(no subject)

[seekingferret]

Title of vid: Ein HaNamer
Vidder: seekingferret
Fandom: Jewish Athlete RPF
Music: Ein HaNamer by Infectzia
Summary: 3000 years of beautiful tradition from Moses to Sandy Koufax
Content notes: Fast cuts
Responsible for lack of consistent title block from vid to vid: seekingferret
Acknowledgements: Thanks to bessyboo for beta and source help and sanguinity for beta help.

"" (Watch on YouTube)

I made a fanvid to Idan Raichel's "Ma'agalim" and submitted it to Club Vivid two years ago because it was dancey and fun. And after that I started joking that I should submit a Hebrew language vidsong to Club Vivid every year until Ian gets tired of it. Nobody laughed, but nobody ever laughs at my jokes, so that's okay. It took two years after that for Ian to be so tired of it that he cancelled Vividcon altogether. [There might have been a few other reasons involved, but getting sick of Hebrew Club Vivid vids is clearly the biggest reason] So this is my last Hebrew language Club Vivid vid.

I stumbled into it by accident. I was following Aly Raisman's testimony against Larry Nassar, the doctor who sexually abused many top US gymnasts. Raisman is Jewish and famously did floor routines to Hava Nagila, so in my family we full-throatedly rooted for her when she was competing in the Olympics. It was heartbreaking to see her talk about what she and the other gymnasts had suffered, and yet exciting to see her take a leadership role in speaking up for justice. I was trying to figure out if I could make a vidlet about how awesome she is, situating her activism within the tradition of Jewish activism, but vids that have to handle soaring highs and crushing lows are difficult to navigate and I gave up pretty soon. But the parts of the vid draft that worked most easily were the ones of Raisman flipping and leaping, so I started asking if I could use that in a different vid. Hey, I said, last year I did a multifandom vid about fictional Jews, maybe I can do a multifandom vid about real Jewish athletes. Then I said, wait a minute, making a multifandom vid consumed your life, are you sure you want to do that again? But by the time we got to this point in the conversation my hands had already started vidding.

I laid out about a minute of rough timeline on four different Hebrew songs, all of which had decided musical merits but specific lyrical flaws. Then I thought, maybe I'm going at this wrong. I'm trying to do a Jewish version of runawaynun's amazing vid "Stamina", so maybe I should find a Hebrew cover of "The Greatest". I found one, but it was acoustic and not dancey. But this led me to the idea more generally of finding a Jock Jams kind of song in a Hebrew cover. And thus Youtube led me to Infectzia's Hebrew cover of Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger". Which was so clearly the right answer I don't know how i didn't come it it sooner.

I've been a Jewish sports fan my whole life, so there was less research required than I expected. A lot of the players I needed were obvious, and in particular there were athletes I needed to include not because of their broad significance in the world of sports, but because of their personal importance to me. Danny Schayes was the only Jewish basketball player in the NBA when I was growing up, and he meant a lot to me even though he was never that great a player. I was at the NBA draft when Omri Casspi was drafted and the israelis in the crowd starting dancing around Madison Garden with an Israeli flag. I remember the Jewish Jordan hype around Tamir Goodman and what he meant to my community. I felt our own Jewish version of Linsanity when rookie Ike Davis was tearing it up for the Mets. And of course there were usual suspects like Hank Greenberg and Nancy Lieberman and Sid Luckman who couldn't be left out. Wikipedia's list of Jewish athletes helped me fill in the gaps, and the gaps were crucial, because just as with "Might Lead to Mixed Dancing", I wanted diversity, to show all the different sorts of Jews who have been successful in so many different sports. This was a dangerous rabbit hole, though. Pretty soon I was watching the European curling championships and tracking down 20 year old Paralympic videos. Did you know the Paralympics were created by a Jewish refugee from the Nazis? Of course they were, this was the least surprising thing I learned while making this vid. [Ask me about Dr. Ludwig Gottman.] In spite of my efforts, this vid will definitely suffer from recency bias, because I didn't fall quite as deeply down the rabbit hole as I could have and that limited me mostly to what was on Youtube. [I'm also grateful to bessyboo, who made sure her faves were in the vid as well. Jason Zucker's tattoo cracks me up. Just saying.]

