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‘Married to the Mob,’ but under a chuppah: A new memoir details a Jewish family’s crime ties
(New York Jewish Week) — The Geiks weren’t your typical Bronx working-class Jewish family.
One brother ran a mob-protected trucking company in Manhattan’s Garment District. Another brother, an NYPD detective, chauffeured organized crime couriers around the city with illicit cash. Their kid sister visited a Las Vegas casino where the tween was set up with a couple of slot machines in a private room.
And a close family friend was sent up the river for killing a notorious Jewish gangster.
Meet the family whose close ties to Jewish gangsters are chronicled in “Uncle Charlie Killed Dutch Schultz,” a memoir just published by Alan Geik.
Dutch Schultz was the mob name of Arthur Flegenheimer, the Jewish bootlegger and numbers racket kingpin who left this mortal coil in October 1935 at the Palace Chop House in Newark. The triggermen were two Jews, members of the organized crime group Murder Inc. Mendy Weiss and Charles “Bug” Workman, the Uncle Charlie of the memoir’s title, did the hit.
Workman, who reportedly killed more than 20 people before pleading guilty to the murder of Dutch Schultz, was not a blood relative of author Alan Geik. But Workman grew up with Geik’s father on the Lower East Side and was so close to the Geik family he was considered an uncle. The author was in his 20s when he first met Workman, after the hitman was released from a New Jersey prison in 1964.
“I would never think of calling him anything but Uncle Charlie,” said Geik, 80, a retired TV producer and radio host who lives in Las Vegas.
In addition to diving deep into Workman’s story, the book also explores how Jewish mobsters and their hangers-on fought antisemitism, beat up Nazis and helped a fledgling Israel acquire arms for its War of Independence.
“These were people, from the first generation of Jews in America, who fought back against antisemitism in the streets,” Geik said. “Their parents fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe. They were not going to let it happen again and they didn’t.”
Geik’s book joins a crowded shelf of histories and memoirs of the Jewish mob, including “But He Was Good to His Mother: The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters,” by Robert A. Rockaway, and “Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams,” by Rich Cohen. Like those books, Geik’s family history provides a sort of reverse image of typical Jewish immigrant stories: Instead of scrapping their way up from New York’s Jewish enclaves into retail and the professions, Geik’s family joined a criminal counterculture.
Alan Geik’s family’s close ties to Jewish gangsters are chronicled in a just-published memoir, “Uncle Charlie Killed Dutch Schultz.” (Sonador Publishing)
Books such as Geik’s “really put a personal experience to this whole world that we all know about, the world of New York mobsters,” said Larry Henry, author of a monthly column for the Mob Museum in Las Vegas. “The public’s appetite for mob stories is insatiable.”
“Uncle Charlie Killed Dutch Schultz” describes a tangled family tree ripe with, well, rotten apples. Geik’s father, Lou, was not actually in the mob but did reap benefits from his ties with organized crime, Alan concedes. Lou Geik was one of several individuals who delivered mob cash to Workman’s family over 23 years.
“Uncle Charlie felt indebted to my father,” said Geik.
The author’s father is cited as a source for many of the anecdotes included in the memoir. Geik said that while his father’s business relied on mob protection, Lou Geik didn’t have “that extra whatever-it-took to be a really hardened criminal” — a trait, he said, his own older brother Bernard also lacked.
“My brother always wanted to be a gangland figure,” said Alan Geik. “So, instead my brother became a policeman.”
An ultimately very corrupt policeman. Bernard Geik joined the force in 1962 and resigned in 1971 after serving in the notorious Special Investigative Unit, which, as depicted in the book and the motion picture “Prince of the City,” devolved into an extortion ring. After resigning from the NYPD, Bernard Geik was arrested for bribery and bribe-taking in 1974. He reportedly pleaded guilty but served no time.
The disgraced detective went to work at his father’s trucking company. According to the author, his brother was one of the detectives provided by a supervisor to drive their Uncle George and other mobsters around town when they were transporting mob money in New York.
Uncle George Gordon was a real uncle. Gordon is allegedly one of the gangsters the actor George Raft modeled himself after for his roles in 1930s and ’40s crime melodramas. For decades, beginning at a casino and speakeasy near the Hudson River in midtown Manhattan, Gordon had a big hand in organized crime’s gambling operations, supervising enterprises in Florida, the Midwest, Las Vegas and Havana.
