Jews and the Sporting Life: Studies in Contemporary Jewry XXIII

ST UDI ES I N CONTE MPORARY JEW RY The publication of Studies in Contemporary Jewry has been made possible through th...

Author: Ezra Mendelsohn

455 downloads 2894 Views 1MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

ST UDI ES I N CONTE MPORARY JEW RY

The publication of Studies in Contemporary Jewry has been made possible through the generous assistance of the Samuel and Althea Stroum Philanthropic Fund, Seattle, Washington

THE AVRAHAM HARMAN INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY JEWRY THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM

JEWS AND THE SPORTING LIFE STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY JEWRY AN ANNUAL

XXIII

2008 Edited by Ezra Mendelsohn

Published for the Institute by

1

1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With ofﬁces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2008 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jews and the sporting life / edited by Ezra Mendelsohn. p. cm. – (Studies in contemporary Jewry, ISSN 0740-8625; 23) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-19-538291-4 1. Jewish athletes. 2. Sports–social aspects. I. Mendelsohn, Ezra. GV709.6.J47 2008 796.089'924–dc22 2008023777

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY JEWRY

Editors Jonathan Frankel Eli Lederhendler Peter Y. Medding Ezra Mendelsohn Institute Editorial Board Michel Abitbol, Mordechai Altshuler, Haim Avni, David Bankier, Avraham Bargil, Yehuda Bauer, Daniel Blatman, Jonathan Dekel-Chen, Sergio DellaPergola, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Allon Gal, Nitza Genuth, Moshe Goodman, Yisrael Gutman, Anat Helman, Menahem Kaufman, Hagit Lavsky, Pnina Morag-Talmon, Dalia Ofer, Uzi Rebhun, Gideon Shimoni Managing Editors Laurie E. Fialkoff Hannah Levinsky-Koevary International Advisory and Review Board Chimen Abramsky (University College, London); Abraham Ascher (City University of New York); Arnold Band (University of California, Los Angeles); Doris Bensimon (Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle); Bernard Blumenkrantz (Centre National de la Recherche Scientiﬁque); Solomon Encel (University of New South Wales); Henry Feingold (City University of New York); Martin Gilbert (Honorary Fellow, Merton College, Oxford University); Zvi Gitelman (University of Michigan); S. Julius Gould (University of Nottingham); Paula Hyman (Yale University); David Landes (Harvard University); Heinz-Dietrich Löwe (University of Heidelberg); Michael Meyer (Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati); Alan Mintz (Brandeis University); Gerard Nahon (Centre Universitaire d’Études Juives); F. Raphael (Université des Sciences Humanies de Strasbourg); Jehuda Reinharz (Brandeis University); Monika Richarz (Germania Judaica, Kölner Bibliothek zur Geschichte des deutschen Judentums); Ismar Schorsch (Jewish Theological Seminary of America); Michael Walzer (Institute for Advanced Study); Bernard Wasserstein (University of Chicago); Ruth Wisse (Harvard University)

This page intentionally left blank

Preface

Upon encountering this volume’s symposium subject, our readers may conclude that the hard-pressed editors of Studies in Contemporary Jewry, after 25 years of commissioning essays on themes of central importance to Jewish studies—ranging from Jewish art and music to antisemitism and the state of Israel—are now reduced to scraping the very bottom of the barrel. Why sports? Is this not one of the few ﬁelds of endeavor in which Jews have, on the whole, failed to make much of an impression (with the exception of chess, but is chess a sport?). Sports has no deep roots in Jewish history; moreover, it is an activity that many Jews have traditionally regarded with contempt as a specimen of goyim nakhes, “pleasure for the Gentiles.” Surely this is a subject best left to Jewish apologetics, to those pathetic and ludicrous efforts to prove that Jews could pitch, serve, run, and swim with the best of them, even if we know that they could not, and did not even want to. And yet, despite its susceptibility to parody (did you know that David Beckham, the English soccer star, is half-Jewish?), this is not a subject to be despised. For one thing, the study of sports in general has now come into its own as a serious and challenging subject of historical, social, and cultural research, with its own academic journals and rapidly growing historiography. There is even a special name for it (in German, of course: Sportwissenschaft). This is not surprising, since sports has much to teach us about many central aspects of modern life: nationalism (consider the role of cricket in India and Pakistan); religious and ethnic identity; racism; politics (thus the “Nazi Olympic Games” of 1936 in Berlin); the media; high ﬁnance (oligarchs buying up football teams); popular culture (including the fascinating issue of celebrity); religion (the spread of fundamentalism among American athletes); gender (the remarkable rise of women’s sports in recent years); criminality and the impact of drugs on modern life (thus the great steroid scandal afﬂicting baseball); and so forth. For whatever reason, sports is capable of mobilizing the masses and of arousing great passion. Tiger Woods and Roger Federer are more famous, and much richer, than many a president, prime minister, or general; Manchester United and the New York Yankees inspire fanatic love (and hatred). One can hardly imagine Boston without its “Red Sox nation” (note the terminology—the fans of this venerable and now extremely successful baseball team see themselves as a “nation”). Despite the stigma attached to sports as a subject ﬁt only for juveniles (mostly males) of all ages, the growing interest of scholars and observers of modern life, not to mention novelists (John Updike and Philip Roth, to mention only two) and movie-makers, is wholly justiﬁed. The results of sporting events may be ephemeral, but sports has much to tell us about who we are, and about the world we live in.

viii

Preface

What is true in general is no less true in our particular case. If we look beyond the silly apologetics, the various encyclopedias of Jewish sports and Jewish sports halls of fame (and even they have their signiﬁcance as cultural artifacts), we ﬁnd, as the articles in this volume demonstrate, that sports has occupied, and continues to occupy, an important place in the modern Jewish world. The vast majority of American Jews back in the 1960s would not have been able to identify the leaders of the American Jewish Committee or of any other Jewish organization, but a large number did know of Sandy Koufax and took pride in his accomplishments as a Jewish athlete who maintained his ethnic identity in that most non-Jewish of all environments, professional sports. Moreover, the fact is that Jews have been, at certain times and places, quite prominent in sports, and even Orthodox Judaism has for a long time co-existed peacefully with this “Gentile pleasure,” as demonstrated by Yeshiva University’s sports program. In Israel, where sports is the subject of intense interest, the Orthodox establishment does not interfere with soccer games on the Sabbath, which are played before enthusiastic crowds that include many traditional, synagogue-going people. In recent years a number of important studies on Jews and sports have been published, allowing us to claim that this volume is very much in tune with the zeitgeist.1 These books, and our volume, emphasize the importance of sports for modern Jewish nationalism, and above all for the history of Zionism, a movement that stood for the regeneration not only of the Jewish land and of the Jewish nation, but also of the Jewish body. As part of their reframing of Jewish history (the invention of tradition, it might be called), Zionists organized sports groups named after ancient Jewish military heroes, and even established a special event modeled on the Olympics, the Maccabiah games, which are held every four years in Israel exclusively for Jewish athletes. Sports has functioned both as a marker of Jewish identity and as a way of overcoming Jewish parochialism and of promoting integration. For the young American Jewish community, and for Jews elsewhere, too, interest and participation in local sports activities was a hallmark of acculturation, and the heroics of Jewish sportsmen a source of ethnic pride on the part of a people often derided for its lack of physicality, for its “softness” and its “femininity.” Sports, not unlike the army, was often an equal opportunity employer, offering advancement to those with talent, irrespective of religion or national origins. It was also (again, like the army) a hotbed of racial and religious prejudice. Thus the infamous 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and the many instances of Jewish athletes barred from participation in sports clubs, teams, and athletic competitions. As such, it is a signiﬁcant aspect of the history both of Jewish “assimilation” and of Jewish exclusion. It also serves as an index of upward social mobility. There are scarcely any boxers of Jewish origin left in the United States, where once there were many, and in general the number of outstanding Jewish athletes in wealthy western countries is on the decline, the result, no doubt, of the Jews’ transformation from a proletarian and lower-middle-class urban community to members of the afﬂuent, largely suburban middle and upper-middle class. Basketball in the United States, once an important Jewish domain, is now dominated by blacks, while baseball, where at least a few Jewish players once stood out, is now increasingly the realm of Hispanic athletes. As Edward Shapiro demonstrates, the role of Jews in American sports today is chieﬂy

Preface

ix

as millionaire owners of professional teams, a remarkable sign of the times in Jewish life. Sports, as Sander Gilman reminds us, has also invaded the realm of Jewish culture. Jewish novelists, ranging from Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth to Chaim Potok, have been inspired by it as they grapple with the great theme of Americanization in general and with the place of the Jews (and the Jews’ body) in that drama. Sports in Israel is also a fascinating subject, which (as Anat Helman shows) sheds light on virtually all aspects of life in that still embattled country—relations between Jews and Arabs (a few Arab players play on the Israeli national soccer team, and some mostly Arab teams play in Israeli leagues); relations between different Jewish ethnic groups; national pride and national humiliation (as in Israel’s desperate but usually unsuccessful efforts to win entrance to the World Soccer Cup, or to the European soccer cup competition); the activities of the Israeli “oligarchs” (who, like Jewish millionaires abroad, enjoy buying teams); religion (the issue of playing on the Sabbath, for example); international relations (for obvious reasons, Israel plays in the European division of international soccer and basketball, despite its geographical location), and so forth. At a November 2007 soccer match involving Betar Jerusalem, a team traditionally associated with the Israeli right, the fans were asked to observe a moment of silence in memory of the slain prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. The ensuing bedlam, and the cries of support for Rabin’s incarcerated murderer, brought home in the clearest possible way the ties that bind Israeli sports to issues of Jewish ethnicity and social class, to feelings of cultural and economic resentment, and to politics, a subject discussed here by Tamir Sorek. This volume cannot cover all aspects of this highly variegated subject, but we hope that the essays collected here will convince our skeptical readers that our choice of a symposium subject was a reasonable one. In fact, we look forward to the day when the Hebrew University, and other institutions of higher learning in Israel, will offer courses on Jewish sports as an integral part of their programs in Jewish and Israeli studies. As is always the case, this volume includes, apart from the symposium, general essays, review essays, and book reviews. Our managing editors, though far from being experts on the subject of sports (as they will readily admit), did their usual stellar job of producing a highly readable and intellectually satisfying volume, as they have been doing for many years now. Without them there would be no Studies in Contemporary Jewry. My thanks to them, and to my fellow editors. Studies in Contemporary Jewry is made possible by the ongoing economic support of the Samuel and Althea Stroum Foundation, and is assisted as well by a grant from the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, for which we are most grateful. It is with deep sadness that I must inform our readers of the death of Jonathan Frankel, who passed away in Jerusalem on May 7, 2008 at the age of 72, just as this volume was about to go to press. In the early 1980s, the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, under the leadership of the late Moshe Davis, decided to issue its own Englishlanguage scholarly journal, and Jonathan was asked to take the lead in forming an editorial team and in determining the journal’s character. The enviable reputation that Studies in Contemporary Jewry has enjoyed over the last quarter century owes much

x

Preface

to his vision, guidance, and hard work. We mourn his passing, and pledge to carry on in his spirit and in keeping with his high standards. Our next volume, on which Jonathan was working until only a few weeks before his death, will include an essay on his path-breaking and highly inﬂuential writings, and on his unique personality. E.M.

Note 1. See, for example, Jack Kugelmass (ed.), Jews, Sports, and the Rites of Citizenship (Champaign, Ill: 2007); Jeffrey Gurock, Judaism’s Encounter with American Sports (Bloomington: 2005); Michael Brenner and Gideon Reuveni (eds.), Emancipation through Muscles: Jews and Sports in Europe (Lincoln: 2006); Michael Berkowitz and Ruti Ungar (eds.), Fighting Back? Jewish and Black Boxers in Britain (London: 2007). Other recent publications have discussed Jewish “toughness” and even Jewish violence (for example, vol. 19 of Studies in Contemporary Jewry, edited by Peter Medding).

Contents

Symposium Jews and the Sporting Life Sander L. Gilman, Thoughts on the Jewish Body, Baseball, and the Problem of Integration,

5

Diethelm Blecking, Jews and Sports in Poland before the Second World War,

17

Gabriel N. Finder, “Boxing for Everyone”: Jewish DPs, Sports, and Boxing,

36

Michael Alexander, The Jewish Bookmaker: Gambling, Legitimacy, and the American Political Economy,

54

Jeffrey S. Gurock, Pride and Priorities: American Jewry’s Response to Hakoah Vienna’s U.S. Tour of 1926,

70

Edward S. Shapiro, From Participant to Owner: The Role of Jews in Contemporary American Sports,

87

Anat Helman, Sports in the Young State of Israel,

103

Tamir Sorek, Why Did Beit Shean Let Betar Win? Latent Ethnic Solidarity and the Sports Ethic in Israel,

128

Sergio DellaPergola, Dream and Disenchantment: Massimo Della Pergola and the Invention of the Italian Totocalcio,

141

Essays Matthew Silver, Reﬂections from “Hutz La’aretz”: Responses of Reform Rabbis to Israeli Statehood,

161

Jan Schwarz, 1953/1954: A Year in Yiddish Literature,

185

xii

Contents

Review Essays Aharon Klieman, Denigrating Israel, Israeli Style,

202

Daniel Blatman, Polish Antisemitism: A National Psychosis?,

213

Book Reviews (arranged by subject) Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide David Bankier (ed.), The Jews Are Coming Back: The Return of the Jews to Their Countries of Origin after WWII, David Weinberg,

229

Anna Bikont, My z Jedwabnego (We from Jedwabne), Joanna B. Michlic,

231

Robert Blobaum (ed.), Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland, Daniel Blatman,

213

Christopher R. Browning, Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony, Susannah Heschel,

235

Jan T. Gross, Fear: Antisemitism in Poland after Auschwitz, Daniel Blatman,

213

Steven T. Katz and Alan Rosen (eds.), Obliged by Memory: Literature, Religion, Ethics, Alvin H. Rosenfeld,

237

Walter Laqueur, The Changing Face of Antisemitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, Milton Shain,

239

Joanna Beata Michlic, Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present, Theodore R. Weeks,

241

Robert Satloff, Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands, Daniel J. Schroeter,

243

Theodore R. Weeks, From Assimilation to Antisemitism: The “Jewish Question” in Poland, 1850–1914, Daniel Blatman,

213

Gary Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust, Emily Miller Budick,

245

Andrzej Z˙ bikowski, U genezy Jedwabnego: Z˙ ydzi na kresach północno-wschodnich II Rzeczpospolitej, wrzesien´ 1939–lipiec 1941 (The genesis of Jedwabne: Jews and the southeastern borderlands of the second Polish republic, September 1939–July 1941), Daniel Blatman,

213

Contents

xiii

Cultural Studies and Religion Samantha Baskind, Encyclopedia of Jewish American Artists, Ezra Mendelsohn,

249

Menachem Butler and Zev Nagel (eds.), My Yeshiva College: 75 Years of Memories, Lloyd P. Gartner,

251

Alyson Pendlebury, Portraying ‘the Jew’ in First World War Britain, Sharman Kadish,

252

Daniel Rynhold, Two Models of Jewish Philosophy: Justifying One’s Practices, Shubert Spero,

254

History and the Social Sciences Nathan Abrams, Commentary Magazine, 1949–59: ‘A Journal of Signiﬁcant Thought and Opinion,’ Gerald Sorin,

256

Karen H. Adler, Jews and Gender in Liberation France, Phyllis Albert,

258

Bat Ye’or, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, Rivka Yadlin,

262

Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Michail Liubansky, Olaf Glöckner, Paul Harris, Yael Israel, Willi Jasper, and Julius Schoeps, Building a Diaspora: Russian Jews in Israel, Germany and the USA, Maria Yelenevskaya,

266

Michael Brenner and Gideon Reuveni (eds.), Emancipation through Muscles: Jews and Sports in Europe, Mitchell B. Hart,

270

Hasia R. Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000, Lloyd P. Gartner,

272

Marion A. Kaplan (ed.), Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945, Donald L. Niewyk,

274

Fred A. Lazin, The Struggle for Soviet Jewry in American Politics: Israel Versus the American Jewish Establishment, Jerome A. Chanes,

276

Alexander Paritsky, Molitva (Prayer), Samuel Barnai,

279

Karen Hunger Parshall, James Joseph Sylvester: Jewish Mathematician in a Victorian World, Todd M. Endelman,

283

Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History, Lloyd P. Gartner,

272

Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East Avi Bareli, Daniel Gutwein, and Tuvia Friling (eds.), H . evrah vekhalkalah beyisrael: mabat histori ve’akhshavi (Society and economy in Israel: historical and contemporary perspectives), Ronen Mandelkern,

285

xiv

Contents

Shlomo Ben-Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The IsraeliArab Tragedy, Aharon Klieman,

202

Gideon Biger, The Boundaries of Modern Palestine, 1840–1947, Aharon Klieman,

202

Ahron Bregman, Elusive Peace: How the Holy Land Defeated America, Aharon Klieman,

202

Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conﬂict Can Be Resolved, Aharon Klieman,

202

Isaiah Friedman, Palestine: A Twice Promised Land? The British, the Arabs & Zionism, 1915–1920 (vol. 1), Aharon Klieman,

202

Zeev Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, Aharon Klieman,

202

Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in the Modern World, Aharon Klieman,

202

Orna Sasson-Levy, Zehuyot bemadim: gavriyut venashiyut baz.ava hayisreelit (Identities in uniform: masculinity and femininity in the Israeli army), Amia Lieblich,

287

Contents for Volume XXIV, Note on Editorial Policy,

290 291

ST UDI ES I N CONTE MPORARY JEW RY

This page intentionally left blank

Symposium Jews and the Sporting Life

This page intentionally left blank

Thoughts on the Jewish Body, Baseball, and the Problem of Integration Sander L. Gilman (emory university)

This essay pivots on two seemingly unrelated moments. They are the “medicalization” of the Jew’s body in the course of the 19th century and the claims of Jewish physical inferiority that were still common at a time when Jews from Western and Eastern Europe began to integrate into 20th-century American culture. It is the American culture of sports or, more precisely, the literary fantasy of sports that will be the place to examine how Jews and others in the production of mass, popular, and high culture come to imagine Jewish difference. And it is the “ill” body of the Jew as unsportsmanlike, weak, diseased, and obese that sets the tone. How Jewish scientists and writers deal with such claims of difference is the theme of this essay. In modernity as in the ancient world it is the legible body that reveals character. You are what you appear to be. A particularly salient marker of difference is obesity. Even today the obese body is labeled as unhealthy, unnatural, deformed, or destructive, and its inherent visibility is understood to reveal the inner, hidden nature of the individual. Whereas in ancient times obesity was regarded as a mark of sin, in modern times it is transformed into a sign of illness—whether a faulty psyche, a mutant DNA, or an erratic metabolic system. The stereotyped body of the Jew comes to represent all of the potential for disease and decay associated with obesity. This is very much in light of the general understanding of the stereotypical “Jew,” in both Christianity and Islam, as the antithesis of the healthy, true believer. Time and again it was obesity (and the gluttony inherent in the Jew’s soul) that was seen as “shaping” the Jew’s body. Often this was a matter of race. In his The Cure of Obesity, Jean Frumusan claimed that the “Oriental races, enervated by climate, customs, and a superalimentation abounding in fats, sugar and pastry, will inevitably progress towards the realization of fat generations, creating an extremely favourable soil for obesity.”1 Another view holds that Jews inherited their tendency toward fat because of their lifestyle. “Can a surfeit of food continued through many generations create a large appetite in the offspring; alternatively, can it cause a functional weakness of their weight-regulating mechanism?” asks another obesity expert, W.F. Christie. And he answers: 5

6

Sander L. Gilman Take, for instance, the Hebrews, scattered over the ends of the earth. Probably no race in the world has so apparent a tendency to become stout after puberty, or is more frequently cited as an example of racial adiposity. It is also probable that no nation is so linked in common serfdom to their racial habits and customs. [Elliot] Joslin [a noted American diabetes expert] says of the present generation of Jews: “Overeating begins in childhood, and lasts till old age.” The inheritance of large appetites and depressed weight-regulating mechanism may exist in them, although they show no other signs of the latter; whereas the inheritance of fat-forming habits is certain.2

In this reading, “nature,” through the inheritance of acquired characteristics, trumps “culture,” even among emancipated Jews. Within the modern, acculturated body of the Jew is a racially deﬁned Jew whose body betrays itself. The physician William-Frédéric Edwards argued in 1829 that races remained constant all over the world, pointing to the stability of the Jews as proof.3 One of Edwards’ friends, the Scottish physician Robert Knox, noted the “fact” that the portraits of Jews in Egyptian tombs resembled Jews of contemporary London!4 Oscar Wilde was, of course, right when he argued decades later that nature copies art rather than art copying nature. The reality of the world mirrored the fantasies of its observers, and fantasies about the Jewish body demanded such arguments of continuity. In 1841, Hubert Lauvergne, a follower of the phrenologist Franz Joseph Gall, argued that contemporary Greeks bore the proud face and skull of ancient Greece, while the “immutability of the Jewish type” proved their degeneracy.5 Other accounts stress the Jews’ poor hygienic traditions—a view diametrically opposed to that of 19th-century Jewish reformers who regarded Judaism as the rational religion of hygiene. It is the “Oriental” Jew who presents the worst-case scenario for this line of argument. The German physician Max Oertel, perhaps the most quoted authority on obesity at the beginning of the 20th century, states that “the Jewesses of Tunis, when barely ten years old are systematically fattened by being conﬁned in dark rooms and fed with farinaceous articles and the ﬂesh of dogs, until in the course of a few months they resemble shapeless lumps of fat.”6 Here the fantasy about the “Oriental” body in the West is heightened by the image of Jews feeding their daughters non-kosher food, such that obesity comes to represent hypocrisy as well as gluttony and squalor. From the 19th century, diabetes was regarded as a disease of the obese and, in an odd set of associations, the Jew was implicated as obese because of an apparent increased presence of diabetes among Jews. (The evident analogy was to gout as the disease of the overindulgent.) A popular view holds that diabetes, the “Jewish” disease, is the expression of a gluttonous body. Robert Saundby, a physician specializing in diabetes, comments: All observers are agreed that Jews are specially liable to become diabetic. . . . A person belonging to the richer classes in towns usually eats too much, spends a great part of his life indoors; takes too little bodily exercise, and overtakes his nervous system in the pursuit of knowledge, business, or pleasure. . . . Such a description is a perfectly accurate account of the well-to-do Jew, who raises himself easily by his superior mental ability to a comfortable social position, and notoriously avoids all kinds of bodily exercise.7

According to one early 20th-century specialist, it is mainly rich Jewish men who are fat.8 Rather than arguing for any metabolic inheritance, he attributed the disease

Thoughts on the Jewish Body, Baseball, and the Problem of Integration

7

to poor diet—too much rich food and alcohol, this being yet another stereotype connected with the Jew. Such claims naturally did not go unanswered by Jewish scholars. Bound by the limitations of their role within the science of their time, they struggled with the notion of an inherently unhealthy Jewish body. The essay on diabetes in the early 20thcentury Jewish Encyclopedia, written by two leading scholars, (the British) Joseph Jacobs and (the American) Maurice Fishberg, contains a categorical rejection: “It has also been shown that diabetes is not a racial disease of the Jews.”9 In their view, diabetes is a disease of “civilization.” As Jews become both emancipated and secularized they come to have all of the diseases of those cultures into which they seem to amalgamate. Hence: Both of these views, (1) that the Jews suffer more frequently from diabetes than other races, and (2) that they are not more often affected—are probably well founded. It is only a question of the nativity of the Jews: the Jews in Germany, for example, are decidedly more diabetic than those in Russia, England, and France; and the difference of opinion among physicians of experience is simply due to the fact that they usually neglect to consider the question of the nativity of the Jews under consideration. In the United States, where Jews arrive from various countries, diabetes is found to be extremely frequent among the German and Hungarian Jews; while among the Russian Jews it is certainly no more—perhaps it is even less—frequent than among other races.10

Jacobs and Fishberg’s essay contends with another argument concerning the alleged Jewish propensity toward diabetes—one that links the disease to “incest” or “inbreeding.”11 In the literature on diabetes, consanguineous marriages are labeled as more frequent among the Jews than among most other races. “The Jews are the children and grandchildren of town-dwellers,” writes Charles Bouchard. He continues: In the long run the unfavorable hereditary inﬂuences are not rectiﬁed for them by the frequent intermarriage of the urban with the country people, as is the case with the rest of the population. The Jews marry exclusively among themselves; ﬁrst cousins from the paternal or maternal side ﬁnd no barrier to marriage, and immediately on being born the young Israelite receives the accumulated unfavorable (hereditary) inﬂuences, which he further develops during his lifetime, and which tend to the diseases that are generated by disturbed nutrition, particularly diabetes.12

Jacobs and Fishberg strongly deny this claim. Moreover, in a different essay in the Jewish Encyclopedia titled “Diathesis” (the “predisposition to certain forms of disease”), they also reject obesity as causal of diabetes. Jews, they write, may suffer from “arthritism,” under which they “understand a certain group of diseases, usually due to disturbances of the normal metabolism, which manifest themselves primarily as chronic rheumatism and gout, but which also include other morbid processes, such as diabetes, gall-stones, stone in the kidneys, obesity, and some diseases of the skin.”13 But these “are not racial in the full sense of the word. In the majority of cases they are due to their mode of life, to the fact that Jews are almost exclusively town dwellers, and to the anxieties of their occupations.”14 Obesity remains for them a product of civilization, and diabetes is one of obesity’s manifestations. This brief outline of 19th and early 20th-century claims and counterclaims concerning the links between Jews, obesity, and diabetes points to the need of Jews to

8

Sander L. Gilman

function within the constraints of the culture of their day (in this instance, the medical culture) in order to confront speciﬁc charges of Jewish racial or group inferiority. Simply put, Jewish thinkers of that day were arguing within the system, making use of what was then cutting-edge science in an attempt to ease the Jews’ integration into a liberal, secular, science-based culture. To be sure, their efforts to confront the issue of inherent Jewish difference were limited by the framework in which they were operating. But within it, they were quite willing to undertake a rethinking of the Jewish body.

Fat Jews and Baseball We now shift our attention to 20th-century sports in the United States—speciﬁcally, the “American” game of baseball, which was and remains the metaphoric litmus test for what is imagined to be prototypical of American society. It is in the literature about baseball even more than in the actual practice of the game that the struggle of Jewish thinkers to discover their cultural space (without contesting the norms of the culture in which they ﬁnd themselves) is best articulated. As far back as 1896, with the appearance of one of the ﬁrst self-consciously “Jewish” literary works in the United States, Abraham Cahan’s exemplary Yekl: A Story of the New York Ghetto, baseball plays a pivotal role as the new Jewish immigrants mock the book’s protagonist, Jake, because he has become a baseball fanatic. Indeed, as Allen Guttmann has argued, baseball seems to have inspired a disproportionate Jewish literary contribution to American letters.15 In 1919, Morris Raphael Cohen described baseball as the “national religion” in America, characterizing it as the “redemption from the limitations of our petty individual lives and the mystic unity with a larger life of which we are a part.” It is “a religion, and the only one that is not sectarian but national”—in addition, it is the “moral equivalent to war” for the Jews now entering the mainstream of Israel Zangwill’s “melting pot.”16 (This view of baseball as the secular religion of the Jews does not vanish. Decades later, Philip Roth characterized baseball “as a kind of secular church that reached into every class and religion of the nation.”17) Yet this new religion, at least in the literary accounts, appeared to be open to the Jew only in the role of viewer, not participant. The Jew as player had in fact been present since the 19th century, but only in the most marginal manner. Players such as Lip Pike (Lipman Emanuel Pike), who played professionally from 1866 to 1881 for teams such as the Philadelphia Athletics, did acknowledge their Jewish identity, or at least their audience did.18 Andy Cohen, who played baseball for the University of Alabama and then for the Waco club of the Texas League, was urged to change his name. He kept it and went on to become a darling of the fans when he came to play for the New York Giants in the mid-1920s. Cohen’s public Jewish identity drew huge numbers of Jewish fans to his games and led to his receiving a gold medal from the Y.M.H.A.19 Yet it was often his Jewish body, rather than his Jewish identity, that commanded a greater share of attention; in one contemporaneous account, he is described as appearing at the plate “half a foot behind his nose.”20 By 1934, the public display of Jewish identity within baseball was assured in the course of the Detroit Tigers’ pennant race with the New York Yankees. Hank

Thoughts on the Jewish Body, Baseball, and the Problem of Integration

9

Greenberg, a Jewish player for Detroit, announced that, in accordance with his rabbi’s advice, he would play in the game that coincided with Rosh Hashanah but not in the game scheduled for Yom Kippur.21 Greenberg was regularly labeled “the Jewish boy from the sidewalks of New York.”22 Three decades later, Sandy Koufax, a pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers from 1955 to 1966, replicated Greenberg’s gesture on October 6, 1965, when he refused to play on Yom Kippur in the World Series against the Minnesota Twins. To the extent that Jewish religious difference was viewed as a difference of mentality, of physiology,23 baseball became the space where such difference was most clearly articulated. After the “Black Sox” scandal of 1919, which came about when players on the Chicago White Sox threw the World Series at the behest of the publicly identiﬁed “Jewish” gambler Arnold Rothstein, Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent noted that “the Jews are not sportsmen. . . . The Jews saw money where the sportsmen saw fun and skill.”24 And as Jews were entering baseball in the 1930s in larger numbers, there was the view, as stated in 1935, that the Jew did not possess the background of sport, which was the heritage of the Irish. For centuries, the Jew, in his individual business, had to ﬁght against heavy odds for his success. It sharpened his wit and made him quick with his hands. Therefore, he became an individualist in the sport, and a skillful boxer and ring strategist, but he did not have the background to stand out in a sport which is so essentially a team game as baseball.25

In sum, Jews do not good ballplayers make. They may well appeal to the general public because they seem counter to “type.” They may well be like Saul Bellow’s prototypical Jewish intellectual Von Humboldt Fleisher, who “could hit like a sonofabitch on the sandlot” and could have “ended up in the majors.” Yet, despite his athlete’s body (“with his shoulders, just imagine how much beef there went into his swing”), Fleisher “started in to hanging around the Forty-Second Street library.”26 In other words, he was too intellectual, too different, too “fat.” Moreover, the Jews themselves did not approve of their children taking baseball too seriously. As Eddie Cantor, the popular radio and vaudeville comic noted, the absolutely worst thing you could call a child was “you baseball player, you!”27 The view that baseball is not serious is already challenged in some of the baseball ﬁction of the 1940s, where baseball becomes the ideal metaphor for the universal claims of American life in opposition to European fascism and Nazism. (The irony of this was not lost on the players of the Negro League.) In John R. Tunis’ novel Keystone Kids (1943), for instance, there is a catcher, Jocko Klein, who is more commonly known as Buglenose.28 The other players talk about how he won’t make it in the big leagues, since “those Jewish boys can’t take it. . . . Everyone knows it.” Underlying this belief is the feeling that the Jew somehow taints “America’s pastime.” In fact, Jocko is accused of not being American. A teammate comes to his defense: “Whaddya mean he ain’t an American? He was born in K.C. and raised there, went to school there, same as you were raised in Charlotte.” But his accuser is not to be swayed: “Aw, well. . . . anyhow, it’s different. . . . Jews aren’t athletes; they never were. They can’t take it, they’re gonna crack, they always crack.”29 Why is it that the “Jews” are “gonna crack”? The fault lies in long-held assumptions about the “Oriental” nature of the Jewish body. Jews were seen (and often saw

10

Sander L. Gilman

themselves) as being unable to compete physically with non-Jews. Such inability reﬂected the impact of “2000 years in the ghetto,” as one 19th-century French commentator notes, or else was a function of their racial makeup.30 In any event, Jews were perceived as physically incompetent even if they appeared to be strong. The Jewish body, even if it were in reality an ideal sportsman’s body, as in the case of the 18th-century English boxer Daniel Mendoza, would at some point betray the Jew by turning to fat and revealing its inherent weakness. It was seen as an inauthentic body, merely mimicking that of the sportsman. In an attempt to rectify this situation, several Jewish movements in the 19th century sought to take East European Jews out of the urban ghetto and move them to farming communities in lands as disparate as Argentina and Palestine. Modern Zionism, in the voice of Max Nordau at the Second Zionist Congress, called for a “new muscular Judaism” to replace the weak body of the ghetto inhabitant. Indeed, by the beginning of the 20th century, the stereotype of the “weak Jew” was arguably as powerful as that of the “fat Jew.” Imagining the Jewish body in baseball, and in sports in general, means dealing with such stereotypical notions of hidden Jewish inferiority. Jewish writers turn to sports as that space where the “ill” Jewish body can be healed—where the Jew, as in many of the wartime novels and in the ﬁlms of the 1940s, is simply “one of the gang,” different only in his New York City accent. But even in ﬁction, reality has a habit of intruding. In Irwin Shaw’s Voices of a Summer Day (1965), Benjamin Federer, a college athlete who plays both football and baseball, applies for a teaching job. He anticipates that his weigh-in, a requirement for job applicants in New Jersey public schools, will go smoothly. However, the doctor dismisses him as “obese” when the scale registers him at 187 lbs., whereupon Federer looked down at his powerful hard arms, his tucked-in, narrow waist, at the long, granite half-back’s legs. . . . [H]e could tear telephone books in half with his bare hands and run the mile in well under ﬁve minutes, and in the last baseball game of the year he had hit a home run over a fence 350 feet away. “Obese,” he said. “There isn’t an ounce of fat on me.”

However, the chart does not lie: at his height and age, he should weigh no more than 165 lbs. All the while Benjamin is observed by a classmate, Levy, “a short, narrow-shouldered boy with sickly oysterish skin marked by the livid scars of years of carbuncles. His chest was concave, he was knock-kneed, his legs and arms were like sticks. . . . ” Levy passes. He is “perfectly normal,” whereas Benjamin is “ofﬁcially obese,” told to lose 22 lbs. if he wants to be a public school teacher.31 Philip Roth, in his American Pastoral (1997), reﬂects on the meaning attached to “looking American” in the 1940s and 1950s. For men this meant looking like a sports ﬁgure. The protagonist of this novel is the “Swede,” Seymour Levov, a “blue-eyed blond born to our tribe,” whose “steep-jawed, insentient Viking mask” marks him culturally as the ﬁrst generation of Jews to be truly American and therefore “happy.”32 (Roth uses the model of Jewish athletes at Princeton such as the blond, blue-eyed Phil King, one of early baseball and football’s greatest players, and Moe Berg, who played much later for the Brooklyn Dodgers.) A third-generation American Jew who played varsity football, basketball, and baseball, Levov appears to the somewhat younger narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, as the personiﬁcation of Jewish acculturation. He is a “real” American and seemingly the antithesis of Ernest Hemingway’s Robert

Thoughts on the Jewish Body, Baseball, and the Problem of Integration

11

Cohn in The Sun Also Rises (1926), who came “out of Princeton with painful selfconsciousness and a ﬂattened nose” as a result of boxing—his attempt to prove (so Hemingway implies) that even a Jew could do sports.33 For Roth, however, the mask of acculturation hides the decay of the Levov family. It obscures the Swede’s desperation concerning his daughter, an anti-Vietnam War radical who has gone underground after perpetrating a fatal bombing. “I remember when Jewish kids were home doing their homework,” the Swede recalls his father saying. “What happened? What the hell happened to our smart Jewish kids? If, God forbid, their parents are no longer oppressed for a while, they run where they think they can ﬁnd oppression. Can’t live without it. Once Jews ran away from oppression; now they run away from non-oppression.”34 This tension between the struggle to free oneself from stigma and the heavy identiﬁcation with the stigmatized becomes a leit-motif of the transformation of the Jewish body in literary works of the 1990s. The physical transformation into a varsity player is shown to be a form of false or at best superﬁcial acculturation. What looks like a healthy American body only obscures the Jew within. Whether seemingly accomplished through intermarriage, the identiﬁcation with American goals, or aesthetic surgery, true integration is shown to be unobtainable. American Pastoral carefully responds to the desire to change Jewish difference present among some American Jews in the 1940s and 1950s. Yet in a different novel by Roth, fat baseball players both exist and are deﬁned by their fat. Notably, however, these characters are clearly not “Jewish.” Thus Big John Baal in Philip Roth’s grand parody of the ﬁrst-person baseball novel, The Great American Novel (1973), has “ten fat ﬁngers,” and early on in the novel he is introduced as “John Baal, the big bad ﬁrst-baseman the sentimentalists used to try and dignify by calling him ‘Rabelaisian.’”35 In fact, his weight is part of his greatness: If he didn’t drink, if he didn’t gamble, if he didn’t whore and cheat and curse, if he wasn’t a roughneck, a glutton and a brawler, why he just wasn’t himself, and his whole damn game went to pot, hitting and ﬁelding. But when he had ﬁfteen drinks under his belt, there was nobody like him on ﬁrst base. Giant that he was, he could still bounce around that inﬁeld like a kangaroo when he was good and drunk.36

Roth’s parody of sports autobiographies sees the fat boys in the game as its essence and not as an anomaly to be reformed. This counterimage is present elsewhere in baseball ﬁction, where a character’s clumsy walk is understood to be indicative of his bulk. In Tunis’ Keystone Kids, for instance, there is a relief pitcher known as Old Fat Stuff who evokes the myth of the fat and clumsy Babe Ruth as opposed to the gluttonous (but elegant) Ruth. Mark Harris, professor and novelist, is the Jewish intellectual as baseball chronicler, at least according to Eric Solomon, who sees his ﬁrst two baseball novels, The Southpaw (1953) and Bang the Drum Slowly (1956), as “the ﬁnest in the genre.”37 Many readers in addition to Eric Solomon consider the latter work to be the ultimate American baseball novel.38 Bang the Drum Slowly is actually the second of four works that chronicle the career of a pitcher named Henry Whittier Wiggen, surpassing the others in the tension it creates between sports and a healthy team spirit, on the one hand, and individual friendship, on the other. According to the book’s

12

Sander L. Gilman

title page, the author is “Henry W. Wiggen Certain of His Enthusiasms Restrained by Mark Harris,” and the conversational ﬁrst-person narration echoes that of Babe Ruth’s ghost-written autobiography of 1928.39 As in Roth’s account of the “American” game, the qualities classically ascribed to the Jewish body come to be revealed as the transient qualities of the baseball player. Wiggen, for instance, is a “fat boy.” “What you need is a truck scale,” he is told when he goes to weigh in, and after the scale registers him at 211½ lbs., he “threw his banana away.”40 Ten pages later, he is down to 210½ lbs. and by page 136, his weight has dropped even further, to 205½. Nonetheless, Wiggen regards himself as “fatter than a pig.”41 This is in contrast to another pitcher, Paul Richard Byrd, who weighs 240 lbs. and is known as Horse because, as he acknowledges, “I am a little large.”42 Unlike Wiggen, Byrd both conﬁrms and validates his bulk by naming it, and he is not seen to lose weight in the course of the novel. In varying ways, Harris shows, both of these fat boys can and do tame their bodies. This is not the case with the other protagonist in the novel, a second-rate catcher named Bruce Pearson. He has been diagnosed with Hodgkins’ disease, which threatens not only his life but also his role as a baseball player. We meet him when Wiggen visits him in Rochester, Minnesota, at the unnamed Mayo Clinic. He does not look ill, and when Wiggen asks him his weight and is told that it is 185, he is reassured. But he is indeed “doomeded [sic],” as he says.43 Wiggen befriends him and forces the team to keep him on. Because of this, Pearson is able to become, for at least for one stellar moment, a true athlete. He literally dies in harness, collapsing in the process of catching a game. Thus the fat outsider becomes a hero, dying in the moment of his success. (And yet he remains an outsider. No one from the club apart from Wiggen, who is one of his pallbearers, shows up to his funeral.) Here we have the tension between the images of Babe Ruth, who represented a type that could, through willpower, tame his body, and Lou Gehrig, whose body became the prison that robbed him of any control. The image of the fat ballplayer as a symbol of corruption turns up in the work of yet another major contemporary American Jewish novelist, Bernard Malamud. Of those Jewish writers who turn to baseball as the space to examine and excoriate the American soul (a task taken up as well by a number of non-Jewish novelists of the mid-20th century), none is more successful than Malamud in his novel of 1952, The Natural.44 In this work, the curse of the “fat” Jew is projected onto “Middle America” and becomes the metaphor for an “American” rather than a “Jewish” failure of will. The Natural centers about the life and times of Roy Hobbs, a baseball wunderkind from Middle America. In an early scene, Hobbs is shot in the gut by a femme fatale and vanishes from the baseball scene for 15 years. He reappears, at the age of 35, as a new player for the New York Knights: “His face was strong-boned, if a triﬂe meaty. . . . for his bulk he looked lithe.”45 No longer slim, he has become the older, fat ballplayer who, initially left on the sidelines by the manager, is nevertheless an inspiration to the bottom-of-the-league team. After the star hitter, Bump, dies of injuries sustained when he runs headlong into a wall, Roy gets his chance to play. With his bat, Wonderboy, he goes on to lead the team to one victory after another. Throughout the novel, death (or serious injury) and sexuality are intimately linked. Hobbs, for instance, becomes infatuated with Memo, who is both the manager’s niece and Bump’s widow. But before their affair is consummated, he has a brief relationship