I watched the documentaries "Jews and Baseball: an American Love Story" and "The First Basket", respectively histories of Jews in baseball and basketball. And they both to a certain extent ascribe cultural significance to the presence of Jewish athletes at the top rungs of the game. Hank Greenberg meant something, Dolph Schayes meant something, Sandy Koufax meant something, because they testified to the ways in which early 20th century American stereotypes about Jews as bookish and wimpy nerds were wrong. They told the world that Jews could be tough and strong and sexy. I'm not certain I want to gainsay those claims, because I think to the post-war generation of Jews that was an important cultural testimony, but I don't want this vid to just exist as a supplement to that testimony, which is less relevant to my generation.

I want to say in this vid that Jews do sports because all people do sports, and some Jews are paragons because that's how things work. And that these people mean something to me and I admire them, both when they do and don't conform to cultural narratives that are convenient. I don't think Kerri Strug's triumph in Atlanta matters because she's Jewish, I think it matters because she's a fucking badass and an incredible gymnast. Shortly after I submitted the vid to the con, my sister shared an article with me about the day this June when five Jewish major leaguers all hit home runs. It made the Jewish papers, but it ultimately wasn't some sort of huge watershed moment. At a certain point, the stereotype is debunked and all that matters is sports.

But it's also unavoidable when making a vid like this to run into the ways in which being a prominent, public Jew means encountering and negotiating anti-semitism- to this day. I couldn't not rewatch the Muslim judokas forfeiting rather than compete against an Israeli. I couldn't not rewatch Denis Leary's bizarre rant about Kevin Youkilis. I couldn't not see all the anti-semitic chants Hank Greenberg faced. I had to look again at all the unnecessary obstacles the basketball world put up to prevent Tamir Goodman from playing college basketball at the level he was capable of. I couldn't miss the way the Austrian Swimming Federation banned some of its greatest swimmers for sixty years for the sin of refusing to compete at the '36 Olympics in Nazi Germany. This is not a vid about those things, but the fact that those things happen in sports is part of why I needed to celebrate these athletes.

This vid is not encyclopedic. It does not contain the best Jewish athletes of all time or even necessarily all my favorite Jewish athletes. It just exists as a celebration of the people it does include, who are awesome.

Athletes in the vid, in order of first appearance. All told it's about 75 athletes. I am happy to talk at length about any of them if you ask. I have lots of feels.:


Max Baer
Sarah Avraham
Tal Flicker
Alice Schlesinger
Nancy Lieberman
Irina Slutskaya
Sarah Hughes
Oksana Baiul
Sasha Cohen
Kevin Youkilis
Shawn Green
Hank Greenberg
Ryan Braun
Aly Raisman
Omri Casspi
Tamir Goodman
Andy Ram
Sada Jacobson
David Levin
Jonathan Erlich
Arielle Gold
Sue Bird
Mark Spitz
Sandy Koufax
Gabe Kapler
Alexei Bychenko
Sara Decosta
Jason Zucker
Shay Doron
Al Rosen
Maccabi Tel Aviv Basketball(1977)
USA Maccabiah Rugby Team (2017)
Yael Averbuch
Kyle Beckerman
Valley Torah High School Basketball (2011)
Harold Abraham
Beitar FC soccer (2012)
Adam Keller
Maya Aviezer
Jon Scheyer
Margie Engle
Kerri Strug
Sid Luckman
Ernie Grunfeld
Jeff Agoos
Ron Blomberg
Sid Gordon
DeAndre Yedlin
Jay Fiedler
Noga Nir-Kistler
Daniel Berger
Dara Torres
Geoff Schwartz
Hakoah Vienna swim team (early 1930s)
Artem Dolgopyat
Danny Schayes
Goldberg
Nathan Cohen
Morgan Pressel
Adam Edelman
Steve Mesler
Jessica Fox
Kaleigh Fratkin
Evan Kaufmann
Jo Aleh
Jason Brown
Adriana Behar
Art Shamsky
Jason Lezak
Israeli National Curling Team
Jessica Eig
Jordan Farmar
Ike Davis
Barney Ross
Roman Greenberg
Yuri Foreman

Comments

[naraht]

This is fantastic! What a collection of great athletes, and a great celebration of them. For fiction research purposes I've been doing a lot of reading recently about Jewish athletes in the Soviet Union – and I was really struck by how many there were.

You've done an excellent job of pulling together a lot of different kinds and qualities of footage, and different rhythms of competition, and pulling them together into one cohesive whole.

[seekingferret]

Thanks so much!