Alan Geik isn’t the only keeper of his family’s convoluted story. His sister Iris has her own memories of growing up mob-adjacent, such as when she and her parents were Gordon’s guests at the Stardust Hotel in Vegas when the mob was running its casino and skimming cash from the profits. Gordon wanted Lou Geik to work there.
According to Iris, Gordon posted a guard outside a private room in which she had been ensconced with a couple of slot machines. The 13-year-old was “mesmerized” by the slot machines. Her mother was initially unaware of what was going on.
“Uncle Charlie” Workman, seen in 1941, pled guilty to the 1935 murder of mobster Dutch Schultz and was given a life sentence. (NYPD)
“I was having a blast,” Iris Geik said. “I’ll never forget when the door flung open and my itty-bitty mother came in with a big guard behind her. She immediately made me stop [playing with the slot machine] and give back the money I had won.”
Iris Geik, now a privacy lawyer in the Boston area, has written hundreds of pages of her own memoir about the wives and girlfriends of the Jewish gangsters, tentatively titled, “The View From the Women’s Table.”
“Their lives were complex but they were also heimische Jewish women,” she said, using the Yiddish word for cozy and familiar. She and her father eloped because they were a mixed couple: Her mother Reba was a Sephardic Jew and her father was Ashkenazi.
Geik remembered that as a child she noticed a newspaper article about a family friend being arrested. She said, “Mom! Mom! Look, we’re famous.” To which her mother replied, “That’s infamous, dear.”
Geik said that on several occasions her mother observed: “There are no second-generation Jewish mobsters. Jews don’t make gangsters out of their children.”
Reba Geik had been involved in caring for two of Iris’ aunts who lived in Brooklyn while they were dying. Those acts of kindness had a profound impact on Uncle George, the casino supervisor.
After the aunts passed away, Gordon always stood when Reba entered a room, Iris said. “My mother was very honored by that because he was such a big shot.”
Throughout her life, Reba Geik remained close to Sylvia Lorber, a friend from her teenage years. Lorber was the only mob mistress her mother would spend time with, said Iris. Lorber was the paramour of two Jewish gangsters: Benny Kassop, the brother of Murder, Inc. gunman Sammy Kassop, and Sam “Red” Levine, an observant Jew who wore a kippah under his fedora. Levine won the affection of Lorber while the Kassop brothers were in Sing Sing, the maximum-security prison in Ossining, New York.
“Sylvia was a hell of a lot of fun but my mother worried about her,” Iris said. “Sylvia told me her stories, which were kind of glamorous when she was young but sad when she was older.” After spending 20 years with Levine, Lorber couldn’t attend his funeral. Sylvia Lorber stopped talking to Reba Geik in her last years.
Jewish gangsters do, on occasion, display some altruism in Alan Geik’s memoir. Take Moe Dalitz, the head of the Cleveland Syndicate. He was a major bootlegger during Prohibition whose flotillas of illegal liquor on the Great Lakes came to be known as The Little Jewish Navy. His family ran legitimate laundry businesses in Boston and Detroit. Too old to be drafted during World War II, he enlisted at the age of 42 and was commissioned as a lieutenant. Dalitz ran the military laundry service on New York’s Governor’s Island — but declined to bunk in the island’s barracks, opting instead to stay at a swanky hotel overlooking Central Park.
Then there was Johnny Eder, a major source for Geik’s narrative. Eder was part of the Lower East Side teenage crime crew that included Uncle Charlie and Uncle George. As an adult he was a major fence for stolen jewelry and always had a bag of stolen rings on him. Eder also had many connections at City Hall and in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office.
According to Geik’s account, Eder was the mob’s representative to the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary force in Palestine. Eder arranged meetings in the noisy kitchen of the Copacabana, a mob hangout, between Haganah agents and mobsters and others described as “former wartime U.S. intelligence agents” working to secure weapons for Israel’s War of Independence. (The late Teddy Kollek, Jerusalem’s longtime mayor, would tell a story about passing cash to an intermediary at the Copacabana, who brought the money to an Irish sea caption with a ship full of munitions bound for the Holy Land. The bagman, according to Kollek, was Frank Sinatra.)
Author Alan Geik’s father-in-law, Lou Lenart, left, and other fighter pilots in front of Avia-S-199 plane. Lenart was part of the group of men transporting surplus fighter planes and other weapons to the Holy Land for use in the War of Independence. (Courtesy of Boaz Dvir)
Alan Geik has a very personal connection to the creation of the Jewish state. His late wife Nina was the daughter of Lou Lenart, a World War II fighter pilot who served in the U.S. Marines. Geik’s memoir details how the elder Lenart was part of the group of men transporting surplus fighter planes and other weapons to Palestine for use in Israel’s War of Independence. Lenart’s story was featured in Nancy Spielberg’s 2014 documentary “Above and Beyond,” about the creation of the Israeli air force.
The story of how Jewish gangsters used some violent muscle against Nazi sympathizers in New York has been told before in historical accounts, but one episode in Geik’s memoir is particularly dramatic. A pair of Jews attended a Bund rally at Camp Siegfried on Long Island, a summer camp that taught Nazi ideology, and were offered a ride back to the city by a Nazi sympathizer who they ended up beating senseless in Brooklyn.
Alan Geik was not really hungry when he met Meyer Lansky at a Central Park hotel in the late 1950s. The gangster asked the 15-year-old nephew of George Gordon if he wanted a pastrami sandwich. Geik declined. Then Lansky, who struck Geik as an “older Jewish man who I knew was really powerful,” suggested that they split one. It was an offer that Geik did not refuse.
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Why Orthodox Jews are pushing back against permanent daylight saving time
(JTA) — For many Orthodox Jews, a typical winter weekday begins early: head to synagogue, gather in a minyan for morning prayers, then rush off to work.
Orthodox Jewish groups say a bill that would make daylight saving time permanent could upend that routine by pushing winter sunrises — and the earliest permissible time for some prayers — an hour later.
Agudath Israel of America is among the groups urging the Senate to reject legislation that would make daylight saving time permanent nationwide, arguing that the change would create both public safety risks and significant challenges for Orthodox Jewish religious life.
The House passed the Sunshine Protection Act on Tuesday by a wide bipartisan margin. In a statement issued after the vote, Agudath Israel said it understood the appeal of ending the twice-yearly clock changes but opposed making daylight saving time permanent.
The Orthodox advocacy organization warned that permanent daylight saving time would push winter sunrises past 9 a.m. in some parts of the country, forcing many children to travel to school before dawn. It also said the later sunrise would make it difficult for observant Jews to attend morning synagogue services and still arrive at work or school on time, because Jewish law prohibits reciting key morning prayers before prescribed times tied to sunrise.
“The extension of DST will create an extreme hardship on observant Jews,” the organization said. “It would be extraordinarily difficult — if not impossible — to arrive on time for a job and will affect the start time of our schools.”
The Orthodox Union and the Coalition for Jewish Values have also come out against the measure.
In a column for Chabad.org that didn’t take a position on the bill, Menachem Posner also wrote that the change would present a challenge in parts of the country for morning minyan, the 10-person prayer quorum. But he also noted an upside to the extension of daylight saving: a later start time for Shabbat on short winter Fridays.
Shabbat begins at sundown, which during the winter can fall before 4:00 p.m. in parts of the country. “With DST, however, this will be shifted one hour later, so that even on the darkest day of winter, Jews will have one more hour to prepare for Shabbat,” Posner wrote.
Orthodox parties in Israel have also made an issue of changes to the daylight saving calendar. In 2011, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet unanimously approved extending daylight saving time until the first Sunday after Oct. 1, despite objections from haredi parties. The change brought Israel’s clock closer to European practice while still acknowledging Orthodox concerns about morning prayer and a later start time to Yom Kippur that they argued would make the fast more difficult.
This week Agudath Israel also pointed to the brief U.S. experiment with year-round daylight saving time during the 1970s energy crisis, when Congress repealed the policy after widespread public dissatisfaction over dark winter mornings.
The organization said it hoped the Senate would weigh the broader consequences of permanent daylight saving time, including alternatives such as permanent standard time or retaining the current system of seasonal clock changes.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Why Orthodox Jews are pushing back against permanent daylight saving time appeared first on The Forward.
