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The battle for Jewish hearts and minds returns to the printed page
(JTA) — The last 20 years haven’t been kind to Jewish journalism, with local weeklies shrinking or folding and even big city papers suspending their print publications and going completely digital. Publishing online has allowed these papers to cut costs and given them the potential for a wide reach — albeit a potential undermined by an increasingly siloed and ideologically polarized market for news and ideas.
Yet still there are those who aren’t giving up on print — at least in small, carefully targeted batches. This spring has seen the launch of two Jewish journals — Masorti, a reboot of the former Conservative Judaism, and Fragments, a product of the left-leaning Jewish human rights group T’ruah. The two magazines join a small but scrappy fraternity of journals aiming to steer the Jewish conversation.
“We’re the people of the book. I think print is having a moment,” said Rabbi Lev Meirowitz Nelson, who as director of Emor, T’ruah’s affiliated think tank, edits Fragments. “In the midst of all the [digital] bombardment people experience, there’s something very grounding about picking up a hard copy and being able to mark it up or carry it with you.”
Of course, Fragments and its more established cousins — from a legacy Modern Orthodox quarterly like Tradition to the interdisciplinary journal Modern Judaism — are all available online, and few print more than 1,000 copies at a time. The goal, the editors and publishers of some of the newer publications told me, is to establish a brand and repair what each one said was a broken communal discussion about Israel, domestic politics and religion.
“I hate what’s become of discourse in Jewish life, which largely goes on on Twitter and other places like that,” said Mark Charendoff. “I think Jews like longform discussions, and we’ve become very, very impatient. I wanted to carve out a space for that long type of writing and reading.”
Charendoff is president of the Maimonides Fund, which publishes Sapir, perhaps the best known of the newish journals. It has a high-profile editor — Bret Stephens, the conservative columnist on the New York Times opinion page — and a penchant for hot-button topics that rally conservatives and enrage liberals. Recent issues of the two-year-old journal have focused on “cancel culture” and a campus environment that most of its contributors consider hostile to conservatism and Jewish life.
“I think society and the Jewish community has become so polarized that people are afraid of articulating controversial views. We need to take a breath and say, ‘You’re not going to be harmed by reading something you disagree with,’” said Charendoff.
T’ruah believes there are plenty of controversial views being aired, but mostly on the right: It has explicitly positioned its new journal as a “necessary alternative to well-funded right-wing Jewish publications.” The news release announcing Fragments did not name those publications but presumably they include Sapir; Mosaic, supported by the right-leaning Tikvah Fund; and Tablet, which is published by Nextbook, Inc., whose president, Mem Bernstein, is on the board of Tikvah and is the widow of its founder. Tablet has published writers from across the political spectrum, but has drawn howls from the left for its frequent articles denouncing “wokeness” and cancel culture and a recent piece questioning the motives of donors who support gender-affirming care for trans people.
(Another journal, The Jewish Review of Books, was initially backed by Tikvah, but recently spun off under its own foundation.)
The premiere issue of Fragments includes essays on concepts of freedom by Laynie Soloman, a director at SVARA, an LGBTQ yeshiva based in Chicago, and Joelle Novey, the director of an interfaith environmental group in the Washington, D.C. area.
Nelson sees two audiences for Fragments: “It’s definitely speaking to the left and offering a deepening of language and of conversation around Jewish sources and Jewish ideas,” he said. “And it’s an effort to speak to the center, which often shares our values and can be spooked by the language they see coming from the right.”
Fittingly for a magazine published by a group formerly known as Rabbis for Human Rights, Fragments leans into Jewish text and religious perspectives. That sets it apart from Jewish Currents, a legacy journal of the Jewish left that, after a relaunch in 2018, now aims for an audience of young, left-wing, mostly secular Jews who, when not anti-Zionist, are deeply critical of Israel. Arielle Angel, editor in chief of Jewish Currents, has said that the magazine has become “a reliable and essential space for challenging, rigorous, surprising work that has shifted the discourse even beyond the American Jewish left.”