Thoughts on the Jewish Body, Baseball, and the Problem of Integration

13

with Iris, a fan who has stood up in the bleachers for him in a show of support (deeply moved, Hobbs hits the next ball out of the park, thus ending a month-long batting slump). Iris will reappear later in the novel; at this point, however, Hobbs ditches her in order to continue pursuing Memo. Despite Memo’s apparent allure and the promise of an “ideal” life together, Hobbs feels a deep, empty gnawing inside. He begins to eat continuously, but nothing ﬁlls him up. He is the King of Klouters. . . . Yet no matter how many bangs [home runs] he collected, he was ravenously hungry for more and for all he could eat besides. The Knights had boarded the train at dinner time but he had stopped off at the station to devour half a dozen franks smothered in sauerkraut and he guzzled down six bottles of pop before his meal on the train, which consisted of two oversize sirloins, at least a dozen rolls, four orders of mashed, and three (some said ﬁve) slabs of apple pie. Still that didn’t do the trick, for while they were all at cards that evening, he sneaked off the train as it was being hosed and oiled and hustled up another three wieners, and later secretly arranged with the steward for a midnight snack of a long T-bone with trimmings, although that did not keep him from waking several times during the night with pangs of hunger.46

Consumed with desire (“he was sure that once he got an armlock on her things would go better”), Hobbs takes out his frustration in gluttony. Once again we have a ﬁctional character evoking Babe Ruth, one who is afﬂicted, this time around, with a “disease of the will”—a projection of all the views about Jewish bodies that circulated in America (and Europe) during the 20th century.47 Approaching the climax of the novel, the Knights are heading toward a crucial game that may determine whether they get to play in the World Series. The night before the game, Memo arranges a celebratory feast for the team (supplied by a friend of hers, a bookie) and tells Hobbs that she will ﬁnally sleep with him. Following an evening of gluttony that is encouraged by Memo, Hobbs staggers up to her room when he ﬁnds her in bed, naked, “chewing on a turkey drumstick.” He suddenly experiences agonizing pain in his belly and collapses: “Inside him they were tearing up a street.”48 His being shot in the gut 15 years before is now paralleled by the consequences of middle-age gluttony. Rushed to the hospital (the same one where Bump died), Hobbs has his stomach pumped, with “unbelievable quantities of bilge” dredged up,49 and awakens to discover that both the Knights and their main rival, the Pirates, have lost their respective games and will be competing against each other in a pre-World Series playoff game. The doctor advises him to retire immediately after this game. Hobbs has extremely high blood pressure, he is told, and this, coupled with “his athlete’s heart,”50 means that he is a walking time bomb. At this point, Hobbs faces a new dilemma related not to his body but to his soul. Memo, acting at the behest of a character known as the Judge (who wants to buy out the team), tries to persuade Hobbs to throw the upcoming game. Balking at ﬁrst, he is eventually convinced to go along with the scheme. But at the actual game, Hobbs, feeling extremely weak, at ﬁrst stays on the sidelines. When he ﬁnally does go to bat, he hits mostly foul balls in the direction of a heckler in the stands. Suddenly, a woman in white (Iris) stands up right behind the heckler and is hit in the eye by Hobbs’ next hit. Reunited with Hobbes as they wait in the clubhouse for the doctor, Iris informs him that she is pregnant and urges him to win for the sake of his unborn

14

Sander L. Gilman

son. Filled with a sudden wild love, Hobbs returns to bat, but in the process breaks Wonderboy and, as a result, swears never to bat again. Yet it is now the bottom of the ninth inning, the Knights are down by one with one man on third, and Roy is their last hope. And so he returns to the plate one ﬁnal time, carrying a new bat that resembles Wonderboy, taking ball after ball. The pitcher is replaced by a young kid with the meanest fastball this side of the Mississippi. Two strikes down, Hobbs, seeing himself in the young pitcher, decides to go all out to win, the Judge and Memo be damned. He swings once again, and is struck out. The game is over and he has lost. Amid speculation that he threw the game, Hobbs goes to the Judge and returns the bribe money. Once again there is violence: the Judge pulls a gun on him; he wrestles it away; Memo retrieves it and shoots him, grazing him in the shoulder, then turns the gun on herself until Hobbs persuades her to relinquish it. As he walks away from the stadium, where this scene has taken place, Hobbs sees a newspaper featuring a photograph of himself taken after the shooting 15 years before, alongside a quote from the baseball commissioner to the effect that Hobbs would never play ball again. The novel ends with a young boy begging him: “Say it ain’t true”—the line that was addressed to Shoeless Joe Jackson after the “Black Sox” scandal of 1919. How very different is Barry Levinson’s ﬁlm version of The Natural (1984), starring Robert Redford, which resolves everything in a happy ending.51 In Malamud’s novel, the fat baseball player, out of control in all aspects of his life, cannot but “fall.” His health and strength fail him in the end, and the “immortal” aspect of sports is shown to be all too mortal. In novels such as The Natural, Jewish writers graft antisemitic images of Jews onto the all-American game of baseball. Deliberately creating non-Jewish main characters, they are free to depict baseball as a game symbolizing all of the anxieties and struggles of American life. As with the Jewish scientist wrestling with the accusation of an “ill” Jewish body that precludes the possibility of Jews being athletes, so too the Jewish author turns to the “body” of the athlete in an attempt to delineate the failure or success that deﬁne the arena of sport. Thus the obese body of the athlete moves from being a risk for all professional athletes, to a quality of the Jewish body that must be overcome, to an aspect of the professional athlete in decay—each image evoking a fantasy revolving around difference and sports. Such images exist in relationship to many other groups who desire to enter the public sphere through sports, who are seen, variously, as too weak or too strong, too smart or too brutal, too crude or too devious. What is fascinating about the American Jewish case is how an analogous struggle for the role of the creative artist in American high culture is mirrored in the use of the metaphor of baseball, the all-American game—one that demands an all-American body free of disease and fault.

Notes 1. Jean Frumusan, The Cure of Obesity, trans. Elaine A. Wood (London: 1930), 9. 2. W.F. Christie, Obesity: A Practical Handbook for Physicians (London: 1937), 31. 3. Quoted in Martin S. Staum, Labeling People: French Scholars on Society, Race, and Empire 1815–1848 (Montreal: 2003), 129.

Thoughts on the Jewish Body, Baseball, and the Problem of Integration

15

4. Ibid., 130. 5. Ibid., 59. 6. M.J. Oertel, “Obesity,” in Twentieth Century Practice, vol. 2, Nutritive Disorders, ed. Thomas J. Stedman (London: 1896), 647–648. 7. Robert Saundby, “Diabetes Mellitus,” in A System of Medicine, ed. Thomas Clifford Allbutt (London: 1897), 197–199. 8. Carl von Noorden, Die Fettsucht (Vienna: 1910), 63. 9. Joseph Jacobs and Maurice Fishberg, “Diabetes Mellitus,” in The Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 4 (New York: 1905), 554. 10. Ibid., 555. 11. In historical terms, writers such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain could comment on the origin of the Jews and its “refreshingly artless expression in the genealogies of the Bible, according to which some of these races owe their origin to incest, while others are descended from harlots.” See Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, trans. (from German) John Lees, vol. 1 (London: 1913), 366. 12. Quoted in Jacobs and Fishberg, “Diabetes Mellitus,” 556. 13. Joseph Jacobs and Maurice Fishberg, “Diathesis,” in The Jewish Encyclopedia, 4:574. 14. Ibid. 15. Allen Guttmann, “Becoming American: Jewish Writers on the Sporting Life,” in Sports and the American Jew, ed. Steven A. Riess (Syracuse: 1998), 241–255. 16. Quoted by Walter L. Harrison, “Baseball and American Jews,” Journal of Popular Culture 15 (1981), 112. 17. Philip Roth, “My Baseball Years,” ﬁrst published in New York Times (2 April 1973), 35; quoted by Eric Solomon, “Counter-Ethnicity and the Jewish-Black Baseball Novel: The Cases of Jerome Charyn and Jay Neugeboren,” Modern Fiction Studies 33 (1987), 51. 18. Peter S. and Joachim Horvitz, The Big Book of Jewish Baseball: An Illustrated Encyclopedia (New York: 2001), 134. 19. Richard Vidmer, “Andy Cohen Keeps his Name,” New York Times (22 July 1924), 106. 20. Eric Solomon, “Counter-Ethnicity and the Jewish-Black Baseball Novel,” 50. 21. Steven A. Riess, “From Pike to Green with Greenberg in Between: Jewish Americans and the National Pastime,” in The American Game: Baseball and Ethnicity, ed. Lawrence Baldassaro and Richard Johnson (Carbondale: 2002), 116–141. On what it meant to be one of the ﬁrst Jews in baseball of the day (and the most prominent), see Hank Greenberg, The Story of My Life, ed. Ira Berkow (New York: 1989), 22–23, 44–45, 56–61. 22. John Drebinger, “Heavy Hitters Dominate Tigers,” New York Times (1 Oct. 1935), 30. 23. Rabbi Solomon Schindler of Boston’s Temple Israel wrote in 1887 that “it remains a fact that we spring from a different branch of humanity, that different blood ﬂows in our veins, that our temperament, our tastes, our humor is different from yours; that, in a word, we differ in our views and in our mode of thinking in many cases as much as we differ in our features.” Quoted in Eric Goldstein, “ ‘Different Blood Flows in Our Veins’: Race and Jewish SelfDeﬁnition in Late Nineteenth Century America,” American Jewish History 85 (1997), 46. 24. Quoted in Riess, “From Pike to Green with Greenberg in Between,” 124. 25. Quoted in Edward G. White, Creating the National Pastime (Princeton: 1996), 258. 26. Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift (New York: 1996), 334. 27. Quoted in Irving Howe, The World of Our Fathers (New York: 1976), 182. 28. John R. Tunis, Keystone Kids (New York: 1943). 29. Ibid., 104, 146–147. 30. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, Israel among the Nations: A Study of the Jews and Antisemitism, trans. Frances Hellman (New York: 1895), 258; ﬁrst published as Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu [Henry Jean-Baptiste Anatole], (Les) juifs et l’antisémitisme: Israél chez les nations (Paris: 1893). See also Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: 1991). 31. Irwin Shaw, Voices of a Summer Day (New York: 1965), 69–72. 32. Philip Roth, American Pastoral (Boston: 1997), 3. 33. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: 1954), 4; see also Michael S. Reynolds, The Sun Also Rises: A Novel of the Twenties (Boston: 1995).

16

Sander L. Gilman

34. Roth, American Pastoral, 255. 35. Philip Roth, The Great American Novel (New York: 1973), 32, 110; Kerry Ahearn, “Et in arcadia excrementum’: Pastoral, Kitsch, and Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel,” Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature 11 (1993), 1–14. 36. Roth, The Great American Novel, 104. 37. Eric Solomon, “Jews, Baseball, and the American Novel,” Aethlon 14 (1996), 57. 38. See, for instance, C. Kenneth Pellow, “Baseball in Fiction and Film: Mark Harris’ Bang the Drum Slowly,” Arete: The Journal of Sport Literature 4 (1987), 57–67; Robert Cochran, “Bang the Drum Differently: The Southpaw Slants of Henry Wiggen,” Modern Fiction Studies 33 (1987), 151–159. 39. George Herman Ruth, Babe Ruth’s Own Book of Baseball (New York: 1928; rpt. Lincoln, Neb.: 1992). 40. Mark Harris, Bang the Drum Slowly (New York: 1956), 96. 41. Ibid., 57. 42. Ibid., 141. 43. Ibid., 12. 44. See Gerry O’Connor, “Bernard Malamud’s The Natural: ‘The Worst That Ever Was in the Game,’” Arete 3 (1986), 37–42; Patrick Keats, “Hall of Famer Ed Delehanty: A Source of Malamud’s The Natural,” American Literature 62 (1990), 102–104; Kathleen Sullivan Porter, “Women as ‘Goddess’ Archetypes in Baseball Fiction,” Aethlon 15 (1997), 63–70. 45. Bernard Malamud, The Natural (New York: 1952) (all quotes are taken from the 2000 edition), 39. 46. Ibid., 151. 47. Ibid., 152. 48. Ibid., 174–175. 49. Ibid., 176. 50. Ibid., 178. 51. Ruth Tarson, “The Natural, the Movie about Robert Redford, and God, and Baseball, and What if the World Were Flat,” Aethlon 4 (1997), 17–20.

Jews and Sports in Poland before the Second World War Diethelm Blecking (albert-ludwigs-universität)

In the period preceding the Second World War, and in particular during the interwar period, thousands of Polish Jewish athletes achieved renown in a variety of ﬁelds, including soccer, table tennis, track and ﬁeld, boxing, and weightlifting. For instance, Leon Sperling, Józef Lustgarten, and Ludwik Gintel all played for the Cracovia Kraków soccer team as well as representing Poland in international matches; in 1928, Gintel was the country’s top-scoring player.1 Half of the table tennis clubs in Poland during the interwar period were afﬁliated with one of the organized Jewish sports movements, and all of the national table tennis champions during this time were Jews, including Emil “Gutek” Schiff and Alojzy Alex Ehrlich, who also took part in international games.2 One of the most successful Polish athletes of the 1920s was Maryla Freiwald, a sprinter of the Maccabi Kraków club who represented Poland at 15 international athletics events and who won three gold medals at the Maccabiah games held in Palestine in 1932 and 1935.3 Jewish boxing champions during the interwar era included Szapsel Rotholc, who fought for Poland in 16 international events, as well as others belonging to clubs in Warsaw, Lviv (Lwów), and Vilnius (Wilno),4 who won a total of 14 medals in Polish tournaments.5 Finally, Max Nordau’s concept of “muscular Jewry” was embodied in the most literal fashion in a number of wellknown weightlifters, notably Majer Wajngarten, Boruch Winnykamien´, Leon Stern, and Jakub Minc (all of the Bar Kochba Lodz club), who, apart from being Polish champions during the 1920s, held a number of national records in weightlifting.6 This essay focuses on the historical and social context of organized Jewish sports in Poland of the interwar period, although some of the material pertains as well to the partitioned Polish lands of the pre-First World War era. Here it is important to note the distinction between Jewish athletes and organized Jewish sports; many of the aforementioned athletes were active (for at least part of their careers) on Polish teams. In addition, contacts between clubs—whether Jewish, Polish, or afﬁliated with other ethnic minorities—were the rule rather than the exception during the period under discussion. However, as there is virtually no documentation regarding such contacts, they will not be discussed here at length. Another important caveat concerns the data: since only fragments of the major statistical survey of Jewish sports undertaken by 17

18

Diethelm Blecking

YIVO in 1935 have survived, this essay relates to a limited number of towns and cities for which ﬁgures are available.7

Organized Jewish Sports in Poland before and during the First World War The emergence of a Jewish sports movement in Europe generally, and in Poland in particular, can best be understood as part of a broader trend of sports organizations founded along national and ethnic lines in 19th-century Europe. The explicit goal of such organizations was to improve the physical and mental health of their members (and, by extension, that of the entire nation or ethnic group). Most of these organizations were to be found in areas populated by the “small peoples” of Europe— in the main, Slavic peoples living in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires.8 Their inspiration was the Deutsche Turnbewegung, a nationalist German gymnastics movement founded by Friedrich-Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852) in response to the early 19th-century Napoleonic occupation. It is no coincidence that Jahn’s “Deutsches Volkstum” (1810), a proto-Darwinist essay describing the German people as an “organism,” was translated into Czech by Josef Jungmann, one of the intellectual leaders of early Czech nationalism.9 Similar Darwinist ideas were promoted by the Sokol gymnastics movement founded in Prague in 1862, which subsequently became inﬂuential in the partitioned Polish lands.10 In Habsburg-ruled Galicia, the ﬁrst Sokol clubs were started in 1867; in the Prussian-ruled areas of Poland, nationalist Poles established Sokol clubs in 1884 and were soon using them as a platform for political activity sponsored by the right-wing National Democratic Party (Endecja).11 Two other social-political organizations that were active in sports were the (Ukrainian) Sokil clubs of Galicia, which began operating in 1894, and, from 1900 onwards, the anti-clerical movement Sich, also based in Galicia, which (in addition to setting up ﬁre brigades) devoted some of its resources to gymnastics and physical education.12 The growing exclusion of Jews from many areas of life, alongside an increase in political antisemitism in Western and Eastern Europe, was evident in such events as the 1881 pogrom in Odessa, followed by further murderous attacks on Jewish communities in various parts of Russia; the Dreyfus affair in France in 1894; and the election of a notorious antisemite, Karl Lueger, as lord mayor of Vienna in 1895. Such events, which revealed the limits of Jewish integration in an age of national rivalries and imperial greed, motivated Jewish activists from various points of the political spectrum to set up their own organizations.13 As early as the Second Zionist Congress in Basel in 1898, Max Mandelstam emphasized the necessity of physical education as part of the strategy to inaugurate a national Jewish movement.14 However, it was not Mandelstam but rather Max Nordau, Theodor Herzl’s colleague in the movement, who took over the ideological leadership that inspired the Jewish sports movement in Central Europe and the Polish territories. Nordau’s slogan, “muscular Jewry,” was in fact the expression of a fully developed political and educational program aimed at “cultivating gymnastics as a means of raising the physical stature of the Jewish tribe.”15 This slogan

Jews and Sports in Poland before the Second World War

19

became decisive in shaping the attitudes of middle-class Polish Jews who took part in sports. In 1898, the ﬁrst Jewish sports club in Europe was founded in Berlin under the name Bar Kochba, in honor of the 2nd-century leader of an abortive revolt against Rome who was characterized by Nordau as “the ﬁnal historical incarnation of warhardened, weapon-happy [waffenfroh] Jewry.”16 (In similarly militant fashion, the Maccabi clubs were named after the Hasmonean heroes of the ancient Jewish world.) The club soon created a special section designated for Jewish men from Galicia and Russia who would set up similar clubs upon their return home. In this way, the Berlin Maccabi club became a model for others.17 The ﬁrst Jewish gymnastics club in the region near Galicia was established in Bielitz (Bielsko), in Austrian-ruled Silesia.18 This club was founded in reaction to “antisemitic forces in the Deutscher Turnverein.”19 In the eastern Galician city of Lviv, whose ethnic mix before the First World War was approximately 60 percent Polish, 28 percent Jewish, and 10 percent Ukrainian,20 the ﬁrst Jewish club was started by a group of academics under the Hebrew name Dror (freedom). Lviv took the leading role in organized Jewish sports in the Galicia region, as it had already done with regard to the Polish Sokol organization. In 1912, the Dror club joined forces with its sister club in Kraków to form a Jewish gymnastics league, which took the name “Maccabi” in 1914. By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, this league comprised 27 clubs with a total of 2,776 members—of whom, apparently, some 500 were women.21 Like other minority group organizations, the Galician Jewish sports clubs faced difﬁculties in obtaining funding and access to resources. Applications to use municipal sports facilities were often rejected out of hand, and sports teachers had to be recruited from the Sokol clubs and paid for their services. In addition, the clubs had to deal with religious opposition to sports on the part of Orthodox Jewish leaders. Such opposition at ﬁrst prevented the sports clubs from winning the support of the Jewish communities (kehilot). Nonetheless, in 1913, the Lviv sports clubs launched two major initiatives: in conjunction with Jewish doctors in the town they offered medical examinations for athletes, as well as a six-week course for Jewish gymnastics teachers.22 Members of the Galician Jewish sports clubs maintained ties with similar clubs in Vienna and Berlin and promoted the idea of Jewish sports clubs in visits to Gnesen, Stettin, and Posen (in the Prussian sector of Poland). By 1904, clubs had been established in the last two towns. The Posen club had a women’s section and maintained close relations with Berlin. In addition, it sent a delegation of athletes to the Eleventh Zionist Congress in Vienna in 1913 in order to take part in a gymnastics display.23 Other clubs were set up in Danzig, Breslau, and Kattowitz. By the outbreak of the First World War, about 30 Jewish sports clubs were in operation in towns located in what became interwar Poland. Some of these were afﬁliated with the Zionist movement, which had established a “Jewish gymnastic body” during the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel in August 1903. The majority of the clubs appear to have been located in Galicia and Bukowina.24 The greatest resistance to Jewish sports clubs on the part of the authorities was to be found in Russian Poland, which included two of Poland’s largest cities, Warsaw and Lodz. Nonetheless, the

20

Diethelm Blecking

area’s ﬁrst club opened in Lodz in 1912, and on February 1, 1914, it presented “the ﬁrst display of Jewish gymnastics in the Russian Empire.”25 The following year, with much of Europe at war, the Lodz branch of Maccabi was inaugurated. Lodz at this point was occupied by the Germans, and in the course of the war it became the main center for Jewish sports activities in the German-occupied part of Poland. In December 1916, the ﬁrst congress of Jewish sports clubs from the Germanoccupied region convened in the Hazamir hall in Lodz. The assembly decided to actively promote physical education and sports among the Jews and accordingly set up the. Central Association of Jewish Gymnastic and Sports Clubs (Centralny Zwia˛zek Zydowskich Towarzystw Gimnastyczno-Sportowych). A somewhat more pronounced national tone was set at the second congress in 1918, which voted to replace Polish sports terminology with Hebrew terms.26 By this time, the association had committees on language, propaganda, and Jewish literature, and it seemed to be following the nationalist model ﬁrst set forth by the ethnic national organizations of the late 19th century, such as Sokol. However, it had relatively few members, and its activities—including track and ﬁeld, soccer, and individual and group gymnastics—were restricted to the area in and around Lodz.27 In sum, by the end of the war and during the creation of the Second Polish Republic, there existed more than two dozen Jewish sports clubs, a small cadre of sports teachers, and a cultural national ideology—Zionism—in the area of what was to become a free and independent Poland, from Galicia to Great (western) Poland, to the urban centers of Warsaw and Lodz. Despite its Zionist component, and in contrast to the socialist working-class sports movement based in several European countries such as Germany, Austria, Belgium, France, England, and Switzerland,28 the “muscular Jewry” sports movement was not characterized by a platform urging political and social separation from other sports organizations. Such an outlook was more commonly found in the Marxist Jewish sports organizations that began operating in the interwar period.

“Muscular Jewry” and “Marxists” in the Second Polish Republic Following the proclamation of the Polish Republic in 1918, the situation in the Polish territories became extremely unstable, in part because of continued ﬁghting between Poland and Soviet Russia. With the ratiﬁcation of the constitution in March 1921 and the consolidation of its territories by 1923, the Second Republic developed into a state comprising many different minorities. Apart from the Poles, the new republic contained Ukrainians (16 percent of the population), Jews (10 percent), Belorussians (6 percent), Germans (2.4 percent), Lithuanians (0.6 percent), and smaller minorities of Russians and Czechs.29 The proportion of minorities was too small to allow for a federal structure, but too large to ensure that the reborn Polish state could develop as a nation-state. Both the Minorities Treaty of 1919 and the constitution guaranteed the minorities a right to their own cultural activities,30 which quickly led to the establishment of ethnic sports organizations, clubs, and associations.31 In the case of Jewish sports, existing clubs were joined by new ones or else continued (and in some cases, expanded) their prewar activities. Clubs now existed in

Jews and Sports in Poland before the Second World War

21

many of the larger Polish cities and towns, including—in addition to Warsaw, Lodz, Kraków, and Lviv—Grodno, Równo and Bielsko-Biała. The entire spectrum of modern sports was to be found in these clubs, where the emphasis was often on sports competition. For instance, the Maccabi club in Warsaw had approximately 1,000 members who took part in 18 ﬁelds of sport, ranging from soccer to swimming, and who competed at various Polish sports matches.32 By 1934, there were no less than 164 Jewish soccer clubs active in the 15 regional divisions of the Polish Soccer Association.33 The social structure of these Jewish sports clubs differed greatly from region to region and reﬂected the huge social differences between the Polish urban centers and rural, small-town Galicia. The Kielce province Maccabi club, for example, contained (Zionist) working-class youths and craftsmen.34 Given the unusual social structure of Polish Jewry—only about 3 percent belonged to the middle-class, whereas 64 percent were lower-middle-class tradesmen or craftsmen, 22 percent were industrial workers, and 10 percent were professionals or members of the intelligentsia35—the target population of Jewish sports organizations was mainly lower-middle-class and proletarian. The history of the Maccabi organization, the largest Jewish sports entity in Poland, is complex.36 In 1921, the Maccabi World Association was established at the Twelfth Zionist Congress. This new worldwide organization, whose headquarters was in Berlin, both superseded the previous Maccabi movement founded in 1903 and more ﬁrmly incorporated Zionist ideas into the European Jewish sports movement. At ﬁrst, the Polish Maccabi organization was based in the town of Bielsko, but in 1928 an apolitical association known as the Jewish Council for Physical Education in Poland . (Zydowska Rada Wychowania Fizycznego w Polsce) was established in Kraków as a nationwide framework for the various Maccabi clubs. Soon, however, the strongly Zionist orientation of many of the local branches led to demands for a more politically assertive organization. Accordingly, a new body, the .Maccabi Association of Jewish Gymnastics and Sports Clubs in Poland (Zwia˛zek Zydowskich Towarzystw Gimnastycznych i Sportowych w Polsce Makabi) was set up in Warsaw in 1930. Apart from a monthly house organ put out by the new association, there were several other Maccabi publications, including Makabi (Warsaw), Głos Makabi (Lodz), and Trybuna Makabi (Kraków). Recruitment literature for the Polish Maccabi clubs was replete with social-Darwinist terminology (“survival of the ﬁttest,” “struggle for existence”) alongside references to Eretz Israel as “the source of the Jewish race and Jewish folk nature.”37 One appeal, which was put out by the “Zionist List” in February 1931, addressed the athletes directly: “Maccabim! Jewish gymnasts and sportsmen, do not forget that Zionism is the spiritual father of the Maccabi movement . . . without men like Herzl and Nordau, there would be no Maccabi, to whom you owe so much. Zionists, Maccabim, young people, help us in our enrollment efforts!”38 Donation appeals for the Jewish National Fund also appeared in Maccabi and other Jewish publications. By 1934, the Polish Maccabi had some 30,000 members belonging to 143 clubs and 10 regional subdivisions; two years later, there appear to have been more than 150 clubs with a total membership of approximately 40,000.39 This constituted the largest contingent in the international Maccabi movement, whose total membership

22

Diethelm Blecking

(from 27 countries) was 200,000.40 In 1937, the leadership of the Polish Maccabi association was taken over by a former (General Zionist) member of the Sejm, Henryk Rosmarin.41 Two main characteristics of Maccabi—its Zionist orientation and its focus on competitive sports—were shared by another Jewish sports organization active in Poland in the interwar period: Hapo’el. Clubs afﬁliated with Hapo’el began to appear in Poland in the early 1920s and mostly attracted young workers and craftsmen.42 By 1926, the organization had some 800 members, but it was not until 1935 that Hapo’el clubs (with approximately 5,600 members) became organized at the national level. Afﬁliated politically with Poale Zion, a Zionist socialist organization, Hapo’el in Poland received support from its mother association in Palestine,43 which had been set up in 1926 under the auspices of the Histadrut labor federation (at a later date, it joined the Socialist Workers’ Sport International). Although Hapo’el at ﬁrst campaigned for mass sports under the slogan “thousands and no champions,” it soon changed its orientation, and its clubs offered the same wide spectrum of sports as could be found in any of the Maccabi clubs. In consequence, from the 1930s onwards, there were constant discussions over whether Hapo’el should enter the Maccabi World Association and whether it should take part in the Maccabiah games.44 Another socialist Zionist group, the more strongly Marxist and Communist-oriented Poale Zion-Left, sponsored a network of sports clubs known as Gwiazda/Shtern (star), which belonged to the Socialist Workers’ Sport International. The ﬁrst club was set up in Warsaw in 1923.45 In 1929, a nationwide organization, the Gwiazda-Shtern Workers’ Sport Union (Robotnicze Stowarzyszenie Wychowania Fizycznego Gwiazda-Shtern) was founded, and by 1938 it comprised about 100 clubs. A total of 21 Gwiazda clubs belonged to the Polish Soccer Association; as previously noted, the boxing division of Gwiazda-Warsaw was renowned throughout Poland for its outstanding performances. Although these clubs were often ideologically aligned with the Polish Socialists and Communists, they put more emphasis on sports competition. Their purely pragmatic view was that there was no such thing as “proletarian” versus “bourgeois” sports—as the left-wing Zionist newspaper Arbeter-tsaytung put it, the bourgeois or proletarian character of a given sports movement, rather than being intrinsically determined, was “solely a function of the organization’s leadership and goals.”46 Apart from sports, the Gwiazda clubs also sponsored artistic activities, theatrical and musical events, and summer camps for working-class women and children.47 Whereas the Zionist Left sports clubs did not move beyond the rhetoric of socialism, those of the General Jewish Workers’ Bund had a much more activist socialist agenda. Operating in a political landscape in which there seemed to be no hope of gaining political power, the Bund clubs promoted mass sports as a means of achieving cultural hegemony over the mass of the Jewish proletariat.48 Such clubs had existed since the start of the 1920s, although it was not until 1925 that the ﬁrst nationwide conference of the Morgnshtern organization (Jutrznia) was convened. At the time, the clubs had a countrywide membership of approximately 4,000.49 Two central aspects of the Morgnshtern platform were its rejection of the socialDarwinist principles of “muscular Jewry” and its anti-Zionism.50 Athletes from the Bund clubs were apt to regard their “middle-class” Zionist opponents as an assimi-

Jews and Sports in Poland before the Second World War

23

lated “gang of Moritzes and Monieks” who were “downright hostile to all that is truly, democratically Jewish . . . a bunch that is ashamed of being Jewish and which babbles in Polish, though not without errors.”51 The Morgnshtern clubs deliberately staged sports events on the Sabbath in order to provoke Orthodox Jews. They were especially interested in recruiting women and young people,52 and they boosted their international work in the Socialist Workers’ Sport International by taking part in the Workers’ Sport Olympics. Finally, the Bund was scathing in its criticism of Hapo’el—its rival in the Socialist Workers’ Sport International—with regard to the latter’s efforts to join the Maccabi World Association.53 Like Maccabi, the Bund had its own sports publication, the Yiddish-language Arbeter sportler. The Bund publishing house also put out a Yiddish translation of Sports and Politics, authored by Julius Deutsch, the head of the Austrian workers’ sports association. This book, which promoted the concept of mass, non-competitive sports, became the Bible of the mostly working-class Morgnshtern sports clubs in Poland.54 However, the Bund’s criticism of Maccabi’s middle-class ideas on sports (applicable as well to Hapo’el clubs) led it into an ideological cul-de-sac. As in Germany, the continuous struggle of Polish working-class sports clubs against middle-class sports and its competitive orientation was destined to fail. For instance, at the congress of the Socialist Workers’ Sport International in 1929, Morgnshtern proposed a ban on boxing in addition to a change in the rules of soccer whereby points would be awarded for both aesthetic play and “fair play.” Yet in 1935, the Warsaw Morgnshtern, the largest of the Polish Jewish sports clubs, set up a boxing section that competed not only against Gwiazda and (non-Jewish) Polish clubs, but also against clubs afﬁliated with Maccabi.55 Soccer, for its part, was considered vital in the campaign to recruit young workers to the Socialist movement. In the right hands, it was argued, the game could “help unfold the collective and solidarity senses of the athlete.” Moreover, since soccer “greatly captures the interest of the young workers,” Bund branches were urged to organize soccer teams and have them compete in general and regional soccer leagues.56 At the end of the 1930s, there was a signiﬁcant increase in Morgnshtern membership, with the Warsaw branch alone accounting for some 2,000 members. Moreover, the Bund celebrated a number of remarkable successes in the local elections of 1938 and 1939. However, it is somewhat misleading to regard Jewish sports in interwar Poland as no more than a tale of factionalism and Jewish in-ﬁghting.57 This will become evident in the following examination of three representative Polish Jewish communities—those of Rzeszów, an economically backward Galician town; Vilnius, the capital of Yiddish culture; and Lodz, one of the most modern and forward-looking of interwar Polish cities.

Jewish Sports in Rzeszów, Vilnius, and Lodz Rzeszów had about 15,000 inhabitants at the turn of the 20th century, of whom a majority—some 9,000—were Jews.58 Following the Habsburg-Polish Kleiner Ausgleich (minor compromise) at the end of the 1860s, several Polish and Jewish self-help, leisure, and cultural organizations had been set up in the town.59 The ﬁrst

24

Diethelm Blecking

Jewish sports club, Bar Kochba, was established some time before the First World War—although the exact date of its founding is unknown, the Głos Rzeszowski published a report in July 1910 on a match between members of the club and the Polish sports club Resovia.60 In addition to competitions taking place between Jewish and Polish sports clubs (a Sokol club also existed), there was a certain amount of integration of Jewish athletes within Rzeszów’s “Polish” clubs. Józef Heublum, for example, began his career as captain of the Bar Kochba soccer team but later moved to Resovia, though he later returned to the Jewish team.61 And in a rare phenomenon that lasted for several years, a number of Polish athletes belonged to a Jewish workers’ sports club known as Samson.62 From the beginning of the 1930s, many sporting events in Rzeszów took place at Beit Ha’am, the local Jewish community center. Here, the Bar Kochba boxing division, which was established in 1934 (this sport, rather than soccer, soon became the town’s favorite), celebrated numerous victories over national and international opponents, including the renowned Gwiazda boxing team from Warsaw. In contrast, the Bar Kochba soccer team lost much of its luster during the 1930s. Many of its players moved to other clubs, and in 1937 the team was disbanded. There seems to have been a certain amount of tension between Bar Kochba’s soccer team and those of the Polish clubs. On two occasions in 1929, for instance, the Bar Kochba team refused to turn out for the second half of a game against Resovia.63 By the end of the 1930s, Bar Kochba had approximately 800 members, compared with 500 members belonging to Rzeszów’s second-largest sports club. By this time the town had grown considerably, its borders having been extended at the turn of the century.64 Of a total of 34,000 residents, only a minority—12,800—were now Jewish. Nonetheless, Bar Kochba retained its enormous prestige among the general population. In Vilnius, as opposed to other parts of Eastern Europe where Jewish sports developed in response to emerging ethnic and nationalist trends, the ﬁrst sports programs were initiated by doctors who set up a physical education program in Jewish schools.65 In 1916, a Maccabi club was established in the midst of the German occupation. In contrast to similar clubs in the ethnic Polish territories, this club used Yiddish terminology in its gymnastic activities and was not explicitly Zionist in its orientation. Following the annexation of Vilnius by Poland in 1920, the club retained its pluralistic attitudes; it was open to Zionism as well as to other philosophical and political viewpoints. At this point, Vilnius was both a regional capital and a city of some 195,000 residents, of whom more than 40 percent were Jews.66 It was also the capital of Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe—the birthplace of the Bund and, not least, the headquarters of the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (YIVO). Yiddish cultural organizations placed an emphasis on the recruitment of young people. Thus, the SKIF and the Tsukunft groups (which were subsidiary organizations of the Bund), along with the left-wing Zionist Hashomer Hazair, concentrated their recruiting activities on pre-university students.67 In 1927, a Morgnshtern club was founded, offering sports activities and musical and theatrical performances. On the whole, ideological differences between the two Jewish sports clubs of Vilnius were less marked than in other parts of Poland. To be sure, in accordance with its stance regarding competitive sports, the Morgnshtern club did not feature

Jews and Sports in Poland before the Second World War

25

soccer or boxing, yet Maccabi—the largest sports club in the city—had a similar “Yiddish” orientation and addressed itself mainly to Jewish working-class youth. In 1938, a Morgnshtern ofﬁcial even suggested that the Maccabi club initiate contacts with Morgnshtern’s Polish headquarters. This situation brings to mind the close relationship between Polish and Jewish sports clubs in Rzeszów. In both cities, speciﬁc regional circumstances led to more than usual interaction between Jews and Gentiles and among various Jewish groups: in Rzeszów, the Jewish club was part of the general urban everyday culture, whereas in Vilnius, Yiddish culture was clearly more powerful than any class afﬁliations. Lodz was a 19th-century industrial boomtown whose population had increased sixfold between 1820 and 1914.68 By the 1930s it was a major city with approximately 680,000 inhabitants, of whom 57.1 percent were Polish, 33.8 percent Jewish, and 8.9 percent German.69 Following the First World War, a variety of sports clubs with varying national orientations (81 of them Polish, 27 Jewish, and 18 German) operated in the city, offering their members a total of 25 different sports.70 Representatives of all three national groups sat in the 16 district sports associations, organizing municipal championships and arranging for the participation of Lodz athletes, both men and women, in Polish championships. Ofﬁcials of Jewish clubs were appointed to positions in the Polish table tennis association, and some of them even served on the executive committee. From 1930, Lodz was recognized as an independent district in the Polish Maccabi Association. Whereas a number of Jewish athletes from the area of Lodz trained in Polish clubs—the best-known example being the fencer Roman Kantor, who represented Poland at the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin—there do not seem to be any reciprocal examples of Polish athletes working out in Jewish clubs (as was the case in Rzeszów). Moreover, from 1930, sports in Lodz became increasingly politicized, in large part because the Deutsche Turnerschaft clubs set up their own district organization and in 1933 began to adopt an increasingly radical nationalist platform along the lines being formulated in Berlin. At the “Deutsches Turnfest” held in Breslau in July 1938, some 60 German sportsmen from Lodz were part of a larger contingent of Polish Germans who marched past Adolf Hitler. Several years before, Jewish athletes in Lodz had reacted to the Nazi seizure of power in Germany with calls to boycott a friendly soccer match scheduled to take place between the Lodz and Berlin teams; in fact the game was called off. In the wake of repressive measures against Jewish sports organizations in other parts of Poland, Lodz authorities began to take action against the left-wing Jewish clubs beginning in 1937. First Morgnshtern was dissolved, then retaliatory action was taken against those Maccabi members who had not only returned their medals and trophies as a protest against antisemitic measures, but who had also rejected the Polish sports badge. These athletes were expelled from the sports club and banned for life from taking up ofﬁcial positions in sports. In this fashion, multicultural sports in Lodz came to an end on the eve of the Second World War. “In the summer of 1939,” Andrzej Bogusz informs us, a few athletes and club ofﬁcials from Lódz left the town for the Reich. In September that year, they returned in army uniforms, and some of them even wore Gestapo uniforms. They would soon be taking up new positions in the penitentiaries of Radogoszcz and in

26

Diethelm Blecking

Danziger Strasse, where they would be carrying out the task of interrogating Poles from Lódz. Among the people they interrogated were comrades from their own clubs.71

In sum, Jewish sports in Rzeszów and other Galician towns not only enjoyed great prestige in both the general and Jewish community but was widely associated with Jewish power and strength, especially with regard to Rzeszów’s successful boxing teams of the 1930s. In Vilnius, the inﬂuence of an integrating Yiddish ideology within the close-knit Jewish environment worked against the divisiveness that might otherwise have resulted from the differing ideological philosophies of the Maccabi and Morgnshtern clubs. A different situation prevailed in the industrial city of Lodz, where the structure of Jewish clubs reﬂected both the political factionism that was characteristic of Polish Jewry and the integration of Jewish sports into the multicultural network of Polish sports. Increasing repression following the death in 1935 of Poland’s ruler, Marshall Józef Piłsudski, ﬁrst affected Lodz’s left-wing Jewish clubs and later, Maccabi. In consequence, Jewish sports associations in the city cut their ties with Polish sports, both symbolically and on the ﬁeld. This signaled the beginning of the end of the multicultural social experiment in Lodz.

