Sports and the American Jew (review)

Until recently, scholars devoted little attention to Jewish involvement in sport, but this collection makes clear that studying it provides significant insight into acculturation and assimilation, the intensity of anti-Semitism and Jewish reaction to it, relations between German and East European Jews, and changing gender roles in the Jewish community. Although stereotyped as weak and craven, lacking the attributes necessary for physically strenuous activity, American Jews were heavily represented in, and excelled at, several important sports--notably boxing, basketball, and track--during the three decades preceding World War II. Institutions highly important in early twentieth century Jewish life--the settlement houses, YMHAs, and YWHAs--strongly encouraged both male and female youth to participate in athletics.

In a stimulating introductory essay, editor Steven Riess notes that heavily urbanized, early twentieth-century American Jews thrived at sports that could be easily adapted to a city environment, but found it more difficult to gain proficiency in those, like football and baseball, that require greater physical space. Anti-Semitism also restricted Jewish access to major league baseball and to the more prestigious college sports. Sportswriters often employed crude anti-Semitic stereotypes, as when Paul Gallico attributed Jewish success in basketball to an "Oriental background . . . [a] scheming mind and flashy trickiness. . . ." (p. 26). Riess could have provided more insight into how American anti-Semitism and Jewish insecurity changed from 1920 to 1950 by comparing public reaction to two key sports scandals: the 1951 college basketball point-shaving scandal, to which he briefly alludes and which initially focused on Jewish players and gamblers; and the Black Sox scandal of 1919-20, which antisemites blamed on Jewish gamblers.

Riess also exaggerates the discontinuity in outlook of first- and second-generation East European Jews in America, claiming that the former, strictly orthodox and disdaining physicality, immigrated from a "static premodern" (p. 14) shtetl world. Yet many in the first generation had already drawn away from orthodoxy in Europe. Influenced by Bundism and Zionism, East European Jews after the Kishinev pogrom had organized armed self-defense forces. As a result, the next major Christian attack on Jews at Gomel resembled a war more than a pogrom.

In his essay "Tough Jews" Riess traces American Jews' emergence as a dominant group in prizefighting, so prominent that non-Jews sometimes adopted Jewish names for the ring. He notes that second-generation ghetto youth embraced boxing to protect themselves from physical attack, to enhance their self-esteem, and to earn a living, especially during the Depression. But rather than "universally decr[ying] boxing" (p. 65), as Riess claims, many Jewish immigrants, familiar with Jewish self-defense in Europe, encouraged their sons to use their fists in America.

William Simons suggests that Jewish baseball superstar Hank Greenberg facilitated Jewish acculturation by projecting an image of modesty and "clean-living" that gentiles endorsed, thus providing a sharp contrast to the Jewish boxer's "ghetto pugnacity" (p. 203). Simons carefully analyzes media coverage of the controversy in 1934 over whether Greenberg should play on the High Holidays, concluding that both the mainstream and Anglo-Jewish press praised him for subordinating religious to secular demands, an approach that appealed to second-generation Jews desiring respectability. Yet Greenberg resembled the ghetto boxers more than Simons acknowledges. A tough, physically imposing player and a decorated war veteran, Greenberg was often praised in the Jewish press for challenging anti-Semitic bench jockeys with his fists.

Essays by Peter Levine on the Jewish country club in the 1920s and by Gerald Gems on the Chicago Hebrew Institute (CHI) also focus on sport and acculturation. Levine argues that affluent German Jews hoped to gain acceptance from the WASP upper class by establishing country clubs that emphasized elite sports like golf, tennis, and polo, thereby demonstrating that they differed from East European Jews. He examines Los Angeles's German Jewish Hillcrest Country Club, which in the 1920s denied membership to prominent Hollywood...