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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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A Message From the Torah for 2026: Live Now in a Way You’ll Be Proud of Later
A Torah scroll. Photo: RabbiSacks.org.
I have always cherished Ludwig van Beethoven’s last words, spoken on his deathbed: “Plaudite, amici, comedia finita est.” “Applaud, my friends, the comedy is over.”
This kind of blunt honesty only comes from people facing their final moments. The masks drop, the posturing stops, and what’s left is pure truth.
Steve Jobs was diagnosed with terminal cancer in October 2003. Remarkably, he lived for another eight years, during which he became deeply reflective, increasingly conscious of his legacy and of life’s meaning in ways he had never been before.
In the address he gave at the Stanford commencement in 2005, he told the graduating class and their families, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward — you can only connect them looking backward.”
He didn’t say it explicitly, but his words came from a deep awareness of his own mortality. The message was clear. He was looking back on his life, taking stock, and seeing patterns that only become clear near the end. When death feels real, clarity follows.
Jobs also talked to the Stanford students about his failure, about being fired from the company he started, and about death itself. Looking back, his speech feels less like a graduation talk and more like a final message. It wasn’t about money or material things, but about meaning. Some things in life matter. Others don’t. Some things are just noise. Others have real substance.
History is full of moments like this, when great figures, as their lives are coming to a close, suddenly see what really matters. Near the end of his life, Thomas Jefferson wrote to his beloved daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, “The last pang of life is in parting from you!”
What worried him most about death wasn’t losing power or fame, but the pain of being without those he loved. When all is said and done, relationships with our loved ones are what really matter, and our career or achievements pale into insignificance by comparison.
Sir Isaac Newton expressed something similar, though in a different way, as he looked back on his incredible life. Newton, whose discoveries changed how we see the universe, spoke with great humility: “I do not know what I may seem to the world — but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
Even after a lifetime of achievement, he didn’t focus on his success. Instead, he saw clearly how much was still unknown, and how even greatness can feel small when you look at life’s bigger picture.
This is the emotional and moral setting at the start of Parshat Vayechi, which holds the Torah’s great final conversation. Jacob is dying, and he knows it. In his last moments, he gathers his children and speaks to them — not as a nostalgic father looking back, but as someone who truly understands who they are and what each one needs to hear.
If we expect deathbed speeches to be warm and fuzzy, Jacob’s version of one will come as a surprise. Some of his words are blessings, but others are more like rebukes. Reuven is reminded he didn’t reach his potential. Shimon and Levi are called out for their violence. Yehuda is elevated to family leadership, but is also reminded that this role comes with responsibility, not privilege.
This isn’t a “feel good” speech. It’s a speech that values truth over comfort. And that’s exactly the lesson of Jacob’s last words: legacy isn’t about saying nice things, but about saying what’s needed. Jacob isn’t focused on how his sons feel right now. He cares about who they will become after he’s gone, and how his words will echo through their lives and future generations.
Which brings us to today’s world, where we tend to focus more on our image while we’re alive and often don’t think about how we’ll be remembered. Social media in particular has taught us to always project an image that’s curated and perfect in the here and now, with no thought about the long term impact.
Everything is about appearances and how things are seen in the moment. We tell our own stories as they happen, believing that if we control how things look, we can control the outcome.
Vayechi breaks that illusion. Jacob reveals something uncomfortable: you can’t write your own legacy. He is brutally honest with his sons, and in doing so, he also faces his own role as a father. He doesn’t hide the truth. He points out their patterns, their tendencies, their choices — not to shame them, but to help them see both their strengths and weaknesses, take responsibility, and grow into the best version of themselves.
Vayechi is honest, but it is not hopeless. Yaakov doesn’t say, “This is who you are, and you can’t change.” He says, “This is who you have been — now choose what to do with it.” Steve Jobs ended his Stanford speech with the famous line, “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
But the line before is even more telling. He called death “life’s change agent,” the force that clears away what doesn’t matter to make room for what does. The message is clear: it’s better to let that kind of clarity shape our lives now, instead of waiting until the end.
Vayechi teaches this lesson. When we reflect honestly, death doesn’t make life smaller — it makes it sharper. It removes pretense and leaves us with what really matters. Seeing our lives from a distance can be cleansing. The key is to live that way now, so we won’t need to revise it later.