Antisemitism, Self-defense, and Resistance As early as the 1920s, Jewish athletes taking part in Polish sports competitions were accustomed to hearing antisemitic comments, especially from members of the National Democratic Party (Endecja) and their sympathizers.72 In one article published in the party’s newspaper in 1924, Jewish soccer players were characterized as “brutal.”73 Shortly before the ﬁrst winter Maccabiah took place in the Polish town of Zakopane in 1933, the right-wing Gazeta Warszawska called on Polish youth to intervene in order to prevent the “Jewiﬁcation of Polish winter sports venues.”74 Two years later, in October 1935, the title page of Hamakabi carried a picture of the recently deceased Piłsudski and appealed for donations for a memorial.75 Piłsudski’s death had been followed by increasingly authoritarian policies and a marked rise in antisemitism.76 Between 1935 and 1937, 14 people were reported killed and about 2,000 wounded in antisemitic attacks.77 The increase in antisemitism was also felt by Jewish sports clubs. Clubs belonging to the Gwiazda workers’ movement and to Morgnshtern (Jutrznia) were banned in many places.78 In 1937, the Polish government refused to issue passports to 300 Morgnshtern athletes who were scheduled to travel to the third Workers’ Sport Olympics in Antwerp, and in 1938, Morgnshtern athletes were excluded from the Warsaw Boxing Federation.79 Poland’s leading boxer, Szapsel Rotholc, was expelled from the delegation that was scheduled to participate in the European championships hosted by Dublin in April 1939. Anticipating antagonistic reactions from spectators, Rotholc also refused to take part in the Polish boxing championships held that same month in Katowice.80 At about the same time, a woman athlete from the Maccabi club of Kraków was excluded from a preparatory meeting for the Olympic games scheduled for 1940.81 The Polish Bund, which had previously dealt with antisemitism in the years before the First World War, reacted to the new wave of exclusion and violence by setting up self-defense organizations under the auspices of its youth movement, Tsukunft.82

Jews and Sports in Poland before the Second World War

27

Maccabi, for its part, had no illusions about the character of the Nazi leadership in Germany; as early as the summer of 1933, noting that “there was no longer any place for Maccabi under the bestial Hitler activities,” it had relocated its world headquarters from Berlin to London and announced that it was boycotting any further sports contacts with Germany.83 This ban was enforced even with regard to sports events sponsored by German Jewish clubs—any Maccabi club that took part in such events was subject to expulsion.84 Given the current antisemitic climate in Poland, the Maccabi association distanced itself as well from Polish sports institutions and activities. The Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 led to the virtual annihilation of Polish Jewry. Among those murdered were well-known athletes who had participated in the 1936 Olympic games, including the aforementioned Roman Kantor, who had later actively resisted the German invasion.85 Following the establishment of the Vilnius ghetto in September 1941, the Judenrat set up a sports section that continued to offer such sports as boxing, soccer, tennis, basketball, and gymnastics.86 More than a thousand athletes of both sexes are reported to have taken part.87 Without going into a detailed critical analysis of the role and function of the Judenräte, it might be noted that they organized sports events both to retain some semblance of pride and dignity and, even more important, to provide pleasurable activity for Jewish youth.88 Ironically, on their way to deportation and annihilation, many Vilnius Jews passed the gate of the ghetto prison, which carried a piece of grafﬁti depicting an athlete working out on the parallel bars above the well-known slogan, “A sound mind in a healthy body.”89 Both left-wing Zionist circles and the Bund were involved in acts of resistance to the Nazis. Members of the left-wing Zionist Hehaluz, a pioneer organization, were at the forefront of Jewish resistance in Poland.90 Mordechai Anielewicz, the legendary . commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa) in the Warsaw ghetto, came from the ranks of the Marxist left-wing Hashomer Hazair youth organization and was also a former member of Maccabi,91 and Marek Edelman was a leader of the Bundist Tsukunft.92 It appears that at least part of the Jewish resistance movement was recruited from among those engaged in sports in Maccabi, the Bundist youth organizations, or the left-wing Zionist pioneer organizations.93

A Jewish Boxer in the Ghetto The Jewish boxing star Szapsel Rotholc chose another path. As noted, Rotholc was extremely popular in Poland, not only as a national champion but also as the victor of a number of matches held against German boxers in Warsaw, Poznan´, and the German town of Breslau. At this last match, held in 1938, the German boxers had swastikas on their shirts, prompting Polish fans to cheer Rotholc on with the cry: “Szapsel, beat the German, beat him into the swastika!”94 Two years previously, capitulating to pressure both from ofﬁcials in the Polish Olympic movement and from the armed forces in which he was serving at the time, he had taken part in the Berlin Olympics.95 (As noted, sports events involving Germany were being boycotted at this time by all leading Polish Jewish sports organizations. Rotholc, though

28

Diethelm Blecking

he did not lose his membership in the Gwiazda club, was expelled from the Jewish Printers’ Trade Union.)96 As late as March 1939, Rotholc represented Poland in an international match against Finland.97 Following the German occupation of Poland, he joined the Jewish ghetto police in the Warsaw ghetto.98 After the war, he admitted taking part in smuggling and black-market deals, while denying any role in the deportation of ghetto residents to the death camps. Indeed, there is clear evidence that Rotholc saved the Gwiazda club chairman, Nechemiasz Tytelman, from deportation.99 When the ghetto was destroyed, Rotholc attempted to save his family by moving himself, his wife, and his small son to the Aryan side. His wife, however, was shot by the occupying forces, while Rotholc was captured and deported to a work camp in Essen (Germany). His son, Ryszard, remained in hiding and survived the war unharmed. In 1946, the case of Rotholc was dealt with by the Citizens’ Court (Sa˛d Społeczny) of the Central Committee of Polish Jews, which put the former boxing star on trial on charges of collaborating with the Nazis. Rotholc defended himself by arguing that, in his function as a member of the ghetto police, he had attempted to treat the Jews as well as possible. In doing this, he said, he had exploited the respect shown to him by the Germans for his athletic achievements. “They respected me because I was Rotholc,” he claimed.100 The climax of this citizens’ trial, which turned into a general reckoning with the issue of collaboration, came with the prosecutor’s statement: . “This boxer should have joined the ZOB!”101 On November 29, 1946, Rotholc was sentenced to two years’ exclusion from the Jewish community. In addition, his right to participate in Jewish communal or political activities—including sports—was revoked for three years. In the face of intervention by the Polish boxing association as well as by the former captain of the Polish national team, Stanisław Cendrowski, and other Polish sports authorities, the exclusion was eventually nulliﬁed; on July 6, 1948, Rotholc’s disqualiﬁcation from sporting events was lifted by the Head Ofﬁce of Physical Culture.102 Later that year, Rotholc and his son left Poland for Belgium and from there emigrated to Canada, where the former boxer lived until his death in 1996.103

Summary and Epilogue Jewish sports began to be organized in the territories of partitioned Poland at the turn of the 20th century, within the context of national movements that had earlier taken hold among the “small peoples” of Eastern Europe. The slogan “muscular Jewry” calls to mind other national movements that promoted gymnastics and sports movements as “embodiments of the nation.” The notion of a “muscular” Jewry was especially strong in the Polish Maccabi clubs, which produced distinguished athletes in the ﬁelds of boxing, weight-lifting, and table tennis. The numerical dominance of the lower middle class and the proletariat in the social structure of Polish Jewry was reﬂected in the strength of the organized Jewish workers’ movement, and also in the Jewish sports organizations associated with the political left, in particular the Gwiazda clubs of Poale Zion Left and the Morgnshtern clubs afﬁliated with the Bund. As with their sister organizations in the Socialist

Jews and Sports in Poland before the Second World War

29

Workers’ Sport International, these clubs failed in their ambitious attempt to draw up an alternative socialist concept of sports. But thanks to their outstanding sports and cultural work with youth organizations such as Tsukunft and SKIF, large sections of Jewish working-class youth were drawn into the socialist milieu. Jewish sports in Poland represented the athletic and cultural strengths of Polish Jewry at three levels: internationally, through its representation in the Maccabi World Association (as the largest contingent) and the Socialist Workers’ Sport International; nationally, by means of Jewish athletes’ notable successes in Polish championship competitions; and internally, as a source of pride and identiﬁcation. Thus, interwar Poland was not only “the center of autonomous Jewish culture,”104 but, more speciﬁcally, the center of an autonomous Jewish sports culture. Following the Second World War, there was a short-lived revival of the Jewish community in Poland, which resulted in the re-creation of Jewish sports clubs in Lower Silesia, Warsaw, and Lodz, most of them afﬁliated with the Gwiazda organization (featuring mainly boxing, soccer, and table tennis).105 However, the antisemitic riots of 1946 and 1947, followed by a large wave of Jewish emigration from the country, soon spelt the end of Jewish sports in Poland.106 It was not until 1993 that a Maccabi club, sponsored by the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, was once more set up in Warsaw to take part in competitive sports.107

Notes 1. Janusz Kukulski, 80 lat KS Cracovia 1906–1986 (Kraków: 1986), 21. Sperling, who is mentioned in a publication of Cracovia Kraków published in honor of the club’s 80th anniversary, was later murdered by the Nazis in the city of Lviv. . 2. Bernard Woltmann and Ryszard Kułczycki, “Udział z ydów w rozwoju tenisa stolowego w Polsce w latach 1919–1950,” ms. of lecture given at the conference “Jüdischer Sport und jüdische Gesellschaft—Internationales Symposium,” Berlin, 21–23 Oct. 1998. 3. Jehuda L. Stein, Juden in Krakau (Konstanz: 1997), 88. 4. The spelling of Polish towns and cities is a perennial problem for historians. In this essay, towns and cities are spelled in accordance with the most current usage; in the case of some larger or better known places such as Warsaw and Lodz, the preferred English spelling is given. . 5. On Jews and boxing, see Przemysław Pieczyn´ski, “Zydowskie sekcje bokserskie w Polsce w latach 1923–1939,” ms. of lecture given at “Jüdischer Sport und jüdische Gesellschaft” conference. The special status of . Jewish boxers in Poland is also evident in the series of articles titled “Jews in the ring” (“Zydzi w ringu”) that appeared in Poland’s leading sports newspaper, Przegla˛d Sportowy, on December 13, 1933. In 1934, Szapsel Rotholc was rated one of Poland’s best athletes by Przegla˛d Sportowy. In 1936, the Yiddish Sporttsaytung characterized him as one of the most popular Jewish athletes; it later named him the best Jewish boxer of 1936–1937 and 1938–1939. On Szapsel Rotholc, see Gabriel N. Finder, “The Trial of Shepsl Rotholc and the Politics of Retribution in the Aftermath of the Holocaust,” Gal-Ed, On the History and Culture of Polish Jewry 20 (2006), 64. . 6. On Bar Kochba in Lodz, see Andrzej Bogusz, Zydowskie stowarzyszenia sportowe Łodzi 1897–1939 (Lodz: 1992), 13–16. 7. At the YIVO headquarters in Vilnius, a special sports subcommittee was set up to carry out and evaluate sports data. See Hamakabi 3, no. 7 (1935), 8. On the difﬁculties in obtaining data on Jewish sports in Poland and the fate of the YIVO questionnaire, see Jack Jacobs, “The Politics of Jewish Sport Movements in Interwar Poland,” in Emancipation through Muscles:

30

Diethelm Blecking

Jews and Sports in Europe, ed. Michael Brenner and Gideon Reuveni (Lincoln: 2006), 99–100 and Jack Jacobs, “Sport: An Overview,” online at http://www.yivoinstitute.org/downloads/ sports_overview.pdf. 8. Miroslav Hroch, Das Europa der Nationen, Die moderne Nationsbildung im europäischen Vergleich (Göttingen: 2005). 9. See Eduard Winter, Romantismus, Restauration und Frühliberalismus im österreichischen Vormärz (Vienna: 1968), 89, 165. 10. As noted by Sokol’s founder, Friedrich Emanuel Tyrš, in his Reden und Aufsätze (Kaaden [Kadanˇ]: 1925), Above all we may conclude that with regard to peoples, the smaller they are, the more they have to develop lively activities in order . . . to remain . . . signiﬁcant and important members of society: they must principally aim at healthy development and assiduous progress. Rottenness and ruin can more easily take hold of the whole body of [a small] people, whereas larger peoples can resist this process for a longer period of time . . . (p. 17). On the history of the Sokol movement, see Claire Nolte, The Sokol in the Czech Lands to 1914: Training for the Nation (Basingstoke: 2002). On Sokol’s role in the cultural construction of the Czech nation, see Hroch, Das Europa der Nationen, 224–225. 11. “Endecja” stands for the initials ND, from the Polish Narodowa Demokracja (National Democracy). On the Polish Sokol movement and its political orientation, see Diethelm Blecking, Die Geschichte der nationalpolnischen Turnorganisation: “Sokół” im Deutschen Reich 1884–1939 (Münster: 1987). 12. On Sokil, see “Sokil,” in Encyclopedia of Ukraine, ed. Danylo Husar Struk (Toronto: 1993), 813–814; on Sich, see “Sich,” in ibid., 700–702. 13. For a general discussion of these events, see Victor Karady, Gewalterfahrung und Utopie: Juden in der europäischen Moderne (Frankfurt: 1999), 174–202. 14. Diethelm Blecking, “Marxismus versus Muskeljudentum: Die jüdische Sportbewegung in Polen von den Anfängen bis nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg,” in SportZeit 1, no. 2 (2001), 33. 15. From the statutes of the Jewish gymnastics association established in 1903, quoted in Siddy Goldschmidt, Die Geschichte des Maccabi (Berlin: n.d.), 11. In Sander Gilman’s view, Nordau’s social-Darwinist rhetoric projects a thoroughly negative “Jewish image” that is reminiscent of Friedrich-Ludwig Jahn’s antisemitic tracts. Gilman comes to the interesting conclusion that Nordau adopts “some of the premises of anti-Semitic rhetoric from a Jewish perspective and . . . uses their powerfully effective political message for his own aims.” See Sander L. Gilman, Jüdischer Selbsthass—Antisemitismus und die verborgene Sprache der Juden (Frankfurt: 1993), 216–217. 16. Quoted in Jüdische Turnzeitung 4 (1903), 138. On the Jewish sports movement in Germany, see Eric Friedler, “Maccabi Chai – Maccabi lebt”: Die Jüdische Sportbewegung in Deutschland 1898–1998 (Vienna: 1998). In previous years, Jewish clubs had been set up in Constantinople (Istanbul) and in Philippopolis (Plovdiv), but these had no historical importance. On these clubs and other precursors of Bar Kochba Berlin, see Daniel Wildmann, “Der Körper im Körper, jüdische Turner und jüdische Turnvereine im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1898–1914,” in Peter Haber, Erik Petry, and Daniel Wildmann, Jüdische Identität und Nation, Fallbeispiele aus Mitteleuropa (Cologne: 2006), 50–51. From the 1880s, increasing antisemitism led to the establishment of Jewish sports groups such as that in Essen, which began activities in 1881. See Georg Röwekamp, “Essen und das Ruhrgebiet - zwischen Lackschuhvereinen und Arbeitersportlern,” in Die Geschichte der Juden im deutschen und internationalen Fussball, ed. Dietrich Schulze-Marmeling, (Göttingen: 2003), 156. 17. Jüdische Turnzeitung 4 (1903), 7. 18. Bielitz is now part of the Polish town Bielsko-Biała. The Białka River separated the Silesian Bielsko (Bielitz) from the Galician Biała. 19. Die Jüdische Wochenpost (2 March 1934), 10. 20. Peter Fässler, Thomas Held, and Dirk Sawitzki, Lemberg-Lwów-Lviv: Eine Stadt im Schnittpunkt europäischer Kulturen (Cologne: 1995), 62. . . 21. Rafał Zebrowski, Dzieje z ydów w Polsce, Kalendarium (Warsaw: 1993), 90.

Jews and Sports in Poland before the Second World War

31

22. Goldschmidt, Die Geschichte. des Maccabi, 24–25. . 23. Jarosław Rokicki, “Pocza˛tki zydowskich organizacji sportowych,” Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego 4 (1998), 67. 24. Das jüdische Sportbuch (Berlin: 1937), 21. 25. Jüdische Monatshefte für Turnen und Sport 15, no. 1 (1914), 8–9. 26. The Dror sports club in Lviv had already worked on the development of a Hebrew-language gymnastics terminology. See Blecking, “Marxismus versus Muskeljudentum,” 35. 27. On sports developments in Lodz during the First World War, see Andrzej Bogusz, “Körperkultur und Sport bei den Lodzer Deutschen und Juden,” in Polen, Deutsche und Juden in Lodz 1820–1939: Eine schwierige Nachbarschaft, ed. Jürgen Hensel (Osnabrück: 1999), 358–359. 28. On international worker sports, see Arnd Krüger and James Riordan (eds.), The Story of Worker Sport (Champaign, Ill.: 1996); on worker sports internationals, see David Steinberg, “Die Arbeitersport-Internationalen 1920–1928,” in Arbeiterkultur, ed. Gerhard A. Ritter (Königstein: 1979), 93–108. Basic information on the Workers’ Sport Olympics staged by the Socialist Workers’ Sport International can be found in Franz Nitsch, “Die olympische ‘Gegenbewegung,’ Bedeutung und Vermächtnis des internationalen Arbeitersports und seiner Olympiaden,” in Sport und Olympische Spiele, ed. Manfred Blödorn (Reinbek: 1984), 113–137. 29. Wolfgang Kessler, “Ethnische Minderheiten,” in Deutsche und Polen, GeschichteKultur-Politik, ed. Andreas Lawaty and Hubert Orłowski (Munich: 2003), 452. 30. For a critical assessment of the Minorities’ Treaty, the constitution, and the real social and political conditions for the Jewish minority see Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars (Bloomington: 1983), 34–43. 31. Aside from Jews, other groups—in particular, Ukrainians and Germans—set up their own organizations and activities. The aforementioned Ukrainian Sokil organization renewed its activities in 1920 and is believed to have had a total membership ranging from 12,500 to 25,000 (male and female) between 1920 and 1939. There were also a number of Ukrainian socialist sports organizations that were members of the Socialist Workers’ Sport International. On Ukrainian sports, see Henryk Laskiewicz, Robotnicza kultura ﬁzyczna w Polsce w latach 1918–1939, vol. 6 (Warsaw: 1971), 68–73; and Stanisław Zaborniak, “Powstanie i działalnos´c´ ukrain´skich klubów sportowych w Galicji i na kresach wschodnich w II RP (1919–1939),” Ricznik Universytetu Prikarpackoho Ivano-Frankiwsk (2006), 80–85. Mention of a Lithuanian sports club and a Boy Scout movement in Vilnius can be found in Bronisław Mankowski, Litwini w Polsce 1920–1939 (Warsaw: 1986), 152–154. For the German Turnerschaft in Poland, German sports clubs, and the workers’ gymnastics and sports league in Poland, see the monograph by Tomasz Jurek, Kultura ﬁzyczna mniejszos´ci niemieckiej w Polsce w latach 1918–1939 (Poznan´: 2002). Data on Belorussian organizations is not available. 32. Mała encyklopedia sportu, vol. 2 (Warsaw: 1986), 694. 33. Stanisław Zaborniak, Iwona Pezdan, and Aneta Rejman, “Kultura fizyczna w . s´rodowisku z ydowskim na s´wiecie i w Polsce w latach 1896–1949,” in Miscellanea z dziejów kultury ﬁzycznej, ed. Andrzej . Nowakowski and Stanisław Zaborniak (Rzeszów: 2003), 60. 34. Marta Meducka, “Zydowskie stowarzyszenia sportowe w Województwie Kieleckim w . latach 1918–1939,” Biuletyn Z ydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego w Polsce, nos. 3–4 (1990), 143. 35. Gertrud Pickhan, Gegen den Strom: Der Allgemeine Jüdische Arbeiterbund “Bund” in Polen 1918–1939 (Stuttgart: 2001), 183–184. 36. Blecking, “Marxismus versus. Muskeljudentum,” 39; Jarosław Rokicki, “Sport,” . in Jerzy Tomaszewski and Andrzej Z bikowski, Z ydzi w Polsce: Dzieje i kultura: Leksykon (Warsaw: 2001), 431. . 37. Tygodnik Z ydowsk, no. 4 (1934), 3. 38. Jüdisches Volksblatt, no. 5 (1931), 5. 39. Rokicki, “Sport,” 432. 40. Das Jüdische Sportbuch, 39. In the Maccabiah games held in 1932 in Palestine, the Polish contingent took ﬁrst place. On Polish Jewish athletes in the Maccabiah games, see Rokicki, “Sport,” 433–434 and 437–439.

32

Diethelm Blecking

41. Rosmarin was born in 1882 in Peratyn, in the region of Tarnopol. With the outbreak of the Second World War, he ﬂed via Romania to Palestine. There he served as the ofﬁcial Polish General Consul from 1940 to 1945. .He died in Tel . Aviv in 1955. See Jarosław Rokicki, “Henryk Rosmarin,”. in Tomaszewski and Zbikowski, Z ydzi w Polsce, 402. 42. Meducka, “Zydowskie stowarzyszenia sportowe w Województwie Kieleckim,” 145. 43. On a reported meeting between David Ben-Gurion and Dov Zilberman of Hapo’el in 1932, see Blecking, “Marxismus versus Muskeljudentum,” 42–43. 44. On the negotiations preceding the ﬁrst Maccabiah, see Toni Niewerth, “Zwischen alljüdischem Olympia und nationaljüdischem Sportfest: Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Makkabiaden,” SportZeit 1, no. 2 (2001) 61–62. On Hapo’el, see Uriel Simri, “Israel’s Worker Sport Organisation,” in Krüger and Riordan (eds.), The Story of Worker Sport, 157–165 and Blecking, “Marxismus versus Muskeljudentum,” 40. 45. For the early history of Gwiazda-Shtern, see Jacobs, “The Politics of Jewish Sport Movements in Interwar Poland,” 102. 46. Quoted in ibid., 96. 47. For the further history of the Gwiazda clubs, see Rokicki, “Sport,” 435. 48. The shaping of a distinctive subculture by means of cultural and club activities was a basic theme in left-wing Jewish proletariat organizations during the Second Republic; see Pickhan, Gegen den Strom, esp. 178–262. Jack Jacobs interprets Morgnshtern’s concept in the context of his thoughts on cultural hegemony as formulated by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. See Jacobs, “Creating a Bundist Counter-Culture: Morgnshtern and the Signiﬁcance of Cultural Hegemony,” in Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100, ed. Jack Jacobs (New York: 2001), 59. . . 49. Jarosław Rokicki, “Jutrznia-Morgnsztern,” in Tomaszewski and Zbikowski, Z ydzi w Polsce, 224. 50. For an assessment of Bundist anti-Zionism, see Jack Jacobs, “Bundist Antizionism in Interwar Poland,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 33 (2005), 239–259. 51. Arbeter Sportler (1 Nov. 1929), quoted in Jacobs, “Creating a Bundist CounterCulture,” 62. 52. Half of the members of the gymnastics and handball division of the Warsaw Morgnshtern were women. See Jacobs, “Creating a Bundist Counter-Culture,” 62. The Bund set up two groups for young people: SKIF (Sotsialistisher kinder farband), for children aged 6–14; and Tsukunft, for young people aged 14–25. In 1939, SKIF had 6,000 members; in 1938, Tsukunft had about 15,000 members. Both associations promoted cross-country running and hiking. See Henri Minczeles, Histoire générale du Bund: un mouvement révolutionnaire juif (Paris: 1995), 391–395; cf. Daniel Blatman, “The Bund in Poland, 1935–1939,” Polin 10 (1996), 58–82. 53. Roni Gechtman, “Socialist Mass Politics through Sport: The Bund’s Morgnshtern in Poland, 1926–1939,” Journal of Sport History 26, no. 2 (1999), 339. Maccabi circles also encouraged closer cooperation and even mergers with Hapo’el. See Hamakabi 1, no. 4 (1933), 6. 54. Gechtman, “Socialist Mass Politics through Sport,” 331. 55. Jacobs, “Politics,” 97. Austrian and German worker athletes also tried—and failed—to establish non-competitive sports. On theories regarding the intrinsically competitive nature of sports, see Karl-Heinrich Bette, Systemtheorie und Sport (Frankfurt: 1999); and Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: Vom Ursprung der Kultur im Spiel (Reinbek: 2001 [1st ed. 1938]), esp. 56–89. 56. Arbeter Sportler (5 March 1930), quoted in Gechtman, “Socialist Mass Politics through Sport,” 344. 57. The overall picture of organized Jewish sports in interwar Poland . also includes two organizations not mentioned here: the Jewish Academic Sports Clubs (Zydowskie Akademickie Stowarzyszenie Sportowe [ZASS]), which belonged. to the Polish Maccabi association, and the Union of Women’s Sports Clubs (Zrzesenie Zydowskich Kobiecych Stowarzyszenie Sportowe). The Pioneer organizations of Hehalutz, whose attitudes ranged from left-wing Zionism to mainstream Zionism, also included sports in their programs; see Blecking, “Marxismus versus Muskeljudentum,” 40. For a schematic outline of Jewish sports organizations in Poland, see idem, Jüdischer Sport, 24.

Jews and Sports in Poland before the Second World War

33

58. Rzeszów was one of the 31 “large towns” (containing more than 10,000 inhabitants) in the agrarian, backward region of Galicia. In addition, Galicia contained 151 small towns with fewer than 3,000 inhabitants, and 147 medium-sized towns whose population ranged between 3,000 and 10,000. See Teresa Andlauer, Die Jüdische Bevölkerung im Modernisierungsprozess Galiziens (1867–1914) (Frankfurt: 2001), 47. On the Jews as a majority population in Rzeszów, see Andrzej Bonusiak, “Bar Kochba” i inne (Rzeszów: 2004), 6. 59. On the “minor compromise,” which led to the political and cultural dominance of the Poles in Galicia, see Isabel Röskau-Rydel, “Von der Revolution bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (1848–1914),” in Deutsche Geschichte im Osten Europas: Galizien, ed. Isabel Röskau-Rydel (Berlin: 1999), 105–108. 60. Bonusiak, “Bar Kochba” i inne, 4. 61. Heublum was later murdered in his home by the Gestapo (ibid., 19). 62. Ibid., 4. 63. It is unclear whether these conﬂicts had anything to do with the increasing tension between Poles and Jews at a time of economic crisis. According to Bonusiak, only at the end of the 1930s was there an increasingly “unhealthy” atmosphere in Rzeszów (ibid., 34). 64. Ibid., 7. 65. Here I should like to thank Prof. Jack Jacobs (New York), who, for the following passages on Vilnius, has permitted me to use research and data appearing in his forthcoming paper “Jews and Sport in Interwar Vilna.” 66. According to the 1915 census that was conducted under the German occupation, the city’s population was 50 percent Polish, 43.5 percent Jewish, and 2.6 percent Lithuanian. This data, along with material pertaining to later censuses, appears in Anna Veronika Wendland, “Kulturelle, nationale und urbane Identitäten in Wilna (1918–1939): Ansätze und Fragestellungen auf dem Weg zu einer integrierten Stadtgeschichte,” in Jüdische Kulturen im neuen Europa, ed. Marina Dmitrieva and Heidemarie Petersen (Wiesbaden: 2004), 15. 67. Gennady Estraikh, “The Vilna Yiddishist Quest for Modernity,” in Dmitrieva and Petersen (eds.) Jüdische Kulturen im neuen Europa, 109. 68. Wiesław Pus´, “Die Berufs- and Sozialstruktur der wichtigsten ethnischen Gruppen in Lodz und ihre Entwicklung in den Jahren 1820–1914,” in Polen, Deutsche und Juden in Lodz 1820–1939, Eine schwierige Nachbarschaft, ed. Jürgen Hensel (Osnabrück: 1999), 33. 69. Ludwik Mroczka, “Die Berufs- and Sozialstruktur der wichtigsten ethnischen Gruppen in Lodz und ihre Entwicklung in den Jahren 1918–1939,” in ibid., 47. . 70. On Jewish sports in Lodz, see Bogusz, Z ydowskie stowarzyszenia; idem, “Körperkultur und Sport bei den Lodzer Deutschen und Juden Juden.” 71. Bogusz, “Körperkultur und Sport bei den Lodzer Deutschen und Juden Juden,” 364. 72. On Endecja’s antisemitic orientation, see Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars, 38–39. . 73. Olaf Bergmann, Narodowa Demokracja wobec problematiki z ydowskiej w latach 1918–1929 (Poznan´: 1998), .222–232. 74. Quoted in Tygodnik Z ydowski 31 (1932), 2. 75. Hamakabi 3, no. 7 (1935), 1. 76. The non-aggression pact between Poland and Nazi Germany in January 1934 had already aggravated the situation for Jews in Poland. See Yfaat Weiss, Deutsche und Polnische Juden vor dem Holokaust. Jüdische Identität zwischen Staatsbürgerschaft und Ethnizität 1933–1940 (Munich: 2000), 109–110. 77. Pickhan, Gegen den Strom, 297. . . 78. Examples can be found in Bogusz, Z ydowskie stowarzyszenia and Meducka, “Zydowskie stowarzyszenia sportowe w Województwie Kieleckim.” 79. Gechtman, “Socialist Mass Politics through Sport,” 338. 80. See Finder, “The Trial of Shepsl Rotholc,” 65; cf. Piotr Osmólski, Leksykon boksu (Warsaw: 1989), 158. 81. Nowy Dziennik (29 March 1939), 10; ibid. (29 April 1939), 10.

34

Diethelm Blecking

82. Desanka Schwara, “Oijfn weg schtejt a bojm,” Jüdische Kindheit und Jugend in Galizien, Kongresspolen, Litauen und Russland 1881–1939 (Cologne: 1999), 327–329; Blatman, “The Bund in Poland, 1935–1939,” 65. The third national conference of Morgnshtern in May 1939 decided to set up self-defense units. See Jacobs, “Creating a Bundist Counter-Culture,” 64. 83. Hamakabi .1, no. 4 (1933), 6. 84. Tygodnik Z ydowski 17 (1934), 4. 85. Tomasz Jurek, “Sportkontakte zwischen Juden und Deutschen in Lodz bis 1939,” ms. of lecture given at “Jüdischer Sport und jüdische Gesellschaft” conference, 15. 86. On sports in the Vilnius ghetto, see Rachel Kostanian-Danzig, Spiritual Resistance in the Vilna Ghetto (Vilnius: 2002), 100–102. A sports poster inviting people to take part in competitions is reproduced in ibid., 101. 87. An invitation from the Jewish Council department of culture in the Vilnius ghetto, published on December 3, 1942, was worded as follows: “I invite you to take part in a discussion about the sports club today, six o’clock after dinner in room 13,” signed G. Yashunski. See the original (in Yiddish) reproduced in ibid., 100. 88. On the Judenräte, see ibid., 101–102, 112–115. On October 22, 1940, the head of the Judenrat in Lodz, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, “proclaimed permission to organize a sport movement in the ghetto and to create a sport administration” (see Isaiah Trunk, Łódz´ Ghetto: A History [Bloomington: 2006], 340).The classical, critical position on the function of the Judenräte was taken by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: 1963). Sports and games took place not only in the ghettos, but also in the concentration camps; see George Eisen, Spielen im Schatten des Todes, Kinder im Holocaust (Munich: 1988); Wolf Oschlies, “Sport in Auschwitz,” online at www.shoa.de/content/view/236/234; and Veronika Springmann, “‘Sportmachen’: Eine Praxis der Gewalt im Konzentrationslager,” in KZ-Verbrechen: Beiträge zur Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, ed. Wojciech Lenarczyk (Berlin: 2007), 89–101. 89. See the photo in Kostanian-Danzig, Spiritual Resistance in the Vilna Ghetto, 102. 90. For a complete survey and assessment of Jewish resistance, see Reuben Ainsztein, Jüdischer Widerstand im deutschbesetzten Osteuropa während des Zweiten Weltkrieges (Oldenburg: 1993) and Israel Gutman, “Jüdischer Widerstand—Eine historische Bewertung,” in Zum Kampf auf Leben und Tod, Vom Widerstand der Juden 1933–1945, ed. Arno Lustiger (Munich: 1994), 26–35. 91. Ainsztein, Jüdischer Widerstand im deutschbesetzten Osteuropa während des Zweiten . . Weltkrieges, 308–309; Jarosław Rokicki, “Makabi,” in Tomaszewski and Zbikowski, Z ydzi w Polsce, 302. 92. Marek Edelman remained in Poland after the war. He was active in the Solidarnos´c´ movement and in 1993 brought a convoy of goods into Sarajevo, which was besieged at the time. In 1999, Poland awarded him its highest order, the “White Eagle.” On Edelman, see Hanna Krall, Schneller als der liebe Gott (Frankfurt: 1980) and the section devoted to him in the periodical Midrasz (November 1999). 93. Rokicki, “Makabi.” . . 94. Marian Fuks, Z ydzi w Warszawie, Z ycie codzienne, wydarzenia, ludzie (Poznan´: 1997), 353–354. 95. Finder, “The Trial of Shepsl Rotholc,” 65 and Piotr Osmólski, Leksykon boksu (Warsaw: 1989), . 158. 96. Fuks, Z ydzi w. Warszawie, 353. 97. Pieczyn´ski, “Zydowskie sekcje bokserskie w Polsce.” . . 98. On the. Jewish. ghetto police (Słuz ba Porz a˛dkowa) in the Warsaw ghetto, see Aldona Podolska, Słuz ba Porz a˛dkowa w getcie warszawskim w latach 1940–1943 (Warsaw: 1996). . 99. See The testimony of Sara Grzywacz, in the Szapsel Rotholc ﬁle, Archiwum Zydowski Instytut Historyczny (Warsaw) 313/109, 230. The commander of the Jewish ghetto police on the Umschlagplatz, a man named Szmerling, was also a well-known former boxer. See Ainsztein, Jüdischer Widerstand im deutschbesetzten Osteuropa während des Zweiten Weltkrieges, 299. Tytelman was later murdered in the ghetto. 100. Rotholc ﬁle, 210.

Jews and Sports in Poland before the Second World War

35

101. Ibid., 292. Rotholc’s defense.counsel offered the following rejoinder: “It will be said that Rotholc should have joined the ZOB. But he’s not one of those people whose mentality allows him to come up with such ideas. He joined the police with the same aim as thousands of others: to ensure order, do his duty, and to take part in smuggling” (ibid., 294). 102. Ibid., 335. 103. Rotholc’s life formed the basis for many legends in Poland and Israel, with some viewing him as a collaborator, others as a hero, and others as something in between. According to one account, Rotholc lent out his uniform to the Jewish underground for use in clandestine activities. See Finder, “The Trial of Shepsl Rotholc,” 67. The journalist Barbara Stanisławczyk tried to clarify Rotholc’s role in the ghetto in a conversation with one of his rescuers, Zdzisław Man´kowski (see her Czterdzies´ci twardych [Lodz: 1997]). For their efforts in saving the Rotholc family, the brothers Tadeusz and Zdzisław Man´kowski from Warsaw were granted the status “righteous Gentiles” (h.asidei umot ha’olam) by the state of Israel. Tadeusz was awarded the title posthumously, as he was murdered in the attempt to rescue Rotholc’s wife, Maria, from the Germans. See under “Polish Righteous,” “Those Who Risked Their Lives,” http://www.raoulwallenberg.net/english/Saviors/POLONIA/mv.htm. 104. Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars, 63. 105. Urban, Der jüdische Sport in den Jahren 1945–1950. . 106. Helena Datner and Małgorzata Melchior, “Zydzi we współczesnej Polsce— nieobecnos´c´ i powroty,” in Mniejszos´ci narodowe w Polsce, ed. Zbigniew Kurcz (Wrocław: 1997), 70–81. 107. Dos Jidishe Wort 1 (1995), 21.

“Boxing for Everyone”: Jewish DPs, Sports, and Boxing Gabriel N. Finder (university of virginia)

Jewish Athletes! Continue the tradition of Jewish heroism! Fortify the ranks of our boxers! —(announcement in Jidisze Sport Cajtung, November 1947)

Following the defeat of Germany in the Second World War, between 150,000 and 250,000 Jewish refugees converged on makeshift camps designated for “displaced persons” (DPs) that had been hastily set up in the American zone of occupation in Bavaria and elsewhere in southern Germany. Making use of biblical terminology, the mostly Yiddish-speaking Jewish DPs called themselves sheyres hapleyte—“the surviving remnant” (sheerit hapeleitah in Hebrew). An estimated 50,000–80,000 of them had been liberated from German concentration camps, and a majority of them came to the DP camps in 1946 in the wake of widespread antisemitism and antiJewish violence, particularly in Poland. Either unable or unwilling to return to their former homes, they were forced to remain in the DP camps until the gates of Israel and the United States were opened to them. The ﬁrst wave of Jewish DPs departed with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and by 1952 only some 12,000 Jewish DPs remained in Germany. The DP camps were initially established to house the overall refugee population, and among their ranks were Nazi collaborators and many non-Jewish East Europeans who were traditionally antisemitic in their views. The presence of collaborators and the eruption of tensions between Jews and non-Jews prompted the Jewish survivors to demand separate, self-governing Jewish DP camps. Once settled in their own camps with the approval of the American occupation authorities, Jewish DPs took pains to recreate Jewish communal life even as they waited in limbo on the “accursed German soil.” In July 1945, representatives from DP camps in Bavaria founded the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Bavaria; several months later, in January 1946, representatives from Hessen and Baden-Württemberg were added, and the expanded organization was renamed the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the American 36

“Boxing for Everyone”: Jewish DPs, Sports, and Boxing

37

Occupation Zone in Germany (Tsentral-komitet fun di bafrayte yidn in der amerikaner zone in daytshland). This committee set up self-governance institutions as well as coordinating and assisting various programs in the camps. Financial support, medical care, and additional allotments were provided both by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) and by Jewish relief organizations, in particular the American Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint). Thus, with their physical security assured but with no viable immediate prospects of emigration, the Jewish DPs proceeded to revitalize Jewish political, religious, and cultural life in the DP camps.1 “In this state of temporariness,” notes the journalist Philipp Grammes, “they played a great deal of sports.”2 Indeed, although many DP ofﬁcials were inclined to favor cultural pursuits over athletics, sports “were the most popular leisure-time activity in practically all the Jewish DP camps.”3

The Emergence of Organized Sports In July 1945, Jewish leaders in the DP camp in Landsberg met to discuss the establishment of a soccer team and a sports facility in the camp, probably prompted by a wave of impromptu and informal matches on the camp’s grounds.4 Three months later the ﬁrst friendly soccer matches between Jewish teams from different DP camps were underway, even though the teams lacked proper equipment, clothing, and even coaches. In February 1946, the Central Committee of Liberated Jews set up the Center for Physical Education (Tsenter far ﬁzisher dertsiyung) as part of its health department. Shortly thereafter, sports enthusiasts from among the DP population founded the Association of Jewish Sports Clubs, later called the Association of Jewish Gymnastics and Sports Clubs (Farband fun di yidishe turn un sport-faraynen), which worked closely with the Center for Physical Education.5 The goals of the sports association, which were later printed on the back of every sports club registration card, were the “physical and athletic revival (oyﬂebung) and education of sheyres hapleyte” in preparation for their future life in Eretz Israel.6 Soccer was the most popular sport among the DP population, and over the next few months, according to Grammes, “a professional operation had been formed from the diverse improvised clubs, soccer pitches, and leagues.” On a more modest scale, the association also organized track and ﬁeld, swimming, basketball, table tennis, volleyball, and boxing events.7 Thanks to the large-scale emigration from Poland in the wake of anti-Jewish violence, which increased the Jewish DP population in the American zone by some 100,000 over the course of 1946, the ranks of Jewish DP athletes grew substantially. By March 1947 there were 16,000 athletes playing on 105 different teams located in the DP camps, including 20 teams that refrained from participating in sports activities on the Sabbath.8 In line with the growing number of athletes, teams, and spectators, the number of sports events expanded. Friendly matches between clubs evolved into league play, tournaments, and (especially for soccer) zone-wide championships.9 UNRRA provided modest ﬁnancial assistance to enable the purchase of equipment and uniforms, and it occasionally supplied the victor’s trophy or cup.

