The World Cup starts tomorrow, and if you were planning on rooting for either the U.S. or Israeli team, you already had your hopes dashed when they failed to qualify.

And so, with 32 countries vying for the title, it’s hard to decide which team to support. Should you root for an underdog? Pick the team with the best looking players? Or, better yet, ask yourself the age-old question: Are they good for the Jews?

The ADL conducted a study about global anti-Semitism in 2014 (partially updated in 2015). The study’s general system: If you answer “probably true” to a majority of the anti-Semitic stereotypes polled for, you count as an anti-Semite, and a country’s overall score is the percentage of people questioned who fall into this category. So the lower the score, the less anti-Semitic the country. And the more likely we are to root for their soccer team.

The ADL even has a nifty “compare” feature—so if two countries with the same overall index play each other, you can easily look at them side by side, and think, “Hm. More South Koreans think Jews complain too much about the Holocaust, but in Senegal we’re more likely to get blamed for the world’s wars!” (Or, you can side with the country with the lower population, which therefore contains fewer total anti-Semites. You can insert your own judgment.)

According to the study, Middle Eastern countries are the most anti-Semitic, and Western European ones are the least, but there are anomalies throughout the list—you may be surprised by what you find.

And so, with no further ado, the order in which you should be rooting for countries in the World Cup:

1. Sweden: 4%
2. Denmark: 8%
3. England (polled for anti-Semitism as the UK): 12%
4. Australia: 14%
5. Brazil, Germany, Iceland, and Nigeria: 16%
6.  France: 17%
7. Portugal and Belgium: 21%
8. Japan and Russia: 23%
9. Argentina and Mexico: 24%
10. Switzerland: 26%
11. Spain: 29%
12. Costa Rica: 32%
13. Croatia and Uruguay: 33%
14. Poland: 37%
15. Peru: 38%
16. Colombia: 41%
17. Serbia: 42%
18. Panama: 52%
19. Senegal and South Korea: 53%
20. Iran: 60%
21. Saudi Arabia: 74%
22. Egypt: 75%
23. Morocco: 80%
24. Tunisia: 86%

So, in conclusion… go Sweden?

There are eight countries on this list that are majority anti-Semitic, so if any of the other 24 succeed, consider it a win for the Jewish people.

Sports, go sports!

Image via Max Pixel.

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When we swing, we swing for the fences.

Perhaps more than any other sport, Jews have been drawn to baseball, both on and off the field, and in so doing, have established a kind of tradition, passing on stories from generation to generation. Hank Greenberg blasting two homers on Rosh Hashanah before sitting out on Yom Kippur, Sandy Koufax taking the bench for the first game of the 1965 World Series, even the latest jaw-dropping run by Team Israel in the World Baseball Classic—these Samsonian strongmen represent something bigger than themselves, and their success and failures have become a liturgy for the emerging Jewish baseball fan. Following suit on the page, authors—some members of the tribe, others playing for different ball clubs—have used blended Jewish ideas with baseball to create a new mythology.

The first stab at stitching Jews and baseball together on the literary field comes as early as the Roaring Twenties, although the scouting report is ill-favored for the home team. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has survived perhaps rightfully as a commentary on the tarnishing of the American Dream, but perhaps wrongly for how it veers from crediting the affairs of apathetic WASPs to blaming a caricature of the Jew as a loyalty-less grubber: Meyer Wolfsheim. Wolfsheim appears as one of Gatsby’s shadier connections—to really drive the point home, Fitzgerald dresses him in human-tooth cufflinks—but the true source of his corruption is revealed later by Gatsby:

“Meyer Wolfsheim? No, he’s a gambler.” Gatsby hesitated, then added coolly: “He’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919.”

“How did he happen to do that?” I asked after a minute.

“He just saw the opportunity.”

Wolfsheim, as it turns out, is a barely disguised Arnold Rothstein, often attributed with doing just what Gatsby accuses—fixing the World Series and getting away with it. It is clear from Gatsby’s distaste that he sees something perverse in a Jew bleeding the sacred cow that is baseball for a couple coin, and in doing so he establishes the first of many strains of myth-making in baseball literature. Baseball’s original sin stretches so long that W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe (more popularly known in movie form as Field of Dreams) is still trying to atone.

