Remember back in August? We know, it feels so very, very far away given the world we’re in now. But if you concentrate really hard, you may recall that Aly Raisman kicked butt in the Olympics, including winning the silver medal for all-around female gymnastics. You may also remember that one Colton Underwood, a professional football player (formerly of the Oakland Raiders, but he’s currently a free agent, whatever that means), asked her out via video that she watched for the first time during an on-camera interview.

Well, it turns out that the meet-cute worked, and she and Underwood have been an item since shortly after the video. They happened to be in the same city, and went on a date. For dates two and three, Underwood (who’s 24) drove over an hour to see Raisman (22).

As the two grew more seriously involved, they kept their relationship from the media, but they finally went public yesterday at the Sports Illustrated Sportsperson of the Year event in New York. (Raisman looked amazing by the way, in a red scaly dress that made her look like some sort of gymnastics dragon.) Raisman also mentioned that she would be spending the holidays with the Underwoods. Well, if she’s there for Christmas, that still gives her most of Chanukah to bring the boyfriend back to Massachusetts for time with everyone’s favorite Jewish athlete parents (hers, of course).

Can we say that we’re NF-Kvelling? No, OK, sorry. Chag Sameach, Aly and Colton.

Image via Wikipedia

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Aly Raisman is doubtless one of the greatest Jewish athletes competing today, having just taken the silver medal for all-around female gymnastics at the Olympics in a year where all conventional standards ran out the door.

But there are lots of non-athletic reasons to love Raisman. There’s her pride in her Jewish heritage (remember 2012’s Hava Nagilah floor exercise?). There’s her outspokenness— like when she expressed disappointment of the Olympic committee’s decision to not commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Munich Massacre. And of course, there are her parents, who react so viscerally and expressively to her competitive routines that you just want to scoop them up and tell them Aly will be fine.

Because Raisman is a female celebrity, she’s been in the news this week for a public proposal to double date made by Colton Underwood, the tight end for the Oakland Raiders. The other couple on the date would be his teammate Andrew East and East’s wife, Olympic gold medal gymnast Shawn Johnson (who knows Raisman).

In general, this was Not Cool.  It’s really putting someone on the spot with some sort of romantic public proposal, and when you’re a female celebrity, there are all sorts of weird gender dynamics and extra pressure at play. There’s also been creepy speculating about what a great couple they’ll make, when they don’t even live on the same coast, and Raisman won’t be in San Jose until next month.  But Underwood still made the video, and a Yahoo journalist still showed it to Raisman, so here we are.

So let’s see how she did (You can watch the video here).

As the video begins, despite trepidation, Raisman is pleasant, but generally impassive, keeping the upper hand while watching Underwood make his case. At the end of the video date proposal, she looks up.

“They’ve actually told me about him.”

A good start! Raisman nonchalantly reveals that word of young Underwood has reached her (presumably from Johnson, who Raisman thinks has put the journalist up to this antic). She is prepared, but clearly not too giddy that she reached out to him when she first learned of his yearnings.

“He’s very cute,” she continues, as she hands the phone with the video back to the reporter.

Perfect! A compliment that sounds sincere without being overenthusiastic. The reporter asks Raisman if she knows who Underwood is (despite the fact that he said was an NFL player in the video AND that she says she heard about this).

And… the landing.

“Yeah,” she smiles, “Yeah, I’d go on a date with him.”

NAILED IT. Despite being put in a bad situation by a kind of creepy media (this video concludes that Underwood is a “boyfriend match,” despite the fact that they literally have not met yet. Ugh), with grace, Raisman accepts the date proposal and compliments the asker without seeming nervous, or even really impressed by his humble-brags of being a professional athlete (standing in front of the Raiders banner wearing a Raiders sweatshirt was a bit much, dude).

