Menschwarmers

In September, the San Francisco Giants made Major League Baseball history—in fact, probably pro sports history—as the first-ever team to hire a master sommelier. Evan Goldstein, one of just 269 master sommeliers in the world, has spent decades working with wine and watching sports. Now he gets to combine those passions: it's his job to bridge beer-loving baseball fans with the world of tannins and...

Eliezer Sherbatov has played hockey all around the world. Born in Israel to Russian parents, with a career that's taken him from Quebec to Kazakhstan, Slovakia and Ukraine, Sherbatov has wandered between worlds, considered an outsider by every culture in which he's played. He was the first Israeli player to compete in the Kontinental Hockey League and remains captain of Israeli's national men's ho...

Allan Leibel was a three-time Olympic sailor who competed for Team Canada in 1972, 1976 and 1980. The first of those was, of course, the Munich Games, which were notoriously marred by a terrorist hostage situation that resulted in the deaths of 11 Israelis. As a Jewish athlete, Leibel—now a lawyer in Toronto—was deeply affected by the crisis. Today, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Munich...

Golf is enjoying a post-pandemic boom—socially distanced, outdoors and more accessible than ever before. While this may result in longer tee-time waits for avid golfers like the Menschwarmers, it's good news for Golf Canada CEO Laurence Applebaum, who's on a mission to spotlight the country's beautiful and often under-appreciated courses, both domestically and on the global stage. Applebaum joins...

Israel isn't exactly known for golf. And with just one 18-hole course in the whole country, neither is it a destination for many pro golfers or passionate fans. That may be why it took until 2014 for the country to produce a player who qualified to join an LPGA Tour: Laetitia Beck. Since then, she's competed at the highest levels for her home country: at the Olympics, the Women's British Open, the...

With 80 countries and 10,000 participating athletes, the 21st Maccabiah Game—the third-largest sporting event in the world—will be bigger than ever before. And one country poised to make a splash, as usual, is Canada, which sending a delegation of 600 staff and athletes to the Holy Land. In arguably no sport are the stakes higher than in hockey. The Canadian men's team won gold at the last Maccabi...

Basketball legend Sue Bird rocked the sports world last week by announcing her retirement at the end of the 2022 season. One of the most decorated Jewish athletes of all time, the five-time Olympic gold medalist and four-time WNBA champion spent her entire 21-year career with the Seattle Storm. She's the all-time WNBA leader in assists and games started, and ranks in the top 10 for career three-po...

Howard Megdal first published the The Baseball Talmud: The Definitive Position-by-Position Ranking of Baseball's Chosen Players in 2009. But a lot of Jewish ball players have come and gone since then. So when the Menschwarmers heard Megdal—whose journalism has appeared in The New York Times , Sports Illustrated , FiveThirtyEight and elsewhere—was releasing an updated edition in May 2022, we knew w...

The Survivor is a new film by Barry Levinson about Harry Haft, a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz who was forced to box other inmates to survive. Haft went on to work a brief professional boxing career in Germany and the United States, though it didn't last very long. Gabe and James sit down to discuss what they thought of the movie, where the Hollywood adaptation took some liberties in storytelling a...

Historically, young Jewish athletes have had to choose between embracing a Jewish life and turning pro. But Brad Eisen is hoping to change that. Despite not having a background in baseball, the longtime sports front-officer staffer, formerly of the Los Angeles Clippers and LA Galaxy, is embarking on a new project to showcase Jewish prospects from across North America for Israel's national baseball...

Spring has sprung, which means two things to the Menschwarmers: baseball's opening day and Passover are mere days apart. For the second year in a row, the boys are burning their chametz and settling in for long innings of watching Blue Jays games from (mostly) pandemic-induced isolation, recalling stories of the most iconic type of Hebrew freedom: the freedom of Jews to play really great baseball....

This week is Wrestlemania, the biggest weekend in wrestling. It's as good a time as any to air an interview with acclaimed wrestling journalist David Bixenspan , where he and the boys chat about the long and complicated history of Jews, Jewish stereotypes and antisemitism in wrestling, from Bill Goldberg's reign to Brian Kendrick's unsurfaced claims of Holocaust denial. Plus, Gabe and Jamie update...

Roman Abramovich is one of Russia's most prominent billionaire oligarchs. As the owner of Chelsea F.C. who routinely throws money to combat antisemitism in sports, he has been accused of "sportswashing" his controversial career and close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. But sanctions by the British government in light of the Russian war on Ukraine have thrown the century-old soc...

