Where Have You Gone, Sandy Koufax?

Four decades after Los Angeles Dodger Sandy Koufax refused to pitch on Yom Kippur during the World Series and ignited Jewish pride, the Jewish-athlete-obsession business is red hot. But times have changed since 1965. Now every Jew who lifts a dumbbell at a Muscle Beach competition or warms a bench as a third-string professional is benighted by sports fans as a mini-Koufax.

There are 18 Jewish Sports Halls of Fame in the United States, dozens of websites on Jewish athletes, a bear market in Jewish sports memorabilia ($535 for a baseball signed by 1940s Detroit Slugger Hank Greenberg), a newly issued set of Jewish Major Leaguers, baseball cards covering the years 1870 to 2003 and a new Judaica Sports Collectibles Library from New York City-based S.p.i. Books, which includes the forthcoming title The Big Book of Jewish Athletes: Biographies & Anecdotes of Great Jews in Sports.

This is serious business to many people. Few things raise the ire of brissed-out ball fans more than jokes like the one in the 1980 movie Airplane:

“May I offer you anything to read, ma’am?”

“Do you have anything light?”

“How about this leaflet, Famous Jewish Sports Legends?”

There is nothing light about the Jewish Sports Review, a bi-monthly publication with 1,000 subscribers that seems to catalogue every athletic feat by every Jew from junior high school through senior citizens’ leagues.

Readers of the $6, 24-page Sept/Oct issue can find among its hundreds of rapid-fire tidbits:

“DAVID MANSOUR (Eng) captured the foil event of the 2003 British Fencing Association Championships. He is the first Jew to win the senior foils since ALAN JAY in 1963.”

“We just learned that DEDE COHEN of Houston’s (TX) Memorial H.S. enjoyed an outstanding sophomore season as a shooting guard.”

“CAROLYN WARHAFTIG (P) (Soph) – Colgate – from Wyckoff, NJ. Carolyn fed for an assist for one point as she started 17/17 contests.” [This from the Women’s 2003 College Soccer Preview, a special section in the issue]

The (P) after a name means that only an athlete’s father is Jewish. If there’s no (M), meaning only the mother is Jewish, or (C), indicating a conversion, the athlete is 100-percent full-blooded Yid.

Manhattan-based Shel Wallman, 66, a retired high school dean, and his co-publisher, Ephraim Moxson, a 61-year-old parole agent administrator in Los Angeles, pore over the sports pages in newspapers from around the country, and every time a Stein, Rosenberg or Cohen appears, they play “Is he a Jew?” with gusto, chalking up members of the tribe like a marlin fisherman notches his rod to count catches.

“Last year,” JSR notes, “we mentioned ANITA MARKS, QB for the Florida Stingrays of the Women’s Professional Football League. We can now include her teammates, DT ALISON KATZ, DE BONNIE LEVY and OL MELISSA GREEN.” (Marks, incidentally, posed for the September 2002 issue of Playboy, wearing shoulder pads, a wrist guard and little else.)

Why do Wallman and Moxson do it?

“People were always asking, ‘Is this guy Jewish, is that guy Jewish?’” Wallman says. “We decided we would find out, and that’s what we’ve done for five and a half years. We find out, and people who want to know, they subscribe to our magazine.”