It's tournament time once again. For those of you looking for a rooting interest, here are five teams with ties to the Jewish basketball diaspora:

1.) Tennessee Volunteers
Legendary goofball Bruce Pearl -- he's famous for wrestling students in a blow-up sumo outfit and showing up for a women's game shirtless and painted in orange -- has turned around the Tennessee men's program. A New England Jew, Pearl was shunned in the late 1980's for tape-recording a recruit telling how another school offered him $80,000 and a new Blazer, and then turning it into the NCAAs. He had to beat the Division II bushes, but took the Southern Indiana Screamin' Eagles to the title before leading the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Panthers to the Sweet Sixteen.

The Volunteers were ranked #1 earlier this summer after a team-bonding trip to a concentration camp, an experience that got Pearl all teary-eyed talking about his distant relatives in the Holocaust on HBO's Real Sports. Pearl is often criticized for his wild antics and bright orange blazer, but give him credit for two things: Dick Vitale trashed him and he managed to humanize Pat Summit for God's sake. I am putting my sheckels where my mouth is and picking UT to win it all in one bracket.

2.) UCLA Bruins
Although the real "Jewish Jordan," Jordan Farmar, is now with the Lakers, the Bruins still have coach Scott Garson. According to JewishJournal.com, Garson's "family loved two things: Judaism and basketball. His mother, Corinne, was president of the Woodland Hills Reform congregation Kol Tikvah, while his father, Lee, is a UCLA alum who coaches youth basketball." The Bruins are one of the favorites this year, thanks to Garson's handling of their stupendous backcourt of Darren Collison, Josh Shipp and Russell Westbrook. For people like me who are always looking for a Catholic angle, know that Garson learned his X's and O's under the ample belly of the great Rick Majerus. And hey ladies, he's single.

3.) Memphis Tigers
What is about the Volunteer State and the Chosen coaches? According to the Memphis Commerical Appeal, coach John Calipari, "a Catholic of Italian heritage, was recently at the Anshei Sphard-Beth El Emeth Congregation speaking to an audience of Orthodox Jews about community and charity and his new favorite theme of bouncing back from personal and career misfortune." Sure, some believe Calipari has a reputation of running a clean fast-break and a dirty program, but if the dude spreads the Tiger love with the Torah, it must mean something. Never forget: It's hard out here for a pimp. Bonus points for Calipari's stumping for Tennessee's 9th District Jewish Congressman, Democrat Steve Cohen.

4.) Duke
Yes, Coach K is undeniably hard to root for, but the #1 name in college hoops (which hasn't won a game in a couple of years, by the by) has a 6'5" Jewish 6th-man former Illinois "Mr. Basketball" known for really strange facial contortions, which means you should definitely-- Oh, who am I kidding? Don't root for Duke; it's like cheering for Bill Kristol.

5.) Special Underdog Pick: American University
First of all, what's more egalitarian and patriotic than American University? After Barack's speech, I think it's clear we're all in this NCAA tournmanet bracket together. Plus, American is the alma mater of the dude who runs the website BlackJew.net (which is exactly what it sounds like.) As Mr. BlackJew himself said:

"when we finally reached this impossible goal of going to the NCAA Tournament it was a dream come true. Win or lose we still made it! AU IS GOING TO THE BIG DANCE. ONCE AN EAGLE ALWAYS AN EAGLE."

Unfortunately, American is playing Tennessee in the first round, but my fellow hoop friends, that is what "One Shining Moment" is all about.

Go Marquette! Nobody call me for three weeks.

• It would be facile (not to mention condescending) for me to comment on how soul-deadening it is to see Auschwitz firsthand, but I did want to share a couple of tidbits from our excellent, somber, forthright tour guide. After explaining that these weren’t my views, but that rather I had “written about Holocaust deniers” (scholarly, no…but still technically accurate), I asked if they’d ever encountered any on the tour. She said no, but added that there had been a couple of teenagers with a Scandinavian school group who espoused Nazi ideals. They were immediately sent home because it is illegal in Poland to express those views. Apparently, a professor was even fired from his job for translating a David Irving book, even after making it clear these weren’t his beliefs in the introduction. Considering the horrific immediacy of the surroundings, the free speech question never entered my mind, but I did find one thing the tour guide told me interesting. She said, “We aren’t bothered by the Holocaust deniers. We are scared by those who sympathize with the Nazis, especially amongst the young, because it is easy to influence their minds.” I guess it makes some sense, but it was striking to hear that Holocaust deniers are no big deal while walking alongside the Birkenau train tracks.