There weren't a lot of Jews involved with the "Showtime" Los Angeles Lakers of the 1980s. But there was Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and coaches Paul Westhead and Pat Riley, and all these big characters and iconic stories are coming to TV in a new show, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty , debuting March 6, 2022, on HBO Max (Crave for Canadians). Aside from a handful...

Despite the usual fanfare before the games began, hype around the 2022 Winter Olympics died down tremendously during the games themselves and TV ratings have hit historic lows. Maybe it's the inconvenient time zone; maybe audiences are boycotting the Olympics for being held in China, given the attention paid to the Uyghur genocide; maybe the whole spectable is just too close to the delayed Summer...

David Warsofsky has spent over a decade playing pro hockey. He's skated for the Boston Bruins, Pittsburgh Penguins, New Jersey Devils and Colorado Avalanche. Now with ERC Ingolstadt in Germany, he's heading to the Winter Olympics in Beijing on behalf of the American national hockey team this month. We caught up with the half-Jewish, half-Catholic defenceman days before he flew out to China. Plus,...

From Olympic-level sibling snowboarders to several LPGA contenders, 2022 looks packed with Jewish sports stories to keep your eyes on. Gabe and Jamie return for what we're calling the third season of Menschwarmers with a look ahead to Jews competing in tennis, golf, football and the controversially Chinese-hosted Winter Olympics. Credits Menschwarmers is hosted by James Hirsh and Gabe Pulver, and...

For our last episode of the year, we're recapping the biggest Jewish sports moments of the year. From Joc Pederson's streak to Meyers Leonard's slur, Sue Bird's basketball victory to Team Israel's baseball loss, this was how 2021 looked for Jewish sports fans around the world. Credits Menschwarmers is hosted by James Hirsh and Gabe Pulver, and produced and edited by Michael Fraiman. Our intro musi...

From Team Israel's fairy tale run to Sue Bird's unbroken Olympic victories, Jewish athletes have long beaten the odds. To celebrate Hanukkah, the Menschwarmers run through their picks for the greatest Jewish sports streaks and miracles of all time. Credits Menschwarmers is hosted by James Hirsh and Gabe Pulver, and produced and edited by Michael Fraiman. Our intro music is by Coby Lipovitch, and o...

It's an off week for the Menschwarmers, but we have a bonus episode for you all: a full-length interview with Mitch Garber, a Montreal business mogul and philanthropist. Garber brought the Montreal Alouettes back to the CFL and is working with Stephen Bronfman to bring back the Expos, but he joined _ The CJN Daily_ podcast earlier this week to talk about his other investment: the newest NHL team,...

Former pro basketball player Dan Grunfeld spent years confirming this one basic fact: that his father, Ernie Grunfeld, an acclaimed NBA player-turned-executive, is the only son of Holocaust survivors to play in any of the Big Four pro leagues. As far as he can tell, it's true. And that unique situation, in which generational trauma mixed with generational athleticism, fuelled his book, By the Grac...

Who's the greatest Jewish athlete of all time? How would you measure their success: by records held, peaks reached, popularity earned? The longevity of their career? Who deserves to be mentioned in this massive debate? Ask Mark Hebscher, and he'll tell you his answer: Ida Schnall. Hebsy is writing a four-part series for The CJN on why Schnall—whose career spanned sprinting, diving, baseball and Ho...

Peri Goodman is a cheerleader for the Brock University Badgers. She's toured the world as a flyer—that's the one who, yes, flies in the air, thrown up by her teammates—and has navigated the surprisingly intense behind-the-scenes politics of cheerleaders versus gymnasts. She joins to chat about life on a cheer team, cheer's odds at becoming an Olympic sport and her team's trip to compete in Poland....

As a co-host of Menschwarmers , James has interviewed pro athletes, journalists and historians. But the one guy whose job he really wants is Josh Rawitch, the newly minted president of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Rawitch, whose family more than doubled the Jewish population of Cooperstown, NY, joins to talk about how he landed the job and share stories of a few lesser-known Jewish entrants...

Since his humble beginnings in the Midwest wrestling scene in the early 2000s, Scott Colton, a.k.a. Colt Cabana, has grown into a seismic force in the pro wrestling world. After diving into the WWE as Scotty Goldman—a character presented a little antisemitically by the organization—a he made a name for himself as a world heavyweight champion in numerous global competitions and recently signed with...