38

Gabriel N. Finder

Jewish sporting events often drew hundreds and even thousands of spectators. In addition, many DPs gleaned sports news from Yiddish-language publications (generally written in the Latinized orthography of the time, since Hebrew/Yiddish typeface was hard to come by in postwar Germany). The largest Yiddish newspapers published in the DP camps, Undzer Weg (the organ of the central committee in Munich) and the Landsberger Lager-Cajtung (later called the Jidisze Cajtung), regularly covered Jewish sports activities in the DP camps, as did the Jidisze Sport Cajtung, an illustrated biweekly publication that also featured portraits of prominent Jewish DP athletes, sports news from abroad (especially from Palestine), and commentary. Appearing from May 1947 to June 1948, the Jidisze Sport Cajtung had a readership of 4,000–5,000.10 An examination of sports club registration cards reveals that most DP athletes had been members of Jewish sports clubs in their countries of origin before the Second World War. Although many of them had played for non-Jewish teams, Jewish sports clubs had appealed to Jewish athletes because they often had been made to feel unwelcome in non-Jewish clubs. Incidentally, although women had increasingly participated in sports during the interwar period, particularly in swimming and in track and ﬁeld, almost all of the DP athletes were men; so, too, were most of the spectators. Among the Jewish DPs, for reasons to be described more fully, sports had reverted to being a male preserve.

The Individual and Collective Function of Sports Why were sports so popular? Since there is very little direct testimony from Jewish athletes that addresses this question, their motivation has to be deduced or inferred from the documentary record. To be sure, athletes received modest perquisites, even though they were not paid outright, partly in order to discourage professionalization.11 For example, the camp administration in Landsberg treated more than 50 of the Ichud sports club’s best athletes to a week at a spa.12 Appreciative sports functionaries and fans also feted talented or victorious athletes. After a much anticipated friendly soccer match held in Munich in May 1946 between the celebrated teams from Landsberg and Feldaﬁng, both players and their guests were invited to a festive dinner sponsored by Munich Maccabi.13 Boxers who fought in the boxing championship of January 1947 attended victory dinners in their honor for weeks after the event was over.14 But modest material rewards and recognition were not the main appeal of sports. Sports represented the pursuit of a redemptive future by means of living in the present and an excuse for what the historian Atina Grossmann has aptly termed, in the DP context, “productive forgetting.”15 In addition, there was the search for a substitute family structure; an antidote to loneliness; an alternative to the enforced idleness and monotony of DP camp life; an exorcism of painful memories and emotions; and—not least—plain fun. Moreover, as the historian Robert Edelman observed (in a different context), sports’ “liminality and spontaneity” could allow the DPs to “demonstrate a measure of agency denied them in other parts of their lives.”16 Equally important, sports provided a safe haven for Jewish community building among “tough Jews” and their admirers after the devastation of the war years. Writing

“Boxing for Everyone”: Jewish DPs, Sports, and Boxing

39

about Jewish sports clubs in the antisemitic atmosphere of Vienna of the 1990s, Matti Bunzl notes that they were both “a constitutive part of the Jewish community’s quest for resistive autonomy” and “sites of Jewish pride and empowerment.”17 This was also true of organized Jewish sports in the DP camps and was particularly evident whenever Jewish teams competed with teams of American soldiers. For instance, after a team of select Jewish DP boxers was narrowly defeated by a team of American black GIs in an exhibition match in October 1947, the Jidisze Sport Cajtung nonetheless waxed triumphant: “Our boxers demonstrated their high level and we can say with pride that Jewish ﬁsts are a match for anybody.”18 Jewish athletes were restrained, however, from ﬂexing their muscles against German teams or teams composed of DPs from other ethnic groups. Delegates to the ﬁrst meeting of Jewish sports clubs in April 1946 resolved not to organize such matches “because it is unclear whose hands are clean of Jewish blood.”19 In fact, unofﬁcial matches between Jewish and German teams occasionally took place in contravention of ofﬁcial Jewish DP policy and to the chagrin of Jewish DP sports functionaries.20 A stir was even caused when a Jewish DP team from Americanoccupied Bavaria played against a Jewish DP team in Berlin that ﬁelded a couple of half-Jews.21 It is fair to say that many athletes probably identiﬁed with the prohibition on competition with German teams, but as Grammes notes, it was sports ofﬁcials who both insisted on it and sanctioned it with severe penalties.22 The threatened penalties against violators included banning them from further participation in sports, sending their names (and those of their family members) to Jewish ofﬁcials in Palestine for the purpose of having them publicly condemned and ostracized, and informing on them to UNRRA and to the DP camp authorities—an act that could result in their being thrown out of the camp.23 I would further suggest that, just as young Jewish women reclaimed their domestic reproductive roles in a conscious, collective afﬁrmation of Jewish life—as noted by Atina Grossmann, the Jews in the DP camps “perceived pregnancy and maternity as . . . a certain kind of revenge, marking that they were more than just ‘victims’ and precisely did not want to dwell obsessively on the traumatic past”24—so, too, many of the men, motivated in their case to reestablish their masculine identities, turned naturally to sports as an arena in which to exhibit their manhood in service to Jewish revival. In so doing, they were perforce repudiating the entrenched stereotype of Jewish physical weakness that had been fostered by antisemites in the 19th and early 20th centuries and further reﬁned by the Nazis, who contrasted their own idealized vision of the heroic, muscular, and disciplined German with that of the cowardly, ﬂabby, and effeminate Jew.25 In addition, widespread rumors in the DP camps reported that the Germans had subjected male Jewish concentration camp inmates to emasculating potions and experiments.26 In light of all this, it seems reasonable to assume that many players—and their fans—found personal vindication in Jewish athletic prowess. To be sure, athletic prowess could cross the line into unsportsmanlike behavior. Although rowdy behavior was clearly not what DP leaders and sports ofﬁcials had in mind when they promoted sports as a means of rejuvenating the Jewish DPs, it was commonplace in DP camp athletic matches. Grammes argues that the evolution of friendly soccer matches into league matches in the second half of 1946 led to an emphasis on competition and shifted the focus to winning a championship.27 In the

40

Gabriel N. Finder

spring of 1948, as the camps were in the process of disbanding, the editor of Jidisze Sport Cajtung wrote a nostalgic summing-up in which the downside of competitive play was also mentioned: “How many times did athletes feel and spectators see in the course of matches how the feverish struggle transported us beyond the permissible limits of sports competitions?”28 Although the competitive spirit made for more exciting play on the ﬁeld, it also provoked obstreperous behavior on the part of fans and players alike.29 Skirmishes on the ﬁeld and in the stands could turn violent—on occasion, aggressive players and spectators even drew blood. Referees, in particular, were the target not only of invective but also of physical assault.30 The Center for Physical Education and the Association of Jewish Gymnastics and Sports Clubs took both athletes and fans to task for such behavior. According to a joint circular issued in July 1946: “Our goal is to make our young people healthy, to give them physical education and athletic training and also [to promote] respectable behavior. An athlete must respect his partner and defeat him (his rival) using only sports skills. In no instance may one resort to brutality.” The circular concluded with an admonition to athletes “to observe sportsmanlike discipline and comradely behavior! The athlete should bring honor to us and not disgrace.”31 When the futility of public reproach proved evident, a disciplinary committee was set up in the spring of 1947. Beyond threats, the committee was empowered to impose signiﬁcant penalties: in one instance, the coach of a boxing team who had hit a referee was disqualiﬁed for the rest of the season. Although it operated for only a year, the disciplinary committee issued a plethora of rulings, reproaching scores of athletes and imposing scores of penalties for breaches of discipline. As Grammes points out, the disciplinary committee was ﬁghting an uphill battle, and up to the dismantlement of organized sports in the DP camps, it was unable to put an end to the disruptive behavior of players and spectators.32 To some extent, unsportsmanlike behavior on the part of Jewish DPs can be regarded as perfectly normal, as such behavior was basically no different from that of players, fans, or spectators anywhere else.33 Beyond this, however, it is possible that unruly DP sports fans and athletes were giving vent to years of pent-up aggression as well as to their continuing frustration with the political stalemate that was impeding their exodus from Germany. A comparative example may help explain the emotional stakes involved. A Jewish youth leader in charge of a group of young male Holocaust survivors who found refuge in England and formed a club after the war reported that, when he rebuked a boy for ﬁghting after a soccer match, the boy replied: “ ‘I’ve lost so much that I cannot keep on losing.’ ”34 Robert Edelman (examining the role played by soccer in the lives of workers living in Moscow during the Stalinist era) suggests that such behavior represents more than a safety valve, as that term “implies a dismissal of the seriousness of the feelings and emotions expressed in sport.”35 DP sports ofﬁcials, themselves survivors or repatriated refugees, understood the brutalizing effects of the years of war and persecution on the younger generation. Thus, they expected athletes to play aggressively, with an eye on winning quickly and decisively, but at the same time, they attempted to convey the message that athletes needed to parlay their aggression into a “hard chivalrous contest.” In an article in the Jidisze Sport Cajtung, the chairman of the disciplinary committee wrote: “The reborn Jewish athlete, who felt the consequences of Jewish weakness on his own skin,

“Boxing for Everyone”: Jewish DPs, Sports, and Boxing

41

must thereby remember that we live in hard times and therefore must play hard but fair, which means in a disciplined and chivalrous way.”36 The challenge encountered by DP sports ofﬁcials was to channel Jewish athletes’ aggression, whose causes they understood, in a positive direction. As it happened, the sport deemed most conducive to aggressive displays of behavior in an acceptable and productive way was boxing.

Boxing in the Minds of Jewish DPs Although soccer was the most popular sport among Jewish DPs, representatives of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews as well as local camp ofﬁcials went to great lengths to enhance boxing’s appeal, setting an example by regularly attending boxing matches. In Landsberg, for instance, the camp committee ﬁnanced the construction of a new boxing ring in January 1947,37 and an article appearing at this time in Undzer Weg announced that the Center for Physical Education and the Association of Jewish Sports Clubs had “established a goal to develop the sport of boxing and see to it that this important branch of sports appeals to a broader audience.”38 Among the DPs there was a certain amount of resistance to boxing, which was regarded by some as goyim nakhes—a contemptible, uncouth, and dangerous form of behavior, “the kind of foolishness,” as David Margolick writes (in the American context), that “Christians enjoyed,” but that was beneath Jews.39 But the proponents of boxing, many of whom were associated with the Jidisze Sport Cajtung, were not easily intimidated. A satirical article published in the paper in December 1947 began with a caricature of boxing’s detractors: People say that boxing is a brutal game. Boxing could only interest people of a low cultural level and with a taste for brutality. Besides, what could be more loathsome than a mutual slugfest, where one [contestant] “smacks” the other on the cheek, hooks him under the eye, or, if things are going well, socks him in the nose? Sport is, as we know— so say those who are of a reﬁned nature—an undertaking that develops the body and spirit of people and cultivates a gentlemanly character, presence of mind, mental and physical agility.

But then there were the boxers, who: roll up . . . their sleeves, and “smack” one another right off in the nose [and in] the stomach so that their guts spill, or (this is already very much a great achievement) ﬂatten the opponent on the mat with a murderous blow. And the referee, instead of coming to the aid of the man lying there and calling a doctor, is preoccupied with counting. And a couple of thousand people stand or sit around the entire spectacle and scream bloody murder, as if they had just been beaten rather than the unfortunate one [on the mat]. . . . And this they call a sport.

Tongue in cheek, the article, whose author was a partisan of boxing, concluded: “Then we, too, must imitate [the rest of the world]. For this reason, Jews, start learning to box! This is no joke. Roll up your sleeves and ‘smack’ just like the others. At the beginning this may be difﬁcult, it hurts a little, but Jews are already used to pain. You might even win now and then.”40

Figure 1. Boxers, ofﬁcials, and spectators stand at attention for the playing of the American national anthem and “Hatikvah” at the boxing championship in Munich in January 1947. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), courtesy of Aviva Kempner

Figure 2. Group portrait of the members of the Zeilsheim displaced persons’ camp boxing team. USHMM, gift of Alice Lev

Figure 3. A boxer rests in the corner of the ring during a match at the Zeilsheim displaced persons’ camp. USHMM, gift of Alice Lev

Figure 4. Boxing match at the Neu Freimann displaced persons’ camp. USHMM, gift of Jack Sutin

44

Gabriel N. Finder

FPO

Figure 5. A boxing match at the Landsberg displaced persons’ camp. Standing in the ring behind the boxer is Max Weinberg, the founder and coach of the Landsberg boxing team. Süddeutscher Verlag Bilderdienst

It would not have been unprecedented in the Jewish sports world if the DP leadership had banned boxing to appease critics of the sport. Morgnshtern, the interwar Bundist association in Poland that promoted physical education among Jewish workers and their families, had initially declined to support boxing because its leaders thought boxing was a brutal sport that could harm the health of contestants (although it later reversed its policy).41 Yet DP leaders and sports functionaries never even considered a ban on boxing. Rather, they enthusiastically endorsed the sport because it could be harnessed to the personal needs of individual Jewish men and the national objectives of the Jewish people after the Holocaust. A press release from October 1946 titled “Boxing as a National Self-Defense Sport for Jews,” co-authored by Boas Rasner, the head of the boxing section of the Association of Jewish Gymnastics and Sports Clubs, and K. Tschertok, encapsulates the essence of prevailing perceptions of boxing among sports functionaries and, by implication, many, if not most, DP leaders. Acknowledging that a “certain portion of people believe that boxing is a disgusting, brutal, and even dangerous sport,” it

“Boxing for Everyone”: Jewish DPs, Sports, and Boxing

45

immediately argued against this claim: “For people who understand the importance of physical education for our youth and can connect this importance with our national aspirations, it is clear that this . . . opinion is fundamentally a false one.” It then went on to enumerate the multiple beneﬁts accruing to Jewish youth from boxing: In the ﬁrst place, boxing develops the health and physical strength of people; it further develops speed, dexterity, endurance, cold-bloodedness (kaltblutikajt), an impulse for battle (drang cum kamf), a will to win, and the ﬁnest characteristic that a man can possess—bravery (heldiszkajt). Despite all of this, almost every boxer who has attained a certain level with the systematic tools of physical education is a gentleman. In the course of his matches a boxer competes with various rivals who are his arch rivals [and] are in political, national, and moral terms on a low level. The boxer knows this, he takes this into account, but during the match he must forget all of this and conduct himself strictly in the framework of principles and discipline because during the match every rival is only a rival in the domain of sports and a representative of physical culture. In the life of a boxer there are those moments when he is assaulted or provoked to ﬁght; then he exhibits his cold-bloodedness and, believing in his physical capacity to settle an incident satisfactorily, only then when he can ﬁnd no other way out, does he step forward and show what he is capable of. The one thing that one can say about boxing is what a boxer gets in due course—a crooked nose; the only question is whether a crooked nose or a straight one is more attractive. No other sport forces the brain to perform such strenuous work as boxing because the result occasionally depends on the tactical struggle. A good boxer designs his strategic plan for the match during the match, and the boxer who loses his intuition during the match is lost; and this is the reason that the Jews inhabit such an honorable place in world boxing. Taking everything into account and our situation after the great misfortune of our people, we must understand that . . . boxing . . . is also signiﬁcant for self-defense and must be introduced into all sport organizations, schools, kibbutzim, and in all other places where Jews gather. We must immediately attend to mass training for our youth in boxing with the watchword boxing for everyone.42

This press release expressed the feeling of many in the Jewish DP community that boxing was more than just a game. The boxing ring was a site wherein the “militarization of a demilitarized society through sports,” as Gideon Reuveni puts it, could be realized in anticipation of DPs’ participation in the impending battle for statehood in Eretz Israel.43 For boxing organizers, themselves survivors who took pains to ensure a Jewish future, the ideal crucible for forging a Jewish male identity was the pugnacious masculine space of the boxing ring. From this perspective, the ideal man was a restrained warrior who mastered and controlled his surroundings, from the boxing ring to the battleﬁeld, using his body and intuition but also putting his intellect to good use. It is noteworthy that “Boxing as a National Self-Defense Sport for Jews” rejected the stock-in-trade stereotype, held by Jews and non-Jews alike, of the Jew whose excessive intellect detaches him from his natural instincts and paralyzes him into passivity. On the contrary, it characterized the ideal tough Jew as also being smart. Noteworthy, moreover, is the lack of any afﬁnity with idealized 19th- and early 20th-century standards of male beauty. What matters, in the post-Holocaust concept of Jewish masculinity, is neither a straight nor a crooked nose, but rather the wielding of masculine prowess in defense of Jewish honor and, even more important, Jewish lives. With the help of boxing, DP sports functionaries and leaders aspired to create a cadre of Jewish heroes in this mold.

46

Gabriel N. Finder

An article in this vein, authored by J. Solonoitz, the editor of Jidisze Sport Cajtung, appeared in January 1948—several months before an open call for Jewish athletes to mobilize for frontline duty in the upcoming war in Eretz Israel. Titled “We Must Hold Our Own with the Rest of the World,” it stressed the challenge of building a Jewish national home in the face of the daunting opposing force of the far more numerous Arabs. On the threshold of independence, Solonoitz warned, the Jews were still mentally and physically enervated by the catastrophe that had befallen them in Europe: For our people there exist challenges that momentarily exceed our remaining strength. Our people have been grappling with our tragic fate for many years, but at no time has our people’s victory been as close as it is today. . . . Especially today our youth and, ﬁrst and foremost, our strong athletes must understand that they have to be in the avant-garde of Jewish builders and ﬁghters. Our bodies have to be strong, our hands and ﬁsts have to be steel-hard, our hearts have to rid themselves of feelings of fear. Boxing can give us this.44

To a large extent, the sentiments expressed by Rasner and Tschertok and by Solonoitz were shared not only by many of their fellow DPs but also by Jews elsewhere in the diaspora. Jews were by no means unfamiliar with boxing; both in the United States and in several European countries, notably France, England and especially Poland, Jewish boxers had achieved renown in the 1920s and 1930s (and in the case of England, much earlier).45 Elliott Horowitz notes, in the context of the United States, that “the boxing ring, more than the baseball diamond or the tennis court, provided an arena in which traditional images of Jewish weakness and timidity, whether internally generated or externally imposed, could be challenged (if not quite undermined).”46 It was also the case that the sport offered many young Jewish immigrants an opportunity to earn a respectable and sometimes lucrative living.47 Both in America and even more in Europe, boxing was an expression of physical prowess in the face of a hostile environment: when Jewish boxers defeated non-Jewish opponents, their feats in the ring symbolized hoped-for Jewish triumphs over antisemites in the outside world. This symbolic connection became especially intense in the 1930s, with spiraling antisemitism in Poland and, of course, the Nazi regime’s assault on German Jews.48 The DPs continued to attach symbolic importance to Jewish athletic conquest over the forces of antisemitism, especially in the boxing ring, after the Holocaust. In June 1947, when the Jidisze Sport Cajtung published the ﬁrst in a projected series of proﬁles of “great Jewish athletes,” the subject was Jojsef Pilnik, a middleweight ﬁghter from interwar Wilno (Vilnius) who, in the late 1930s, advanced to the semiﬁnals in the Polish national championship held in Poznan´ (“the nest of Polish antisemitism”). Written by Solonoitz, the article featured a blow-by-blow account of Pilnik’s dramatic bout with an ethnic Polish boxer named Studnicki against the background of an unceasing chorus of antisemitic taunts. Solonoitz’s colorful recollection illustrates the DPs’ idealization of the interwar “tough Jew”: The third round begins. From the entire hall resounds the shout “Beat the Jew! [Szlogt dem jidn!] Beat the Jew! Studnicki makes his move to the accompaniment of the shouts, he attacks, his hands want to reach Pilnik. Pilnik detects the shouting. Whoever has ever stood in the ring knows that the shouting of the crowd fades in the ring. The match demands of the boxer his full concentration. But Pilnik detected the shout, “Beat the Jew.” His Jewish heart quickened. Not on account of fear, he was far removed from that. His

“Boxing for Everyone”: Jewish DPs, Sports, and Boxing

47

heart quickened as a result of agitation, abased dignity. He grits his teeth, squints his eyes, and to every catcall of “Beat the Jew!” he lands a punch on his rival as never before in his life. He goes on the offensive, attacking incessantly, his ﬁsts cut through the heavy air like lightning, he becomes as if possessed, his body is soaked from sweat, his face is splattered with Studnicki’s blood. Something happens that is more important than victory. Studnicki comprehends that his friends are only detrimental to him, that for every catcall from the crowd he receives two, three jabs from the Jew, and he who ten minutes ago had smiled to the crowd, shouts in the direction of the hall: Stop! Quiet! The hall indeed becomes quieter. The supporters who are standing around the ring hear Studnicki and they repeat his call: Stop! The “chorus” becomes quieter. But “Joske” Pilnik ﬁnishes his work. Studnicki falls. Pilnik wins and advances to the ﬁnals of the Polish championships.

As it happened, the exhausted Pilnik was defeated the following day in a bout fought against a hometown favorite. Solonoitz, however, concluded on a triumphal note addressed to his readers: Pilnik was only the runner-up. But the match proved the strength of Jewish athletes, the match proved what athletic training, a strong will, and an athletic spirit can accomplish. Pilnik is merely an example, Pilnik is merely a symbol. There can be more Pilniks among us and there will be more if Jewish youth, weak, covered in blood, understand the importance of sports and physical education. . . . Through sports we are forging a new, hardened generation.49

In the Ring Prompted by the encouragement and backing of both DP camp ofﬁcials and the local Jewish press, interest in boxing steadily increased between 1946 and 1948. The ﬁrst reported “boxing championship” (boks-maystershaftn) took place in early July 1946 in Zeilsheim (near Frankfurt). Though modest in scale—representing only four clubs— it was conducted with great pomp and circumstance, with opening speeches given by the director of the DP camp’s cultural department, the local UNRRA representative, the chairman of the camp committee, and M. Landau, the director of the Center for Physical Education. The UNRRA director donated the cup for the tournament, and the camp committee presented a cup for the second-place ﬁnisher. The winners also received sportswear. The reporter from Unterwegs, published by the regional Jewish committee in Gross-Hessen, described the event as “successful and necessary.”50 A report from a series of matches between Landsberg Ichud and Hagibor Bergen-Belsen (in the British zone) on July 15, 1946 suggests that the quality of DP boxers at this early stage was uneven and sometimes downright amateurish. Fourteen boxers competed in 7 matches. According to the sports reporter for the Landsberger Lager-Cajtung, a certain Koper was “a talented boxer in his weight class. [He] hits fast and precisely,” whereas a young boxer from Bergen-Belsen was “a future [star] for the Jewish boxing world, light, with good technique, controls his footwork, slugs his opponent.” In contrast, another boxer was dismissed as “simply too weak for boxing,” while another earned a mixed review (“ﬁghts hard and bitterly but lacks footwork”). In conclusion, the boxers from Landsberg were urged to “train some more and become well acquainted with the rules of boxing. Then, let’s hope, we will derive much satisfaction [ﬁl nakhes] from them.”51

48

Gabriel N. Finder

Later reports of matches between Jewish DPs and American GIs suggest that Jewish DP boxers improved with time. The boxing section of Ichud from Landsberg met American GIs for the ﬁrst time on May 20, 1947. Although there were several highly trained and skilled boxers among the Americans, the Jewish boxers acquitted themselves admirably in the ring despite a 9:7 loss. The reporter for the Jidisze Sport Cajtung noted that the Jewish boxers were well received by their American hosts, and their own supporters accompanied them home singing. Although technically a defeat, the outcome of the matches was seen as a clear moral victory for Jewish pride.52 Enthusiasm for Jewish DP boxing matches peaked in the 1946–1947 season, culminating in the individual boxing championship sponsored by the Center for Physical Education, the Association for Jewish Gymnastics and Sports Clubs, and the Joint, which took place in Munich on January 27–29, 1947. More than 50 boxers, in all weight classes, participated. Several of them were veteran boxers, among them Henryk Szpigelman and Hirsch Dilewski, both of them renowned members of Jewish boxing clubs in interwar Poland. By the last night of the tournament, there was a full house of spectators—some 2,000 in all—while hundreds more stood disappointed outside, unable to secure seats. As the reporter covering the event for Undzer Weg wrote, the boxing championship “turned into a real Jewish sports festival [emesn yid(ishn) sport yontev].”53 To mark the solemnity of the occasion, an orchestra played “Hatikvah” and the American national anthem to open the event. In attendance on the ﬁrst night were Dowid Treger, the chairman of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews, and the other members of its executive council; a colonel from the American military government; Philipp Auerbach, the Bavarian State Commissioner for the “Victims of Fascism”; and representatives of UNRRA, the Joint, and the Jewish Agency. Several dignitaries made speeches. “Through physical education and digniﬁed competition, we will build our own home in Eretz Israel,” declared Treger. “Boxers—compete honestly and with dignity, in a manner beﬁtting our athletes from the Jewish people.” The colonel noted: “This is more than a routine boxing match that we’re used to seeing. This is a demonstration of the best boxers among the 16,000 athletes in the American zone. The athletes, who are ﬁghting for a better future, embody the struggle to attain a healthy and good life.” Auerbach’s remarks underlined the irony that this event was taking place in Munich, site of the most egregious provocations to Jew-hatred in Nazi Germany: “With great joy, we see how the Jewish remnant in Germany is embracing a new life and a healthy spirit [through] sports.” He ended his speech with the traditional Hebrew phrase h.azak veemaz. (be strong and of good courage) to a round of resounding applause. Both the Jewish and the German press covered the event.54 Leo W. Schwarz, who was director of the Joint in Germany in 1946 and 1947, provides a vivid description of the boxing championship in his 1953 chronicle of sheyres hapleyte in American-occupied Germany: On Monday, January 27, the spotlight was turned on yet another event: the ﬁrst Boxing Championships of all the sports clubs in the zone. In the large Munich sports arena, Circus Krone, election tempers abated,55 taunts became thrills, combat returned to the ring. Punctually at ﬁve o’clock, announcer Kaﬂinski formally opened the program. Drums rolled. The hall was ﬁlled with light. Applause thundered as two ten-year old boys from

“Boxing for Everyone”: Jewish DPs, Sports, and Boxing

49

Landsberg, accompanied by Rasner who was to act as referee, stepped into the ring and gave a neat round of exhibition boxing which was declared, ﬁttingly, a draw. As the bouts proceeded, it was evident that many of the competitors were not novices. Several of the boxers had held amateur and professional records before the war, but they did not seem unevenly matched. Fifteen out of sixteen contenders won by points; only in the bantamweight class did Wellheim score over Pocking by a technical knockout. By the time of the ﬁnale, on the evening of January 29, interest was at a high pitch. . . . Photographers for the German newspapers as well as the camp press actively recorded the highlights. Camp honors went to Zeilsheim, which captured the championships in featherweight, middleweight and welterweight classes. The contenders, ﬁghting superbly and bitterly—three of the seven won by knockouts—demonstrated the superiority of experience over youth. By defeating his seasoned Zeilsheim opponent thirty seconds before the end of the ﬁrst round, Hirsch Dileski [sic], captain and trainer of the Landsberg team, provided the sensation of the whole event. The solid Landsberg deputation in the stands broke into hysterical applause. Each of the new champions was awarded a specially designed silver cup, and the runners-up carried away beautifully engraved certiﬁcates. These were proudly exhibited at the victory banquets which, despite the election excitement, were held in the camps during the following weeks.56

Schwarz’s laudatory description is corroborated by Jack (Yakov) Jonilowicz’s documentary ﬁlm of the event. In the ﬁlm, the boxing ring and the arena are seen to be distinctively male spaces. Jonilowicz skillfully directs the gaze of the viewer to the unmistakable display of Jewish manhood. The boxers, all of them sporting Stars of David on their shorts, exhibit strength, discipline, and nimbleness; their behavior is sportsmanlike. None of the boxers appears to lose his self-control in the ring or to exhibit the wish to injure his rival. A viewer’s clear impression is that, among the Jewish DP population, boxing was regarded as a manly sport but decidedly not as a blood sport.57 Indeed, the most lasting impression made by the boxing championship was the high level of boxing, exempliﬁed both by prewar stalwarts such as Szpigelman and Dilewski and by newcomers such as Harry Haft, a young Polish Jew who was voted the best boxer of the championship after scoring a knockout in his ﬁnal, heavyweight match.58 The quality of the boxing had one particularly signiﬁcant ramiﬁcation. “For many boxers,” notes Grammes, “the championship in Munich meant a kind of return to normality after the long, dark years of the Holocaust.”59 This return to normality was not lost on the spectators, either. “It was unbelievable,” wrote the reporter for Undzer Weg, “that our athletes, who were enslaved for many years in ghettos and concentration camps, were able after a relatively short period of time after liberation to exhibit strength and athletic prowess in such a forum, as the matches proved.”60 If the motivation behind the consolidation of organized sports in the Jewish DP population was the mental and physical rehabilitation of the survivors, then the 1946–1947 boxing championship was an unqualiﬁed success.

The Swan Song of DP Boxing The fate of boxing in the DP camps paralleled that of organized DP sports in general. In the wake of the successful tournament of 1947, another championship

50

Gabriel N. Finder

was scheduled for April 1948. But by then, a large number of the best boxers had answered the call to enlist in ﬁghting for the Jewish homeland and had either left for Palestine or else were enrolled in special training courses for recruits.61 This left mostly older boxers to compete in the championship. According to the Jidisze Sport Cajtung, the boxers competing in the 1948 championship were mediocre—lacking both sufﬁcient training and enthusiasm—and the bouts were lackluster.62 A similar lack of excitement was displayed both by camp ofﬁcials and the DPs themselves, who attended the matches in modest numbers. The tournament was also marred by rowdy behavior on the part of spectators; in one incident, a group of fans who disagreed with the referees’ decision threw chairs into the ring. In spite of these many shortcomings, the championship did proceed. The matches were preceded by greetings from representatives of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews, the Joint Distribution Committee, and the Jewish Agency. All of them emphasized the importance of physical ﬁtness, especially boxing, for the Jewish people, and wished the participants success in their matches and in a future career in sports in Eretz Israel, where they would help their brethren in their struggle. There followed a moment of silence for those who had already lost their lives. The ﬁrst round of matches left much to be desired. “One sees less technique, almost everyone lacked air by the third round, and also the tactics were circumscribed by the abilities of the boxers. In one word, the level of a year ago has signiﬁcantly deteriorated,” the reporter from the Jidisze Sport Cajtung wrote. The second round proved superior to the ﬁrst. Particularly impressive was Wdowinski, a prewar stalwart from Lodz who clobbered his opponent, but other older competitors, including the 43-year-old Yosl Wysocki from Ichud Landsberg, who won his ﬁrst-round middleweight bout, showed the effects of age in the second round. One boxer in the heavyweight competition even skipped his own match without explanation. The awards ceremony was festive, but “those in attendance slowly left the arena,” perhaps in nostalgic farewell to the end of a brief but memorable episode in their lives in limbo.63 This was the last boxing tournament to be sponsored by the Jewish DPs. With the departure of the best athletes and the most dedicated spectators, sports, including boxing, had run its course before the ﬁnal dismantling of the camps.

Notes 1. Important recent studies of Jewish DPs in the American zone of occupied Germany include those authored by Zeev W. Mankowitz, Life between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany (Cambridge: 2002); Michael Brenner, After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany, trans. Barbara Harshav (Princeton: 1997); Angelika Königseder and Juliane Wetzel, Waiting for Hope: Jewish Displaced Persons in Post-World War II Germany, trans. John A. Broadwin (Evanston: 2001); Ruth Gay, Safe among the Germans: Liberated Jews after World War II (New Haven: 2002); and Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton: 2007). 2. Philipp Grammes, “Sports in the DP Camps, 1945–1948,” in Emancipation through Muscles: Jews and Sports in Europe, ed. Michael Brenner and Gideon Reuveni (Lincoln, Neb.: 2006), 187.

“Boxing for Everyone”: Jewish DPs, Sports, and Boxing

51

3. Königseder and Wetzel, Waiting for Hope, 125. On the bias toward cultural activities rather than sports, see Grammes, “Sports in the DP Camps,” 208. 4. “Impozante fajerung fun jidisze sportler in Landsberg,” Landsberger Lager-Cajtung (22 Feb. 1946), 9. 5. Grammes, “Sports in the DP Camps,” 190–192. 6. YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (hereafter: YIVO), RG 294.2, Displaced Persons Camps and Centers in Germany (hereafter DPG), folder 434, fol. 1185 (protocol of the meeting of representatives of Jewish sports clubs in the American zone, held in Landsberg, 21 April 1946); YIVO DPG, folder 434, fol. 1237 (statute of the Association of Jewish Sports Clubs, no date [21 April 1946]). A reporter’s account of the meeting can be found in H. Pomeranc, “Cuzamenfor fun jidisze sport-klubn in der amerikaner zone in Landsberg,” Landsberger Lager-Cajtung (26 April 1946), 8. See also Grammes, “Sports in the DP Camps,” 191–193. For a sports registration card, see, for instance, YIVO DPG, folder 435, fol. 1316 (the back of the sports club registration card of Pesach Koper, issued in Landsberg, 8 Aug. 1946). 7. Grammes, “Sports in the DP Camps,” 194, 196, 198. 8. YIVO, RG 294.1, Leo W. Schwarz Collection, folder 129, fols. 773, 775, 777 (general report of the second congress of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the American Occupation Zone in Germany, held in Bad Reichenhall, 25–27 Feb. 1947); YIVO DPG, folder 434, fol. 1195 (protocol of the second conference of the Association of Jewish Gymnastics and Sports Clubs, held in Munich, 11–12 March 1947); YIVO DPG, folder 434, fol. 1037 (list of sports clubs afﬁliated with Elizur, the religious sports association, Munich, no date). See also Grammes, “Sports in the DP Camps,” 191. 9. Grammes, “Sports in the DP Camps,” 194. 10. Königseder and Wetzel, Waiting for Hope, 126. 11. Ibid. There was, however, no coherent and uniﬁed policy on the matter; to some extent, the Association of Jewish Gymnastics and Sports Clubs encouraged professionalization through its promotion of organized training for coaches and referees, some of whom were paid. See Grammes, “Sports in the DP Camps,” 193. 12. Dowid Koton, “Impozante derefnung fun boks-sezon in Landsberg,” Jidisze Cajtung (28 Jan. 1947), 3. 13. H. Pomeranc, “Zig fun landsberger ‘Ichud,’ ” Landsberger Lager-Cajtung (24 May 1946), 9. 14. Leo W. Schwarz, The Redeemers: A Saga of the Years 1945–1952 (New York: 1953), 207. 15. Atina Grossmann, “Victims, Villains, and Survivors: Gendered Perceptions and SelfPerceptions of Jewish Displaced Persons in Occupied Postwar Germany,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, nos. 1–2 (2002), 313. 16. Robert Edelman, “A Small Way of Saying ‘No’: Moscow Working Men, Spartak Soccer, and the Communist Party,” American Historical Review 107, no. 5 (Dec. 2002), 1467. 17. Matti Bunzl, Symptoms of Modernity: Jews and Queers in Late-Twentieth-Century Vienna (Berkeley: 2004), 106. 18. Jidisze Sport Cajtung (Oct. 1947 B), 10; quoted in Grammes, “Sports in the DP Camps,” 200. 19. YIVO DPG, folder 434, fol. 1187 (protocol of the meeting of representatives of Jewish sports clubs in the American zone, held in Landsberg, 21 April 1946). 20. “Algemejne farzamlung fun sport farejn ‘Ichud’ in Landsberg,” Landsberger LagerCajtung (12 July 1946), 7. 21. Jugol, “Zigrajcher turnej fun landsberger ‘Ichud’ in Berlin,” Jidisze Sport Cajtung (Jan. 1948 A), 5. 22. Grammes, “Sports in the DP Camps,” 207. 23. “Algemejne farzamlung fun sport farejn ‘Ichud’ in Landsberg.” 24. Grossmann, “Victims, Villains, and Survivors,” 312. 25. On the representation of the Jewish body in late 19th- and early 20-century Europe, see John M. Efron, Medicine and the German Jews: A History (New Haven: 2001), 142–150; on the stereotype of Jewish intelligence, see Sander L. Gilman, Smart Jews: The Construction of the Image of Superior Intelligence (Lincoln, Neb.: 1996); on the Nazi representation of the