The aspiration that the “discourse can be shifted” by gladiators writing for small magazines harkens back to the post-World War II period, a sort of golden age of Jewish thought journals. Jewish and Jewish-adjacent publications like the Menorah Journal, Partisan Review, Commentary and Dissent provided a launching pad for an ideologically fluid cohort of “New York intellectuals” that over the years included Sidney Hook, Hannah Arendt, Lionel Trilling, Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Delmore Schwartz, Norman Podhoretz, Paul Goodman, Midge Dector, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Alfred Kazin.
Partisan Review was among a spate of magazines that offered a platform for Jewish intellectuals in the years immediately after World War II. (Open Culture)
While writers like these tackled Jewish issues, or general issues through a Jewish lens, many of them influenced the wider national conversation. Angel has said she has drawn inspiration from Commentary: Founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee, the magazine became hugely influential in promoting neoconservative ideas and thinkers in the 1980s and ’90s.
The “golden age” was an explosion of Jewish creativity, and political influence, that would be difficult to replicate today. Benjamin Balint, a former editor at Commentary and author of a history of the magazine, says the flowering of Jewish journals in the mid-20th century was the result of “terrific pent-up pressure among the children of immigrants who were pushed down for so long and were able to explode into the mainstream.” Small magazines “provided that release — pushing critics and writers into the larger culture,” said Balint, who previously edited Sources, the journal of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
A long piece in Tablet recently argued that such Jewish influence is in steep decline “anywhere where American Jews once made their mark,” from academia to Hollywood to government. Author Jacob Savage doesn’t blame the loss of the immigrant work ethic, however, but rather “American liberalism” for marginalizing Jews.
Whatever the cause, few of the newer journals aspire to that kind of influence on the larger culture, and acknowledge that they are trying to shape the conversation within the Jewish community.
“We believe that Jewish leaders need great ideas to do their work well,” said Rabbi Justus Baird, senior vice president for national programs at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and publisher of its journal Sources, launched in 2021. “The way we invest in ideas is by cultivating a large group of Jewish thinkers and scholars who are doing not just the scholarship for its own sake, but really trying to work collaboratively on how Jewish thought can apply to the challenges facing the Jewish people.”
The Hartman Institute (which also counts the Maimonides Fund among its long list of major donors) is a religiously pluralistic, liberal Zionist think tank with outposts in New York and Jerusalem. Recent essays in Sources include lengthy essays by Yale religious studies professor Christine Hayes on the ethics of shaming and Hartman scholar Mijal Bitton on how relationships can heal the breach between the Diaspora and Israel.
Part of Hartman’s goal in publishing the journal is to provide a space for such long-form articles, filling what Baird calls “a gap between the quick, super-responsive, news-oriented Jewish publication landscape, the hot takes about what is going on, and the academic Jewish work.”
“It’s a space where ideas can really percolate,” said Claire Sufrin, who now edits Sources. “The written word, the printed word is there and can be shared in that way and people can engage with it over and over again.”
Masorti, the relaunched journal of Conservative Judaism, is also trying to bridge a gap, in this case between Jewish scholarship and the synagogue.
“Rabbis have responsibilities to serve as congregational leaders, and also the obligation to engage in Jewish learning and scholarship,” said Rabbi Joseph Prouser, the editor of Masorti.
The original Conservative Judaism was published from 1945 through 2014. The reboot is sponsored by the movement’s Rabbinical Assembly and its five seminaries, including the Jewish Theological Seminary, the New York flagship. Its readership base is rabbis and cantors affiliated with the movement.
Masorti arrives at a critical time for the Conservative movement: In an essay in the first issue, its associate editor, Rabbi Jonathan Rosenbaum, says what was once America’s largest Jewish denomination is at a “precipice.”
“At its summit, the plurality of [North American] Jews identified with the Conservative movement, something like 40%,” Rosenbaum said in an interview. “There was something like 1.6 million Jews who were thought to be part of the Conservative movement up to maybe the late ‘80s, early ‘90s. Today, there are about 500,000.
“Part of the goal of the journal,” he said, is to “look at the problems and the means of solving them.”
