From the 1930s through the 1950s, professional Jewish boxers and wrestlers were quite common, and these sports drew a large Jewish audience. An exhibition at the YIVO Institute explores this episode in American-Jewish history and such colorful figures as Rafael Halperin (1924-2011), as Joseph Berger writes:

Born in Vienna, [Halperin] was the son of an Orthodox rabbi who moved the family to Palestine out of fear of growing Nazism. Halperin proved as adept at physical feats as with talmudic riddles and took up weightlifting.

After a wrestling career in America notable for his refusal to fight on the Sabbath, Halperin became an entrepreneur in Israel, opening one of the first mechanical carwashes and a successful optical chain, then becoming an ultra-Orthodox rabbi who produced an encyclopedia of rabbinic figures.

What do Hamas’s leaders hope to achieve in the current war? First of all, writes Matthew Levitt, survival. Second, they want the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority (PA) to return to power in the Gaza Strip, which happens to accord with one of the commonly floated plans for the day after the current war. Hamas, to this end, has engaged in reconciliation talks with its arch-rival, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which currently controls the PA. Levitt explains:

In seeking to force a new governance structure on Gaza and to refashion the PLO in its own image, Hamas hopes to impose a Hizballah model on the territory. Like Hizballah, the heavily armed, Iranian-backed Shiite militant movement in Lebanon, Hamas wants a future in which it is both a part of, and apart from, whatever Palestinian governance structure next emerges in Gaza. That way, as with Hizballah in Lebanon, it hopes to wield political and military dominance in Gaza and ultimately the West Bank without bearing any of the accountability that comes from ruling alone.

Why risk giving up control in Gaza, which it ruled since 2007? Because

the movement’s support in Gaza appeared to be eroding. Israel’s pre-October 7 strategy toward Hamas was based on buying calm by allowing Qatari funds to flow into Gaza in the hopes that this would decrease support for Hamas militancy among the Gazan population. For all the criticism Israel has faced for this approach in the months since Hamas’s attack, there is some indication that it was working.

Hamas also feared Israeli normalization with Saudi Arabia. The Saudis were demanding that Israel take tangible and irreversible steps toward a two-state solution and that Washington enter into a formal security treaty with Riyadh; in exchange, the Saudis would formally recognize Israel. Most Palestinians likely saw progress on Palestinian statehood as a good thing, but not Hamas, which has always been dead set against a two-state solution and committed to Israel’s destruction.

So as Hamas sees it, . . . it must adopt a Hizballah model in its relation to the postwar governance structure that emerges—joining with the PLO and changing the Palestinian movement from within while maintaining Hamas as an independent fighting force. For Hamas, this would be a return to first principles: it could pursue its fundamental commitment to destroying Israel and replacing it with an Islamist Palestinian state in all of what it considers historic Palestine.