Not the most auspicious start for a lasting relationship, though the irony is that Jewish authors and Jewish themes have long elevated the game in prose. Although not Jewish himself, Pete Hamill’s Snow in August transplants the golem from Prague to mid-century Brooklyn, where it is brought to life by a Holocaust survivor and his young Irish Catholic friend. The book uses baseball as a canvas for its themes of intolerance, and though not implicitly drawn, the true golem of the story is Jackie Robinson, beginning his history-making turn in the majors, who echoes the golem’s traditional purpose as a symbol for the oppressed. James Sturm takes the opposite approach in his graphic novel, The Golem’s Mighty Swing, which demystifies the image of the golem in a story of a barnstorming Jewish baseball team during the Great Depression and exposes the limits of how far baseball can truly take the American Dream when it seems rotten at its core.

With a more cosmic perspective, however, comes Michael Chabon’s YA novel, Summerland, a blender of Native American and Norse mythologies, all centered around a belief that baseball is a tool of champions. Chabon provides a typical hero’s journey, but with a twist: the battleground? A baseball diamond. The stakes? The end of the world. The hero? A kid who only needs to catch one good game.

In this sense, all roads lead back to the quintessential baseball novel and the man who married Americana and Arthurian legend to build a new motley mythos: Bernard Malamud’s The Natural. It tells the story of a man named Roy Hobbs, returned to the game after being shot in his prime years before, and how he tries to rescue a slumping team with his Excalibur-like bat “Wonderboy” while battling his own tendencies to succumb to temptation. Nothing about the novel is essentially Jewish, except perhaps its ending. Whereas the movie adaptation provides a true Hollywood moment when cornfed Robert Redfield shatters the lights with his pennant-winning homer, the book ends, in true Arthurian taste, with Hobbs striking out, accused of throwing the game, and erased from its history. Maybe King Arthur learned pessimism from the Jews.

There can be miracles, however, if you believe. In Mindy Avra Portnoy’s timeless children’s classic Matzah Ball, a young fan feels ashamed schlepping to the ballpark with his Passover-approved lunch—and even more awkward when his friends eat his lunch instead of their own, leaving him in the lurch. In this dark hour, an old man appears and regales the kid with tales of boyhood games in Ebbets Field and gifts him a very special piece of matzah before disappearing. You know how it goes now—the kid catches a home run using his matzah as a glove, and we learn that while there may not be angels in the outfield, at least Elijah has a seat in the bleachers.

Photo of Sandy Koufax via Flickr

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Let’s be plain: there are not many good Chanukah movies. For the children, there is the Rugrats Chanukah special. For the adults… It’s A Wonderful Life? (One can only imagine a restless Jewish station manager conspiring to schedule as the yearly Christmas viewing a movie that is 98% human misery and only 2% Christmas.) However, blessed is the Disney Channel, for from this unlikely place came one of our only modern Chanukah classics (the other, of course, being The Hebrew Hammer in all its exploitation glory), Full-Court Miracle.

Inspired partly by the true story of ex-Sixer Joe “Jellybean” Bryant, who coached the girls of Akiba Hebrew Academy so his son (Kobe—you might have heard of him) could play basketball at nearby Lower Merion High, and partly by the real-life Lamont Carr, 2003’s Full-Court Miracle tells a fable of five Philly day school kids and their quest to win a local basketball tournament. There’s T.J., whose temper can only be cooled by his passion for Rebecca Bloomberg; Joker, mouthy and sardonic; Ben, the fat one; Stick, a leggy nice Jewish boy who is clearly the MVP of the movie (he’s the first to dream up that their new coach is Judah Maccabee, is endearingly bookish, and even scores the winning points with his hook shot); and Alex “Schlotz” Schlotzky, our pint-sized, basketball-obsessed hero.

When Schlotz is tired of losing to a team of the most obviously villainous opponents since the 80s, he stumbles upon a former college basketball star, Lamont Carr, who the boys believe to be a reincarnated Judah Maccabee (a classic, I know). A series of obstacles ensue and are overcome, and along the way we all learn the true meaning of Chanukah.

