• Is there perhaps a little more chatter than usual over the potential for an Israeli military strike on Iranian nuclear weapons facilities? [ThinkProgress/LobeLog]

• There is certainly fear that Iran could develop the bomb and then decide not to declare it but rather go to school on Israel’s putt and adopt “nuclear ambiguity,” which would be bitter irony indeed. [JPost]

• Darren Aronofsky is making a $150 million movie about Noah’s Ark. [i09]

• Contributing editor David Rakoff won the prestigious 2011 Thurber Prize for American Humor. Mazel tov! [Publishers Weekly]

• Gal Beckerman on Natan Sharansky, post-politics. [TNR]

To atone for the Hank Williams, Jr., fiasco, ESPN should open Monday Night Football with the most Jewish pop act I could immediately think of: Adam Levine and The Lonely Island.

Or, you know, the Beastie Boys.

• “Now is the time to deal with these issues,” said President Obama at a press conference today about the national debt. “If not now, when?” A Joseph Telushkin fan, this guy! [The Caucus]

• Did Glenn Beck, testifying before the Knesset, make chit-chat with a member of a State Department-ordained terrorist group? Looks that way. [+972]

• Nextbook Press author Jonathan D. Sarna uses the story of Manischewitz, now run by Sephardim, as a microcosm for the increasing diversity of the American Jewish community. [Forward]

• Rep. Anthony Weiner and Hillary Clinton adviser Huma Abedin retreated to Miami to celebrate their anniversary. And why not? [Page Six]

• Mila Kunis is beautiful, Jewish, talented, and also awesome: She is attending a Marine Corps. Ball in North Carolina with a Marine who asked her out from Afghanistan. [CBS News]

Sam Fuld will be doing color commentary on ESPN for tonight’s Home Run Derby. I’ll be watching. And the entire time, I’ll be thinking of this:

The National Basketball Association playoffs—which, if you haven’t been following, are the best they have been in years—are Van Gundy’s most prominent annual moment. The former New York Knicks coach turned incandescently yappy ABC/ESPN broadcaster can be heard and seen in prime-time throughout the season and two to three times per week during the playoffs, which run from mid-April to as late as mid-June. Hubie Brown, with his boundless enthusiasm and warm first-person plural, is the dean of hoops color commentary. Charles Barkley’s smart-dumb/dumb-smart act rules the studio crews. But after them, only Van Gundy (and maybe relative newcomer Chris Webber) pulls off the combination of intelligence, humor, and irony expected of the league’s on-air personalities.

Almost all Jewish basketball fans (and plenty of non-Jewish ones) have, at one time or another, sought to confirm their intuitions about Van Gundy, who is diminutive and bald; talks too much and always sounds slightly annoyed at himself for doing so; and, of course, has that vague yet unmistakably European surname. The strong prima facie case for Van Gundy’s Jewishness is only enhanced by his connection to the Knicks, a franchise with strong Jewish overtones. Both Jews and Knicks fans tend to be eager for anything resembling a Jewish presence in Madison Square Garden (during his time as a Knick, current Golden State Warriors forward David Lee—not a Jew—was subject to similar whisperings).

Van Gundy took over as the team’s coach in 1996 after spending six seasons under his mentor, the great Pat Riley, as well as another half-season under Don Nelson. With his rumpled jacket, furrowed brow, and nervous intensity, Van Gundy could not have been further from the hair-gelled, Italian-besuited, and aristocratic Riley. Riley drank from the fountain of youth; Van Gundy was never without a Diet Coke, and seemed to age with every press conference without ever assuming a shred of gravitas. He was an underdog who smirked at having to prove he belonged, too smart for his own good, and yet determined to drive himself crazy with a slow, punishing, inherently frustrating brand of basketball. The Knicks made the playoffs every year he was coach; in the strike-shortened 1999 season, they entered the postseason as the Eastern Conference eighth seed and made it all the way to the Finals—only the second Knicks appearance in the championship series since they won it all in 1973, and exactly as many Finals appearances as Riley accomplished with the franchise. In 2001, Van Gundy stepped down because of exhaustion, a slippery bit of sports euphemism that, in his case, seemed unusually literal.

Van Gundy joined TNT’s broadcasting team, where early attempts to go stern soon gave way to gabby humor. Then came a coaching relapse, as he took the Houston Rockets to the playoffs from 2003 through 2007. Then, he returned to the booth, at which point he morphed into a caricature of himself, dispensing coach wisdom like an absent-minded professor, railing against pet peeves and specks of enemies, and replacing his trademark scowl with an audible grin. A few years on, he has entered the realm of shtick, even camp—further exacerbating his case of mistaken Semitic identity.

