Will Bore Gentiles For Food

Consider this the preamble to the preamble, which is always an apology of sorts. I have been way out of touch with the NBA these last few weeks. Limited cable access, little time to sneak off and watch a game of my choosing, and time spent (thankfully) with people who don't want to spend a Thursday at home with Barkley and Kenny. I've also been talking non-stop about some of the more axiomatic features of the league, which sort of dries out your appetite for day-to-day trainspotting.

I also have this weird feeling that everything in the league has been destroyed except for the Thunder, though that's probably just some unconscious way of guilt-tripping myself for going slack.

But I feel fully armed and ready to do what I do best—take something I said once already and more forcefully, desperately, throw it in the face of those who would doubt me. Yesterday, I put up a post that inquired into exactly what "the Jewish athlete" meant today. Some commenters, and at least one blog with a bigger readership than mine, took me to task as either questioning Farmar's Judaism (different from Jewish-nes, I think), or being guilty of the worst kind of self-stereotyping.

First off, Farmar's Judaism is unimpeachable, insofar as he takes it seriously, attends services, and was raised by two Israelis. That's more than I can claim. The whole "he's half-black, and plays a blacker game" had some awkward elements of racialized biology that no one really called me on, but the point mainly was that, for whatever reason, when he steps on the floor he's able to embody the basketball mainstream. Apparently, there are still American Jews out there who believe strongly in the imperative of, or at least the right to, assimilation. My Greenberg allusion was meant to date this attitude as something that, in theory, we've moved past. Jews now can assert the ways in which they are different from "white people" without endangering themselves professionally or personally. We won.



But the funny thing about Jews as an ethnic group: Except for the construction of Israeli identity, or going all-out religious, it's hard to pin down exactly what Jewish "authenticity"—the idea I was trying to nail down in my plea for a "Jew-y" player—would be, other than a bunch of semi-embarrassing stereotypes. That's why I was ridiculed for suggesting that I'd like to see such a player; it's regarded as self-satire, as opposed to alive and kickin' identity politics. I'm not content with today's criteria-based, near-polarizing system of classification, which is why personally, the "he attends shul" proof doesn't do it for me. Nor do I want a repeat of the Jewish Jordan fiasco. I want an athlete whose game I can identify with.

Someone suggested that my seach for a "Jew-y" player would ultimately be detrimental to the league in the same way "blacker" players have been. Ummm, okay. Allen Iverson's not perfect, but he's changed the game forever. As someone who, however foolhardily, takes the idea of a "cultural Judaism" seriously, it would mean a lot to me if—at a time when I'm increasingly asked to either shut up and accept my whiteness or ante up and pay membership dues at my local synagogue—there were a player that did something to work toward a contemporary version of this term. I threw out Woody Allen as an example; he was dismissed as "of the past," but while he may need updating (as would, say, Serch), that's the kind of figure I'd like to see reflected in sports, just as Iverson was to hip-hop.

(Sidenote: If anyone super-influential is reading this, please send me that lost footage from Annie Hall where the Knicks—the real Knicks—take on a team of famous philosophers)

So while it may have been unfair of me to single out Farmar, or accidentally turn him into a figurehead, the fact remains that sports are fucking huge in America, and insofar as I have spent a lot of time in this life of mine looking at so-called secular variations on Jewish identity, I would like to see this borne out in basketball. I don't know what I'm looking for, but I know it's not just a guy who self-identifies as Jewish but otherwise bears no stylistic markers. Or a monolithic, and largely implausible, version of what it means to project "Jewish-ness" for all the world to see. The internal tensions and external negotiations of culture are never an easy thing to pin down, and there's over a century of art, music, and literature that attest to this within the Jewish experience. With sports as central to America as they now are, why can't I ask for an athlete who uses this medium to continue in the critical, often confusing, tradition?



Fine, shove this right back at me as "allusive," guilty of reductionism, keeping the people down, and getting in the way of a more transparent, or flexible, definition of "Jew." Maybe I am living in the past, or preoccupied with my own personality quirks. But I'm not done wrestling with the meaning of secular Jewish identity, nor am I entirely comfortable dismissing an inherently unstable history and canon just because we can't give an easy account of where they stand today. That's the sort of work culture does, and big surprise here, but I think sports, and the power of style, are clearly capable of doing some of that work. They have for everyone else, in every other sport.

Imagine a cross between Rudy Fernandez, Shane Battier, and early Joe Johnson. Also, Stephen Jackson sometimes strikes me as really Jewish. Is Doug Moe the one that got away?

If you want to keep going down this path, I'd suggest consulting our NBA Race War, and its sequel.



I'm fucking exhausted. Don't call me Sarah Silverman or ask for a syllabus.

Blanketstein

Off the road, finally. Still not home yet, but I got to sit down this morning and think no Macrophenomenal thoughts. By the way, for all of you lamenting my long absence: You could try checking out the Sporting Blog. Not quite the same absurdist overtones, but I get my licks in, and I have been constantly churning out material there throughout this long, fun ordeal. Like today, you can find my reaction to that joint-popping Suns/Cats trade.

So many memories, so many faces, so many photos and media that we may or may not post up here in the future. Yes, KGB Radio night, I'm talking primarily about you. I've also watched hardly a game these last few weeks, so bear with me as I try and muster up a post to prove that yes, I still belong to you, you belong to me, and in heaven no one will tear us apart.

Of all the conversations I had multiple times on the road, none was more poignant, or tricky for me, than the Jordan Farmar one. Apparently, a lot of loyal FD readers, and semi-interested Jews, didn't realize Farmar was of the faith, or the people, or whatever the least PC nomenclature imaginable is these days. Now mark my words, I know the way things work, and have no interest in denying Farmar his full spectrum of cultural heritage. But—and this is more about our society than my own feelings—I don't think Farmar reads as Jewish, on at least two levels. For one, there's the Obama principle. Our real life FBP also happens to be half Heartland, and yet that other half is what defines him. Perhaps because of the context, Farmar is more likely to be recognized as "mixed" (which, of course, still ends up being primarily about black blood), but his Judaism is a technicality, or at least not readily apparent, even if he claims it quite regularly.



And that brings me to the second, really tacky, element of this analysis: Race and style. Once upon a time, the likes of Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax has to prove that Jews could outman (quite literally) their gentile brethren. Around the same time, in New York a generation of Chosen Kids were defining basketball as a sneaky, shifty urban game that played into all sorts of stereotypes. Sound familar? Farmar's game is squarely in that first category. He has ups, maneuvers with ease, and conveys a certain sense of equilibrium. Personally, I no longer feel the need to prove that Jews can be mighty and proficient in traditional ways. Perhaps it's the ghost of cultural stuidies, or the influence of Woody Allen on the paths of comets, but—and in some ways, this relates to what Kevin Pelton told me about the WNBA—I would want to see a player who played, well, Jew-y. In the same way that certain players are perceived as having a "blacker" style than others.

What would that game be? I'm not quite sure. I could trot out some stereotypes, but that wouldn't actually get to the heart of what I think is a very real discussion to be had. I've long been obsessed with other countries producing new strains of style; Spaniards like Rudy Fernandez, and established guys like Barbosa and Manu, are the proof of this. Has our own country become more fractured by identity politics than it has united by mass consumer culture?



This is where I would insert the video of the time several early FD operatives played a full-court game against a van full of Hasids in Maine. They thought I was a showboat, which apparently there's a word for in Yiddish. It's been lost forever, though, so instead I will open the floor, and ask if anyone knows whether Doug Moe is Jewish.

BONUS: Gordon Gartrelle with a close reading of the Vince/Obama tee.