• Hot Dogs: at auschwitzI was stunned to learn that, thanks in large part to the efforts of those who been imprisoned there, the camps were opened to the public a mere two years after the liberation. Two years. So, let’s recap: In a poor, desolate country, physically destroyed by World War II, people who were left with nothing after surviving the Nazi nightmare got Auschwitz up and running by 1947 to bear witness to the atrocities they had just experienced. I think you know where I’m going with this…I realize it’s not apples-to-apples, but it sure makes the seven years of Ground Zero squabbles seem awfully small.

• Casting no aspersions on fellow tourists, but it is very strange to watch people take photos of themselves in front of the crematorium.
  

• They sell hot dogs at the Auschwitz snack bar. I’ll let that sink in for a moment... In fact, the only food available for lunch that can quickly be wolfed down before the bus to Birkenau is the hot dog. I can’t say with 100% certainty, but both my wife and I thought it was a traditional frankfurter. And we do enjoy our frankfurters. By the way, the hot dog? Delicious. It was served on this crunchy-on-the-outside-chewy-on-the-inside roll, it came with a homemade relish of big chunks of pickled onions and cabbage, and was topped off with killer tangy ketchup. From the center of Krakow, the Auschwitz tour is an all-day deal, so the sale of nourishing non-kosher concentration camp hot dogs sure seemed like one final twist of the knife.

• Krakow’s old Jewish quarter, Kazimierz has been reborn since the fall of the Commies. It’s bustling with coffee shops, restaurants, hipster hotels, bookstores, boutiques, etc., and we were told that a lot of the entrepreneurs are the grandchildren of those who were persecuted by the Nazis. That seemed reassuring. However, we stopped into an art gallery with an exhibit--a modern art black-and-white-photos-covered-in-spray-paint collage kind of thing. The picture in the window had two topless women, and the head of a bald man had been pasted over one of the ample-bosomed bodies. The proprietor told us it was a nationalistic Polish priest with a popular radio program (probably Father Tadeusz Rydzyk) who shovels “anti-Semitic propaganda.” This was not reassuring.

• Ostoya Palace Hotel: where the maids are hotWord on the Euro street is that Krakow is the hotspot for stag parties and that the town has a thriving sex trade. I didn’t notice an excess of strip bars or sex shops, but then again, we spent most of our time in the Medieval castles-and-churches section. After all, it’s an anniversary trip, and I’m old. What I can attest to, is that Krakow has an incredibly high number of beautiful, beautiful, beautiful women, including our maid at the Ostoya Palace hotel. Fellas, the dollar still owns the zloty, so you may want to take that into consideration before booking Vegas this summer.

• If you are the kind of person who can power through a full day of sightseeing, I recommend taking the Wieliczka Salt Mines tour as rejuvenation after getting your spirit crushed at Auschwitz. Basically, you walk down a labyrinth of wooden stairs (reaching some 440 feet) into a massive mine filled with statues made of salt, walls made of salt (I licked them for proof) and an enormous chapel with a giant chandelier that hosts weddings, concerts and Sunday mass. There’s even a salt lake where a bunch of drunken Austrians capsized a boat and suffocated to death a century ago. There’s also a health center on the grounds for the traditional salt bath. Salt isn’t like coal or copper: It's good for the system, and great for the lungs. Plus, it’s always a balmy 55-60 degrees in the mine, so the dudes that toiled down there were healthier than the general populace. The Nazis took Wieliczka over and used it as a munitions factory (I think that’s what our guide said) and it was the only time slave labor was ever used in the mine. During World War II, people from the nearby Plaszow camp were brought over to work in the mines. Consider this if you will: you’re a Jewish factory worker reassigned to Wieliczka in say 1940. You bust your hump in the mines for the next few years, which ironically helps with the old lifespan. And for argument’s sake, let’s assume you’re down in the middle of the Earth without much access to the goings on at the extermination camps a few miles away. I’m not saying they’re lucky; they were slaves to the Nazis, after all. However, the mine job with the clean air and the comfortable temperature had to lead to one hell of a whopping guilt complex in the Krakow daylight.

