Jay Ruderman:

Welcome to All About Change. 

Before we get started, I want to offer congratulations to Kenneth Cole for winning the Morton E. Ruderman Award in Inclusion. Each year, the foundation presents the Morton E. Ruderman Award in Inclusion to an individual who has made an extraordinary contribution to the inclusion of people with disabilities.

The award was named after my father, Mort Ruderman, the founder of the Ruderman Family Foundation. He was a successful entrepreneur, mentor, and proud family man who saw success as the result of help he received from others, and was therefore passionate about providing opportunities for others.

The award recognizes Kenneth’s transformative leadership in confronting mental health stigma and building a national movement for inclusion through storytelling, awareness, and action as the founder of the Mental Health Coalition. Mazeltov Kenneth Cole, for receiving the Morton E. Ruderman Award in Inclusion.

There’s a notion that observant Jews don’t have a chance to be professional athletes.

There are so many stories in our community of kids cut from elite travel teams because they won’t play on Friday night or Saturday, missing out on the chance to show their skills in front of talent evaluators and recruiters. The few athletes who managed to push beyond these scheduling limitations have to think outside the box.

One basketball player would stay in hotels near his Shabbat games and walk to the stadium by himself while his teammates took the bus from the team hotel. AJ Edelman is one of these trailblazing athletes. Without any support offered by the classic Winter Olympic pipeline, he taught himself the dangerous art of skeleton from watching YouTube videos and went on to compete for Israel in the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

Since then, he’s built out the Israeli bobsledding program recruiting athletes and sponsors and pushing his team to reach the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan. AJ’s success as Israel’s first bobsled Olympian has given him a platform to campaign against bullying as an advocate for LGBTQ representation in sport for Israel and for Jews to get involved in high-level athletics without having to face as many roadblocks as he did. AJ, welcome to All About Change.

AJ Edelman:

It’s a pleasure to be here, thank you for having me.

Jay Ruderman:

So we were just talking before we started recording that you are in Whistler, British Columbia.

AJ Edelman:

I am indeed. Whistler is one of three places in North America with eight bobsled tracks.

Jay Ruderman:

So I wanted, let me ask you a couple questions about sports because I’m really interested in that and we’re going to get into the activism in a second, but you started in skeleton and I’ve always wondered, first of all, you’ll tell us what skeleton is, but I’ve always wondered why skeleton and not luge?

AJ Edelman:

Most generally ask why the one. Skeleton and luge differ in terms of the directionality that you’re facing. So skeleton, you’re head first on the equivalent of a lunch tray and on luge, your feet first.

The luge event, many people start when they’re real young. They start eight years old, nine years old. There’s a lot of development that’s based around after-school programs in winter sport, locations like Park City, Utah, Lake Placid, New York, Whistler here, of course. Luge has its game really well put together for the development of youth sliding.

Skeleton and bobsled are known as skill transfer sports, which means if you come from an athletic background and have skills in another sport, you’ll generally be able to apply those to the best of your ability in bobsled or skeleton. So that often means what that translates into is luge doesn’t have a starting component to it, and so more developed track athletes, football athlete, powerful athlete generally comes to bobsled and skeleton and that’s why it’s more attractive to an adult athlete, and I transferred over from my sport of hockey when I was 23 years old.

Jay Ruderman:

Talk about what you went through in order to become good in skeleton. How did you push yourself through some pretty difficult injuries?

AJ Edelman:

So I did skeleton for the audience members who don’t know me. From 2014 to 2018, I did skeleton. I retired from sport for a couple of years to develop the next generation of Israeli sliding athletes.

I went to business school and then I started the current iteration of the bobsled team in 2020. When I came into the sport of skeleton, I was essentially trying to see if the next phase of my life was going to be dedicated to sport or was going to jump into my career. And what motivated the question was a desire to see Jewish sport change for the better.

