Ben Goldfaden
Professional basketball player (1913-2013)
Benjamin Paul Goldfaden (September 6, 1913 – March 25, 2013) was an American professional basketball player. He played two games in the Basketball Association of America (BAA) as a member of the Washington Capitols during the 1946–47 season. Goldfaden spent most of his professional career playing in the American Basketball League.
Goldfaden began playing basketball in Detroit during his early years due to his height. He attended South Side High School in Newark, New Jersey, where he was an all-state team selection in 1933. Goldfaden was so highly recruited during his teenage years that he was pursued by Catholic and other sectarian prep schools despite that he was Jewish. He was paid to play for barnstorming teams in exhibition games as a 16-year-old that would have marred his amateur status and disqualified him from playing college basketball. Goldfaden played collegiately for the George Washington Colonials on an athletic scholarship.
Goldfaden quit playing basketball at the age of 33 to become a physical education teacher as its salary of US$2,000 ($33,020 adjusted for inflation) was better than his basketball career. He worked 20 years as an agent for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance and served as a city recreation director in Maryland.
“Ben Goldfaden” enters the record as professional basketball player (1913-2013). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Goldfaden, Professional and basketball can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8246120. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1913, 2013, 1946 and 1933.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ben Goldfaden” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.