Tag Archives: American Jews

Jews of the Week: Spitz, Torres, Lezak & Leibovitch

World’s Best Swimmers

Mark Spitz

Mark Spitz – Greatest Olympian

Jews play an illustrious role in swimming history. One of the early greats was California Jew Mark Spitz, who began his career at the 1965 Maccabiah Games, winning 4 gold medals. The 1972 Munich Olympics were his shining moment, winning an incredible 7 gold medals while setting 7 new records. This added to the 2 gold medals he’d already won in the ’68 Olympics. Mark Spitz was famously the only one to swim with a mustache (which would later inspire Michael Phelps). He has been voted “Athlete of the Century” and “Greatest Olympian”. Meanwhile, Dara Torres is considered the greatest female swimmer in American history. She’s competed in 5 Olympic Games and has won a staggering 12 Olympic medals. In Beijing 2008, Torres set the record for being the oldest swimmer in Olympic history. She still managed to win 3 silver medals. Born to a Jewish father, Dara converted to Judaism officially before marrying Israeli surgeon Itzhak Shasha.

Keren Leibovitch

Keren Leibovitch

The 2008 Olympics also saw Jason Lezak win a breathtaking relay, ironically earning Michael Phelps an 8th gold medal and thus breaking Mark Spitz’s long-time record. Like Spitz, Lezak is a Jew from California who captains the US swim team and has 7 Olympic medals under his belt. Lastly, and most heroically, is Keren Leibovitch. While serving in the IDF, she had an accident that rendered her legs 90% paralyzed. She became a Paralympic swimmer, winning 4 golds, 2 silvers and a bronze medal over her career, plus 3 World Championships and 3 world records. She has the distinction of being the greatest Israeli Paralympian of all time.

Words of the Week

A single action is better than a thousand groans.
– Rabbi Sholom DovBer of Lubavitch (1860-1920)

Jews of the Week: Martin Cooper and Joel Engel

Inventing the Cellphone

Cellphone Inventor

Martin Cooper & DynaTAC

Though many people were involved in the production of the cellphone, credit is given to Martin Cooper (b. 1928), nicknamed the “father of the cellphone”, who made the first cellular phone call in New York on April 3, 1973. Cooper was the executive of Motorola, and placed the first-ever cellphone call to his major competitor Joel S. Engel (b. 1936), a fellow Jew who was also working on cellphone technology. Engel participated in the Apollo space program and worked for AT&T before becoming the research head at Bell Labs, where he had previously co-led the team that developed “the architecture of the cellular network and its parameterization”. Meanwhile, Martin Cooper was born in Chicago to Ukranian-Jewish immigrants. Besides the cellphone, he had many more contributions to radio and communications technology, including “Cooper’s Law”, named in his honour. He went on to become Vice-President and Corporate Director at Motorola, which opened its first branch outside the U.S. in Israel. Their first phone was the DynaTAC, which weighed 1 kilogram and cost $9,000 (adjusting for inflation). Cooper described it as such: “The battery lifetime was 20 minutes, but that wasn’t really a big problem because you couldn’t hold that phone up for that long.” He said that his inspiration for the cellphone came from Captain Kirk’s Communicator device on Star Trek!

Words of the Week

Joel Engel

We have discovered how to hit the Jews where they are the most vulnerable. The Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win, because they love life and we love death.

– Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah

 

Jews of the Week: Sandy Koufax & Ryan Braun

Best Baseball Players in the World

Sandy Koufax

Since the very beginnings of baseball, the sport has been dominated by great Jewish players: Hank Greenberg, Buddy Myer, Al Rosen, Ken Holtzman and many more. Perhaps most famous of all is Sandy Koufax, the greatest left-handed pitcher of all time, who actually started out as a basketball player in Brooklyn. The first person to win the Cy Young Award (for best pitcher) three times, he was also the league MVP in 1963. Koufax’s shining moment was when he refused to play the first game of the World Series because it was on Yom Kippur. He came back to lead his trailing team to the World Series victory, which earned him the Sportsman of the Year Award. Forced to retire at the young age of 30 due to arthritis, he became the youngest player ever to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Interestingly, Koufax’s last name at birth was Braun, like this year’s baseball MVP Ryan Braun, nicknamed “The Hebrew Hammer”. The son of an Israeli, he has recently said, “I am Jewish… I’m extremely proud to be a role model for young Jewish kids.”

Words of the Week

Ryan Braun

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.
– Gandhi