It’s really a miracle that this movie exists at all. Nothing else stands like it in the canon of Disney Channel Original Movies, a staple of many childhoods, with a new movie featuring snowboarding or surfing or motorbiking teens each month. (Sadly for kids today, these are released with much less frequency.)

In Full Court Miracle, there are menorahs on every surface, so you know these characters are really Jewish. The sports-fanatic rabbi has a running joke asking “is there something on your mind beside a yarmulke?” There are explanations of chukim (Lamont responds to the idea with a saying of his grandmother’s about how if we knew everything God knew, we would be God ourselves). There is a moment of tension when, at the Shabbos table, Lamont asks for a glass of milk with his chopped liver—even though, of course, he just ate chopped liver with his gefilte fish. There is a Dreidel, Dreidel rap remix. (I don’t think it can be overstated how much of classic this movie is.)

On the other hand, it’s unbelievable no one made this movie before. Chanukah really is the ultimate sports movie, if you consider sports movies at their hearts to be underdog stories. Who has ever been more underdog than the Maccabees? (Think of how many Jewish sports organizations are somehow Maccabee-derived.) Full-Court Miracle merely mashes up the genres to create the optimal version of the Chanukah story. Instead of the Syrian-Greeks, we have the Warriors—yes, the Warriors—led by the sneering Tyler, who is so evil he calls a timeout to end the final game, and his over-the-top coach, who is begging for a mustache to twirl. Instead of Judah, there is an ex-ballplayer with bad knees who lives in a van down by the river. (License plate: JM 165.) Instead of the hills of Judea, there is a facsimile Philadelphia. And the climax of the movie models both miracles of Chanukah when a bunch of Jewish kids succeed where they are not supposed to by outlasting their rivals and a backup generator overextending its fuel supply.

Of course, this idea makes up the DNA of most Jewish sports movies: when the world isn’t a level playing field, let the playing field level the world.  Even Ernest Hemingway noted it, in his more-than-vaguely anti-Semitic portrait of Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises: “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton… He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton.”

Consider School Ties, where the protagonist is a Jewish quarterback in an anti-Semitic 50s boarding school, who bests his detractors in the end zone. Consider Chariots of Fire, where the protagonist is a Jewish runner in an anti-Semitic 20s university, who bests his detractors on the track. Consider Race, where in the midst of Jesse Owens’ story, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller cheesily flash their Star of David necklaces in the faces of Nazi guards. Each feels freakish and undermined, and so responds with feats of greatness, avenging themselves and their people in an arena where disadvantages can be surmounted.

To reflect inward a moment, Full-Court Miracle feels like a movie that was designed almost specifically for me: Jews, sports, loving shots of the Philly skyline, Allen Iverson jerseys. But I can sympathize with Schlotz and his Lions even more because my alma mater once cooked up an experiment as to whether or not a Jewish day school could front a competitive tackle football team. There were even pep rallies and cheerleaders. (My school sport was geography, and no, we did not have pep rallies or cheerleaders.) It went about as well as could be expected, but we kept the orthopedic surgeons sharp that season.

The lesson here is not in the failure, but in what makes Full-Court Miracle such a universal movie: it is ultimately about dreams. Dreams we have and dreams we shouldn’t have, dreams we reach for even though we’re told we can’t accomplish them and dreams that change as we change. Maybe a yeshiva boy shouldn’t dream of playing in the NBA, but neither was Judah Maccabee expected to liberate his people. Which is why this is the Chanukah classic we all deserve—because in the face of insurmountable odds, what is really to fail is to never try at all. (And because of the Dreidel, Dreidel rap remix. Of course.)

Image via YouTube

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David Goldstein’s sophomore book, Alley-Oop to Aliyah: African American Hoopsters in the Holy Land  tells the fascinating story of how black NBA players ended up playing on Israeli Teams. These men came to Israel with to play basketball, but ended up falling in love with the country.  

I asked my Israeli friends about this phenomenon, and they gushed about the American players choosing to play in Israel and how “they really make the team.” And while Israel is most often associated with soccer, basketball is also a hugely popular sport. To quote the first chapter of the book, “In Israel basketball matters. Sure it is just a game, but it represents so much more than that.”