52

Gabriel N. Finder

German and, by contrast, Jewish male, see John M. Hoberman, Sport and Political Ideology (London: 1984), 164–165. 26. Grossmann, “Victims, Villains, and Survivors,” 305. 27. Grammes, “Sports in the DP Camps,” 195. 28. J. Solonoitz, “Undzer sport ojf naje wegn,” Jidisze Sport Cajtung (June 1948 A), 2. 29. Grammes, “Sports in the DP Camps,” 195. 30. Ibid., 187, 197–198. 31. YIVO DPG, folder 773, fol. 727 (joint circular of the Center for Physical Education and the Association of Jewish Sports Clubs, admonishing players and athletes to observe sportsmanlike conduct, Munich, 29 July 1946). 32. Grammes, “Sports in the DP Camps,” 201–212. 33. Edelman, “A Small Way of Saying ‘No’,” 1457. 34. Martin Gilbert, The Boys: Triumph over Adversity (London: 1996), 380. 35. Edelman, “A Small Way of Saying ‘No’,” 1467, n. 119. 36. A. Kaﬂinski, “Wi azoj darf geszpilt wern, hart oder wejch?” Jidisze Sport Cajtung (4 June 1947), 3. 37. Koton, “Impozante derefnung fun boks-sezon in Landsberg.” 38. Y. Bank, “Tsu di boks-maystershaftn,” Undzer Weg (17 Jan. 1947), 8. 39. David Margolick, Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink (New York: 2005), 37. See also Elliot Horowitz, “‘They Fought Because They Were Fighters and They Fought Because They Were Jews’: Violence and the Construction of Modern Jewish Identity,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 18, Jews and Violence: Images, Ideologies, Realities, ed. Peter Y. Medding (New York: 2002), 34; Douglas Century, Barney Ross (New York: 2006), 27–28. 40. Ben Jakow, “Jidn, frasket glajch in noz arajn!,” Jidisze Sport Cajtung (Dec. 1947 A), 9. 41. Jack Jacobs, “Creating a Bundist Counter-Culture: Morgnshtern and the Signiﬁcance of Cultural Hegemony,” in Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100, ed. Jack Jacobs (New York: 2001), 61–63; Roni Gechtman, “Socialist Mass Politics through Sport: The Bund’s Morgnshtern in Poland, 1926–1939,” Journal of Sport History 26, no. 2 (1999), 343–345. 42. YIVO DPG, folder 773, fols. 705–706 (Boas Rasner and K. Tschertok, “Boks als nacjonaler fa[r]tejdikungs sport far jidn!,” press release of the Association of Jewish Sports Clubs and the Center for Physical Education on the beneﬁts of boxing, Munich, 6 Oct. 1946, emphasis in original). It appeared in Jidisze Cajtung (25 Oct. 1946), 9; quoted in part in Grammes, “Sports in the DP Camps,” 207. 43. Gideon Reuveni, “Sports and the Militarization of Jewish Society,” in Brenner and Reuveni (eds.), Emancipation through Muscles, 45; see also Grammes, “Sports in the DP Camps,” 207. 44. J. Solonoitz, “Mir muzn zich ojsglajchn mit der welt!,” Jidisze Sport Cajtung (Jan. 1948 A), 2; quoted in part in Grammes, “Sports in the DP Camps,” 208. 45. Regarding Jews and boxing in the United States, David Margolick notes that “Jews were all over boxing, not just as ﬁghters and fans but as everything in between: promoters, trainers, managers, referees, propagandists, equipment manufacturers, suppliers, chroniclers. No major ethnic group in American history ever so dominated an important sport” (Margolick, Beyond Glory, 37). On Jewish boxers in Poland, see Diethelm Blecking, “Jews and Sports in Poland before the Second World War,” in this volume, esp. 17, 26–28. 46. Horowitz, “‘They Fought Because They Were Fighters and They Fought Because They Were Jews’,” 25. 47. Steven A. Riess, “Tough Jews: The Jewish American Boxing Experience,” in Sports and the American Jew, ed. Steven A. Riess (Syracuse: 1998), 103. 48. When Shepsl Rotholc, the featherweight stalwart who boxed for the Warsaw afﬁliate of the Jewish sports club Gwiazda (Shtern in Yiddish), defeated a German opponent in 1933, the Yiddish-language sport periodical Sportcajtung, which was published in Poland in the 1930s, ran a front-page headline, “Rotholc Triumphs over the Swastika” (“Rotholc triumﬁrt iber dem hakenkrayts”). In November 1938, there was another front-page headline: “Rotholc Defeats the Nazi Boxer in Breslau!” (“Rotholc shlogt dem Nazi-bokser in Bresloy!”). See Gabriel

“Boxing for Everyone”: Jewish DPs, Sports, and Boxing

53

N. Finder, “The Trial of Shepsl Rotholc and the Politics of Retribution in the Aftermath of the Holocaust,” Gal-Ed 20 (2006), 64 (English section). This was true not only of Jews in Eastern Europe. When Max Baer, an American boxer who claimed to be Jewish (and was in fact of partial Jewish ancestry), defeated Max Schmeling in June 1933, German Jews rejoiced privately. See Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: 1998), 104. For their part, American Jews openly celebrated Baer’s victory. Moreover, when Joe Lewis defeated Schmeling in June 1938 for the world heavyweight title with a technical knockout in the ﬁrst round, Jews from New York to Warsaw were ecstatic. See Margolick, Beyond Glory, 40, 324–325. 49. J. Solonoitz, “Zayn grojser zig,” Jidisze Sport Cajtung (4 June 1947), 8. For similar laudatory descriptions of Jewish boxers’ victories over Polish rivals, see Reb Majer, “Adolf Neustadt, der jidiszer nokautn kenig,” Jidisze Sport Cajtung (Nov. 1947 B), 11, which also praised his refusal to join the ranks of German agents in the Warsaw ghetto; idem, “Di szlog maszin—Paul Rozenblum,” Jidisze Sport Cajtung (Dec. 1947 A), 11. 50. YIVO DPG, folder 1033, fol. 1199 (K. Tschertok and Ch. Rosenholz, report of the Center for Physical Education and the Association of Jewish Sports Clubs for 1946, Munich, 2 Jan. 1947); Koton, “Sport in Landsberg,” Landsberger Lager-Cajtung (19 July 1946), 9; “Fun die arumike yishuvim in Groys-Hesn,” Unterwegs (15 Aug. 1946), 3. See also Grammes, “Sports in the DP Camps,” 194. 51. Koton, “Boks-match ‘Ichud’ (Landsberg) ‘Hagibor’ (Bergen-Belsen) 7:9,” Landsberger Lager-Cajtung (19 July 1946), 9. 52. Dowid Koton, “Amerikaner aplodirn di jidisze boksers!,” Jidisze Sport Cajtung (4 June 1947), 6. 53. Y. Bank, “Yidishe boks-farmestungen adurkh mit derfolg,” Undzer Weg (4 Feb. 1947), 3. 54. D. Koton, “Erszte indiwiduele boks-majsterszaftn fun Szejris-Haplejto in der amerikaner zone in Dajczland,” Jidisze Cajtung (4 Feb. 1947), 7. 55. The championship took place during a heated election campaign for seats on the Council of Liberated Jews in the American zone. The elections took place several weeks later. 56. Schwarz, The Redeemers, 206–207. 57. This ﬁlm, titled “Boxing Championship,” can be viewed on the website of the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive (www.spielbergﬁlmarchive.org.il). 58. While Haft was interned at Auschwitz, an SS ofﬁcer there spotted him and became his patron. In exchange for protection, the German initially had Haft forage for jewelry through the pockets of the discarded clothes of Jews selected to be killed. The German was reassigned to the slave labor camp at Jaworzno after Haft’s own transfer there, and every Sunday he had Haft box half a dozen fellow Jewish camp inmates, with SS ofﬁcers placing bets and the loser of the match invariably sent to Auschwitz. In this makeshift setting, Haft developed a killer instinct in the boxing ring. Following his dazzling success at the 1946–1947 boxing championship, Haft continued to box for the Maccabi team from the DP camp in Neu-Freimann, scoring a number of victories and impressing aﬁcionados of the sport with his talent and sheer strength. He eventually departed for America, where he embarked on a promising but brief boxing career. It ended in ignominy when, after threats to his life, he took a fall in a bout with Rocky Marciano, the future heavyweight champion, for which he later berated himself. He raised a family, but he remained an angry and deeply troubled man; the demons of the past haunted him to the end of his life. See the biography written by his son, Alan Haft, Harry Haft: Auschwitz Survivor, Challenger of Rocky Marciano (Syracuse: 2006). At least while he was a DP, in the context of a supportive community of Jewish men with similar wartime experiences, Haft seems to have found in boxing an acceptable outlet for his pent-up aggression and rage. 59. Grammes, “Sports in the DP Camps,” 199. 60. “Yidishe boks-farmestungen adurkh mit derfolg.” 61. “Cum opfor fun bokser ch[aver] Szpigelman H.,” Jidisze Sport Cajtung (25 July 1947), 10. 62. Ben Jakow, “Di II-te boks majsterszaftn fur Szerith Haplejta geendikt,” Jidisze Sport Cajtung (April 1948 B), 3–5. 63. Ibid.; see also Grammes, “Sports and the DP Camps,” 203.

The Jewish Bookmaker: Gambling, Legitimacy, and the American Political Economy Michael Alexander (university of california, riverside)

No fort is so strong that it cannot be taken with money

—Cicero

During graduate school, I sometimes took an evening away from campus to visit my Uncle Seymour, who invariably arranged for us to meet in the vacant recreation rooms of synagogues and churches scattered throughout Queens and Nassau counties in New York. After ﬁnding the correct exit of the Long Island Expressway or Belt Parkway and then navigating some residential streets, I would pull into a dark parking lot and locate a service entrance to the house of worship. There an aging (but still substantial) bouncer would delay me until I explained that I hoped to join my uncle. At Seymour’s name, the doors opened.1 Inside I found a complete casino setup: craps, blackjack and poker tables, and various untraditional card games, such as Caribbean Stud, which my uncle dismissed as a “sucker’s game.” Looking over to the Caribbean Stud table, I would ﬁnd Seymour’s longtime girlfriend betting heavily and smiling. Aunt Helen’s fondness for the game irritated my uncle, though they enjoyed an otherwise placid relationship that included regular evenings “at Temple.” Seymour himself shot craps. He always placed the same bet, the most conservative in the casino: he bet against the shooter and then augmented his wager on the back line.2 This gave the house only a small concession (called the “vig” or “vigorish,” Yiddish terms related to the Russian word for “winnings,” vyigrysh), which, though still bothersome to my uncle, was an acceptable entertainment expense. Seymour continued betting until a scratchy radio broadcast announced the end of some professional or college sporting event. Then he would collect his chips and go over to a man sitting between an adding machine and a metal cash box. He was my uncle’s bookmaker, and also the proprietor of these affairs. The time had come to settle accounts. This was the state of the small-time “sporting life” a decade ago, and judging by the varied ages of both proprietors and clientele, these operations are no doubt 54

Gambling, Legitimacy, and the American Political Economy

55

continuing in the new century. Over the course of the past hundred years, Jews by proportion (compared to other religious and ethnic groups) have been the most active participants in American sports betting, and probably in gambling generally.3 It has been this way ever since the day after July 15, 1912, when young Jewish criminals invented the surreptitious casino scenario described above. Known as the “ﬂoating crap game,” it developed out of necessity after Lt. Charles Becker of the New York City Police Department arranged for the murder of Herman “Beansy” Rosenthal, the manager of the Hesper Club casino. I have referred to the murder of Rosenthal in other writings, though not to its signiﬁcance in the history of both money and power in America. In brief, July 15, 1912 is the date when illegal gambling stopped being a concession of corrupt politicians and the police in their employ. From then onwards, the state and Jewish professional gamblers entered into a competition, both for gambling dollars and for the power that these revenues represented.4 By describing the history of Jewish bookmaking in America, I hope to say something about the American service economy, by which I mean the shift of much of the American economy in the mid-20th century from the creation of physical goods (production) to the distribution of goods and the selling of services. By the late 1960s, this phenomenon had become noticeable enough to enter the economic and sociological discourse, and it has since come to be accepted as a fact of our contemporary social order.5 Though the phenomenon has sometimes been put under the microscope of cultural analysis, that analysis has overlooked what I believe to be deep cultural anxieties regarding the service economy.6 Speciﬁcally, at least since medieval times, economic activities not related to production have occupied a suspicious realm best relegated to inferiors, which often meant Jews. As Jews became signiﬁcant participants in the growing service economy (though they never dominated it), to many they also came to symbolize this new economy. Thus my discussion of “the Jewish service economy” indicates two intertwined phenomena: the real preponderance of Jews in a particular industry or set of industries; and the perception that Jews monopolize or otherwise control vast and unsavory areas of the service sector. That confusion, between viewing Jews as participants in larger modernizing economic trends, and viewing them as somehow overseeing those trends (especially for sinister purposes), has had very real implications, not least of all concerning how Jewish power has been viewed. All economic behavior, however stigmatized, has political ramiﬁcations and plays its role in the political economy. In discussing these power implications, I will make use of Max Weber’s distinction between legitimate and non-legitimate domination. Not surprisingly, power related to production and, classically, the agrarian economy has been considered legitimate, whereas power related to the Jewish service economy, though quite real, often has not been considered legitimate. In fact, the power attached to the Jewish service economy has at times been so discredited and debased that even some recent scholarship has discounted its very existence. As I hope to show in the following account of Jewish bookmakers in America, nothing could be further from the truth.

56

Michael Alexander

Origins of Jewish Bookmaking Historically, modern casinos are descended from the “auction pool” associated with racetrack gambling. Although gambling has been banned or circumscribed by law at most times and in most places in America, informal gambling among horse owners has always been critical to the culture and ﬁnances of racing. After the Civil War, the emergence of modern urban racetracks, built and maintained as local governmentworks projects, mandated the professionalization of the sport and the rationalization of its ﬁnances. In the 1870s, racetrack ofﬁcials began to supplement gate fees illegally (albeit openly) by auctioning the winning rights of individual horses prior to their races. Following the race, whoever had purchased the rights to the triumphant horse would collect the entire betting pool, less 10 percent to the track. Though proﬁtable, this system was imperfect. For one thing, it neglected large sums of interested capital from those who had not won the initial auctions. Moreover, ofﬁcials had to maintain too visible a connection to auctioneers and to illegal gambling in order to calculate their just commission. The auction system was replaced around 1880 when track ofﬁcials began to offer the privilege of working in the stands to professional gamblers who paid a ﬂat fee. These gamblers often published their initial offering of odds on chalkboards, but each bet was bargained individually and its details were recorded in a book or pad (hence the phrase “making book”). Bookmakers had to control immense amounts of changing information concerning horses, track conditions, jockeys, odds, and what ﬁnancial risks their own resources would allow, while at the same time negotiating multiple bets from excited patrons in the few closing moments before a race. As this was a conspiracy of government ofﬁcials in the ﬁrst place, track ofﬁcials easily enforced their illegal contracts with bookmakers: local police were instructed to eject or arrest any gambler who did not pay the fee.7 After the invention of the telegraph, corrupt track ofﬁcials opened remote ofﬁces connected directly to the racetrack by wire. Though these later became known as wire-rooms, they were initially known as pool-rooms, in what was even then an anachronistic reference to the old auction pool. Bookmakers were brought in to manage these places. Besides horse betting, the pool-room offered lotteries, card and dice games, food and drink, entertainment, and prostitution. In short, it had all the hallmarks of the modern casino, the difference being that, despite its illegality, the pool-room was owned by government ofﬁcials with solid connections both to race track administrators and the local police force. As a journalist observed in 1907, “the type of the big pool-room man . . . is either a politician or the friend of politicians. To be precise, he is ‘in right’.”8 Such an institution was the Hesper Club at the time that its owner, “Big” Tim Sullivan, enlisted Beansy Rosenthal to manage it. Timothy D. Sullivan, sometime state senator but more importantly a Tammany boss of the Democratic party in New York City, owned dozens of pool-rooms. He hired professional gamblers to manage them, typically ﬁrst- and second-generation East European Jews who had spent their youths in America making book at racetracks and, increasingly, baseball stadiums. Arnold Rothstein, Sam Paul, “Bridgey” Webber, Harry Vallon, Sam Schepps, and “Bald” Jack Rose were among those who, as teenagers, had wandered into Tim

Gambling, Legitimacy, and the American Political Economy

57

Sullivan’s Lower East Side pool-rooms and ended up managing them. These men did not think of themselves as independent owners of casinos. They did not have the political connections to gain access to a racing wire or to avoid the Strong-Arm Squad of the New York City Police Department (now known as the Vice Squad). Rather, they were hired by Tim Sullivan to make book and otherwise manage his gambling interests, for which they received a portion of the proﬁts.9 When Tim Sullivan inexplicably went insane in 1909, and therefore could no longer inﬂuence his police minions, there was some confusion as to who owned the Hesper Club. It was not long before Lt. Charles Becker of the Strong-Arm Squad reasoned that, with Big Tim gone, someone else should accept the owner’s share of proﬁts. Whether Becker thought of himself as the new owner of the Hesper Club or whether he simply sought compensation for protection from police raids is a matter of perspective. Concretely, he wanted $500 per week, which was probably a ﬁgure closer to an owner’s proﬁt than to a police protection fee (it corresponded to the typical annual income of a Lower Manhattan resident). This amount shocked Beansy Rosenthal, though other casino managers, including Rothstein, Paul, Webber, Schepps, and Rose instantly agreed to the new arrangement. When Rosenthal appealed to Arnold Rothstein, the most inﬂuential of Sullivan’s Jewish casino managers, to utilize his personal connections in Tammany in order to curtail the police lieutenant’s gambling ambitions, Rothstein responded by peeling $500 from his own bankroll and suggesting that it be used as a ﬁrst payment to the Hesper Club’s new ownership. Rothstein explained that until Tammany Hall ﬁlled the vacuum created by Sullivan’s departure, Lt. Becker was the de facto “Big Feller” and would take an appropriate share of the casino’s proﬁts. Beansy Rosenthal still refused to pay. Instead he tried to stop the lieutenant by reporting the matter to the muckraking New York World. In retaliation, Becker ordered the murder of Rosenthal, a crime for which he was eventually convicted and executed. As the messy Becker-Rosenthal affair made headlines and sold newspapers, nervous politicians closed down their casinos.10 These were the shadowy circumstances that forged the ﬁrst ﬂoating crap games in New York. They also permanently unhinged ownership of illegal gambling from holders of government ofﬁce. Thereafter, politicians and their police might be paid to overlook gambling or to prosecute speciﬁc competitors, but unlike Tim Sullivan they held no assets in these operations, nor did they consider themselves to be proprietors. The immediate connection between government ofﬁcial and illegal enterprise was simply too close, too risky. For one thing, newspapers loved to report on instances of hypocrisy on the part of politicians, whose notoriety was then exploited by political rivals. Muckraking, however, was only one aspect of a larger movement to rationalize and professionalize government ofﬁce, which became known in the United States as Progressivism. By the beginning of the 20th century, this movement had come into national vogue, in part because of its success in exposing the suspicious business interests of incumbent politicians who, typically, had sought public ofﬁce in the ﬁrst place in order to protect their ownership of these interests. In this new environment, rationalization of both the economy and politics, in both legal and illegal arenas, meant that the service industry of gambling was best left in the hands of career gamblers, while the increasingly technical knowledge and skills necessary to the administration of force were best left to professional politicians

58

Michael Alexander

and their police. To be sure, gamblers did mete out a share of direct force—Arnold Rothstein, for instance, both carried and on occasion made use of a .38 Special revolver, and his game operators, Meyer Lansky and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, began their careers as shtarkers (“tough guys”) who were hired by labor or management during union disputes. But the typical nexus between the illegal economy and its occasional need for enforcement came about through graft. Whereas a legal business could openly use the courts to activate force in its interest, an illegal business had to gain the same political services without access to the tool of law. Henceforth, government was “on the take.” When rationalization trends ﬁnally succeeded in splitting political ofﬁce from direct business interest, it marked the end of the traditional relationships between sovereignty, property, and revenue that had organized agrarian society for centuries. With the exception of taxes, crude physical control over material resources had effectively been divorced from the income that property created. This division of power and property, with the former placed in service to the latter, had been the vision of Adam Smith and the ideal shared by the framers of the American Constitution, but its near accomplishment at the turn of the 20th century was thoroughly disturbing, as it challenged long-held agrarian ideals of how wealth is rightly accumulated, both in its creation and in its protection. John B. Morrall reminds us of the earliest European articulations of this agrarian political-economic ideal, espoused in the early Middle Ages by the barbarian conquerors of Rome: In an age when material force was the strongest political argument, the practice of protection of the weak by the strong became widespread over western Europe. . . . [It] led to the grant or assumption of public political authority by the military landowning elements who now exercised in their localities the administrative and judicial functions regarded in Roman times as the sole prerogative of the central government.11

This elementary fusion of power and property remained in force even through 11thand 12th-century market and urban revolutions, during which the necessity of distribution and the urban market was conceded and was even tolerated when provided by an inferior class such as the Jews. Still, distribution and ﬁnance services never gained the legitimacy of holding property directly and deriving income from it. It may be said that the moral view of agrarian society, which fused control of property with the complete and legitimate economic beneﬁt of its resources, was still the preferred theory of the 18th-century Physiocrats and has existed and thrived in places perhaps even into the 21st century. If it is difﬁcult to fathom Adam Smith’s rather basic division between sovereign power and the non-sovereign economic use of property, how much more obtuse are regions of the economy that are one step further abstracted, where value is created without producing a material product at all: distribution, banking, entertainment, and even the ancient professions of law and medicine—that is to say, the service economy, the area to which Jews were consigned for the bulk of their history. What a discomforting surprise it must have been to those who realized, whether during the market revolutions of the 11th century or the post-industrial explosion of the 20th, that the lords over this suspect service economy were reaping the material rewards due a king.

Gambling, Legitimacy, and the American Political Economy

59

Because of the longstanding association of Jews with the service economy, market revolutions that have threatened the agrarian political ideal, even market revolutions led by Gentiles, typically have been met by antisemitic rhetoric. Often the smears came from those who led the new economy.12 Henry Ford, a business genius by any reckoning in the areas of both production and distribution, could not fathom the legitimate value of the service economy, which in his mind was personiﬁed by Jews. “The Jew is a mere huckster,” he said in an interview, “a trader who doesn’t want to produce, but to make something out of what someone else produces.”13 To the average American who may have shared Henry Ford’s view, the manner in which effete Wall Street types (who produced nothing) legally gained unprecedented wealth, social stature, and inﬂuence must have seemed distasteful, even unnatural. It was mystifying when foreigners enjoyed economic success in the abstract distribution areas of the economy. But it was outright unconscionable when illegal conspiracies protecting these perverse arrangements came to light. Such revelations raised worrisome questions about whom American power served, or worse, who actually held power. Such was the mood when, during the World Series of 1919, some began to suspect that certain bookmakers had ﬁxed events on the baseball ﬁeld from the stands. No Yiddish newspaper at the time thought there was much use in denying the claim. Since racetracks had closed during the Great War, gamblers had become increasingly interested in what Walt Whitman had named “Our Game.” Baseball had been created in New York City in the 1840s, and from the ﬁrst, it had been conjoined with wagering (a score was initially called an “ace,” a team’s turn at bat was called a “hand”). As with horse racing, baseball team owners often gambled on their own teams.14 And as with horse racing, baseball underwent its own professionalization after the Civil War. Concomitant with growing interest in the honest outcome of the games the public was now paying to see, gambling was publicly disavowed, but team owners do not appear to have been deterred from honoring their betting traditions in private. Not surprisingly, suspicions concerning gambling and ﬁxes recurred. These were raised in 1914, 1917, and rather seriously regarding the World Series of 1918. Finally, in 1920, when White Sox pitcher Eddie Cicotte fully confessed to his ﬁx of the 1919 World Series, including his own masterminding of the plan, a nationalist gasp was drawn up from across the American plain. How could strong American athletes have been bent to the will of sallow hucksters? Had suspicious money been used to ﬁx the World Series, along with everything else in America? Had the most recent tide of foreigners turned American society upside down? Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent was far from alone in proclaiming so. “A lot of dirty, long-nosed, thick-lipped, and strong-smelling gamblers butted into the World Series,” the Sporting News declared, “an American event, by the way.”15 In his recounting of the baseball scandal in The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald also used the caricature of the Jewish usurer, transforming Arnold Rothstein into Meyer Wolfsheim, “the man who ﬁxed the World’s Series” and who “play[ed] with the faith of ﬁfty million people—with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.”16 Fitzgerald’s lampoon of Rothstein was as graceless and crass as the living man was polished. For instance, whereas Rothstein knew Great Britain, having traveled there several times for business, Meyer Wolfsheim marveled that his friend Gatsby had attended “Oggsford College in England. You know Oggsford College?”—stumbling over the pronunciation of a

60

Michael Alexander

language that Rothstein spoke natively. And while Rothstein dressed in the “subdued method of Fifth Avenue,”17 Wolfsheim decorated his shirts with cuff links made of the “ﬁnest specimens of human molars.”18 Then again, Fitzgerald wanted less to lampoon the man than his nose. Although he claimed to have met Rothstein,19 his Wolfsheim was “a small ﬂat-nosed Jew . . . with two ﬁne growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril,” and when Wolfsheim felt fury it was not so much expressed by his face, but rather “his nose ﬂashed . . . indignantly.”20 When Edith Wharton ﬁnished reading The Great Gatsby she dashed off a note to Fitzgerald and speciﬁed that in Wolfsheim, Fitzgerald had created the “perfect Jew.”21 With Wolfsheim, Fitzgerald represented what he imagined to be a massive and treacherous pivot in the stratiﬁcation of the American social order. The Tom Buchanans of Yale, with their stables of polo horses, had been replaced by a nouveau riche class of Jay Gatsbys, an indistinguishable crowd of salesmen and stock swindlers with neither history nor pedigree, who would chase money blindly in the ever elusive search for satisfaction. In their chase, this new class unwittingly served the purpose of Wolfsheim, foul Jewish lord of the underworld who wielded complete power in an America with no recognizable legitimate authority.22

Bookmaking at Mid-century The public outcry surrounding the World Series of 1919 brought no change or interruption to the structure or volume of organized sports betting. Americans simply liked to gamble. As noted, pool-rooms had begun reestablishing themselves within months of Beansy Rosenthal’s murder in 1912, this time without the direct proprietorship of corrupt government ofﬁcials. In time, however, various state and local governments acted in opposition to the rationalizing trend that would have kept them out of the economy and decided to compete with professional gamblers by offering legal pari-mutuel gaming options at government-sponsored racetracks. (Pari-mutuel systems gather bets centrally and then divide the proceeds among the winners in proportion to their original wagers. Bookmakers, in contrast, collect and distribute bets individually.) At the same time, the widespread use of the telephone allowed for expanded options for illegal professional gamblers. Throughout the 1910s, enterprising bookmakers had used their networks of racetrack informants to compile racing results from around the country and then sold this information to smaller bookmakers. By 1920, these services had been consolidated—in most cases violently—by Jacob “Mont” Tennes and his General News Bureau in Chicago. Tennes’ own history is not well documented beyond the fact that he was born in Chicago in 1874 to “German” parents (a common euphemism for Jewish at the time)23 and that, under the tutelage of machine boss Mike McDonald, came to monopolize gambling on Chicago’s North Side. Tennes’ telephone service, which became known anachronistically as “the wire,” served “wire rooms.” A 1916 investigation by Federal Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (later appointed baseball commissioner following the Black Sox scandal) found that although bookmakers used the racing wire for illegal purposes, the transmission of racing data was not in itself a criminal act, since the information was a form of news.

Gambling, Legitimacy, and the American Political Economy

61

Moses Annenberg espoused that legal view when he bought Tennes’ General News Bureau in 1927 and renamed it the Nationwide News Service. Five years earlier, Annenberg had purchased The Racing Form newspaper, thus conﬁrming his transition from distributor for William Randolph Hearst (a violent job during the bloody Chicago newspaper wars of the early 1910s) to publisher of his own news and wireservice empire. A Jew born in East Prussia in 1878, Annenberg and his family moved to Chicago in 1881, where as a boy he sold newspapers, ﬁrst for Hearst’s competitors and then for Hearst himself. Annenberg would eventually own the Milwaukee Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Miami Tribune.24 By 1930, half of the states had established legal pari-mutuel gambling systems at their racetracks. In the same year, the Department of Justice estimated that Annenberg’s wire provided information to more than 15,000 illegal bookmakers; by 1940, it was the ﬁfth-largest customer of the American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation. Annenberg’s legal wire service thus competed with the legal gambling interests of the state. Racing track ofﬁcials arranged for the removal of public telephones in an attempt to stop “spotters” hired by Annenberg to relay race information, but the spotters soon created complex systems of signaling from high in the stands to colleagues stationed out in the parking lot, who then called in their reports to the home ofﬁce.25 The state had no legal foundation to prosecute Annenberg’s news service. Annenberg’s son Walter, who worked in the family business at this time, would later explain: “After all, the Associated Press and others were getting the [race] results, too.” That may have been true, but the government believed that Moses Annenberg’s marketing techniques were less than legal. He was accused of intimidating rival news services, such of that of Sol King in New York, by crippling delivery trucks and printing presses. Since bookmakers who used Annenberg’s services were criminals, they could hardly appeal to the courts for protection. In due course, however, Annenberg’s businesses became the focus of increasingly tenacious federal investigations, which led to his selling the wire in 1939. Shortly thereafter, he was convicted of federal tax evasion and sentenced to a four-year prison sentence, two of which were actually served at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania before he was released for an inoperable brain tumor, of which he died in 1942.26 The sale of the Nationwide News Service to a person less formidable than Annenberg (James M. Ragen, who was murdered on State Street, Chicago, in 1946) created a vacuum that others sought to ﬁll. Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, who had worked for Arnold Rothstein in the 1920s, opened Trans-American Publishing in California, probably with the ﬁnancial backing of Meyer Lansky.27 For reasons beyond Siegel’s control, his wire was not remarkably successful, and no single service came to replace that of Annenberg. In large part, this failure can be attributed to the invention of the “point spread” in the last years of the Second World War. The point spread greatly broadened the kinds of sports games on which it was possible to gamble. Previously, sports featuring head-to-head competition, such as basketball and football, were difﬁcult to make equally appealing to betters for both teams—an essential condition for bookmakers seeking to balance the risk of their bets and safely collect a vigorish. The point spread made this equalization possible. In the point spread system, an even bet was offered for both sides of a contest, but the points necessary to “win” each game

62

Michael Alexander

were different for each team. In basketball, for instance, a disparity of talent between competing teams might mandate a “spread” of 20 points. If the favorite did not win by more points than the spread, those who bet on the weaker team would collect the bet. This technical innovation made it practical for bookmakers to offer bets on popular human competitions. Leo Hirschﬁeld, a Jew from Minneapolis, was the ﬁrst major handicapper to recommend odds for sports other than horse racing. Hirschﬁeld’s telephone service for bookmakers became known as the Minneapolis line, and it set the national standard for sports other than horse racing from the time the point spread was invented through Hirschﬁeld’s retirement in 1961 due to new federal antigambling legislation. Bookmakers paid $25 a week for telephone access to Hirschﬁeld’s recommended odds, while gamblers subscribed to Hirschﬁeld’s Green Sheet publication, which touted particular picks for the week. As with Annenberg’s and Tennes’ services, Hirschﬁeld’s enterprise operated within the limits of the law, though its clientele did not.28 While Hirschﬁeld was honing the new point spread system, a New York sportswriter by the name of Ned Irish began to notice the increasing popularity of college basketball games in the metropolitan area. He decided to promote college tournaments at Madison Square Garden, ﬁrst by booking local teams such as Long Island University, City College of New York, St. John’s, Manhattan College, and Seton Hall, the rosters of which, not surprisingly, included a signiﬁcant number of Jewish players. The demand for these games enabled Irish to draw nationally recognized basketball teams to New York to play the local talent. The surge of college basketball, paired with the emergence of the point spread system, allowed college basketball to rival and then exceed horse racing as the primary focus of national gambling interest.29 While the point spread made it possible for bookmakers to offer bets on basketball, it also made it easier for corrupt gamblers to skew the outcome of games in their favor. If a gambler wished to ﬁx a game by paying off college players, he no longer needed to pay the students to lose outright. Players merely had to “shave points” and win by a score less than the spread. This practice was less obvious to observers, and it was also easier for players to rationalize morally, since, although taking bribes, they were still winning games for their schools. Summer resorts in the Catskill Mountains of New York were popular places for college players to meet and fraternize with gamblers. From the 1930s, coaches from all of the major New York teams secured jobs for their best players in Catskill hotels. Ostensibly hired as waiters, busboys, and janitors, the students in fact played scrimmage games for hotel patrons in what became known as the Borsht Belt League. These games became so popular that sports reporters covered them for the newspapers and big gamblers came to frequent them. Playing under casual conditions and also far removed from home, some players learned to miss shots, make subtle defensive errors, and, most importantly, take money. By the time they arrived for ofﬁcial league play in the fall and winter, they had acquired new sets of skills and a taste for how easily they could line their own pockets. Inevitably, the corruption rampant in college basketball became a matter of public knowledge. On January 18, 1951, the New York Journal American reported that the players of Manhattan College were routinely skimming points. Soon all of the

Gambling, Legitimacy, and the American Political Economy

63

major New York basketball programs had become implicated. Richard O. Davies and Richard G. Abram, the premier historians of sports betting, regard the ensuing scandal as being “equal in impact and signiﬁcance to the 1919 World Series ﬁx.”30 It certainly caused a national outcry of comparable volume. But antisemitism this time around did not rear its head publicly. Over the course of the following year, 33 college basketball players were implicated; some, but by no means all of them Jewish. The ﬂamboyant Nat Holman, the Jewish coach of City College of New York (CCNY), was among those whose actions were scrutinized, yet although the press unearthed some dubious recruiting practices at CCNY, Holman himself was cleared of any wrongdoing. The absence of antisemitic rhetoric at the time is open for interpretation. Perhaps it can be attributed to timing (close on the heels of the Holocaust, which led to a certain degree of sympathy for the Jews); alternatively, it may be the case that the corruption of what was regarded as an urban game did not give rise to the kind of volkisch concern associated with baseball and its pastoral ﬁelds. In any event, when Arthur Daley, a Catholic columnist for the New York Times, expressed his outrage and distress, he singled out Manhattan College, a Catholic school, writing that the charges against it were “far more stunning, far harder to believe than any of the others.”31 Jews may have felt a comparable anxiety regarding the scandal, similar to what they felt concerning the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case of March of the same year, but in both instances, there was no popular antisemitic fallout.32 Despite the actions of a few Jewish basketball players and gamblers, Jews appear to have been regarded as a vested group of Americans who, like everyone else, were appalled by the reported corruption. As it happened, both the basketball scandal and the Rosenberg case came to trial (and ultimate conviction) before Jewish judges.

The Business Today Though the basketball programs for City College of New York, Long Island University, New York University, and Manhattan College were ruined for years thereafter, the business of sports gambling continued as usual. Bookmakers still offered wagers at a rate of 11-for-10 ($11 risked to earn $10), thus ensuring themselves a 4.545 percent vigorish. In instances in which losing bets were covered by a loan typically payable at the usurious rate of six-for-ﬁve per week (that is, 20 percent), monies quickly compounded much to the bookmaker’s favor. As we have seen, after the invention of the point spread, human sports became the focus of sports gambling; outside the auspices of the state and its law, it remained untaxed. Clandestine “turf clubs” (once again, the chosen term was already an anachronism) operated throughout the country during the 1950s and 1960s, providing lines mainly on human sports. Street bookmakers sent out armies of runners, who made payouts, collected bets, and offered weekly loans to tide over clientele until the next round of games. Then, in 1974, Senator Howard W. Cannon of Nevada convinced Congress to lower the federal tax on sports bookmaking (set prohibitively high in 1931, at 10 percent, in order to encourage tax-exempt state-run pari-mutuel racetrack betting), ﬁrst to 2 percent, and soon after to just .025 percent. The new tax was far enough below the

64

Michael Alexander

vigorish so that bookmakers could now operate legally (where permitted by individual states) and proﬁt.33 Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, a Jewish bookmaker from Chicago who became manager of the Stardust Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas, set out immediately to create the ﬁrst modern legal sports book.34 In contrast to underground illegal turf clubs scattered throughout the country, Rosenthal envisioned a plush arena for sports betting: a theater capable of serving the food, drink, and entertainment needs of 600 gamblers, ﬁxed with a 48-square-foot television screen and dozens of other screens, each ﬂickering events from across the country and around the world.35 Though visionary in its time, Rosenthal’s Stardust Sports Book is dwarfed by today’s standards. According to a 1999 congressional report, one hundred sports books in Nevada took in $3 billion in bets and generated $100 million in proﬁt. In addition, approximately 250,000 bookies operated illegally. At least once that year, a quarter of adult Americans bet on sports, and 15 million bet on these events regularly. Still, in the grand scope of all organized wagering in America, even these seemingly large ﬁgures for sports gambling are not impressive. As Davies and Abram remind us: “Gambling is undoubtedly the biggest single industry in the United States, in terms of both revenues generated and the number of customers/participants. In the year 1999 an estimated 125 million Americans gambled at least once, putting some $2 trillion into play.”36 Since the time of the congressional investigation, there has been an explosion of “virtual casinos” that are incorporated in legally unreachable places such as Antigua and Costa Rica, offering online betting of all kinds. Their CEOs are respected businessmen elsewhere (for instance, in Great Britain, where they often maintain ofﬁces), but when they set foot in the United States they are apt to be arrested.37 In this sea of gambling, the sports book seems a lowly vessel, its main function being to draw in players who might eventually turn to other games more proﬁtable to the casino. Then again, that was already the case in Beansy Rosenthal’s pool-room. Despite the limited place of sports in the larger arena of American gambling, the congressional investigation of 1999 singled out sports betting as a unique problem. This may simply have been an expression of economic competitiveness on the part of the government, since bookmaking at the time (before virtual casinos) was the single largest untaxed arena of organized gambling. Yet it is also possible that congressional concerns about sports betting can be traced all the way back to the medieval anxiety about the possibility of ﬁscal dominance being more important than physical prowess. Whatever the congressional attitude toward sports gambling may be, the Jewish appetite for these kinds of wagers (and probably for wagering of all kinds) remains mysterious. The proclivity may be explained partially by reference to the fact that the likelihood of sports gambling increases both with education (41 percent of college graduates gamble, as compared with 28 percent of high school graduates and 14 percent among those with a lower level of formal education), and with urbanism—or rather, suburbanism (38 percent of suburban dwellers gamble, versus 29 percent of urban dwellers and 25 percent of those living in rural areas).38 Since all areas of the organized American criminal economy developed in urban areas (usually in “redlight” entertainment districts abutting industrial areas and low-income housing), Jews may have become especially involved in gambling simply because of physical proximity, though it must be admitted that many ethnic groups were similarly proximate but did not exploit the opportunity as thoroughly.39

Gambling, Legitimacy, and the American Political Economy

65

Perhaps it is helpful to view Jewish participation in “illegitimate” and sometimes illegal areas of the American economy as a transplanted outgrowth of the exclusion of East European Jews from the normative economy. As with mercantile distribution and interest ﬁnance in ages past, the gambling industry in America started as a pariah profession heavily populated by Jews, only to end up as it is now: a pillar of the new American service economy. When Benjamin Siegel opened the Flamingo Hotel the day after Christmas in 1946, Las Vegas was a town of less than 25,000 people, and Siegel was barely a step ahead of the law. Sixty years later, the Las Vegas metropolitan region has 1.8 million residents and is considered America’s most rapidly growing urban area, entertaining more than 38 million visitors annually.40 The corporations that own and run its hotels and casinos are taxed and traded on the major stock exchanges, while Jews such as hotel and casino developer Steve Wynn continue to constitute a core of the gaming business community, and others have entered Nevada government ofﬁce. From the perspective of economic history, heavy Jewish participation in the American sports gambling industry, and gambling in general, likely derived from Jewish economic mentalities and behaviors forged in Europe. But the political activities of those Jews who participated in the American gambling industry appear quite different from those of their predecessors in Europe. No matter how great the ﬁnancial power of a gevir (wealthy person) or shtadlan (intercessor), he could not dissociate himself from the European sovereign power that “tolerated” his existence. This dependence on sovereign protection was “the intrinsic fragility of a Jewish grandee’s position,” according to David Vital, and the Jewish community overall could be characterized politically as a “non-sovereign people.”41 In Eli Lederhendler’s formulation: The dependence of Jewish self-rule on the consent of the gentile state and the Jewish reliance on the state’s enforcement powers as the ultimate coercive force available to the community held true throughout the medieval period, beginning in late antiquity and continuing in many respects into the modern era. . . . The power exercised by Jewish communities was, therefore, derivative power.42

Some may claim that this political situation cannot even be compared to the American case. After all, Jewish enfranchisement into the American body politic came about with the very creation of the state, whereby Jews became, at least as individuals, sovereign persons along with every other American citizen. Nevertheless, well into the 20th century, there existed large pockets of government power that resisted the ideals of popular sovereignty and the rule of law. In the major American cities, government was still the site of widespread “corruption,” which was simply the use of government power for personal gain—an expected activity for any feudal sovereign worthy of the name. At the time that Beansy Rosenthal rather naively questioned Lt. Becker’s and Tammany Hall’s corrupt use of government power, New York City was in effect an urban ﬁefdom. “These clubs, such as Tammany Hall, are like Knight orders,” Max Weber observed in 1918: “They seek proﬁts solely through political control, especially of the municipal government, which is the most important object of booty.”43 But by the time Jewish gamblers had emerged from hiding after Rosenthal’s murder, that medieval world was practically gone. Jewish gamblers

66

Michael Alexander

from 1912 on may have paid government for the service of administering force, or they may have exerted coercive force themselves, but the gambling grandee no longer suffered an “intrinsic fragility” in his relationship to sovereignty. He was not dependent. His relationship to power did not devolve on the personal favor of those in government. Agon (contest) accurately characterizes the relationship between the Jewish underworld and legitimate power, though Weber himself preferred the more militaristic term Kampf (battle) to describe the rivalry between legitimate and nonlegitimate forms of domination.44 Some may claim that the intrinsic fragility of the European grandee in relation to the sovereign had simply been replaced by an intrinsic fragility of the American gambler in relation to the sovereignty of law. But the Jewish gambler was soon to overcome this obstacle as well. Though Jewish criminals had existed in Europe and had contested sovereign power, scholars to date have unearthed none who triumphed so thoroughly as did those in America: Moses Annenberg in sports gambling, Moe Dalitz in casino gaming, Samuel Bronfman during the American alcohol prohibition—all of whom represent cases of playing against the state and winning. Given that these illegal enterprises sometimes required non-sovereign means of enforcement they are also examples of Jews’ contesting the legitimacy of the monopolization of violence by the state—at least until the state was made to view Jewish marginal enterprises as legal, if not unambiguously legitimate. Gambling and the entertainments that surround it may never become “legitimate.” Las Vegas is in effect a national red-light district, as attested to by a recent advertising slogan that capitalized on the popular appeal of this furtive and antiauthoritarian realm: “What happens here, stays here.”45 However, it would seem that gambling has become legitimate enough for the state to try its own hand at providing these services, whether they be racetrack betting throughout the 20th century, or massive national lotteries today. When the state is unsuccessful in competing with private gambling enterprises, it taxes them, bringing the once forbidden service under the rule of law, and its revenue into government coffers. At this point one might ask: What, exactly, is legitimate about sovereignty and law if these are made malleable by “illegitimate” economic pressures? And whom does the power of sovereignty serve? Similar questions might be asked of Jewish diaspora politics generally. Lederhendler is right to claim that legitimate Jewish power in Europe for most of history was derivative. But we are also speaking about a group whose legitimate existence was never established. When investigating Jewish power, we should be looking more closely at realms beyond the ofﬁcial and the legitimate. The sovereign claim of holding monopoly over coercive force is an ideal, a staking out of territory—it has never been a reality. From the standpoint of practical political analysis, “primary” and “derivative” power are categories that may not be as revealing as “legitimate” and “non-legitimate,” as Weber maintained: “Action . . . may be guided by the belief in the existence of a legitimate order. The probability that action will actually be so governed will be called the ‘validity’ of the order in question.”46 There is no other test for legitimacy except its being accepted as such. Of course, when accepted, the practical political signiﬁcance of legitimacy is substantial, as (in an extreme example) the lawfully enacted Nuremberg Laws of 1935 conﬁrm. But those same laws also conﬁrm that legitimacy is established subjectively; it depends entirely on political consensus, and almost entirely on tradition.47 That the Jewish service

Gambling, Legitimacy, and the American Political Economy

67

economy never led to the legitimacy of the Jewish community in Europe or to the legitimacy of the power it most certainly wielded (without such power, the community would have ceased to exist) was surely the outcome of an agrarian mentality that could not reﬂect or even fathom the far more complex economic and political reality on which it depended: the market, the city, the nascent service economy, and, where it existed, kehilat yisrael (the Jewish political entity).48 To review the history of Jews and the American gambling and sports betting industries is to see a world in which resources and power reside outside of the normative economic and political orders—where a service economy mysteriously generates value without land or even material property, and where power hovers ethereally, above the ground, as it were. Jewish power outside of Zion generally has been entwined with this service economy, and accordingly it has been decried by Gentile and Jew alike as being tainted, alien, unnatural, illegitimate, and derivative. But judging by its persistence, its increasing necessity for the larger world economy, and its sometime triumphs over legitimate avenues of domination, the surges of power attached to the service economy have been anything but derivative or ethereal. By saying so, I may seem merely to reiterate a call made by David Biale two decades ago,49 but it is one that merits both nuance and expansion: historiography must look beyond medieval prejudices and reevaluate the legitimacy, as well as the sheer reality, of Jewish power.

