Eli Dershwitz

He has an older brother (Phil, who fenced for Princeton University) and a twin sister (Sally, who competed in gymnastics and lacrosse).[3][10] Dershwitz is Jewish, and was born and raised in Sherborn, Massachusetts.[6][11][12][13][14][15] His parents are Renee Goetzler and Mark Dershwitz.[14][15] His maternal grandparents, both Holocaust survivors, were Ruth (née Schmukler) Goetzler (born in Tarnów, Poland, she survived the Holocaust hidden in a barn by a Polish farmer) and Mark Goetzler (born in Jasło, Poland, he also lived in Samarkand, Uzbekistan).[14][15][13] His paternal parents were Arthur Dershwitz and Tillie (née Segel) Dershwitz.[14][15] He has an older brother (Phil, who fenced for Princeton University) and a twin sister (Sally, who competed in gymnastics and lacrosse).[3][10] He attended the Conservative synagogue Temple Israel of Natick, was bar mitzvah in 2008, and considers himself a "proud member of the Jewish community."[13]"Congratulations to the Graduates of 2014!"</ref>[13]

Dershwitz played basketball and soccer up until the end of middle school.[16] He attended Dover-Sherborn High School, graduating in 2014.[2][3]

He was a student at Harvard University, where he majored in history and graduated in 2019.[16] He was a member of the varsity Harvard Crimson fencing team.[17] As a freshman in 2014-15, he was a First Team All-American, All-Ivy League, and finished third at the NCAA Fencing Championships with a 22-2 record.[2] He was the seventh Harvard fencer to compete in the Olympics, with the prior two having been Emily Cross '09 (Team USA) and Noam Mills '12 (Israel), who both competed in the 2008 Beijing Olympics.[18][19] Dershwitz took off the 2015–16 school year to train full-time for the Olympics.[6] As a sophomore in 2016-17, he was again a First Team All-American, All-Ivy League, and this time he won the NCAA Fencing Championship in men's saber, becoming the first fencer to win an NCAA fencing championship for Harvard since 2007.[9] As a junior in 2017-18, he again won the NCAA Saber Fencing Championship. He became the first Harvard male fencer to win back-to-back NCAA championships, and was again voted an All American.[20]

Dershwitz in 2016

Dershwitz was ranked number 1 in saber in the United States, and number 10 in the world, as of the summer of 2016.[6][7] In March 2016, US Olympic saber coach Zoran Tulum said: "Eli’s world ranking is remarkable... he is the youngest [saber] fencer among the world’s top 25."[21] (This was incorrect, he was the second youngest at the time.[22]) He was ranked #1 in the world as of July 2018.

He followed his older brother into fencing.[7] Dershwitz has been coached since 2004 when he was 9 years old by Tulum, at the Zeta Fencing club in Natick, Massachusetts.[23][24] Tulum coached the US men's saber team at the 2016 Summer Olympics.[6][10][25][26]

In February 2016, Dershwitz beat Russia's 2015 world champion Alexey Yakimenko at the Warsaw World Cup.[27] In March 2016, while winning the gold medal at the Seoul Grand Prix in South Korea, he defeated 2014 world silver medalist Gu Bon-gil of Korea in the quarterfinals, 2014 world champion Nikolay Kovalev of Russia in the semifinals, and Iranian Mojtaba Abedini in the final.[28]

In February 2017, Dershwitz won the individual saber Ivy League Championship.[29] In March 2017, he won the individual saber in the 2017 NCAA Fencing Championships, and was again named a first-team All-American.[30][31] In May 2017, Dershwitz won a silver medal at the Villa de Madrid, his first individual world cup medal.[32] By that time he had already won two gold and three silver team world cup medals from 2014–16, three junior world championships medals, a Pan American Games gold medal in 2015, and a grand prix gold medal in 2016.[32] In June 2017 he won an individual saber silver medal at the 2017 Pan American Fencing Championships.[33] In July 2017 he won the gold medal in saber at the 2017 Maccabiah Games.[34] In November 2017 he won a saber World Cup in Algeria (while he was the youngest of the top 25 saber fencers in the world).[9] '

In February 2018 (while ranked 6th in the world) he beat two-time Olympic champion Áron Szilágyi of Hungary to win the saber fencing World Cup event in Padua, Italy, and in April 2018 he won a bronze medal at a men's saber grand prix in Seoul, South Korea.[35][36][37] In February 2019 he won the gold medal at the Men's Saber World Cup in Warsaw, Poland.[38] After his win, he posted on his instagram account: "Amazing and emotional day as my mother told me this morning that my Polish grandparents, who came to America 75 years ago, would be watching over me today."[39]

• List of select Jewish fencers

• Eli Dershwitz official Facebook page