For example, Maccabi Tel Aviv gave the Israeli people hope after the Yom Kippur War. Before Aulcie Perry, a black American, joined, their team had been the joke of the Euro Cup, but his arrival in 1976 turned Maccabi Tel Aviv into an international powerhouse. They went from losing the European Cup year after year to winning it– six times total.

Perry’s role in Maccabi Tel Aviv becoming a championship team inspired teams around Israel to start bringing African-American players over. But there was a small issue with loading teams with these players: a league rule limiting the number of foreign players on a team. And so, the powers-that-be solved this issue by making these elite players citizens. In the 1970’s and 80’s, players began converting to Judaism en masse so that they could use the Law of Return to become citizens. Many of them even married Israeli women, which Goldstein insinuates was to expedite the immigration process. While some Israelis claimed these acts of assimilation were ingenuine, Perry, at least, had a sincere conversion and continues to practice Judaism today.

Alley-Oop to Aliyah also highlights the love that Israeli fans have for their players. Dean Thomas, a former player for Maccabi Tel Aviv, said the following about Israelis: “The fans love you- they honestly love you, and they treat you as if you are one of their own… When I broke my leg before the 2005 Euroleague Final Four, I had (Israeli-American) fans fly from Tel Aviv to New York to visit me in the hospital. They brought their whole family!”

If that doesn’t show the deep love that the fans have for their players, what does? And not everyone plays for the blue-chip Maccabi Tel Aviv; many play in small cities and towns. Ramon Clemente played three seasons in Israel’s second league while living on a moshav. One day, a neighborhood kid approached him to ask for free tickets to the game. Of course, Clemente said yes, and even drove the kid– and six of his friends– to the game. Clemente recalls this experience as an example of the communal and supportive atmosphere of Israel.

Even if you aren’t a superfan of basketball (I’m not), there still may be something for you in Alley-Oop to Aliyah: African American Hoopsters. After all, it is also a tale of Jewishness, Israel, immigration, and belonging. You can get all that from Amos Oz, sure, or you can get it here, through basketball.

Alley-Oop to Aliyah: African American Hoopsters in the Holy Land, by David Goldstein, comes out on November 7, 2017 from Skyhorse Publishing.

Photo of Stanley Brundy with his son, Nadav. Brundy was from New Orleans, played one year in the NBA before taking his career overseas, and has primarily played in Israel, where he is now a citizen, since 1999.

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Let’s cut right to the chase, like a group of athletic men running after one another, risking permanent brain damage— last night’s sports-ball game (Piggers are gonna go all the way this year!) had undeniably Jewish moments or elements. Enough for a (relatively) unforced list of five:

1. Obviously, Julian Edelman: the wide receiver for the Patriots (who won last night) is on the official list of the greatest Jewish football players of all time. It was kind of a kick (pun most definitely not intended— does he even kick the ball?) hearing announcers keep saying a name that you would expect in your summer camp roll call.
2. Both team owners: Robert Kraft has been a bit of an embarrassment this year; the well-known Jewish philanthropist has also been a Trump supporter; it was a factor in the controversy of the Patriots playing (and winning) last night. But Arthur Blank, the owner of the Falcons, is a Member of the Tribe as well; he grew up in an observant family in Queens. He’s also a Democrat, so maybe the owners’ conflicting politics counter the uncomfortable risk of it seeming like Jews are secretly running the NFL.
3. The commercials— If you kept your eyes open, you could spot both men in kippot and a mezuzah in two different ads (Coke and Google, respectively). Plus, Gal Gadot (soon to be Wonder Woman) kicked ass in an ad for Wix.com (well, you’ve heard of it now).
4. Lady Gaga— OK, she’s not Jewish, she’s Italian-American Catholic. But she certainly brought “New York values” to the halftime show (Woody Guthrie + and LGBT anthem in Texas = New York infiltration, my friends).
5. It was Super bowl LI— This means Roman numeral 51, but I have at least one friend whose mother thought it meant “Super Bowl Long Island.”Once again guys, it was in Texas.

I’m looking forward to next year, when Barbra Streisand can do the halftime show, the ads will be for Kars 4 Kids, and Sandy Koufax will somehow be a player, despite his age and the fact that he’s retired from a different sport.