In the past the Conservative Judaism journal had been a forum for debate within the movement. It published dueling papers, for example, on the decision to ordain women and what is and isn’t permissible on Shabbat. Prouser says he’ll uphold that tradition of dissent: The current issue features an essay by Michal Raucher, a Jewish studies professor at Rutgers University, who criticizes the movement’s establishment for embracing a justification for abortion that doesn’t go far enough in recognizing the bodily autonomy of women (an argument she also advanced in a JTA oped).
And Prouser does hope these arguments are heard beyond the movement, positioned between traditionalist Orthodoxy and liberal Reform. “One of the beauties of the Conservative movement is that we can talk to people to our right to our left right, we can talk to the entire spectrum of the Jewish community,” he said.
The editors of the new journals agree that there are fewer and fewer spaces for civil conversation among Jews, blaming the filter bubble of the internet and the take-no-prisoners style of current political debate. And each said they would like to be part of the solution.
Sufrin, the editor of Hartman’s journal, calls it a “bridge, because people can talk about it together, they can engage with the ideas together, and it’s in that conversation that they can develop a relationship and ultimately, talk together more productively.”
The question is whether it is too late: At a time when algorithms reward readers with the kind of material they are likely to agree with, will even an elite reach across ideological divides and listen to what the other side is saying? When institutions — from government to religion — regard compromise as surrender, who dares to concede that your ideological opponent might have a point?
“Difference and disagreement are productive when we engage with the best versions of those with whom we disagree,” Hayes writes in Sources. That sounds like a call to action. Or is it an epitaph?
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Civil war’s nothing new for Jews. How do we survive this one?
I’ve perhaps arrived early to an older man’s fixation: Civil War. Not the American one. (At least not the one that took place in the 19th Century.)
This week I returned to Westeros for House of the Dragon Season 3, in which various platinum-haired nobles born of incest fight for a throne made of swords with lizards that breathe fire. I chased it with the Public Theater’s fine production of Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays, in which branches of the same family pledge their allegiance to a white or red rose corresponding to their preferred ruler of England.
Before I saw any of that, I was in the Berkshires to see S. Asher Gelman’s play The Zionists, about a Jewish house divided by (what else): Israel. In that play, there was no kingdom to inherit, but our common inheritance as Jews is a tendency to disagree that, if not approached with mutual respect, can yield disastrous results.
Jewish tradition has its own version of these stories: Last week’s parshah was Korach, in which Moses faces rebellion — and the rebels face the fate of being swallowed by the ground and dragged down to Sheol.
A while later in Tanakh time, the House of David and Saul had their factions. Then the sons of David, and on and on.
Jewish civil war, as chronicled by Josephus and other historians, most recently Barry Strauss, was perhaps at its most bitter circa 63 BCE, when the Romans intervened in a succession dispute between the Hasmoneans (leading to the end of the dynasty and the beginning of Judea as a Roman client state) and 70 CE, when rival factions among the Zealots, confronting the common foe of Rome, couldn’t put their differences aside long enough to quell the siege of Jerusalem.
In the Talmud account, it is baseless hatred between two men that sets the temple ablaze.
Recently I spoke with the historian Laura Arnold Leibman. We were discussing early American Jewry, which — surprise — was split on whether to support the Patriots fighting for independence or remain loyal to the British Crown.
Reviewing this more recent history, she remembered teaching a course on antiquity and telling the story of First Century Jerusalem.
“One of my non-Jewish students said, ‘This is so fascinating to hear that there were these different sects of Jews and that they disagreed with each other. Is it like that today?’” Leibman told me. The student, she said, had “clearly never been to a bar mitzvah.”
In Game of Thrones, Shakespeare and the Bible, internecine fighting ends — that is, when it doesn’t begin — when someone dies. Someone is crowned and gets to write the favorable history.
Looking at American Jewry today, we are relitigating the past and revisiting old arguments.
Bundism in the key of anti-Zionism is hot again — though critics say its ideas were tested and failed to the tune of millions of dead Jews between Hitler and Stalin. Supporters of Zionism cite scripture for our claim to the land, archaeology to establish our continued presence or a massacre of Jews that predated an attack on Arabs to point to who’s to blame for ongoing violence.
