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Ofer Idels, "Embodying the Revolution: The Hebrew Experience and the Globalization of Modern Sports in Interwar Palestine" (Rutgers UP, 2025)
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Ofer Idels
Ugh.
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Ofer Idels
Hey, still got my hoodie?
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Welcome to the New Books Network
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Rabbi Mark Katz
hi and welcome to the New Books Network podcast. I'm your host Rabbi Mark Katz and I'm here today with Ofer Idels, author of the book Embodying the the Hebrew Experience and the Globalization of Modern Sports in Interwar Palestine. So Ofer, normally we let our guests introduce themselves so I'll give you a chance to tell our readers a little bit about who you are and why you were attracted to the topic.
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Ofer Idels
Thank you. Hello Mark. First of all, glad to be here. So I was born and raised in Israel and did my entire academic route from BA to PhD at Tel Aviv University at the History department, which is. Well now that I'm no longer there I can appreciate like how how actually good and initiative, initiative and world basically cutting edge. It was and still is but definitely in the time when I was there as a student. So especially when I was there I was starting to working with a Professor Buzz Neumann work over there. He wrote a few books about German History, but also a very influential book in the history of Zionism. It was also translated to English, I think. Land in Desire, that's the English title, which also very much influential my own work and the project we are going to discuss today. But yes, that's pretty much my short cv.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
And so tell us a little bit about how you got interested in talking about specifically sports in interwar Palestine.
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Ofer Idels
A very much long. There is like a long background here which probably won't be too necessary about like writing a specific seminar during my masters and stuff like that. But for the most part I found it very interesting because there is stuff that are not. There is some kind of a contradiction. Well, because when you think about Zionism or at least the cliches of Zionism, you usually think about the new Jew, this strong, healthy, or the opposite of the Diaspora Jew and so forth. Yeah, very known stuff. But so supposedly sports or the athletes are.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
Are
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Ofer Idels
supposed to. To fill right into this narrative of a strong healthy Jew. But as many Israelis will tell you, Israeli sports culture or its relation to its athletes, it's very much different or we call particular than other places. And it's also. And even today living in Calgary, in Canada, you can feel like there's a very different sports culture than in Israel. Also before Canada, I lived in Germany for a few years and it's also true there. So there is a very particular Israeli sport in which the athletes are not really the symbols of the new Jew. So this was basically I was curious about this question, trying to understand why. Why society that you can say pretty much until today is very much devoted to muscular Judaism to create this strong healthy Jew doesn't really kind of marginalize sports or treat it differently. Definitely in historical terms, you know, there's not like if you go to the 20s, 30s, 40s, there's a lot of people from Zionism kind of a national heroes or national figures, but there's not really an athlete. So this was kind of like the point of curiosity which drove me to this project.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
So before we really get into sports in the interwar period, I wonder if you can talk about that period in general, what is going on in Israel in the war, in the relationship between Israel and the world between the period between World War I and World War II.
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Ofer Idels
Yeah. So as you said, the, the project, it's project timeline is mostly the interwar period, which I chose it because it's in terms of the history of sports. It's the period where sports become a global phenomenon. There is many books about it, mostly in the interwar period mostly even you can say in the 30s that sports started to become this global phenomenon that we know and most of us love today. And so I try to take this, I can call global time frame and check what happened in the Yeshua. But also it's a time from a local perspective where, you know, it's just after the Balfour Declaration where the Jewish where Zionism and their place in Palestine is becoming much more official or semi official. But they get recognition from the British Empire, the British or the Mandate. Changes the relationship of the status of Zionism or Jews to this land. And of course during this time we also have growing immigration waves, what you call the third aliyah, the fourth aliyah and then the fifth aliyah. Very close to the rise of Nazism, which substantially grows the Jewish population in Palestine, in Mandatory Palestine and make it a much more bigger or more influential center of Jewish relationship. Basically almost prepare itself to World War II or the 1948.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
So you begin the book, your first chapter talks about the turn to sports and the complicated relationship that Jews at that period have to sports. And you draw this really fascinating distinction between sports and gymnastics. And I'm wondering for our readers if you can unpack that distinction and talk about why it is that Jews had a very distinctly different relationship between sports and gymnastics. Gymnastics being something that defined what you called before the new Jew, the strong, strapping, tanned, outdoorsy type in a different way than sports would have.