Image via Wikimedia

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Today, in “Information that will not even help you in bar trivia”: Jews and skateboarding.

There are actually a number of great Jewish skateboarders, but let’s focus on a pioneer of the sport: Alan Gelfand.

If you can name one skateboard trick, it’s probably the ollie, the jump that brings the skateboard up into the air with you. But grungy teenagers didn’t all wake up and do it one day.

If you check the Oxford English Dictionary, you’ll see its origin as “from the name of the US skateboarder Alan ‘Ollie’ Gelfand, who invented the jump in 1976.” That’s right, the ollie is named for a Jewish kid. Gelfand, New York-born and Florida-based, is famous in skateboarding history, part of the modern pioneers of the 1970s. He’s even a member of the International Skateboarding Hall of Fame.

Gelfand has also been a racecar driver, though there is no word on whether like in his signature skateboard move, he can make cars jump without a ramp.

Check out young Ollie doing his thing:

Photo Credit: Ricky Aponte via Flickr.

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Katy Perry’s yarmulke-inspired dress* (the “bramulke,” if you will) won the Super Bowl last night, obliterating all other competitors—including Perry herself, who put on a pretty good show.

But Idina Menzel (AKA Adele Dazeem) was a close second with her stunning rendition of the national anthem, which had just the right amount of theatrical trilling and drama. Love how she punches the air at the end! She knows she’s nailed it. Take that, Alicia!

http://youtu.be/_OM56DiHGUo

Comedian Billy Eichner received an honorable mention for a series of perfectly executed tweets:

At the end of the game they will announce who gets Israel

— billy eichner (@billyeichner) February 2, 2015

What if this whole game is just someone’s bar mitzvah party — billy eichner (@billyeichner) February 2, 2015

My wife and I LOVED that Scientology ad.

— billy eichner (@billyeichner) February 2, 2015

And apparently a bunch of dudes played a football game? I have no idea what the outcome was; sorry. I’m Australian.

This concludes your coverage of Super Bowl XLIX—and your sports news for 2015. See you next year!

(Main image: Timothy A. Clary/Getty)

* Editor’s note: You guys, for real, we know it’s beachball-inspired.

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Marc Tracy and Franklin Foer’s new collection Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame, a series of essays profiling some of the most influential Jewish personalities in the world of sports, has won the 2012 National Jewish Book Award for best Anthology. Jonathan D. Sarna’s When General Grant Expelled the Jews, published by our cousins at Nextbook Press, is a finalist in the American Jewish Studies category. You can view the full list of award-winners here.

Tracy, a former Tablet staff writer and longtime friend of Jewcy (he wrote about Krusty The Clown, the great Jewish entertainer on The Simpsons, for our Network Jews series), recently stopped by Tablet’s podcast, Vox Tablet, where he and Foer discussed some of the lesser-known Jewish athletes featured in the book—such as Sidney Franklin, the bullfighter from Brooklyn—as well as bigger names like Oakland Raiders manager Al Davis. Have a listen:

2012 National Jewish Book Award Winners [Jewish Book Council] Previously: Network Jews: Krusty the Clown, Jewish Entertainer on ‘The Simpsons’

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Over at Tablet, Jordan Teicher introduces us to Sandy Pyonin, a little-known basketball coach from New Jersey who’s been responsible for getting 34 players to the NBA, most notably Kyrie Irving and Al Harrington. His latest prospect? Tyler Roberson, who recently committed to Syracuse.

Still, no one seems to have heard much about Pyonin, whose day job is at Jersey’s Golda Och Academy, where he runs the basketball program and teaches gym class. The guy doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. What gives?

Former players regularly use the word “crazy” to describe their coach—crazy as in ridiculously focused, intense, and fanatical. Zack Rosen, point guard for Hapoel Holon of the Israeli Super League, trained with Sandy from 2003 to 2005. “The guy knows the game and he knows how to work you. He pushes you every day.” Before joining Hapoel Holon, Rosen had an accomplished career at the University of Pennsylvania, winning Ivy League Player of the Year in 2012 and earning a spot on the Philadelphia 76ers Summer League roster after graduating. Rosen believes Pyonin helped him develop a strong work ethic in those early years at the Y.

The NBA’s Jewish Playmaker [Tablet]

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