• Oldsmobil: krakow's american-themed car barI lied. Salt mines won’t do the trick. Might I suggest the “Wodka Sampler” at the U.S. car-themed bar, Oldsmobil. I don’t know what happened to the “e,” but the six shots are smooth and clean. And the owner does a great impression of an American that didn’t sound like any American I’ve ever met. Much needed jocularity, though. Na zdrowie!

• One last note for my fellow American travelers. We aren’t as popular these days, as I was reminded late one night in the land of my ancestors. A sousy Irish bride told me she had never been to “the States” and didn’t care if she ever did. Then she snarled, “Thanks for George W. Bush.” And this was the day after she got married. And this was after a friendly half-hour chat with her husband about New York City architecture and the Philadelphia Eagles. And the Irish are suppose love us. (Note to the County Cork gent who inquired: No, Bill Clinton is not generally regarded as one of the five greatest Presidents of all time.)

So, to the kid from the Oregon private school on the World War II trip--the one in the Jewish bookstore in Kazimierz who insisted on hectoring the young sales girl with variations of, “When the Nazis came, why didn’t they just pretend they weren’t Jews?” You know who you are. The clerk patiently responded about the importance of religion, the poor uneducated populace, the powerlessness… She was being sincere. You were being a dick. That ain’t helping our cause. From one former punk teen to another, you’re better than that.

And she was hot. You sniveling little fuck.

From Cracovia with love,

Patrick J. Sauer

Related: The Connoisseur's Guide to Internet Anti-Semitism

The Magic City: Billings, MontanaOne of the great, underrated things about living in New York is meeting all those people who come from everywhere else. Not that Gotham natives aren’t a barrel of monkeys, but it’s cool that someone always seems to have a different frame-of-reference, a different slice of life about where they came from, which is my way of explaining why I am sharing this story about my hometown, Billings, Montana.

Growing up, I always knew I was going to move on from the Magic City and live in urban environs that provided access to professional sports, even if the Knicks don’t count. I wasn’t one of those “I gotta’ get the hell out of here” kids, I had a great time and loved coming of age in Billings. During the seventies and eighties, it was a laid-back town, seemingly equal parts live-and-live and frontier stoicism. I was naïve, of course, but you didn’t really hear racial slurs that I soon found in the big city. Partially, this is because we didn’t have a large population of “the other” (and I am sure Native Americans would beg to differ), but in my little world people were generally friendly and I kid you not, I never heard the anti-everybody-else vitriol that I soon found commonplace. I remember my mom once said that part of the reason she didn’t want us raised in her Irish Philadelphia enclave was because she didn’t want us exposed to that sort of ugliness.

I went off to college at Marquette University and was shocked to find out that a good number of white suburban kids used the N-word in everyday conversation (I told you I was naïve.) It really bothered me, and although it wasn’t the majority of kids, I was still astounded that so many people my age seemed to view the world through the lens of the Dixiecrat South. I moved to New York City in 1993 and lived/worked in the Bronx as a member of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. It amazed me how much of an isolated afterthought the kids in the Bronx were and how little respect the entire community earned (again, naïve, but getting better.) Not that Andrews Avenue was filled with choirboys (although there were more people who truly sought salvation in the neighborhood churches than I saw in 16 years of Catholic school), but I was still taken aback when a cop pulled me over, asked me where I was buying drugs, then mocked the fact that I chose to live amongst “these people.”

  Christmas of 1993, I headed back to Billings and learned that there had been a string of race-baiting events throughout the year perpetrated by a group of white supremacists. It started with some racist fliers on car windows at an MLK Day celebration. Other crimes included the destruction of some headstones at a Jewish cemetery, harassing phone calls to Jewish leaders, skinheads ominously standing in the back of a mass at the small African Methodist church and finally spray-painted swastikas and “Die, Indian, Die” on a local woman’s home. The town reacted quickly, as 100 locals, including members of the Painters Union, got together at dawn one morning and repainted her house.

