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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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Why Does the Palestinian Authority Still Promote Holocaust Denial? Because It Starts at the Top
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas looks on as he visits the Istishari Cancer Center in Ramallah, in the West Bank, May 14, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mohammed Torokman
Official Palestinian Authority (PA) television recently aired yet another segment questioning the reality of the Holocaust.
On Oct. 8, 2025, PA TV brought on Tunisian journalist Sufian Al-Arfawi to claim that the Jewish “victim narrative” is collapsing, and the PA TV host added that even the gas chambers could be dismissed with “simple evidence.”
Tunisian journalist Sufian Al-Arfawi: “The moral issue that they [the Jews] were victims and the issue that they were subjected to extermination by Hitler allowed them to receive support and a global popular embrace, because there was sympathy. This [victim] narrative has begun to collapse and to go in the right direction…”
Official PA TV host: “There is the narrative that says that the [German] soldier used to drag the Jews to the crematorium while calmly eating a sandwich. How does someone drag a person into a crematorium that has toxic gas and isn’t harmed by it? Meaning, even the narrative can be undone with very simple evidence.” [emphasis adde]
[Official PA TV, Capital of Capitals – Tunis, Oct. 8, 2025]
According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Holocaust denial and distortion, “Holocaust denial may include publicly denying or calling into doubt the use of principal mechanisms of destruction (such as gas chambers, mass shooting, starvation and torture) or the intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people.”
Given the ideology of the PA’s leadership, this denial is entirely predictable.
PA leader Mahmoud Abbas himself laid the groundwork for this narrative decades ago in his doctoral thesis, later published as The Other Side.
Abbas argued that Zionists intentionally inflated the number of Holocaust victims for political gain and that the real number of Jews killed was only “a few hundred thousand.” He even claimed that Jews were “offered up” to increase the victim count.
Having more victims meant greater rights and stronger privilege to join the negotiation table for dividing the spoils of war once it was over. However, since Zionism was not a fighting partner – suffering victims in a battle – it had no escape but to offer up human beings, under any name, to raise the number of victims, which they could then boast of at the moment of accounting …
It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement…is to inflate this figure so that their gains will be greater. This led them to emphasize this figure in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions — fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand.” [emphasis adde]
When the head of the PA has distorted the memory of the Holocaust throughout his life, such as when he suggested that Hitler killed Jews out of self-defense because “they caused ruin” and because of Jews’ “social role,” it is no surprise that PA TV echoes them.
This is not a new narrative; rather, it is a continuation of the Holocaust distortion that Mahmoud Abbas embedded into PA ideology and that its media still carries forward today.
Ephraim D. Tepler is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Itamar Marcus is the Founder and Director of PMW, where a version of this article first appeared.
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Israel Exposed Hamas’s Terror Network Across Europe. Will UK Media Now Stop Treating Its Leaders With Kid Gloves?
Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official in Gaza, speaks during an interview with Reuters in Istanbul, Turkey, Oct. 16, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Murad Sezer
Over the past two years, senior Hamas official Basem Naim has been granted multiple high‑profile interviews on UK platforms such as Sky News and the BBC — remarkable visibility for someone with a leadership position in a designated terrorist group. Now, in light of a startling disclosure by Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad concerning a Europe‑wide terror infrastructure attributed to Hamas, those media appearances demand re‑examination.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office released a statement this week on behalf of the Mossad saying the agency, in cooperation with European counterparts, has dismantled a network of terror cells across Germany, Austria, and beyond — cells that stockpiled weapons and stood ready to strike Jewish and Israeli targets on the continent.
Among the most striking details was a weapons cache seized in Vienna last September, consisting of pistols and explosives and traced to a certain Muhammad Naim, who was identified by Israeli intelligence as the son of Basem Naim. Investigators reportedly uncovered a meeting in Qatar between father and son, allegedly signaling leadership‑level approval of the European operation.
When one considers that Basem Naim has been treated in the UK media as a mainstream political figure, flattered with copious airtime, speaking from Istanbul and Doha, questions must be asked.
On Oct. 10, Sky News’ lightweight foreign news presenter Yalda Hakim interviewed Naim in Doha (perhaps she flew there on Sky News’ weather forecast sponsor Qatar Airways’ own fleet), where she didn’t once question Hamas’s international terrorism aimed at Jews. Instead, Naim was given time to claim Hamas was prepared to relinquish governing Gaza but would not agree to disarm.
Hakim’s three softball interviews of Naim never one challenged the terrorist and his organization’s evil, sadistic behaviors or ideology in as aggressive a way as she badgered me for doubting the discredited and disproven Hamas-supplied casualty figures during the Gaza war. Earlier, a BBC “HardTalk” session with Sarah Montague on Jan. 29 featured Naim on Gaza’s future, once again without evident interrogation of his organization’s international terror links.
