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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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Hannah Senesh’s example of Jewish pride and sacrifice gains renewed attention in our anxious era
More than 80 years after she parachuted into Yugoslavia as part of the only military operation in World War II that attempted to rescue Jews, the Jewish poet and kibbutznik Hannah Senesh is having her moment.
The play “Hannah Senesh” is running through Nov. 9 at the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene in New York — an excellent one-woman show, starring Jennifer Apple, that draws directly from Senesh’s diary and poems.
A new book by Douglas Century, “Crash of the Heavens: The Remarkable Story of Hannah Senesh and the Only Military Mission to Rescue Europe’s Jews During World War II,” is a work of nonfiction written with the pacing and tension of a thriller.
Early next year, the noted Israeli journalist Matti Friedman will tell the story of Hannah’s team of parachutists in “Out of The Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe.”
And this week the New York Times gave Senesh the obituary treatment she had been denied in 1944, as part of its “Overlooked No More” project.
Why, in 2025, is the culture turning its attention to the story of this young poet, soldier and martyr? What does her life mean, especially, to Jews?
Hannah Senesh was born in Budapest in 1921 to an assimilated Hungarian Jewish family. Her father, Béla Szenes, was a well-known playwright and journalist who died when she was a child, and her mother, Katharine, raised her and her brother alone. Their home was cultured and secular.
As a schoolgirl, Hannah excelled in writing and was drawn to literature, but by her teenage years, antisemitism had begun to close in on Hungarian Jews. Rather than retreat, she grew more conscious of her Jewish identity and of the new Zionist movement that sought to combine Jewish pride with action.
In 1939, as the clouds of war gathered, Senesh left Budapest for Palestine. She studied at the Nahalal agricultural school for girls and later joined Kibbutz Sdot Yam near Caesarea, embracing the pioneer life. In the kibbutz she found a community rooted in the land and faith in the future of the Jewish people. There she also honed her poetic voice, writing verses that would later become part of Jewish collective memory.
I, along with countless young people, grew up singing her most famous poem in Jewish summer camps. That is “Eli, Eli” — “My God, my God, may these things never end: the sand and the sea, the rustle of the waters, the lightning of the heavens, the prayer of man.” The poem’s original title is “Walking to Caesarea,” which is where Hannah wrote it. Caesearea, the Roman capital of ancient Palestine, was where the sages suffered martyrdom. The reference to the site suggests Hannah could sense the possibility of her own martyrdom.
So does “Blessed Is the Match,” another of her best-known poems: “Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame, blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.”
As the Holocaust unfolded, Senesh could not remain on the sidelines. She volunteered for a special British unit to train Jewish parachutists who would drop behind enemy lines to aid Allied forces and assist persecuted Jews.
Hannah Senesh wears the uniform of the British Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, which she joined in 1943. (Yad Vashem Photo Archive)
In 1944, she parachuted into Yugoslavia as part of an Allied mission to reach occupied Hungary. Her goal was to make contact with the underground and help rescue Jews who were being deported to Auschwitz. After months of operating with Yugoslav partisans, she attempted to cross the Hungarian border but was captured by fascist forces. Tortured, interrogated and offered the chance to save her life by revealing secret details of her mission, she refused. When asked if she was British, she reportedly declared instead, “I am a Jew.”
Senesh was imprisoned in Budapest, tried for treason and executed by firing squad on Nov. 7, 1944. She was only 23. Her writings — diaries, poems, and letters — were preserved by her mother and later published, ensuring that her voice lived on. Nearly every Israeli household has a copy of her writings.
Like Anne Frank, Hannah left behind a diary chronicling her idealism and inner life. But where Anne Frank’s writings reflect a confined adolescence, albeit with a free-floating spirit, Hannah Senesh’s life was defined by agency and action.
She was not only a poet and diarist; she was a soldier who took up arms against the Nazi war machine. Her vision of heroism fused cultural Zionism with physical courage — a model of Jewish strength that is both intellectual and militant. She was, in many ways, a figure closer to Theodor Herzl than to Anne Frank: a Hungarian Jew whose secular upbringing gave way to a conscious and proud Jewish identity, and whose life was devoted to the realization of that identity in the land of Israel.
Like me, Douglas Century grew up learning Hannah’s story. In my conversation with him, he told me that “her martyrdom amazed and terrified” him. He came to know David Senesh, Hannah’s nephew, who is a therapist specializing in trauma (and who this month spoke to the Times of Israel about how his aunt’s story influenced his life and his work with former hostages and other traumatized Israelis). David had been a prisoner of war in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and spent months undergoing torture. David’s father, George, had been in a POW camp in Vichy France, and his grandmother, Catherine, had been a prisoner of the Gestapo
As David wryly told Century: “I sometimes think it’s our destiny – or something in the Senesh family DNA.”
These converging story lines of Jewish agency and sacrifice suggest why Hannah’s story may be right for these fraught times, marked by antisemitism, anti-Zionism and moral confusion.
The Folksbiene production of Hannah Senesh and the books by Century and Friedman arrive at a time when Jews feel pressure to minimize or conceal their identity. The play’s climactic moment — when Senesh asserts her Jewishness to her captors — feels like a direct message to today’s audience: a call not to erase or apologize for who we are. It is both a historical reenactment and a moral demand.
