WHY JEWS Play in Sports

HOBERMAN, JOHN M.

WHY JEWS Play in Sports DO SPORT AND JEWISH VALUES CONFLICT? JOHN M. HOBERMAN Unlike many other small countries, Israel has never won an Olympic medal. Indeed, very few elite athletes of Jewish...

...B'nai B'rith has enthusiastically embraced Jewish participation in sports on both amateur and competitive levels...
...It did not take a semiotitian to detect the estrangement of this Jewish non-athlete from his well-muscled colleagues in the broadcasting booth...
...then the show will travel to other museums throughout the United States.—L.T...
...The success of Jewish fighters and the pride they engendered in their beleaguered coreligionists have obscured the problems boxing poses for Jews who, historically, have usually eschewed activities involving violence...
...The Jews' admission ticket to baseball or any other American sport, Ford says, is the acquisition of "a sportsman's spirit" In short, a character makeover with its reverence for the ethos of sport would bring the Jew into line with the Anglo-Saxon male ideal...
...The protracted defamatory • campaign directed against the Jewish male is part of the his...
...Eddie Gottlieb, owner, Philadelphia Warriors...
...We inherited this emphasis on matching gentile achievements from the Victorian period...
...see box on p. 38), is only the most recent example of this interest in the achievements of Jewish athletes...
...Arnold "Red" Auerbach, coach, Boston Celtics...
...There is no reason why we should not be equally discriminating about domesticated versions of these entertainments like football and boxing...
...An earlier generation's encounter with American sport is eloquently described by Philip Roth in his memoir, The Fads: A Novel of Autobiography (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988...
...American Jews continue to struggle wrtfi questions posed by the sports tradition: Should we wholeheartedly participate, shun sports altogether, glorify our few sports heroes or simply let the matter pass without comment...
...Roth's special infatuation was baseball: I was an average playground player, and the mitt's enchantment had less to do with foolish dreams of becoming a major leaguer, or even a high school star, than with the bestowal of membership in a great secular nationalistic church from which nobody had ever seemed to suggest that Jews should be excluded...
...It is seldom noted that this rite was only one episode in a long tradition: Analogous efforts to impugn Jewish masculine identity were aimed at France's Jewish prime ministers, Leon Blum and Pierre Mendes-France, both during and after their political careers...
...These authors do not enumerate the medieval fantasies about Jewish physiology, including the myth of Jewish male menstruation, that preceded the foundation of "scientific" racism...
...For Roth, involvement in sport was a solution to his Jewish identity problem...
...If we think about these issues, then our centuries-long encounter with physical culture in its various forms can help us better understand those sometimes unarticulated cultural instincts from which our values grow...
...The opening of the B'nai B'rith Sports Hall of Fame in Washington, D.C...
...Shirley Povich, sports writer, Washington Post...
...At the same time, we should not overlook the appeal this ethos had for many Jews during this period...
...By the latter part of the 19th century, medieval notions about Jewish anatomy had achieved a pseudoscientific legitimacy through the racial doctrines of that era...
...and Mark Spitz, Olympic swimming champion...
...The historical introduction to Bernard Postal's The Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports (Bloch, 1955) is a useful exception to the rule, but, even here, we see a reluctance to relinquish the notion that in the world of sport Jews are really no different from anyone else, except for the prejudices they have had to overcome...
...And then there is Woody Allen, the effeminized Jew as cultural hero...
...Nor has this struggle concluded...
...The famous Dreyfus affair illustrates the larger context in which the masculinity of the Jew is a significant theme...
...For behind the relentless cheerfulness of the prose and accompanying illustrations was a pathos I could not explain...
...The constant emphasis is on the ability of Jews to perform on the sports field just like their gentile counterparts...
...In 1894 Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French army and an assimilated Alsatian Jew, was unjusdy tried and convicted of treason...
...Roth's "old country Jewish origins" no doubt guided his choice of an American sport civilized enough for Jews—=an example of how the social history of European Jewry has shaped American Jews' feelings about sport...
...His ordeal is usually presented as the martyrdom of the honorable Jew-as-citizen and soldier...