I wish there were a more elegant way of putting this, but I feel I have to sadly announce: Jeff Van Gundy is not a Jew. He appears on none of the Internet’s copious directories of Jewish athletic professionals. His Wikipedia page makes no mention of his religious background. On Answers.com, the question lingers—itself unthinkable for a genuine Jewish sports figure, given the near-obsessive interest in recognizing and cataloguing them. “Van Gundy,” when you think about it, is pretty obviously Dutch, and his family’s Hudson Valley roots hammer this one home. The Website “Jew or Not Jew” cites “various Catholic and Jesuit institutions” in his past. (I learned that ESPN confirmed that Van Gundy is not Jewish, and that he did not wish to offer any further comment on the matter.)

More than any other case, Van Gundy illustrates that, in looking for a Basketball Jew—in looking for any Jew—we are really looking for what we already think we know. We hear hoofbeats and look for a horse, forgetting that horses can approach quietly, and forgetting, also, the existence of zebras.

***

This past summer, superstar Knicks forward Amar’e Stoudemire sent ripples through the community by proclaiming himself Jewish and traveling to Israel to get in touch with his roots. It was almost too easy: the Knicks’ newly minted superstar experiencing de facto conversion months after signing. Stoudemire, a sculpted, 6-foot-10-inch tall African-American, didn’t exactly register as Jewish; much early discussion, which in retrospect took the entire thing way too seriously, wondered exactly which brand of Judaism, or perhaps just how crazy a Black Hebrew sect, Stoudemire might have some vague family tie to. At the end of the day—after Stoudemire popped up on Israeli television wearing a gigantic yarmulke, but before he retreated to mushy platitudes about “original culture” and outlandishly vowed to honor Shabbat despite his chosen occupation—the conversation was exciting for basketball-loving Jews. As long as his, and our, delusion was plausible, this was the next best thing to a certified Jewish All-Star. Given the fraught relationship between blacks and Jews, maybe this story could have a happy, legitimate ending for everyone.

Stoudemire meant well and genuinely showed interest in Judaism—his reputation for depth helped amplify the gesture. However briefly and farcically, we were momentarily grateful, and if we were bamboozled, we have no one to blame but ourselves. Predictably, though, Amar’e the Jew proved to be little more than a gusty meme, the equivalent of a summer jam that remains tethered to those months.

By contrast, nobody could question the literal Jewishness of Sacramento Kings forward Omri Casspi. The first Israeli to play in the NBA, Casspi is a point of pride for anyone who ever attended Hebrew School or took a summer trip to the Holy Land.

At the same time, though, Casspi is unmistakably Israeli. While Diaspora Jews and Israelis have more in common with each other than do, ahem, Diaspora Jews and Stoudemire, that Casspi is a sabra is a crucial distinction that has too frequently been glossed over. As a giant, jump-shooting Magen David, Casspi is of immeasurable importance; that his play is lithe, athletic, and doesn’t lend itself well to tropes of identity is probably for the best. However, it also separates him from his American audience, many of whom have spent time among Israelis and found Israelis quite different from themselves. This isn’t a question of Jewish masculinity or some benighted idea that Jews need play Jew-y. But Casspi’s otherness should not be ignored. Israelis aren’t Americans.

Meanwhile, since 2006, one full-fledged American Jew—not a high-profile trick question like Stoudemire or a whirlpool like Casspi—has played in the NBA: New Jersey Nets guard Jordan Farmar. Born of a black father and a Jewish mother and raised by an Israeli stepfather, Farmar is indisputably one of us. And yet Farmar is consistently overlooked, if not scorned, even though he got real playing time on two championship Los Angeles Lakers teams—hardly a status that kept him out of the spotlight. Maybe if he now played for the Knicks, not the Newark Nets, or had Stoudemire’s talent, things would be different. Then again, the combination of Farmar’s skin color (he looks more black than Jewish) and his undeniable authenticity might be exactly the kind of needling that Jewish NBA fans don’t want out of icons.

Our humoring of Stoudemire, our safe distance from Casspi, and our Farmar-blocking eye-patch are all related to our fascination with Jeff Van Gundy. Because Van Gundy, if only by accident, fits the bill. That’s why the bond sticks; that’s why we can’t help but claim him.