Given a turbulent present, we too often retreat into familiar narratives, so locked into our views that we shut out perspectives that might challenge us. The history of Am Israel, really a family story, teaches that when we close ourselves off to dissent, we face a kind of doom.
Leibman told me another story that signals a different approach.
After the Revolutionary War, Moses Seixas, the lay leader of the Jewish community in Newport, Rhode Island, paid an early morning visit to his brother-in-law Hiam Levy, accompanied by the local sheriff. Levy was a Tory, and Seixas came to confiscate his belongings for the Revolutionary government.
This all had the makings of a family feud, but researching her book Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism, Leibman found a letter Levy wrote to Moses, conveying his safe arrival in Amsterdam and thanking him for his support getting him set up financially there.
“They may have had political differences,” Leibman said, “but those kin connections trumped other sorts of problems.”
In this, there’s a model to be emulated.
The post Civil war’s nothing new for Jews. How do we survive this one? appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel presses on with settler-fueled archaeology expansion, crippling Palestinian communities
JERICHO, WEST BANK — Israel’s ultranationalist government and its backers are undertaking a major drive to develop and expand archeological sites in the occupied West Bank, with leaders stressing that it is incumbent upon Jewish citizens to connect to their history and heritage.
“He who doesn’t understand the importance of an archeological site for the preservation of the nation doesn’t understand where his future is going,” Israel Ganz, head of the Yesha Council representing more than 500,000 settlers, told the Forward in an interview on Sunday.
Funding to accelerate the push emerged in May, when the cabinet allocated 250 million shekels (approximately $86 million) to preserve, upgrade and make accessible heritage sites that show ancestral Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria — lands the settler movement contends Jews are entitled to claim.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, linking the drive to Israel entering the 60th year since its victory in the Six Day War, told the cabinet that the funds are an investment “in preserving our past in order to secure our future, strengthen our hold on the Land of Israel and pass on to future generations the heritage, identity and historical truth of our people.”
But Palestinians and left-wing Israeli groups see this as not an innocent educational drive, but rather an intensification of efforts to displace Palestinians and annex the territory.
The archeology drive, reflected in robust budgeting and ambitious planning, including of new roads and wide expropriations of Palestinian land around sites, is moving ahead despite Netanyahu’s decision early this month not to advance a bill creating a separate antiquities authority for the West Bank, both supporters and opponents of the push say. That decision, reportedly to avert international diplomatic fallout, does not affect the allocation of funds. And Ganz notes the Judea and Samaria authority can still be created in the future.
“For sure now we are seeing the largest-scale effort ever to use archeology for annexation,” said Alon Arad, director of the organization Emek Shaveh, a left-wing group watchdogging the use of archeology by settlers as a tool for expansion. The momentum stems from plans made when the coalition took power in 2022 now coming to fruition, and a sense among right-wing parties that promoting Jewish heritage is a way to impress voters for upcoming elections, he added.
Whether this is in Israel’s interest or not is in the eye of the beholder. The flagship site of the archeology drive, the Hasmonean Palaces near Jericho, reflects all that is wrong with Israel’s harsh rule over Palestinians, critics say: settler violence, violation of international law, dispossession of helpless people and a hierarchy in which Israelis have all the rights and Palestinians none.
Digging as a tool
When the Forward visited the site recently, its most striking ruins were those of Palestinian Bedouin homes, 13 of which were destroyed by a settler bulldozer driver during a day-long raid on Feb. 10 by an estimated 50 settlers according to witnesses. Haaretz reported that at least 15 homes were destroyed.
Only 200 meters from the excavations, families are living inside the ruins of their homes. Among them is Ali Kaabnah, his wife Najiba and six children, staying in a house missing one side and with a large hole in the bedroom.
It is half a house, looking as if the driver had been interrupted in the middle of his task. Somehow a refrigerator survived, still plugged in.
“The house doesn’t have supports, it is without pillars. If there is a tremor it will collapse,” Kaabnah said. His and other families have no other place to go and remained even though settlers struck again in late April and last week warned him to leave, he said. “I do not sleep because we do shifts to see if settlers are coming,” he said.
