Jews in the Gym: Judaism, Sports, and Athletics Edited by Leonard J. Greenspoon (review)

In an opening scene in the satirical comedy film Airplane, one of the passengers asks for something light to read. Without much hesitation the stewardess replies: “How about this leaflet, Famous Jewish Sports Legends?” While it might well be the case that the number of Jewish sport legends did not significantly increase since the release of the film in 1980, over the last couple of years we are witnessing a burst of publications on the topic of Jews and sport. This volume thus corroborates a recent trend in research. Exploring sporting activities from the period of King Herod to Omri Casspi, the first Israeli player in the NBA, the range of disciplinary approaches and scope of topics dealt with in this volume is vast and it is difficult at time to find a common thread that pervades all fourteen essays of this collection. The articles vary in their length, structure, and meticulousness. For the sake of consistency, in my view, a thematic division and more textual uniformity would have strengthened the volume’s coherence and sense of continuity. Given the multiplicity of topics, an index would have assisted readers to find their way around the text. Many of the essays deal with the question of integration as well as representation. Organizing the book around these categories is one option of how to format Jews in the Gym.

What is then new and innovative about Jews in the Gym, as Leonard Greenspoon notes in his introductory comments, that hasn’t been already covered in previous research? Beyond filling some research gaps and adding information about Jewish involvement in various physical activities, one of the volume's main contributions is its focus on the complex interplay between Judaism and sport; an aspect that is frequently overlooked in research on Jewish sports in Europe.

The volume commences with an essay on Jewish attitudes towards sports and spectacle during the Second Temple period. Based on a diverse body of sources, Loren Spielman shows how Jewish attitudes to sports during this period implied that Jews were more integrated in their Hellenistic environment than previously assumed. Spielman's article devotes lengthy sections to the question of Jewish spectatorship, a topic that has not previously received much study. Moving from the Second Temple period to the twenty-first century, Ori Soltes explores, in his contribution, representations of sporting Jews in graphic novels alluding to the importance of physical exercise as a vehicle of integration and a medium that helped Jews hold positive images of their bodies. Representation is also the topic of the third essay in the volume. Nathan Abrams provides a concise analysis of the ways in which the Jews and their bodies are represented as “almost the same” in films such as the 1984 British drama Chariots of Fire.

Steven Riekes seeks to answer the question “is life a game?” Based on a close reading of Maurice Samuel’s almost forgotten book The Gentleman and the Jew, Riekes qualifies the argument regarding the incompatibility between competitive sport and Judaism. He suggests that the Jewish faith is not an ascetic religion but a way of life that advocates enjoyment and recreation. The complex relationship between Judaism and sports is further explored in Danny Rosenberg’s study of Jewish athletes of faith. Inspired by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s notion of The Lonely Man of Faith, Rosenberg probes the challenges the world of high-performance sports imposes on Orthodox Judaism. He depicts the Jewish athlete of faith as “a rare person who experiences a special kind of loneliness”(95). The difficulties of negotiating the world of faith with the world of sports is also the topic of Ori Soltes second contribution to this volume in which he offers a comparative analysis of the different ways Jews, Muslims, and Evangelicals cope with the tension between their religious convictions and their athletic desires.

Challenges of a different kind of integration are the topics of Steven A. Riess...