Skokie is Chicago's Brooklyn.
It's a real, honest-to-gods melting pot. It has mosques, temples, shuls; it became home to successive waves of immigrants from India, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea; it has kosher butchers, it has vegan restaurants, it has Halal candy shops; heck, Skokie is probably more Brooklyn than Brooklyn these days.
Perhaps that's why its effusive embrace of integration draws the fire -- sometimes quite literally -- of bigots. Skokie is the close-in northern suburb where many Holocaust survivors settled in the years after World War II. It's where a small, brown-shirted, beleaguered band of Nazis petitioned for the right to march in the late 1970s. And it is where former Northwestern University basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong was gunned down on the street by a white supremacist, as he jogged alongside his young daughters, in the summer of 1999.
But in a triumph of the American spirit; in tribute to the idea that all God's children can learn to live, play and work together; and in ringing endorsement of the idea that people from all walks of life can spend too much time on football; Skokie once again proudly hosts the Indo Jew Bowl (h/t: the One True Wife).
If the link above doesn't work, or doesn't whet your appetite sufficiently for the image of an offsenive lineman in a turban decking a tailback in a yarmulke, or vice versa, try the Indo Jew Bowl Home Page.
In between plays, and bouts of non-p.c. trash-talk, the participants genuinely have fun. And they raise money for hurricane victims.
The Indow Jew Bowl: now there's something to be grateful for.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
--T.A.
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