Thirteen-year-old Zachary Targoff was feeling cornered. His options were running out. Across the table, 90-year-old Herman Bomze sat impassively, waiting. “I made a bad move there,” Zachary said. A minute passed in tense silence. Then Zachary accepted his demise. “I’m going to go ahead and resign,” he said. Thus ended the latest of the improbable…
Israeli chess player Boris Gelfand won the Tal Memorial chess tournament in Moscow on June 23, after reaching a draw with Russia’s Vladimir Kramnik in the final round. With an overall score of six points, Gelfand edged out last year’s winner, Norway’s Magnus Carlsen —the top-ranked chess player in the world — as well as…
The finalists for the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature have been announced. Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum and Library has become home to Maurice Sendak’s only mural. Jonah Lehrer retrieves Thorstein Veblen’s forgotten essay on why Jews become intellectuals. An Iranian grandmaster claims to have beaten an Israeli chess record after playing 614 people simultaneously…
In a whirlwind affair, 30 year-old Israeli grandmaster Alik Gershon broke a world record Thursday when he played 523 people simultaneously. The display took place in Rabin Square in Tel-Aviv and lasted over 19 hours. According to the New York Times, Gershon needed to beat at least 80 percent of his opponents and easily topped…
Crossposted from Haaretz Israeli chess grandmaster Alik Gershon broke the Guinness World Record in Tel Aviv early Friday morning for simultaneous games played, a title previously held by an Iranian chess player. The thirty-year-old played 527 concurrent games, winning 87% of them. Jewish Agency Chair Natan Sharanskey and several Knesset members turned up in Tel…
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 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….
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