BHIF: Old Jewish Men loses a friend...

Carrots. Chabad. Poker. Steve Guttenberg. OJM resident young person. Shtreimels! Is that a pickle or are you just happy to see me?

Welcome to BHIF for Friday January 10, 2024. Baruch Hashem (Thank God) It’s Friday is The Old Jewish Men weekly roundup where we get to all the crap that actually matters in the world. Obituary winners. Matchmaking. Market watch. Marketplace finds. Complaint of the week. Joke of the week. You get the picture.

This week we had the unfortunate job of writing a very personal obituary for our longtime editor and BHIF co-founder, Max Chiswick, who passed away tragically this week. It has been an extraordinarily difficult time for the OJM offices. Please bare with us as we attempt to move forward without him. May Max’s memory be a blessing.

---

Max Chiswick, BHIF Editor, Professional Poker Player and Educator, Art and Clothing Collector, Chabad and Travel Enthusiast With an Irrational Love for Carrots, Dies at 39.

After winning a fortune at the poker table, Max Chiswick, an effective altruist, spent his life supporting little-known artists around the world, visiting and mapping Chabad Houses, fighting for AI Safety, and teaching kids about probability and risk. His general obsession with value, particularly in the rotisserie-chicken department, is also quite notable.

Chiswick, a respected student and teacher of risk and probability, a tennis addict, art collector, professional gambler and lover (and promoter) of bland foods, whose ambitions took him to faraway places and who used his unknown level of wealth to philanthropic ends, died at Ichilov hospital in Tel Aviv this week. He was 39.

His tragic death, caused by cerebral malaria contracted on a recent trip to Senegal, was confirmed by his sister, Lisa Chiswick. 

Max Chiswick (pronounced chis-ICK), or simply “Chis” to many, seemed to be everywhere all at once. In the month before he died, Chiswick was in New York, San Francisco, Miami, Turkey, Senegal, Singapore and Israel. And, we can only assume, dozens of Whole Foods locations. 

This, however, was typical. He was, somehow, in every country in the world while also in transit, chatting with you from 36,000 feet in the air. At one moment he was teaching probability and risk assessment to kids in Senegal, the next cruising a comped buffet in Vegas while also magically seeing you tomorrow for Shabbos dinner in Crown Heights. The lifestyle left friends confused yet impressed by his ability to juggle time zones. Somehow Chiswick always managed to be where you needed him. He lived everywhere and nowhere. But he wasn’t a ghost.  He was the opposite: a constant presence in the lives of those he loved and who loved him. He could sleep on anything, and even preferred couches and floors. He talked a lot about airline travel, about points and how to spend your way into what he called “premium status.” It was in a way a joke, but also, a way of life. 

He was always on the move, with a backpack full of organic produce, bike helmet in hand, a tennis racket on his back, zip-off cargo pants and laceless Salomon shoes; he was usually coming from or going to some obscure place for some bizarre reason that made perfect sense only to him. Friends recall receiving texts from Max at various airport lounges where he liked to survey the buffet with a keen eye for value, rating the offerings by the amount of protein on hand. Chiswick kept a diary cataloguing the eggs he ate during hotel stays; a brilliant idea that one BHIF editor believes “deserved more attention.” Chis told friends that food should be “bland but packed with nutrition,” and we should be conscious of calorie-to-dollar restaurant offerings. Max once catalogued every single item at the Cheesecake Factory, the biggest menu in the world. He stayed away from processed foods and took great care of his body.

Chiswick was over six foot and built like a marine, with muscular arms and legs and a square handsome jaw. He played tennis obsessively, living for years at a residence in Chicago to be closer to a “free tennis” offering, and walking distance to Costco where he would buy the materials he needed to automate the food.

He was regimented in his dietary needs, kept strict kosher in his Chicago residence, and would begin each day by scrambling 6-8 eggs with sliced, un-salted avocado, and a watery assortment of un-peppered Israeli salad that he prepared in this machine. Max was a consumer — of food, art, clothing, gadgets — but not necessarily a consumerist in the traditional sense. He ate around six thousand calories a day, much of which came in the form of carrots, which he preferred raw and unwashed, although it was unclear whether unwashed was preference or laziness. He was known to carry around entire bags of grapes, potato chips (sans seed oils, which he was vehemently opposed to) and would eat the same thing for dinner each night: a pound and a half of salmon and white rice followed by several apples. At airport lounges, when the food was “free-rolled” — a poker term he frequently used that means having unlimited upside— he would regularly eat until sick, something he seemed faintly proud of. 

These idiosyncratic trips and habits could appear undefined from the outside, but their purpose lived in Chiswick’s very real mapping and cataloging of the world, archived in projects such as Chabad.Earth, 40k Travel Map, and a highly technical poker AI startup called AI Poker Tutorial. Chiswick kept careful track of everywhere he went: the hundreds of Chabad houses he visited, the 76 countries he entered (including nearly every African country); putting everything in vast spreadsheets, including the rotisserie chickens he consumed, and the 6000 mile transcontinental trek from Cairo to Cape Town. It was not pure whimsy that propelled these trips; he was building something. 

