Anti-Semitism Is Not a Sport : The Valley Torah High basketball team repeatedly runs into problems over wearing yarmulkes. The real issue is one of simple prejudice.

“Danny and I probably would never have met . . . had it not been for the desire . . . in the Jewish parochial schools to show the Gentile world that yeshiva students were as physically fit, despite their long hours of study, as any other American student.”

--Chaim Potok, “The Chosen”

One of the best things about Los Angeles, I often tell friends, is that the anti-Semitic remarks and confrontations which I found commonplace growing up as an Orthodox Jew on the East Coast are virtually nonexistent. In the four years I have lived here, I can’t recall having heard one anti-Semitic remark as a result of wearing a yarmulke.

But apparently, if we can judge by the experience of the Valley Torah High School basketball team, I have been premature in my assessment of our city’s level of religious tolerance. Players on the Jewish school’s team have reported difficulties from opposing players and fans as well as referees, for the wearing of the religiously mandated yarmulke during games.

Despite permission from league officials in the California Interscholastic Federation, Valley Torah basketball players have encountered difficulties from referees who have refused to officiate games claiming that the bobby pins used to hold the yarmulkes in place pose a safety hazard. In one case a referee forced the players to tape their yarmulkes to their heads so they wouldn’t fall off. In another, the tip-off was delayed 40 minutes by a referee who claimed the yarmulkes posed a safety problem.

With all due respect for the concerns of such officials, the safety of yarmulkes in basketball is a non-issue. Jewish high school players on the East Coast and in Chicago have been playing with yarmulkes for decades, and Yeshiva University’s basketball team has been playing college games since the 1940s. Despite thousands of games, no injuries have ever been reported from a yarmulke or the bobby pins used to hold it in place.

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The real issue is one of simple prejudice. It has everything to do with fear and nothing to do with safety. Otherwise, how can one explain the throwing of pennies at these players (a classic anti-Semitic taunt to signify the “cheap Jew”) or the remarks and snide comments they have been facing?

As high school basketball players for New Jersey’s Jewish Educational Center during the early 1980s, my teammates and I never heard anything about yarmulkes’ being unsafe, but we certainly heard the anti-Semitic remarks from the players on other teams.

Sometimes the comments were nothing more than standard schoolboy attempts to “psych out” opponents. On other occasions, the remarks had more sinister connotations.

In one infamous junior varsity contest against a Catholic prep school team, the entire game was played to threats of how they would “kill us Jews after the game” if we won. We lost that game by one point, and after our varsity team won by the same margin, there was nearly a riot between the Jewish and Catholic teams. Needless to say, we never played them again. Instead of an event that could have served as both an athletic competition and a bridge between players of different religions, what resulted was the planting of seeds of anger. For some of our players, I am sure, the event resonates even all these years later.

Like my teammates more than a decade ago, these Valley Torah players really only want to play ball. Harassing them because they choose to honor their religion is something there should be no place for in our society, either on or off the court.