In the stadium where Adolph Hitler watched the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Berlin’s football club kneeled last week in solidarity with American pro football players protesting the national anthem. The symbolic protest, carried out before a game, is believed to be the first such protest by an entire sports team outside the U.S., the Comeback reported….
RIO DE JANEIRO (JTA) — The Jewish president of the Rio 2016 Olympic Committee was arrested amid an investigation into a vote-buying scheme to bring the Olympic Games to South America for the first time. Carlos Arthur Nuzman, who also is the president of the Brazilian Olympic Committee and an honorary International Olympic Committee member, would…
In a uniquely strong statement for a young athlete, Aly Raisman demanded “more accountability” from USA Gymnastics in the wake of a horrific slew of allegations that female gymnasts are being routinely sexually abused with the knowledge of the national gymnastics organization. “I feel like there’s a lot of articles about it, but nobody has…
Margaret Bergmann Lambert, a record-breaking athlete who was barred by the Nazis from competing for Germany in the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics because she was Jewish, died in Queens, N.Y. on Tuesday at the age of 103. Lambert was known in her athletic prime as “The Great Jewish Hope.” Then known as Gretel Bergmann, she…
Aly Raisman was in for a rude surprise at the airport this Wednesday when a security agent told her she didn’t look strong enough to be a champion gymnast. The three-time Olympics gold medalist is also an advocate of empowerment and body positivity for girls, so she definitely wasn’t going to take guff from the…
Aly Raisman has been caught up in a whirlwind since helping the United States to its golden haul in Rio — and has her sights on the 2020 Tokyo Games. Raisman, who captained the ‘Final Five’ U.S. women to the most dominant Olympic victory in the team event six months ago, will be 26 when she…
A version of this piece originally appeared in Plus61J. Jews and The Olympics have hardly been the best of friends, despite the disproportionately high Jewish tally of some 360 medals since the start of the Modern Games in 1896. Not out of a love of sport did Baron Pierre de Coubertin resurrect the ancient Olympics:…
A version of this piece originally appeared in Plus61J. Jews can’t fight, fence, ride, run or swim. That was the conventional wisdom of earlier centuries. By contrast, some time in the 1930s, the Russian–Jewish writer Isaac Emannuilovich Babel, a one-time Cossack (in an administrative capacity) alerted his readers: ‘beware a Jew on horseback’. So which…
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