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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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This isn’t Mark Ruffalo’s first antisemitism controversy
Mark Ruffalo is in the spotlight after facing accusations of antisemitism for his criticism of the Ellison family — but this isn’t the first time the actor has been caught in controversy on this topic.
Last Friday, the actor connected the merger of David Ellison’s Paramount with Warner Bros. Discovery to Israel’s war with Hamas. He called Larry Ellison an “oligarch” due to his financial backing of his son David’s merger using wealth earned from his time at Oracle, which created technology used by the Israeli military. His statements immediately drew criticism, with Paramount leaders accusing Ruffalo of invoking antisemitic tropes.
Ruffalo, a four-time Academy Awards nominee best known for playing the Hulk in Marvel movies, has long been an outspoken advocate for progressive causes — including the Palestinian one.
In 2014, Ruffalo made his first public statements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, posting criticisms of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge military operation against Hamas.
He criticized Israel for striking Gaza’s el-Wafa hospital, writing that, “Sorry, I thought blowing up Hospitals [sic] was something that all human beings could agree was off limits.”
Ruffalo also questioned the claim that Hamas used civilians as “human shields.”
“Do you honestly think these people, these fellow human beings, would use their own children as shields?” he wrote. “Use your heart.”
Around the same time, Ruffalo also disputed whether Hamas had actually kidnapped three Israeli teenagers, one of the incidents that sparked the 2014 hostilities — an incident that the terrorist group later admitted to.
Ruffalo received criticism for his posts, but stood by his perspective. “Empathizing w/ Gaza does NOT make me anti-Semitic, nor pro-Hamas or anti-Israel,” he wrote in 2014. “It makes me human.”
As clashes between Israel and Hamas sprouted up again in 2021, Ruffalo once again took to Twitter to denounce Israel, likening the situation to South Africa and calling “for sanctions to free Palestinians.”
Soon after, Ruffalo wrote another tweet apologizing for his rhetoric.
“I have reflected & wanted to apologize for posts during the recent Israel/Hamas fighting that suggested Israel is committing ‘genocide,’” he wrote. “It’s not accurate, it’s inflammatory, disrespectful & is being used to justify antisemitism here & abroad. Now is the time to avoid hyperbole.”
Following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack in 2023 and Israel’s military response, Ruffalo returned to pro-Palestinian activism. Less than two weeks after the attack, on Oct. 20, Ruffalo — along with more than 50 others creatives through the organization Artists for Ceasefire — sent a letter to President Joe Biden demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. At the following Academy awards, Ruffalo wore a pin from the organization.
In Sept. 2025, Ruffalo, and along with more than 5,500 others in the film industry, signed a letter pledging to boycott “Israeli film institutions” that they believed were “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people.”
Ruffalo has publicly aligned himself with the Boycott Divest Sanction (BDS) movement, calling to “boycott, divest, sanction and prosecute” Israel, on a podcast with Mehdi Hasan. During the same interview, he said that he has stopped talking to former friends who don’t agree with his perspective on the issue.
“I can’t talk to them anymore,” he said. “They’re either trying to convince me that the Palestinian people are all terrorists and they all deserve to die, or in the same breath will tell me that they’re actually human shields, and they deserve to die because they’re human shields.”
Now, after making statements connecting the Paramount-Discovery merger to Israeli military technology, Ruffalo has been accused of antisemitism by numerous Jewish organizations including the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Weisenthal Center.
The actor has now taken to social media to denounce the accusations of antisemitism, calling the accusation “appalling and fundamentally dishonest,” and saying that criticizing “the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract, or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticising Jewish people.”
He added, “Everything I know about acting, activism, and humanism has been profoundly shaped by the Jewish friends, colleagues, and loved ones who have been integral and family throughout every point of my life.”
The post This isn’t Mark Ruffalo’s first antisemitism controversy appeared first on The Forward.
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American synagogues are spending more than ever on security. How much is enough?
At Temple Israel in Bloomfield, Michigan, which was attacked in March by a gunman, getting ready for the High Holidays this year means more than preparing for crowds of worshippers.
The synagogue is spending millions of dollars on security upgrades, including a new gatehouse, artificial intelligence technology and physical and ballistic hardening of its building.
“There are major changes coming,” Rabbi Josh Bennett of Temple Israel said in an interview. “I think that extends then to many of the other places of worship in town, and then, by extension, the entire Jewish community around the country.”
But as congregations install barriers, hire guards and tighten access to their buildings, Jewish leaders are struggling to balance budgets and keep their synagogues welcoming.
Bennett fears fortressing the Jewish community through ever-expanding security upgrades is “unsustainable at all levels,” from the emotional to the financial.
The Secure Community Network, a Jewish security organization that provides threat intelligence and safety training to Jewish institutions across the country, told the Forward that the American Jewish community now spends between $765 million and $1 billion annually on security and safety.
CEO Michael G. Masters said that figure is dramatically higher than it was several years ago, when it was the exception, rather than the rule, for a Jewish institution to have a security plan, let alone layers of cameras, guards, and coordination with law enforcement.
The spending reflects what Mitchell Silber, CEO of the Community Security Initiative, a New York-focused Jewish counterterrorism and security organization, described as “the most complicated threat picture that the Jewish community in the United States has ever faced.”
According to the FBI, Jews were the victims of nearly two-thirds of religion-based hate crimes in the United States in 2025. And these days, Silber’s analysts are tracking threats from white supremacists and neo-Nazis, Islamist extremists and actors inspired by or connected to Iran and Hezbollah, and left-wing violence connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“That’s taking a tremendous toll just financially on our Jewish institutions,” Silber said.
The growing costs have pushed Temple Israel to lobby Congress in support of the bipartisan Jewish American Security Act, which would increase federal funding available to protect Jewish institutions. Last week, members of Congress, including the bill’s co-sponsor, Rep. John James of Michigan, visited the Temple to see the security updates.
When congregants help screen for danger
But as congregations pour money into keeping potential attackers out, another question looms: At what point does protecting a synagogue begin to change the experience for those coming in?
“The more you build, there’s, I think, an inverse proportion to how safe people will actually feel when they’re coming in,” said Bennett, whose congregants have been emotionally rattled since the March attack, during which a gunman rammed a truck loaded with gasoline and fireworks into the synagogue. “Nobody wants to walk into a building where you walk by loaded semi-automatic machine guns.”
A person arriving at a synagogue for the first time could have harmful intentions. They could also be new to town, exploring Judaism, or simply looking for a place to spend Shabbat. Distinguishing between those is an important challenge.
Unlike an outside guard, a longtime congregant may know who normally attends services, which unfamiliar face is expected for a wedding or bar mitzvah, and when someone’s behavior genuinely seems out of place. That’s why organizations like SCN and the Community Security Service train community members to serve as additional protection at their own institutions.
In 2026 alone, SCN has conducted close to 1,000 in-person safety trainings, reaching roughly 25,000 people. For the High Holidays, they are offering Zoom Webinars for Jewish institutions across the country, as synagogue-goers who ordinarily recognize most people walking through their doors may suddenly welcome hundreds of unfamiliar worshippers.
Preparation was put to the test at Central Synagogue in Manhattan last Friday, when a man stormed the temple, punched a congregant, and headbutted and spat on a security guard while directing a racial slur at him.
Silber described the response as a “tactical success.”
“Their security team had drilled. Their clergy and staff had drilled. And when the moment came, within less than 60 seconds, they had this individual moved outside of the sanctuary.”
At Temple Israel, the congregation has been fundraising specifically for security. After the March attack, Bennett said, some congregants would like to see “a moat and a full army around our buildings.”
He understands the impulse. But he worries there may be no end to what a synagogue can spend in pursuit of safety.
“How do you do this with the knowledge that it’s financially unsustainable?” Bennett said. “This is not the way we should be spending dollars.”
The post American synagogues are spending more than ever on security. How much is enough? appeared first on The Forward.
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The far right is more dangerous to Jews than the far left. A historian explains why.
When Jewish leaders speak out these days, it’s often to blast the anti-Israel actions of one Democratic Socialists of America politician or another. Given all the attention — and the millions of dollars raised within the Jewish community to help defeat these candidates — you’d think the greatest existential threat to American Jews was coming from the left.
But a new book by historian Steven Ross is here to tell you: You’d be mistaken.
“What you’ve seen seeping in on the far left is more anti-Israel and some antisemitism,” Ross told me in a phone interview. “But here’s the thing: the left has never called for death to people, the right has.”
Right-wing extremist groups have spent 80 years calling for the death and deportation of Jews and minorities — and sometimes acting upon those calls. The far left, whatever its failures on antisemitism, has not. And unlike in previous years, the far right today has found the two things it lacked: a single leader to unite behind, and a technology to reach millions.
In The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy, Ross, a professor of history at University of Southern California, tracks the continuous, noxious activity of hate groups in the United States from the end of World War II to the present day — and the brave and secretive men and women who sought to thwart them.
The book reads like a great suspense novel, except, unfortunately, it’s nonfiction. And its conclusion — spoiler alert — is that the threat is only growing more dangerous.
