The register of justice
True Hoop informs us all today of the sanctified goodness going down at the Seeds of Peace camp, a mere three hours from my current location. Now, I know the wise men teach us to never question decency in another, or seek to determine what gray beast lurks beneath a kindly arm. But looking at the seemingly random list of players involved, and given the alarming increase in Middle East discussions that happens when you leave Texas, I feel it's my right to wheel out the Jadakiss and ask, simply, WHY?
(NOTE: Yes, I recognize that all of them have ties to Arn Tellem, himself an alum of the camp. Still, does it not benefit us all to speculate what might stir them beyond, I don't know, a fear that their agent will hate them?)
LaMarcus Aldridge: Jermaine O'Neal redux, in more ways than one. The general perception among everyone who dealt with Aldridge at UT is that he was bright, thoughtful, and had some sense of the world beyond himself.
Etan Thomas: Anyone surprised that Etan supports this kind of effort probably shouldn't be reading FreeDarko.
Jarron Collins: I guess he went to Stanford, has always seemed like someone who'd watch a lot of C-Span because it's soothing.
Brian Scalabrine: However wrongly, he's viewed as the emobodiment of Celtics/Boston white boy favortism. So it couldn't hurt to demonstrate some sympathy for, you know, those unfortunate Third World kids.
J.J. Reddick: Appalachians are the Palestinians of the American South.
B.J. Armstrong: It's true, I did once accidentally confuse him with Craig Hodges.
Jordan Farmar: First step in his international Zionist basketball conspiracy.
posted by Bethlehem Shoals @ 8/01/2006 01:00:00 PM
19 comments
19 Comments:
"J.J. Reddick: Appalachians are the Palestinians of the American South."
Gold.
I, like shoals, tried to figure out a way to twist this into form that fits with my continuing dislike of scalabrine, though with less success.
what a great camp, and what a lineup. these guys should be the olympic team for the U.N. or valhalla or something.
check out chad ford's article on playing for peace on espn.com:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=playingforpeace
i didn't know c-fizzle was still writing for the Worldwide Follower. isn't he teaching somewhere (hawaii?)
he's an assistant professor of conflict resolution at BYU Hawaii.
which makes it the perfect intersection of freedarko tension what with the various mormons and Tabuse discussions lately.
dmkoc = Darko Milicic Kills Oll Comers
Apparently I'm FreeDarko's resident expert on the right wing Jewish world?
All I can say I disagree with nothing in this post and think Seeds of Peace is great.
Would I have loved to see Kobe at Seeds of Peace? Sure, that would have been great. But I can't say how nice it is to have Farmar around. These past couple of years, I've been missing Danny Schayes like you wouldn't believe. And it's terrific that Farmar is already showing he knows the entire hoops hopes of the Jewish world rest on his shoulders.
I would argue that this is a storyline that should be followed closely, because having the entire Jewish-Controlled Media putting that much pressure on you can't be easy for a rookie just fighting to stick around in the League.
One further comment: Surely it should be noted that every Jew in the world checked the first time they saw the name Etan Thomas to see if it were evidence of Israeli heritage. It seems ET is a wannabe Jew.
not that i meant this to get serious but re: farmar. . .this might be one of those situations in which we (take that as you may) discover just how little a lot of the country cares about/recognizes/remembers a player's jewish heritage. like although i'm sure there will be a lot of people pulling for him because of his ethnicity, it could quite possibly have zero effect on the way he's treated or discussed by anyone else involved in the nba circus. for one thing, he seems to come from the shoals school of ethnic amibeuity, meaning he's hardly some yarmulke-toting exotic like tamar. and while at least one First-Teamer is aware that Jews exist, even he seemed to have absolutely no clue that they rarely show up at sports' highest levels.
ambiguity. that word single-handedly keeps me from a career in editing.
You're right, Shoals. But while the majority of NBA insiders have no understanding of the dynamics of the Jew in Sports, for the vast majority of the media (i.e. there's a lot of Jewish sportswriters) it's a big issue. I guarantee you'll see plenty of articles about it over the coming season.
