Jews, Sports, and the Rites of Citizenship (review)

Jews, Sports, and the Rites of Citizenship, edited by Jack Kugelmass, collects ten articles from a conference on Jews in sports. The ten papers vary greatly. After an introductory overview, they turn to Jews and horses; consider whether American Jews can be sportsmen; and examine eastern European Jewish sport societies and sport and Zionism in Tel Aviv, Libya, and Casablanca, as well as athletics at New York's Yeshiva University and the basketball gambling scandal at the City College of New York (CCNY). The introduction attempts to organize the discussion around the oppositional nature of sport, its role in assimilation and citizenship, the ways it civilizes the body, and whether the stereotype of the bookish Jewish male is or was ever true. The disparate nature of the articles, however, outruns the unity of the introduction.

The first two articles lend support to the stereotype of the non-athletic Jewish male. John Hoberman argues that Jews were not considered horsemen, were cut off from nature, could not bear arms or engage in duels (all of which required horses), and hence were considered unmanly. More forcefully, Stephen Whitfield argues that Jacob, not Esau, stood supreme in American Jewish life. Despite evidence to the contrary, Jewish boxers and basketball and baseball players were extraordinary Jews, never the majority. Like Superman, they served compensatory functions for a "mouse nation" (57). Based largely on prescriptive, fictional, and cultural commentary, these articles are weak on the actual history of Jews in sports. They never ask: What types of athletics did Jews actually engage in? Why were there so many athletes among the second generation in the United States? How do the rates of Jewish participation in athletics compare to those of other groups?

The remaining articles bypass the general discussion to analyze a variety of Jewish sports activities. Joshua Shanes finds a real sports movement underway among the Zionists of Galicia at the turn of the twentieth century. Here, and as Jack Jacobs shows in his work on Jewish workers' sports movements in interwar Poland, Zionist and Bundist organizations tried to follow Max Nordau's plea to build the new muscular Jew as a way to integrate into the majority society or to establish a separate Jewish national identity or both.

In different settings, sport played different roles. I was particularly struck by Anat Helman's "Zionism, Politics, Hedonism: Sports in Inter-war Tel Aviv," which shows that various Zionist organizations promoted athletics to showcase collective strength of individuals. Soccer boomed from the 1920s on, even on the Sabbath. Jews differed in their team allegiances, not by class as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would have it, but according to their politics. Sports would build a virile Jewish male body and a strong Jewish state. Still, Tel Aviv was highly secular and a seaside resort, and underneath the collective glorification of strength, enjoyment of the body increasingly emerged.

Speaking of soccer, Tamir Sorek offers a look at modern "Arab Soccer in a Jewish State." In contrast to André Levy's "Soccer Games between Jews and Muslims in Casablanca," which posits that, as a minority, Jews were cautious about using soccer to engage the larger Muslim majority on the field, in Israel the Arabs took up soccer as a means to engage the majority, using the sport to redefine Israeli national identity as non-religious, non-Jewish, and more inclusive. The soccer field is the one arena where the Palestinian citizens of Israel could assert their place by playing Jewish teams, by including Jews on their teams, and by joining Jewish teams. Moreover, Hebrew, not Arabic, became the language of Israeli soccer, and hence served as a well-defined arena for promoting the goals of integration and group identity.

Two historically oriented articles conclude the volume. Edward Shapiro examines the Jewish basketball mania at CCNY and the gambling scandal that brought the program and Jewish hopes low. New York City Jews followed their team, made up of Jews and blacks, that won...