What Sandy Koufax has to say about attracting young people to Israel

Sadly, the national movement for the return of the Jewish people to their homeland is being hampered by Israel’s perpetuation of the image of the Jew as history’s eternal non-athlete.

By GIDON BEN-ZVI
Michael Levitt celebrates Nobel win with wife 370 (photo credit: REUTERS)
Michael Levitt celebrates Nobel win with wife 370
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Israel has been abuzz over the last few days, what with the news that yet another prodigal son had taken home the world’s most prestigious award. On Wednesday, Kibbutz-born Arieh Warshel won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, along with fellow Jewish professors Michael Levitt (who also holds Israeli citizenship) and Martin Karplus.
The trio won the award “for the development of multi-scale models for complex chemical systems,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced. By creating computer models that can delve into complex chemical processes, the three are helping to elucidate the pathways of photosynthesis, without which life as we know it would not exist.
With their staggering achievement, no less than six Nobel prizes over the past 11 years have been won by Israelis.
Yet amid the media blitz and phone calls from presidents and prime ministers, there is a giant blue and white elephant stomping around the room. An important and obvious topic, which many Israelis are aware of, but which isn't discussed since it is uncomfortable to do so, is this: wasn’t the Zionist enterprise meant to combat and ultimately conquer that most nefarious of anti-Semitic stereotypes - the effeminacy attributed to Jewish men as characterized by a disproportionate emphasis on intellectual pursuits alongside an aversion to any rigorous physical activity?  Sadly, the national movement for the return of the Jewish people to their homeland is being hampered by Israel’s perpetuation of the image of the Jew as history’s eternal non-athlete. 
A long-accepted theory explaining the Jewish people’s academic prowess is that they had to be smart to survive in exile. Recent history, however, has shown that brain power was but just one way out of a life lived in constant fear.
In the early part of the 20th century, millions of Jews fled persecution in Europe for the safe haven that America could provide. However, these immigrants were a microscopic religious minority in a largely Christian nation. As such, there was always a lingering sense of being a stranger in a strange land, little more than a visitor whose continued well-being was anything but a foregone conclusion.
Since Jewish Americans were excluded from certain neighborhoods, universities, jobs and even country clubs simply because of their religious and cultural background, they turned to sports as a ticket out of a second class life.
And did they soar! Barney Ross, Dolph Schayes, Benny Friedman, Sandy Koufax, Hank Greenberg and too many more to list shattered the myth of the pale, skinny Jewish weakling into a thousand pieces.
Today, the strong, vibrant State of Israel revels in the fact that Jews account for roughly twenty percent of all Nobel Prizes ever awarded – and this while constituting only one fifth of one percent (0.2%) of the global population. Yet to appeal to young Jewish men and women everywhere who look to Shawn Green, Dara Torres, Ryan Braun and Lenny Krayzelburg as role models, perhaps the time is right to start focusing a bit more time and treasure on sports.
After all, it doesn’t take a Noble Prize winning chemist to understand that while the contributions of two American Israelis and one US Jew to computational biology are immense, they may not have the popular appeal required to fill up those Nefesh B’Nefesh flights from Los Angeles to Lod.

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Gidon is an accomplished writer who moved back to Israel in 2009 after having spent 12 years in the United States, where he earned a B.A. in Political Science from California State University, Northridge. Between 1994-1997, Gidon served in an IDF infantry unit. In addition to writing for The Jerusalem Post, Ben-Zvi contributes to The Times of Israel, CiF Watch, The Algemeiner, Tel Aviv Faces and blogs at Jerusalem State Of Mind.