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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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Jewish Haverford students named a professor in their antisemitism lawsuit. Police say he responded by stalking one online.
A religion professor named by Jewish Haverford College students in a recently settled lawsuit against the school was arrested Tuesday after authorities say he used anonymous accounts to harass one of those students online.
According to an indictment unsealed in federal court Tuesday, Haverford professor Guangtian Ha used at least four burner accounts on X to send roughly 50 threatening messages to an unidentified male Jewish student between October 2025 and May 2026.
Ha is charged with one count of cyberstalking, a crime that carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
Federal authorities say Ha replied to one of the student’s posts with a picture of the student’s home mailbox and an emoji of a pair of eyes. After the student took security precautions in response to the messages, the professor allegedly commented on them and wrote, “The goyim have woken up, Jew. Run. Flee. Leave.”
Haverford College President Wendy Raymond informed students of the arrest in a letter published on the school website Tuesday, saying Ha had been placed on administrative leave and barred from campus while the case proceeds.
“I am deeply distressed by these allegations and want to state in the plainest of terms that any form of harassment or discrimination based on identity is unacceptable, antithetical to our values, and has no place at Haverford,” Raymond wrote.
Ha, who was on sabbatical this semester, could not be reached for comment. Federal court filings do not identify any legal representation for the defendant.
The arrest comes two months after the liberal arts college, which is located just outside of Philadelphia, settled an antisemitism lawsuit filed by Jewish students.
In that lawsuit, filed in 2024, those students had listed a number of Haverford professors who they said contributed to an antisemitic environment. One of them was Ha, a member of Faculty for Justice in Palestine, who had tweeted from his public account that “the only way to deal with Zionists is to stop talking to them and refuse to let them waste your time.”
He later tweeted — still from his public account — that he knew who at Haverford had been “silent on this genocide or even tacitly support it,” saying, “I will never forgive them. I know their names and I know their faces. Never forgive. No reconciliation.”
The messages Ha allegedly sent from his anonymous accounts were even more threatening. According to the indictment, one read, “Jew, get the f— out of my country.”
Another message allegedly read, “If Jews are so special then they should be placed in special camps and receive special treatments.”
According to an amended civil complaint filed in January 2025, the school took no public action against Ha, who taught courses on Islam and religion in China.
In the settlement, the college’s leaders agreed that Haverford’s policy would bar discrimination specifically against students and employees with Zionist views, as well as those who are Jewish or Israeli, according to Higher Ed Dive.
In addition to his alleged online activity, Ha had co-written an opinion column in the Haverford Clerk, the campus newspaper, in which he downplayed student concerns about antisemitism as “Zionist witch hunts” — arguing instead that pro-Palestinian students faced the brunt of campus discrimination.
“A truly inclusive learning community would necessitate our administration taking a clear and careful stance against this sort of hatred,” he wrote.
The post Jewish Haverford students named a professor in their antisemitism lawsuit. Police say he responded by stalking one online. appeared first on The Forward.
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‘He has repeatedly capitulated to Zionist pressure’: Leftist groups to protest Mamdani on Oct. 7
A raft of pro-Palestinian and democratic socialist groups will protest against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on the three-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks, accusing the mayor of capitulating to pro-Israel pressure since taking office.
More than 20 local organizations, most of them college chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine or Young Democratic Socialists of America, are participating in the event, which will culminate with a rally at City Hall. (Young Democratic Socialists America is the student offshoot of the DSA.)
The groups’ complaints against the mayor include his allowing a law to take effect that allows NYPD to implement security perimeters at places of worship and launching a plan to combat antisemitism that includes funding for Jewish community groups that do not disavow Israel.
“Zohran Mamdani campaigned on promises to the Palestine movement,” the groups said in a caption alongside a poster for the event. “He has betrayed his own alleged values, failing to make those promises a reality. Instead, he has repeatedly capitulated to Zionist pressure.”
The protest comes even as Mamdani, who drew on the support of local progressive groups in his run for office, continues to hammer the Israeli government and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from City Hall. But the protest — which appears to have split the city’s DSA movement — revealed growing discontent from the far-left with how Mamdani has governed.
It also underscored how uncompromising the left flank of the democratic socialists can be on matters related to Israel.
Why leftist groups are protesting Mamdani
Mamdani rode into office last November on a swell of pro-Palestinian support and democratic socialist organizing power. He rejected many of the pro-Israel norms of New York City campaign trail, including by promising to arrest Netanyahu if he ever visited New York and calling the war in Gaza a genocide.
Since taking office, Mamdani has revoked an anti-BDS executive order signed by his predecessor, Eric Adams, and the city’s previously accepted definition of antisemitism from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Mamdani also publicly defended pro-Palestinian student protesters detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and opposed the West Bank land sales at local synagogues.