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Colombia and Slovenia recently recognized a Palestinian state. Now they’re moving their embassies to Jerusalem.
(JTA) — JERUSALEM — Colombia, the world’s second most populous Spanish-speaking nation after Mexico, has little in common with landlocked Slovenia, the second-smallest of the six republics that once comprised Yugoslavia.
But when it comes to their stance on Israel, the parallels are hard to ignore.
Within one month of each other, leftist, pro-Palestine governments in both countries were voted out of office and replaced by right-wing leaders who vowed not only to restore full diplomatic relations with Israel but also inaugurate embassies in Jerusalem.
In fact, Colombia’s next foreign minister, Omar Bola Escobar, promised exactly that Wednesday during a meeting in Washington, D.C., with his Israeli counterpart, Gideon Saar. That followed a declaration by President-elect Abelardo de la Espriella that Colombia would establish relations “like never before” with Israel once he takes the oath of office on Aug. 7.
In June 2024, the parliament of Slovenia — an Alpine republic of 2.1 million — voted to recognize a Palestinian state only a week after Spain, Ireland and Norway had done the same thing. But half a year later, it went further. Slovenian public broadcaster RTV, citing the ongoing war in Gaza, became the first in Europe to demand Israel’s exclusion from the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest.
Then last year, Slovenia under Prime Minister Robert Golob banned all imports from Jewish settlements in the West Bank as well as all weapons trade with Israel — the first member of the European Union to do so. And this past June, RTV not only boycotted Eurovision altogether but aired films about Palestine instead.
That anti-Israel campaign made life uncomfortable for the country’s 100 or so Jews, said Robert Waltl, president of the Ljubljana-based Liberal Jewish Community of Slovenia.
But on May 22, Janez Jansa — leader of the Slovenian Democratic Party and an admirer of U.S. President Donald Trump — formed a winning coalition with other right-wing parties following the country’s parliamentary elections, clearing the way for Jansa to replace Golob as prime minister.
In a striking about-face, Janza immediately announced that Slovenia would cancel its previous recognition of Palestine and move its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. That would make it the first country in the 27-member EU to take that step (though not the first country in Europe: Kosovo already has an embassy in Jerusalem).
Likewise, Israel will open an embassy in Ljubljana for the first time.
“That’s an important and welcome milestone — and something many of us have hoped to see for a long time,” Waltl explained in an email. “That said, I still feel it’s too early for me to draw broader conclusions about what this will mean in practice for bilateral relations, or for the Jewish community. I’d rather judge by actions than by first impressions.”
Ernest Herzog, executive director for operations at the World Jewish Congress, said Slovenia’s new direction is a lot more than a foreign policy adjustment; it carries huge historic significance.
“Israel was among the first countries to recognize Slovenia’s independence in 1991” following the breakup of Yugoslavia, he said. Opening an embassy in Jerusalem “would send a clear signal that Slovenia views Israel not only as a key regional partner but also as an important ally in defending the rules-based democratic order at a time of growing geopolitical instability.”
In Colombia, the shift is even more dramatic. Famous for world-class coffee, salsa dancing, beautiful beaches and biodiversity, it’s home to maybe 5,000 Jews out of 54 million inhabitants.
President Gustavo Petro — Colombia’s first left-wing leader in recent memory — is a former M-19 guerrilla leader. He became mayor of Bogotá in 2011 and president in 2022. On May 2, 2024, in the midst of worsening conditions in Gaza, Petro severed diplomatic relations with Israel and stopped lucrative exports of coal to Israel, as well as all weapons deals.
Margarita Manjarrez, Colombia’s first female ambassador to Israel, stayed on until June 30 of that year, at which point she closed the embassy in Tel Aviv (though consular services remain open).
Petro, constitutionally limited to one term, backed Iván Cepeda as his successor. But Cepeda lost to right-wing businessman Abelardo de la Espriella by the narrowest margin in Colombian election history.
Widely supported by Colombia’s small but wealthy Jewish community, the new president will be sworn in Aug. 7. One of his first acts, he said, will be to open an embassy in Jerusalem. That would make it the ninth embassy in Israel’s capital, along with those of the United States, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Fiji and Argentina.
