RISHON LEZION, Israel — On my first trip to Israel three years ago, I was leaving the Holocaust Memorial when a passerby in the parking lot yelled out, “Go Yankees!”
I was wearing my Red Sox hat at the time. It seems that the Greatest Rivalry in All of Sports follows you anywhere, even ten thousand miles away from the East Coast and outside the somber remembrance of the greatest massacre in human history.
[Conversely, the opposite happened when I was traveling in Egypt. Near the Sphinx, I saw a guy wearing a Yankees hat, and I yelled, “Go Red Sox!” He gave me a puzzled look. “Not American?” I asked. “Uh, no,” he replied in a German accent. “Never mind,” I replied. Evidently, he was one of those foreigners who wears a Yankees hat only because the team is supposedly synonymous with the United States. Talk about good branding.]
The baseball playoffs are occuring this month, and the Red Sox and Yankees have clinched the AL Wild Card and AL East respectively. But the games will be difficult to watch — night ones start between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. here. Still, I will be excited to see the Red Sox beat the Angels (as they always do in the playoffs) and then face the Evil Empire. But I will need a lot of קפה.
