Self-Proclaimed ‘Hebrew Hammer’ Josh Rosen To Start As QB For Cardinals

Josh Rosen, of the Cardinals Image by Getty Images

By Jenny Singer September 25, 2018

Everything’s coming up Josh Rosen.

The 21-year-old, a first-draft pick for the Arizona Cardinals in April, has been named to start as quarterback in the team’s upcoming game against the Seattle Seahawks.

Rosen — the type of man to make a Jewish pop-culture reporter reconsider sports as a form of entertainment — is football’s newest Jewish boy-toy. He hates Trump, thinks school sucks, and comes from religious stock but believes, more than anything, in the sanctity of himself. He’s our guy.

“Josh is our starter, and it’s his job to lose,” Cardinals head coach Steve Wilks said at a press conference announcing the change, Reuters reported. “Josh plays with a lot of confidence,” he added, making some sports novices wonder if it is common for coaches to inspire players with backhanded compliments, like a passive aggressive Jewish parent.

We’re rooting for the Chosen Rosen — as we’ve observed in these pages before, Rosen is the consummation of the American dream. In him, we have lived to see the Jewish son of an ice-skating surgeon and a lacrosse-playing Quaker — who is also the great-great-great grandson of Joseph Wharton, the namesake of the Wharton School of Business — picked to serve as a quarterback in the National Football League in our great country. We won’t turn up our noses at liberals who become red state voters, and certainly not at anyone willing to hack another hole in the stereotype that Jews aren’t athletic.

Aly Raisman has been more than pulling her weight, so let’s see some hustle, Joshua! Or at the very least, lets see you make it through a career on a national men’s sports team without shaming our people. We believe in you.

With reporting from Reuters.

Jenny Singer is the deputy lifestyle editor for the Forward. You can reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @jeanvaljenny

Jenny Singer is a student in the MFA Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, a former staff writer at Glamour, and a former writer and editor at the Forward.

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.

In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.

At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.

Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need 300 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.

Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO