World Series Pitcher: Sandy Koufax

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                                

Sanford Koufax, nicknamed "the Left Arm of God", is an American former professional baseball player. Widely regarded as one of the greatest pitchers of all time, he played 12 seasons in Major League Baseball for the Brooklyn / Los Angeles Dodgers from 1955 to 1966.

October 6, 1965. The World Series. The whole country tuning in to watch the most dominant pitcher in baseball. And Sandy Koufax wasn't there.

It was Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, and Koufax made a choice that had nothing to do with baseball and everything to do with who he was. He sat out Game 1, letting his teammate Don Drysdale take the mound instead. When manager Walter Alston pulled a struggling Drysdale from that game, Drysdale famously cracked, "I bet right now you wish I was Jewish, too."

Koufax didn't do it for headlines. He did it quietly, without fanfare, because it was simply right. In an era when Jewish athletes were stereotyped as weak, Koufax stood tall by standing down. He went on to pitch a shutout in Game 5 and a three hit gem in Game 7 on just two days' rest, leading the Dodgers to the championship and earning World Series MVP. But it's that empty mound in Game 1 America remembers.

Koufax with the 1954 University of Cincinnati baseball team (left; top row, 5th from the left) at age 19.

Koufax was born Sanford Braun to a Jewish family on December 30, 1935, in Borough Park, Brooklyn. His parents, Evelyn (née Lichtenstein) and Jack Braun, divorced when he was three years old. The son of a single working parent, he spent most of his childhood with his maternal grandparents and spent his summers at Camp Chi-Wan-Da, a Jewish summer camp in Ulster Park, New York, where his mother worked as a bookkeeper.

Evelyn, a certified public accountant, remarried when her son was nine to Irving Koufax, an attorney, whose name Sandy took. Koufax also gained a stepsister, Edith, Irving's daughter from a previous marriage. Shortly afterwards, the family moved to the Long Island suburb of Rockville Centre. They moved back to Brooklyn in June 1949, the day after Koufax graduated from ninth grade, settling in the neighborhood of Bensonhurst.

Years go by.  Walter Alston was the long-time manager of the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers who guided Sandy Koufax through his entire Hall of Fame major-league career.

Notably, teammates Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella both clashed with Alston on Koufax's usage, noting the young pitcher's talent and objecting to him being benched for weeks at a time. Pitcher Don Newcombe stated years later that Koufax faced antisemitism as a young pitcher from white players on the team who shunned him and used antisemitic slurs when referring to him. This led to black teammates rallying to Koufax's defense and supporting him during his early years.

 Koufax was 6'2" and weighed in at 210 lbs. Sanford Koufax, was a Major League Baseball player who pitched for the Brooklyn Dodgers (1955-1957) and Los Angeles Dodgers (1958-1966). Did you know that Sandy, his nickname, was the youngest player ever inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame (36 years, 20 days / #2 - Lou Gehrig, 36 years, 172 days), the first pitcher to ever throw four no-hitters, and one of only three pitchers (the other two are Walter Johnson & Grover Alexander) in baseball history to win the Triple Crown of Pitching (leading the league in wins, strikeouts and earned run average) three times?

Koufax and teammate Don Drysdale changing parts on a military truck at the US Army Reserve Center in Van Nuys, California

Koufax, along with fellow Dodgers pitcher Don Drysdale, served in the United States Army Reserve for two years, from 1957 to 1959. He was often stationed at Fort Dix, New Jersey, during the offseason..

Clinching the pennant on September 27, the Dodgers faced the heavily favored New York Yankees in the 1963 World Series. In Game 1, Koufax beat Whitey Ford 5–2. He struck out the first five batters and 15 overall, breaking Carl Erskine's decade-old record of 14. The Dodgers won Games 2 and 3 behind the pitching of Johnny Podres, Ron Perranoski, and Don Drysdale. Koufax completed the Dodgers' series sweep in Game 4 with a 2–1 victory over Ford; the only run he allowed was a home run by Mickey Mantle.  During the series, Koufax struck out 23 batters in 18 innings, a record for a four-game World Series, and had a 2–0 record with an earned run average of 1.50; for his performance, he was awarded the World Series Most Valuable Player Award.Koufax is considered one of the greatest big game pitchers in baseball history.  I have only touched on a little of his life. 

Resource:  

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Koufax

most. Sometimes the greatest act of courage isn't throwing the pitch. It's knowing when not to.

