JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Chess isn’t what you’d call a blood sport. Unless, of course, it’s 1972 and your name is Bobby Fischer. At the time, the face-off between the chess-prodigy from Brooklyn and Russian champ Boris Spassky had the world riveted. And soon, you’ll be able to relive the whole thing on the big screen. Tobey Maguire and…
Garry Kasparov tells us what it’s like to play chess in the shadow of Bobby Fischer. In a 1923 article in The Nation, “Romanian-Jewish-American-Yiddish novelist, journalist, dandy, screwball folklorist of the Gypsies” Konrad Bercovici described “The Greatest Jewish City in the World.” An Israeli forger almost managed to sell a fake Kandinsky for three million…
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. As we reported in June, four parties, including young Jinky, were caught in a legal battle over Fischer’s $2 million estate following…
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…
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…
The New York Times has an interesting article on the recently deceased chess genius and Jewish antisemite Bobby Fischer. The Times tracks down Joseph Virovatz, a Holocaust survivor and fellow chess player who was a longtime friend of Fischer’s. In Fischer’s younger days, the two would eat Hungarian food together on the Lower East Side….