The reaction spurred the thugs to step it up. They threw a piece of cinder block through the window of a six-year-old Jewish boy’s room because had the gall to set up a celebratory menorah. The boy’s parents contacted the Billings Gazette, and the editors decided to utilize the community in fighting back. They printed a full-page menorah and urged locals to hang in their homes and businesses. Hundreds followed suit, which led to more anti-Semitic vandalism. If memory serves, they even threw a brick through the window of my alma mater, Billings Central Catholic High.

The community takes action: Not In Our Town Billings, however, didn’t back down. Police Chief Wayne Inman urged more and more citizens to put up the menorahs, saying, "Visible signs of support for the Jewish community have to increase, not decrease. For every vandalism that is made, I hope that 10 other people put menorahs in their windows." At its peak, some 10,000 citizens had menorahs in their windows, more than 10% of the population. Could you imagine if one million New Yorkers had united in a cause like this after one of the notorious incidents of the time?

I remember walking home from midnight mass on a wintry night and seeing all of the Christmas lights, which made the menorahs glow all that much brighter. My parents and my three brothers took the long way home and house-after-house had taken the time to hang up a page from the newspaper in solidarity with the local Jewish community, which I am guessing might have been 1,000, tops. We took note of the ones hanging in the houses of our Jewish neighbors, the Weissmans and the Fleets (more or less the only Jews I knew until I moved to New York.)

It was incredibly moving. I was one of those staunchly Gen X kids, skeptical of what the “power of the people” could really accomplish and how things never change. I was wrong.

For one holiday season, Billings was the most amazing place on Earth.

As the website says: The community made an unmistakable declaration: "Not in Our Town." Since then, no serious acts of hate violence have been reported in Billings.

All these years later, it is still one of my favorite Christmas memories, even if I will probably never call Billings home again.

And it’s a story I love telling the sophisticated urbanites this time of year.

* * *

Stopping the hate: Citizens put these in their windows Unfortunately, there is one ugly dénouement to the story.

In its infinite sappy wisdom, Hollywood decided to turn the inspirational story of community activism into a schlocky movie-of-the-week. For starters, they decided to call it Not in This Town, perhaps because they didn’t want to pay royalties to the “Not in Our Town” movement that sprung up to help communities respond to acts of hate. Or, maybe they didn’t do their homework.

Either way, it’s more or less what you’d expect on the Lifetime network. Adam Arkin plays the big city Jewish doctor who moves to Billings to get away from the urban ugliness and be left alone to fly-fish in peace. Kathy Baker plays his shiksa wife who can’t believe this is happening in Utopian Billings. She won’t be denied and starts meeting the uplifting minorities culled right out of Hollywood P.C. casting 101. The simple black house of worship becomes a packed mega-church with a choir right out of Forrest Gump, the native Americans no longer live on the poverty-stricken Crow reservation and invite her to commune with the spirit world or some such, and of course, the coup de grace that brings Arkin out of his shell, is when she finds a Holocaust survivor who tells of what happens when communities look the other way.

All nice in theory, but in practice, it was a simplistic Oprah-friendly treatment that doesn’t do much to honor the incredible events in the first place.

And I am pretty sure they filmed it in California, because Lord knows, Billings didn’t need any of that residual Hollywood income.

The only thing that kept it from making viewers throw a brick through the television is the unintentional comedy of the actor chosen to play the leader of the white supremacist group. You guessed it, Ed Begley, Jr. Watching a man who powers his house with his own waste gather people around a campsite (they sit on hay bales, natch) and seriously discuss “elements” destroying Billings provided enough comic relief that Not In This Town is actually worth a watch.

If the average Nazi skinhead were as frightening as Begley in his L.L. Bean getup…well, there wouldn’t have been much need for the newspaper menorahs in the first place.

* * *

My hope for you this season is that someday everyone gets to experience a powerful moment of community activism at some point in his or her life. I guarantee it will move your spirit.

Oh, and if Hollywood comes calling, you simply say: not in our town.

Happy holidays.

p.s. Here is the website of the Not in Our Town organization.