Mah jongg, the tile game created in China and made famous by Jewish women in the early decades of the 20th century, has experienced a resurgence in recent years. While Hollywood power players hold parties where guests play the game and mah jongg-themed tchotchkes take up room in the Jewish kitsch machine, a new generation ...

For many years, certain Jews—and those who dislike them—have relished an image of the Jewish body as skinny and weak, hunched-over, barely able to hold up its Jewish bobblehead, with a gargantuan brain and massive, jutting nose. This is a caricature, obviously, but one that is based on a tiny kernel of ethnic reality, a ...

Omri Casspi, a 6-foot-9-inch, 220-pound small forward from Yavne, a town south of Tel Aviv, has played three seasons for Maccabi T.A., a professional powerhouse in the highly competitive Euroleague. What the wiry forward brings to the game, said Uri Savir, co-editor of the Israeli basketball website Safsal, “is very unusual for a European player, let alone an Israeli. He’s a true killer on the court, plays with huge passion. His energies and aggressive play might be his greatest strengths for now.”

Once upon a time in the Alps, the hills were alive with the sound of Yiddish.
Before the nationalists showed up with their traditional costumes and anti-Semitism, before the Nazis equated the serenity of nature with the purity of race, Europe’s most imperial mountain range was deeply popular with German and Austrian Jews.
They were more than ...

A star quarterback on the New York Giants from 1929 to 1931, when the National Football League was in its infancy, Benjamin Benny” Friedman started out as the son of working-class Orthodox immigrants from Russia. In 1923, at age 18, he left his family behind in Glenville, Cleveland’s Jewish neighborhood, for the University of Michigan, ...

Olshansky on the field
In Knocked Up, Seth Rogen extols Steven Spielberg’s Munich for so demonstratively debunking the myth of the Semitic Wimp. “Every movie with Jews, we’re the ones getting killed,” he says. “Munich flips it on its ear. We’re capping motherfuckers!” When reminded of the quote, Igor Olshansky, the laconic football player for the ...

In 1993, when Dan White set out to hike the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada, he brought along his girlfriend, a $385 backpack, and zero long-distance hiking experience. A self-proclaimed “product of the low self-esteem movement,” White, who hailed from a posh seaside town in Southern California, quit his job as a ...

I must have been 9 or 10 the summer I read Seymour, the Formerly Fearful, by Eve Feldman, about a boy who dreads sports, swimming, and summer camp—in other words, my literary doppelganger—until Pesach, his older Israeli cousin fresh out of the army, comes for a visit.
Until then, I knew Israel only through the cousins ...

When couples intermarry, they eventually find themselves in the position of having to decide in which tradition they’ll raise their child: The mother’s? The father’s? Both?
So it is that David and I find ourselves having to decide whether Bess, now seventeen months old, will be raised a Mets fan, a Red Sox fan, or ...