Forget about Deflategate, there’s a bigger Tom Brady mystery brewing. Mark Leibovich profiled the New England Patriots quarterback in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine—an excellent read, with plenty of gems for those of us more interested in Brady’s Uggs (he sports a brand new pair during one interview!) than Sunday’s Super Bowl—and one brief aside jumped out at us.
Leibovich is at Brady and Gisele Bündchen’s new Brookline, Mass. mansion (a “barnlike guesthouse” is being built for the supermodel’s photo shoots), when he spies something unusual: a menorah.
He marched me back into the house, through the kitchen and past a shelf that displayed a large glass menorah. “We’re not Jewish,” Brady said when I asked him about this. “But I think we’re into everything. . . . I don’t know what I believe. I think there’s a belief system, I’m just not sure what it is.”
Maybe it was a gift from Brady’s brother-in-law Kevin Youkilis, the Jewish retired Red Sox first baseman who married his sister Julie in 2012. Maybe Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who, along with his late wife Myra, is known for his Jewish philanthropy, sent it over as a housewarming present (Kraft lives around the corner, and according to Leibovich encouraged his “fifth son” to move to the neighborhood). Maybe Gisele just loves Hanukkah.
As a wise quarterback once said, I don’t know what I believe.
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Stephanie Butnick is chief strategy officer of Tablet Magazine, co-founder of Tablet Studios, and a host of the Unorthodox podcast.