Notes 1. I wish I could thank two of my uncles, Seymour Alexander, who introduced me to this world, and Nathan “Toosh” Alexander, who lived these events as a bookmaker in Brooklyn until Mayor LaGuardia ended that happy portion of his career. May their memories be blessed. 2. For those interested in the rules of this game, see John Scarne, Scarne on Dice (North Hollywood: 1980). John Scarne was a sometime employee of Arnold Rothstein. 3. In 1974, a congressional survey of sports gambling, both legal and illegal, analyzed its results by “religious preference” and by “ethnic background.” The results were as follows: among Jews, 39 percent had placed bets and 8 percent had placed illegal bets; among Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, 30 percent had placed bets and 6 percent had placed illegal bets; among Protestants, 27 percent had placed bets and 3 percent had placed illegal bets—though the comparable ﬁgures for a subset of members of “Bible-oriented” churches were lower (13 and 2 percent); among atheists and agnostics, 22 percent had placed bets and 1 percent had placed illegal bets. Surveys organized by ethnic background revealed the following: among West Europeans, 34 percent had placed bets and 5 percent had placed illegal bets; among East Europeans, 33 percent and 6 percent; Spanish-speaking, 33 percent and 3 percent; Irish, 32 percent and 6 percent; British, 31 percent and 3 percent; Italian 25 percent and 8 percent; African, 24 percent and 0.3 percent. See Maureen Kaillick, Daniel Suits, Ted Dielman and Judith Hybels, “Survey of American Gambling Attitudes and Behavior,” Gambling in America (Appendix 2) (Washington, D.C.: 1976), 297–334, esp. 300. Mark Haller has noted that although many ethnic groups have been represented in the American gambling industry over the course of the 20th century, if any one group stands out, it is Jews hailing from Eastern Europe. This is a difﬁcult claim to support empirically since so much of gambling history has occurred outside of the law, but my own perusal of the biographical data of professional gamblers, compounded by evidence from the 1974 congressional ﬁndings about Jewish sports betters, leads me to believe that Haller’s impression is warranted. See Mark H. Haller, “The Changing Structure of American Gambling in the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Social Issues 35 (1979), 93–97. 4. Michael Alexander, Jazz Age Jews (Princeton: 2001), 34f.

68

Michael Alexander

5. Victor Fuchs, The Service Economy (New York: 1968); Alain Touraine, The Post-Industrial Society (New York: 1971); Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: 1973); John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics and the Public Interest (Boston: 1973); Alan Gartner and Frank Riessman, The Service Society and the Consumer Vanguard (New York: 1974). 6. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: 1992). 7. Richard Sasuly, Bookies and Bettors: Two Hundred Years of Gambling (New York: 1982), 65–105. 8. Josiah Flynt, “The Pool-Room Spider and the Gambling Fly,” Cosmopolitan (March 1907), 513–521, cited in Richard O. Davies and Richard G. Abram, Betting the Line: Sports Wagering in American Life (Columbus, Ohio: 2001), 16. 9. “This City’s Crying Shame,” New York Times (9 March 1900). See also Steven A. Riess, “Professional Sports and New York’s Tammany Machine, 1890–1920,” in Major Problems in American Sport History, ed. Steven A. Riess (Boston: 1997), 159–167. 10. “Rosenthal Said ‘Big Tim’ Helped Him Start Gambling House,” New York World (17 July 1912). See also Jonathan Root, One Night in July: The True Story of the RosenthalBecker Murder Case (New York: 1961); Jenna Weissman Joselit, Our Gang: Jewish Crime and the New York Jewish Community, 1900–1940 (Bloomington: 1983). 11. John B. Morrall, Political Thought in Medieval Times (New York: 1962), 13–15. 12. Hillel J. Kieval, “Antisemitism and the City: A Beginner’s Guide,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 15, People of the City: Jews and the Urban Challenge, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (New York: 1999), 3–18. 13. Cited in Robert Lacey, Ford: The Men and the Machine (New York: 1987), 234. 14. Davies and Abram, Betting the Line, 18. 15. Sporting News, cited in David Pietrusza, Rothstein (New York: 2003), 171. 16. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: 1925), 78. 17. Donald Henderson Clarke, In the Reign of Rothstein (New York: 1929), 20. 18. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 77. 19. See Fitzgerald’s letter of July 1937 to Corey Ford, in F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Turnbull (New York: 1963), 551. 20. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 75. 21. Quoted in Ernest Lockridge (ed.), Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Great Gatsby (Englewood Cliffs: 1968), 106f. See also Willa Cather’s character Louie Marcellus in The Professor’s House (1925), cited in John Higham, Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America (Baltimore: 1984), 168. 22. See further my own analysis in Jazz Age Jews, 53f. 23. Tennes was either German or Jewish or both. My colleague Mark Haller, an authority on Chicago crime, assures me that the real possibility of Tennes being Jewish is consistent with the ethnic contours of crime (especially gambling) in Chicago at the time. 24. On Annenberg, see generally Christopher Ogden, Legacy: A Biography of Moses and Walter Annenberg (Boston: 1999); and John Cooney, The Annenbergs (New York: 1982). There is an excellent précis of Annenberg’s gambling interests in Davies and Abram, Betting the Line, 29–40. 25. Davies and Abram, Betting the Line, 30f. 26. Ibid., 35. 27. See FBI ﬁles related to Benjamin Siegel: “Freedom of Information-Privacy Act, Benjamin Siegel,” http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/siege.htm (accessed 24 Aug. 2006). 28. Davies and Abram, Betting the Line, 55ff. 29. Charles Rosen, The Scandals of ‘51: How the Gamblers Almost Killed College Basketball (New York: 1999), 20f. 30. Davies and Abram, Betting the Line, 61. 31. Cited in Murray Sperber, Onward to Victory: The Crises that Shaped College Sports (New York: 1998), 302. 32. Lucy S. Dawidowicz, “ ‘Anti-Semitism’ and the Rosenberg Case,” Commentary (July 1952), 41–45. This piece provides a rather opinionated synopsis of articles in the Jewish press. For a recent view, see Edward S. Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jewry since World War II (Baltimore: 1995), 35–38.

Gambling, Legitimacy, and the American Political Economy

69

33. Act of 29 Oct. 1974, Pub. L. No. 93–499, §3,88 Stat. 1549. 34. Benjamin Siegel’s Flamingo Hotel had offered limited horse betting along with its casino games in the 1940s, but given the federal tax on horse bookmaking, this service acted as a “loss leader,” drawing in customers to place other more proﬁtable kinds of bets; it was eventually curtailed. 35. Nicholas Pileggi, Casino (New York: 1995), 11–32. 36. Davies and Abram, 1, 2, 5, 129. The statistics in this section are culled from The National Gambling Impact Study Commission (Washington, D.C.: 1999). 37. In one instance, British citizen David Carruthers, the chief executive ofﬁcer of BetOnSports online gambling service, was arrested on July 16, 2006 while changing planes in Dallas en route to Costa Rica. BetOnSports was founded by Gary Kaplan, a New York bookmaker who is believed to be residing in Costa Rica, a fugitive from American investigators. 38. Kaillick, “Survey of American Gambling Attitudes,” 300. 39. For a history of Jews in the red-light district, see Mark Haller, “Jewish Business in the Red-Light District, 1900–1950: Creating American Popular Culture,” in Jews and American Business, ed. Nancy Isserman (Philadelphia: forthcoming). 40. “Reports of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority,” http://www.lvcva.com/ press/statistics-facts/index.jsp?whichDept=stats (accessed 24 Aug. 2006). 41. David Vital, A People Apart: A Political History of the Jews in Europe, 1789–1939 (New York: 1999), 10, 14. 42. Eli Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics: Political Tradition and Political Reconstruction in the Jewish Community of Tsarist Russia (New York: 1989), 12. 43. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: 1958), 110. 44. Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: 1978), 38–40. 45. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority’s campaign was conceived by the R&R Partners advertising agency in 2003. See further “Vegas Board Votes on Amending Trademark Agreement,” Casino City Times (6 Oct. 2005), online at http://www.casinocitytimes.com/news/article.cfm?contentID=153971 (accessed 24 Aug. 2006). 46. Weber, Economy and Society, 31. 47. According to Weber, legitimacy can also depend on reason and on the charisma of the bearer. See ibid., 33–38, 212–301. 48. Weber has much to say about the city (which he deﬁned as “essentially a ‘market settlement’ ”) as an arena of nonlegitimate politics that ultimately usurped the legitimate agrarian political order by planting the seeds of revolution with the establishment of municipal bureaucracies and democracies. Though Weber has only scattered comments about Jews, there may be some merit in viewing the kehilah as a political entity with a kind of power analogous (though not identical) to the “nonlegitimate” medieval city. See ibid., 1214, 1301–1339. 49. In this essay I have obviously not abided by Biale’s circumscription of power as that which can be wielded only collectively and legitimately. In his words: Power can only be exercised by a collective, a political body whose members recognize its authority and whose legitimacy is recognized by others. In contrast, individuals who are not organized as a political collectivity may possess inﬂuence in society, as a result of, for example, their economic status, but they do not exercise power in a political sense. Similarly, those such as terrorists, who employ force or violence to achieve their aims do not automatically possess power; on the contrary, violence may well be an expression of powerlessness or of the complete abandonment of the political arena (Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History [New York: 1986], 7). Yet it is not power that distinguishes terrorist from sovereign, or economic inﬂuence from the inﬂuence of government ofﬁce, but rather legitimacy. It is precisely the “legitimacy test” that has relegated Jewish power to the realm of the derivative and, at times, has written it out of history entirely. Legitimacy is a helpful concept in classifying types of power, but it is not a litmus test for the existence of power itself.

Pride and Priorities: American Jewry’s Response to Hakoah Vienna’s U.S. Tour of 1926 Jeffrey S. Gurock (yeshiva university)

In 1898, Max Nordau rose at the Second Zionist Congress to champion “muscular Judaism” (Muskeljudentum), the creation of cadres of proud, athletic Jews who would help their nation take its respected place within the modern world. Nordau called upon young Jews to emulate both the victorious ancient Maccabees and the tragic-heroic Bar Kochba—to become again a “warrior” people that would be ready to confront all antagonists, whether on an athletic ﬁeld of honor or, if need be, on the military battleﬁeld. “We want to restore to the ﬂabby Jewish body its lost tone,” he declared, “to make it vigorous and strong, nimble and powerful.” In a comparable vein, he argued that Jews had “to show to themselves, and to the world, how much vitality they still possess.” This would put the lie to the canard of Juden Jungen (ﬁg., Jewish weaklings), the antisemitic stereotype of a people racially predisposed to physical defect, fear, and anxiety.1 From its founding in 1909, the Hakoah (The Power) athletic club of Vienna embodied Nordau’s dream. This group of Jewish athletes took the Zionist message to heart as it proudly bore the movement’s blue and white colors. First established because of exclusionary antisemitism in the pre-First World War Austrian sports world—as Ignatz H. Koerner, a founder and president of Hakoah would later recall, “sports associations . . . declared themselves ‘Aryan’ associations”—the club’s prideful response was a program designed to give “the growing Jewish youth physical training that would free it from possible degeneration and that would place it on a par with the non-Jewish world.”2 Hakoah soon branched out from Vienna to other Austrian locales including Linz, Graz, and Innsbruck. By 1914 the movement had several thousand members. In time, Hakoah athletes competed in more than a dozen sports, ranging from swimming to track and ﬁeld, from tennis to skiing. After the First World War, it expanded its activities to Eastern Europe, South America, Palestine, and various Arab lands. Back in Austria, according to John Bunzl, it offered the most vital Jewish response to antisemitism in the pre-Anschluss period. At a time when Jewish political parties had 70

American Jewry’s Response to Hakoah Vienna’s U.S. Tour of 1926

71

little inﬂuence, Hakoah athletes “were able and allowed to celebrate success as Jews in Austria.” They did more than simply participate in athletic events; they often made strong showings. For example, in the mid-1930s, eight of Hakoah’s women swimmers achieved world-class status.3 Hakoah athletes were also renowned (or notorious) for their Jewish defense activities. One former club member recalled that in the 1930s, “when the organized antisemitic demonstrations started in Vienna, we from Hakoah formed ‘Haganah groups,’ which were ready at all times to protect the Leopoldstadt Jewish quarter with all their might.” In quieter moments, and when not schooling themselves in the teachings of Zionism, club members availed themselves of a variety of cultural activities. For instance, Hakoah sponsored its own orchestra, which provided “a number of Jewish composers the opportunity of being heard when they were refused such hearing by alien-minded [antisemitic] leaders.” All told, as Bunzl puts it so well, the Jewish athletic association “was a space where [members] found and created community, self-conﬁdence and joy in living, an activity that gave their lives more meaning.”4 Cultural and Zionist endeavors notwithstanding, Hakoah was best known to sports aﬁcionados of that era, Jew and non-Jew alike, for the remarkable achievements of its soccer team in 1924–1925. In that season, the team overcame all opponents—not to mention antisemitic spectators whose favorite epithet for the players was “Jewish pigs”—to capture the Austrian national league title. A year before, the club had gained international recognition when it outclassed the highly regarded British West Ham United team by a 5–0 margin. During a tour of the Middle East in 1924, it knocked off the Egyptian national team. And subsequent to its triumph in Austria, Hakoah went back on the road and defeated the leading clubs of Belgium and Holland before winning 15 games in tournaments in Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania. Czech and Hungarian teams also fell before the men in blue and white.5 Among its star players was Alex Neufeld, who patrolled the outside right position. He earned the nickname of “Emes” (Truth) and was, according to an article in the Philadelphia Jewish Times, “as popular in Austria as Babe Ruth in America.” Flanking him in the outside left spot was Erno Schwarz, the “Howitzer of the Forwards,” who was particularly feared for his long-distance shots.6 Indeed, in the annals of modern Jewish sports history, Hakoah’s soccer players were, arguably, the greatest Jewish sports team of the 20th century. To be sure, Jews excelling in individual sports may have achieved somewhat higher athletic status—during Hakoah’s own era of ascendancy in the 1920s, for instance, Jews held seven boxing world championships.7 But not until the establishment of the state of Israel, and well into that state’s history, would a “Jewish” team succeed so decisively over world-class competition. In this regard, it should be noted that when Maccabi Tel Aviv won Euroleague basketball championships more than half a century later, it did so with the help of several key players who were neither Israeli nor Jewish.8 When these renowned globetrotting athletes toured the United States in 1926, their presence engendered enormous enthusiasm. Soccer lovers, not to mention entrepreneurs who wanted to develop a professional U.S. soccer league, hoped that the “invasion from Vienna” would increase “the game[’s] appeal . . . to the masses here.”9 New York World sports editor George Daley said as much when he observed that soccer “does not grip the imagination of Americans in a way to command the prominence

72

Jeffrey S. Gurock

it so well deserves. It is quite possible that the international ﬂavor of the approaching matches will attract many for their ﬁrst taste and thus add . . . converts.” If nothing else, Daley remarked, the games “will certainly aid in establishing international good will.”10 The New York Herald Tribune sports editor, W.O. McGeehan, praised Hakoah similarly for “do[ing] some real sports pioneering” and expressed the hope that the visit could be “the forerunner of some international competition of a decidedly interesting nature.” Meanwhile, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency quoted a prediction that, in the wake of Hakoah’s American matches, there would be “a long series of international soccer games that will, in a few years, attract the same enormous crowds that are drawn to soccer games in Europe and in South America.”11 As it turned out, the Austrian Jewish team’s tour did temporarily spike American interest in the world’s most popular game. Some 46,000 fans turned out for the May 1, 1926 match between Hakoah and a “picked team” from the American Soccer League (founded in 1921). At the time, this was the largest crowd ever to attend a soccer game in the United States.12 For American Jews living in cities that Hakoah visited during its six-week, 11-game tour, the team’s presence was a source of unmitigated excitement and considerable pride. Local Jewish residents showed up en masse to the games, forming part of the record crowd at Manhattan’s Polo Grounds as well as helping to pack the stadiums in Brooklyn, Providence, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Chicago. In addition, Hakoah players were wined and dined by Jewish communal groups and institutions.13 In Chicago, for example, the club’s president, Ignatz Koerner, arrived a week in advance of the game and was feted by the “Zionist organization of the city.” Later that day, he addressed a crowd at the Jewish People’s Institute, a major community center, and on the Sabbath, he spoke at the Anshe Emes Congregation. Between meals and speaking engagements, Koerner met with the Women of the Chicago Hakoah Committee, a local group set up for the upcoming event. Working in a temporary ofﬁce in South Dearborn Street, he helped organize the logistical arrangements, including ticket sales, for the upcoming match against the Sparta Athletic Club. For its part, the Sentinel, Chicago’s local Jewish newspaper, implored its readers to “accord the white and blue team that cordial welcome to which it is fully entitled,” as well as running an article on “How Soccer Football is Played” and offering discounted rates for tickets to the game. The response to such efforts was impressive: Jews made up the major part of the 15,000 spectators who came out to Chicago’s White Sox park to watch Hakoah win by an overwhelming 6–1 margin.14 As noted by community spokesmen and commentators, Hakoah’s visit came at a most opportune time. Ever since the mass migration of East European Jews, defenders of the new Americans had battled against the canard that Jews were not only “the popular opposite of our pioneer breed . . . undersized and weak-muscled,” but also “have an idea that physical weakness is a virtue.”15 During the 1920s, nativism was once more in ascendance. Thus, notwithstanding the visibility attained by a fair number of second-generation American Jewish athletes—including basketball’s Nat Holman, the boxer Benny Leonard, and quarterback Benny Friedman—the perception of Jews as unathletic or even anti-athletic, as physically unlike other Americans, persisted.16 Matters were not helped when, in 1924, the well-known popular scholar and publicist Maurice Samuel published a book titled You Gentiles. In this polemic,

American Jewry’s Response to Hakoah Vienna’s U.S. Tour of 1926

73

Samuel argued that humanity consisted of “two distinct parts,” Jewish and Gentile; that for Gentiles, “life is a game and a gallant adventure,” whereas for Jews, “life is a serious and sober duty”; and that these antithetical outlooks were immediately apparent in the two groups’ attitude toward “sport.” According to Samuel, the Gentile “attitude toward combat . . . and all the virtues pertaining to it, is one from which [the Jews] shrink.” In essence, Samuel opined: “Your courage is combative, ours passive, yours offensive, ours defensive. Heroics play a great part in your idealism—none in ours.”17 As noted by a number of journalists, Hakoah’s arrival effectively undermined Samuel’s argument. “The sportsmanlike prowess” of Hakoah, this “agile aggregation,” wrote one proud Jewish journalist, was “a virile refutation of [Samuel’s] ridiculous sophistry.” For Samuel Margoshes, a columnist for the Zionist Der Tog, “Hakoah vindicates Jewish ability to play as well as to work.” A third Jewish observer commented that when Hakoah displayed that “miraculous vitality, adaptability and versatility of the Jew, whom age cannot wither,” it was “no wonder the Jewish spectators went wild with joy, while the others looked on in wonder.” Moreover, this champion team provided proof that a Jew could be “trusted to acquit himself more than creditably” in any game, “provided it is played fairly.”18 In a pragmatic assessment of the team’s possible impact on U.S. public opinion, the English-language columnist of Der Tog noted that “unusual prowess in athletics tends to arouse American interest more than any achievement imaginable, and that the group to which the extraordinary athlete happens to belong is sure to come in for a degree of public esteem.” Thus, “one will hardly be surprised to witness a revival of the old Jewish prestige in America, as the scores of the Hakoach [sic] are shown on thousands of bulletin boards all over the United States. What our brains could not accomplish for us, our brawn may.”19 Indeed, as Hakoah athletes were showered with accolades wherever they appeared, the Jewish community experienced “a palpable rise in its self-respect.” President Calvin Coolidge, who almost never hosted sports teams, received the club at the White House, and the usually taciturn chief executive, it was said, “expressed great interest in the . . . tour and expressed regret that Washington was not included among the cities where the team would play.” More explicitly playing to Jewish pride, Mayor James J. Walker presented Hakoah with a “Freedom of New York” medal on the steps of the city hall and spoke of the team as “a worthy representative in the ﬁeld of sport of the Jewish people, whose achievements in other spheres are an intrinsic part of the history of the world.” Mayors and dignitaries from other cities turned out for the matches and offered comparable encomiums.20 Meanwhile, Hakoah’s reputation for off-the-ﬁeld toughness was also held up as a model for its host community to emulate. In an era during which many American Jews feared that antisemitic rhetoric might one day turn violent, Hakoah’s “moral” was to “join the Y.M.H.A. and go in for ‘gym’,” as one Jewish editorial writer put it, adding that, “when Jew-baiting bullies discover that Jacob possesses the hands of Esau, that he combines brawn with brains, they prudently decide to look for safer ﬁelds of distinction.”21 Capitalizing on this martial spirit and the apparent fears of American Jews, the entrepreneur Joseph Lessing launched Camp Hakoah, billed as a “national athletic sport camp.” Located on Sackett Lake, near Monticello, New

74

Jeffrey S. Gurock

York, the camp’s stated aim was “to produce Jewish men of brawn who will form the vanguard of the Jewish people with a view of protecting them against attack.” The prizewinning boxer, Benny Leonard, was to run the physical education department, so that children would “develop . . . to the highest degree of physical perfection.”22 It remained for America’s Zionists to exploit to the fullest Hakoah’s sojourn in their midst. In their view, these heroes were also teachers, their students being second-generation American Jewish youth who, in their quest to be at one with their country, were increasingly divorced from their community and its traditions. Thus, “thousands of speeches and nationalist reproofs” could not do as much as “one [soccer] game to bring our youngsters back toward Jewishness.”23 As a writer for the New Palestine, the English-language organ of the Zionist Organization of America, observed: “among Americans generally and young people speciﬁcally [sports] are one of the basics of their lives. . . . Likewise, the younger generation of Jews can be counted among the devotees . . . of all kinds of sports and games.” For these youths, there was no chance that “dogmatic teachings against which the young Jew is always in revolt” would be of any interest.24 But the sight of the blue and white clad champions, American Zionist leaders hoped, would inspire the establishment of a national organization of American Jewish athletes—a sure conduit to Zionist identiﬁcation. “The coming of Hakoah,” rhapsodized another writer in the New Palestine, would “do more for the extension of Zionist education than any single event in recent years. . . . Hakoah players carry with them not only . . . exemplary sportsmanship, but they proclaim the virtues of Jewish character when it is exercised under the ﬂag of the Jewish nationality.”25 In an article appearing in a special supplement to the New Palestine, Hakoah’s president concurred unqualiﬁedly with the analysis that “American Jews must pay attention to their rising generation, lest they lose it” and underlined the team’s mission to “show what racially [i.e., Zionist] conscious Jews can do.” Back home in Europe, Koerner noted, Hakoah had succeeded in winning over individuals who had hitherto been aloof both from Zionism and from Jewish nationalism in general. The same dynamics, he was convinced, could take effect in America.26 American Zionist and Hakoah spokesmen also fervently hoped that the positive publicity generated for the team’s U.S. tour would be of immense propaganda value to Zionism’s political and diplomatic cause. As of 1926, a decade had passed since the Jewish national movement had received its ﬁrst substantive recognition on the international scene. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 had served as the basis for the League of Nations decision of 1922 to grant Britain a mandate over Palestine. While the United States had not ofﬁcially signed on to this international agreement (and never would, since it would not join the League), the U.S. Congress had expressed its sympathy for Jewish political aspirations.27 Still, Zionism had a long way to go before its envisioned commonwealth would stand among the family of nations. In this era of the movement’s ﬁrst steps toward international recognition, the sight of the “full ﬂedged, fully recognized representative of a nation,” in the words of one New York Jewish sportswriter, took the “blue and white ﬂag out of indoor meetings into the open where it ﬂutters besides the banners of all nations.”28 The sight of the Zionist banner on a pedestal next to Old Glory in some of America’s greatest stadiums was of no small propaganda value. This point was

American Jewry’s Response to Hakoah Vienna’s U.S. Tour of 1926

75

not lost on the Zionist Organization of America, whose weekly organ unabashedly quoted a statement appearing in a Viennese newspaper: “The Hakoah visit to America may be looked upon as a piece of propaganda carried through on a large scale by the Jews of America in the interests of Jewish nationalism.”29 Koerner, for his part, promised reporters attending a New York City press conference that “Jews from all over the world will be represented in the next famous Olympic Games.” In a sense, this sports ploy conceived during the hopeful days of the mid-1920s anticipated far more desperate Zionist moves during the Second World War, when the goal was to have a Jewish army accepted as part of the Allied military forces. The ultimate objective in each case was the same: the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth.30 In the meantime, American Zionists regarded the visit by Hakoah as a means of bringing the variegated and often divided American Jewish community under its banner. Outreach to non-Zionist groups, particularly the German Jewish elite in the United States, was high on the Jewish nationalists’ agenda. The major goal, achieved in 1929, was the establishment of the Jewish Agency for Palestine. In this regard, world Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann did yeoman work in convincing people such as Louis Marshall that the Zionist goal was attainable, and that American Jews of substance had a stake in the building up of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine). During Hakoah’s visit, when local leaders extended invitations to wealthy patrons such as Nathan Straus, Jr., Henry Morgenthau, Alice Proskauer, and Frederick Warburg—either to head up a local “Hakoah Committee,” or to attend tribute banquets for the team at which they might sit next to leading Zionists such as Louis Brandeis or Stephen S. Wise, or else simply to occupy front-row box seats at the Polo Grounds match—they were not only cultivating inﬂuential dignitaries but were also attempting to show how uniﬁed American Jews had become in support of the movement.31 However, even as so many American Jews took undiluted pride in what the Austrian athletes were accomplishing on U.S. shores, one group was mightily disappointed with the team’s stance on an important religious issue. Even before Hakoah landed on U.S. shores, a number of religious Jews—deﬁned here as Sabbath-observers—expressed their dismay that four of the club’s 11 games had been scheduled for Saturday afternoons. These critics were also chagrined that the otherwise “gratifying” reception that New York Mayor Walker had planned for “the celebrated Jewish sports club from Vienna” was to be held on the Sabbath. In their view, whenever Hakoah played or was honored on the Sabbath, it was violating the cardinal rules both of its movement and its faith. Hakoah players who had attended Mayor Walker’s reception, wrote I.L. Bril of the New York Yiddishes Tageblatt, showed a troubling lack of self-respect that was unworthy of a Zionist. “The Mayor as a good Catholic,” he remonstrated, “would have understood the reasons which have prompted the setting of another day. Jewish nationalists should respect their faith. If they do not they are not Jewish nationalists.” In addition, he wrote, Hakoah had violated a scared trust by setting a terrible example for the Jewish youth they hoped to inﬂuence. “For years and years,” Bril pointed out, “observant Jews have been endeavoring to prevent athletic and sports meets [from] being held on Shabbos.” And “now comes a Jewish sports club, under Jewish national-Zionist auspices, and disregards Jewish precepts. . . . [T]he managers

76

Jeffrey S. Gurock

of the Hakoah will alienate a great deal of support if they persist in their ﬂouting of Judaism.”32 The editors of the Jewish Forum, an Orthodox weekly, chimed in with comparable angst when they declared that Hakoah did not deserve to call itself a group of “Jewish nationalists” because it failed “in keeping with Jewish sentiment with everything kept sacred by the Jew from time immemorial.” These critics’ advice was for Hakoah not to “go parading under the Jewish name, till it learns to be Jewish. When it will be able to show spiritual prowess as well as physical, then it will be truly representative of the new Jewish youth and the object of pride for all Jewry.”33 Such criticism, however, did not move the team to reconsider its game schedule. The most that was said in defense of meeting with His Honor was that Saturday “was the only day the Mayor could greet the team”—a “lame excuse,” in Bril’s opinion. And when Bril subsequently objected to a projected Saturday game in Brooklyn, all that Abraham Tuvim, the team’s manager, would reply was: “very sorry, but it could not be helped.” To this response, Bril’s riposte was that “nothing can be helped if one does not want to help it.”34 Clearly, Hakoah’s management did not share the religious values espoused by Bril and others, nor their deﬁnition of what constituted a proper Zionist role model. If anything, its oft-repeated ideological stance was that “we are ﬁghting for the preservation of our younger generation and of the Jewish people . . . we want to bring all Jews into our ranks; their opinions do not matter.” Beyond an afﬁliation with Zionism, however, Hakoah ofﬁcials did not clarify their views on the nature or content of the Jewish identiﬁcation they sought to inspire in their devotees.35 Some Hakoah leaders, moreover, may have harbored residual animosity toward Orthodox Jews because of an awkward encounter with them that had taken place in Austria some years before. According to an account appearing years later in a jubilee publication, during and immediately after the First World War, Hakoah had fallen on hard times ﬁnancially. Yet despite its appeals to Jewish pride—and apart from its team’s victories on the pitch—both the Union of Austrian Jews and some rich Viennese Orthodox Jews had rebuffed the group. The Union of Austrian Jews (dubbed “assimilationists” by the author of the account) was not helpful because it had “no intention of supporting Zionist activities.” Some years later, on the “day after a victory” in the early 1920s, Hakoah leaders invited “the wealthy Orthodox Schiff brothers,” whose ofﬁces were just across the street from club headquarters, to celebrate with the athletes. Although the Schiffs drank with the winners, they did not become Zionist supporters. “I do not exaggerate,” the author of this account concludes, “if I call the Union of Austrian Jews and the Orthodox our enemies.”36 Although the management appeared to be indifferent with regard to religious issues, Hakoah’s touring players were a religiously heterogeneous group. Thus, as it turned out, the team ended up having to grapple with the Sabbath question within its own clubhouse. One of the athletes, Alois Hess, had reservations about desecrating the Sabbath. Described as “a religious Jew, who did not travel on the Sabbath,” Hess decided to walk “some twenty kilometers from [the] hotel” to the stadium. (Presumably someone else had agreed to bring his sporting gear to the stadium in order to avoid the collateral religious problem of carrying on the Sabbath.) In the end, it was decided that a twelve-and-a-half mile walk “in the boiling sun” was “hardly

American Jewry’s Response to Hakoah Vienna’s U.S. Tour of 1926

77

the right preparation for a competition.” Accordingly, “a well-rested replacement” played in Hess’ stead.37 In any event, Hakoah’s fundamental unresponsiveness to calls to respect the Sabbath led to the lodging of a series of ofﬁcial protests. On April 28, 1926, three days before the record-breaking game in the Polo Grounds, a predominantly Orthodox group known as the Jewish Sabbath Alliance announced that it was attempting to have the match cancelled. Rabbi Israel Rosenberg, the group’s executive secretary, told the New York Times that “we will leave no stone unturned [since] actions such as these tend to break down not only the religious but also the national Jewish spirit.” Rosenberg pledged to “carry [the] protest to every rabbi and Jewish organization in the city.”38 One day later, the newly established Synagogue Council of America, an umbrella organization representing the rabbinical and lay associations of Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Jewish groups, took a similar stance. “Having learned with deep regret that Hakoah [was] arranging football games on the Jewish Sabbath,” spokesmen for the “Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the United Synagogue of America, the Rabbinical Assembly, the Union of Jewish Orthodox Congregations, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, and the Rabbinical Council of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations . . . unanimously protest[ed] against this desecration of the Holy Day and call[ed] upon Hakoah as an all Jewish team to maintain the traditional sanctity of the day.” A few days later, the interdenominational Board of Jewish Ministers of New York City added its voice, deploring the “failure of the Hakoah team to respect the sensibilities of religious Jews.”39 A week before the Jewish soccer stars took on a St. Louis opponent, also on the Sabbath, two local American Orthodox rabbis added their own plaintive calls. In a personal protest published in St. Louis’ Yiddish-language Jewish Record, rabbis Israel Lebendiger and Abraham Halperin declared that the “prestige” that Hakoah “adds . . . to the Jews . . . cannot be attained at the price of the desecration of the Sabbath and with perverting the feelings of those to whom the Sabbath is holy.” While respecting the team for “negat[ing] the antisemitic characterization of the Jews as . . . highly intellectual at the expense of their bodies . . . the fundamental lessons of Jewish history teach us that it was spiritual values, not physical powers, that have preserved the Jews.” These criticisms, in turn, moved the editor of the Jewish Record to add his own comment: “[I]t is possible that the Hakoah will lift our national prestige among non-Jews, yet it will certainly not serve as a spiritual reservoir for our national existence. . . . If the Hakoah is a national entity seeking in its activities to be a role model for our youth, then it certainly is a national crime to desecrate the Sabbath publicly.”40 This last statement did not go unchallenged. For starters, Y.I. Sivitz, a columnist at the Jewish Record and a self-described “freethinker,” rose to the team’s defense. For him, the good that these so-called shkotsim (ﬁg. “sinners”) were doing for the Jewish people far outweighed their religious transgressions. Writing somewhat hyperbolically, Sivitz reminded his readers how, in Europe on the High Holidays, “as Jews were in their synagogues praying with tears . . . at the same time, the thousand members of Hakoah—strong, healthy and fearless, with ﬁre in their eyes . . . defended the Jewish community from a blood bath.” Taking a further swipe at the seeming passivity of other Jews, particularly religious ones, he continued that “the spirit of

78

Jeffrey S. Gurock

Hakoah is worth far more for the Jewish people than the hundreds of Jews who say psalms in synagogues and the hundreds of students who ﬁll the American yeshivas.” Furthermore, he suggested, the outspoken community rabbis would do better to focus their vitriol on the “majority of members of [local] Orthodox synagogues” who worked on the Sabbath, drove to services in their “weekday” automobiles, smoked, or otherwise “mock[ed] God’s Sabbath.” In conclusion, Sivitz urged St. Louis Jews, and particularly the youth, to “come see Hakoah win over its non-Jewish colleagues. Come let us celebrate their victories, even if they (let it not happen) lose.”41 Also standing up for the team was the local YMHA spokesman, Oscar Leonard. His tone was not nearly as overwrought as that of Sivitz, but his bottom line was much the same: “Hakoah will do more on their visit here than thousands of sermons that are mere lip service about things honored more in the breach. . . . The Mogen David [sic] will acquire a new meaning to our Jewish boys and girls after they have seen it on the chests of these stalwart and sturdy Jews.”42 It was left to a Jewish Record pundit, Nat S. Hurwitz, to have the ﬁnal say on the matter. In his “Sense and Nonsense” column appearing the week after the Saturday game, he announced, tongue in cheek, that with “the ‘Shabbas Goyim’ gone . . . the atmosphere has returned to its sweet normal Kosher self. . . . all is well again . . . nothing to complain about, no one to blame and not even a protest heard. Blessed be the righteous, Amen.”43 The criticism recorded on the pages of the Jewish Record was an exception to the generally enthusiastic coverage of Hakoah in the American Jewish press. Even newspapers that regularly bemoaned religious nonobservance failed to resonate to the protest alarms sounded by the Jewish Sabbath Alliance, the Synagogue Council of America, and a few scattered columnists, editorialists, and readers. In New York, neither the American Hebrew nor the Jewish Tribune and Hebrew Standard mentioned Hakoah’s malfeasance, even though these papers routinely covered Conservative and American Orthodox initiatives to bring Jews back to traditional behavior (the latter publication, for instance, featured a highly laudatory article on the formation of the Synagogue Council of America).44 In Chicago, S. Felix Mendelsohn, a Reform rabbi and a columnist at the Sentinel, minced no words in attacking both the local Young Women’s Hebrew Association (for scheduling a theater party on a Friday evening) and the Junior Hadassah organization (for choosing to present “a play of highly questionable reputation” as a beneﬁt performance). In chastising the latter group, Mendelsohn noted that “Zionism is a movement which stands for the renascence of Judaism,” and that Zionists “dare not do anything that might create mistrust in them or their leadership.” Yet Hakoah’s Saturday games, occurring at about the same time, went unmentioned. Likewise, the Sentinel’s news columns did not take note of the controversy, despite its detailed coverage of the team’s U.S. tour.45 Philadelphia’s largest English-language Jewish newspaper, the Exponent, also was silent with regard to Hakoah’s religious transgressions, even though it closely followed the team from the time of its arrival in the United States. The paper noted with pride that “endorsements of the programme of Hakoah . . . continue to pour in from all over the country,” and it evinced no consternation at the fact that “thousands of people, the majority of them Jews, were present at City Hall, New York [on] Saturday.” Interestingly, this was a weekly that not only was well aware of, but was