To that end, the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene has launched a special fundraising initiative to make tickets for “Hannah Senesh” available free of charge for students — both Jewish and non-Jewish. With incidents of antisemitism, intolerance and hatred taking place at an alarming clip in the city, NYTF is committed to providing up to 1,000 free student tickets.
There is also a deep cultural hunger for stories of heroism and moral clarity. Senesh’s story even appears in the late Sen. John McCain’s memoir, “Why Courage Matters”: “I don’t think Hannah wanted to die for the sake of having her memory exalted in history or to prove herself equal to a romantic image she conceived for herself,” writes McCain. “Her purpose wasn’t to die. She died for her life’s purpose.”
Senesh’s story is also a rebuke to the way too many Jews and others remember the Holocaust. For decades, much of Holocaust representation has focused on Jewish victimhood and suffering. Senesh represents something different: defiance, action and dignity. Her story restores a narrative of Jewish power and resistance, embodied not by generals or politicians but by a 23-year-old woman who refused to compromise her Jewish identity. In an age when many feel ambivalent about that identity — when assimilation, fear, or politicized hostility challenge Jewish expression — her unwavering sense of purpose feels radical and necessary.
At a time when “Zionist” and its hateful cousin “Zio” are epithets, more often spat than spoken, the musical, in particular, reclaims that identity as a badge of courage. Moreover, it locates a Zionist identity where it belongs — as a symbol of idealism and resilience. In the show, Hannah makes it clear: Her Zionism echoes that of the philosopher Martin Buber, who believed that both Jews and Arabs could and would share the land.
Every time I lead services from the Reform prayer book, “Mishkan T’filah,” and I come to the readings before the Mourner’s Kaddish, I encounter Hannah’s poem, “Yesh Kochavim”: “There are stars up above, so far away we only see their light long, long after the star itself is gone.” That is Hannah Senesh — a star that fell to earth long before its time, but whose light still illuminates the world.
This is Hannah Senesh’s moment. It comes at a time that calls for models of Jewish strength, compassion and integrity. The play and Century’s book answer that call — not with nostalgia but with renewal. They remind us that, even when surrounded by darkness, the match still burns, and the stars still shine.
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Yad Vashem says it has identified 5 million Holocaust victims: ‘Behind each name is a life that mattered’
Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, says it has reached a major milestone in its efforts to uncover the identities of all of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust, crossing the 5-million name threshold with the help of AI.
That leaves 1 million names still unknown from the tally of 6 million murdered Jews that is synonymous with the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II.
Two years ago, Yad Vashem inaugurated a 26.5 foot-long “Book of Names,” which included the names of 4,800,000 victims of the Shoah, at the United Nations headquarters in New York City.
Since then, researchers deployed AI technology and machine learning to analyze hundreds of millions of archival documents that were previously too extensive to research manually, according to Yad Vashem. In addition to covering large amounts of material quickly, the algorithms were taught to look out for variations of victims’ names, leading to the new identification of hundreds of thousands of victims.
Yad Vashem estimates an additional 250,000 names could still be recovered using the technology.
“Reaching 5 million names is both a milestone and a reminder of our unfinished obligation,” said Dani Dayan, the chairman of Yad Vashem, in a statement. “Behind each name is a life that mattered — a child who never grew up, a parent who never came home, a voice that was silenced forever. It is our moral duty to ensure that every victim is remembered so that no one will be left behind in the darkness of anonymity.”
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Trump calls on Orthodox Jewish voters in NJ to vote for Republican gubernatorial candidate
(JTA) — President Donald Trump on Sunday urged Orthodox Jewish voters in Lakewood, New Jersey, to vote for the Republican candidate in the state’s gubernatorial race.
“I need ALL of my supporters in the Orthodox community in Lakewood and its surrounding towns to vote in HUGE numbers for Jack Ciattarelli,” wrote Trump in a post on Truth Social. “Jack needs every single Vote in the community, including all the Yeshiva students who turned out to vote for me last year.”
Ciattarelli received a joint endorsement last week from Orthodox Jewish leaders in Lakewood as well as the neighboring towns of Jackson, Toms River, Howell and Manchester, according to the Lakewood Scoop.
But Ciattarelli also faced backlash from his opponent, Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill, last month after his Muslim relations advisor said he wasn’t “taking money from Jews” at a campaign event.
In his post, Trump also touted his fierce backing in Lakewood, a center of haredi Orthodox life in the United States, during the 2024 presidential race. He boasted that Lakewood was “one of our biggest Wins anywhere in the Country with more than 90% of the Vote.” In fact, 87.8% of voters in the town cast their ballots for him.
Democrat Kamala Harris won New Jersey in 2024 with 52% of the votes, Ciattarelli is currently hoping to flip the governor’s mansion red. Sherrill is leading in polls, but some show a very tight race, according to an aggregation published by the New York Times.
Several top Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, visited campaign events in New Jersey over the weekend to rally behind Sherrill, in a sign that the party is concerned about the possible outcome of the election.
“Your Votes in this Election will save New Jersey, a State that is near and dear to my heart,” wrote Trump, before exhorting everyone to the polls in all caps.
The post Trump calls on Orthodox Jewish voters in NJ to vote for Republican gubernatorial candidate appeared first on The Forward.