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Ofer Idels
So yes, as I just said, the interwar period was considered kind of like the rise of global sports. But this rise never came in a vacuum. It came, it also was replacing something else which we can call the gymnastics. So basically since the 19th century there's two modern approaches to physical culture. One is modern sport, which we know and know today. The other one which is less, less known, but very much for sports historian. It's kind of like the basic is gymnastics. So while modern sports is based on competitive business and specific rules and stuff like that, and it's very much based in the British Empire and North America as its main, vocal, main, main focal points in Central Europe, mostly Germany, they're mostly focused on gymnastics which is include most of the drills and equipment we know for like the Olympic sports of gymnastics that will grab that we'll watch once, once in a few years in when there's Olympics on or there's the world championship or whatever you're interested. But it's very much a German thing that much more connected to nationality, very much more connected to just becoming a healthy, not competitive and not. So it's two different approaches to how do we develop the modern body, which in many ways are juxtaposed as well. Okay.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
Because
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Ofer Idels
advocates of gymnastics will tell you that doing sport with its competitiveness, it's radical, it's unhealthy both to the mind and to the body. So as we know, Zionism was developed at Central Europe mostly, or Eastern Europe, where gymnastics was much more popular and much more dominant than modern sports. And the main emphasis of this is of course, Max Nordau. When he thinks about masculine Judaism, he thinks that it almost in line with doing gymnastics, gymnastics is the way from which we, Jew, Zionist, will become muscular Judaism again. Because that's what he knows. That's like the, the atmosphere over there. Yeah. And so that's also how the, A few years later in. Still in the Ottoman period, this is the base in which Maccabi, the Maccabi movement in Ottoman Palestine is also established up front as a, as a gymnastic movement. So they see Zionism is very much intertwine with gymnastics in a way.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
What you're saying, as I was reading your book, because when I think of gymnastics, I do think about competitions because I watched the Olympics and it's very much a competition. But it kind of felt to me like gymnastics in the interwar period is maybe what like CrossFit is nowadays.
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Ofer Idels
CrossFit, it's, it's, you know, there are
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Rabbi Mark Katz
competitions, but it's really about the individual person getting fitter. It's about like changing your body. It's like that's the purpose of CrossFit, as opposed to like going out and
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Ofer Idels
playing soccer, I think the most. It's hard for us to, to really grasp it because in our entire mind today in like late capitalism, it's all about like, you know, competitions. We're doing competition. Even when, when we're doing like yoga, we're always a competition with ourselves. You know, it's like, it's very hard for us to imagine that there is like a physical. We're doing physical culture, which. It's just about enjoying it. Okay. It's about, but also in a very much, very national. About a national way in which, you know, when, when I'm developing my body, I'm also developing what we call the national body. So it's. I would say if we try to compare it to some, to something today, it's like going to the gym. Okay. That might be like the, the most. Yeah. But the gym is like mostly males. Okay. And they have like a flag and we're like, we're all going to go join the army later. Okay. It's like very something else. But if you just like to just maybe as a quick anecdote, like. Because we also know, most of us know gymnastics today and is, is its formation as a sport. But the fact that there is like, you know, it's very much hard to follow the score in gymnastics instead of like other sport. It's because it was changed almost unnaturally to become like. Because it's, it's. It. It wasn't supposed to be a sport when they develop all of the, the pommel horse and all of those. So when they tend to develop into a sport, it becomes some kind of like, mechanical. It's very much not very intuitive to understand. So that's just a quick anecdote, but perhaps. Yeah. So the point is that it's two different approaches. If you're a gymnastic advocate, you're thinking about sport as something dangerous, unhealthy, that's like really not what you wanted you want for your nation or for yourself. But time changes. The interwar years come, sports become popular, gymnastics become kind of like anachronistic or something that changes back to school to become like physical education and something like much less excited, exciting perhaps. And so things changes. But because all of the leaders of sports in, in the SHU were coming from gymnastics, they saw it as kind of a rapture, as kind of a shift that we're not doing anything. That is, when we're doing sports, it's kind of like, okay, we have to do it because we need to sell tickets. That's what the people want from us, perhaps, but we're not contributed to the national designism as we wanted to.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
Yeah. And apropos of that, in your next chapter, you end up talking about the way language around sports is used and what that teaches. So I have two questions about that chapter. The first is, I'm curious if you can unpack the specific words that are used. You do this great job in your book of kind of talking about when Hebrew decides to take loan words for sports terms and when they make up their own words and how that shows, you know, a sense of, let's call it Israel ness or Zionist connection to sports. And I'm wondering if you can say a word about that for our readers.