American Jewry’s Response to Hakoah Vienna’s U.S. Tour of 1926

79

also concerned with the problem of Sabbath desecration. Indeed, in the week before Hakoah’s ﬁrst Saturday game, the Exponent reported on the success of the Sabbath Alliance of America in persuading the New York Police Commissioner to respect the needs of Sabbath-observing Jews. In that same issue of April 30, 1926, it informed its readers that the Orthodox Jewish Union had gained some relief from the New York Board of Education for students who, for religious reasons, could not take examinations “on the Jewish holy day.” But when it came to coverage of the Polo Grounds game, the paper merely reported Hakoah’s 3–0 defeat at the hands of the American Soccer League team.46 During the succeeding four weeks, the Exponent kept tabs on Hakoah’s wins and losses as the team wound its way from stadium to stadium. It also predicted that Hakoah would “have a rousing welcome” when it came to play its ﬁnal game in Philadelphia. Its correspondents covered the farewell dinner in New York sponsored by the Zionist Organization of America at which the speakers, including Stephen S. Wise and Vladimir Jabotinsky, heaped “praise and honors upon the Hakoah.”47 The closest the paper came to criticizing the entire Hakoah phenomenon was in an early question posed on its editorial page—namely, whether “a professional athletic club, highly skilled and always competing with equally skilled teams” could “furnish . . . that stimulant for physical development” among the Jewish masses. In reply, Hakoah’s leaders took the implied criticism in stride, averring that their players were “amateurs in good . . . standing” and that proceeds from their matches furthered the clubs’ mission to promote physical ﬁtness among more than 5,000 members, both men and women, in Europe and Palestine. Such individuals, it was further noted, were in the vanguard of those who sought to realize Max Nordau’s dream of “muscular Judaism.”48 In contrast to the Exponent, the younger and less inﬂuential Philadelphia Jewish Times published an editorial in support of the Board of Jewish Ministers’ statement regarding Hakoah’s failure to respect Jewish religious sensibilities. (It offered no comment on the Jewish Sabbath Alliance’s or the Synagogue Council’s demands.) This editorial, however, probably did little to encourage the New York-based religious leaders. Though it noted that “the Hakoah . . . as a representative Jewish sports club should have respected the tenets of the Jewish religion . . . regardless of what might have been the individual opinion of every member of the organization,” the paper’s greater concern was that the protest against the team, because it was so ineffective, might actually work to American Jews’ disadvantage. How, it asked, could Jews demand respect for their Sabbath—and, not incidentally, the rolling back of Sunday closing laws—if they themselves showed so little concern for their day of rest? In the view of the Jewish Times, since the rabbis’ cries were going “unheeded,” it might have been better had the protest not been initiated.49 Apart from this one editorial comment, the Jewish Times, like its fellow weeklies in New York and Philadelphia, energetically promoted the visiting team’s appearance in its city. It awaited “with keen interest the coming of Hakoah” and noted that the most important Jews in town were part of the welcoming committee, even as it took “great pride” in the fact that sportswriters praised the team’s “honest and gentlemanlike play.” On the masthead of its May 28, 1926 edition, directly across from the Jewish Times’ listing of the religious “Calendar for the Week,” it emblazoned

80

Jeffrey S. Gurock

the message: “Go Out and Root for Hakoah, Monday, May 31st at 3 p.m. Franklin Field.”50 Writing in a similar vein, New York’s Zionist Yiddish daily, Der Tog, offered its own (predictably) ardent accolades to these Jewish “heroes.” As previously noted, one of the paper’s columnists, Samuel Margoshes, applauded Hakoah for vindicating Jews’ ability to play as well as to work. Der Tog also paid close attention to every stop on the team’s tour, including the Saturday reception at New York’s city hall, which was reported on the front page without any negative commentary. The only “religious” angle that was played up was the occurrence of Lag Ba’omer a day after the Saturday match. According to another of Der Tog’s columnists, “through the winners of Hakoah . . . perhaps for the ﬁrst time in Jewish history, Lag Ba’omer will achieve its full signiﬁcance as a holiday—the holiday of Jewish sport.” The message of the holiday and the mission of the team were presented as one and the same. Hakoah had “opened the eyes of all our ‘intellectuals’ [that is, non-athletic, passive Jews] and taught them a lesson. Just as it is important to give our youths a healthy mind, they also need healthy bodies.” In addition to its running account of the team’s wins and losses, Der Tog also kept its readers informed on Hakoah’s on-the-ﬁeld exploits as they were being reported in American newspapers such as the New York Times and the World.51 It remained for two columnists from the “religious and Zionist” daily Yiddishes Tageblatt of New York to articulate the only strongly pointed criticism of Hakoah’s mission and message.52 I.L. Bril, as has been seen, was one of the columnists. The other was David Eidelsberg, who wrote about how his joy at watching Hakoah win its ﬁrst game in New York (on a Sunday) was “disturbed” when he heard of the forthcoming Sabbath afternoon game. Had Hakoah “categorically refused” to compete on the Sabbath, he wrote, it would have won for itself “even more deep respect from the Jewish masses all over”—not just from Orthodox Jews. Instead it had “lowered itself” by “abandoning its Jewishness and desecrating the Sabbath.” In a word, those who were “representing the Jewish national movement” had “transform[ed] a kidush hashem [sanctiﬁcation of God’s name] into a khilul hashem [desecration of God’s name].”53 However, even these two journalists did not mount a sustained attack on the team. In a column appearing the week before the controversial Sabbath game, Bril wrote (with regard to a game scheduled for earlier that week) that a Hakoah victory “will surely gladden the heart of all. . . . The Hakoah eleven are artists, well trained and well captained.” In his view, the team was “entitled to hearty congratulations and best wishes for more successes.” While the paper took the trouble to note—probably with some smirks in the editorial room—that “some Jews in the street” attributed the team’s “lack of luck” to its religious malfeasance, the Tageblatt did not alert its readers to the Board of Minister’s ofﬁcial protest until May 2, 1926, a day after the controversial game. Two days later, it reported that the Synagogue Council also had taken the team to task for its transgression. However, in the days that followed, the newspaper, very much like all other contemporary American Jewish organs, simply covered the sports results and the gatherings in Hakoah’s honor. Similarly, in the ﬁnal week of the club’s tour, the Tageblatt did not comment on the May 22nd and May 29th Saturday games in Brooklyn. It did, however, note that buses and tickets were available for the ﬁnal match in Philadelphia.54

American Jewry’s Response to Hakoah Vienna’s U.S. Tour of 1926

81

Meanwhile, the paper’s editor, Gedaliah Bublick, remained silent on the Sabbathsoccer question. His only articulated concern over the entire Hakoah phenomenon was that the excitement over the Viennese visitors might “cast a shadow over another major event in New York . . . [t]he commencement of the six-million-dollar campaign for the hungry and needy Jews of Poland and other countries.” Bublick reminded his readers that while it was essential to show “that the Jew can stand against others, not only with his spirit, but also with his body” (this, as we have seen, was the community-wide mantra), it was ultimately the case that “the chief Jewish power lies in a good Jewish heart.” For Bublick, the Jewish people’s “national honor”—its “koykhes” [transcendent power]—resided in its charitable nature.55 Bublick’s religious Zionist counterpart in St. Louis was Leon Gellman, editor of the weekly Jewish Record and a national leader of the Mizrachi religious Zionist movement. After an initial attack on Hakoah’s Sabbath-game schedule—he termed it “a national crime,” and promised to write more on the subject—he, too, backed off. In the May 14th issue, which appeared a day before the Sabbath game at the St. Louis University athletic ﬁeld, the paper reported on the “warm reception” accorded the team, proﬁled its star players, and explained the rules of soccer to fans who might attend the game.56 Finally, the New York-based Yiddishe Morgen Zhurnal, the largest Orthodox Yiddish daily in the U.S., chose to downplay Hakoah’s visit to America. While the paper dutifully noted the games and the team’s public appearances, its writers did not rhapsodize about the athletes either as Jewish champions or as vital defenders of Jews. By the same token, although it reported on the possibility of a protest sponsored by the Jewish Sabbath Alliance, the Morgen Zhurnal did not take up its editorial cudgels in support. It did not even mention the criticism voiced by the Board of Ministers or the Synagogue Council of America.57 In short, it would appear that the public complaints against Hakoah’s Sabbath games engendered minimal popular support and did not really affect the team’s activities and public stature. Interestingly, however, Hakoah’s Sabbath transgressions seem to have had an adverse impact on the organization’s negotiations with one of America’s most inﬂuential Jewish leaders, Louis Marshall—a man who ordinarily did not harbor keen religious concerns. Toward the end of Hakoah’s tour, both Benny Leonard and Ignatz Koerner wrote letters to Marshall in which they asked for his assistance in convincing the Joint Distribution Committee to allocate $75,000 to build a “clubhouse” or “headquarters” for the team in Vienna. In a courteous response to the boxing champion, Marshall wrote that he was unconvinced of the need for such a facility at a time when funds were desperately needed to “deal with the acute conditions among the Jews of Eastern Europe.” In writing to Koerner, Marshall gave much the same message but employed a decidedly less friendly tone. This was because Marshall was angry at Koerner for having written an article in a Viennese newspaper, based on a private discussion with him, in which the head of Hakoah had launched “a bitter and vituperative attack upon me and upon those of my associates who have been engaged in the United Jewish Campaign” in efforts to provide economic aid to the “Jews of Russia.” In explaining why he was not particularly inclined to provide funds for “ﬁtting out a club house” when there were “more vital needs” to attend to, Marshall could not resist bringing up the Sabbath

82

Jeffrey S. Gurock

question. “It is well for you to know,” he wrote, that “a great many prominent Jews of this country, even those who are not strictly Orthodox, felt outraged that the initial game of Hakoah in New York took place on the Sabbath.”58 The only thing Koerner would say in a rejoinder written several months later—he had apparently waited for Marshall to calm down—was that “Hakoah in Vienna will always attempt, through its deeds that bring only honor to Jews, to prove the worthiness of the support” of people like Marshall. Koerner did not speciﬁcally mention or defend the Sabbath sports infraction.59 It is not known why Hakoah was not called more strongly to task for what Marshall called its lack of “respect for the principles and traditions of Judaism.”60 Nor can we say for certain why the Zionist club did not take these concerns to heart. It may be that the silence on the Sabbath question was largely due to the fact that American Jews were not only proud of Hakoah but also appreciated what the team was doing on their behalf on the athletic ﬁeld of competition and honor. Hakoah’s “muscular Judaism” was lionized for manifesting the still not fully realized athletic potentiality of America’s Jews as they strove to be seen as “100 percent Americans.” In addition, the team’s Jewish self-defense posture resonated with those who feared that outright and even violent antisemitism would one day be a problem in the United States. The feelings that the victorious Viennese team evoked among their hosts tell us that, for all their efforts at integration, many American Jews in the 1920s did not feel totally at home. They were still engaged in seeking a comfort zone among their fellow citizens. The Hakoah phenomenon and “controversy” of 1926 remind us of additional realities of American Jewish life during the 1920s. First, the post-First World War period was an era of massive decline in religious observance among second-generation American Jews. Thus, it is not surprising that tens of thousands of Jewish fans turned out for Hakoah’s Saturday games. By the 1920s, mass neglect of Sabbath strictures was not merely an outcome of poor Jews’ having no choice but to work on the holy day. Rather, for a growing number of American Jews, Saturday had become a leisure day that was largely secular in character.61 This helps to explain the failure on the part of the Jewish Sabbath Alliance, the Board of Ministers, and the Synagogue Council of America to provoke real interest in their campaign against the Saturday games. This was a time when Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox leaders stood together in common religious cause—yet they often stood alone.62 Finally, the lack of response from Hakoah and its sponsors—in particular, the Zionist Organization of America—speaks to a lack of sensitivity to Jewish observance within the Zionist movement of interwar America. This movement portrayed itself as a bulwark against both anti-Jewish hatred and group assimilation. However, its version of Jewish identiﬁcation clearly was lacking a religious component. Along these same lines, the fundamental quietude of the American Mizrachi movement points to its apparent lack of vitality at this time. For religious Zionists whose mission was nothing less than the harmonization of traditional teachings with the dynamism of the modern Jewish national movement, such a high-proﬁle abuse of the Sabbath should have been a cause célèbre. But evidently Mizrachi had neither the weapons at hand nor the constituency on board to make a difference. Or perhaps, during this remarkable fortnight of April-May 1926, even religious Jews were swept

American Jewry’s Response to Hakoah Vienna’s U.S. Tour of 1926

83

up in the excitement generated among an adoring public by these European standardbearers of Jewish pride.

Notes 1. On Nordau’s and Herzl’s advocacy of athleticism as a value for Jewish youth within the Zionist movement, see Ignatz H. Koerner, “How the Hakoah Was Founded,” Sentinel (11 June 1926), 4; Max Nordau to His People: A Summons and a Challenge (New York: 1941), 88; Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (New York: 2004), 69–70; http:// www.maccabiworld.org/history. 2. Koerner, “How the Hakoah Was Founded,” 4. 3. On Hakoah’s history, sports achievements, and contribution to Jewish pride and status in Austria, see John Bunzl, “Hakoah Vienna: Reﬂections on a Legend,” in Emancipation through Muscles: Jews and Sports in Europe, ed. Michael Brenner and Gideon Reuveni (Lincoln: 2006), 110–113. The exploits of the champion women swimmers have also been chronicled in the documentary ﬁlm “Watermarks.” For an evaluation of this ﬁlm, see Leonard Quart, “Watermarks: Hakoah Vienna on Film,” Commentary (May–June 2005), 14–15. 4. On Hakoah athletes’ defense of Jews in the streets, see the reminiscences noted in Michael John, “A ‘Cultural Code’? Antisemitism in Austrian Sports between the Wars,” in Brenner and Reuveni (eds.), Emancipation through Muscles, 119–141, esp. 133. On the cultural activities of the club and its providing a venue for Jewish composers, see S.P. Rudens, “The Hakoah: Brawn and Body in Israel,” Sentinel (23 April 1926), 33. For his observation about Hakoah creating a sense of community and belonging among its athletes, see Bunzl, “Hakoah Vienna,” 113. My thanks to Michael Brenner for providing me with a pre-publication look at these important articles. 5. For an account of the team’s successes on the pitch, see “Hakoah Opens Chicago Ofﬁce,” Sentinel (9 April 1926), 33. 6. “Who are the Hakoah Players,” Philadelphia Jewish Times (28 May 1926), 12. 7. Steven A. Riess (ed.), Sports and the American Jew (Syracuse: 1998), 73, 84. 8. In 2005, for example, when Maccabi prevailed over Tau Ceramica of Spain, ﬁve of its 13 players were foreigners imported from the United States, Croatia, Greece, and Lithuania (see http://www.euroleague.net/teams). 9. George Daley, “The National Jewish Team,” Hakoah: Supplement to the New Palestine (23 April 1926), xiii. 10. Ibid. 11. W.O. McGeehan, “Real Sport Pioneers,” ibid., xii. For a newspaper article that relied on the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s release, see “Hakoah Soccer Team Wins First Match in U.S.,” Sentinel (7 May 1926), 3. 12. For a report on the crowd that attended the May 1 game, see “46,000 See Hakoah Lose at Soccer, 3–0,” New York Times (2 May 1926), S1. This record stood until 1977, when Pelé attracted some 76,000 fans to one of his New York Cosmos games. In a distant replay of the 1920s effort, the Brazilian superstar had been imported to the U.S. team in yet another quixotic effort to try to jump-start soccer as a major American spectator sport. On Pelé in the United States, see http:// www.soccer-for-parents.com/us-soccer-history. 13. For newspaper accounts of the tour, in which Hakoah won seven games, lost two, and tied two, see, for example, Der Tog (2 May 1926), 1; ibid. (3 May 1926), 1; American Hebrew (7 May 1926), 884; New York Times (19 May 1926), 13; American Hebrew (21 May 1926), 77. 14. On the Chicago phase of the tour, see the following articles in the Sentinel: “Chicago Entertains Dr. Koerner” and “Hakoah Opens Chicago Ofﬁce” (30 April 1926), 33; “The ‘Hakoah’ in Chicago” (23 April 1926), 7; “How Soccer Football is Played” (16 April 1926), 12; “Hakoahs Defeat Spartans, 6 to 1” (14 May 1926), 24–25. 15. Edward A. Ross, The Old World in the New: The Signiﬁcance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People (New York: 1914), 189–190, cited in Riess, “Sport,

84

Jeffrey S. Gurock

Race and Ethnicity in the American City, 1870–1950,” in Immigration and Ethnicity: American Society—“Melting Pot” or “Salad Bowl?,” ed. Michael D’Innocenzo and Josef P. Sirefman (Westport, Conn.: 1992), 215, n. 15; for another negative view of the Jews’ lack of physicality, see Edmund J. James, The Immigrant Jew in America (New York: 1907), 298, 316. 16. For a contemporaneous account of outstanding Jewish athletes in the United States, see Ed Sullivan, “Welcome, Jewish Champions,” Hakoah: Supplement to the New Palestine, xii. 17. Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles (New York: 1924), 12–13, 31, 51. 18. “Soccer versus Sophistry,” American Hebrew (14 May 1926), 941; S. Margoshes, “The Week,” Der Tog (2 May 1926), 12; “Hakoah’s Latest Triumph,” Jewish Tribune and Hebrew Standard (30 April 1926), 4. For additional criticism of Samuel’s book, using Hakoah as an exemplar, see William Z. Spiegelman, “Our New York Letter,” Sentinel (30 April 1926), 5. 19. “The Week in Review,” Der Tog (18 April 1926), 13. 20. On the rise in self-respect, see “Hakoah,” Hadoar (23 April 1926); for reports on public ofﬁcials receiving and honoring Hakoah, see, for example, Sentinel (23 April 1926), 35 (covering the White House visit); ibid. (4 June 1926), 2; New York Times (10 May 1926), 27; Hakoah: Supplement to the New Palestine, viii; Arthur Baar, 50 Jahre Hakoah, 1909–1959 (Tel Aviv: 1959), 66. 21. “The Coming of Hakoah,” Jewish Tribune and Hebrew Standard (23 April 1926), 10. 22. “Camp Hakoah,” American Hebrew (4 June 1926), 154. Adults who enrolled their youngsters at the camp would be “at liberty to write to [Leonard] . . . about physical problems,” with the expectation that the ﬁghter “will answer all . . . questions and show . . . the way to eternal health.” 23. “Baba Kama: Keiz. ad haregel,” Hadoar (30 April 1926), 398. 24. “Symbol of Jewish National Life,” New Palestine (30 April 1926), 399. 25. Ben Moshe Zvi, “Jewish Athletes-Hakoah,” ibid. (28 May 1926), 483. 26. Ignatz Koerner, “Human Highlights on the Hakoah,” Hakoah: Supplement to the New Palestine, vii. 27. Herbert Parzen, “The Lodge-Fish Resolution,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly (Sept. 1960), 71–80. 28. Harry Conzel, “Taking the Blue and White Flag Out of Indoor Meetings into the Open,” Hakoah: Supplement to the New Palestine, iii. 29. Ibid., xii. 30. Ibid.; Rudens, “The Hakoah,” 33; “Hakoah Triumphs Over Opponents, 4–0,” Jewish Tribune and Hebrew Standard (30 April 1926), 5; “Hakoah Will Take Part in Olympic Games,” Der Tog (28 April 1926), 7. On the Jewish army effort, see Monte N. Penkower, “In Dramatic Dissent: The Bergson Boys,” American Jewish History (March 1981), 281–309. 31. On the founding of the Jewish Agency, see Naomi W. Cohen, “An Uneasy Alliance: The First Days of the Jewish Agency,” in A Bicentennial Festschrift for Jacob Rader Marcus, ed. Bertram Wallace Korn (New York: 1976), 107–121. On the involvement of non-Zionist Jews in the festivities surrounding Hakoah’s visit, see Baar, 50 Jahre Hakoah, 66–67; see also Nathan J. Straus Jr.’s message in Hakoah: Supplement to the New Palestine, ix. For a listing of some 150 men and women of East European and German Jewish origin, Zionists and non-Zionists, who were listed as members of “reception committees” in the cities where Hakoah played, see the letterhead of “The Testimonial Dinner in Honor of Hakoah, June 1st [1926]” (Felix Warburg Papers, Jacob Rader Marcus American Jewish Archives). 32. I.L. Bril, “Reﬂections,” Yiddishes Tageblatt (16 April 1926), 8; idem, “Reﬂections,” ibid. (23 April 1926), 8. 33. “Hakoah’s Success,” Jewish Forum (May 1926), 115–116. 34. I.L. Bril, “Reﬂections,” Yiddishes Tageblatt (16 April 1926), 8; (23 April 1926), 8. 35. For an example of a Hakoah statement about its mission to young Jews, see Koerner, “Human Sidelights on the Hakoah,” Philadelphia Jewish Times (28 May 1926), 12. 36. Arthur Wolfman, “Etwas von Assimilanten und Orthodoxen,” in Baar, 50 Jahre Hakoah, 74–76.

American Jewry’s Response to Hakoah Vienna’s U.S. Tour of 1926

85

37. Arthur Baar, “An Episode from One Player’s U.S.A. Trip,” in Hoppauf Hakoah: Jüdischer Sport in Österreich, ed. John Bunzl (Vienna: 1987), 69. 38. “Eleven to Oppose Hakoah Announced,” New York Times (28 April 1926), 23. On the history of the alliance, see Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, “The Jewish Sabbath Movement in the Early Twentieth Century,” American Jewish History (Dec. 1979), 205–207. 39. On the Synagogue Council’s protest, see Yearbook of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, vol. 36 (1926), 47; “Synagogue Council of America Protests . . . ,” Sentinel (14 May 1926), 3; on the Board of Jewish Ministers’ protest, see Charles H. Joseph, “Random Thoughts,” Sentinel (7 May 1926), 12. 40. “A protest gegen ‘Hakoah’ fun rebe Lebendinger un rebe Halperin,” Jewish Record (7 May 1926), 8; Leon Gellman, “Onmerkung fun redaktor,” ibid., 8. 41. Y.I. Sivitz, “An ofenem briv tsu rebe Lebendinger un rebe Halperin (poshete devorim vegen Hakoah protest),” Jewish Record (7 May 1926), 8. 42. Oscar Leonard, “Welcome Hakoah Players,” Jewish Record (7 May 1926), 8. Interestingly enough, Leonard was on the record as one of the leaders of the growing YMHAJewish Community center movement who was far from concerned about religious activities within these secular Jewish organizations. On Leonard, see Jeffrey S. Gurock, Judaism’s Encounter with American Sports (Bloomington: 2005), 92. 43. Nat S. Hurwitz, “After Saturday, May 15,” Jewish Record (21 May 1926), 8. 44. “Synagogue Council of America,” Jewish Tribune and Hebrew Standard (21 May 1926), 6. Although the Synagogue Council of America eventually devoted almost all of its energies to speaking out “on social and international issues” of concern to American Jewry, its primary mission at the outset was furthering common religious concerns among Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Jews. For an account of the Synagogue Council of America that omits discussion of its decidedly religious work among denominational groups, see Sidney L. Regner, “Synagogue Council of America,” Encyclopaedia Judaica (CD Rom Edition). 45. S. Felix Mendelsohn, “The Changing World,” Sentinel (28 May 1926), 7. 46. On Hakoah’s arrival and the Saturday reception in its honor, see “Commissioner Louis Harris Endorses Hakoah,” Jewish Exponent (9 April 1926), 7 and “Welcoming the Hakoah Stars,” ibid. (23 May 1926), 4. For examples of the newspaper’s generally sensitive approach to religious issues, see “Here and There” (30 April 1926), 4; “Orthodox Congregations and the Public School” (7 May 1926), 2; and “The Season of the Giving of the Law” (14 May 1926), 4. 47. For examples of the newspaper’s coverage of the team’s tour and farewell dinner, see Jewish Exponent (23 April 1926), 7; (30 April 1926), 7, 18; (7 May 1926), 7; (14 May 1926), 11; (21 May 1926), 12; (28 May 1926), 15; (4 June 1926), 7. 48. On criticism of Hakoah and the team’s response, see “Welcoming the Hakoah Stars,” Jewish Exponent (23 April 1926), 4 and “ ‘Hakoah’ and Professional Athletics,” ibid. (30 April 1926), 2. 49. “The Hakoah and the Sabbath,” Jewish Times (7 May 1926), 6. 50. On the Jewish Times’ coverage of the team’s tour, see “Hakoak [sic] To Play Last Game Here” (14 May 1926), 1; “The Hakoah is Coming” (14 May 1926), 6; “Hakoah Reception Committee Chosen” (21 May 1926), 6; “Hakoah, All-Jewish Soccer Team Reigns Supreme” (28 May 1926), 12. See also the masthead of the May 28, 1926 edition. 51. For examples of Der Tog’s coverage of Hakoah’s tour, see “Hakoah kumt haynt, mayor vet bagreysn tiem in siti hal,” 1. For the article concerning Lag B’Omer, see “Der yontef fun yidisher sport: legbaymer falt oys morgn un der sieger fun Hakoah,” (1 May 1926), 5. The author of the piece is identiﬁed with the initial “Resh.” See also Der Tog (18 April 1926), 1; (22 April 1926), 5; (26 April 1926), 1; (27 April 1926), 5. For an analysis of Der Tog’s ideological orientation, see Mordecai Soltes, “The Yiddish Press—An Americanizing Agency,” American Jewish Year Book 26 (1924), 169, 334. 52. For an analysis of the Tageblatt’s ideological orientation, see Soltes, “The Yiddish Press,” 169, 334. 53. David Eidelsberg, “Ahin un aher,” Yiddishes Tageblatt (29 April 1926), 4.

86

Jeffrey S. Gurock

54. Bril, “In the News,” Yiddishes Tageblatt (27 April 1926), 8; “Hakoah farlirt fut bal geym 3 tsu 0 hir shpilt shabes nit vi zuntig,” Yiddishes Tageblatt (2 May 1926), 1. On the newspaper’s coverage of the protests and of the team’s activities, see ibid. (25 April 1926), 1; (27 April 1926), 5; (29 April 1926), 7; (2 May 1926), 1; (3 May 1926), 1; (4 May 1926), 8; (21 May 1926), 2, 3, 11; (23 May 1926), 11. 55. “Nokh an ‘Hakoah,’ ” Yiddishes Tageblatt (19 April 1926), 4. 56. Leon Gellman, “Editorial Remark,” Jewish Record (7 May 1926), 8. On Gellman’s background, see “Leon Gellman,” Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 6 (New York: 1941), 525. See also Jewish Record (14 May 1926), 1, 5, 7, 8. 57. For an analysis of the Yiddishe Morgen Zhurnal’s ideological orientation, see Soltes, “The Yiddish Press,” 171, 334. For examples of this newspaper’s treatment of the Hakoah phenomenon, including its coverage of the planned protests, see Yiddishe Morgen Zhurnal (15 April 1926), 2; (16 April 1926), 12; (26 April 1926), 2, 12; (30 April 1926), 2; (10 May 1926), 12. 58. Louis Marshall to Benny Leonard, 28 May 1926; Marshall to Ignatz Koerner, 28 May 1926; Leonard to Marshall, 4 June 1926; Marshall to Koerner, 30 June 1926 (Louis Marshall Papers, Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives). 59. Koerner to Marshall, 22 Sept. 1926. 60. Marshall to Koerner, 30 June 1926. 61. On patterns of non-observance of American Jews during this period, see Jeffrey S. Gurock, “From Fluidity to Rigidity: The Religious Worlds of Conservative and Orthodox Jews in Twentieth Century America,” David W. Belin Lecture in American Jewish Affairs, University of Michigan (2000), 8–11. 62. For an analysis of this era of cooperation among Jewish religious movements in America, see Jeffrey S. Gurock, “ ‘Different Streams into a River Yet to Be’: Movement towards an All-Inclusive American Judaism, 1920–1945,” in The Margins of Jewish History, ed. Marc Lee Raphael (Williamsburg, Va: 2000), 23–40.

From Participant to Owner: The Role of Jews in Contemporary American Sports Edward S. Shapiro (seton hall university)

In the 2008 Superbowl, the U.S. football championship and the greatest of all American sports events, there were no Jews on the squads of the two competing teams—yet both teams, the Philadelphia Eagles and the New England Patriots, were owned by Jews.1 Two years earlier, the same phenomenon had occurred in the National Basketball Association (NBA) semi-ﬁnals. The owners of three of the four teams—the Dallas Mavericks, the Detroit Pistons, and the Miami Heat—were Jews, and yet there was not one Jew playing for any of the teams. In fact, the number of Jews who played in the NBA that season did not outnumber David Stern, the association’s Jewish commissioner. Today there are more Jews owning teams in major league baseball, the National Football League (NFL), the National Hockey League (NHL), and the NBA than there are Jews on the rosters of teams in these leagues. There are many Jewish sports agents, but they would starve if they had to rely on Jewish clients. As one joke puts it: “A bar mitzvah is when a Jewish boy realizes he’s more likely to own a ball club than to play on it!” If any individual is a logical candidate for afﬁrmative action, it is the American Jewish professional athlete. The phenomenon is apparent across the spectrum of U.S. sports. The only male Jewish golfer of note during the past quarter of a century has been Corey Pavin, who once won the U.S. Open—as it happens, though, Pavin had previously converted to Christianity. There is not one Jew today ranked among the top 50 American men golfers. The same is true of tennis. Barely 15 years ago, there were three Jews who were ranked among the top American professional tennis players: Jay Berger, Brad Gilbert, and Aaron Krickstein. Today there are none, and none are on the horizon. There has also been a shortage of female Jewish professional athletes. With one exception, no American Jewish woman has won a major tennis or golf tournament in decades. (On April 1, 2007, 18-year-old Morgan Pressel won the Kraft Nabisco Championship, one of the four Ladies Professional Golf Association major tournaments. Pressel, just nine months out of high school, was the youngest winner ever of an LPGA major. She is Aaron Krickstein’s niece.) Wherever one looks among American professional atheletes, Jews, by and large, are absent; there is little likelihood that this will change. No American Jew was chosen in the 2006 draft conducted 87

88

Edward S. Shapiro

by the NBA, although two Israeli Jews were selected. No American Jewish boxer has won a title in several decades, and not one is among the top contenders in any weight division. There are only a handful of Jews playing in the National Football League, and it has been at least a decade since a Jew was selected as all-pro or participated in the post-season Pro Bowl. It has also been several decades since a Jew was an AllAmerican in either football or basketball. The decline in the number of professional Jewish athletes has been particularly noticeable in baseball, the so-called “national pastime.”2 Jacques Barzun, the prominent Columbia University historian of European culture, once remarked that “to know the heart and mind of America one must learn baseball.” The historian Peter Levine noted that, for young Jews, baseball both provided entry “to an American childhood and conﬁrmed their American identities.”3 The belief that knowledge of America’s game could facilitate entry into the American cultural mainstream perhaps explains why so many Jewish novelists have written about baseball. In his 1896 novella, Yekl, Abraham Cahan has his protagonist, Jake, instruct an immigrant named Bernstein on how to become “an American feller, a Yankee”—for one thing, he tells him, “you must know how to peetch.” Bernard Malamud, who said that he was a baseball fan “from the time I was a kid and went to Ebbets Field whenever I could,” wrote his ﬁrst novel, The Natural (1952), about baseball, using the game as a backdrop for an exploration of the contemporary relevance of medieval mythology. Other American Jewish novelists who have written about baseball include Philip Roth (The Great American Novel, 1973); Mark Harris (The Southpaw, 1953, and Bang the Drum Slowly, 1956); Eliot Asinof (Men on Spikes, 1954); Chaim Potok (The Chosen, 1967); Joseph Heller (Good as Gold, 1979); and Eric Rolfe Greenberg (The Celebrant, 1983). There now are probably more Jews writing about baseball than playing in the major leagues. Stephen J. Whitﬁeld has noted that, while Jews have written some of the most important books on baseball, most notably Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer (1971), they themselves have left “professional competition to the goys of summer.”4 In the meantime, even those American Jews whom one would least expect to be interested in baseball have had a love affair with the national pastime. Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff, the American-born head of a yeshiva in Jerusalem, once gave a eulogy (hesped) for Joe DiMaggio, the great centerﬁelder for the New York Yankees.5 And the Jewish Press, a Brooklyn weekly popular among the right-wing Orthodox community, published an article lamenting “the vanishing Jewish baseball player” that asked: “Where have you gone, latter-day versions of Harry Danning, Sid Gordon, Hank Greenberg, Al Rosen, and Sandy Koufax?” The question must have startled many readers who were more accustomed to reading hagiographic portraits of Orthodox leaders and rabbinic decrees on recondite topics.6 In the 1950s, the American and National League had eight teams each, and each team had a roster of 25 players. Today there are 30 such teams, and yet there has been a decline in the number of Jews making it to the major leagues. During the 1950s, 21 Jews played in the major leagues. Eighteen played in the 1960s, 17 in the 1970s, and 13 in the 1980s, and this number has not appreciably changed during the past two decades.7 In fact, the number of Hispanics on many major league teams outnumber the Jews playing on all the teams combined.8 So desperate are Jewish baseball fans

The Role of Jews in Contemporary American Sports

89

for ethnic heroes that, in 2006, a group decided to honor Mike Jacobs, the ﬁrst baseman for the Florida Marlins—only to discover that he wasn’t Jewish. The contemporary status of the professional Jewish baseball player is symbolized by the sad saga of Adam Greenberg of the Chicago Cubs. Greenberg’s ﬁrst, and until now only, appearance in a major league game was on July 9, 2005. He was beaned in the ninth inning by the ﬁrst pitch thrown to him by Florida Marlins’ pitcher Valerio de los Santos. Greenberg was put on the disabled list and was then sent back to the minor leagues. The next season he was released from the Cubs’ lower minor league afﬁliate and was signed by the Los Angeles Dodgers, who then sent him to their minor league afﬁliate, the Jacksonville Suns. Unless he returns to the major leagues, Greenberg will have a perfect major league on-base percentage, but no batting or ﬁelding percentage. But Greenberg, in contrast to most professional baseball players, did graduate from college. The career of a third Greenberg can be added to that of Hank and Adam. The paternal grandfather of Shawn Green, an outﬁelder for the New York Mets, had shortened the family name from Greenberg to Green “for business reasons.” His grandson was a high school baseball phenomenon and an excellent student at Tustin High School in southern California, good enough to rank third in his high school class and to be admitted to Stanford University. “If Shawn doesn’t make the majors,” his mother said at the time, “he’ll just become a doctor.”9 Green was the ﬁrst-round pick of the Toronto Blue Jays in the 1991 amateur draft and received a $750,000 signing bonus—a high ﬁgure for those days. Four years later, he was in the Blue Jays’ starting line-up. His breakout season was 1998, when he hit 42 home runs and had 123 runs batted in (RBIs). In 2001, his best year, he hit 42 home runs and had 125 RBIs. Thirty-ﬁve years after the retirement of Sandy Koufax, another Jewish baseball superstar had seemingly arrived. There was even talk in Jewish newspapers and over the internet that Green was destined to join Koufax and Hank Greenberg in the Baseball Hall of Fame. One enthusiast composed a ditty in his honor: Shawn Green’s not Irish. He is in fact a Jew. The best Judeo batsman Since that awesome Rod Carew!10 Green had grown up in a secular household and was unfamiliar with Jewish religious practices. While playing in Toronto, however, he became interested in things Jewish and, recognizing the potential beneﬁts of being more visible as a Jew, began attending synagogue services. When the Blue Jays, reluctant to pay Green his market value, decided to trade him after the 1999 season, Green insisted that it be to a city with a large Jewish population. In November 1999, he was traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers. He then signed an $84 million, six-year contract, at that time the fourthlargest contract in baseball history. While in Los Angeles, Green continued the tradition started by Hank Greenberg and observed by Sandy Koufax and other Jewish players, and refused to play on Yom Kippur. He had not suddenly become a devout Jew—in fact, he had a sui generis approach to the concept of separation of church and plate. In 2004, for instance, he played on Yom Kippur night but did not play the next

90

Edward S. Shapiro

day. “I just had to do what I feel is right and what’s most consistent with my beliefs,” Green explained. “Everyone has different ways of expressing their beliefs. For me as a Jewish person and a teammate, I feel that this is the right decision for me.” (It must also have felt right because the Dodgers were in a tight pennant race and playing an important series against the San Francisco Giants.) In any event, after the season, the Dodgers traded Green and his contract to the Arizona Diamondbacks.11 In August 2006, the Diamondbacks traded Green to the New York Mets. This was a match made in heaven. A Jewish player intent on capitalizing on his Jewishness and eager to participate in a World Series was now to play in the city with the largest Jewish population in the world, and for a team owned by a Jew. Jewish fans were ecstatic. One fan waved a sign saying “Shalom Shawn” when Green appeared for the ﬁrst time in a Mets uniform. By 2006, however, there was no more talk about Green and the Hall of Fame. His home run and RBI production had tailed off over the past ﬁve seasons, and his best years appeared to be behind him. He was recognized as a good, but certainly not a great player. Instead, attention now focused on the probability that sometime during the 2007 season, he would overtake Hank Greenberg as the Jewish player with the most major league homers. As of the time of writing, it seems likely that when Green retires his total number of homers will be about one-half of the record set by Hank Aaron.12 But when it comes to athletic accomplishments, Jewish fans can’t afford to be choosy.13 As the number of Jewish athletes in professional hockey, basketball, and football has declined during the past half century, the number of teams in these sports has more than tripled, the size of their rosters has increased, and the salaries of the players have skyrocketed, with leading baseball, basketball, football and hockey players earning well over a million dollars a year. Yet in the late 1980s, when John Frank was one of the few Jewish football players in the NFL, he chose to retire. Rather than continuing in professional sports, he opted to fulﬁll every Jewish mother’s dream by entering medical school. “Jews,” the historian George Eisen notes, “have always viewed sports participation as a means for achieving something else—gaining social status or scholarships to universities, or going into business—not an end in itself.”14 Other historians and sociologists have speculated on the reasons for the shortage of Jewish professional athletes. One explanation has emphasized Jewish cultural and religious values. In his paean to the left-wing immigrant culture of East European Jews in America, World of Our Fathers, Irving Howe ignored the interest of the second generation in American sports and made only one brief mention of the popularity of boxing among Jews. For Howe, Jewishness was cerebral, not physical: “Suspicion of the physical, fear of hurt, anxiety over the sheer ‘pointlessness’ of play: all this went deep into the recesses of the Jewish psyche.”15 This might have been true of the immigrant generation, but certainly not of their children. They were infused with the importance of physical training and sports while in the public schools, took an avid interest in professional sports, and the most athletically gifted saw sports as an avenue of social and economic mobility. And yet even Jews who did not share Howe’s politics agreed with him that there was something “un-Jewish” about the Jewish athlete. Thus Jeffrey S. Gurock’s Judaism’s Encounter with American Sports emphasizes the conﬂict between the values of traditional Judaism and those of athletic competition. “An age-old question would perplex Jewish circles,” Gurock writes. “Was it possible