Kaabnah said that he had repeatedly called Israeli police during the bulldozing raid but they did not come. The Israel police did not respond to an inquiry from the Forward about the incident.
Ali’s brother, Yusuf, said he had to be taken to hospital with head injuries during the first attack. and that settlers severely beat his wife, Shikha, 46, during the second attack, resulting in her being treated at a hospital in Nablus. His son Aliyan, 20, was “beaten with clubs without mercy” and his youngest son, 11-year-old Ali, was also attacked, he said: “Until now he screams at night in terror that ‘they are coming.’”
Arad views the settler violence as a state-backed method, along with demolition of homes on the grounds they were built without permits, to drive Palestinians away from the area of the site. The IDF denies siding with settlers and says troops are expected to detain Israeli citizens perpetrating violent acts.
Violence is not the only threatening aspect of the archeology uptick for Palestinians. Land expropriations around sites, which include swaths well beyond the antiquities themselves, are pulling the territory from underneath the Palestinians’ feet, critics say. In the last half year, there have been three land expropriations around sites, the largest at Sebastia in the northern West Bank; plans for roads on land seized from Palestinians to enable easier access, and forays by settlers to establish a presence or control of sites on Palestinian property.
Dror Etkes, a veteran monitor of Israeli policies in the West Bank, says the Sebastia expropriation — said by the government as intended to develop the site for visits by the public — includes the vast majority of the olive groves of the Palestinian village of Sebastia. Emek Shaveh says the expropriation separates the village from antiquities, breaking an ancient attachment central to the identity of locals and harming them economically.
“The goal of Israel’s colonial project is to dispossess and settle,” said Etkes, who heads the West Bank land monitoring group Kerem Navot. “Archeology provides an effective way of doing this.”
Ganz and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu — who famously raised the idea in November 2023 of dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza — are particularly enthusiastic about developing the Hasmonean palaces site. Harkening back to the days of Joshua, Eliyahu terms the Jericho vicinity “the gateway to the land of Israel.”
He does not appear to view the settler violence at the site as a problem. In a social media post released the day of the bulldozer raid, he declared that “in every place where there is building on Jewish heritage, we will destroy it.” Speaking from the site, he promised a mass infusion of funds to achieve the perceived revival of its past glory.
Claims of vandalism
At present the Hasmonean Palaces site looks unimpressive, lacking signage, explanations or a path. Only some of the antiquities are roped off. But Ganz describes the site as being on a par with Israel’s most important ones. “I can’t say what the breadth of the site is but it certainly doesn’t fall short of Masada,” Ganz said.
According to the IDF body dealing with civilian affairs in the West Bank, called the civil administration, the site is “of great importance to Jewish heritage as well as to the architecture of the early Roman period.”
“It was built as a winter palace for the Hasmoneans in the first century BCE and served the Hasmonean dynasty for approximately 200 years,” the civil administration wrote in a statement. Subsequently during the reign of Herod there was also significant construction including a fortified palace, a bridge and a sunken garden, it added.
Ganz says the site needs to be safeguarded from what he claims is deliberate and systematic destruction by the Palestinian Authority, which he alleges has targeted it and other sites in a bid to erase evidence of Jewish ties to the land. The Civil Administration statement also cited vandalism as a major problem, though it did not specify involvement of the Palestinian Authority.
Palestinian Authority assistant deputy minister of tourism and antiquities Jehad Yasin said in remarks to the Forward that allegations of PA culpability aim to enable Israel to take over West Bank sites. “We haven’t done that. We do our best to keep our sites and if someone does something it doesn’t mean you have the right to take this site,” he said.
Yasin stressed that for an occupying power to expand sites and carry out anything other than salvage excavations violates international law. Referring to the Israeli plans at the site near Jericho, he said: “They don’t have the right to make an archeological park or an excavation. It’s a Palestinian site.”
Arad agrees Hasmonean Palaces is an important site but stresses that this in no way justifies harming Palestinians.