Max Jordan Chiswick was born on Dec 1st 1985 to Peter and Ellen Chiswick in London, England. He grew up in Chicago and studied Electrical engineering at Northwestern, graduating in 2008. He completed his masters at the Technion in Haifa in 2017 before spending eighteen weeks at the Recurse Center, an independent educational institution for computer programmers, in 2019. It was during Chiswick’s days as an undergrad that he began his career as an online poker player. Not much is known about Max’s exact winnings, but he didn’t hold a regular job for at least a decade and a half following his retirement from online gambling in the mid 2000s. At the height of Max’s poker career, he was playing 100 hands a minute, and completed a challenge to play three million hands in a year. 

Chiswick saw the writing on the wall when Artificial Intelligence entered online poker, and decided to exchange professional playing for teaching. He thought poker offered real-world tools that far exceeded the simple joys of casual gambling. Chiswick was working on a book project called Bet Mitzvah, aimed at educating kids about risk management and probability. Over the summer he ran his first ever poker camp for adults in Lower Manhattan. Chiswick described it to friends as a modest success, and hosted another camp in San Francisco this past year.

Tech colleagues remember Max’s dedication to learning through non-traditional means. Trips to the casino weren’t degenerate, but educational. He cared little about financial results, preferring to prioritize decision making over luck. He seemed to be working on a continuous loop, sending images and graphs to friends for advice at all hours, asking if things made sense, and what he could improve on. These work projects extended to other areas of interest. He was diverse in his pursuits. He knew nothing of art history, but loved art and collected it with a joyful passion. He became known in the New York art world, particularly through his connection to 56 Henry, a well-known Lower East Side gallery.

Friends who went to gallery openings with Max claim it was “like walking in with the king of England — everyone knew him.” But his tastes were his own; he didn’t pander. He was what one friend, an artist whose work Max collected, called “a deep diver who loved finding weird unknown artists like Paa Joe, Gaetano Pesce, lots of outsider artists and an obscure Hasidic artist named Pinny.”

He traveled endlessly, amassing a collection of nearly a thousand unique pieces, including works from Daniel Arnold, Al Freeman, Liorah Tchiprout, Ruby Bradford and Ohad Meromi. His taste in art aligned with his taste in clothing and furniture — it was fun, and often carrot-themed. If there was a painting or t-shirt with a carrot on it, Max simply had to have it. He owned thousands of t-shirts at one time, so many,in fact, that he had to seek professional help to get rid of them all. During the sale he became known online as “The Carrot Guy,” due to his huge collection of carrot-themed clothing. 

At BHIF, editors encouraged Max to stay away from carrots unless they made sense with the material, which was at times hard for him. Regardless, his BHIF Marketplace picks were singular in their odd sophistication: Ethiopian needlepoint pillows depicting biblical stories, postmodern Italian furniture, and vintage dreidel sweatshirts from the 70s. 

Everything Max did, everything he picked, everywhere he went, was tinged with a sense of joy and adventure that was all his own.

Click here to read about his trips to Africa and food automation. 

His colleagues at BHIF will remember him for his gentleness and generosity. A man who loved being Jewish and never said a bad word about anybody. He often wore a Chabad baseball cap, and when one BHIF editor complimented it, Max showed up the next week with two in his hand. One for the editor, and one for his wife. 

Max’s goal for 2025 was to put on tefillin every day, and we hope that you will think of him the next time you wrap, or if you decide to take up the mitzvah in his honor.  

- OJM MGMT

Below is a t-shirt for Max’s project, CHABAD.EARTH. All proceeds go directly to Chabad.

OJM Around Town

It’s either too cold or blazin hot in America this week.

Polymarkets certainly didn’t have Steve Guttenberg as America’s hero by the end of 2026. Stay safe, Steve.

Happy birthday to Old Jewish Men’s resident young person. Here’s our very own fashion consultant, Sammy D squinting at the camera. Someone get this kid a glasses prescription.

Weekly Mishmash

→ Wondering where Marketwatch is? Has anyone ever made it this deep into the newsletter? Well, we’ve got a surprise for you. On Mondays (or Tuesdays) we’ll be offering a totally unnecessary, bulked up Marketwatch. Tune in and/or conk out.

→ Joke of the Week (Woody Allen):

“I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t wanna be there when it happens.”

→ Complaint of the Week: Our weekly complaint columnist, Leecy Davis (Atlanta, Georgia):

Here’s my complaint for this week, the moron in question is one of my best friends since childhood (he agrees, he is a moron) -

Is everyone a rabbit pretending to be human? What’s up with “healthy” eating? I was raised to drown my latkes in applesauce and a heaping spoonful of the grainiest sour cream. I don’t understand the meaning of “saturated fats”. But, everyone these days has a list longer than me of what they will and won’t eat. I saw one moron wipe the top of his burger patty with a napkin because “the gluten from the bun touched it”. WHAT!?! If any of you try to tell me you’re doing these verkakte shenanigans to work on your looks… newsflash! You’re still skinny fat and have dark circles under your eyes. My father, who’s older than Methusaleh, still eats Crisco and government cheese, and doesn’t look a day over forty. Anyways, all of you would be so easy to scam considering how willingly you fell for this “I’m gonna live forever” shtick. Watch your wallets people, I’m coming for ya.

→ Ask the (Eastern Standard Time) Rabbi

Fri Jan 10:

4:30pm: Shabbat begins (enough with the rainbow cake)

Sat Jan 11:

5:34pm: Shabbat ends (anyone seen the remote?)