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Ofer Idels
Yeah. So basically the first chapter we just discussed, it's about setting up the rapture between Zionism and sports and to do later chapters about describing this rapture or this tension. And really the second chapter is about language. It's about like how The Hebrew language, again, not. Which is still very young, definitely as a daily life language, as a language we talk and use to describe your life and yourself is still not very obvious at the time. It's still something that people not take for granted. And so the chapter shows that they're really thinking about how we describe this sports phenomenon, which is again, new for itself in the interwar period. For most people, it's the first time they're encountering a soccer match, a boxing match. It's the first time they have to think about it. You know, we have. In our. In our lifetime, we have many cultural phenomenon. We meet on the first time and we'll have to. And it's mostly leads to some kind of a cultural discussion. Do we want it? How do we want it? You know, social media, is it good or it's bad? It's obvious that we cannot ignore it, but we can have a discussion about what we want. So basically, sports in the interwar period, it's that it's a new phenomenon that is everywhere, but we still have a discussion about it because it's new. So the chapter follows many journalists, Hebrew journalists and mostly, and see how they can describe this phenomenon, how they can describe the competition. So the first thing you can see it's. They're using the word competition in Ibrah Takhaut. They don't use like a match or game, much less. It's. It's very specific that we're doing sport, we're doing tahot, we're doing a competition. But we all can also see they're very, very anxious or afraid even, or trying to avoid describing the competition, the competition moment in an exciting term. They're much more trying to keep it, trying to frame it, that it won't create too much of an excitement. Something that it's like that they see as something that is dangerous, perhaps, or opposed to what they think is supposed to be the people or Zionist wish go.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
And then you move to talk about the actual articles after you talk about the words themselves. And I'm curious if you can say a word or two about that. I found it fascinating the way that you unpacked the. Let's call it like if there was an article about a sports game, where was the detail? And you compared your subjects to, let's say, an American article about boxing and where the word count, I guess, lay whether they were talking about profiling the athlete, the lead up, or whether or not they were talking about the fight in an exciting way. And I'm wondering if you can unpack that a little bit.
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Ofer Idels
Yeah. So I was. It's. So I. I compared a few like description from the like. How do you describe in Hebrew the sporting moment? This he like this exciting moment that like I know for example two boxer arrive to the rings and do their stuff. And so I compare it to a few boxing matches that were in the interwar period. Boxing is like perhaps the second or even the first most leading sport at the time. Much, much bigger than it is today. So I compared a few and from both English, which is perhaps a little bit unfair, but also Yiddish. For example, in Yiddish articles from Central Europe or Eastern Europe. And you can see that like both in English and in Yiddish, they're trying to describe an experience. Okay. They describe. To describe an event, an atmosphere, the emotions of the event. The two books, what's happening they're telling you as a story. And instead in the Yeshuv in Hebrew they're trying to create something much more that is less of emotions that it's like lacking of emotion. It's. It's narrow. It's just the events this guy hit, this guy, he fell, he won. Okay. Something very much that is non inspiring and you can think it's a coincidence, but there is a few, there's a more than a few quotes in the book that shows it was completely deliberate that they're trying to do so because they don't want. Because they think that creating this what we call narrow, even dull perhaps descriptions of a sporting event, it's coalesce with their national goal. Okay. Because they don't think a sport itself is a good model for Zionism and for the new Jew.
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Ofer Idels
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Ofer Idels
Namaste.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
you don't talk about this in your book, but I'm curious. You, you must have done some thinking on this. I'm wondering if, let's call it the different economic modalities at the time correspond to why early Zionists might have had a weird reaction to sports. Right. If you think about it and you talked about it before, like what is sports? But it's capitalistic, it's who's going to win. But a lot of these guys were socialists. They're the ones who started the kibbutz movement. And I'm wondering if their, you know, their socialist outlook might have been part of the reason that they felt so odd about sports.