Jewish sport doesn’t really have an infrastructure in the same way that many other communities make. And for some reason, a lot of people peg that on the sound of issue, but if you actually take a look at the majority of Jews, majority of Jews don’t keep that sort of degree. And so that when the Israeli hockey team have need to play for them in 2014 onward, I took a broader view of the Israeli and Jewish sport landscape and thought, “What would be the value add that I would contribute by playing for Israel as opposed to doing the rest of my career?”

And I realized that there were very few individuals who were even facing this choice from our community, and there had to be a reason for that. And the reason that I pegged was it was just a vicious cycle of people who didn’t see Jewish sports role models, so they didn’t pursue sport and because they didn’t pursue sport, it further depressed things.

And I always draw the comparison of if a kid goes to their parents in the Jewish community and says, “I would really like to become a proficient pianist or a violinist or a teller.” One of those sorts of endeavors, a parent might immediately jump at the opportunity to spend oodles of money and resources and time and effort to get them to even a moderate level of proficiency because they find value in that.

Jay Ruderman:

Yeah.

AJ Edelman:

In sport, the response might be, I think more often than not, what do you see? A future in this? What do you see? You’re going to make this a job? It’s going to be a parnasa like an income? That had to change, and in order to change things. You got to be the change.

So I was looking for a sport in which to be the change to affect some change, to be able to go out into the world and say, “I accomplished something in this area. I know what it means, what value it can bring to the community.” If you go do skeleton, at least if you do it, you do it on your own and you fail on your own.

And when I went to try skeleton, I got the worst scouting report in the history of the training camp that they had put on in Lake Placid and the scouting report was they related it back to Israel and they relate it to me on my 23rd birthday in 2014. And they said, “You’re not what we would call athletic. You will never achieve any degree of success in the sport. You might get down the track, but that’ll be the most of it and you’ll certainly never make the Olympics.”

And for me, that was kind of, I thought about I think as just a young 20 something that sort of like you can’t do something as a real, I’ll show you. By 2018, I had become one of the better drivers in the world, even though I had a lackluster start a pushing aspect of this sport, which is why they said I would never be competitive. I had watched over 10,000 hours of footage alone to become the best driver that was in many of the fields. So that’s how I developed in skeleton.

Jay Ruderman:

So the next Olympics, the Winter Olympics are coming up next year in Milan. Is the team going to go or what’s your chances?

AJ Edelman:

So it’s TVD because everyone, it’s kind of like if you’re Jewish in the audience, it’s like Yom Kippur every October the new season rolls around and the points are reset to zero. So you could have won the World Championships back in March and it has no bearing on the Olympics. So the points are presently at zero.

I peg our chance is very good. We’re a very good team. I’m a very decent driver, very good driver, thank God. And my mom would be sitting, she’s going to be watching if it’s sitting at home and going, “Don’t stay.” We’re a good team and in sport you really have to believe that you’re going to accomplish what you can’t accomplish, but I actually do. We’re a very good team.

We should have been there in 2022, We were six spots ahead in the final two weeks in the quota, but there was a variant of the COVID virus called Omicron. It wiped out six people from the World’s Cup competition on that other circuit. Three other pilots tore their hamstrings and pulled out and allowed the sled from the Netherlands to jump us in the final day. So I believe we’ll be there in February.

Jay Ruderman:

Well, I wish you the best of luck and my producer is probably a little bit upset that I talked so long about sports, but I want to get into your activism. So you once wrote that ambassadorship is the responsibility and role of a national athlete as much as competing, but it’s clear from your story that you’ve always seen yourself as an avatar for the every Jew.

Your recent work lifting up Jewish athletes, advocating for and representing Israel seems to be part of a larger project. Did this attitude come from family, from school, or did you develop that goal on your own?

AJ Edelman:

I think the sense of responsibility towards your community is one that at least I received from a very loving home that had a certain set of values. My parents were always ones to give back silently.

They instilled in us a great set of responsibility or sense of responsibility towards our community and towards our family and friends. And that carried over into the broader, as we find our places in the world, as we find our places in the Jewish community, we all seek out, or at least I do, what was my role in my place in the Jewish community? How can I contribute there?

