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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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More Americans now sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis, new poll finds
(JTA) — Another major poll has founded that sympathy has surged among Americans for Palestinians and now exceeds support for Israelis.
Gallup, one of the country’s most respected polling outfits, found that 41% of Americans say they sympathize more with the Palestinians, compare to 36% who sympathize more with the Israelis. A year ago, a Gallup poll showed a 13-point advantage for the Israelis.
The poll comes nearly six months after a national poll found for the first time that Americans’ sympathies had flipped. In a New York Times and Siena University poll released in September, 35% of registered American voters said they sympathized more with Palestinians compared to 34% with Israel. Prior to the war in Gaza, 47% of respondents said they sympathized more with the Israelis.
Both pollsters have asked about voters’ sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for decades. They each said the sympathy gap in their latest polls was not statistically significant but that the trajectory of sentiments was.
Between 2001 and 2018, the Gallup poll found that Americans were more sympathetic to the Israelis by an average margin of 43 points. The gap began narrowing the following year but did not flip until now.
In both polls, the stark recent shift was driven by sharp shifts in sentiments among Democrats. The Gallup poll found that voters under 55 prefer the Palestinians by a wide margin, while older voters remain more sympathetic to the Israelis. The New York Times poll found that older, college-educated Democrats had seen their sentiments shift most harshly.
The polls add to the data points showing a sharp drop in sympathy for Israelis since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack and the subsequent war in Gaza, for which the United States brokered a ceasefire in October. The Gallup poll is the first to demonstrate post-ceasefire sentiments among Americans.
The post More Americans now sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis, new poll finds appeared first on The Forward.
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Is goy a slur, an antisemitic dogwhistle or a word for non-Jews?
Suddenly the term goy is trending. X is full of memes about “goy pride” and goyim “waking up.” People are debating whether goy is an antisemitic term, or, well, an anti-goyish term. Google Trends shows searches for the term have nearly quadrupled in the last four months.
Why is everyone suddenly obsessed with this bit of Jewish vocabulary?
Well, it’s not so sudden. Antisemites have been obsessed with it for decades. Memes on 4chan and other dark corners of the internet have long passed around quotes from the Talmud discussing goyim as though each use of the term was proof of a nefarious plot against non-Jews. They made up new terms, like “goyslop,” anything unhealthy supposedly created by Jews to weaken the world. White supremacists claim the term as one of pride, creating antisemitic groups like the Goyim Defense League.
Goyim broke into the mainstream discourse thanks to two events. One is the Epstein files, in which Jeffrey Epstein uses the term goy with a pejorative tone. The Epstein files have already birthed a network of conspiracy theories about Jewish cabals and government control, and goy was taken as just another example of Jewish scheming. Candace Owens talked about Epstein’s use of the term at length, incorrectly saying that it means “cattle.”
The other is a viral antisemitic YouTube video about a so-called “Jewish invasion” in New Jersey. The video’s creator, Tyler Oliveira, addressed his video to goyim and claims the label himself, aiming to inform the goyim about the supposedly nefarious threat of Jew moving into a town.
But is goy really such a problematic term? Literally, it just means “nation” — in the Torah, it is used in places to refer to the nation of Israel. In practice, it simply means “non-Jew,” or foreign nation which isn’t inherently insulting; Jews are far from the only group to have a term for outsider — think gringo in Spanish or farang in Thai.
This can, of course, be exclusionary. There is certainly the sense that outsiders cannot understand or participate in certain activities of an in-group — an idea that is not limited to Jews. And sometimes that is used to discriminate or insult.
Goy is used much more commonly among Jews to simply describe something that’s not Jewish. Think of the famous Lenny Bruce bit about pumpernickel being Jewish and white bread being goyish — is it a slur to observe that white bread is not part of Jewish culture? Thanks to a history of poverty and shtetl life, Jewish food is often more humble and less processed. That’s just history. It’s not an insult to white bread, or, for that matter, to pumpernickel.
The use of goy by non-Jews is similarly complicated. Someone can casually describe themself as a goy, simply because they are not Jewish or have little contact with Jewish culture. But the term is also used by neo-Nazi types as a dog whistle that signals familiarity with the world of antisemitic conspiracy theories. The phrase “the goyim are waking up,” which has suddenly entered the mainstream, echoes a much older antisemitic meme — “The goyim know,” which is used to imply there is something sinister to know or wake up to, namely the supposed Jewish control of society. (“Noticing” is another antisemitic meme, referring to the same phenomenon.)
