ADAM JEREMY “A. J.” EDELMAN has turned his passion for sport into a mission to get the Jewish community to care about it as well. The American-born “sliding sports” athlete competed for Israel in the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. He has represented Israel in skeleton and bobsled. When I interviewed him, he was in the midst putting together an Israeli bobsled team for the upcoming Winter Games in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo. He spoke to me from Japan, where he was training, building the body that gives him his nickname: The Bear Jew.
What was it like for you growing up as a kid in a Modern Orthodox world who was also very engaged with sports?
I think when my older brother Alex and I started playing hockey for Brookline, [Massachusetts], back in 1994, 1995, we were the only visibly Jewish kids. It kind of continued in that vein for a very long time. Things oftentimes took place or were planned during Shabbos. It really discouraged Orthodox kids from competing in sport systemically because it just wasn’t accessible. Brookline did an amazing job in scheduling around Shabbos for us. They really did a fantastic job at accommodating us and scheduling a lot of our games for Sunday.
I tipped into Olympic sports because of Mike Rosenberg, director of alumni for Maimonides, the day school I went to in Brookline. He had told me back in 2014 that no one had played high-level collegiate sport who didn’t go to Brandeis or Yeshiva University. I found that to be really shocking, and I had this realization that Jewish kids self-selected out of pro sports. It was, at best, a high school thing: no one was investing the time or resources or energy into a pathway to more professional or elite-level success.
You can observe that if you take a look at the major sports. Where are the Jewish NBA players, for instance? It’s not like Jews are just so clinically small that we don’t have people who are six-five, six-six”. To me, it’s a very poor focus and it pervades the entire Jewish psyche. Let’s be real. If a kid goes to their parent and says, I want to invest a lot of time and energy into learning an instrument or the piano or a language, the parent will go to enormous financial lengths, enormous time lengths, enormous energy spent to help their child achieve a certain standard of proficiency in piano, without the hope of joining the Boston Symphony Orchestra. But if someone goes to their parent and says, I want to be a martial artist, [or] a taekwondo [fighter], a dancer, whatever the sport is, oftentimes a parent from the Jewish community will tell them there’s no future in that.
How much of this is the old immigrant story, which is: if we’re going to invest all of our energies into you, it should be a career? You can play the piano as long as you go and get a law degree and you have the piano on the side.
Parents are vastly influenced by the system in which they grew up, and you’re not going to unwind that mentality. Parents oftentimes are making a judgment call, or the Jewish culture has made a judgment call, about what is a worthwhile pursuit.
I’ll give you a prime example here: Israel’s bobsled team has never received a drop of government funding. Not in twelve years, not a single cent. I paid for my own flight to the Olympics in 2018. That is how disadvantaged the bobsled team is. It has gone further than any other unfunded team in bobsled history. No other team has done what we have done.
Even Jamaica?
Jamaica is massively funded. Jamaica has hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The movie [Cool Runnings, about the Jamaican bobsled team] kind of makes it all up: they had donated sleds and equipment and all sorts of stuff. Israel doesn’t have one fraction of what that original Jamaican team had.
It’s nearly impossible to knock off a legacy nation in bobsled because bobsled costs are six figures a year, at minimum. A $150,000 budget is a shoestring. And yet, every person I’ve ever approached about trying to save the bobsled team at various points has said a version of the following: Have you asked the Krafts? Have you asked the Wilfs? Have you asked the Aronsons? Have you asked, you know, basically anyone Jewish that you can think of who’s been involved in sport? And the answer from every single one of those people that we’ve asked has been no.
We had approached an NFL owner in 2021/22. We had this Arab/Druze/Jewish team which was, at that point, painfully close to the Olympics, but I was really struggling to support it all. I said to him, We just need a new sled. And his wife laughed at us — legitimately laughed on the phone — and hung up. We fell out of contention on the last day: Jamaica jumped us by 0.1 seconds after they had bought a brand-new sled. We had beaten them through four of the eight races, but they then bought a brand-new sled for $100,000.
