The Kibbitz
Jewish kids self-selected out of pro sports. It was, at best, a high school thing: no one was investing the time or resources or energy into a pathway to more professional or elite-level success. A DAM JEREMY “A. J.” EDELMAN has turned his passion for sport into a mission to get the Jewish community to care about it as well. The American-born “slid- ing sports” athlete competed for Israel in the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. He has represented Israel in skele- ton and bobsled. When I inter- viewed him, he was in the midst putting together an Israeli bobsled team for the upcoming Winter Games in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo. He spoke to me from Japan, where he was training, building the body that gives him his nickname: The Bear Jew.
You can observe that if you take a look at the major sports. Where are the Jewish NBA players, for instance? It’s not like Jews are just so clinically small that we don’t have people who are six-five, six-six”. To me, it’s a very poor focus and it pervades the entire Jewish psyche. Let’s be real. If a kid goes to their par- ent and says, I want to invest a lot of time and energy into learning an in- strument or the piano or a language , the parent will go to enormous finan- cial lengths, enormous time lengths, enormous energy spent to help their child achieve a certain standard of pro- ficiency in piano, without the hope of joining the Boston Symphony Orches- tra. But if someone goes to their par- ent and says, I want to be a martial artist , [or] a taekwondo [fighter], a danc- er, whatever the sport is, oftentimes a parent from the Jewish community will tell them there’s no future in that. How much of this is the old immi- grant story, which is: if we’re going to invest all of our energies into you, it should be a career ? You can play the piano as long as you go and get a law degree and you have the piano on the side. Parents are vastly influenced by the system in which they grew up, and you’re not going to unwind that men- tality. Parents oftentimes are making a judgment call, or the Jewish culture has made a judgment call, about what is a worthwhile pursuit. I’ll give you a prime example here: Israel’s bobsled team has never received a drop of government fund- ing. Not in twelve years, not a single cent. I paid for my own flight to the Olympics in 2018. That is how disad- vantaged the bobsled team is. It has gone further than any other unfund- ed team in bobsled history. No other team has done what we have done.
What was it like for you growing up as a kid in a Modern Orthodox world who was also very engaged with sports? I think when my older brother Alex and I started playing hockey for Brook- line, [Massachusetts], back in 1994, 1995, we were the only visibly Jew- ish kids. It kind of continued in that vein for a very long time. Things oftentimes took place or were planned during Shabbos. It really dis- couraged Orthodox kids from com- peting in sport systemically because it just wasn’t accessible. Brookline did an amazing job in scheduling around Shabbos for us. They really did a fan- tastic job at accommodating us and scheduling a lot of our games for Sunday. I tipped into Olympic sports be- cause of Mike Rosenberg, direc- tor of alumni for Maimonides, the day school I went to in Brookline. He had told me back in 2014 that no one had played high-level collegiate sport who didn’t go to Brandeis or Yeshiva Uni- versity. I found that to be really shock- ing, and I had this realization that
“If a kid goes to their parent and says, I want to learn the piano , the parent will go to enormous lengths. But if some- one says, I want to be a martial artist , oftentimes, a parent from the Jewish community will say there is no future in that.”
24 WINTER 2025/2026
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