Describing the View From the Sideline

FRANKLIN FOER’S latest book is a giant game of Jewish geography. An almost indecent number of the 50 writers he and his co-editor, Marc Tracy, recruited to write profiles for “Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame” are friends and sometime colleagues. And the panel discussion held recently at the Union Square Barnes & Noble, just a few hundred feet from where Emma Goldman once roused crowds in Yiddish, felt kind of like a bar mitzvah. The Collection: A New Fashion App for the iPad A one-stop destination for Times fashion coverage and the latest from the runways. Download It From the App Store Follow Us on Twitter Follow @NYTimesfashion for fashion, beauty and lifestyle news and headlines. David Remnick was kibitzing, and his Cosell imitation killed. Mr. Tracy got a big laugh simply by saying of a fabled Jewish basketball team, the Dizzy Izzies, “They were very short, because you know.” A sampling of the names that appear in “Jewish Jocks”: Bimstein, Rothstein, Epstein, Goldstein, two Goldbergs, two Greenbergs, Berkovic, Remnick, Lithwick, Leibovich, Lieberman, Leibovitz, Arnovitz, Shulevitz, Spitz, Plotz. Surprisingly, only two of the book’s writers are named Jonathan, one of them Mr. Foer’s younger brother Jonathan Safran Foer, who wrote a profile of the mentally disturbed chess player Bobby Fischer (the book defines “jock” very liberally) and who sat beside his brother at Barnes & Noble, in a beard that was beyond rabbinical, approaching Unabomber. When Franklin Foer, 37 and bespectacled, is not engaging in tribal celebrations, he works a day job as the editor of The New Republic — a role that looks considerably sunnier than it did his first time around. Like the past New Republic editors Michael Kinsley and Hendrik Hertzberg, Mr. Foer has left, then returned to this position. During Mr. Foer’s initial stint as editor, from 2006 to 2010, he worked under three different owners. The magazine’s circulation had declined by almost 40 percent in the previous four years, and he had to contend with budget cuts and a boss widely viewed as difficult (Martin Peretz, who bought The New Republic in 1974). Mr. Foer called it a “preservation mission.” “But it’s a whole new world now,” Mr. Foer said. As of March, the controlling owner is Chris Hughes, a baby-faced Facebook co-founder who made his first zillion at 23, directed the 2008 Obama campaign’s social media operation, and is now injecting real money and ambition into The New Republic, hoping to propel it from the ranks of little magazines to compete with titles like The New Yorker and New York. (Mr. Hughes, a New Yorker, has opened and populated an office in the Flatiron district and promised a more pronounced New York voice, though the headquarters remain in Washington.) One of his first acts as publisher and editor in chief was to rehire Mr. Foer, and together they’ve undertaken a makeover that will culminate in a rebirth of the magazine and its Web and mobile components in late January. Mr. Foer’s Washington office exhibits a distinct secular-Jewish sensibility, if a less borscht belt-y one than he shows in “Jewish Jocks.” When Louis Brandeis was nominated to be the first Jewish Supreme Court justice, in 1916, the Boston Brahmin establishment tried “to do him in,” Mr. Foer said. “So the magazine put together this diagram showing how all the people who were campaigning against Brandeis were interconnected by their clubs and their set of very WASPy incestuous relationships.” Despite the editor’s entreaties, The New Republic’s owner caved to social pressures and spiked it. The diagram and a pleading letter from the editor to the owner, both now framed, hang on Mr. Foer’s wall. Brandeis, an anti-monopolist and crusader for social justice, figures prominently in the book that Mr. Foer has been working on, a history of liberalism. Brandeis is also a great hero to Mr. Foer’s father, Albert Foer, a Brandeis graduate who in 1998 founded the American Antitrust Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for vigorous anti-monopoly enforcement. “My father orchestrated dinnertime discussions about politics, ethics and the world,” Mr. Foer said. But he also taught his sons “how to tease and be teased.” Today, around the dinner table at his Cleveland Park house with his wife, Abby Greensfelder, a television producer, and their two young daughters, he said, “I still put him on speaker phone at dinnertime so that I can lean on him to answer my kids’ most challenging questions.” Mr. Foer’s mother, Esther Safran Foer, spent her career as a publicist, but since 2007 she has thrown herself into transforming the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue, in Washington’s Chinatown, into what he called “a 92nd Street Y for D.C.” While both of his parents claimed their true callings late in life, their sons have distinguished themselves by their early achievements. Mr. Foer, who attended Columbia, first became editor of The New Republic at age 31. Besides “Jewish Jocks,” he has written “How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization.” A review in The New York Times called it “such an eccentric, fascinating exposé of a world most of us know nothing about that his inability to prove his central thesis seems almost irrelevant.” Since graduating from Princeton, his brother Jonathan has published three well-regarded books, starting at age 25: “Everything Is Illuminated,” “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” (both literary novels that became movies) and “Eating Animals” (a personal exposé of factory farming). He also has an experimental streak, taking on projects like a libretto and a rethinking of the Passover Haggadah. It would be enough, as the Haggadah says, if there were only two wildly accomplished Foer brothers, but there’s a third one. Soon after graduating from Yale, Joshua Foer wrote an article for Slate about the USA Memory Championship, prompting a book proposal, a bidding war, a reported advance of $1.25 million, a movie deal and the raw resentment of Web sites like Gawker. As part of his research, Joshua Foer entered and trained for the USA Memory Championship, and — you already know this — won. The book, “Moonwalking With Einstein,” was an instant sensation, which, considering the author’s heritage, is a bit of an anticlimax.