. Nixon was president. Kissinger was National Security Adviser. Le Duc Tho chain-smoked at the Paris Peace Conferences where they argued for three months over the shape of the negotiating table.
I was one of the dusty dumpy boys of summer; short and overweight, I occasionally tapped or blooped the ball into the shallow outfield for a single. In my life I remember only two doubles over five decades. Nothing like the moonshots the big boys slapped into the upper atmosphere.
Sometimes I played second base, but more often I was deposited and abandoned into the Siberia of right field. Once, when I was a young adult in the UJA softball game at Heckscher Diamond in Central Park, a high-pop sailed into the outfield, nothing fancy. The orb floated daintily into my glove at the warning track. Somehow, I threw a strike to third base and nabbed the runner trying to advance on the fly. It was a rare moment of triumph.
All was right with heaven and earth at that moment, in fact with the entire solar system. It was as though I had mastered the entire Mishna in the morning and had a date with Ann-Margret later in the evening.
But most of the games were a grind. Long afternoons in the dust bowls of Queens, the sandlots of the Rockaways. Forgotten stretches of overgrown weeds between concrete and cobblestone. Chainlink backstops with holes a wild boar could poke through. Beyond the overpass of the Van Wyck and the Whitestone Expressways, a dagger dug through central Queens conceived by the community-defiler, Robert Moses in the form of Flushing Meadows Park.
Sunburnt and with solemn resolve, I muttered pleas and hopes to the baseball gods with no real hope of improvement. Thus years would pass. How I loved the game, but it would not love me back — at least not in the way I wanted it to.
I would go up to take the bat. Which should I use? Wooden, aluminum? The shorter one with the bigger snout and barrel? The longer but skinnier one? “You want to use a lighter bat,” someone would invariably say. It made no difference. I would take a weak hack and hope for the best.
My father bought me am $8 pitcher’s glove with Fritz Peterson’s signature on it. Then, I got a bat with Roy White’s signature from a giveaway on Bat Day at Yankee Stadium — June 4, 1972. It was white and wooden with a long heavy barrel. This would do it — my own bat.
Yet I held it limply at the baseball diamond. “You’re not doing it right,” someone would invariably tell me.
I came to the baseball field for absolution, for redemption, but there was none to be had. I felt hollow, even desperate. I appealed to the only man who I knew would not reject me: my late father.
Yet, my father, though I was the apple of his eye, considered baseball to be something childish. He thought I should immerse myself in the sacred texts — the only thing that would ever really pay off. Why would anyone want to play ball?
My father saw childhood itself as an illness. If he could not cure it with his strict and clear instruction and imprecations from the rabbis, it would surely pass on its own by the time I was 13.
My mother and sisters were indifferent to my baseball agony; it was something they consigned to “the mens’ world.” They couldn’t tell a baseball from a candled egg or a guinea hen.
I knew the problem was far deeper than just strength or technique. I could see the ball (I almost never struck out) so why couldn’t I hit it with force? I would go up to the batter’s box full of doubt, but excitement too. Maybe this time it would be different.
More years of weak swings and fading dreams. I was not strong. And when I reached my full height, I was 5’3”. One needed strength, but one l also needed technique. I studied the swings of the great baseball players. They seemed to take a cut from their upper shoulders and wrap a swing with even more strength coming from their glutes and hips. Perhaps only gentiles had these kinds of shoulders and hips. Oh, the mysteries of the universe…
A Freudian dilemma
When I first started playing, I was younger than everyone. Decades later on the baseball diamonds of Passaic, I am older than everyone by decades. But with age comes wisdom.
I practiced swinging hard, but I always held back, as though a full swing was un-Jewish, a sin. A full swing takes a certain, shall we say aggression? Forgive me for sounding a bit basic, but what did this swing really mean? Was this all about my father? I was afraid to take a swing; did that mean I was afraid to take a swing at dad? Only fathers can swing, but even though I was now a father and grandfather, I did not feel I could swing. I held something back.
Maybe this seems too Freudian, but in order to hold on to my father, even after he went on to the next world, I had to do poorly.
If I wanted to hit a home run, I had to let him go.
A new father
About ten years back, when I was 50, I hired a trainer, Moshe Klyman, a Jewish Greek god from Underground Gym in Tenafly. He is an anachronism from the time of the Maccabees. He can lift 630 lbs five times in a row. This modern day Samson, two decades and some younger than me, said, “you can do it.”
I believed him, at least a little. The man knows everything there is to know about the human body (and I know everything there is to know about the mind — hey, I thought, this partnership could work. ) I am convinced that on the day of creation six thousand years ago and then some, God Himself consulted with him on how to construct the first human.
A few months ago, he had me deadlift 405 lbs, almost three times my weight. If that weren’t enough he had me do 200 pull-ups 50 at a time.
“Age is irrelevant,” he said. “You and I are going places.”
As I kept working with Moshe, I got better at the game. Not a home run, though, never even close. A base hit or two, once in a while a satisfying crack at the bat.
Until now.
After years of jumping, lifting, pressing, pulling (and puking) my body began to take on a different identity, separate from my history. I may have been 62 but now I was ready for the Marines.
This past Sunday, I took a full cut, a real swing at the ball. No pulling back. I waited for my pitch and uncoiled. To my great surprise, the ball was corked, launched. It was high, it was far; it landed at the left field fence, missing a home run by just a few feet.
The left fielder, a terrific athlete, was caught flat-footed. I watched the ball fly over his head. The team was dismayed. Was this Yisrael at bat? What kind of juice was he on?
As the ball sailed farther than I ever believed, 47 years of humiliation seemed to melt away. I headed for a triple.
Maybe this summer, I will finally hit my first home run.
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