Last month Zach Hyman, who plays for Canada’s Edmonton Oilers, joined the elite list of now 99 players in the NHL who have scored more than 50 goals in a single season. Hyman, Armin Rosen notes, is “a graduate of the University of Michigan and the Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto.”
He is both the Ontario Junior Hockey League’s most gentlemanly player of 2011, and the University of Michigan athlete of the year for 2015. On the ice for Edmonton, he wears number 18—the traditional Jewish good luck symbol for chai, life.
Fifty goals in a season means you’ve now vaulted over the New Jersey Devils’ Jack Hughes as the greatest Jewish hockey player in history, I declared to Hyman after the game, a 6-1 thrashing of Anaheim in which he’d notched a late goal. Hyman let out an embarrassed laugh. “I don’t know about that,” he replied. “Jack’s a pretty good player.” When I suggested to Hyman that his own success, along with that of Hughes and the Rangers defenseman Adam Fox, meant the Jewish people were now in an unprecedented hockey golden age, his first reaction was to add another name to the list. “I also saw [that] Jeremy Swayman said he had a bar mitzvah,” Hyman said, mentioning the Bruins netminder. “So you can throw that in there. He’s a pretty good goalie.”
I observed to Hyman that he had likely been one of the only Jewish members of just about every team he’d ever played on.
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/sports/articles/golden-age-jewish-hockey