Ganz’s vision for the site includes new excavations, touching up finds to preserve them and steps to “absorb the public.” A new access road is seen as essential for tourism, and he wants to see a convenience store along with state-of-the-art scanning capability enabling visitors to explore information about the site.
The land for the road has already been seized by military order from Palestinians, Etkes said, adding that when it is paved it will take less than a half hour to drive from Jerusalem to the site. What’s more, according to Etkes an illegal outpost overlooking the site and situated next to an army intelligence base is on the way to becoming a full-fledged settlement.
Arad says all of this amounts to Israel turning the site into a “touristic settlement,” something he stresses has been done previously on a large scale at the popular City of David site in occupied East Jerusalem.
“You change the identity so that from a village on the outskirts of Jericho it becomes a palace of a dynasty. You don’t need actual settlers there, it’s enough to build an access road, put up a fence and whatever comes with tourist development-a kiosk, a parking lot, someone to guard it.” Arad said.
The goal, in his view, is to woo the public to the settler view that the West Bank is part of Israel. “You start bringing in tourists and it’s a normalizing process for people to go inside the West Bank and return to Haifa or wherever they are from,” he said. “They go in and out and it was fun for them and you create the idea that this is part of Israel.”
As for the possibility of there being an Arab presence at the Hasmonean Palaces site, Ganz said: “If they don’t harm the site they will be allowed gladly. But if, God forbid, there are security incidents or harm to the site, then they can’t be there.”
Ganz stressed that the homes at the site needed to be destroyed for being illegally built, but that the demolition should have been done by the state and not what he depicted as a lone deviant. “No one is permitted to take the law into their own hands,” he said.
Etkes predicts that based on the experience of other sites, local Palestinians face an extremely bleak future. He termed the sight of Palestinians living in what is left of their houses “one of the worst things I have ever seen in the West Bank.”
But that is by no means the end of the harm Israel will cause to Palestinian civilians in the vicinity of the archeological site, he said. “We will see an area completely disconnected from its surroundings,” said Etkes. “Palestinians won’t be able to enter the area. Two roads [for Israelis] will lead to this area. Settlers will be very violent, it will be very restricted for the Palestinians, construction in the area [by Palestinians] will be completely banned, the construction that already exists is without a permit and a large part of it will be demolished by Israeli authorities.”
He declared: “It will be another national park that will tell one story — the story the Israeli radical right wants you to hear.”
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The eternal summer question that no rabbi can answer: Will I finally hit a home run this year?
I was six or seven years old when I first dared to dream of hitting a home run. Nixon was president. Kissinger was National Security Adviser. Le Duc Tho chain-smoked at the Paris Peace Conferences where they argued for three months over the shape of the negotiating table.
I was one of the dusty dumpy boys of summer; short and overweight, I occasionally tapped or blooped the ball into the shallow outfield for a single. In my life I remember only two doubles over five decades. Nothing like the moonshots the big boys slapped into the upper atmosphere.
Sometimes I played second base, but more often I was deposited and abandoned into the Siberia of right field. Once, when I was a young adult in the UJA softball game at Heckscher Diamond in Central Park, a high-pop sailed into the outfield, nothing fancy. The orb floated daintily into my glove at the warning track. Somehow, I threw a strike to third base and nabbed the runner trying to advance on the fly. It was a rare moment of triumph.
All was right with heaven and earth at that moment, in fact with the entire solar system. It was as though I had mastered the entire Mishna in the morning and had a date with Ann-Margret later in the evening.
But most of the games were a grind. Long afternoons in the dust bowls of Queens, the sandlots of the Rockaways. Forgotten stretches of overgrown weeds between concrete and cobblestone. Chainlink backstops with holes a wild boar could poke through. Beyond the overpass of the Van Wyck and the Whitestone Expressways, a dagger dug through central Queens conceived by the community-defiler, Robert Moses in the form of Flushing Meadows Park.
Sunburnt and with solemn resolve, I muttered pleas and hopes to the baseball gods with no real hope of improvement. Thus years would pass. How I loved the game, but it would not love me back — at least not in the way I wanted it to.