...Unfortunately, the standard treatments of Jewish sports history tend to skim over deeper questions about sport and Jewish values...
...This superficial approach to the relationship between Jews and the athletic tradition is inadequate because it fails to take into account the meaning of sport in a wider cultural sense...
...Dolph Schayes, coach, Philadelphia 76ers...
...Virile forms of ac-3 tion like military service, duel-jj ing and sport became venues • in which Jewish weakness or • fortitude could be tested...
...In May, when its Sports Hall of Fame opens to the public, B'nai B'rith's glorification of Jewish sports heroes will reach its pinnacle with a gala dinner, an exhibit entitled "Stars of David—Jews in the World of Sports" at its B'nai B'rith Klutznick Museum in Washington, and the inauguration of the first 14 members into the Hall of Fame at its permanent home within the Klutznick Museum...
...That someone had taken the trouble to assemble this Jewish athletic pantheon, including a number of obscure figures, struck me as both interesting and somehow disquieting...
...torical background in relation to which sport became a dem...
...Like much writing about Jews in sport, this little volume was a morale-building project, and quite possibly a useful one...
...Neiditch, who admits he is not a sports fan, finds a fascinating social history presented in the exhibit and the Hall of Fame...
...Membership in sports teams "separated us from the faint, residual foreignness still clinging to some of our parents' attitudes and...validated our own spodess credentials as American kids...
...Folkloric humor about Jewish athletic ineptitude is a more benign variation of earlier and more vicious images denigrating the Jewish male and his suitability for idealized masculine roles like the soldier, duelist, horseman and athlete...
...In popular lore the successful Jewish athlete ranks with the proverbial Swiss admiral, Italian general and other comic-pathetic male figures of the popular imagination...
...The problematic status of the Jewish athlete persisted as an underAre We Still Worshipping Our Sports Heroes...
...Ford's "analysis" removes the Jew from the fellowship of normal, red-blooded American males, but ingenuously claims that this expulsion may not be permanent...
...Dick Savitt, Wimbledon tennis champion...
...current in American society even as Jews achieved starring roles in football (Sid Luckman), boxing (Benny Leonard), basketball (Dolph Schayes) and baseball (Hank Greenberg and Al Rosen...
...It may be a defect in their character, or it may not...
...Celebrating the famous Jewish athletes of this century, like Allen's brand of humor, has been an indirect attempt to exorcise the traditional denigration of the Jewish male...
...These different perspectives were inevitable given that sport has always featured contests of strength symbolizing power relationships and privileged roles for idealized male bodies...
...Upbeat stories about Jewish athletic champions may strengthen the self-esteem of Jewish children and give them a stronger sense of their normality...
...The antisemitism of a conservative military establishment resulted in Dreyfus being stripped of his rank and deported to a remote prison colony...
...But this Jewish estrangement from the sporting ideal has presented a problem in an age of Jewish assimilation, especially in the United States...
...This is not set down in complaint against them, but merely as analysis...
...If the museum is a serious educational tool, we need to reach the whole Jewish population," Neiditch says...
...The traditional Jewish repugnance to hunting demonstrates that Jewish critiques of blood sports are an authentic expression of the Jewish historical memory and the experiences of our ancestors...
...Holmes' encomium to these Teutonic swordsmen represents the antithesis of the Jewish anti-sportive tradition...
...The antisemitic hate mail received by Howard Cosell (ne Cohen) confirms that the Jew's outsider status within the world of sport has persisted into the modern era...
...B'nai B'rith also hopes to increase the visitor base of the museum...
...Are today's Jews willing or able to acknowledge cultural differences that separate their tradition from the mainstream sports culture...
...This apparent abstention from high performance athletics raises questions about Jewish interest in sport, and it recalls old doubts about whether Jews are mentally and physically suited to be great athletes...
...For the Dreyfus affair was also a spectacular trial of Jewish virility...
...Al Rosen, third baseman, Cleveland Indians...
...These athletic bodies have often been associated with an alleged racial and virile superiority exhibited by the Germans and Anglo-Saxons who dominated sport, especially gymnastics, for many years before and after the turn of the century, A long folkloric tradition, still surviving in attenuated forms, also alleges that the Jew is physically and athletically inferior...