Also, while Farmar is not an obvious Jew like Tamar, or even like Lior Eliyahu, he has a clear Jewish identity. He's clearly shown he's not going to shirk it like Mike Lieberthal or somebody.
this is rapidly turning into its own post, albeit one that can't really get wrote until the season starts.
i just don't know what the basketball jew means or stands for. the baseball jew harkens back both to greenberg and koufax's expressions of ethnicity and the very real role that their ancestry played in baseball history. and that basebaill played in shaping their ancestry (same thing as with african-americans and baseball).
with football, it turns into an even more grotesque version of the "jews can be physical" line. but that's only really said amongs jews behind closed doors.
basketball, though. . . it gets into all those weird issues of it in some ways being another minority's sport at this point. or the weird historical relationship between jews and blacks, if that even matters anymore. i don't know, i just have trouble seeing how someone like farmar is anything but another white-ish dude trying to make it in the nba. at least tamar was a zealot straight outta poland, a real life example of a REAL outsider making his way in an "American" game. farmar, though. . i have trouble connecting with his nascent career in any meaningful way, and all i do is sit around and think about being jewish and liking the nba.
let's not forget that farmar is also half-black, although he was raised mostly by two jews. but, still, that alone makes him less of an outsider than other jewish players. also makes use of the term "jewfro" to describe his hairstyle a little more complex.
wv: ydqsno = yo david, quick selling nuckaz out!
i totally forgot about that. forget everything i said--he'll be jewish to the press, black to the league and most fans.
My father, who's very much a Baseball Jew who can't understand why I give basketball more than casual attention, loves to point out that the first Knicks team started four Jews (There was a Forward article about this two years back). Abe Saperstein comes up with equal frequency (The Jewish connection to the Harlem Globetrotters is a question so loaded I don't even want to go into it). I think he feels a historical connection to basketball more than any current one, and I definitely think that relates to the idea of basketball as a game associated with a poor urban environment, a game that suburban Jews have left behind.
i mean, i'd really like to believe this, but i think it's contingent on a) being a knicks fans and b) supposing that it makes any sense for the jewish people to return to the urban basketball environment. that is, that it even exists in the same way it did for them. hard not to feel that the games, cities, and the game in cities have been transformed so dramatically that the "great jewish game" of the olden days is more at home in a suburban YMCA.
Googled Jordan Farmar because all I knew was that the Lakers drafted him.
Sixth link: "Farmar’s parents divorced when he was young. His mother, Melinda Kolani, and stepfather, Yehuda Kolani, raised Farmar in a Jewish home, took him to Israel and sponsored his Temple Judea bar mitzvah. Farmar doesn’t consider himself observant, but identifies himself as part of the Jewish people.
"'That is part of me, of who I am,” said the 2004 Southern California Jewish Sports Hall of Fame High School Athlete of the Year. “People are watching the game, the way I carry myself on and off the court, and I know that all reflects on my community and my people.'"
http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=13773
back when roethlisberger burst onto the scene i remember wondering (hoping?) if he was jewish. i was told he's not, which is apparently true, but it seems like i was not the only one who was interested:
http://maosdinner.blogspot.com/2006/01/dear-america-ben-roethlisberger-is-not.html
I think farmar has a deal of control over how big this story is. as someone legitimately located at the intersection of two cultures, he can in some sense decide how jewish he is. It's an interesting position to be in, and i'm curious to see if he downplays it or not.
the game in cities have been transformed so dramatically that the "great jewish game" of the olden days is more at home in a suburban YMCA.
This is exactly why, as you've said, Farmar will be black to the league. Farmar plays a black game. He's a fast, flashy point guard, at times turnover prone. The historical Jewish game is a thing of the past, and if Farmar is to be a prototype for the new Jewish player, it's a development that'll have to be discussed in terms of the assimilation of the Jew.
None of this detracts from the fact that much as the Jewish community has embraced the unwilling Mike Lieberthal, Farmar will have the support of the Jewish community whether he wants it or not, and whether the world knows it or not.
aaron - even with the tats?
it may seem a facietious question, but it's based on a real discussion i had with a friend of mine (who briefly supported my Cal Bears led by Steve Levy - later discovered to be Irish Catholic) where he was wavering on supporting Farmer due to the tats.
I don't think the tattoos will be a big issue for most people. Perhaps among the real frummies, but they're not really the people who find their Jewish identity in sports, anyway.
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