And even in a public appearance conceding he did not have the authority to arrest Netanyahu, Mamdani reiterated his stance that the Israeli premier is a war criminal.
Still, he has tried to court Jewish groups by pledging to address antisemitism through his new multimillion dollar strategy that allocates $6.4 million to community organizations. He has also visited with Jews in all five boroughs to build community relations.
Their criticism of Mamdani for the security perimeter bill reflected disappointment in the mayor for something he couldn’t do much about. The bill, Int. No. 1-B, passed in March with a supermajority, meaning he was unable to veto it. Rather than sign it into law, Mamdani did not take action on it and it became law after 30 days. (He vetoed a separate bill creating a protest buffer zone for schools that had passed with a simple majority.)
The protesting groups argue the bill criminalizes protests against synagogues that host “illegal land sales” of property in the West Bank. Additionally, the chapters take issue with Mamdani’s antisemitism strategy providing security infrastructure to “Zionist synagogues” that hold these sales. The bill provides the same security to all synagogues regardless of their affiliation with Israel.
The online poster for the event states in its caption that Mamdani’s Strategy to Combat Antisemitism provides “funding for Zionist propagandist groups” such as the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York. The council works in partnership with the UJA-Federation of New York to fight against antisemitism and foster support for Israel, including sponsoring tours to the country. Under a Mamdani-created program, JCRC will work with grassroots groups on programs that include education, victim support, data collection and combating online hate.
The mayor’s office declined the Forward’s request for comment. The organizations involved did not immediately respond to inquiries, except for Lehman College Young Democratic Socialists of America which declined.
The post ‘He has repeatedly capitulated to Zionist pressure’: Leftist groups to protest Mamdani on Oct. 7 appeared first on The Forward.
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Israelis don’t lose sleep over Mamdani. Why is Netanyahu focused on him?
(JTA) — Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly this year came at a critical time for Israel. Talks were underway to resolve the conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, and Israel was awaiting the outcome of the on-again, off-again U.S.-Iran ceasefire negotiations. The country had also just been sanctioned by 12 countries, led by Britain, over its West Bank policies.
Yet it was Zohran Mamdani, the New York mayor who has virtually no say in international relations, who drew the Israeli prime minister’s fiercest, most lengthy criticism. Mamdani, Netanyahu charged, was an antisemite, a “buddy” of Hamas, the husband of a supporter of the Oct. 7 massacre and the friend of a 9/11 enthusiast.
The U.N. address wasn’t the only time in the weeks leading up to Israel’s Oct. 27 election that Netanyahu focused his sights on Mamdani in an unusual forum. In August, Netanyahu’s Likud party launched an election billboard campaign showing Mamdani alongside Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, and Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem, with the slogan, “They want Netanyahu to lose, don’t let them win.”
In the weeks leading up to his visit to U.N. headquarters in New York, the prime minister and Mamdani went at each other on social media, with Mamdani calling for Netanyahu’s arrest in New York (while acknowledging he had no power to order it), and the prime minister accusing the mayor of antisemitism and support of Hamas.
Netanyahu is making the New York mayor a central bogeyman this election season – is it working?
It’s true that Mamdani, who is Muslim, is unpopular across most of the Jewish political spectrum in Israel. During his election campaign and since taking office, Mamdani has constantly accused Israel of genocide and ethnic cleansing, charges most Jewish Israelis and politicians from both coalition and opposition parties reject.
But it is unlikely that the average Israeli would base his or her vote on a candidate’s attitude towards the mayor of New York. After all, Israelis have many other issues on their plate that are closer to home, such as the state of national security, accountability for the failures that allowed Hamas to carry out its deadly raids inside Israel on Oct. 7 and the exemption of ultra-Orthodox Israelis from IDF service.
Still, Netanyahu aide Caroline Glick, the prime minister’s international affairs adviser, said in an interview it was “obvious” and “self-explaining” that the prime minister would push back against a person who has been “spewing antisemitism.”
Glick repeated Netanyahu’s claim in his speech that New York Jews felt unsafe as a result of Mamdani’s rhetoric and policies. She said Mamdani “got what he ordered up” in the premier’s U.N. address. (Mamdani pushed back sharply on what he called Netanyahu’s “baseless lies” in the speech.)
Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, said Mamdani started it. Mamdani “began a smear campaign already in July,” Danon said, referring to the video in which Mamdani called on the federal government to arrest Netanyahu, and the beefs on social media since then. Mamdani “fuels the fire and incites, and our approach is not to keep quiet versus inciters,” Danon wrote to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in response to a query.