Eventually I came to see myself more even as an Israeli than as Jew because I chose Israel in a sense, whereas I was born into Judaism, Israel chose me I feel like as well, Israel has contributed a lot to life. The sense of responsibility of a national athlete I think came from, in particular the national athlete, came from the years of, it was really truly blood, sweat, and tears of what was taking place in no man’s land, parts of Europe.

As I was slaving away at this project of carrying Israel’s sliding to the Olympic game. I woke up every day with a sense of purpose that this was my responsibility, that Israel had given me the responsibility of West life and therefore I needed to give back in not equal but better than equal part.

That was my responsibility towards, because the only relevance a national athlete has is the flag that they wear otherwise, and especially in a sport like bobsledding or skeleton, you’re just a guy going down a hill, right? And that’s for most people, crazy thing to do. The only relevance that has, the only thing that gives it value is the flag that she ran is Israel’s blessing to allow me to represent it. It removes your individual sense of self-esteem.

Jay Ruderman:

I did hear you speak about how you connect with younger people and how they see you and the impact that that has. So can you tell one of those stories and tell us how that motivates you?

AJ Edelman:

I think the most impactful interaction I ever had with a young person that solidified what it meant or solidified the importance of, at least it was a validation of what I preach so to speak, was after the 2018 games. I went to the, there’s like a national Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in Commack, New York.

It’s in a JCC over there, and I went to donate some of my equipment from the Olympics to the Jewish Sport Hall of Fame. And in the JCC, they were having a theater after school program for kids. And the person who was taking me around who was the head of the complex named Avi, he said, “Why don’t you tell the kids in five minutes or less your story?” And I did.

And this kid came up after he came running up to after we were leaving the complex, and he said, “I tell my friends in school always that I’m going to work on Broadway, and they’re always laughing at me and saying that I’ll never work on Broadway, but I’m going to tell them that I met this guy who they said, never make the Olympics and you made the Olympics and you just tried really hard and I’m going to go in and tell them tomorrow in school.”

And it was the most, it was warming. It still always makes me incredibly emotional to recall it. Kids have very vivid and vibrant imaginations and they’re able to put themselves in scenarios for which they can kind of just co-opt it into their own sense of self and their own lives. And sports is one of those very powerful images that even if they’re not pursuing sport, they know enough about sports to be able to put themselves or to apply it for their own situation.

And so I think that the biggest value that my journey has ever had is being impacting younger people to say, “I did this with really the biggest support was always my parents. They’ve always loved and supported and we speak every day.” But when it comes to Olympic athletes, I’d say I’m probably I’m sure in the bottom one percentile of infrastructure and work of anyone who’s ever done this sort of thing. So I’m really excited when I get to talk to young people because I know that there’s lot they translate.

Jay Ruderman:

That’s beautiful. I’ve spoken to several professional athletes who are activists and devote a significant amount of their time about talking about things that are important to them. Could be the environment, could be helping people from the community that they came from. You’re out there.

When things happen in the world, you’re talking to people, you are raising your voice, you are using your social media platform to talk about issues that are important to you in support of the Jewish people, in support of Israel. Not all athletes do that. Some people said, “Okay, I’m an athlete and I’m going to focus on my day job, but I’m not going to say anything about what’s going on in the world.”

AJ Edelman:

For many athletes, I think the responsibility of the athlete is to shut up and dribble, right? It’s to borrow the phrase from a number of years ago when all the protests were breaking out on the national anthem and things like that. When it comes to the role of the national, my country, my people, they’re under attack.

I don’t get involved in domestic US politics in issues like that. I don’t get involved in, if it was 2012, I wouldn’t be involved in the gay marriage issue. And if it was around the time of Roe being overturned, I wouldn’t be involved in that. It’s not the responsibility of a national athlete certainly to come down on a political side. I think that that’s the opposite.

It’s very polarizing, and your responsibility is to be an ambassador of the people in the state. So if there’s ever an election in the drill, I won’t be stumbling for some in my role as an athlete. Where I do insert myself and I find a responsibility, not just an option, but a responsibility is being a representative of Israel, is being a representative of not just all those in Israel, but it’s the Jewish state and of the Jewish people.

