Let’s end with a very different little-known but influential Jew: Abe Saperstein, who founded the Harlem Globetrotters and made a major contribution to the development of basketball. Jacob Gurvis writes:

Saperstein, who at 5-foot-3 is the shortest man in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, is credited with introducing the three-pointer to the game. . . . In a new book, Globetrotter: How Abe Saperstein Shook Up the World of Sports, the brothers Mark and Matthew Jacob explore Saperstein’s far-reaching legacy, which they say is still underappreciated 58 years after his death. In addition to the three-pointer, they contend, Saperstein played a crucial role in elevating basketball from a second-tier American sport to a professionalized global powerhouse.

Saperstein was born on July 4, 1902, in London to Louis and Anna Saperstein, who had left what is now Poland amid a rise in anti-Semitism. The family moved to Chicago when Abe was five. The Sapersteins were Conservative Jews who attended High Holy Day services and spoke Yiddish at home but were largely secular.

In particular, the Jacobs brothers argue, Saperstein played a crucial role in bringing African Americans into basketball, and by extension in ending athletic segregation in the U.S.

[Saperstein] “showed that Black athletes could compete with anyone, at a time when a lot of white people didn’t think that was true,” said Mark Jacob. “A lot of people point to that game as a real impetus for the integration [of the NBA] and making it, in fact, inevitable that Black players would be allowed in the NBA because they could prove they could play.”

In a recent article, the New York Times Magazine asserts that Benjamin Netanyahu “prolonged the war in Gaza to stay in power.” Niranjan Shankar takes the argument apart piece by piece, showing that for all its careful research, it fails to back up its basic claims. For instance: the article implies that Netanyahu torpedoed a three-point cease-fire proposal supported by the Biden administration in the spring of last year:

First of all, it’s crucial to note that Biden’s supposed “three-point plan” announced in May 2024 was originally an Israeli proposal. Of course, there was some back-and-forth and disagreement over how the Biden administration presented this initially, as Biden failed to emphasize that according to the three-point framework, a permanent cease-fire was conditional on Hamas releasing all of the hostages and stepping down. Regardless, the piece fails to mention that it was Hamas in June 2024 that rejected this framework!

It wasn’t until July 2024 that Hamas made its major concession—dropping its demand that Israel commit up front to a full end to the war, as opposed to doing so at a later stage of cease-fire/negotiations. Even then, U.S. negotiators admitted that both sides were still far from agreeing on a deal.

Even when the Times raises more credible criticisms of Israel—like when it brings up the IDF’s strategy of conducting raids rather than holding territory in the first stage of the war—it offers them in what seems like bad faith:

[W]ould the New York Times prefer that Israel instead started with a massive ground campaign with a “clear-hold-build” strategy from the get-go? Of course, if Israel had done this, there would have been endless criticism, especially under the Biden administration. But when Israel instead tried the “raid-and-clear” strategy, it gets blamed for deliberately dragging the war on.