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Ofer Idels
Yeah. So first I'm an historian, so it's not that obvious. I'll do any thinking anyway, but it's never that clear. But luckily I did think about it. So what I was trying to show in the book, actually, it's not actually capitalism versus socialism. Yeah. People from entire spectrum of the issue, but more middle class or more pioneers, they all have actually very much similar, perhaps even identical reaction to modern sports. And actually it's kind of like the, in the, in the, in the kind of a central theme in the book that it's like sports and we know it from many theoretical books about sports or actually also historical. It's supposed to be autotelic. It's supposed to have a meaning for itself. It. Which mean. And we can also understand it from like, you know, when you're playing sports or doing etiquette, kind of like you have to be in the moment. Okay. Even if you're watching sports, its appeal is that you're in the moment. Okay. It's got its, you're in the aesthetic moment of it. Yeah. If you're trying to like take a step back, you're just like, oh, just people running and passing the ball and shooting hoops. It's kind of like, you know, it's like it doesn't, it's, it's lose much of its appeal because if you're trying to think about it, like why am I even interested about it? You know, it's, it's, it's hard. And the point is that like in the issue in the interval years, because it was a new phenomenon, people really think about it and they acknowledge that they need to have that in order to work that it's appeal, it's autotelic, that it has a meaning in itself. And many Zionists, both middle class and socialist, are actually afraid of that because they think it's like, oh, we're not here. We're here to create a new Jewish experience in which the body is something has more national, more revolutionary if you want. And this is basically the major juxtaposition between sports and Zionism. The ability that do we have purpose while doing sports? What are we contributing to the Zionist cause, to Jewish life here or not?
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Rabbi Mark Katz
So I'm wondering if we can unpack this turn of phrase that you have in this book. It's a really cool turn of phrase and I'm wondering what it means for our readers. It was the Zionist revival that imbued the Hebrew body and sports with meaning and not vice versa.
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Ofer Idels
Yes. So as I just explained, so in maybe take a step back in recent years, actually you can say even a few decades or recent decades, there is a growing trend of trying to write daily life or daily culture as kind of separated from Zionist ideology, basically arguing and I'm make it too simplistic perhaps. So all of my colleagues, please forgive me, but mostly there is a Zionism. There is like a meet a top down pioneers. Some of them are in the frontier, but some of them are in the Histadrut or in like leading up in a leading political establishment. But most people live in the cities, in Tel Aviv, in Haifa and Jerusalem and had urban life, kind of like detached or like not really or less influenced by Zionism as an ideology. Okay, they just went to their cafes, they'll have like, you know, consumerism and all of the stuff we know from the present. And the book tried to show something else. It tried to show how this appeal or promise of Zionism to create a new Jewish experience, a sovereign Jewish experience, played a different role, played a dominant role in people life, in urban people life. Yeah, most of the, most of the protagonists of the book are living in the cities, in Tel Aviv, in Jerusalem, in Haifa, and they're middle class. Some of them are not even belonging to the labor movement or the socialists, yet still they're reflecting all the time their meaning of Zionism through sport. It's meaningful. So Zionism and its promise is all the time presentation and influences how they see sports. Basically the entire attitude towards sport is because they're Zionist and they're thinking about Zionism all the time and not the other way around.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
You also have another term, the return to history, that sports embodied. I'm wondering if you can say a word about that.
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Ofer Idels
Yeah, so yeah, that's not my term actually. That's kind of actually a very known term in Zionist historiography or Zionist history perhaps that Zionism, if we go back is trying to create a new Jew, trying to create. Transform Jews from this passive that just wait for redemption in the Diaspora into an active Jew who takes parts in the world as a Jew. That means basically the return to history. And in the last two chapters I'm trying to show, after describing what we call the rapture or the juxtaposition tension between sports and Zionism, I'm trying to show two actually scenarios in which sport could achieve some meaning. And one of those is international competition. So Zionists didn't care still about sport itself, about winning. That was meaningless to them. But international competition allowed them basically to return to history as Hebrews. So it was a platform where they can be like everybody else basically that there could be a national flag like the rest of the other flags where there is like suddenly you arrive to the hotel of the competition. There is many languages there. Yeah. Because the participants arrive from all over the world. But now there is also Hebrew there. So those kind of were much more appealing to Zionism and how they use sports and why sports could be important for the national cause. So they didn't care that they lost most of the time. They cared that there was Hebrews there in the international arena.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
And it really came to a head during the Berlin Olympics. And you speak about that and the tension of what it means to have sports finally entering in, want to make a standing at the Olympics and at the same time not want to show up in Nazi Germany and give authenticity to what's going on around them at that Olympics. And so I'm wondering if you can tell that story.
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Ofer Idels
Yes. So even if we'll. Berlin Olympic in general is a very important or a pivotal moment in the history of sports, in. In the global history of sports. Mostly because it was the first time there is a. We're talking about this rise during the interval years. And then there is the Olymp. The. The Olympics and basically led to a
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Rabbi Mark Katz
large
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Ofer Idels
transit transnational debate or discussion about like should we. What's the place of sports? Should we allow sports to continue even though it's in Nazi Germany? Does the fact that it's in Nazi Germany is contrast to the ideas of sports, to this thing that sports is noble and important, it's a good educational tool or sports, it's above nationality. And because of that, even when it's in Nazi Germany, we Have and we, we still need to, you know, the Games. The Games go on basically. And so there's a great debate about the meaning of sports that it's not only related to the issue and, and for the issue, however, it was kind of like unfortunate in many ways because they decided they were accepted to the ioc, to the International Olympic Committee very shortly before the Games were decided. We'll go to Berlin. So it was so basically the first
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Rabbi Mark Katz
decision
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Ofer Idels
they had to receive was if I'm going to Nazi Germany or not. They didn't have any public support to go to Nazi Germany and so decided to skip it. Okay. And again, they didn't know World War II is on the horizon and the Olympics are going to stop for basically close to a decade. So for them it was like, okay, we're not going to go to this Olympic and, and we'll just go to the next one which was supposed to be in 1940, which never happened of course. And so again the Berlin Olympics shows us that like the tensions between trying to join the world basically and a designist desire to be part of the large preparation and the fact there are still Jews and how they can still manage that while keeping some kind of participation and the meaning of sports.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
Now your book then takes a turn and it talks about the Arab revolts at the end of the 1930s and how that then started to change people's outlook towards sports. I'm wondering if you can tell our listeners both what were those revolts and what was their effect on the sports around them.
- [32:48]
Ofer Idels
Yes. So the Arab revolt was a long three, three years long basically rebellion or there's different a lot of terminologies you can change check about of the mostly Arabs against the. The British controlling the land. But it's also very much affected the Jewish population over there. And, and, and in I think the most important book about it is Anita Shapira Landon Power thing that's called Forgotten. They have forgot the English translation and the title. And but, and the point is that like during this revolt Jewish Jewish self defense basically become from being defensive and also being more aggressive and being more prominent in describing also the soldier as part of the image of the athlete of Zionism. Perhaps not only the pioneer now is the but also the soldier is kind of like a major figure in the national ethos. And for the sports people who are lacking in meaning. Yes. They don't know how they can contribute to the national cause. It was kind of like an opening a place that like oh, we can create now also soldiers. Okay. And by that contributed to the national cause and also create meaning for ourselves. Like what? So they're trying to, for close to three years they're trying to use sports or using the Maccabi and all of the movement in order to create basically soldiers or kind of what they call pre military activities which they title sports, which in the most direct translation will be useful sports. So again it's like something sport. If it's just sports, it's not useful. If it's militarization, basically it's got use, it's got meaning.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
Yeah. I found it interesting that one of the sports that Israel tried out to be their national sport was swimming. And partly because it just doesn't work. I mean when you think about who the great swimmers are on the world stage, you think Australians, you think, you think Chinese, you think Americans, you don't really think Israelis. And it was interesting to. To look at that almost as a false start as a national sport for Israel.
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Ofer Idels
Yeah. So during the Arab revolt there was a opening the harbor in Tel Aviv, which was one of the. So it was one of the leading it create more interest in what you can call water sport, which is also like not only swimming but also sailing and yes, and the book shows that there is great enthusiasm about it in the first few years. But like militarization, like useful sport, it's very quickly decline and it just doesn't. It's because it very clearly won't lead to anything. But they're still thinking about swimming as something that's much more helpful. It also has some kind of meaning now. But yeah, it's very quickly and decline and it kind of disappears kind of like a something special.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
Now I know your book is mostly contained to the interwar period toward the end you bring us up to modern day. But I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the history of the Maccabia Games and the way that the Maccabia Games reflect or don't reflect because they're more modern at this point. Some of the themes in your book.