Where am I active and that’s come out very strongly is in the post-1007 timeframe, both Israel and Jews are under attack. So my responsibility as an Israeli is to be the ambassador that Israel needs and as a Jew, to be the ambassador that Jews, because I’ve always our motto or my motto back in skeleton and it’s still sifted from my back here, that’s me, see if you can see it, it means for myself, for my people and for my country.

So I represent myself in sport, but I represent my people. That would be the people of Israel, that’d be Jewish people. And I represent my country and it’s all of the Jews, the Christians, the Muslims in Israel, but the state of Israel, that’s my job, that’s my role. I could think of nothing else more important in this time period than to do that, and there was a lot of cost to it. The team became politically very toxic. We lost every sponsor that was lined up.

We’ve never really had many sponsors, but we were becoming quite good around when October 7th came about and a quick October 7th rolled around and I started to really raise a voice and the team just became, we got multiple emails, I got multiple emails that it is not the right time to be doing this, to be associating with the team. So of course, there’s a cost to it, but that’s the responsibility of the athlete that I am, that I’ve been allowed to represent the country. I have no other choice in my view.

Jay Ruderman:

So AJ, I want to ask you that since October 7th, two years ago, the world has been focused on Israel, and since you’ve been representing Israel as an athlete, sometimes public figures who are on social media get turned into fake people by the masses, by social media.

How is that different? Your public persona and how you’re treated than when you’re in the Olympic Village with other Olympic athletes? What’s it been like for you interacting with other Olympians?

AJ Edelman:

It’s a great question because I found myself wearing this shirt in the start house yesterday, Zionist I am. It was the kind of thing that I just came right after 10-7, I just started splashing it on a bunch of our stuff because I really think that we need to explain exactly what Zionism is.

It’s really not well understood by people and crazy. And so the interactions with other athletes, I really try to lean the Israel stuff because Jewish people have, I think it’s the Israeli condition, but certainly the Jewish condition as well. We do believe that because we are white, other people know we are white and because we have the that on our side that other people should just get it.

But the reality is, and we oftentimes forget, it’s like many other social issues that just don’t impact us. We don’t care, and they don’t care. They don’t have the time and the day to care, nor should they. I really don’t think that a normal person should be caring about Jewish issues, it’s Jews who care about Jewish issues. In the same way that while I empathize and sympathize with any single issue from any other minority community, I don’t sit around my dinner table wondering what’s affecting their community today.

What I have taken is just being the most normal, decent, good human, and we’ve always had a thing on the team where every single person who comes into this land who sits in my land, we have a conversation and the conversation generally goes something like, “You’re now a representative of the state of Israel. If we move slowly back, we are off the king no matter how good you.” And so I expect a certain level of knowledge, professionalism, but even if people try to screw us, even if people try to deal with us in bad faith, which is very common in Bobsled, we don’t play stereotypes.

We deal with people honestly, we help them out every single time we can because I have been personally in situations where I have had a very negative interaction with an athlete from a country, and I have never met anyone else from that particular country. But when I see that country on the news or that flag, I do have a negative perception of the country and I can’t help it, but all, and I’m thinking of one athlete in particular who, he’s the only person I’ve ever met from that country, but he’s been horribly anti-Semitic.

He’s just said terrible things about Jews. He’s just been a terrible person and human being. And so when I see things about that country, I don’t think, “Oh, that must be a great country. I don’t think it must be a terrible country.” But it’s not like I go, “Oh, that must be a great country.” At best, I’m ambivalent. I do know that there are countries that the athletes are wonderful towards us, and so when I see the flag, I’m like, “I love that country. That country must be great.”

So that’s my experience in the start house. That’s the experience in being with other athletes is you just have to be a real good member and that’s all you can be, and you don’t force Israel issues, we never talk politics. We never talk the war unless they ask and if they ask, you just be honest about the issues. But we never go in and go, “Did you see what happened? Or whatever.”