It’s an idea that finds a moving expression in Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl describes a woman who was his patient reflecting on her life, a life that was shaped by suffering and sacrifice as she cared for a severely disabled son.
Viewing her life as if from its end, she concludes — through tears — that it was not a failure. On the contrary, it was filled with meaning. The pain had turned her life into one of love and responsibility.
Frankl’s point is devastatingly simple: when life is seen through the lens of its conclusion, meaning often emerges where none had been visible before.
Steve Jobs was right: you can only connect the dots of a life by looking back. But Parshat Vayechi shows us we don’t have to wait until the end to start that process. Jacob connects the dots for his sons while he’s still alive — but more importantly, while they all still have many years to live.
The challenge he gives us is simple: live now in a way that will make sense later, when we look back. Because when the full story is told, the dots will connect, whether we like the picture or not. The only thing we really control is how we choose to draw them from the start.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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Israel Cannot Outsource Its Survival
Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepts rockets launched from the Gaza Strip, as seen from Sderot, Israel May 13, 2023 Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Israel’s security doctrine has been shaped by a harsh but undeniable reality: hesitation invites criticism, but delay can invite catastrophe.
This is not a posture of arrogance or defiance; it is an expression of responsibility toward all of Israel’s citizens. For Israel, the cost of miscalculation is not theoretical, it is measured in lives. From its founding, Israel has faced existential threats that no other modern democracy has had to confront so consistently or so closely.
Surrounded by hostile actors, terrorist organizations, and regimes that openly question its right to exist, Israel has learned that survival depends on clarity, preparedness, and the willingness to act when necessary, even when such actions are unpopular internationally. Waiting for consensus or permission has historically proven to be something that could endanger Israel’s very existence.
This does not mean Israel rejects peace. On the contrary, Israel has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to pursue peace where peace is genuinely possible, and cooperation where cooperation enhances security. Peace treaties with former adversaries, regional partnerships, and humanitarian initiatives all testify to Israel’s desire for stability and coexistence. But peace cannot be built on unenforceable promises or blind faith in actors who have repeatedly violated agreements and norms.
Israel will not gamble its existence on assurances that cannot be guaranteed or enforced. Sovereignty, in this context, is not a symbolic concept or a political slogan. It is the concrete ability to defend oneself when no one else will, or when others cannot act in time. Sovereignty means maintaining independent judgment, operational freedom, and the resolve to protect one’s population under all circumstances.
History has taught the Jewish people an enduring and painful lesson: ultimate responsibility for Jewish survival rests with the Jewish State itself. Centuries of persecution, abandonment, and broken promises culminated in a clear understanding that security outsourced is security endangered. Israel’s independence is not only political; it is moral and existential.
Alliances matter. International partnerships, shared values, and moral clarity play an important role in strengthening Israel’s position and legitimacy. Israel values its allies and understands the importance of cooperation in a complex global environment. But when survival is at stake, alliances cannot replace independent decision-making.
No ally can assume responsibility for Israel’s existence, and none should be expected to.
When Israel acts to protect itself, it often ends up protecting others as well. By confronting extremist ideologies, disrupting terrorist networks, and standing as a frontline defender against radicalization, Israel contributes to global security, even when this reality is uncomfortable or inconvenient for the international community to acknowledge.
In the end, Israel’s guiding principle remains clear: peace where possible, strength where necessary, and sovereignty as the final shield.
History has shown that when Israel defends itself decisively, it not only safeguards its own people but helps prevent greater instability beyond its borders. Whether the world is ready to admit it or not, Israel’s self-defense has often served as a defense of shared values and global security itself.
Sabine Sterk is the CEO of Time To Stand Up For Israel.
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Selective Reporting: How Gaza Aid Vetting Became a Media Narrative
Trucks carrying humanitarian aid and fuel line up at the crossing into the Gaza Strip at the Rafah border on the Egypt side, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, in Rafah, Egypt, October 17, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
Embedding operatives in civilian and humanitarian organizations in Gaza to evade detection by Israeli authorities has been a key strategy of Hamas and other terrorist organizations. Israel has consistently worked to prevent well-intentioned humanitarian organizations from being exploited for these purposes.
This past week, Israel demonstrated yet again its persistence in combating terrorism wherever it may exist by suspending the Gaza operations of 37 humanitarian organizations that refused to cooperate with the rules laid out by Israel.
In March 2025, Israel notified every aid organization in the Gaza Strip that they had to complete a re-registration process to be able to continue their operations in January 2026.
The main requirement asked of the organizations was to submit a list of all employees as part of a security screening process. Those who did not complete the process would be unable to continue their operations.
Protecting Aid – Preventing Exploitation
As of January 1, 2026, international NGOs that did not renew their registration will no longer be allowed to operate.
Organizations were notified in March 2025, given nearly ten months to comply, and granted a good-faith extension… pic.twitter.com/U0JqfR8OKF
— Oren Marmorstein (@OrenMarmorstein) December 30, 2025
Many outlets, such as CNN, have framed this as potentially leading to a “humanitarian crisis.” This is despite the total amount of aid from these 37 organizations accounting for only 1% of the total aid entering the Gaza Strip.
Alex Crawford of Sky News claimed that Israel was blocking these organizations “without evidence” that there have been connections to terrorist organizations, calling the groups “respected.”
Israel is blocking some of the world’s most respected aid groups from Gaza, The groups say Israel’s rules to operate are arbitrary and cd endanger lives. Israel insists – without evidence – that they’ve been infiltrated by militants. https://t.co/gMb3i7XUz4
— Alex Crawford (@AlexCrawfordSky) December 30, 2025
But there’s nothing respectable about terrorists infiltrating organizations meant to help civilians in need. More than that, this effort is meant to ensure terrorist organizations do not take control of or subvert humanitarian operations.
Throughout the war, humanitarian organizations have been abused by terrorist organizations.
Doctors Without Borders (MSF), for instance, is one of the organizations whose operations are being suspended in the coming months, after it failed to provide a list of its Gaza employees. But MSF has previous form. In 2024, it was revealed that an employee of MSF was active in Islamic Jihad and another was a sniper in a Hamas unit.
This is your employee, @MSF. A physical therapist by day and terrorist by night.
Fadi Al-Wadiya, who was eliminated by the @IDF 2 days ago, worked both as a physical therapist for Doctors Without Borders and as a prominent terrorist in the PIJ terrorist organization.
Fadi… pic.twitter.com/N1FiO6QgLz
— COGAT (@cogatonline) June 27, 2024
Mosab Abu Toha, a Pulitzer Prize winner exposed by HonestReporting for excusing the abduction of Israeli hostages on October 7, likewise joined the choir online to complain about MSF being suspended in Gaza.
He faces a knowledge gap in understanding that Hamas and other terrorist organizations have embedded themselves in civilian infrastructure, including hospitals. And MSF only operates five out of 220 primary care clinics and medical points in Gaza, as per COGAT.
What country is barring more than 30 humanitarian organizations, including Doctors Without Borders, from operating in Gaza?
As if these aid groups were ever allowed to function freely in the first place. For months, humanitarian organizations have faced blocked access, extreme…— Mosab Abu Toha (@MosabAbuToha) December 31, 2025
Naturally, this context is omitted from international reports on the NGO suspensions, as it does not fit the narrative. It is thus also telling that the media’s focus has been on the 15 percent of organizations not complying with Israel, rather than the 85 percent who are. This would, however, require the media to question why 37 so-called aid organizations are refusing the simple task of providing a list of their employees.
This is not the first time Gaza’s aid system has been highlighted as being vulnerable to — if not outright compromised by — terrorist infiltration. Hamas has systematically embedded members in civilian infrastructure as a way to control resources. As a result, international aid organizations have repeated claims published by Hamas without any scrutiny. These claims have then been uncritically amplified by the media, creating a self-reinforcing cycle in which Hamas’ aid narratives turned into accepted facts.
While terrorist organizations seek to spread false information about the lack of humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip, the truth remains that 4,200 trucks filled with aid enter Gaza every week, coordinated between Israel and aid organizations that have complied with the rules. Organizations unwilling to comply and provide a list of employees must explain their persistent refusal to meet this basic requirement of transparency.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.