Mass Murder Thwarted By FBI Slated for October 7th Anniversary

 Nadene Goldfoot                                               

A mass murder plot to slaughter vast numbers of New York's Jews was uncovered and ended by our FBI.  It was to happen around the anniversary of October 7th or Yom Kippur.  They planned to attack the Jews in Brooklyn.  

“Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, AKA also known as Shahzeb Jadoon, of Pakistan allegedly tried to enter the United States to commit an attack on the Jewish community in New York City, planning an ISIS-inspired mass shooting around the one-year anniversary of the attack on Gaza by Hamas,” said FBI Director Kash Patel. “Thankfully, the great work of the FBI and our partners shut that down, and Khan has now been extradited to New York to face American justice. I want to thank our teams and partners for their diligent work in this case and executing the mission.”

Authorities have stated that Khan was arrested in Canada and extradited to the United States to face charges related to an alleged plot. He is charged with attempted provision of material support to terrorism. The man was extradited after being indicted on the charges of attempting to provide material support and resources to a designated foreign terrorist organization (FTO), an official release from the US Department of Justice said. 

“As alleged, Muhammad Shahzeb Khan attempted to enter the United States to carry out a deadly terrorist attack on a Jewish center in New York City,” said U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton for the Southern District of New York. “He planned to use automatic weapons to kill as many members of our Jewish community as possible, all in support of ISIS.                                           

Khan confirmed that he and a U.S.-based ISIS supporter (Associate-1) had been planning to carry out an attack in a particular U.S. city (City-1). Among other things, Khan said that he had been actively attempting to create “a real offline cell” of ISIS supporters to carry out a “coordinated assault” in City-1 using AR-style rifles to “target[] Israeli Jewish chabads . . . scattered all around [City-1].” During subsequent conversations, Khan repeatedly instructed the UCs to obtain AR-style assault rifles, ammunition, and other materials to carry out the attacks, and identified the specific locations in City-1 where the attacks would take place. Khan also provided details about how he would cross the border from Canada into the United States to conduct the attacks. During these conversations with the UCs, Khan emphasized that “Oct 7th and oct 11th are the best days for targeting the Jews” because “Oct 7th they will surely have some protests and Oct 11th  is Yom Kippur.”

Resource:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/pakistani-national-extradited-face-charges-connection-plot-carry-out-isis-inspired-mass

The Sad Case of Jeffrey Epstein of Brooklyn, New York

 Nadene Goldfoot                                           

  

 Epstein in 1980, born in January 20, 1953 –died on  August 10, 2019) at age 66.  He was the age of my son. He died scandalously as the best known sex-offender of the USA.    What happened to him to step out of his role as a respected Jewish man?  We Jews have managed to be the best in many professions, but this?  The number of Jews in New York City soared throughout the beginning of the 20th century and reached a peak of 2 million in the 1950s, when Jews constituted one-quarter of the city's population. 

Jeffrey Epstein was an average Jewish young man of Brooklyn, New York in the 1980s, not much different than the man I married, Danny Eskow, also of Brooklyn.  Jeffrey's parents were   Pauline (née Stolofsky, 1918–2004) and Seymour G. Epstein (1916–1991) who were Jewish and had married in 1952 shortly before his birth. Pauline worked as a school aide and was a homemaker. Seymour Epstein worked for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation as a groundskeeper and gardener. 

Coney Island

Coney Island is a peninsular neighborhood and entertainment area in the southwestern section of the New York City borough of Brooklyn. 

Sea Gate on Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York

 Jeffrey was the older of two siblings; he and his 

brother Mark grew up in the working-class 

neighborhood of Sea Gate, a private gated

 community in Coney Island, Brooklyn.  

(Interesting because out West where I live, a private 

gated community usually contains very expensive 

homes with professional highly educated people).  

Epstein attended local public schools, first attending Public School 188, and then Mark Twain Junior High School nearby. In 1967, Epstein attended the National Music Camp at the Interlochen Center for the Arts. He began playing the piano when he was five. (He must have had gifted tendencies for his family to pay for lessons at that age.  Most piano teachers want a student by age 8).  

He graduated in 1969 from Lafayette High School at age 16, having skipped two grades. (That means he was bright;  very bright).  

Later that year, he attended classes at Cooper Union until he changed colleges in 1971. From September 1971, he attended the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, but left without receiving a degree in June 1974.(He my not have had the money for tuition.). (A scientific fact is that there is a connection between music and math with music helping to develop the math.)  

So far, Jeffrey hasn't let me down.  He was a bright, intelligent and gifted young man.  