Jay Ruderman:

So when you went out to talk to people, you went to Washington Square Park and you were hosting these change my mind and talking about Israel. What was one of your takeaways from that event or one of the conversations that really struck with you and when you put your uniform on, because I know that sometimes you did these conversations with your uniform. How did that change the conversation?

AJ Edelman:

The uniform was important for me in two respects. It was important that people see that I was trying to embody Israel. It would just immediately associated it with Israel or not just with Jews. So I think that it became very important that Israel be the centerpiece, at least as well when people were arguing, the focus of the argument was as much as they could on Israel self because Israel has become a real proxy for Jew hate, that was one.

The second was, it was for me, this was my role as an Israeli athlete. I had been very conscious to stay away from being very vocal on sensitive issues because I think that that’s still the role of an athlete or of a national athlete to steer clear of issues that can polarize internally. Your role is not to create divisions, to create positivity.

Politics themselves are inherently divisive. So the subject of Israel as it relates to debating in the world is not a political issue, that’s our identity issue. I don’t think that the uniform changed too much in terms of the overall, I think people felt comfortable being vocal against someone who is visibly Israeli versus visibly Jewish.

Shouting at someone who’s visibly Jewish might make you a little self-conscious that you’ll be tagged and anti-Semite off the back. Of course, you probably aren’t an anti-Semite, but visibly. Visibly, if you’re screaming at an Israeli flag, it’s more socially acceptable than screaming at a Jew, that was important.

Jay Ruderman:

There have been campaigns to bar Israel from different competitions and the IOC and FIFA barred Russian athletes from participating as Russians. What would you say to people if they said you have to compete as an individual neutral athlete in the Olympics?

AJ Edelman:

Great question. The issue of athlete expulsion from athletic competitions is one that I’ve been exposed to every year now because Russia doped on a state-sponsored program in Sochi when I started an Olympic sport. And so the question is followed, “How do you deal with that? And then following that, the war.” There’s always been questions in my time in sport of what you do with Russians for one reason or another.

Of course, it’s been co-opted now on the Israeli side. In the sports for which you receive money and they’re the major sports, just sporting leagues, not a single person of any nationality or ethnicity should be held out of those competitions. So that would be the NBA, the major leagues, cricket or whatever it is.

When it comes to state-level actors, state-level competitions, I support the banning of certain countries from state-level competitions for certain various things because sport, I believe in the embodiment that sport is a promotion of your country, not of yourself, sport at a national level.

So it’s very difficult to separate out athletes who just want to go to the Olympics, but the Olympics are gathering of country, they are. At the end of the day, that’s what the Olympics are about. For a country like Russia, the athletes are supported in their sporting endeavors almost always at that level through military service, through a connection to the state.

So one of the reasons why we have such a problem on the bobsledding and even recruiting people, recruiting athletes is when the athletes come over, they have no income. You’re just asking them to come and sacrifice a full-time job. Even if they were to commit four years to this, [inaudible 00:26:45], they can’t have a full-time job for four years.

They can have that most of part-time job for five, six months, and they often, and then whether they going to spend all that money and season on their food and their protein and sleeping arrangements, it’s incredibly challenging to put together about something because I have to pay for everything.

There’s no other way to get them here, and at most they’ll sign up for one season, and that’s too because they can’t, as a 23-year-old out of the military with no savings and haven’t yet gone to college, or even if they just haven’t gone to college, they got nothing of my, I can’t say I’m going to sign up for this for five years, six years.

Israel doesn’t function the same way that a country like Germany does or a country like Russia does, where you essentially just get paid as a member of the military, but you go off and do sport. So the German, all the German bobsled athletes, they just go right traffic tickets in the off season, they’re members of the pilot patrol or the national police.

In that sense, yes, those athletes only thrive, only survive because of a state-sponsored infrastructure. And if you’re going to punish the state, then you’re going to end up punishing the athletes they bought into the state program. If you were to set up a system in which athletes were to say, “Okay, you know what, I’m totally renouncing anything to do with Russia for now and forever more. I’ll take a limited amount of resources from the IOC 10 grand a year, let’s say, and I have to fund the rest of myself.”