Finally, to prove that she was not just caving to the pressure of the moment, Raisman tweeted, perfectly, at Underwood:

@Colt3FIVE thanks for the sweet video…. looking forward to meeting you :)

— Alexandra Raisman (@Aly_Raisman) August 21, 2016

(His response, finally on her level, was appropriate and polite.)

https://twitter.com/Colt3FIVE/status/767453745294606336?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

I know Olympic gymnastic scoring isn’t on a 10 point scale anymore, but I’m not an Olympic Judge. 10/10. Raisman is the coolest. Cucumbers get the silver, and Snoopy wearing sunglasses and a sweater gets the bronze.

Image via Wikipedia

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Move over, Aly Raisman—the gold medalist turned Dancing with the Stars contestant is no longer the Jewish community’s Olympic Golden Girl. Who has dethroned the Hava Nagila-playing gymnast? None other than Ryan Lochte, the grill-wearing, nonsense-spouting swimmer.

Jeah.

At least that’s what Malina Saval, a mother and lifelong swimming enthusiast, argues in a Tablet essay:

And yet, I’m here to argue that it’s time we stop making fun of Lochte, at least long enough to focus on a career achievement that has thus far gone completely unnoticed in the Jewish community. Lochte, who isn’t Jewish but believes God has a “plain” for everyone, may not be a rabbinical scholar, but what he has done—and to a much larger degree than most swimmers in the history of the sport—is spread Talmudic wisdom to swim fans, Jewish and non-Jewish, all over the world.

According to Saval, “The Talmud (Kiddushin 29a) specifies three skills that parents must teach their children: Torah, how to make a living, and how to swim.” By her logic, since Lochte has made swimming cool—not just to watch on TV once every four years but to actually do—and has toured the country encouraged kids to get in the pool, he’s done a Talmudic-level service for Jewish parents.

Read the full essay here and let us know what you think in the comments.

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This past weekend, the American Cup, the only international gymnastics competition held in the United States, took place in Worcester, Massachusetts, near Aly Raisman’s suburban Boston hometown. It was at this very gymnasium in 2010 that a then-unknown Raisman burst onto the senior elite scene by placing second in the all-around competition,

This year, however, the Olympic champion did not compete. She was on hand to sign autographs for young fans and speak to the press about her latest venture—her upcoming stint as a contestant on Dancing With The Stars.

Raisman is following in the footsteps of 2008 Olympic gold medalist Shawn Johnson, who beat out Giles Marini to win her post-Games season on the show. Raisman even performed with Johnson and the rest of Fierce Five during the DWTS: All Stars finale back in November.

Giving interviews at the American Cup this weekend, the Jewish gymnast said that when she was in Los Angeles to film last season’s DWTS cameo, she made it clear that she wanted to be a contestant on the show. “I made sure that I let everyone know I wanted to do it when I went on the show,” she said. Sounds like she took some of Sheryl Sandberg’s “lean in” advice.

The golden gymnast has even been partnered with Mark Ballas, who co-won the mirror ball trophy with Johnson. After coaching Johnson to the win, Ballas probably knows better than anyone how to break the many bad dancing habits—flicked wrists, anyone?—that gymnasts learn as part of their athletic training. (Gymnasts’ dance training is often laughable. Raisman’s gymnastics dance background will help her as much Baltimore Ravens’ Jacoby Jones’ end zone dances will help him.)

Olympic athletes—from Kristi Yamaguchi to Apollo Anton Ohno and others—have fared very well on the ballroom dancing show, which bodes well for Raisman, who seemed excited to apply her famous work ethic to the dance floor. But this isn’t merely a competition of dance skill and physical prowess. The voting aspect of the show still makes this, at least in part, a popularity contest—not unlike the election for a high school class president.

Though Raisman left the Olympic Games as a bona fide star, she was still overshadowed by Olympic all-around champion Gabby Douglas and the ever meme-able McKayla Maroney, who herself turned down an offer to be on the show in order to get back to the gym and resume training.

Johnson, as gymnastics blogger (there are several of us!) Blythe Lawrence observed, did more than learn the dances; she created an appealing coming-of-age narrative arc during her time on the show. She grew up, literally and otherwise, while she was a contestant on the program. The youngest member of the 2008 U.S. Olympic team, she arrived as a fresh scrubbed, corn fed Iowan girl and morphed into a strutting woman who wore provocative costumes and makeup, not scrunchies and bows.

Raisman will begin her run without that kind of backstory. She will be older—almost 19—and does not have the same Midwestern appeal, hailing instead from a suburb just outside of Boston. Also, Raisman has a reputation for competitive verve and consistency, not adorableness.

Other past contestants have made their improved physical fitness and weight loss a central part of their experience on the program. Obviously, this would be ridiculous for an Olympic athlete who just completed a nationwide gymnastics tour. So the question is—what will Raisman’s storyline be for DWTS?

It may, at least in part, be Jewish. Her bio, after listing her gymnastics accomplishments, reads:

The eldest of four kids in her family, Raisman comes from a Jewish background and famously performed her gold medal-winning floor exercise to the traditional Jewish wedding song, “Hava Nagila,” for which she earned worldwide recognition in the Jewish community.

I have no idea who wrote this—Raisman, her mother, or some ABC intern—but I was taken aback to see one really long sentence (or short paragraph) devoted to her Jewishness. Is this a call to the Jewish community to support her bid to win the mirror ball trophy? And if we Jews are expected to vote for her, we need to know—where does she stand on Israel? AIPAC is asking.

Will the producers milk the Jewish angle and find some jazzed up version of “Hava Nagila” for Raisman to do the quickstep to? It wouldn’t be entirely out of line, given both DWTS and the song’s own reputation for cheesiness. I’m both hoping for and dreading this sort of pandering. (But it would work. It would so work.)

For Raisman’s sake, I hope that this is just an anecdote in her bio and nothing more, a nod to this summer’s frenzied response to her Jewishness, music selection, and gold medals. I wouldn’t want to see her try to incorporate “Hatikvah” or the score from Schindler’s List in her performances.

Her bigger concern, after all, is not the approval of the Jewish community, but of the “gymternet,” which has long maligned (and that’s putting it euphemistically) her for her artistic abilities, something she is aware of. “People would always complain that I wasn’t expressive enough in my floor routine and I want to show people that I can do that,” she told reporters this weekend.

Now’s your chance.

(Art by Margarita Korol)

Previous columns: Time Machines Don’t Work for Women
A Jewish Childhood After Divorce

The post The BallaBuster: Aly Raisman’s New ‘Dancing With the Stars’ Moves appeared first on Jewcy.

There’s a great article today in Tablet Magazine about the epic rise and fall of Tamir Goodman, the high school basketball phenom nicknamed ‘Jewish Jordan’—and his unlikely friendship with Omri Casspi, the first Israeli to play in the NBA. When Casspi was traded from the Sacramento Kings to the Cleveland Cavaliers, Goodman, who lives in Cleveland, brought over a mezuzah! How do you say ‘bromance’ in Hebrew?

The two bonded, it seems, not only over their shared faith—Casspi, who was raised in a secular Israeli home, has gotten more religious since getting drafted to the NBA in 2009—but also over their professional experiences. When Casspi struggled last season, he turned to Goodman for advice. If anyone knows how to deal with disappointments on the court, it’s the former ‘Jewish Jordan’ himself, who retired from the sport at 27 and now happily coaches basketball camps for young Jewish kids.

From the article:

“Omri is the story of the underdog, the self-made man,” says David Blatt, the coach of Maccabi Tel Aviv, who has worked with both athletes. And Goodman’s is the story of how the weight of expectations can overwhelm a young athlete. “Even today the term ‘Jewish Jordan’ makes me cringe because it did such a disservice to him,” Blatt says. Despite their different trajectories, however, Casspi and Goodman would discover they had more in common than they realized. They would share the same agent, Steven Heumann; the same team uniform, Maccabi Tel Aviv; and then, in 2011, the same Cleveland area code.

The Jewish Jordan Subs Out [Tablet Magazine] From the archives: Will There Ever Be a Jewish Jordan?
Why I’m Glad There Isn’t A Jewish Tim Tebow

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