Name five famous Jewish athletes. I dare you.

No cheating, no googling, and no asking the people sitting next to you.

“That’s going to be really tough,” laughs sophomore Greg Cohen, an attackman on Harvard’s lacrosse team and a Bar-Mitzvahed Jew.

He thinks a moment, then smiles. He has the answer.

“The Maccabees were good athletes,” Cohen says. “They beat the whole Assyrian army with, like, three [people].”

Sitting next to him is Michael Berg, a sophomore defensive tackle on the football team and, like Cohen, also Jewish—though you might not deduce the latter from Berg’s 6’2, 250 lb. frame.

“There just aren’t many Jews in professional sports,” he says, nodding in approval of the Maccabees suggestion.

Sure, you’ve got legends like Sandy Koufax and Hank Greenberg and Mark Spitz—the token Chosen Athletes often evoked, quite indignantly, at the suggestion that the Jewish culture and the athletic culture might not go hand-in-hand—but the list does not continue far beyond these names.

Instead, says Berg, when you think of a clichéd Jew, “you think of the businessman, the lawyer, the [doctor].

“In the professional fields,” he stresses. But not on the professional fields.

And popular culture sternly reinforces this notion.

Take, for example, a 2005 episode of South Park—entitled “Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina,” for reasons beyond the dominion of this column—in which young Kyle Broflovski travels to the All-State Basketball Tryouts at the Denver Convention Center, announcing that “trying out for the All-State team has been my dream for years!”

“This is ridiculous,” his friend Cartman groans. “Jews can’t play basketball.”

And sure enough, when the feeble, weedy Kyle takes the court, he faces only strapping African-Americans—twice his size, each and every one, and far more athletically inclined.

“Look kid,” the coach tells Kyle, “you’ve got great skills and a great attitude, but you’re just not physically built for the game.”