Manjarrez, now Bogotá’s ambassador to Singapore, declined to comment. But Harry Toledo, the Israeli-based director of Fuente Latina — an NGO that provides pro-Israel Middle East coverage for Spanish-language media in the United States and Latin America — says he’s not surprised by any of this.
“I don’t think the issue was Israel,” said Toledo, who is originally from Medellín but has spent the last 24 years living in Tel Aviv. “As we’ve seen in recent years, all these governments are taking advantage of the situation here to distract from their problems at home. In Spain, we clearly saw that Sánchez is using the Palestinians to dispel criticism of his own government. Petro in Colombia did the same thing.”
Toledo, one of thousands of Colombians living in Israel, noted that the Trump administration revoked Petro’s U.S. visa last year, and then later added him, his wife, his son and his interior minister to its Specially Designated Nationals list due to their alleged illicit drug trafficking.
“Petro was a criminal and a genocidal guerrilla. He was a real antisemite who even posted ‘Heil Hitler’ online,” said Toledo. “It’s not like he was hiding his position against Jews.”
Michael Shifter, former president of the Inter-American Dialogue — a D.C. think tank — noted that 12 of Latin America’s last 15 elections have been won by right-wing candidates. Voters in only Brazil, Mexico and Uruguay elected leftists.
Shifter said it’s not so much an ideological conservative turn that’s fueling this wave — but more a profound desire for change.
“The recent electoral swings are better understood as a reflection of widespread frustration with governments of different political stripes that have failed to address persistent economic, security and governance challenges,” he said.
Shifter is no stranger to the region. In the early 1980s, when the Dialogue was founded, Latin America’s biggest economies — Argentina, Brazil and Mexico — were cash-strapped, debt-ridden and beholden to the IMF. And the United States under President Ronald Reagan was actively supporting the government of El Salvador in its bloody war against leftist insurgents, while at the same time secretly funding contras hoping to overthrow Marxist Sandinistas in neighboring Nicaragua.
The only country doing well at the time was energy-rich Venezuela — which today is considered a failed state.
Mike Skol, a former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela who has extensive business ties in Colombia, said de la Espriella’s election is certainly part of that Latin rightward shift against socialism.
The question, he poses, is whether he’ll behave more like Argentina’s Javier Milei, a libertarian who is an outspoken supporter of Israel, or El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele — a hugely popular president of Palestinian origin who has on more than one occasion called himself “the world’s coolest dictator.”
“The White House is looking for outspoken allies — on Venezuela, on Cuba, on Israel, and on oil,” Skol said in an email. “Expect Colombia to be unequivocal in all. The payoff will be an important pillar of regime success.”
Ultimately, the real prize for Israel would be a full restoration of ties with oil-rich Venezuela, which were broken by Hugo Chávez in 2009 following an Israel incursion into Gaza that year. After Trump’s ousting of former president Nicolás Maduro last year and his tacit support for Maduro’s successor, Delcy Rodríguez, anything appears possible.
Just last week, Rodríguez was photographed in a once-unthinkable meeting with uniformed IDF brass overseeing Israeli rescue efforts in the wake of two powerful earthquakes that have devastated Venezuela’s coastal region. The 30-member team’s efforts mark a rare diplomatic thaw following years of official Venezuelan hostility toward Israel.
This raises the inevitable question: Could the Israeli flag one day flutter from an embassy in Caracas?
“Yes, I think it is very possible that Venezuela under Delcy will restore relations with Israel,” Skol said, noting that the U.S. secretary of state is seen as running the show in Venezuela since Maduro’s ouster. “All Marco Rubio has to do is ask.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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He organized World Cup viewings in Gaza. Then an Israeli airstrike killed him
Soccer is a universal language. Billions of people around the world watch the game, which means that soccer fans everywhere can appreciate someone like Mohammed al-Wahidi, who enabled others to participate in that shared global experience.
Al-Wahidi was a Palestinian aid worker who organized public screenings of the FIFA World Cup in Gaza. He’s emerged from anonymity for the worst reason: An Israeli airstrike killed him last week, while he was on his way to watch a screening of the knockout stage match between Argentina and Egypt.
