SEES AND DESIST: Harvard's 'Chosen' Athletes Thrive

Name five famous Jewish athletes. I dare you.

No cheating, no googling, and no asking the people sitting next to you.

“That’s going to be really tough,” laughs sophomore Greg Cohen, an attackman on Harvard’s lacrosse team and a Bar-Mitzvahed Jew.

He thinks a moment, then smiles. He has the answer.

“The Maccabees were good athletes,” Cohen says. “They beat the whole Assyrian army with, like, three [people].”

Sitting next to him is Michael Berg, a sophomore defensive tackle on the football team and, like Cohen, also Jewish—though you might not deduce the latter from Berg’s 6’2, 250 lb. frame.

“There just aren’t many Jews in professional sports,” he says, nodding in approval of the Maccabees suggestion.

Sure, you’ve got legends like Sandy Koufax and Hank Greenberg and Mark Spitz—the token Chosen Athletes often evoked, quite indignantly, at the suggestion that the Jewish culture and the athletic culture might not go hand-in-hand—but the list does not continue far beyond these names.

Instead, says Berg, when you think of a clichéd Jew, “you think of the businessman, the lawyer, the [doctor].

“In the professional fields,” he stresses. But not on the professional fields.

And popular culture sternly reinforces this notion.

Take, for example, a 2005 episode of South Park—entitled “Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina,” for reasons beyond the dominion of this column—in which young Kyle Broflovski travels to the All-State Basketball Tryouts at the Denver Convention Center, announcing that “trying out for the All-State team has been my dream for years!”

“This is ridiculous,” his friend Cartman groans. “Jews can’t play basketball.”

And sure enough, when the feeble, weedy Kyle takes the court, he faces only strapping African-Americans—twice his size, each and every one, and far more athletically inclined.

“Look kid,” the coach tells Kyle, “you’ve got great skills and a great attitude, but you’re just not physically built for the game.”

“What do you mean?” Kyle asks, confused.

“Well,” the coach hesitates, “it’s just that Jews can’t play basketball.”

And the moral of the story? The coach is right.

“I hate being small and Jewish,” Kyle declares. “I feel like a tall black man.”

And so he endures a marvelous, revolutionary medical procedure that turns him into just that—“a tall black man”—and then returns to tryouts.

“Well, you’re tall and black enough,” the coach barks at the remodeled Kyle. “All right, Broflovski, suit up!”

It’s a hilarious scene—and I’d argue the comedy springs from the striking of a certain chord of truth.

Unless, that is, you’re at Harvard, where yarmulkes are often traded in for helmets and caps and Chosen People dot the fields and ice the way raisins dot rugelach.

Take the Harvard men’s hockey team, for example, the squad that earned 21 wins and an NCAA tournament berth. The Crimson is, in fact, a three-Jew team.

From Hobey Baker finalist Dov Grumet-Morris in goal to explosive defenseman Dylan Reese on the blueline to the skilled and crafty Andrew Lederman on the attack, this season’s Crimson was teeming with Jews.

Teeming, you ask? But it’s only three out of 27 skaters—surely a team that is one-ninth Jewish can’t be considered “teeming with Jews.”

You bet it can.

First, it should be noted that Jews constitute a tiny population—roughly 13 million worldwide—of which approximately five million live in the United States, the Unofficial Homeland of the Professional Athlete.

That’s about five million Jews in a country of more than 280 million people.

According to John Halligan, historian of the National Hockey League (NHL), few Chosen Skaters have graced the ice in the 88-year history of the league.

“There’s no definitive list,” Halligan says. “But off the top of my head, over the course of the years, I’d say no more than 20.”

Less than two dozen Jews in more than seven dozen years.

“We’ve never had this many Jewish skaters on the team,” says Grumet-Morris, the Crimson’s starting netminder for the lion’s share of his four years at Harvard. “There aren’t too many [Jews] in hockey.”

But the three-Jew team?

“It’s kind of cool,” Grumet-Morris says. “It’s something interesting.”

Though certainly not what the makers of the 1980 comedy Airplane! had in mind when, in one of the better-known clips, a stewardess distributes hefty magazines, only to find a passenger who desires some lighter reading.

“How about this leaflet?” the stewardess asks, thrusting forward a flimsy piece of paper. “Famous Jewish sports legends.”

Grumet-Morris smiles—he remembers the scene.

But when he graduates in June, the kosher-keeping senior will take with him 13 school records. The legend of Grumet-Morris already exists.

Of the 41 varsity sports Harvard boasts, the Jew-less teams are fewer and farther between than you might think.

But then again, here at Harvard, there are more than five Jews for every 280 students.

So is the Jews-can’t-play-sports stereotype based on some truth?

Or do Jews simply pursue other fields of interest?

Or is the whole theory of under-representation invalid altogether, seeing as how Jews make up less than two percent of the entire United States population anyhow?

There’s no one answer to these questions.

But just ask any ECAC hockey player who has tried to stop Andrew Lederman on the power play, or who has tried to pick a fight with Dylan Reese in the defensive zone, or who has tried to slip the puck past Dov Grumet-Morris in the crease, and they’ll all tell you the same thing.

Those Jews are nasty hockey players.

—Staff writer Rebecca A. Seesel can be reached at seesel@fas.harvard.edu.