State of Israel

When my family moved from Pasadena to Thousand Oaks, in December 1989, one of the first activities that my father led my younger brother, Noah, and I to was CYBA, the Conejo Youth Basketball Association. Though taller than Noah, I never possessed the fluid physical dexterity that so gracefully defined his young sporting life.

I was, frankly, a lanky nerd, and as such inclined toward bookish things, a high center of gravity, and a general lack of cohesive on-court ability. I tended to play defense well, and sit on the bench a good deal of the time.

Noah, however, even at an extremely young age, proved himself agile and gifted with that point-guard leadership that the great NBA guards like Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, and Kobe Bryant seem to always take for granted. Noah, of course, was much younger, much shorter, and much whiter, but his skills placed him among the top players in the league, for his age bracket.

Not long after our first season, Noah was jettisoned on a track of being picked in first round after tryouts, and in suburban Ventura county, there are few things that carry more parental cache than a well-positioned young athlete. Noah's CYBA coach Bob Israel was one of the first outside our immediate family to notice Noah's skills, and selected him to play on his team, alongside his own son, Ryan, and the two made for fine teammates, with nascent ball-handling, shooting, and offensive skills.

Bob was less of a coach, and more of an older teammate. He had a terrific sense of humor and a vaguely New Yorky, what I now know to be kind of Jewish-y, cadence to his speech that made nicely for telling off-color jokes when parents were out of ear-shot. Bob became very much a mentor to Noah, who spent a great deal of time playing Nintendo, collecting baseball cards, and practicing basketball outdoors under Bob's "supervision." More than a few times, I tagged along, and laughed wildly as Bob mock-teased me about my name, calling me Zachariah (he pronounced it Zach-uh-REE-uh) with the diarrhea.

Bob would launch into these elaborate, imaginative scenarios in which I, Zachariah, was cursed with said diarrhea and had to charge headlong into awkward situations in order to relieve myself of my affliction. When you're eleven years old, there are few things funnier than an adult who freely bandies about the word diarrhea, let along one gifted with humor who can work said word into personalized jokes at your expense.

Bob was very easily my first childhood idol. This stemmed mainly from the fact that my own father, the elementary school principal, would rarely break from his professional authoritarian poise, save the few times Noah and I overheard him shouting at the television during Los Angeles Laker games. Bob was a breath of fresh air, an oversized child with adult wit who had no trouble reclaiming his pre-adolescent roots in the company of kids.

To this day, strangers seem determined to place me as a native New Yorker, based on the cadence of my speech. I've long since embraced my bookishness, and tend to speak with rapid-fire precision with a subtle hint of something Eastern about my lilt. I am not, as a point of fact and despite my Old Testament name, Jewish, and was actually born in Pasadena, CA but when I hear these remarks, I can't help but be reminded of Bob Israel, that big kid, who gave my brother and I our first introduction to genuine, ad lib humor.

I've since lived in New York City, found it quite to my liking, and keep up with a number of Jewish friends, in both East and West Coasts. My first two girlfriends, at age 16, were both Jewish, and I consistently seem to gravitate to the films of the Coen brothers, the New Yorker magazine, fiction by Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, & Jonathan Safran Foer, and virtually any film with Natalie Portman. In short, Bob turned the key to the door of a realm that for me never stopped developing.