It\u2019s the winter holiday season and half-Jewish heartthrob Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet, following his 2024 portrayal of legendary folk musician Bob Dylan in \u201cA Complete Unknown,\u201d is once again playing a movie role based on a Jewish celebrity.<\/p>\n
This time, Chalamet, who is named for his Jewish grandfather<\/a>, is swapping a guitar for a ping pong paddle for his role in the buzzy \u201cMarty Supreme,\u201d which is out in theaters on Dec. 25. The Josh Safdie-directed film, nominated for three Golden Globes<\/a> and likely to earn \u201cBest Picture\u201d and \u201cBest Actor\u201d Oscar noms<\/a>, is loosely based on \u201cThe Money Player,\u201d the autobiography of the eccentric, real-life Jewish table tennis champion Marty \u201cThe Needle\u201d Reisman \u2014 so nicknamed for his tall, slim build and his \u201cquick wit<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n The movie is fully stacked with a Jewish cast, including Fran Drescher as Mauser\u2019s mother, Gwyneth Paltrow as Mauser\u2019s love interest, and featuring Odessa A\u2019zion<\/a>, Sandra Bernhard and designer Isaac Mizrahi. \u201cWell, it\u2019s a story about Jewish people so I needed Jewish actors,\u201d Safdie, who is Jewish, said at a recent press conference for the film<\/a>.<\/p>\n Though the film isn\u2019t completely faithful to Reisman\u2019s real-life story \u2014 the movie\u2019s titular character has been changed to \u201cMarty Mauser\u201d \u2014 the actual and the fictional Marty both grew up Jewish in New York City, and both began seeking athletic greatness at the ping pong table in the 1940s.<\/p>\n Reisman (pronounced REESE-man) was born in February 1930 in New York to Russian Jewish immigrants Sarah \u201cSally\u201d Nemorosky and Morris Reisman. He grew up on the Lower East Side, where he attended Hebrew school and his family ate boiled beef and potatoes for Shabbat dinners.<\/p>\n Reisman had an older brother, David; his father was a cab driver with a large fleet of taxis and a serious gambling habit. In 1977, Reisman told Sports Illustrated<\/a>, \u201cI saw my dad lose six taxis during one session of poker.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps it\u2019s no surprise, then, that in addition to his table tennis skills and his preference for the old-fashioned hard bat paddle, Reisman was also known for his big bets on his own ping pong games. At just 15, he mistakenly handed a $500 wad of cash to an official from the United States Table Tennis Association instead of his bookie, and was escorted by police out of the tournament<\/a>.<\/p>\n Reisman first discovered table tennis following a \u201cnervous breakdown\u201d at age 9,<\/a> and realized that playing the game helped him feel better. Much of his early playing was done at the Educational Alliance on East Broadway, one of New York City\u2019s first settlement houses, which was established in 1889 \u201cto offer educational, social, and cultural services to Jewish immigrants arriving to the Lower East Side<\/a>.\u201d By the time he was 13, Reisman was already New York City\u2019s junior champion.<\/p>\n As a young man, Reisman continued playing and earning titles, medalling in five world championships from 1948 to 1952. From 1949 to 1951, Reisman and his partner Doug Cartland became the comedic warmup act for the Harlem Globetrotters<\/a> at Madison Square Garden, playing \u201cMary Had a Little Lamb\u201d with frying pans, and hitting balls across the net using just the soles of their sneakers.<\/p>\n According to The Sun, \u201cthe British press were so enamoured by him [Reisman] that they called him the \u2018Danny Kaye of table tennis\u2019\u201d<\/a> \u2014 so named for the Jewish actor who was famous for his physical comedy.<\/p>\n Marty Reisman practicing ping pong circa 1946. (Bettmann)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Over the years, he toured the world, gambled on his own matches and gained a reputation for spending, becoming known for his brightly colored outfits topped with Borsalino fedoras and Panama hats. Reisman\u2019s signature trick \u2014 apart from a habit of measuring table tennis nets with a $100 bill \u2014 was to split in half an upright cigarette at one end of the table with the sheer force of the ball he hit with his paddle.<\/p>\n In 1957, after performing poorly against a Japanese opponent who played with the new, spongier bats, Reisman allegedly returned from his Asia tour with an armful of Rolexes<\/a> under his shirt sleeve.<\/p>\n As the world of ping pong evolved, Reisman struggled to adapt to a \u201cnormal\u201d life, as he wrote in his book. Reisman couldn\u2019t hold down a regular job \u2014 something he wanted in order to impress his soon-to-be wife, Geri Falk. Reisman was fired from the only non-ping pong gig he ever tried: working in the shoe department at the Jewish-owned New York City department store B. Altman and Company (which just so happens be where the fictitious Jewish comedian Midge Maisel worked in the Amazon Prime series \u201cThe Marvelous Mrs. Maisel\u201d fame).<\/p>\n And so, in 1958, he purchased an indoor tennis club on the Upper West Side, Riverside Table Tennis Courts. The spot was frequented by celebrities, many of them Jewish, like chess player Bobby Fischer and actors Dustin Hoffman, Walter Matthau and Zero Mostel. Actor Matthew Broderick played there as a kid, which he recalled in a 2008 episode of \u201cThe Late Show with David Letterman<\/a>.\u201d Reisman opened two more locations in Midtown.<\/p>\n In 1982, \u201cthe bad boy of ping pong<\/a>,\u201d as Reisman was known, married his second wife, Yoshiko Koshino in Manhattan. He has one daughter, Debbie, from his marriage to Falk in 1958<\/a>, whom he met at Riverside Table Tennis Courts.<\/p>\n In 1997, at 67 years old, Reisman became the oldest person to win an open national competition in a racquet sport.<\/p>\n Reisman died in Manhattan in 2012 at the age of 82 from lung and heart complications and is buried at a Jewish cemetery on Staten Island.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.jta.org \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s the winter holiday season and half-Jewish heartthrob Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet, following his 2024 portrayal of legendary folk musician Bob Dylan in \u201cA Complete Unknown,\u201d is once again playing a movie role based on a Jewish celebrity. This time, Chalamet, who is named for his Jewish grandfather, is swapping a guitar for a ping pong paddle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2211809,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[22221],"class_list":["post-2211808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-culture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/The-real-story-of-Marty-Reisman-who-inspired-the-new.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2211808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2211808"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2211808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2211810,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2211808\/revisions\/2211810"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2211809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2211808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2211808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2211808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.jta.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/12-10-25-Marty-Reisman-2.jpg\")
<\/p>\n