To echo one of the people we approached, they don’t see this actually as a problem in the Jewish community, not having Jews compete in sport at the highest level. It’s not a problem that they feel needs attention. So if people who are deeply enmeshed in sport culture can’t see where it fits within the Jewish cultural framework, making a systemic shift in the minds of parents is going to be very difficult.
So the way that I’ve approached it is by taking a different tack: it’s not What can this provide for the Jewish culture? but What can it provide a human being? Many people have outlets of chess, they have outlets of reading, have outlets of art, they have outlets of music. For many kids, the best way to learn loss, goal setting, personal development, or to grow in life is through sport. And it has nothing to do with Jewish community and Jewish culture and Jewish values.
Most of the activities you see Jewish people, especially more Orthodox people, doing are very much individual, whereas team sports still lag far behind. Is it because you’re often playing against non-Jewish teams and the Shabbat factor becomes an issue, or because it’s a much higher bar to commit to a team sport?
I think that we should be far more represented in a sport like tennis, and I don’t think we are. My life’s effort is to make people healthier, to get people involved in fitness and sport. That’s my passion, my love.
Pursuing an athletic goal requires a bit of early intervention to instill passion, or at least tolerance or drive, to make that a priority in your life. If you’re twenty-five and you’ve never been exposed to the beauty of personal development and doing everything you can to just master your craft, the chance that you just drop everything and say, I’m going to be like a kick-ass marathon runner? It’s really small. It happens. It really does. People can change their lives around, but it’s a really small chance.
What it requires is something cultural. It has to be formative, either in school or among your peer group or from your family life. I think that it’s less to do with Shabbos and more to do with priorities.
When they made that joke in the movie Airplane about the Jewish sports stars — a passenger asks the flight attendant for some light reading, and she gives him a small pamphlet entitled Great Jews in Sports — they weren’t really addressing the religious Jews. They were just addressing Jews. I think a lot of Jews use observance as an excuse. A lot of chess tournaments are held on Shabbos, yet we do have quite a few chess players. If there was a demand for it, if there was a critical mass, there would be a league that catered to it. Those are just the market dynamics. No one’s intentionally discriminating against Jews.
How much of your choice to do skeleton or bobsled was informed by the knowlege that we’re never going to field a full team of hockey players, and how much by finding an unusual sport to diversify?
The issue with hockey was that Israel kind of bounces between B- and C-level. I could be an NHL-level goalie, which I’m not, and it wouldn’t make that difference to propel Israel into the top twelve in A-level, which is where it would need to be to make a mark. My energy devoted to that mission would not be, in my view, worth that time. I wanted to use my adult years to create a larger change than having just existed in the program.
If you’re going to use your life’s energy, and you’re going to derail a lot of things, it has to be commensurate with the impact that you make. I got the scouting report for skeleton and it said that I would never ever make the Olympic Games no matter what I did. And I thought, This is the story I want to tell. If I could flip this, then I could go and tell this story forever. That’s my athletic superpower, because the Olympics are 95 percent mental.
“Many people have outlets: of chess, of reading, of art, of music. But for many kids, the best way to learn about loss, goal setting, personal development, or to grow in life is through sport. I think we should be far more represented.”
As for the Olympics, there’s an amazing value it brings: when you step onto a field, it’s very hard to be prejudiced against a person that you’re looking at competing against. Israel’s mortal enemy is Iran. But when I see Iran competing in the Olympics, I don’t get twisted with hatred. If anything, it just normalizes the country a little bit in my mind. It acts as a very nice, positive face, unless he’s a jerk and doesn’t shake the Israeli’s hand. But if he puts up a good fight and seems like a decent dude, it actually leaves a pretty positive impression of the country.
The benefit of a competition is that I stay an extra hour after to meet everyone who’s at the track. I stay in all the Israeli gear. I meet them, I shake their hand. It’s important to put a friendly face on Israel and the Jewish people. That’s the power of sport. I’m probably the only point of contact as an Israeli that they’ll ever meet. At least they come away with a positive impression in their mind, of a guy who’s not trying to go murder a Palestinian.