...Although the intensity of this outsider experience for Jewish boys has steadily declined, as have the intensity and coherence of Jewish-American culture as a whole, this sense of difference is likely to persist in attenuated forms...
...In summary, our encounters with sport can help us define the limits of our assimilation into mainstream American culture...
...May 16, at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington, D,C, They are: Mel Allen, sportscaster, New York Yankees...
...The sadistic military ceremony that expelled him from the French army—breaking his sword and brutally removing^ his insignia—was nothing less than a rite of devirilization inflicted upon an officer whose manhood was already suspect because he was a Jew...
...The students at Heidelberg with their sword-slashed faces inspire me with sincere respect...
...But these stories also mask more subtie issues that are seldom discussed by Jewish historians and commentators...
...The addition of the Sports Hall of Fame could bring in people, Jewish and non-Jewish, who otherwise might never consider visiting a Jewish museum...
...Stars of David—Jews in the World of Sports" will run from May through November of 1991...
...Success did not preclude outsider status...
...This melting pot is in part an illusion, since Jews have special reason to question the violence and the mindlessness of so much of modern sport...
...Sid Luckman, quarterback, Chicago Bears: Abe Pollin...
...The standard account of Jewish estrangement from sport usually begins with Jewish resistance to Greek athletic games and the nudity and homosexuality associated with them...
...What the standard version leaves out is the symbolic significance of Dreyfus' agonized attempt to preserve his masculine identity...
...When a colleague heard that B'nai B'rith planned to open a Sports Hall of Fame to recognize Jewish contributions to American sports, he remarked, "Where's it going to be, in a closet...
...One of the oldest myths about the Jew," they write, "was the curious belief that he was a physical weakling and there' fore unfit for and a stranger to athletics...
...Benny Leonard, world lightweight boxing champion...
...It also raises the issue of whether the devotion to sport required of serious athletes is compatible with traditional Jewish values...
...My own interest in the relationship between sport and the Jews was awakened several years ago by a children's book about Jewish sports heroes I found in a suburban temple library...
...I rejoice at every dangerous sport which I see pursued," wrote the great jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes...
...Two centuries of cultural conditioning have made our early encounters with sport and its special challenges an emotional trial whose traumas and triumphs may still be felt decades later...
...Having detected an authentic Jewish reticence toward sport, Ford seized on this character trait as a crucial sign of difference, as if baseball really were the civic religion so many Americans take it to be...
...The New York sportswriter Paul Gallico, for example, ascribed Jewish prowess at basketball to the fact that "the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smartaleckness...
...It turns me on intellectually because its important for museums to focus the spotlight on every aspect of Jewish life and social history," he continues, "l recognize that Jews who participate in sports were able to advance in society because of their involvement...
...Our more discerning ancestors recognized and despised the brutal elements of the Greek and Roman games...
...The relationship between Jewish boys and sports has its special complications...
...The challenge for Jewish historians is to explore the implications of this difference despite its exploitation by antisemites...
...its a very important part of the 20th century Jewish American experience...
...Jewish life cannot be presented with just ceremonial objects or even just focusing on political issues...
...it is nevertheless a fact which discriminating Jews unhesitatingly acknowledge...
...The mission of the Klutznick Museum is to see life as a whole," says Michael Neiditch, associate international director for programs at B'nai B'rith...
...Throughout modern history, Jews have regarded physical culture and modern sport differently from their non-Jewish contemporaries...
...Boxing, in which many Jews have excelled since the days of Daniel Men-doza, the British-born boxer who became a champion in 1789 producing jubilation in Jewish circles, illustrates with special poignancy the Jewish dilemma about sport...
...Sport, like many activities, is symbolic action that will be understood and appreciated—or rejected—depending on one's cultural orientation...
...How should the history of Jews and sport be presented to a modern Jewish audience for whom sports are standard cultural fare...
...The B'nai B'rith Klutznick Museum is located at 1640 Rhode Island Avenue, N.W., in Washington, D.C...
...Hank Greenberg, first baseman, Detroit Tigers...
...Ford used the alleged Jewish crimes against baseball in precisely the same way the anti-Dreyfusards had used a trumped-up treason charge against their victim: Both denied manhood and citizenship to the Jew...
...For years Cosell acted, virtually in caricature, the classic role of the acerbic Jewish social critic whose deeper ties to society—and to the sports world that supposedly incarnates its most wholesome values—are always in doubt...
...Indeed, very few elite athletes of Jewish ancestry are currently active anywhere in the world...
...Perhaps the best known of these books, Harold U. and Meir Z. Riba-low's TheJew in American Sports (Bloch, 1966), now in its fourth revised edition, is an unabashedly inspirational book chat only hints at the cultural conflicts sport has caused for Jews...
...Before Allen turned it into slapstick, many Jews were forced to live out the masculinity issue in deadly earnest...
...The first honoreeswill be inducted on Thursday...
...But Henry Ford was more discerning about cultural differences than the Jewish sport historians who have attempted to refute his claim that Jews do not belong in American sport...
...For while the antisemites of the German and Austrian student fraternities often refused to duel with their Jewish contemporaries, arguing that Jews could not give "satisfaction" as worthy adversaries, there were also Jews who fought well enough to frighten off potential opponents in the Aryan camp...
...I am aware that this advice will be resented by Jews who have embraced the sports world as an idealized melting pot that can accommodate a multiplicity of styles and values...
...Whatever the source, however, the fact remains that Jews as a people have chosen to apply their energies to other areas of achievement—and with notable success...
...For many Jews, sport has served as an assimilationist strategy that suppresses certain Jewish values as well as the Jewish history in which these values are rooted...
...Allen's shallow version of the diminutive, angst-ridden Jewish male preserves the haplessness of his role without acknowledging its gravity...
...owner, Washington Bullets and Washington Capitals...
...Blood sports present a special cultural problem for Jews...
...Al Dawis, managing partner, OaklandAos Angeles Raiders...
...Roth chose baseball because, "unlike boxing or even football, [it] had nothing to do with the menace of brute force unleashed against flesh and bones...
...Like almost all Jewish commentators on this subject, the Encyclopedia authors attempt to discredit the image of inherent Jewish physical inferiority and then to assimilate Jews into the mainstream culture of American sport The question, however, is whether Jews belong in the mainstream at all, since the benefits of assimilation always come at a price...
...To begin with," Ford wrote, ¦Jews are not sportsmen...
...Having been largely severed from the European experience and the special nuances of its antisemitic folklore, most American Jews are not aware of the challenges to Jewish manhood that were once a part of everyday life for many Euro-5 pean Jews...
...We have masked potential conflicts by participating in recreational sports and by glorifying our successful athletes as Jewish folk heroes— the boxers Benny Leonard and Barney Ross, the baseball players Hank Green-berg and Sandy Koufax and the swimmer Mark Spitz —who are celebrated precisely because they are exceptions to the rule...
...We have essentially abstained from the alien subculture of high performance sport with its narcissism, its anti-intellectualism, its cult of risk and its skeletal ethic we call "sportsmanship...
...The problematic status of sport within the Jewish tradition has ancient roots...
...onstration of Jewish competence in the world of masculine performances...
...The role of Jews in sports is a legibmate subject to put in a museum setting because Jews play a significant role in sports...
...Whether this is due to their physical lethargy, their dislike of unnecessary physical action or their serious cast of mind, others may decide...
...This 19th century struggle by young Jewish duelists to achieve a masculine identity points forward to 20th century adulation of Jewish sports stars and their symbolic significance for all Jewish males...
...Even the upbeat authors of The Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports recognize this scabrous tradition as a significant element of Jewish cultural history...
...Sandy Koufax, pitcher, Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers...
...Henry Ford's 1921 articles on Jews and baseball in The Dearborn Independent attacked Jewish gamblers allegedly responsible for "fixing" the 1919 World Series, but his deeper antisemitic agenda was evident...

Vol. 16 • April 1991 • No. 2


 
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