With the world’s attention focused on the World Cup in North America, al-Wahidi’s killing briefly brought Gaza back into the global frame.
For the people of Gaza who attended the screenings organized by al-Wahidi, World Cup matches offer a brief respite from the daily struggle to survive, the loss of loved ones, and the absence of any political horizon of hope. Cheering for Egypt against Argentina could not end Gazans’ suffering, but it provided a much-needed moment of escape. Until it didn’t.
It’s common to hear that “politics has no place in sports” — although frequently the governments and sporting institutions that make this claim, while recognizing soccer’s symbolic power, are really arguing that sports should not be used to advance political goals they oppose.
Al-Wahidi’s death made headlines because that refrain simply isn’t true. In fact, it’s both legitimate and necessary to politicize al-Wahidi’s death even further.
In reporting on al-Wahidi’s death, mainstream media outlets — including the BBC, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times — situated it within its broader context. They reminded readers that he was only one of more than 1,000 Palestinians killed by Israel since a ceasefire was announced 10 months ago. His death became an opportunity to highlight that, for Palestinians in Gaza, the so-called ceasefire has amounted to little more than a reduction in the scale of daily killing and ongoing dispossession.
At the same time, some Israeli officials have openly declared their intention to promote what they call the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians from Gaza. Violence against Palestinians — including the killing of al-Wahidi — is a central mechanism for creating the conditions under which such migration becomes possible.
The politics of soccer
The chronology of state violence and the chronology of soccer usually unfold independently, but at times they intersect. When they do, that intersection reveals soccer’s symbolic power, which manifests itself in diverse — and sometimes contradictory — ways.
In 2024, an Israeli airstrike killed Hani al-Masdar, an assistant coach of the Palestinian men’s Olympic national football team, earning an outpouring of international mourning. Both al-Wahidi and al-Masdar were humanized because of their publicly visible connection to soccer. Unlike most Palestinian victims, they had their names and faces shared broadly in Western media, and their deaths briefly resonated far beyond Gaza.
But they’re among more than 900 Palestinian athletes and coaches killed by Israel since October, 2023. The fact that most of us have only heard two of their names, at most, is a tragedy.
Israel has long turned to soccer as a public relations instrument, a way to divert international attention from the long-term process of Palestinian dispossession.
As one senior Israeli minister said after inviting the Argentine team, with star Lionel Messi, to play in Israel in 2018: “When we fight over moving embassies to Jerusalem, there is no question. One of the most popular players in the world, who has billions of followers—surely, it is the right thing to see him playing in Jerusalem. What better public relations tool do we have?” (The match was eventually cancelled, after pushback from pro-Palestinian parties.)
FIFA has occasionally lent credibility to these efforts. Despite the fact that official United Nations bodies have described Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, and that Israeli and international human rights organizations have documented systematic abuses against Palestinians, FIFA has declined to apply the same standard to Israel as it has to other countries, like Russia, which it suspended in 2022 following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In doing so, it has contributed to the normalization of violence against Palestinians.
In an awkward attempt to appease critics, FIFA even proposed that an under-15 match between Israel and Palestine serve as the opening fixture of a new global youth tournament in the United States this September — a proposal that many Palestinians regarded as adding insult to injury.
Palestinian activists, by contrast, have made calls for soccer-related sanctions against Israel an important component of efforts to raise international awareness of the Palestinian struggle for justice. One of their most notable successes came in 2018, when they persuaded Argentina to cancel that planned friendly match against Israel in Jerusalem. Although repeated attempts to suspend Israel from international soccer have so far failed, such efforts are likely to continue.
The possibility of sporting sanctions
Israel has faced few meaningful consequences for these policies, and without sustained international pressure, like in South Africa decades ago. they are unlikely to change. One possible form of such pressure is the imposition of sporting sanctions — a prospect that, for understandable reasons, Israeli officials have worked hard to prevent.
But as long as it doesn’t seriously consider those sanctions, the international sporting community sends the message that there is no meaningful price for the continuous and systematic violation of Palestinian human rights.
Al-Wahidi dedicated himself to bringing the world’s game to Gaza. The symbolic significance of his death should now help bring the world’s attention to Gaza — and to the question of whether Israel should continue to enjoy the privileges of international sport while denying Palestinians their most basic rights.
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