A new chapter opens in the annals of Jewish American sporting achievement. Pausing to reflect on the long list of jokes about the title of the shortest book ever written, we acclaim Ryan Turell, star of the Yeshiva University Maccabees.
The Maccabees — YU’s men’s basketball team — are standing tall in the Atlantic division. Ryan Turell, is standing even taller, as he’s 6ft 7in. Everything is bigger in America, even the Jews.
Turell is an unstoppable bucket-dunker. This season, he’s broken the record for the most points in a YU game, including eight three-pointers, one of them from beyond NBA range. YU have logged their longest unbroken streak yet — they’ve lost one and won 27.
The retired NBA star Amar’e Stoudemire stands a mere 6ft 10in without his black fedora, but he converted to Judaism after retiring from basketball. Since Omri Casspi’s turn with the Sacramento Kings in 2009, several Israeli players have joined the NBA. But if Turell is selected in June’s “draft”, he will be the NBA’s first Orthodox Jew.
YU’s Maccabees should not be confused with YU’s Maccabeats. The Maccabees are inordinately tall sportspersons, the Maccabeats a close-harmony vocal group who formed at YU in 2007, named themselves after the basketball team, and have become the top Orthodox all-male a cappella group.
This might sound a bit niche, and even, among more uncouth readers, evoke more sniggering (very much in the same vein as that Big Book Of Jewish Sports gag), but a cappella is a big deal in American colleges.
It’s a last vestige of the Fifties, when students aspired to adulthood rather than perpetual manchildhood. In those far-off days, undergrads wore tweed, smoked pipes, and grew moustaches. That was before their current regime of wearing flip-flops, smoking pipes of weed and growing moustaches.
Somehow, the barbershop quartet has survived these changes. My local student radio station devotes Sunday afternoons to nonstop close-harmony. The old conventions are all there, but there’s now a beat-boxer and the songs are recent hits. If, like me, you detest all new music, this is a vast improvement. All the overloud modern production is stripped out, and the human voice brought to the fore.
The Maccabeats have long been a fixture in our minivan playlist. Their fame began where most acts end, in parody. In 2010, after three years of singing at Orthodox events in New York City, they recorded Candlelight, a Chanukah-themed take on Taio Cruz’s Dynamite. Like many other things among students, the track went viral.
Within a year, the Maccabeats were performing at the Knesset and at the White House. The reworkings of pop hits kept coming. They turned All About That Bass, Meghan Trainor’s ode to her own bottom, into the Chanukah anthem All About That Neis. They turned Ed Sheeran’s Castle On The Hill into Candles on the Sill. They changed the lyrics of Alexander Hamilton so it was about Judah the Maccabee.
If there was a NBA league in this stuff, the Maccabeats would be world champions. They are more than parodists. Their music is really a form of kiruv, outreach to their fellow Jews. They take the throwaway, often crass tunes of modern pop and convert them into spiritual inspiration. In this, as in their name and affiliation, they have much in common with Ryan Turell wearing his kippah on the court.
Dominic Green is the editor of the Spectator’s world edition
