August 11, 2008

You probably heard about it yesterday, or got a few text messages when it was televised just before midnight, or read about it this morning, but if you’re still in the dark about the amazing performance by the U.S. men’s swimming 4×100 relay, click here. I’m not a swimmer—little more than a doggie paddler—but I was mesmerized by how those guys blew through the water and “smashed” the favored, and incredibly cocky, French.

The Olympics thus far have been full of good performances (and at least

Jewish winners; Jason Lezak made three). But history is the best measure of one’s accomplishments at the games, and in this case the former Olympian worth talking about is Sam Balter.

An All-American at UCLA in 1929, Balter was 26—of prime basketball age—when the United States sent its best athletes to Berlin for the Nazi Olympics. That year was 1936, and the Olympics were best remembered for the heroics of Jesse Owens, an African America who won four medals in Hitler’s stadium. “On the sacred soil of the Fatherland, the master athlete humiliated the master race,” ESPN later wrote. But Balter too did his part in shaming the man who shamed humanity.

Balter was a Jew, the only Jew on the men’s basketball team. Yes, a Jew who, like Jordan Farmar, had skills on the hardwood and, in 1936, helped the United States win the first gold medal in the history of Olympic basketball.

NPR’s Carrie Kahn, with access to recordings her grandfather made before his death in 1998, reflected on Balter’s legacy last week in a moving personal essay. She revealed that, despite what she grew up believing, her Patoo, as she called him, agonized for months over whether to even play in the Nazi Olympics.

In July of 1936, he boarded the ocean liner Manhattan and left New York harbor for Berlin.

It wasn’t long, Patoo says, before he worried he had made a mistake. Despite the promise that Hitler wouldn’t use the games for his Nazi cause, propaganda brochures were handed out daily at the Olympic village, and anti-Semitic magazines were sold on most street corners.

“The magazine has caricatures of hooked-nosed people, and it lays the blame for everything on the Jews,” my grandfather says. He said he got a sense of how bad the situation had become, “but not obviously as bad as it got later on.”

During the games, Patoo said he was thrilled to get the chance to meet James Naismith, who invented basketball in 1891. Naismith proudly watched his sport’s debut in the ‘36 Olympics. But the Germans didn’t seem to grasp the game and scheduled all the basketball competitions on outdoor dirt courts.

The final between U.S. and Canada was played during a torrential rainstorm.

“If you dribbled, it was a splash and it floated away,” recalls Patoo. By halftime, the score was only 15 to 4.

“These two teams supposedly consisting of the best in the world, and each scored only four points in the second half.”

The final score was 19 to 8.

What Patoo leaves out, but later tells my mom for the first time, is that he didn’t play in that final game. The U.S. team actually consisted of two seven-man squads, and they alternated games.

“It wasn’t our turn. It was the turn of the other group,” he haltingly admits. “We didn’t get medals until much later. Oh, we had a lot of beefs by the end of the games.”

My mom cuts in, “It was quite an inauspicious ending.”

That’s an understatement. Not only did Patoo not march before Hitler, as I had always imagined. He actually got his gold medal — not on a podium in front of the world — but out of his mailbox in Los Angeles.

The rest of her essay can be read and listened to here.

Chef, “South Park’s” culinary sage and one of its few voices of reason, left the show two years ago over the airing of an episode criticizing Tom Cruise and Scientology. “Trapped in the Closet,” a portion of which is shown below, was a bit of genius, but the voice of Chef, the legendary funk and soul singer-songwriter Isaac Hayes, was a real-life Scientologist, and he didn’t the jokes too funny. He was subsequently killed off in this episode.

Still, Hayes held a special place in the heart of all “South Park” fans, not to mention anyone with an ear for music, what with his “Hot Buttered Soul” and his “Chocolate Salty Balls.” (It’s difficult to remember which one of those titles were satirical.) And I found myself surprisingly saddened last night when I walked into my walked past an image of Hayes, and Chef, on the local news yesterday evening. He had died while exercising in his home. Hayes was 65.

Have you heard? John McCain is going to church again.

Yep, his campaign wants you—conservative Christian voter—to know that he’s really a religious man. They know he’s uncomfortable talking about God, that he’s more fluent in the language of the non-God-fearing crowd, that he’s given aging Christian right leaders the heebie jeebies. And the best way to solve these campaign ills, they assume, is to publicly plop his tochis in a church pew.

And you wonder why I am tired of the exploitation of religion for political purposes?

Bring the Pain McCain, though, likely is just as frustrated by the marriage. Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone’s politics writer, observed McCain one Sunday at North Phoenix Baptist Church for an article about the Republican nominee’s presidential dilemma.