***

In recent years, the Jeff Van Gundy Question was further complicated by the emergence of his younger brother, Stan, as a major figure in his own right. Like Jeff, Stan got his start as an assistant under Riley and later succeeded his mentor, in this case as head coach of the Miami Heat. Since 2007, Stan Van Gundy has helmed the Orlando Magic, which he took, in a spot of tremendous coaching, to the 2009 Finals. Stout, mustached, swarthy, Stan bears an undeniable resemblance to the Jewish porn star Ron Jeremy. (What I mean, you comedians, is that their faces look alike.)

Stan magnifies many of his brother’s trademarks. He talks with his hands even more than his brother did; evolved (de-volved?) his brother’s ill-fitting-suit look toward an even more distinctive “style” of wearing polo shirts and mock turtlenecks under blazers, like some third-rate ’70s TV detective; and mouths off to reporters with at least as much of Jeff’s righteous indignation and none of his sly humor. (Stan would never get work as a broadcaster.) Where Jeff frequently bewildered his players, Stan seems on occasion to positively embarrass them.

Stan also is a more sophisticated coach than his older brother and has been at least as successful. Certainly, he has a more fully realized philosophy of coaching and a more ample bag of strategic tricks. This should, of course, have aided the misguided case for Stan Van Gundy’s Jewishness, given actual Jews’ distinguished history of basketball coaching. Yet, somehow, Stan’s unmitigated bellowing and lack of contradictions—and, yes, his appearance—are exactly why Jeff, and not he, has been, well, chosen as an accidental icon. When I asked Twitter about the Jewishness of the Van Gundys, Jeff was much-cited. More than a few respondents, however, admitted that they always read Stan as Italian. Well, of course.

I spotted Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban in the crowded hall almost two hours before the first of two panels he was participating in was scheduled to begin. He had no apparent handlers, but the crowd at the fifth annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference knew to make way for him and his shock of black hair. He is a few inches north of six feet, but what you most notice about his physical appearance are his biceps, which bulged from the sleeves of an inexpensive-looking gray T-shirt that bore the words, “Talk Nerdy To Me.”

The Sloan conference—its host is MIT’s Sloan School of Management—is the foremost gathering for sports professionals, journalists, and fans interested in the most cutting-edge ways of viewing and analyzing sports. Cuban, who made a fortune in the high-tech boom of the 1990s and then bought the majority share of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team in 2000 for nearly $300 million, is the poster boy for the sports-geek culture that found its nirvana on March 4 and 5 at the Boston Convention Center, a metallic, antiseptic hulk in an ugly, picked-over section of downtown Boston. New York Giants defensive lineman Justin Tuck and the Olympic gold medalist speed-skater Apolo Anton Ohno were there. Malcolm Gladwell, ESPN’s Bill Simmons, and basketball coach turned television commentator Jeff Van Gundy were all there. Indianapolis Colts coach Jim Caldwell—the guy who gets to tell Peyton Manning what to do—was there, as was Daryl Morey, the high-profile general manager of basketball’s Houston Rockets—in fact he was the co-chair of the conference.

But no one attracted more attention than Cuban, who gives the impression that he was motivated to buy a sports team by roughly the same sentiment that moved Charles Foster Kane to purchase the New York Inquirer: “I think it would be fun to run a newspaper.” After Cuban once remarked that the NBA’s head of officiating “wouldn’t be able to manage a Dairy Queen,” he later expressed regret for the damage his comment caused the ice-cream chain and volunteered to work at one for a day—the sort of gracious, clever stunt you could see yourself pulling if you, too, ruled the world.

To the fanboys who paid $400 (or maybe the $100 student rate) to attend the conference, Cuban is plausibly one of them.

To those who dream of future front-office success in sports, Cuban is the apotheosis: owner of a perennial contender. The Mavericks have won more than 50 games (of 82) in each of the 11 full seasons Cuban has been the team’s majority owner, and in each one of those seasons they’ve been one of the eight teams (of 15) to qualify for the playoffs in their conference. (It’s a streak only the San Antonio Spurs, the Mavs’ bitter rivals, can match.) This year, the Mavericks went 57-25, good for the Western Conference’s third seed, and are currently up three games to two in their first round playoff series, against the Portland Trail Blazers.

To undergraduate business majors and slightly older business students—in their gray suits and with their consultants’ vibe—Cuban is the guy who arrived in Dallas in the ’80s and saw that while the J.R. Ewings had cornered the oil market, there was money to be made in the burgeoning technology business. He proceeded to make this money and then buy the Mavs, a relatively young organization playing basketball in a football town, and remake them into the sixth most-valuable franchise in the NBA.