There are plenty of other targets that Netanyahu can attack to bolster his reputation as a fighter. He took aim in his U.N. speech at the “moral cowards” who left the hall when he rose to speak, the Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa, French President Emmanuel Macron, Turkish President Erdogan, Qatar, and the protestors outside the U.N. building.
So why did Mamdani consume so much oxygen?
Guy Levy, a spokesperson for Netanyahu’s Likud party, explained that Mamdani is not just a personal adversary but an emblem of a larger struggle. “Mamdani is a symbol of the rise in the West of the connection between the radical Left and Islamists and antisemites,” he told JTA.
That connects with a larger theme in Netanyahu’s campaign: arguing that a governing coalition without him would be dependent on a majority-Arab party and on the left-wing Democrats to get enough seats to form a majority. As such, he contends, they would be unable or unwilling to safeguard Israeli security interests.
The campaign’s most recent slogan is, “It’s either the Right or Palestine” (the two words rhyme in Hebrew), indicating that a rival government would agree to Palestinian statehood, which many Israelis view as a danger. Mamdani, according to Levy, is part of the same left-wing/Arab camp; attacking Mamdani is therefore an attack against Netanyahu’s political rivals. (Mamdani appears to favor a one-state solution – as do many on Israel’s right, although envisioning a very different type of single state.)
Dahlia Scheindlin, a veteran Israeli-American pollster and senior political analyst for the left-wing Haaretz newspaper and a staunch Netanyahu critic, speculated that the decision to go after Mamdani may not have represented a premeditated strategy but rather a “scattershot” approach born out of the prime minister’s poor performance in polls.
“First of all, not much has helped Netanyahu electorally,” Scheindlin said in a phone interview with JTA. “His party is stuck in the polls. It hasn’t changed in a very long time.” She noted that the Likud is currently polling at around 20 to 22 seats or even lower and that the bloc of parties loyal to him for forming a coalition hovers at about 50 to 52 seats – far short of the 61 needed to be in the majority.
Netanyahu has been pushing two major themes in his election campaign, according to Scheindlin: a “positive” theme, stressing his government’s successes against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran; and a “negative” theme against likely Arab participation in a rival government led by Yashar party head Gadi Eisenkot, who is polling best right now.
The attacks against Mamdani fit into the negative frame, Scheindlin argued.
“The one about Mamdani plays into the theme that the whole world is against us, the world is being taken over by Muslims,” Scheindlin said. “These are openly racialized and racist themes against an Arab party and the Israeli government, against Muslims and anywhere else in the world.”
She added that Netanyahu and his government have been claiming that “any criticism coming from Europe of Israel is all because Europe has been taken over by Muslims,” and the New York focus now only expands that message in arguing that radical Islam has taken over the world.
During this government’s tenure, Israel’s standing in both Europe and the U.S. has plummeted, with many European countries imposing sanctions, arms sales blocks and harsh criticism of Israel’s actions in the West Bank and Gaza. Now Netanyahu “is going to be the defender by attacking people like Mamdani rhetorically and politically,” she said.
Scheindlin said she did not believe that Mamdani’s presence in the Likud’s election campaign would sway any voters. “The Mamdani sign came and went. I would doubt if most Israelis even remember it right now,” she said. And while the attacks against Mamdani generally “played into his message,” the bottom line is that Netanyahu is “trying everything” at this point in the campaign.
Yaakov Katz, the former editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post, viewed the speech less as a desperate play and more as a natural part of Netanyahu’s election campaign. In an interview with CBS, Katz said that the speech’s idea was for Israelis to think that “The world is against us no matter what, but thank God we have a leader, in this case, Netanyahu, who can stand up to everyone and stick it to them.” Katz added that “this could bring him some votes, or at the very least consolidate the base.”
Calling Mamdani an antisemite and blaming him for Jews feeling unsafe in New York “plays out well,” Katz said to CBS, “because Israelis look at people like Mamdani and they don’t see much of a difference, whether it’s Mamdani or it’s President Erdogan of Turkey, or it’s some other tent encampment or protest on the streets of Sydney or Paris or London. It’s one and the same.”
With the U.N. speech behind him and more pressing issues to address, including new revelations about warnings Netanyahu received prior to Oct. 7 and the flydubai attack last week, the Mamdani-Netanyahu fight has receded into the rear-view mirror. But if Netanyahu is reelected or if he stays on as caretaker prime minister, the issue will likely resurface.
Mamdani focuses on Netanyahu now, but he has made clear over his career that his problem is generally with Israel, whichever government is leading it. Even if a new administration takes over in Jerusalem, it may find itself at odds with the mayor of New York – and with the growing movement of young democratic socialists that he represents.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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