I myself appeared on Hakim’s Sky studio show back in February 2024, immediately after another segment with Naim, and openly criticized the absurdity of the interview — from Turkey, during active warfare in Gaza — where no questions were asked about Hamas’s torture of its own people or its transnational terror ambitions. I pointed out that he had served as minister of health in the first government of arch-terrorist Ismael Haniyeh, only for the other guest, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, to jump in and suggest that his willingness to perpetuate the suffering of Gazans while he was safe in Turkey was somehow akin to Yair Netanyahu, the son of the Israeli Prime Minister and a private citizen, living in the US. In conversion outside the studio, she insisted to me that Israel’s main problem was its democratically elected leader but, when challenged, couldn’t name a single other Israeli leader who she thought would act differently in the circumstances. I’m not sure she could name any other Israeli politicians at all. No criticism of Dr. Naim, though.
Having highlighted this at the time, I hope that now the mainstream media and establishment’s choice to confer legitimacy on Naim without substantive challenge on important issues is reconsidered. (I haven’t had the opportunity to ask Hakim or Warsi since then).
To dismiss Palestinian terrorism as only a local Israeli problem is to ignore how Hamas has long viewed itself: as a regional, even global, movement, and an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood — a transnational Islamic jihadist movement. Indeed, senior Hamas leadership in Gaza have, for years, framed their cause not simply as liberation of the enclave but as vanguard of a broader “resistance” spanning all of Israel, with their own founding charter clear on its views of Jews in general. They want us dead. To anyone who claims it’s all just rhetoric, the European arrests and weapon caches expose their ambitions in operational form.
The recent arrest in London of a British man accused of helping move firearms into Europe for attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets should dispel any lingering doubt about how far these networks extend.
German authorities say the suspect was detained in the UK on a German warrant after a monthslong investigation into a Hamas-linked cell operating across Germany and Austria. According to Germany’s Federal Prosecutor, he was a member of Hamas and twice traveled to Berlin over the summer to meet a German citizen referred to as Abed Al G, who was arrested earlier alongside two others described as “foreign operatives” alleged to have been seeking weapons for attacks on Jewish sites. During those arrests police seized an AK-47, several handguns, and quantities of ammunition. Prosecutors say the suspect had already taken delivery of five handguns and ammunition and transported them to Vienna for safekeeping.
The picture emerging is of a network that now reaches into Britain itself.
In this context, Britain’s recent decision to admit young Palestinian students from Gaza with fully‑funded scholarships — and dependent family members — is disturbing. On the face of it, the initiative is humanitarian. But when set against the backdrop of a terror network active on European soil, rooted into Hamas leadership and stretched into host‑countries, it smacks of policy naïveté, or worse, “suicidal empathy.”
Granting access to students and their families from a territory under Hamas control where generations have been educated to idolize terrorists and carry out attacks like the Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel seems more than a little foolish. UK campuses are experiencing rising extremism as it is, and radicalization is a known problem without importing the children of a Gazan education system built on antisemitism and violence.
The threat, it seems, is not only on Israel’s doorstep — it may be on our own. And while compassion is a noble instinct, in a world of asymmetric warfare, porous borders, and subterranean terror networks, we risk opening doors without knowing what, or whom, may walk through.
When the media treats a senior Hamas figure as legitimate without challenge, when Western academic institutions open their doors to students from societies led by terrorist groups, and when intelligence agencies expose the apparatus of terror on our continent, can we still afford to view Palestinian terrorism as someone else’s problem? Or have we now become part of that problem ourselves?
Jonathan Sacerdoti, a writer and broadcaster, is now a contributor to The Algemeiner.
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Parshat Toldot: Appearances Can Fool Us, But Divine Purpose Never Does
A Torah scroll. Photo: RabbiSacks.org.
Fans of Victorian England may be familiar with the unusual legal drama known as the “Tichborne Case.” It was part mystery, part tragedy, and part social spectacle. The story has all the elements of a potboiler novel: a ship lost at sea, a grieving mother, a missing heir, a large inheritance, and, in the end, an imposter chasing the money.
In 1854, Roger Charles Tichborne, the young heir to an English baronetcy and a vast fortune, boarded a ship in South America called The Bella. The ship vanished off the coast of Brazil on its way to Jamaica, and everybody on board was thought to have died at sea. Everyone believed Roger had drowned — everyone, that is, except his mother, Lady Henriette Tichborne.
Lady Henriette was French, the illegitimate daughter of a British Member of Parliament, Henry Seymour, who had arranged her marriage to his friend, Sir James Tichborne, Roger’s father.
Known for her emotional temperament, Lady Henriette could not accept her son’s death. She and Roger had lived together in Paris before he left to travel the world, and she kept his room untouched, still writing him letters as if he were just away for a while.
When rumors spread that some survivors of The Bella had been rescued and taken to Australia, Lady Henriette placed ads in Australian newspapers, offering a handsome reward for any information about her missing son.