Around 1974, Jeffrey decided to try his hand at teaching and obtained a teaching position in mathematics with an annual salary of $12,000 at the Dalton School, a highly respected private school in uptown Manhattan which caters to the wealthy. Children in his classes included, for example, those of Robert Redford, Joel Grey and those of wealthy financiers. This was a social class to which Jeffrey had not previously been exposed. As a teacher, Jeffrey was commended for being lively, interesting, and uniquely gifted in presenting the material in a way which challenged the students. As matters would turn out, Jeffrey’s experience at the Dalton School would become life altering on a number of different levels.

Jeffrey began his professional life by teaching at the Dalton School in Manhattan, despite lacking a college degree. (Do I see a pattern of starting something but not finishing it--because of getting tired of it or lacking the motivation for seeing something to the end?)

Bear Stearns World Headquarters , The Bear Stearns Companies, Inc. was a New York-based global investment bank, securities trading and brokerage firm that failed in 2008 as part of the global financial crisis and recession, and was subsequently sold to JPMorgan Chase. The company's main business areas before its failure were capital markets, investment banking, wealth management, and global clearing services, and it was heavily involved in the subprime mortgage crisis.

After his dismissal from the school, he entered the banking and finance sector, working at Bear Stearns in various roles;  eventually starting his own firm. In 2008 Jeffrey was 55 years old.  

Carbyne Raises $56 Million in Series C Funding to Modernize Emergency Contact Centers  Yoni Yatsun (Full stack Team leader), Amir Elichai (CEO), Alex Dizengof (CTO), Carbyne's founders. Credit: Nir Arieli

By 2015, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Epstein invested in the startup Reporty Homeland Security (rebranded as Carbyne in 2018). The startup was connected with Israel's defense industry. Jeffrey was now 62 years old, owner of his own investrment firm from New York, and looked pretty important to Israel.    

          Ehud Barak of the Labor Party  in 2016.   He is a graduate in physics, mathematics, and economics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Stanford University.

It was headed by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who was also at one time the defense minister, and chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The CEO of the company is Amir Elihai who was a special forces officer, and Pinchas Bukhris, who is a director of the company, was at one time the defense ministry director general and commander of the IDF cyber unit 8200.

      Barak and American Condoleezza Rice-Secretary of State from 2005-2009.  

 Epstein and Barak, the head of Carbyne, were close, and Epstein often offered him lodging at one of his apartment units at 301 East 66th Street in Manhattan. Epstein had past experience with Israel's research and military sector. In April 2008, he went to Israel and met with a number of research scientists and visited different Israeli military bases. During this trip, he thought about staying in Israel in order to avoid trial, and possible jail, for charges he was facing for sex crimes; however, he opted to return to the United States.

       His 2019 mugshot;  not bad for a mugshot at 66, just before COVID set in.  

Epstein developed an elite social circle and procured many women and children; he and some of his associates then sexually abused them.  

In 2005, police in Palm Beach, Florida, began investigating Epstein after a parent reported that he had sexually abused her 14-year-old daughter^] Epstein pleaded guilty and was convicted in 2008 by a Florida state court of procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute. 

He served almost 13 months in custody, but with extensive work release. He was convicted of only these two crimes as part of a controversial plea deal; federal officials had identified 36 girls, some as young as 14 years old, whom Epstein had allegedly sexually abused.

Epstein installed concealed cameras in numerous places on his properties to allegedly record sexual activity with underage girls by prominent people for criminal purposes such as blackmail.

Jeffrey Epstein owned two private islands in the 

US Virgin Islands. 

Rick Friedman Photography via Getty; Marco Bello/Reuters

 Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's long-term girlfriend and companion, told a friend that Epstein's private island in the Virgin Islands was completely wired for video and the friend believed that Maxwell and Epstein were videotaping everyone on the island as an insurance policy. When police raided his Palm Beach residence in 2006, two hidden pinhole cameras were discovered in his home. It was also reported that Epstein's mansion in New York was wired extensively with a video surveillance system.

Among his new acquaintances that became his friends 

were:  the British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, leading to her 2021 conviction on U.S. federal charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy for helping him procure girls, including a 14-year-old, for child sexual abuse and prostitution.

 Epstein also maintained long-term relationships with high-profile men including George J. Mitchell, Bill Richardson, Donald Trump, Les Wexner, Bill Clinton, Alan Dershowitz, and Prince Andrew, Duke of York.  I've heard Dershowitz speak of this.  He was Epstein was only a client, and Dershowitz is quite angry that people woul think otherwise.                                

