ABSTRACT
In the final of the 1995 Rugby World Cup, the “Springboks” of South Africa, against all expectations, defeated the New Zealand “All Blacks.” Their match-winning points were scored by Joel Stransky, the one Jew on the team, who in fact scored all his team’s points. With postmatch hyperbole, a journalist in the British newspaper The Independent wrote that, “he probably killed off once and for all the residual anti-Semitism that has long lingered in many Afrikaner–and some black–hearts” (26 June, 1995). Such an outcome is pretty unlikely, although many social-psychological interventions to defeat prejudice and improve intergroup relations seem to have been based on a similar logic.