- [36:48]
Ofer Idels
Yes. No, actually Maccabe games are not necessarily too modern because the two first Maccabees were in the 30s, like during the interval years. But again they are reflecting in the case that like they're not necessarily about doing sports for its own sake. Okay. It's about much more about creating, about reflecting the Yuv or Eret Israel, the land of Israel as kind of like this central place of Jews. It's place that Jews comes from here, from all over the world. So in that case the sports activities are kind of still the excuse for that. You know, we also know that many or many immigrants arrive during the games and stay there with kind of like false visas, basically. And so it's actually the Maccabia games in that respect are just like the reverse. Of like what we talked about internationalism earlier. Instead of like bringing the Hebrews into the world, it's about bringing Jews into the land of Israel. But the sport itself, it's still like very much in the background.
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Rabbi Mark Katz
And it's interesting you say that because when I think about Maccabia nowadays, I actually don't think about Israel being centered and that might just be my own bias. I actually think maybe it's because I'm a Diasporan Jew. I actually think it happens to be in Israel, but that the idea of Claudi Yisrael, that everybody coming from all over the world to be in one place and the power of Jews from Australia meeting Jews from America meeting Jews from Israel kind of on the field for me at least is the paramount theme, which I think is a little bit different than it would have been in the 1930s.
- [38:59]
Ofer Idels
Yes. Because we're talking about a time before the state of Israel and when Jews living in the region were a clear minority of world Jewry. So it was not necessarily the fact that it's still. That it was a center of. So events like the Maccabiya and other from other cultural phenomenon just was able to helping establishing the issue of as kind of a central or critical platform of world Jewry.
- [39:40]
Rabbi Mark Katz
Yeah, it's no longer cool that it's in Israel. It just, of course it's going to be in Israel, Whereas in the 30s it would have been cool that it was in Israel. You finish the book by talking about Matkot, which you call like the national sport of Israel, which is funny because it's kind of a beach game. So I'm wondering if you can explain it and why you use those words that it's the national sport of Israel. And more importantly, how does mat coat as a game reflect a lot of the themes that are in your book?
- [40:10]
Ofer Idels
So thank you. It's really the end of the book, so it's kind of a spoiler. But you know, if, if someone listened to us so far it's. He deserved this spoiler. Anyway, so Matkot is a national game is. Is not my. It's not like it's not my description. It's actually kind of a. A known title of like Matkat is something we do just in Israel. It's not necessarily true. There is other activities that, like that they're playing Matco to different versions of it in different. In other places in the world. I know in South America there is a few. Where there's beaches built mostly, but.
- [40:51]
Rabbi Mark Katz
Yes.
- [40:52]
Ofer Idels
But the fact that it's very much. When you're trying to think about it,
- [40:56]
Rabbi Mark Katz
like why and what, what is it just for the.
- [40:59]
Ofer Idels
Yeah, yeah. So basically it's, it's. You can like compare it to like tennis or ping pong. You just play it on the beach, just passing the ball one to each other. But there's no rules. Exactly. Or there's no. It's not competition. You just pass the ball for your own enjoyment, for your own fun and for your own excitement. And. And again, I think we can also see it's very much something very much reminiscent to gymnastics as something that is not competition. In any case, in any way. You're doing it for your own sake. Okay. For your fun. But it's not, you know, it's not competition. It's much more relaxed about being healthy, about being in the moment. And in that sense it's very much was coalescing with early Zionist frameworks that, that I tried to teach them and as I said, stayed. And people never thought about it, like, why we're still playing this game, I don't know, almost 100 years later.
- [42:14]
Rabbi Mark Katz
So we always have a final question, which is what are you working on next?
- [42:20]
Ofer Idels
Well, I'm actually working on a few projects that connects to this book. It's not about sports, but it's about other stuff, hopefully. I don't know if I'm gonna tell you, actually. I think I'm gonna keep the audience waiting and hopefully things will work out okay.
- [42:38]
Rabbi Mark Katz
All right, I respect that. Well, thank you very much. Ofer Idels, author of Embodying the the Hebrew Experience and the Globalization of Modern Sports in Interwar Palestine. Thank you for joining us again. I'm Rabbi Mark Katz, author of Yohanan's Gamble, and you can join us anytime. We are constantly putting out episodes on the New Books network and would love to have you listen. Thank you very much.
- [43:19]
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