Individual sponsorships, A, no one’s going to do it. B, if they did, I support them, they can do it. Otherwise, you’re still getting paid by Russia. You’re still going as a Russian, the Russian bobsled team, their training camp is an occupied Crimea.

They’re the beneficiaries of the exact issues that the IOC is trying to penalize them for. It’s explicitly against the IOC rule to do that, to hold it in occupied territory, but our sport wants a lot of money from Gazprom and other Russian sponsors. So our sport is probably the only sport that has really gone the back for the Russians or at least the top level.

Jay Ruderman:

So let me finally ask you, you narrowly missed the 2022 Winter Olympics. What is it going to mean to you to compete with the Israeli flag emblazoned on your sled in 2026?

AJ Edelman:

It’s like a great question. How you look at things in hindsight and what different things mean to you, as with the passage of time. In 2018, when I retired from skeleton, I retired from skeleton in 80% percent of that retirement was due to an exceedingly anti-Semitic, it was an anti-Semitic episode at the games from a member of our sports, not an athlete, but from a jury member that was still anti-Semitic, it destroyed my sense of purity in sport.

He said he was going to make up a reason to disqualify a piece of equipment because Jews made all the rules. He said it to me two more things. The other athlete who was out the games who I’ve mentioned before, was also anti-Semitic, and he said that he was going to make up stories that I was prejudiced and that knew was going to believe people, him or the Jews, and it played into the depression, and it was awful.

After 2022, I think I was very numb to it. What happened in the last few weeks was the only one could have missed those games is if this cascading series of insane events took place that no one would have ever predicted, including this violent explosion of Omicron virus. If it didn’t happen, a two-week later period, a week later, that explosion of Omicron, we would’ve been began, that would be competing for that.

I just look back on that. I continued to do sport, I continued to do this journey because I fell into the trap of 0.1 seconds out is like, how could you walk away from that in 2026? I’d be sitting on a couch and going, gone. How could you give up on yourself? I think the passage of time makes us all realize that things are just not as important as we make it out to be at the beginning, or there are certain things that are just more important.

The boss of the team is supposed to have a generational impact because it has Druze on the team, it’s always had Druze on the team, Arab, Druze. It’s supposed to be a story for which many people, not just me then can go out in the world and impact on kids, and there should be a documentary about the team eventually could have just held wild, it’s been since 10-7 to fly in new people every week and pull these together.

In that sense, I think it’s going to be something I’m very proud of an accomplishment. So I think it’s probably what I would be thinking about when walking in is look what happens when you just try your best good things can happen. I’ll probably just take that forward as a life lesson for the next thing. When it hits hard and life is hard, I’ll be able to say, “You’ve had this before in a more extreme version.”

Jay Ruderman:

Well, AJ, I want to wish you to go from strength to strength. Thank you so much for being my guest and all about change. I really enjoyed this conversation and I’ll be following you.

AJ Edelman:

It was a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Jay Ruderman:

Now is a great time to check out my new book about activism, Find Your Fight. You can Find Your Fight wherever you buy books and you can learn more about it at jruderman.com. 

Thank you for being part of the All About change community. We aim to spark ideas for personal activism, helping you find your to action beyond awareness. So thank you for investing your time with us, learning and thinking about how just one person can make the choice to build a community and improve our world.

I believe in the empower of informed people like you to drive real change, and I know that what we explore today will be a tool for you in that effort. All right, I’ll see you in two weeks for our next conversation, but just one small ask, please hit subscribe and leave us a comment below.

It lets us know that you value this content and it supports our mission to widely share these perspectives. If you’re looking for more inspiration, check out this next video. I chose it for you and I know you’re going to enjoy it. I’m Jay Ruderman. Let’s continue working towards meaningful change together.

Today’s episode was produced by Tani Levitt and Mijon Zulu. To check out more episodes or to learn more about the show, you can visit our website Allaboutchangepodcast.com. If you like our show, spread the word, tell a friend or family member, or leave us a review on your favorite podcasting app. We really appreciate it. All About Change is produced by the Ruderman Family Foundation.