Uncannily, in his research, Ross found that Jewish leaders predicted as much — in 1945.
Even before the Allies declared victory in Europe, leaders of the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Nazi League, who had launched undercover operations to infiltrate and disrupt hate groups, had come to a disturbing conclusion. They could defeat any hate group, even the Ku Klux Klan, unless the disparate groups could one day “communicate on an instantaneous basis,” and unless the far right figured out a way to make it into one of the two mainstream political parties.
“Here we are,” Ross said. “Everything has come true.” Social media has enabled hate groups to communicate and organize at scale, and President Donald Trump’s pardon of the Jan. 6 rioters — direct ideological descendants of the postwar far right, Ross says — was but one example of the Republican flirtation with extremist and violent groups.
Descendants of the ‘Betrayed Generation’
In the early 1940s, Jewish leaders also predicted that when the war ended, antisemitism and racism would increase — despite Americans having just fought a savage battle against prejudice and fascism.
The Greatest Generation also birthed what Ross calls “the Betrayed Generation,” men and women who returned to a changed America in which liberals, Blacks and Jews were mobilizing and upwardly mobile.
“The Founding Fathers, they insisted, had created a nation based on white Christian rule and they would not allow traitors or people of color to change that,” Ross writes.
Groups like the American Nazi Party, the Columbians and the National States Rights Party warned that Jews were behind “race suicide,” plotting to replace white people with non-white immigrants. They accused Jews of being secret Communists and undermining the cause of “America First.”
“I will solve the Jewish problem once and for all,” James Madole, founder of the fascist National Renaissance Party, told a boisterous rally in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood in February 1953. “I will finish the job that Hitler started.”
During this period, there were an estimated 3,114 right-wing organizations and periodicals that reached a combined membership of over 10 million Americans, says Ross.
The groups carried out a series of bombings against synagogues and Black churches that were, Ross writes, “unrelenting, unpredictable, and unnerving.”
How to fight back
J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which should have been tracking these groups, was far more concerned with persecuting potential communists. So the ADL, AJC and the ANL fielded undercover agents to infiltrate and disrupt these groups, often at the risk of their lives.
One of them, a 19-year-old Columbia University student named William Goring, rose to the head of the National Renaissance Party’s leadership. In a memo to his handlers, Goring described the far-right members he encountered as “the failures, the lonely,” who feel “abandoned by their government and gain a strong internal feeling of camaraderie” from the far-right parties.
“To ease their lack of self-respect they make up excuses and find scapegoats. Some fix upon the Jews, others on the Blacks,” Goring wrote.
By the 1970s, this spy network as well as internal strife had weakened these hate groups, their memberships dwindling to hundreds.
Jewish groups “thought they had won the battle against hate,” wrote Ross, and turned their attention to the causes of civil rights and Israel.
But the ideology and organizations festered and regrouped, manifesting in the anti-government militia movement, the white supremacist march in Charlottesville and the Jan. 6 riots. Between 2008 and 2016, the number of militia and anti-government groups rose to 1,400.
Media personalities with millions of followers, like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, push warnings against shadowy Jewish influence and the “great replacement theory,” the new term for “race suicide.”
The bombings that wracked Jewish communities in the postwar period have declined, Ross acknowledged. What’s replaced them is a constant stream of hate pushed into people’s social media feeds. Social media has made it harder to infiltrate and disrupt hate networks, while making it easier to constantly find new recruits.
“You don’t have to bodily harm someone,” he said. “Creating a life where they’re afraid, whether it’s Muslim, Jew, immigrant — that’s terrorism, that’s domestic terrorism.”
Meanwhile, Trump and others in his administration openly engage with Holocaust deniers and antisemites. In Florida’s Republican primary races earlier this month, two candidates, Dan Bilzerian and Jake Lang, spouted raw antisemitism. Bilzerian, who lost to a Jewish congressman, had asked his 30 million online followers if Hitler “was a good person.”
Ross, whose father survived the Warsaw Ghetto and Dachau and whose mother survived Auschwitz, said he believes the answer is better education, but that’s “long term.”
I asked him what the short-term solution is.
“Take two people to the polls,” he said. “Get two people in their young 20s who aren’t used to voting, and get them out to the polls. That will change things right now.”
Bilzerian lost badly, but he’s not going away, and neither is the ability to infect minds and harvest hate. The question isn’t whether the far right is more dangerous — Ross has answered that. It’s whether we’re paying attention.
The post The far right is more dangerous to Jews than the far left. A historian explains why. appeared first on The Forward.
