In 1972, the world was glued to a chess match between Brooklyn chess prodigy Bobby Fischer and Russian camp Boris Spassky. Now, you can relive the whole thing in an upcoming biopic.
Well that settles it. It turns out that Jewish chess-champ-turned-rambling anti-Semite Bobby Fischer is not the father of a 9-year-old Filipino girl, Jinky Young, whose mother claimed to have been impregnated by Fischer.
Bobby Fischer was once the greatest chess player in the world, before he devolved into a ranting, rabid antisemite, despite the fact that he himself was Jewish. By the end of Fischer’s life the only country that would have him was Iceland, where he died in 2008 of kidney failure, leaving behind some $2 million and no will. Now, AP reports, Iceland’s supreme court hopes that exhuming his corpse will help determine who gets the loot.
The course of Middle East politics probably won’t be changed drastically by the news, reported October 3 in Britain’s Daily Telegraph, that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was born Jewish. But the disclosure is intriguing enough to spark a whole new line of speculation. The Forward’s Nathan Guttman suggests that Ahmadinejad’s obsessive Jew-bashing may be an extreme case of Jewish self-hatred. Nathan’s being playful, but the Telegraph quotes scholars who take the idea seriously.
The Times also reports that Fischer “was said to be friendly” with Barbra Streisand when they were both students at Brooklyn’s Erasmus Hall high school.