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Reviewed by:
  • When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport by Allen Bodner
  • Miriam Laytner
When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport. By Allen Bodner. Albany: Excelsior Editions, 2011. 199 pp. Softbound, $24.95.

“Why boxing?” was the question I most often heard while reading this book. Strangers at Starbucks, my parents, and colleagues were mystified. I admit, I was mystified, too—which is why I decided to review When Boxing Was a [End Page 174] Jewish Sport. After just a few chapters, I was able to answer this question with confidence. As Academy Award–winning screenwriter and novelist Budd Schulberg notes in the foreword, “I’ve always thought of boxing not as a mirror but a magnifying glass of our society. It is hardly accidental that out of the poor Irish immigration … we had a wave of great Irish fighters. … As the Irish moved up into the mainstream, there was less economic need to use the prize ring as their way out and up. The wave of Jewish boxers followed exactly the same pattern, and so did the Italians” (xi). He goes on to point out that today’s boxers are mostly African American and Hispanic, a potential indication of continued economic distress in and discrimination against these communities.

Bodner focuses on a particular era when Jews dominated boxing rings and clubs at all levels. Rather than glorify them as fighters or bemoan the loss of a certain fighting spirit, Bodner’s analysis reveals that economic hardships, coupled with lack of opportunity and promise of quick payoffs in boxing, made many young men turn to the sport. Bodner’s extensive research, revealed in long quotes derived from his oral history interviews with former boxers, managers, and their families in the early nineties, could serve as a template for oral historians trying to document today’s boxers—or any group of athletes.

When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport focuses on the first half of the twentieth century, a period that saw the arrival of thousands of poor Jews to New York and other cities. Bodner gives a concise, insightful history of their arrivals and struggles but does not dwell on these details, many of which have been explored in mainstream history. Instead, he demonstrates through choice passages from his interviews how known hardships led many urban men to local boxing rings, where they discovered that by training hard and staying healthy they could win more in one night than their parents made in a week. Boxing, as revealed in Bodner’s interviews, was not about guts and glory but about the possibility of a quick payoff for the men and the community that supported (and bet on) them.

Bodner’s research is flawlessly organized, as demonstrated through his many appendices and his command of little-known facts. The book, however, is divided into chapters based on themes—which makes for slightly confusing casual reading but could be useful to researchers interested in “Anti-Semitism” or “The Money.” As a result of this organization, it feels like certain facts and dates are stated multiple times in the course of different stories.

Bodner’s strength as an oral historian is evident in some chapters more than in others, but the most compelling use of oral histories is saved for the end of the book, in the chapters “A Dangerous Sport” and “After the Ring.” In these chapters, Bodner attempts to tackle the issue of the high rate of injury, specifically brain damage, among boxers. He notes that by the time he started [End Page 175] his interviews, he was aware of the lack of boxing-based (as opposed to medically based) knowledge on the topic. He points out, through excerpts of an interview he did with a sports doctor and former boxer, that the boxing community denies or ignores medical evidence of severe brain damage among boxers despite public acceptance of the relationship between the two. What, then, is the accepted “truth” among boxers? Oral history is an excellent tool by which to study, store, and promote alternate or subversive truths, and Bodner’s oral histories are no exception. His quotes reveal an interesting double-talk among boxers: they deny slurred speech and Parkinson’s...

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