Ping! How Jews turned the table on the game Howard Jacobson calls chess in shorts - The Jewish Chronicle

The stellar table table-playing of Jewish Hollywood star Timothée Chalamet in the new movie Marty Supreme is dominating the headlines. Showing in cinemas from Boxing Day, and already tipped for Oscars, the film is inspired by the late Jewish ping-pong titan Marty Reisman – and it’s a reminder of just how successful Jews have been in the sport.

Known as the “The Needle” for his slim frame and sharp wit, New York-born Reisman started his career as a hustler in Manhattan and rose to fame in the early 1950s to become the 1958 and 1960 US Men’s singles champion. He scored 22 major table tennis titles, including two United States Opens and the 1949 English Open, and played movie stars including Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon. He then broke records in 1997 as the 67-year-old winner of the United States National Hardbat Championship.

Marty Supreme’s Jewish director and co-writer Josh Safdie (he wrote the script with Ronald Bronstein) had been interested in table tennis since childhood, when he experienced the “eccentric Jewish immigrant Lower East Side characters” playing the sport at his grandparents’ house. When Safdie’s wife Sara Rossein, the film’s executive producer, brought home a copy of Reisman’s 1974 autobiography in 2018, she ignited the idea for the film.

The same year that Chalamet accepted the role of Marty Mauser, a character based on the legendary Reisman, the actor began intense training in the sport. “He wanted to be like a real [professional] ping-pong player when he started shooting,” the film’s two-time Oscar-nominated cinematographer Darius Khondji told industry magazine Variety of Chalamet’s “months and months” learning the sport. Khondji explained that the preparation was necessary because “you can do anything, any camera tricks you want, but you need to have a core”. He added that in the film the star is surrounded by “some of the greatest real ping-pong champions playing today”.

Reisman, who died in 2012, is often hailed one of the best table tennis players of all time. But the truth is that Jews excelled in the game long before that.

Before the war, most players in Hungary’s top teams were Jewish and in 1926 and in 1928, the Hungarian world championship team comprised two Jewish and two non-Jewish players. But other than those two years, Jewish players alone, most notably Viktor Barna and Miklos Szabados, represented Hungary and between 1927 and 1935, the Hungarian national team won eight world championships. The Austrian team was the only one to beat them – and it too comprised almost all Jewish players. One of the teams players was Richard Bergmann, who won seven World Championship titles, including golds in 1937 and 1939, and, after escaping his country after the Anschluss in 1938, went on to compete for England.

Ping pong pros: Viktor Barna (right) with Miklos Szabados at the table tennis championships in1935Getty Images

The legendary Polish player Alojzy Ehrlich was also a Holocaust survivor, saved because a Nazi guard recognised him. World champion Czech Traute Kleinová also survived Europe’s mass murder of its Jews in the middle of the last century and in 1994 was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. Also commemorated there is Leah Neuberger, who was born in America in 1915 and who died with 29 national titles to her name.

World table tennis champion Richard Bergmann in 1950Getty Images

In fact, it is a game in which women can hold their own with men. Table tennis is a cunning sport which is all about reading the opposition, and while you need to be agile and have good eyesight you don’t need to be big and strong to excel at the game – a nifty flick of the wrist can have your opponent flicking at thin air. This is why older people can beat youngsters and, surely, why Jews excel at the game which the feted novelist Howard Jacobson has described as “a sort of chess in shorts. It is part sport, part game, part conversation.”

All of which he explores in his 1999 novel The Mighty Waltzer about a shy Jewish teenager who finds his identity and escape on the ping-pong table. The book is semi-autobiographical. In the 1950s, Jacobson was one of the top ten junior table tennis players.

The game appeals to the “Jewish imagination”, he has said.

Like many games played throughout the world, table tennis has its provenance in England. It started in the 1880s as after-dinner amusement for upper-class Victorians who would use a line of books for the net, a champagne cork as a ball and cigar-box lids for bats. Its relative newness in the world of sport also meant that Jews did not face the same barriers to playing it as they did in others.

And we continue to play. In 2012, 11-year-old Estee Ackerman, an Orthodox table tennis sensation from Long Island, sat out the final round of the US National Ping Pong Championships in 2012, because it took place on Shabbat, only to win gold the next year. Her inspiring story was captured in the 2024 children’s book Ping-Pong Shabbat.

When Marty Supreme takes over the big screen, and is no doubt showered with awards thereafter, it will be interesting to see if the game that you play with your mind as much as your body inspires more members of the tribe to pick up a starter bat. They cost from around £10.

Marty Supreme is in cinemas from December 26

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Table tennis