[valoise]

I loved this vid. So many great athletes I love that you included Harold Abrahams. Only wish you'd found clips of Moe Berg. I passed the youtube link on to a couple of non-fannish friends who loved it.

[seekingferret]

Thank you

[grrlpup]

Sarah Hughes feels! I caught her Olympic short program by chance on TV and have never forgotten it; she's so luminous.

[seekingferret]

It was that amazing moment for Jewish sports when Sarah Hughes, Irina Slutskaya, and Sasha Cohen were all Jewish and all competing at the highest level in figure skating. We were very proud. I liked Sasha Cohen the best, and I think that is possibly reflected in where I positioned the three of them in the vid, but Sarah Hughes is awesome too.

[happydork]

This makes me so ridiculously happy! What an excellent song choice, what perfect showcasing of Jewish sporting talent, what utter pervasive delight!

[seekingferret]

Thanks!

[brainwane]

Thank you for making this. So fun!

I'd love to read your reflections on Kerri Strug.

[seekingferret]

Thanks!

My thoughts on Strug are not particularly Jewish thoughts- when she was in the public limelight, she chose not to make her Jewishness a particularly visible part of her identity, though she has subsequently become more vocal about the value she places on her Jewish identity.

But she is a fantastic emblem for the complicated tension in sports fandom about bodies and pain. Pushing your body to do extreme things is inherent in sports, and not inherently a bad thing even if it can cause pain. Pain is not inherently a bad thing, even though one of its functions is clearly to signal to the brain that the body is being put under stresses that can lead to damage. Pushing your body to the limits, though, is also how you learn what your limits are, and how you extend those limits. Those are incredibly valuable things and they're worth celebrating. But pushing the body too far can lead to permanent damage, and putting teenagers in pressurized situations where they are routinely pushing their bodies too far and taught to ignore the pain seems on the whole a bad thing, nigh on child abuse. And I think nineteen year old Kerri Strug becoming a worldwide hero for ignoring a serious ankle injury sits fascinatingly on the line between those two things. I'm not of one mind about it- I admire her athletic achievements, and I also greatly admire the grownup Kerri Strug who has handled her fame well and seems to be living a lovely well-adjusted life- but I'm a little queasy celebrating the ethos of playing through pain.

[starlady]

Vis a vis playing through pain, I can't help but connect the fact that her coaches didn't realize (hadn't quantified) that she didn't actually need to do that second vault to that same ethos, and in particular to the poisonous culture of U.S. women's gymnastics that enabled Nasser.

But seeing her land it is a pure jolt of amazingness every time.

[seekingferret]

You're spot on. The inability of the coaches to ask the question "Which is worse: a silver medal or a nineteen year old who can't walk right ever again?" says so much about what the program's priorities were.

[gwenfrankenstien]

Wow!

The only sport I follow is figure skating so my recognition of Who These Awesome People All Are is very limited but <3 I too remember the Sarah and Sasha and Irina times fondly.

[seekingferret]

Thanks!

[laurashapiro]

I was so delighted by this. I'm not a sports fan (though I would be kicked out of my family if I didn't root for the Chicago Cubs), but I know enough about sports to know that "I'll take Famous Jewish Athletes for $500, Alex" is a joke that makes me sad as it makes me laugh. Seeing this kind of representation was a big moment for me: look what we can do!

And it was so super-fun to dance to. :D

[seekingferret]

Thank you! Both Jewish sports documentaries I mentioned discuss the joke from Airplane about how "Famous Jewish Sports Legends" is a short leaflet, but... growing up as a Jewish sports fan, I never lacked for Jewish sports role models. Look what we can do, indeed.

[starlady]

This was so great to dance to at Club Vivid, and its joyfulness holds up on rewatch, as I proved last night on my couch. The song choice is perfect and the wide diversity of athletes and sports represented is so great.

[seekingferret]

Thanks! I'm glad the diversity worked for you. I loved that the biggest cheer the vid got in the room was for the curling. That was such a validating moment to hear that cheer, because it said that the work I had done to go beyond the most obvious sports was worth it.

[ghost_lingering]

I loved dancing to this and it's such a great finish to your Club Vivid streak!

[seekingferret]

Thanks! I need a new silly vidding motif to overuse...

[aurumcalendula]

This is awesome!

[seekingferret]

Thanks!

[primeideal]

Love the range of sports and eras represented here, great work!

[seekingferret]

Thanks!