Steve Sailer writes: Some of the Soviet Jews eventually bounced from Israel to Los Angeles.
The first Israelis I can recall meeting in Los Angeles were in late 1980. There was an Israeli fighter pilot who competed with Martin Rothblatt for being the most arrogant man in MBA school. And there was an Israeli three man basketball team that started a fight at Valley College over whose turn it was on the court. Their leader tried to headbutt in the face of the Valley Guy who was patiently explaining the local customs to the newcomers.
* I first started noticing the arrival of Israelis in the San Fernando Valley when one tried to headbutt a local at a 3-3 basketball game while the local was trying to make the local custom of which team gets to play next.
* Once upon a time, ten All-American boys were happily playing basketball at their neighborhood park. One day two newcomers to the neighborhood asked them if they could join them. “Sure” the boys responded and so the game proceeded with the newcomers rotating in.
Then one day the original ten boys showed up to play only to find that the two newcomers were on the court before them. When the ten asked to join in, the two said “Let us finish our game first”. And so they did.
A few days later the same thing occurred but this time, when the two said, “Let us finish our game first”, they added “and we’re playing to a hundred”. By the time the two had played to one hundred, it was dinner time and the original All-American boys had to go home without having gotten to play at all.
This was repeated the next day and the ten boys got very angry and threatened the two with violence. The two boys ran home and the ten got to play their game.
The next day, the two boys showed up with their fathers in tow. Their fathers confronted the ten and told them that if they didn’t share the court equally with their two sons, then they would find themselves in a different kind of court where they would be facing charges of assault and discrimination against a minority. “After all”, they argued, “two is less than ten and twoness must be protected from assimilation by ten lest it become just another member of twelveness and in doing so, lose it’s unique identity as two.”
The boys didn’t understand this argument but did understand the threat of legal action and so they consented to share time on the court equally with the two. And so the two groups alternated days on which they could play.
All was fine until one day the ten showed up to play only to find the two occupying the court with four other complete strangers. “What’s this?” asked the tens, “Today is our day to use the court”.
The twos responded, “Yes, but, now there are others and you must share. The fours deserve their chance to play too. After all, you didn’t build this court. Today is the four’s turn. You come back tomorrow. Even if you don’t like this new arrangement, that’s tough because if you don’t consent we’ll bring our fathers back and they will sue you.”
And so the court was shared between the three groups.
Until one day when the ten were to play and showed up only to find the twos there with a new group of six strangers. The twos presented the same arguments and the four groups were accommodated just as the three had been.
But as time had passed, the ten couldn’t help but notice that the courts had begun to suffer. First, the nets were gone from the goals, leaving just the bare hoops. The area around the court which had at first been green grass, pleasant to sit on between games, became littered with cast off paper and wrappings. This distressed the ten who began leaving signs asking the others not to litter and such. The signs too were defaced.
Eventually the rims themselves were bent down so that they no longer conformed to standard basketball convention. The court was littered not just with paper, but with broken glass from liquor bottles which made it dangerous to play on. One day the ten arrived to find the burned out hulk of a car sitting square in the middle of the court. When they pushed it to one side, they found that the pavement underneath had melted and broken up, making the court in that area undribbleable.
The ten were dismayed to see the destruction of what had been there nice neighborhood play area. They called a meeting with all the other groups but no one else bothered to attend. So, giving up on the others, the ten with their parents spent one of their play days replacing the hoops, nets and picking up the litter. Barrels were provided for trash.
The next week, when the ten arrived to play, they were dismayed to find that the court was a mess again. The barrel, still smoking, had been used as a burn barrel. Broken glass lay on the ground and the nets were hanging in tatters. They left dejected.
When the ten told their parents what had occurred, their parents said, “No problem, we’ll just build a new court elsewhere, where you can play as you did in the old days”. Which they did.
One of the parents had space in the alley behind his garage which would be perfect for a court. A backboard and hoop were erected, debris swept away and the ten boys resumed playing happily.
Then one day, two strange boys approached them and asked if they could join in……