In 1865, she received a letter from New South Wales about a man claiming to be Roger — a butcher from Wagga Wagga named Thomas Castro. Delighted, she arranged for him to come to France.
But when they met, it was immediately apparent that Castro looked nothing like the slim, tall, dark-haired youth who had disappeared eleven years earlier — a fluent French speaker who also spoke the Queen’s English. This man was obese, fair-haired, spoke no French at all — and his English had a pronounced Cockney accent.
Castro could not recall even basic details of Roger’s childhood or the names of close relatives. Still, Lady Henriette insisted he was her son, dismissing all the startling changes as the result of years of hardship and separation.
Intriguingly, her servants and advisers supported her, insisting that this corpulent stranger was Roger. But the rest of the Tichborne family, the press, and the public considered him a complete fraud.
Scotland Yard detective Jack Whicher soon discovered that “the Claimant” was in fact Arthur Orton, the son of a butcher from London’s East End who had emigrated to Australia.
Even so, Lady Henriette’s faith in him remained unshaken. She gave him a generous allowance and defended him fiercely, as only a mother could. Even after she died in 1868, her implausible opinion seemed to haunt the courtroom as “Sir Roger” sued the Tichborne family for his inheritance.
The sensational trials at Westminster became a national obsession. Crowds packed the galleries and newspapers breathlessly reported every detail. Nearly a hundred witnesses swore he was the true heir. The two trials — one civil, one criminal — lasted 291 days, and the closing statements of the second alone took 62 days.
The jury deliberated for just 35 minutes. Orton was found guilty of perjury and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. He was released a decade later, destitute, and died in poverty in 1898 — having finally confessed that he was indeed Arthur Orton.
But the real mystery lies not in his deception, but in Lady Henriette’s firm conviction that this obvious imposter was her son — a mother so certain of what her heart told her that she became a willing party to Orton’s fraud.
And it is that same strange mixture of blindness and conviction — love triumphing over reason — that we find at the heart of Parshat Toldot. Isaac, old and sightless, summons his older son Esau, whom he loves despite his unrighteous behavior, to receive the family blessing.
But while Esau is out hunting for food to feed Isaac, Rebecca urges her younger son Jacob to disguise himself as Esau, covering his smooth arms with goatskins to imitate Esau’s hairy skin, and to claim the blessing instead.
Jacob hesitates, but obeys his mother. When he enters Isaac’s tent, the scene could almost come from a Victorian melodrama: the blind father reaching out, the reluctant son trembling, the air thick with tension.
Isaac hears the voice of his son and frowns. “The voice is the voice of Jacob,” he says, “but the hands are the hands of Esau” (Gen. 27:22). Then, like Lady Henriette, Isaac allows his emotions to override his doubts. His love for Esau blinds him completely. He blesses Jacob, believing him to be Esau.
But this is where the similarity to the Victorian story ends. The Tichborne claimant was a fraud, but Jacob was not. His act may seem deceitful — pretending to be his brother to get something that isn’t his. But the Torah and its commentators make clear it was not deceit — it was destiny.
Earlier in Toldot, Esau had sold his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of lentil stew. That sale was not just symbolic — it was legally binding. Esau did not value the birthright, but Jacob did. The blessing Isaac intended to give was tied to that birthright. Jacob was not stealing — he was taking what he had rightfully acquired.
As for Rebecca, she wasn’t a meddling mother — she was following what God had told her. Before her twins were born, God said (Gen. 25:23): “Two nations are in your womb… and the elder shall serve the younger.” She knew Jacob, not Esau, was meant to continue the path of Abraham’s covenant. Her plan was not for unfair gain, but to fulfill prophecy.
Some commentators, like the Ramban, even suggest that Isaac may have suspected the truth. The Torah hints at this, quoting Isaac as saying: “See, the smell of my son is like the smell of a field blessed by God” (Gen. 27:27). This is why Isaac’s blessing focused on spiritual destiny, not on hunting or power as it might have for Esau.
Arthur Orton’s fraudulent identity hid a lie and caused years of pain and suffering. Lady Henriette’s refusal to accept her son’s death blinded her to reality, and her embrace of Orton brought her family needless grief.
Isaac’s love blinded him too — but through that blindness, God’s plan came into focus: a wrong was righted, and a precious legacy was preserved. Jacob’s disguise did not conceal a lie — on the contrary, it revealed the truth. Esau’s disregard for the covenant made him unfit to inherit it. Jacob’s deception was not a betrayal of destiny but its fulfillment.
The Tichborne Case ended in shame and imprisonment. The Jacob Case ended in a nation of faith, and an enduring covenant with God. Jacob’s blessing shows us that sometimes destiny is hidden in confusion. What seems like a mistake may be God’s way of making sure a blessing goes where it truly belongs.
Maybe that is the real lesson: appearances can fool us, but divine purpose never does. The voice may sound like Jacob and the hands may feel like Esau, but Heaven knows the truth, and in time, so will we.
The author is a writer and rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.