I would go up to take the bat. Which should I use? Wooden, aluminum? The shorter one with the bigger snout and barrel? The longer but skinnier one? “You want to use a lighter bat,” someone would invariably say. It made no difference. I would take a weak hack and hope for the best.
My father bought me am $8 pitcher’s glove with Fritz Peterson’s signature on it. Then, I got a bat with Roy White’s signature from a giveaway on Bat Day at Yankee Stadium — June 4, 1972. It was white and wooden with a long heavy barrel. This would do it — my own bat.
Yet I held it limply at the baseball diamond. “You’re not doing it right,” someone would invariably tell me.
I came to the baseball field for absolution, for redemption, but there was none to be had. I felt hollow, even desperate. I appealed to the only man who I knew would not reject me: my late father.
Yet, my father, though I was the apple of his eye, considered baseball to be something childish. He thought I should immerse myself in the sacred texts — the only thing that would ever really pay off. Why would anyone want to play ball?
My father saw childhood itself as an illness. If he could not cure it with his strict and clear instruction and imprecations from the rabbis, it would surely pass on its own by the time I was 13.
My mother and sisters were indifferent to my baseball agony; it was something they consigned to “the mens’ world.” They couldn’t tell a baseball from a candled egg or a guinea hen.
I knew the problem was far deeper than just strength or technique. I could see the ball (I almost never struck out) so why couldn’t I hit it with force? I would go up to the batter’s box full of doubt, but excitement too. Maybe this time it would be different.
More years of weak swings and fading dreams. I was not strong. And when I reached my full height, I was 5’3”. One needed strength, but one l also needed technique. I studied the swings of the great baseball players. They seemed to take a cut from their upper shoulders and wrap a swing with even more strength coming from their glutes and hips. Perhaps only gentiles had these kinds of shoulders and hips. Oh, the mysteries of the universe…
A Freudian dilemma
When I first started playing, I was younger than everyone. Decades later on the baseball diamonds of Passaic, I am older than everyone by decades. But with age comes wisdom.
I practiced swinging hard, but I always held back, as though a full swing was un-Jewish, a sin. A full swing takes a certain, shall we say aggression? Forgive me for sounding a bit basic, but what did this swing really mean? Was this all about my father? I was afraid to take a swing; did that mean I was afraid to take a swing at dad? Only fathers can swing, but even though I was now a father and grandfather, I did not feel I could swing. I held something back.
Maybe this seems too Freudian, but in order to hold on to my father, even after he went on to the next world, I had to do poorly.
If I wanted to hit a home run, I had to let him go.
A new father
About ten years back, when I was 50, I hired a trainer, Moshe Klyman, a Jewish Greek god from Underground Gym in Tenafly. He is an anachronism from the time of the Maccabees. He can lift 630 lbs five times in a row. This modern day Samson, two decades and some younger than me, said, “you can do it.”
I believed him, at least a little. The man knows everything there is to know about the human body (and I know everything there is to know about the mind — hey, I thought, this partnership could work. ) I am convinced that on the day of creation six thousand years ago and then some, God Himself consulted with him on how to construct the first human.
A few months ago, he had me deadlift 405 lbs, almost three times my weight. If that weren’t enough he had me do 200 pull-ups 50 at a time.
“Age is irrelevant,” he said. “You and I are going places.”
As I kept working with Moshe, I got better at the game. Not a home run, though, never even close. A base hit or two, once in a while a satisfying crack at the bat.
Until now.
After years of jumping, lifting, pressing, pulling (and puking) my body began to take on a different identity, separate from my history. I may have been 62 but now I was ready for the Marines.
This past Sunday, I took a full cut, a real swing at the ball. No pulling back. I waited for my pitch and uncoiled. To my great surprise, the ball was corked, launched. It was high, it was far; it landed at the left field fence, missing a home run by just a few feet.
The left fielder, a terrific athlete, was caught flat-footed. I watched the ball fly over his head. The team was dismayed. Was this Yisrael at bat? What kind of juice was he on?
As the ball sailed farther than I ever believed, 47 years of humiliation seemed to melt away. I headed for a triple.
Maybe this summer, I will finally hit my first home run.
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