100 Books Like The Other Olympians

In this book, David Goldblatt chronicles the political history of the Olympics, beginning in the 1890s when a plucky French aristocrat, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, chiseled the ancient Greek Olympics from antiquity and rendered them in modern form.

Goldblatt is a sports lover through and through who celebrates Olympic athletes in all their resplendent glory while also skewering the five-ring honchos who all too often pursue their own narrow interests over the collective good. This book brims with fun forays into the quirky crevices of Olympic history with a close eye on how culture matters.

I love watching Caster Semenya run. The South African middle-distance runner who powered her way to two Olympic gold medals and three World Championships in the women’s 800-meter run is not only an icon on the track but off it, too.

In this book, she catalogs the (sometimes cruel, mean-spirited) efforts of naysayers, rendering them impotent beneath the force and grace of her determination and pride. Deemed suspiciously masculine by casual fans and sports administrators alike, Semenya explains how she transcended the unfounded hate and created a life rooted in love. Discipline is freedom, she asserts. In our perilous political times, I couldn’t agree more.

When it comes to delivering principled criticism against the Olympics, Helen Jefferson Lenskyj is the OG. Today, activism against the Games crops up in just about every prospective Olympic host city. These dissidents often lean on the insights that Lenskyj has been making for decades.

In this book—one of several books she has written on the Games—Lenskyj zeroes in on the oversimplified pro-Games propaganda that emerges with metronomic regularity from the International Olympic Committee and decimates it with credible counterfactuals.

Her work on anti-Olympics activism has long set the standard.

In this edited collection, Russell Field assembles a capable slate of writers who offer ground-eye explanations of how various Winter Olympics affected everyday working people, generating local dissent. Perhaps because the Winter Olympics are smaller than their splashy Summer cousin—today, the Winter Games feature around 2,900 athletes while the Summer Olympics have upwards of 10,500—they have spawned less scholarly and media attention.

This book addresses that deficit with riveting chapters, including one on the Denver 1976 Olympics that never happened after locals torpedoed the event through a public referendum, another on the Sochi 2014 Games in Putin’s Russia, and yet another featuring the politics of the Pyeongchang Olympics in South Korea.

This is a must-read if you want to get the full story behind the Winter Olympics. (Full disclosure: I contributed a chapter on the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games).

Recent authoritarian trends and attempts to re-establish white supremacy are not new in America.

In this novel, Philip Roth envisions an alternate history where Charles Lindbergh has defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 Presidential election. He then proceeds to collude with Adolph Hitler and seeks to establish anti-Semitism throughout the country.

The novel is based on the actual attitudes which Lindbergh had toward Jews and other minorities. Of course, this is not truly an insurrection. Still, it is a portrayal of how extreme right-wing attitudes can seek to rob people of our hard-won democracy.

I was raised with a deep respect for freedom for all people in this country. My family had several Jewish friends and we loved and learned from them.

This is a through-the-looking-glass journey into the darker side of British politics. Grundy’s parents were violently anti-Semitic and obsessed with Oswald Mosley, and he himself became active in Mosley’s post-war Union Movement, before turning away from Fascism. It is surreal, scary, and hilarious by turns. It also gives important insights into the origins of today’s Far Right politics.

Nirenberg’s book is not short, but it is a book you will have no trouble working your way through.

It is, I believe, the definitive study of antisemitism through history. If you want to know not just where such a prejudice comes from but also how it changes as society and people’s values change, this is the book for you.

Better than anyone else, Nirenberg shows how an older “religious” prejudice became, as European societies started to become secular in the Enlightenment period, a modern and “secularised” prejudice.

Often, the same tropes remain, but they were just reframed from a religious to a non-religious form. Some people argue for a radical break from a religious “Judeo-phobia” to a modern and racial “antisemitism,” but this is too simplistic.

This book stunned me by becoming something different over and over again.

The characters in Amerikaland are upright role models, but then we dip into their super complicated pasts. When their family pops up, the story begins to weave itself into a wild plot that requires unbelievable fortitude to endure. As the pages kept coming, I no longer had any idea what was going to happen next and felt like anything could happen. These people were driven by inner fires that could burn up the world at any moment.

I had to lay on the couch after this one as I felt completely gutted, but while lying down, I picked it up again and started rereading.

If McWhorter focuses on how woke ideology harms Blacks, Bernstein shows how it harms Jews and inevitably fosters antisemitism.

Like McWhorter, Bernstein provides very specific examples of wokeness in action, both on and off campus. Jews were asked to leave an LGBT Pride event because their flag – a Pride flag with a Star of David on it – “made people feel unsafe”; a Jewish organization that issued a public statement condemning George Floyd’s murder was lambasted because the statement had not been drafted by a person of color; and more.

Bernstein and I are both liberal Jews, but we both fear the consequences of an ideology that divides the world into the non-privileged oppressed and the privileged oppressors – Jews, by virtue of their current success, are automatically considered privileged oppressors despite the long worldwide history of antisemitism.

This book was the first time I read a graphic novel with Jewish themes other than the Holocaust. As a comic book artist who was exploring my Jewish roots, it was eye-opening to read a tale with Jewish characters, especially because it deals with the legend of the Golem, a mystical being made of mud and brought to life through Hebrew incantations.  Add to that great action scenes of 1920s baseball, and it makes for a great read.