To the stat geeks—the conference’s original fan base, who these days toil less frequently in basements and more in professional front offices—Cuban is an acknowledged patron and a kindred spirit, someone who not only perceives their utility but would be one of them if he wasn’t instead spending his time making much more money than they do and appearing on Entourage. “Cuban’s special,” Aaron Schatz, arguably football’s top outside statistician and a difficult man to impress, said appreciatively. “I think most owners who meddle in their teams are very old-school. Cuban meddles in a teach-me-something-I-don’t-know way.” Nate Silver, a former baseball analyst, agreed: “There are owners who are still old-boys culture, but he’s not a part of that.”

And of course there were the Jews.

Everyone at the conference was Jewish—and by “everyone” I mean that while Jews comprise 2 percent of the American population roughly every third person at the conference was Jewish. I met some kids from the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective, a group of terrifyingly bright 20-year-olds, and quickly learned, to my lack of shock, that most of them were Jews. The business majors and the MBAers were Jews; one conference organizer, a Sloan student with a distinctively Irish name told me how glad he was I was writing this story, because clearly everyone there, himself included, was Jewish. The journalists covering the conference were Jews. And Cuban—his family name was Chopininski—is Jewish, too. This matters.

***

Mark Cuban.
Grazier Photography

Roughly a decade ago, the notion that there was a cutting-edge way to view and analyze sports materialized in the public consciousness when Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball sold half a gazillion copies and spawned even more conversations at bars, stadiums, gyms, classrooms, and every other place American men congregate. Moneyball described how Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane used insights gleaned from sabermetrics—the advanced statistical study of baseball—to take the meagerly financed A’s to three consecutive postseasons. (But he never made it to the World Series: “My shit doesn’t work in the playoffs,” Beane famously admitted, an instant entry into the quotes-we’d-need-to-invent-if-they-didn’t-exist Hall of Fame right beside “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”)

Advanced analytics has since made its way to the other professional sports, so that now even the casual fan is aware that an at-bat that results in a walk is nearly as valuable as an at-bat that results in a single and that a basketball player can be a major asset to his team even if his traditional numbers, such as scoring, are unimpressive. “For a long time, it was pretty niche,” Sports Illustrated’s Joe Posnanski, perhaps the foremost practitioner of sabermetrics in journalism, told me. “But now, even people who would claim not to be interested in the numbers would use things like OPS”—that’s on-base percentage plus slugging percentage—“which may be basic in the advanced world but is much, much more sophisticated than batting average, RBIs, and home runs.”

The stats craze was in part an inevitable iteration of the Internet’s democratization of knowledge. “We live in an environment now where there’s a lot of open data, which makes people less tolerant of letting people be gatekeepers,” argues Silver, who at Baseball Prospectus was a top sabermetrician and has since abandoned baseball metrics in favor of predicting elections for the New York Times. “It’s not that radical, really, right? But in some ways it’s been very encouraging—if you believe in mass knowledge, you definitely have seen progress.”

More to the point, the democratization of knowledge has redefined both the professionals and the fans by bringing them closer together—and, in the person of Mark Cuban, arguably making them one and the same. “There’s a geekification going on of sports,” Malcolm Gladwell told me a couple of weeks before the conference, where he would moderate the opening panel discussion. “In the beginning, the fan was a relatively passive figure. You have all of these things that are turning the fan into an actor—fantasy sports, all this statistical stuff.” Being a sports fan today entails not only rooting for your team but affirmatively conceiving what your team could be doing better; using ESPN’s trade machine to make hypothetical trades allowed by each team’s salary cap situation and each player’s contract; and fundamentally understanding how the sport really operates in a way that even hardcore fans of a quarter-century ago could not have imagined.

Continue reading: the world’s biggest Mavs fan, Football Outsiders, and “additional ways to analyze things.” Or view as a single page.

One wants to see the hand of Adonai Himself in the uncanny timing whereby the High Holidays always fall smack in the middle of the pennant race and postseason, tempting the talented faithful. Anyway, given that the Sox are currently a mere 6.5 games behind the Yankees, we’d guess most New Yorkers are hoping Youkilis has so many sins that he has no choice but to Kol Nidre the night away.

An Unholy Move by ESPN [New York Post]
Green, Koufax, and Greenberg—Same Dilemma, Different Decisions [ESPN Classic]
Previously: Look, Jews in Baseball!
Yankees Trade For a Jew