Donald Trump- 54 years old  with his then-girlfriend, Melania

 Knauss, now his wife, and Jeffrey Epstein-47 years old, with Ghislaine Maxwell at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., in February 2000. (Davidoff Studios Photography/Getty Images)

He also surrounded himself with beautiful, young women. "I've known Jeff for fifteen years," Donald Trump told New York Magazine in 2002. "Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side."  

Note that he went with Ghislaine Maxwell for a long time.  Born in France, Maxwell was raised in Oxford. In the 1980s she attended Balliol College, Oxford, and then became a prominent member of London's social scene. Maxwell worked for her father, Robert Maxwell, until his death in 1991; she then moved to New York City, where she continued living as a socialite and had a relationship with Epstein.

Robert Maxwell, 1989  at the Global Economic Panel in Amsterdam 

Robert Maxwell, her father,  was born into a poor Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish family in the small town of Slatinské Doly, in the region of Carpathian Ruthenia, Czechoslovakia (now Solotvyno, Ukraine). His parents were Mechel Hoch and Hannah Slomowitz. He had six siblings. In 1939, the area was reclaimed by Hungary. Most of Maxwell's family was murdered in Auschwitz after Hungary was occupied in 1944 by Nazi Germany, but years earlier he had escaped to France. In May 1940, he joined the Czechoslovak Army in exile in Marseille.  

Yet he was a marked man.  Ian Robert Maxwell MC (born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch; 10 June 1923 – 5 November 1991) was a Czechoslovak-born British media proprietor, member of parliament (MP), suspected spy, and fraudster. Maxwell led a flamboyant lifestyle, living in Headington Hill Hall in Oxford, from which he often flew in his helicopter, or sailing in his luxury yacht, the Lady Ghislaine. He was litigious and often embroiled in controversy. In 1989, Maxwell had to sell successful businesses, including Pergamon Press, to cover some of his debts. In 1991, his body was discovered floating in the Atlantic Ocean, having apparently fallen overboard from his yacht. He was buried in Jerusalem.

Over the years, Epstein had many girlfriends, but ultimately never married. Here's what to know about his romantic relationships. Sources revealed Jeffrey said in 2014 that if he ever married, it would be to Celina Dubin, who was 19 years old at the time, according to New York Post. However, Celina and Jeffrey weren't actually dating or in a romantic relationship. She was also the daughter of Jeffrey's ex-girlfriend Eva Andersson Dubin. Jeffrey and Dubin dated for 11 years starting in 1980, according to The Daily Mail. 

Over the years, Ghislaine Maxwell helped manage his multiple homes and coordinate his social relationships, The New York Times reported. “Ghislaine floated in and out of the house with the keys, and even though Jeffrey told me they didn’t have a sexual relationship, she’d drop under her breath that she was sleeping in his bed from time to time,” one of Epstein's ex-girlfriends told Vanity Fair.

                       

His sex criminal legal legacy may have years to run, says The Guardian.  

Epstein was arrested again on July 6, 2019, on federal charges for the sex trafficking of minors in Florida and New York. He died in his jail cell on August 10, 2019. The medical examiner ruled the death a suicide. Epstein's lawyers have disputed the ruling, and there has been significant public skepticism about the true cause of his death, resulting in numerous conspiracy theories.

 Since Epstein's death precluded the possibility of pursuing criminal charges against him, a judge dismissed all criminal charges on August 29, 2019

Update 9/20/22: Jeffrey could have used the book, mindset by Carol S. Dweck, PhD, who writes about fulfilling one's potential, and Jeffrey had a lot of potential, but it got lost in the middle of his life, going off the main path into something dark.  

Resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/carbyne-raises-56-million-in-series-c-funding-to-modernize-emergency-contact-centers-301619066.html

https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/2019/10/30/post-exclusive-never-before-seen-jeffrey-epstein-biography-surfaces/2210602007/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jews_in_New_York_City

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coney_Island

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Gate,_Brooklyn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_affairs_of_Donald_Trump

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/donald-trump-and-jeffrey-epstein-partied-together-then-an-oceanfront-palm-beach-mansion-came-between-them/2019/07/31/79f1d98c-aca0-11e9-a0c9-6d2d7818f3da_story.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghislaine_Maxwell

https://www.womenshealthmag.com/life/a32686919/was-jeffrey-epstein-married/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maxwell

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condoleezza_Rice