The Great Jewish Fencer Who Served as the Nazis’ Token Jew at the 1936 Olympics

The 1936 Olympics Games, held in Berlin, are best remembered for the American athlete Jesse Owens’ impressive performance, which undermined Hitler’s claims of Aryan physical supremacy. But earlier, the International Olympic Committee had also informed the Third Reich that it couldn’t host the games if it didn’t allow Jews to play, and the Americans likewise threatened a boycott. So the Nazis consented to allow two Jewish female athletes to participate in try-outs. A new off-Broadway play tells their stories. Bruce Chadwick writes in his review:

Helene Mayer, born in 1910 outside of Frankfurt, was one of the greatest fencers ever to live, named one of the top 100 women athletes of the 20th century by Sports Illustrated. She was defeating boys at age ten and at just thirteen won the first of her six German national championships. . . . Hitler, who had promised Germany a “Jew-free” Olympics, was, under enormous pressure, forced to relent and Helen was invited to try out for the fencing squad. She made the team, the only Jew in the entire German delegation.

Henry Naylor’s impressive play stars two women, Lindsay Ryan as [Helene] Mayer and Renita Lewis as the Jewish high jumper Gretel Bergmann, who was also invited to try out but did not make the German team. Both give devastating portrayals of the two women athletes who found themselves standing in the vortex of history that summer in 1936.

Helene, [born to a Jewish father and Lutheran mother], fled the Nazis in 1935 and worked at Mills College in California. . . . She knew that she was in for a political whirlwind if she accepted the Nazi invitation to try out for the team, but did so anyway. She had insisted throughout her life that fencing, like all sports, was above politics and that she had to go to the Berlin Olympics for that reason.

Read more at History News Network

More about: 1936 Olympics, Anti-Semitism, Nazi Germany, Theater

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF