Although Made into an Avatar of Nazi Germany, Max Schmeling Was among the Righteous

In 1936, the German heavyweight boxer Max Schmeling faced off against Joe Louis at Yankee Stadium, in what became the first loss of Louis’s professional career. When the two fought again, in the same venue, two years later, spectators saw the match as a contest between a representative of a state that had embraced racism as its guiding principle, and an African American. But, writes Dean Karayanis—drawing on an interview with the veteran Jewish sportswriter Jerry Izenberg, who listened to the 1938 fight on the radio as a boy—Schmeling was hardly the avatar of Nazi Germany spectators on either side of the Atlantic imagined:

President Franklin Roosevelt, Mr. Izenberg said, “let it be known he had called Louis and said, ‘You’re fighting for America. You’ve got to do this,’ and Louis was ready to go.” He chuckles at the narrative now. “That’s according to the myth.”

Later, Mr. Izenberg got to know both men. “Schmeling,” he told me, “wasn’t fighting for Hitler. He was fighting because he beat this guy, [Louis], once. He was too old to win the title, everybody said, but he could win it now. That’s what motivated him.”

Schmeling, meanwhile, fought Hitler’s overtures to join the Nazi Party and on Kristallnacht, even hid two Jewish brothers in his apartment. “Max asked me several times over the years not to mention it, . . . not to ‘glorify’ him,” one of the brothers, Henri Lewin, said in 1989. “He told me that what he’d done for me and my brother Werner in 1938 was ‘doing the duty of a man.’”

After so much hype, the rematch ended just two minutes and four seconds into the first round. This time, it was Schmeling who was beaten into submission. When his trainer threw in the towel, America rejoiced, but the man they’d cast as a Nazi stooge carried no hard feelings. When Louis died in 1981, Schmeling was a pallbearer and helped pay for his funeral.

Read more at New York Sun

More about: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Nazi Germany, Righteous Among the Nations, Sports

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023