This makes the debate about the term kind of silly. Tone and context is everything, just like with any term. “Jew” can be an insult, too, but it obviously is simply a descriptor as well; I call myself a Jew, because I am religiously and ethnically Jewish. If someone spat “Jew” at me on the street, however, I’d be insulted.
But the supposedly neutral valence of the word goy can make the antisemitism that often accompanies it hard to call out. If Jews use it neutrally, why shouldn’t anyone? Or so goes the defense online.
This is how Tyler Oliveira, the creator behind the “Jewish invasion” YouTube video, spins his use of the term. “Jews are trying to say I’m ‘anti-Semitic’ for using the word ‘goyim’ to describe non-Jews,” he wrote on X. “They can call you ‘goyim’ and it’s fine, but if you call yourself a ‘goy’ you hate Jews…? You can’t make this up.”
But watching Oliveira’s actual use of the term, the antisemitism is clear. He creates false binaries like dismissing antisemitism for the supposedly greater problem of “anti-goyism,” as though Jews, a minority, have outsize power to harm outsiders. He harps on the idea that Jews call themselves God’s chosen people as though it is akin to white supremacy, calling Jews “semite supremacists.”
It’s silly to pretend Oliveira’s use of goy isn’t obviously a loaded one; goy may not inherently be an insult, but when it’s deployed with a conspiratorial wink to antisemites, it’s antisemitic.
That’s really the simple rule for when goy is a slur, or when it’s antisemitic: If the person using it is a bigot, it’s bigoted. Otherwise, it’s just a word.
The post Is goy a slur, an antisemitic dogwhistle or a word for non-Jews? appeared first on The Forward.
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A conservative Jewish professor who rejected Hitler comparisons now invokes one — for Tucker Carlson
(JTA) — In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, Jeffrey Lax, a descendent of Holocaust survivors who has lobbied against antisemitism at the college where he teaches, criticized liberals who compared Donald Trump to Hitler.
Now Lax, a law professor who defines himself as center-right and appears frequently on Newsmax and Fox News, is rethinking the idea of modern-day Hitler comparisons. In fact, he’s ringing that bell on a key Trump ally: Tucker Carlson.
“I never, ever, thought this day would come, but for the first time in my life, I am going to compare a human being to Adolph Hitler,” Lax tweeted on Friday. “Understand that I am the grandchild of 4 Holocaust survivors. I’ve spent a lifetime urging people NOT to compare anyone to Hitler. But… Tucker Carlson’s views, rhetoric, and influence remind me of Adolph Hitler.”
Lax was responding to Vice President JD Vance’s favorable comments about the interview Carlson, a far-right pundit, did last week with Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel. The interview ignited new allegations of antisemitism, but Vance did not suggest any concern. That, Lax says, is a big problem.
“This situation is as dead serious as a heart attack and with @JDVance now expressly and abhorrently legitimizing Carlson’s views, we are in a national Antisemitism State of Emergency,” Lax continued.
It was a dramatic outlay of angst about antisemitism on the right for a figure who has campaigned against left-wing anti-Israel activism at the City University of New York, where he teaches. But Lax said in an interview that he could not remain silent.
“For me to get to this point, it had to be something that was so deeply disturbing on many levels,” he said. Carlson’s call for genetics testing for Jews, he said, crossed that line. “If anything I’ve ever heard is Hitler-esque, when you talk about Jews having to prove that they’re Jews with DNA — if DNA testing was available in the days of Hitler, do you not think that Hitler would have used it?”
Lax emphasized that he was speaking specifically of “early Hitler, the early years, before he took power, before he actually, physically caused anybody to be killed. I’m talking about the rhetoric. He could’ve been stopped at that point. People didn’t take Hitler seriously.”
While Lax has criticized Carlson before, he has in the past refrained from extending those critiques to Vance — despite a mounting record of the vice president minimizing antisemitism on the right. “I’ve had suspicions about Vance for a long time,” Lax said. “I wanted to be sure.”
Vance’s defense of Carlson’s interview provided the certainty he needed.
“Is he out of his mind?” Lax said. “By saying something like that, you are saying that what Tucker is saying is legitimate and needs to be discussed, including that Jews should have genetic testing done to be sure that they’re Jewish and have right to the land.” He described such a belief as “brain rot.”
Lax joins a growing line of other Jewish conservatives who have expressed alarm about Vance and his closeness to the White House. They include far-right activist Laura Loomer; conservative columnist and Newsweek editor Josh Hammer; Israeli conservative luminary Yoram Hazony; Orthodox right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro; Rep. Randy Fine; pro-Israel activist groups StandWithUs and StopAntisemitism; and publications with a conservative-friendly pro-Israel bent including Tablet, The Free Press and Commentary.
Their alarm comes as Carlson builds a formidable political network of his own ahead of the midterms, made up of figures with growing sway over young voters. He has given friendly interviews to several outsider GOP candidates, including Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback, lover of antisemitic memes; Texas congressional candidate and pardoned Jan. 6 rioter Ryan Zink; U.S. Senate candidate Paul Dans, who is challenging pro-Israel Sen. Lindsay Graham; and Iowa gubernatorial candidate Zach Lahn, who used his Carlson interview to disparage non-Christian elected officials.
Influential figures identified with the left are also increasingly coming to Carlson’s side on Israel and Jews. “Hey bitch, the goyim are waking the fuck up. Deal with it,” Ana Kasparian, a co-host on the progressive online network The Young Turks, tweeted as part of an extended defense of Carlson this week.
Amid a backlash, the next day Kasparian doubled down: “I do not regret this comment. I don’t apologize,” she tweeted. “Israel is evil, genocidal and has destroyed our country. They’re about to drag us into another war and all we hear from Israelis and their braindead supporters is ‘ANTISEMITE’ if you disagree with Israel’s agenda.” (Kasparian’s Young Turks colleague, Cenk Uyghur, is a regular Carlson guest.)
While antipathy toward Carlson has been all but fully cemented for Jews on both sides of the aisle, not every Jewish conservative has turned on Vance.
Matt Brooks, director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, harshly criticized Carlson and his defenders last fall after the pundit interviewed white nationalist Nick Fuentes, and the group’s most recent conference was marked by repeated denunciations of Carlson. Yet RJC has refrained from publicly pointing the finger at Vance, and its posts about him to date are uniformly complimentary — as on Thursday, when the group retweeted a speech from the vice president’s X account about Democrats and affordability.
A request for comment to the RJC was not returned.
“That is outrageous that the RJC would not criticize Vance,” Lax said. “That is self-destructive. That is insane.”
Also treading carefully on Vance are many establishment Jewish groups. Neither the Anti-Defamation League nor its CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, has publicly criticized the vice president since February 2025, when the ADL’s X account docked him for meeting with the head of Germany’s far-right AfD party. The American Jewish Committee, similarly, has critiqued Carlson’s rhetoric in the past but remained muted on Vance as he’s increasingly clarified that he believes the pundit is a valuable part of the Republican coalition. Comments to representatives for the two organizations were not returned.
Because Lax runs a registered nonprofit, the Zionist group S.A.F.E. Campus, he said he was hesitant to comment too specifically on electoral politics. But he said he believes Jews on the right are “coming around” to the problem of antisemitism on their side. And he’s deeply concerned about Vance running for president in 2028 without having distanced himself from Carlson.
“I could never support a candidate who says we need to have a conversation about genetically testing Jews,” Lax said. “What Vance said, I think people’s eyes popped out of their heads.”
And, despite his earlier defenses of Trump, he said the president must more forcefully condemn Carlson and Vance’s rhetoric now. “He can’t have his vice president say that it is an important conversation that we talk about genetically testing Jews to see if they come from Abraham,” Lax said. Vance himself once compared Trump to Hitler, prior to being chosen as his running mate.
Lax is also reflecting more on his 2024 piece decrying Trump-Hitler comparisons. If the president doesn’t issue a more forceful condemnation of his party’s antisemitic wing in the next month, the professor said, ”I may very well change my mind.”
By Friday afternoon, he had drawn a possible line in the sand, tweeting a call for Trump to demand Vance’s immediate resignation.
“Enough. This is a National Antisemitic State of Emergency. Only Trump can end it. And he must do so now,” Lax wrote. “It starts by booting JD and cutting Tucker out from all conservative and Republican orgs.”
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