As I’ve mentioned before, Taibbi is not the most astute of conservative Christian observers, mainly, I suspect, because he allows his perception to be overly clouded by his deep disdain for their politics. But his article offers some good insights into why McCain is struggling so seriously in his attempts to court the evangelical voters that, much more than four years ago, appear willing to swing for the Democratic nominee, Barack Obama.

Just a warning: You’ve got to wade through some stomach-wrenching turns of phrase. I’ve posted a (fairly) clean snippet after the jump:

Before it was junked

After the jump is the opening passage of Sherry Jones’ “The Jewel of Medina,” a fictional biography of the Prophet Muhammad’s young wife, Aisha. The racy book was set to be published tomorrow, but in May Random House halted production, afraid “Jewel” would be the re-incarnation of “The Satanic Verses” and Jones would receive a fatwa like Salman Rushdie did.

Before you read the excerpt, here’s a rundown of how Jones’ book got run out of Random House:

This time, the instigator of the trouble wasn’t a radical Muslim cleric, but an American academic. In April, looking for endorsements, Random House sent galleys to writers and scholars, including Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of Islamic history at the University of Texas in Austin. Ms. Jones put her on the list because she read Ms. Spellberg’s book, “Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of ‘A’isha Bint Abi Bakr.”

But Ms. Spellberg wasn’t a fan of Ms. Jones’s book. On April 30, Shahed Amanullah, a guest lecturer in Ms. Spellberg’s classes and the editor of a popular Muslim Web site, got a frantic call from her. “She was upset,” Mr. Amanullah recalls. He says Ms. Spellberg told him the novel “made fun of Muslims and their history,” and asked him to warn Muslims.

In an interview, Ms. Spellberg told me the novel is a “very ugly, stupid piece of work.” The novel, for example, includes a scene on the night when Muhammad consummated his marriage with Aisha: “the pain of consummation soon melted away. Muhammad was so gentle. I hardly felt the scorpion’s sting. To be in his arms, skin to skin, was the bliss I had longed for all my life.” Says Ms. Spellberg: “I walked through a metal detector to see ‘Last Temptation of Christ,’” the controversial 1980s film adaptation of a novel that depicted a relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. “I don’t have a problem with historical fiction. I do have a problem with the deliberate misinterpretation of history. You can’t play with a sacred history and turn it into soft core pornography.”

After he got the call from Ms. Spellberg, Mr. Amanullah dashed off an email to a listserv of Middle East and Islamic studies graduate students, acknowledging he didn’t “know anything about it [the book],” but telling them, “Just got a frantic call from a professor who got an advance copy of the forthcoming novel, ‘Jewel of Medina’—she said she found it incredibly offensive.” He added a write-up about the book from the Publishers Marketplace, an industry publication.

The next day, a blogger known as Shahid Pradhan posted Mr. Amanullah’s email on a Web site for Shiite Muslims—“Hussaini Youth”—under a headline, “upcoming book, ‘Jewel of Medina’: A new attempt to slander the Prophet of Islam.” Two hours and 28 minutes after that, another person by the name of Ali Hemani proposed a seven-point strategy to ensure “the writer withdraws this book from the stores and apologise all the muslims across the world.”

Meanwhile back in New York City, Jane Garrett, an editor at Random House’s Knopf imprint, dispatched an email on May 1 to Knopf executives, telling them she got a phone call the evening before from Ms. Spellberg (who happens to be under contract with Knopf to write “Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an.”)

“She thinks there is a very real possibility of major danger for the building and staff and widespread violence,” Ms. Garrett wrote. “Denise says it is ‘a declaration of war . . . explosive stuff . . . a national security issue.’ Thinks it will be far more controversial than the satanic verses and the Danish cartoons. Does not know if the author and Ballantine folks are clueless or calculating, but thinks the book should be withdrawn ASAP.” (“The Jewel of Medina” was to be published by Random House’s Ballantine Books.) That day, the email spread like wildfire through Random House, which also received a letter from Ms. Spellberg and her attorney, saying she would sue the publisher if her name was associated with the novel. On May 2, a Ballantine editor told Ms. Jones’s agent the company decided to possibly postpone publication of the book.

On a May 21 conference call, Random House executive Elizabeth McGuire told the author and her agent that the publishing house had decided to indefinitely postpone publication of the novel for “fear of a possible terrorist threat from extremist Muslims” and concern for “the safety and security of the Random House building and employees.”

Though Spellberg denies being the instigator, this reads uncannily like the plot for “South Park’s” two-part “Cartoon Wars.” Now that you’ve got that primer, click through to read some of Jones’ work: