Jewish Athletes Shine at Paris Olympics
Jewish athletes from the United States, Israel, and Australia earned 18 medals and Team Israel enjoyed success as well.
It may take years, even decades, to fully appreciate the spectacular feats accomplished by Jewish and Israeli Olympians in the 2024 Paris Games. It was an Olympics in which Jewish athletes from the United States, Israel, and Australia earned 18 medals (six golds, seven silvers, five bronzes). Only 15 other nations took home more hardware from this year’s Summer Olympics. For Israel in particular, the 2024 Paris Games goes down in the record books as the country’s most glorious Olympics: its grand total of seven medals (three of which were earned on a single day, Aug. 3) represented a high watermark in Israeli Olympic history.
While the stories of the Israeli men’s soccer team, Claire Weinstein, and Jessica and Noemie Fox were chronicled in past editions of the AJT, the following world-class athletes are among the dozens of Jewish and Israeli Olympians who represented their home countries with distinction … while millions around the world were watching.
Amit Elor
Making her Olympic debut, U.S. wrestler Amit Elor, 20, didn’t just win a gold medal in the women’s 68-kilogram weight class division. When she knocked off Kyrgyzstan’s Meerim Zhumanazarova 3-0 in the final at Arena Champ-de-Mars earlier this month, Elor became the all-time youngest U.S. gold medalist in wrestling, male or female, and continued a remarkable personal streak of not having dropped a single match, at any weight class, since the Under-17 World Championships in 2019.
Elor, the daughter of Israeli immigrants and the youngest of six siblings who took up wrestling when she was a preschooler watching her older brother’s practices, surely would have competed in the Tokyo Games but by virtue of her Jan. 1, 2004, birthday, missed the cutoff for the 2020 Summer Olympics by a single day. And while she certainly made the most of what promises to be the first of many Olympic experiences, her journey to the world’s grandest stage for athletic competition was rife with great tumult as one of her brothers was murdered in 2018 while her dad passed away in 2022.
More recently, following the Oct. 7 attacks, Elor, who has a considerable social media presence, put up a few apolitical messages meant to convey optimism. Such seemingly innocuous posts were met with a rash of antisemitic remarks and even death threats, prompting her to refrain from articulating her heartfelt messages on said platform.
“I was shocked by the Oct. 7 brutal Hamas attack and deeply saddened and concerned about everything that followed,” Elor told Israeli news source, Ynet. “The enormous pain, suffering, and loss is unbearable. If my wrestling at the Olympics can bring even just a little joy in Israel, it will make all the hard work and sacrifices worth it and extra special. I am an American proudly wrestling for the U.S., but in my heart, I am also wrestling for Israel.”
Nevertheless, Elor, who in the wake of the Olympics has felt more empowered to speak out against antisemitism via social media, persevered to make Jewish sports history by establishing herself as the world’s greatest freestyle wrestler in the 68-kilogram weight division.
Tom Reuveny
Unlike the narrative surrounding Elor, the Israel Olympic Committee harbored no such lofty expectations for Israeli windsurfer Tom Reuveny. Yet the 24-year-old Rosh Ha’Ayin native ended up earning a gold medal in the men’s windsurfing iQFoil event, which by his estimation, was the first time he had won a competition since the World Youth Championship in 2017. Reuveny, coached by Israel’s first gold medalist, Gal Fridman, also a windsurfing champion, stayed the course amidst rapidly changing wind conditions to eclipse Australia’s Grae Morris and Luuc van Opzeeland from the Netherlands for the top prize.
Speaking at a press conference after arriving home from the Olympics at Ben Gurion Airport, Reuveny acknowledged that the ongoing war was on his brain during his finest moment in the competition.
“I really remember myself, just before the deciding final race, I thought about the whole State of Israel, I knew that the gold would not just be for me,” he said. “There are so many soldiers who have been called together to protect us, and thanks to them I am here right now.
“I want to offer a warm embrace to the families of the fallen [soldiers], that also thanks to them I’m even standing here and thanks to them we were even able to go to this Olympics.”
In what turned out to be a banner event for Israel, Reuveny’s teammate, Sharon Kantor, 21, took home a silver medal in the women’s windsurfing event.
Jackie Dubrovich and Maia Weintraub
The gold medal-winning U.S. women’s foil team had a vibrant Jewish presence as Jackie Dubrovich and Maia Weintraub comprised half of this year’s squad. After reaching the semifinals in the last five world championships and getting silver in the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, the United States women’s foil fencers won the program’s first-ever Olympic gold in Paris by beating Italy, 45-39, on Aug. 1.
While the Paris Games marked the inaugural Olympic run for Weintraub, who deferred her final year at Princeton University to prepare, the gold medal was especially sweet for Dubrovich, a former student-athlete at Columbia University who recently stepped aside from her day job as a marketing account strategist to train, as she was part of a U.S. team that fell just short of medaling during the Tokyo Summer Games in 2021. Furthermore, Dubrovich, ranked 11th in the world by the International Fencing Federation (FIE), was able to shake off a disappointing exit in the round of 32 during the individual foil competition earlier in the week.
It’s interesting to note that at least for America, fencing remains an Olympic sport that has an exceptionally high participation rate among Jewish athletes: including Dubrovich and Weintraub, six of the 20 members on the U.S. team are Jewish or belong to Jewish families while legendary Olympic U.S. coach Yury Gelman also happens to be Jewish.
comments