The Role of Jews in Contemporary American Sports

91

for a dedicated player to maintain strong ties to the faith—or at least to continue to ally himself with his people and its past—as he made every effort to emulate the ways of the Gentiles to succeed in a modern arena?” For traditional Jewish voices, the answer was clearly “no.”16 This emphasis on Jewish values cannot account for the prominence of Jews in European sports and cannot explain why Jews won a disproportionate number of the Olympic medals awarded to Europeans prior to the Second World War. Nor can a stress on values explain why second-generation American Jews, who presumably were closer to the values of the “world of our fathers” than those of the succeeding two generations, were more successful in professional sports. More important factors were urbanization, industrialization, secularization, and acculturation. Since sports was such an important element in American popular culture, Jews, particularly second-generation Jews, became more American by cheering for the home team, reading the sports page of the daily newspaper, and playing America’s games. Even American Jewish radicals were not immune to the seductive pull of sports. They may have argued that pennant races and batting averages reﬂected the competitive and individualistic ethos of capitalism, but they also realized that Jews were attracted to sports. Left-wing labor unions sponsored athletic competitions, and the communist Daily Worker even had a sports page. Sports have long provided an entry for minorities into the American mainstream. German, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish, black, and Hispanic athletes have used professional and collegiate sports to move up the social and economic ladders, and their accomplishments have stimulated ethnic and racial pride. The victories of Jesse Owens and Joe Louis provided inspiration for blacks during the Depression years of the 1930s, as did Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color barrier in major league baseball in 1947. Given all of this, it should not be surprising that many of the most successful recent American Jewish athletes have been immigrants or the children of immigrants from Eastern Europe. These include the basketball player Ernie Grunﬁeld, the ﬁgure skater Sasha Cohen, the football player Igor Olshansky, the boxer Dimitriy Salita (the only ranked American Jewish boxer), the Olympic gold-winning swimmer Lenny Krayzelburg, and third baseman Ryan Braun, the National League’s 2007 rookie of the year. By and large, these athletes have attenuated Jewish identities.17 In contrast to their American-born counterparts, they are not products of the current American Jewish ethos that has young Jews channeling their competitive drives into becoming lawyers, doctors, accountants, academicians, or businesspeople. It was during the interwar decades that most of the outstanding Jewish athletes came to the fore: Benny Leonard and Barney Ross in boxing, Hank Greenberg in baseball, Nat Holman in basketball, and Benny Friedman, Sid Luckman, and Marshall Goldberg in football. Jewish athletes were particularly prevalent in boxing and basketball. Between the world wars, approximately 20 American Jewish boxers were world champions, a ﬁgure comprising 16 percent of the total number of world champions. Allen Bodner, the historian of American Jewish boxing, believes that about a third of American boxers during the 1920s and 1930s were Jews. Among the best was Barney Ross, who went from the Maxwell Street ghetto of Chicago to become a world champion during the 1930s in three different divisions (and later,

92

Edward S. Shapiro

a hero in the Second World War). In fact, so renowned were Jewish boxers that a few non-Jewish pugilists—Max Baer comes most readily to mind—actually claimed to be Jewish. Baer, who was brieﬂy the heavyweight champion in the early 1930s, even had a Star of David on his boxing shorts. American popular culture recognized the role of the Jewish boxer. One of the most popular American boxing ﬁlms was Body and Soul (1947), starring John Garﬁeld (himself a Jew), which portrayed the career of Charlie Davis, a Jewish boxing champion from the tenements of New York City. Nor was the Jewish role in boxing conﬁned to the ring. Nat Fleischer founded and operated Ring Magazine, boxing’s semi-ofﬁcial publication, and many of the leading trainers (Whitney Blimstein, Charley Goldman, and Ray Arcel), managers (Al Weill, Joe Jacobs, and Irving Chen), and promoters (Mike Jacobs, Harry Markson, and Bob Arum) were Jews. Jewish involvement in all areas of boxing declined rapidly after the Second World War, however, and Bodner ﬁttingly used the past tense in the title of his history of Jews and American boxing—When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport.18 Jewish prominence in boxing, as in other sports, was largely a second-generation phenomenon. Boxers from other ethnic groups have also usually been secondgeneration Americans, but Jewish boxers were distinctive in not encouraging their sons to follow in their footsteps. Nor were their sons attracted to the ring. They, along with other Jews, went to college. “If the rise of Jewish boxing was consistent with a pattern of ethnic progression,” Bodner notes, “its demise was meteoric, much more rapid than with any other nationality.”19 The prosperity of the country after the Second World War, combined with the Jews’ rapid rise up the economic and social ladder, eliminated the major reason why young Jews ever felt the need to go into boxing in the ﬁrst place. In this respect, Jewish boxers resembled Jewish criminals, who were also a second-generation phenomenon. The boxers and criminals came from the same neighborhoods, had similar ambitions, and viewed boxing and crime as avenues of economic and social mobility. Just as the children of Jewish boxers avoided the ring, so the children of Jewish mobsters did not go into the family business. “For Jewish gangsters,” Rich Cohen writes, “crime was not a way out of the system; it was a way in.” There is nothing comparable among American Jews to the Italian American intergenerational crime families. From the beginning, the children of Jewish criminals went to college. A son of Meyer Lansky, the most famous of American Jewish mobsters, even graduated from the United States Military Academy, served in the army for ten years, and then became a computer programmer. Lansky and the other Jewish mobsters craved respectability and their children provided it, albeit vicariously.20 Basketball was the most popular sport among Jews during the 1920s and 1930s. Jews were among the most outstanding players during these decades, most notably Nat Holman of the original New York Celtics team, and they were disproportionately represented within the various semi-pro leagues prior to the Second World War. Of the 91 persons who played in the professional American Basketball League during the 1937–1938 season, 45 were Jews. The presence of Jews in basketball did not go unnoticed. Sociologists, sports writers, and others claimed that the genetic make-up of Jews was ideal for basketball. The reason for the Jews’ proﬁciency in basketball, explained the sportswriter Paul Gallico, was that their “Oriental background”

The Role of Jews in Contemporary American Sports

93

was well suited for a game that emphasized “an alert, scheming mind and ﬂashy trickiness, artful dodging, and general smartaleckness.”21 (Left unexplained was the proﬁciency of blacks in basketball, which certainly was not due to any “Oriental” background.) Even Jews resorted to racial reasons to explain their proﬁciency in the game. Stanley Frank, who wrote about American Jews and sports, agued that no other sport was so compatible with Jewish characteristics: “mental agility, perception . . . imagination and subtlety. If the Jew had set out deliberately to invent a game which incorporates those traits indigenous in him . . . he could not have had a happier inspiration than basketball.”22 After the Second World War, professional basketball came of age with the establishment in 1946 of the Basketball Association of America, the forerunner of the NBA (founded in 1949). The ﬁrst basket scored in the BAA was by Ossie Schectman of the New York Knickerbockers against the Toronto Huskies, and the Knickerbockers won the league championship that year with seven Jews on its squad. This was the high-water mark of the Jewish presence in American professional basketball. Within a decade, few Jews were in the league, and of these only Dolph Schayes was an exceptional player. The rise and decline of Jews in college basketball occurred at virtually the same time. In 1950, the City College of New York won both the National Invitation Tournament and the National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament with a predominantly Jewish team, including three of the ﬁve starters. (The other two were black.) But since 1950 the number of Jews playing college basketball has declined, and today it is rare for an American Jewish player to start on a major college team.23 In fact, the most noteworthy Jewish college players during the past two decades have been imports from Israel. This drop in the Jewish presence in college and professional basketball resulted from the disappearance of the densely populated inner-city Jewish neighborhoods in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, South Philadelphia, Chicago’s West Side, and other localities where basketball had once been one of the most popular outlets for young Jews. As Peter M. Axthelm noted in his history of the sport, basketball was always the preeminent “city game.”24 Proﬁciency in basketball, however, did not have the same sociological importance as did mastery of baseball. There had been many Jewish professional baseball players in the 19th and early 20th century, but it was not until 1933, when Hank Greenberg began his Hall of Fame career with the Detroit Tigers, that Jews had an authentic Jewish baseball superstar.25 During the 1930s, Greenberg was the most widely known American Jewish athlete and possibly the most famous American Jew. He became a hero to American Jews for refusing to play on Yom Kippur in 1934. Although not religious, Greenberg believed that not playing on Yom Kippur was a matter of self- respect. Actually, by this point in the 1934 season, it no longer made much of a difference. (Ten days earlier, on Rosh Hashanah—while the Tigers were still in a hot pennant race—Greenberg did play. But by Yom Kippur, the Tigers had already clinched the pennant.) Nevertheless, Greenberg’s act set a precedent, and later Jewish major league ballplayers also did not play on Yom Kippur. These included the great pitcher Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who did not pitch on Yom Kippur in the ﬁrst game of the World Series of 1965. Following Koufax as an American Jewish sports hero was the swimmer Mark Spitz, who won seven gold medals at the infamous 1972 Munich Olympics. But

94

Edward S. Shapiro

Spitz proved to be the last of his kind. In the late 1990s, there was a publicity campaign portraying Tamir Goodman, who played basketball for a Baltimore Jewish high school, as the “Jewish Michael Jordan.” The myth crumbled when Goodman went to college and his modest skills were exposed. Shawn Green was also described at about this time as a great Jewish baseball prospect, but as has been seen, his career, while good, has fallen short of greatness. Quarterback Jay Fiedler was supposed to become the next great Jewish football player, but his career sputtered. In contrast to their parents and grandparents, third-generation American Jews seem little concerned with the paucity of great American Jewish athletes. For them it is more an object of humor than of chagrin. In the movie Airplane, for instance, a ﬂight attendant asks a passenger whether he would like something to read. He asks whether she has something light, and her response is, “How about this short leaﬂet: ‘Famous Jewish Sport Legends’?” Decades ago, when American Jews were less secure in their identities as Americans, proﬁciency in and knowledge of American sports was proof to themselves and to their detractors that they were fully Americanized. Now there is little need for such puffery.26 In the past, Jewish insecurity with regard to their status as full-ﬂedged Americans had a stronger basis in fact. In his 1914 book, The Old World in the New: The Signiﬁcance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People, the sociologist Edward A. Ross argued that Jews from Eastern Europe were a different type of being than were America’s Anglo-Saxon pioneers. This was because of innate biological characteristics and the ghetto environment of Eastern Europe that had stunted the physical development of Jews. “Not only are they undersized and weak-muscled,” he wrote, “but they shun bodily activity and are extremely sensitive to pain. Says a settlement worker: ‘You can’t make boy scouts out of Jews.’ ” By comparison, the native American possessed “great physical self-control” and was “gritty, uncomplaining, merciless to the body through fear of being ‘soft.’ To this roaming, hunting, exploring adventurous breed what greater contrast is there than the denizens of the Ghetto.”27 For Ross, the Jews’ supposed aversion to exercise and athletic competition reﬂected their physical weakness and lack of courage. Nor was Ross the only one with such views. The nativist anthropologist William Z. Ripley, in his 1899 book, The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study, argued that Jews preferred to live by brain and not brawn, and thus, over the centuries, had become physical degenerates. Ripley noted in particular that Jews were “distinctly inferior to Christians in lung capacity, which is generally an indication of social environment.”28 American Jews sought to disprove such canards. A 1923 editorial in the Chicago Yiddish Daily Jewish Courier encouraged Jews to participate in athletics in order to refute the stereotype of the Jew as physically decadent. “While we are proud to emphasize our interests in matters intellectual,” it editorialized, “we must not brand ourselves as physical weaklings, but by displaying an all-around development, we will best gain the respect of the world.” The more Jews exercised, the paper believed, the more they would be accepted.29 Wealthy Jews agreed. They funded Jewish community centers with gymnasiums and swimming pools in order to propagate Max Nordau’s “muscular Judaism” and Theodore Roosevelt’s “strenuous life.” It was hoped these centers would transform the stunted physiognomy of the East European Jewish immigrants, encourage participation in American sports, and instill a cult of

The Role of Jews in Contemporary American Sports

95

physical competition. Several books were also written by Jews extolling the exploits of American Jewish athletes, including Stanley Frank’s The Jew in Sport (1936), Harold Ribalow’s The Jew in American Sports (ﬁrst published in 1936 and subsequently reprinted several times), and—several decades later—Robert Slater’s Great Jews in Sports (1983). These books made popular bar mitzvah gifts alongside the proverbial fountain pen. Today, no longer fearful of their status in the larger U.S. society, American Jews have redirected their insecurities. It is now unimportant whether there are a representative number of Jews on the American Olympic team; what is important is that Israel has its war heroes. Paul Breines noted in his Tough Jews (1990) that, for American Jews, the Israeli soldier has displaced the athlete as the embodiment of Jewish strength and bravery. Apart from this, American Jews have conformed to the sociological truth that as an ethnic group ascends the economic and social ladder, fewer from their group will be attracted to professional sports, and when they are, it will be to higher-status games such as tennis or golf.30 Accompanying the movement of Jews up the social and economic ladder was a migration from densely populated urban Jewish neighborhoods to suburbia, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s. It is no accident that, during these decades, the decline in the athletic prowess of Jews became noticeable. The physicality so central to the urban Jewish ethos was not part of the suburban lifestyle. Thus, while Jews in suburbia remained an achieving people, their competitive drives focused less on athletics and far more on their own success in business and the professions, and the admission of their children to elite universities.31

A Reversion to Type? The Rise of the Jewish Sports Mogul The ﬂip side of the dwindling presence of American Jewish professional athletes is the vastly increased numbers of Jewish sports announcers, sportswriters, historians of sports, agents and union leaders, and—in particular—sports executives and sports owners. In 2006, three of the four American sports leagues were headed by Jews: David Stern of the NBA; Gary Bettman of the National Hockey League; and Bud Selig of major league baseball. The commissioner of Major League Soccer, Doug Garber, was also Jewish. (He was formerly the senior vice president of the National Football League’s international division.) Jews were also among the leading executives of professional sports teams, including Randy Levine of the New York Yankees and Theo Epstein of the Boston Red Sox. There was also the case of Steven Greenberg, the son of Hank, who captained his Yale University baseball team but was not good enough to play professionally. Instead, he became a deputy commissioner of the major leagues. The increase in the number of Jews owning professional teams has been particularly remarkable.32 As of early 2006, Jews—who comprised barely 2 percent of the American population—owned outright or were majority owners of more than one third of the NBA teams, nearly one third of the NFL teams, and one ﬁfth of the teams in the NHL and major league baseball. Several Jews owned more than one team. William Davidson owned the Detroit Pistons (NBA), the Tampa Lightning (NHL),

96

Edward S. Shapiro

and the Detroit Shocks women’s basketball team; Robert Kraft owned football’s New England Patriots and soccer’s New England Revolution; and Jerry Reinsdorf was the controlling partner of the Chicago White Sox and the Chicago Bulls. Malcolm Glazer owned not only the Tampa Bay Buccaneers but also an English soccer team, Manchester United, the most valuable sports franchise in the world. When Glazer announced plans in 2004 to purchase the team, many of its rabid fans protested—not because he was a Jew or an American, but because they feared the purchase would saddle the club with excessive debt. The sale eventually took place in 2005, with Glazer paying $1.4 billion for 98 percent of the club, a record purchase price for a sports team.33 Glazer’s purchase of Manchester United was followed the next year by Randy Lerner’s acquisition of Aston Villa, another leading English soccer team. The Cleveland-based Lerner family also owned the Cleveland Browns. Owning a sports team has become a trophy for wealthy businessmen, ranking alongside summer homes, family philanthropic foundations, the chairmanship of elite cultural, educational, or medical institutions, and election to public ofﬁce. Herb Kohl has two such trophies, being both the owner of the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team and a U.S. senator. George Soros, who spent more than $25 million in an unsuccessful effort to defeat President George W. Bush in 2004, attempted to buy the Washington, D.C. Nationals baseball team the following year. To own the franchise of a team that was based in the nation’s capital—could there be a better way for a person with a European accent and a reputation as a political radical to cement his Americanness? Such trophies are particularly important for self-made individuals who are often psychologically insecure with regard to their status in the social and economic pecking order. The ownership of a sports team indicates, and not without justiﬁcation, that one has “arrived” and is worthy of recognition by his or her peers.34 Note that in 2004, a local Boston magazine proclaimed that Robert Kraft was the city’s leading resident, outranking any of the Cabots, Lodges, Forbes, or Kennedys. As in athletic competition, entertainment, and crime, there has been an ethnic progression in the ownership of teams. At ﬁrst virtually all of the teams were owned by individuals with a British background. In the early 20th century, they were joined by wealthy German Americans such as the Busch family of St. Louis (St. Louis Cardinals) and Irish Americans such as the Rooney family of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh Steelers), the Mara family of New York (New York Giants), and the Dolan family of New York (both the New York Knicks and the New York Rangers). As members of other ethnic groups have become enormously wealthy, they also have purchased professional teams. Thus, there are now Italian Americans as owners of the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers (football) and the Buffalo Sabres (hockey); a Hispanic American owns the Los Angeles Angels (baseball); a Chinese American owns the Long Island Islanders (hockey); an Arab American family owns the Sacramento Kings (basketball); and Greek Americans own the San Diego Chargers (football), the Carolina Hurricanes (hockey), and the Baltimore Orioles (baseball). But it has been Jews who have been the most noticeable in this ethnic progression in sports ownership.35 Part of the explanation lies in the rapid increase in the number of extremely wealthy American Jews. Since 1982, Forbes magazine has published an annual listing of the

The Role of Jews in Contemporary American Sports

97

400 wealthiest Americans. (By 2007, one had to have at least 1.3 billion in order to be included.) Jews constituted more than 25 percent of the initial list, and this percentage has increased over time; they also are disproportionately represented among those at the very top of the list. In 2006, Forbes also ran an article titled “Jocks,” which noted that many of those on the top-400 list of that year were team owners. (“It’s an expensive hobby, but the thrill of victory makes it all worthwhile.”)36 Of the 22 persons or families listed on the “Jocks” list, eight were Jews. Money aside, the increase in Jewish ownership of teams probably would not have occurred were it not for the dramatic decrease in antisemitism in the United States since the 1940s. In recent decades, Jews have served as presidents of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton; they have headed some of America’s largest and most elite law ﬁrms and corporations, including DuPont, Walt Disney, and Merrill Lynch; they are to be found at the top of some of the most distinguished medical and cultural institutions in the United States; and they have been appointed to some of the most prestigious of government positions, heading the Departments of State, Defense, and Treasury as well as the Federal Reserve. It is thus not unexpected that Jews en masse would also gain entry into the clubby world of professional sports owners, and that, once there, they would play a major role. In addition to owning sports teams on the East Coast and in longstanding centers of Jewish population such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, Jews also have had major interests in teams located in cities with relatively small Jewish populations, such as Seattle, Dallas, Houston, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Kansas City, Indianapolis, and Tampa. This fact reﬂects the nationalization of Jewish wealth, the ﬂow of Jewish population from the snowbelt to the sunbelt, and the fact that presentday owners of sports franchises do not necessarily live where their teams play. Thus, Ziggy Wilf, the majority owner of the Minnesota Vikings football team, is from metropolitan New York, and the investors who owned the Atlanta Hawks were led for a time by Steven Belkin of Boston.37 The wealth of Jewish sports moguls comes from a variety of sources. Most commonly, their fortunes have been based on real estate. Melvin and Herbert Simon, the owners of the Indianapolis Pacers basketball team, are the nation’s largest and most successful shopping center developers. Ziggy Wilf’s family owns a real estate empire that originated in New Jersey and is now nationwide. Preston Robert Tisch, the co-owner of the New York Giants, ﬁrst made his fortune with real estate investments and the ownership of the Loews hotel chain. Both Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers (NBA), and Lewis Wolff, who owns the Oakland Athletics, are successful real estate entrepreneurs in southern California. Bruce Ratner of the New Jersey Nets (NBA) is a scion of the Ratner family of Cleveland, owners of the giant Forest City Enterprise real estate development company. Fred Wilpon of the New York Mets is a co-founder of Sterling Equities, a real estate development company on Long Island. Malcolm Glazer’s fortune began with investments in mobile home parks and expanded into the ownership of shopping centers and nursing homes before he purchased the Tampa Bay football team and Manchester United. (Glazer also bought the nearly bankrupt Zapata company, an oil and gas outﬁt founded by George H.W. Bush.) Abe Pollin of the Washington Wizards (basketball) owned a construction company in Washington, D.C. before becoming involved in the sports

98

Edward S. Shapiro

industry. Ted Lerner of the Washington Nationals is a major real estate developer in the Washington, D.C. area and built the White Flint shopping center in Rockville, Maryland. The fortune of Larry Tanenbaum, the chairman of the board of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd., which owns the Toronto Raptors (basketball) and Toronto Maple Leafs (hockey), had its origin in construction, asphalt, and steel. Several of the sports moguls made their money in the merchandising of goods and services. Arthur Blank, owner of the Atlantic Falcons football team, was a co-founder of the Home Depot company, the largest home improvement chain. Ed Snider, of the Philadelphia Flyers, grew up in Washington, D.C., where his family owned grocery stores. Howard Schultz, a former part owner of the Seattle Supersonics (basketball), founded the Starbucks coffee chain. Herbert Kohl’s family founded Kohl’s, a chain of department stores. Daniel Snyder, a college dropout from the University of Maryland, founded Snyder Communications, a direct marketing and database marketing concern, when he was still in his 20s. In 1999, he bought the Washington Redskins and its stadium for $800 million, at that time the largest sports transaction in history, and six years later he purchased controlling interest in Six Flags, the world’s largest amusement and theme park operator. Steven Belkin, who had headed the group of investors who owned the Atlanta Hawks (basketball) and Atlanta Thrashers (hockey), founded Trans National Group, a direct marketer of ﬁnancial, travel, and other services. Other Jewish team owners made their fortunes in high tech, among them Mark Cuban, who in 1995 was a co-founder of Broadcast.com, which provided multimedia on the internet. Five years later, the company was sold to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock, and Cuban used some of the proceeds to purchase the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. The Comcast Corporation, a major cable company controlled by the Roberts family of Philadelphia, owns much of the Philadelphia 76ers and the Philadelphia Flyers. Henry Samueli, a former engineering professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, co-founded Broadcom, a manufacturer of high-speed communication chips and switches. Broadcom went public in 1998, and Samueli became a multibillionaire. In 2005, he purchased the Anaheim Ducks hockey team from the Walt Disney company for an estimated $75 million. Before purchasing the Florida Panthers hockey team, Alan Cohen, a pharmacist, founded Best Generics company and Andrx corporation, two generic drug manufacturing and distribution companies. The remaining Jewish sports moguls made their money in a variety of ways. A few are industrialists, including Lester Crown of Chicago, a minority owner of the New York Yankees, the St. Louis Blues (hockey), and the Chicago Bulls (basketball). William Davidson, owner of the Detroit Pistons (basketball) and the Tampa Bay Lightning (hockey), controls Guardian Industries, the world’s largest privately owned glass company. Robert Kraft is a major manufacturer and distributor of paper and packaging products. Leslie Alexander of the Houston Rockets (NBA) and Stuart Sternberg of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (baseball) made their fortunes in the securities industry. Alexander is a venture capitalist, and Sternberg was a managing director at Goldman Sachs. The late father of Mickey Arison, the owner of the Miami Heat (NBA), founded Carnival Corporation, the world’s largest cruise ship operator. The patriarch of the Lerner family of Cleveland, owners of the Cleveland Browns, founded the credit card giant MBNA. Jeffrey Loria of the Florida Marlins baseball

The Role of Jews in Contemporary American Sports

99

team made his fortune in the antiques business. The Montreal Expos baseball team was owned at one time by a scion of Samuel Bronfman, who founded Seagram’s, the largest manufacturer of alcoholic beverages. The Jewish owners of sports teams have been open about their ethnic and religious ties, and many of them are major benefactors to Jewish institutions. Larry Tanenbaum recently gave $50 million (Canadian) to a foundation controlled by the Toronto Jewish federation. William Davidson contributed $20 million to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York along with $30 million to the Technion and $20 million to the Weizmann Institute, both in Israel. The Wilf family has made major gifts to Shaare Zedek hospital in Israel.38 Members of the Tisch and Kraft families are also generous donors to a variety of Jewish philanthropic causes, including a $250,000 gift the Krafts made toward the building of the Kraft Family (baseball) Stadium in Jerusalem. Abe Pollin, a friend of Yitzhak Rabin, changed the name of his basketball team from the Bullets to the Wizards after the Israeli prime minister was gunned down. David Stern, commissioner of the NBA, was honored by both the United Jewish Appeal and Israel Bonds, and Ed Snider is on the board of the Simon Wiesenthal museum in Los Angeles. In addition, some American Jewish sports moguls have invested in the Israeli economy. Davidson purchased a glass factory in Nazareth, the largest and most technologically advanced of its kind in Israel, while Kraft is the largest shareholder of Israel’s largest packaging plant, located in Caesarea. The decline in America of the Jewish professional athlete and the concomitant rise of the Jewish sports owner did not occur in a historical vacuum. Both stemmed from the transformation of the economic and social proﬁle of American Jewry after the Second World War and from changes within the host society. Afﬂuence, suburbanization, and the decline of antisemitism shaped the context in which Jewish involvement in American professional sports took place. So too did the movement of Americans from the Northeast to the South and West, which resulted in the growth of large Jewish communities in Florida and California.39 It is this intersection between the entrepreneurial talents of individual Jews and the opportunities offered by a growing and dynamic economy that explains the phenomenon of the Jewish sports owner. The changing role of Jews in sports attests to the opportunities offered in America to the talented and ambitious. Every year, Fred Wilpon’s New York Mets holds a “Jewish Heritage Day,” during which the team mascot dances on the top of the third-base dugout to the tune of “Hava Nagila.” This secular Hebrew song advises its listeners to rejoice, to be happy, and to sing. It is an appropriate sentiment for those Jews in attendance at Shea Stadium who wish to celebrate their identity as Americans and as Jews—though few, if any, of the ballplayers will understand the words.

Notes 1. Three years earlier, both teams in the Superbowl—the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles—were owned by Jews, with one Jewish athlete participating in the game. 2. In 2003, the American Jewish Historical Society offered for sale a set of cards featuring every major league Jewish baseball player from the 1870s to 2003. There were a total of

100

Edward S. Shapiro

142 cards, a paltry ﬁgure when compared to the total number of players during those years. When the list was updated in 2006, an advertisement for the cards noted that 13 Jews had played in the 2005 season. A total of 13 was not something to brag about; it amounted to about 1 percent of players in the major leagues that year. Furthermore, most of the 13 were fringe players, and not one of them had an outstanding season. 3. Peter Levine, Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sport and the American Jewish Experience (New York: 1992), 98. 4. Cahan and Malamud are both quoted in Stephen Whitﬁeld, “In the Big Inning” in his Voices of Jacob, Hands of Esau: Jews in American Life and Thought (Hamden, Conn.: 1984), 172–179; on Jews and baseball, see also Eric Solomon, “Jews and Baseball: A Cultural Love Story,” in Ethnicity and Sport in North American History and Culture, ed. George Eisen and David K. Wiggens (Westport: 1994), 75–101; and Allen Guttman, “Out of the Ghetto and into the Field: Jewish Writers and the Theme of Sport,” American Jewish History 74 (March 1985), 274–286. For the full story of the Jewish involvement in baseball during its early years, see Burton A. Boxerman and Benita W. Boxerman, Jews and Baseball: Entering the American Mainstream, 1871–1948 (Jefferson, N.C.: 2006). 5. An audio version of the eulogy—part of a lengthy Torah lecture—can be found on the Marcos and Adina Katz Yeshiva University Torah online site, http://tinyurl.com/2pa7sr. Rakeffet-Rothkoff was a student of R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik. 6. Jason Maoz, “The Vanishing Jewish Baseball Player,” Jewish Press (6 April 2006). 7. Steven A. Riess (ed.), Sports and the American Jews (Syracuse: 1998), 53. 8. In view of the rapid increase in the number of baseball players from South America and the Caribbean, some have suggested that the real story is not the vanishing Jewish ballplayer but the vanishing American player. 9. Quoted in Michael Bamberger, online at shawngreen.net/articles/promisedland.html (p. 3). 10. Rod Carew, star hitter of the Minnesota Twins in the 1960s and 1970s, was not a Jew. He married a Jew from the Twin Cities and raised his children as Jews, but he never converted. 11. Seth Swirsky, “Friday Night Game Earns Green a Strike,” Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles (1 Oct. 2004); Shawn Green, “Green’s Decision, in His Own Words,” shawngreen.net/articles/yomkippur.html. 12. On August 7, 2007, Barry Bonds broke Hank Aaron’s record when he hit his 756th home run. This record, however, remains controversial because of the likelihood that Bonds had been using steroids to bolster his muscles. 13. Green subsequently retired from major league baseball in February 2008 with a total of 328 home runs. 14. George Eisen, “Jews and Sport: A Century of Retrospect,” Journal of Sport History 26 (Summer 1999), 235. 15. Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York: 1976), 182. 16. Jeffrey S. Gurock, Judaism’s Encounter with American Sports (Bloomington: 2005), 27. For Gurock, who is a runner, a basketball enthusiast, a professor at Yeshiva University, and a traditional Jew, the conﬂict between his own athletic interests and the Orthodox skepticism regarding sports has a personal meaning. 17. Dimitriy Salita, who was born in Ukraine, is the exception. He was inﬂuenced by the Lubavitch Hasidic movement during the year-long mourning period for his father, and he now eats only kosher food and does not ﬁght on the Sabbath. He has a large following among Orthodox Jews, who sing “David, King of Israel” when he enters the ring. Salita has been alone among American Jewish boxers in being religiously observant, although Barney Ross did refuse to ﬁght on the Jewish New Year in the early 1930s. This was before the baseball player Hank Greenberg decided not to play on Yom Kippur in 1934. Ross came from an Orthodox family, and while not personally observant, was emotionally attached to the world of his parents. Greenberg, in contrast, disdained all religion, including Judaism, and he did not bring up his children as Jews. 18. Allen Bodner, When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport (Westport: 1997), 2–6 and Appendix B. On Ross, see Douglas Century, Barney Ross (New York: 2006).

The Role of Jews in Contemporary American Sports

101

19. Bodner, When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport, 168. Also see Steven A. Riess, “A Fighting Chance: The Jewish American Boxing Experience,” American Jewish History 74 (March 1985), 222–253. 20. Rich Cohen, Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams (New York: 1998), 150–153. For the best histories of Jews and crime, see Jenna Weissman Joselit, Our Crowd: Jewish Crime and the New York Jewish Community, 1900–1940 (Bloomington: 1983); Albert Fried, The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America (New York: 1980). 21. Paul Gallico, Farewell to Sports (New York: 1938), 325. See also Jon Entine, Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk about It (New York: 2000), 202–203. 22. Frank, quoted in Levine, Ellis Island to Ebbets Field, 27. 23. The documentary ﬁlm “The First Basket: A Jewish Basketball Story,” describes the Jewish presence in basketball. The title comes from Ossie Schectman’s basket. For the CCNY basketball teams of 1950 and 1951, see Edward S. Shapiro, “The Shame of the City: CCNY Basketball, 1950–51,” in Jews, Sports and the Rites of Citizenship, ed. Jack Kugelmass (Champaign: 2007), 175–192. 24. Peter M. Axthelm, The City Game: Basketball in New York from the World Champion Knicks to the World of the Playgrounds (New York: 1970). 25. The best source on the life of Greenberg is his autobiography, The Story of My Life, edited and with an introduction by Ira Berkow (New York: 1989). Among Greenberg’s predecessors was Lipman Pike, supposedly the ﬁrst person to be paid to play baseball. In 1857, while he was only 13 years old, Pike was receiving $20 a week. 26. Eisen, “Jews and Sport,” 231–232. 27. Edward A. Ross, The Old World in the New: The Signiﬁcance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People (New York: 1914), 289–292. Interestingly enough, Ross noted that second-generation Jews were attracted to sports. “The second generation, to be sure, overtop their parents and are going in for athletics. Hebrews under Irish names abound in the prize-ring, and not long ago a sporting editor printed the item, ‘Jack Sullivan received a letter in Yiddish yesterday from his sister’ ” (ibid., 290). 28. Ripley, quoted in Joseph W. Bendersky, “The Jewish Threat”: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army (New York: 2000), 40. 29. Quoted in Levine, Ellis Island to Ebbets Field, 16. 30. Paul Breines: Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry (New York: 1990). In his history of Jews and American sports, Peter Levine titled the chapter dealing with the post-Second World War years “Where Have You Gone, Hank Greenberg?” 31. On the emphasis on physicality in one Jewish neighborhood, see Cohen, Tough Jews. On the post-Second World War movement of American Jews to suburbia, see Edward S. Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jews since World War II (Baltimore: 1992), ch. 5. 32. On the involvement of Jews in the ownership of sports teams in one city, see Diane L. Jacobsohn, “City of Champions: Major League Sports and Baltimore Jews,” Generations (2004), 55–71. (Generations is the annual magazine of the Jewish Museum of Maryland.) On February 23, 2008, the Miami Herald reported that Wayne Huizenga, the owner of the Miami Dolphins, had sold a half-interest in the football team to New York City Jewish real estate magnate Stephen M. Ross. The agreement between Ross and Huizenga gave Ross, who had been a minority owner of the New York Islanders hockey team and in 1999 had unsuccessfully attempted to acquire the New York Jets football team, the opportunity to purchase Huizenga’s remaining stake in the Dolphins within four years. When and if this occurs, Jews will own seven of the nine professional basketball, hockey, baseball, and football teams in Florida, including all three teams in Tampa and all four teams in the Miami area. But if recent history is any indicator, not one Jew will be playing for any of these teams. 33. The phenomenon of Jews owning sports teams is not restricted to America. Several teams in the elite European soccer leagues as well as teams in the Canadian Football League are owned by Jews. 34. Owning a sports team can also be enormously proﬁtable, despite the complaints of owners regarding skyrocketing salaries for players and cramped stadiums and arenas that lack

102

Edward S. Shapiro

lucrative luxury boxes. During the past decade, the value of sports franchises has more than doubled. In 1994, Kraft paid $172 million for the Patriots, a league record, but the team was worth at least a billion dollars by 2006. See Wall Street Journal (5 May 2006). 35. Many of these owners do not have complete ownership of their teams. They either own the largest share or are listed as the managing partner. For wealthy Jews uninterested in owning a team, there is the option of endowing a university ﬁeld house, as is the case with the Charles E. Smith Center at George Washington University and the Jerome Schottenstein Center at Ohio State University. 36. “Jocks,” Forbes 176 (10 Oct. 2005), 204. 37. Non-Jewish owners also do not always live where their teams play. An example is George Steinbrenner, the majority owner of the New York Yankees, who lives in Tampa. 38. When Ziggy Wilk purchased a majority ownership in the Minnesota Vikings in 2005, it was widely publicized that he was the child of Holocaust survivors and had been raised in a traditional Jewish family. 39. The best book on the rise of the Miami and Los Angeles Jewish communities is Deborah Dash Moore’s To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A. (New York: 1994), though it does not discuss the role of Jewish athletes and Jewish sports owners.

Sports in the Young State of Israel Anat Helman (the hebrew university)

In late 1949, when Israelis were experiencing the rationing of basic goods and frequent shortages in the shops, a shoe merchant from Haifa chose to phrase his newspaper advertisement as follows: “Pelota”1—the national sport in Cuba . . . In Canada it’s ice hockey, in the United States it’s baseball, in England it’s cricket, and the national sports in Israel is . . . the line! Just think of the number of lines you have to stand in every day; and your poor feet—what about them? It’s time you paid attention to them and got orthopedic shoes from [our] special department. . . . 2

This text links national identities, at least in America and Europe, with national sports. Standing in line, an inevitable pastime in the newly established state, is ironically depicted as the national “sport” and is conveniently tied to the product being promoted. Frequent literal and visual references to sports in early Israeli advertisements allude to a widespread familiarity with sports and its overall attractive image.3 During the last three decades, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians have produced a wide array of theoretical models and comparative case studies about sports, tying the ﬁeld to such central issues as modernity, class distinctions and conﬂict, outlets for violent behavior, patriarchal indoctrination, hegemonic culture, and the western “civilizing process.”4 Douglas Booth convincingly claims that sports reﬂects “socially caused interests and beliefs that are diverse and constantly changing.”5 Sports can therefore serve as an illuminating portal into the past, a kind of litmus test for tracing social and ideological change. Attempting to reconstruct and comprehend the emerging culture of Israel during its ﬁrst years as a sovereign state, this study views sports as one of the ﬁelds in which this culture was reﬂected, molded, communicated, and ampliﬁed. Sports was engaged in and organized by the Zionist community in Palestine (the Yishuv) from the beginning of the 20th century, notably during the Mandate era.6 Although Zionist sports clubs’ tenacious partisan afﬁliations persisted after 1948, the transition from Jewish community to a sovereign state did have some impact on Israeli sports regulation. The Physical Education Department, founded in 1939 by the Va’ad Haleumi (the National Council of Jews of Palestine), later came under the 103

104

Anat Helman

new state’s authority and was subordinated to the Ministry of Education and Culture in 1949. Israel’s ﬁrst national sports institutions were founded in 1951: the national Olympic Committee dealt with Israel’s representation in international sports, whereas the Sports Association was in charge of local sports organizations.7 As a postwar routine was gradually achieved, Israeli sports was institutionalized and professionalized.8 What follows, however, does not focus on sports production and organization but rather on its consumption and reception within Israeli society. The local press and other textual and visual primary sources render evidence about attitudes toward sports and its various cultural aspects. These ﬁndings are presented and discussed within three framing themes: sports and the formation of Israeli character, sports as a window to the world, and its role in both dividing and unifying Israeli society.

Sports and the New Israeli Modern sports has often been expected to bolster courage and virility.9 Zionists sought to replace the “old Jew” of the diaspora—a stock ﬁgure in Zionist discourse, depicted as passive, cowardly, sickly, and weak—with the antithetical “new Jew” who was active, brave, healthy, and strong. Lamenting the traditional Jewish tendency to nurture the spirit and intellect alone, Max Nordau called on Zionists to develop a “muscular Judaism” as well.10 Sports was regarded in the Yishuv as one of the instruments for creating this new Jew and imparting discipline for future military service.11 Although the ideal Israeli, like the former generation’s pioneering Hebrew settler, was supposed to be active, brave, healthy, and strong, the young Israeli-born, known as “sabras,” were not identical to their immigrant predecessors. Oz Almog claims that sabras admired the founding generation, aspiring to prove themselves worthy of their parents’ high expectations and nurturing ideals of national responsibility and voluntarism. At the same time, sabras deﬁned and asserted their identity by rebelling against their parents’ generation: they developed a central strain of antiintellectualism and contrasted Zionist rhetoric and verbal pathos to their own practical, physical, and laconic approach.12 In the rainy winter of 1951–1952, sports and the brave sabra were featured in a newspaper article titled “Yizhak Davidovich—Member of ‘Hapo’el’ and Hero of Musrara.”13 This 17-year-old rower from the Hapo’el Tel Aviv sports club was traveling on his daily bus trip when he noticed a large ﬂooded area and heard shouts coming from a shack cut off by the current. Policemen and ﬁremen were standing around helpless, but when a dinghy was brought, the youngster jumped in, rowed against strong currents—even after one of his oars broke—and delivered the trapped family of ﬁve to safety. “When my task was over,” he said in an interview, “I was wet as a ﬁsh—but happy that my rowing skill enabled me to save an entire family.” The accompanying photograph shows a thin and rather gentle-looking youth, and the sports reporter interviewing him admits to being surprised when he encountered the young hero, whose face was “pale but brave.” Yitzhak, he writes, decided to practice sports, ﬁrst boxing and then ﬂying and rowing, in order to “develop his thin and weak body.” He was now waiting to receive his civil ﬂying license and hoped to become a pilot “in our air force” upon joining the army.14

Sports in the Young State of Israel

105

In contrast to the helplessness of the ofﬁcial rescue forces, this young sabra is portrayed as resourceful and spontaneous. His heroic deed is tied to his sportsmanship (rowing), as are his hopes concerning his approaching military service (ﬂying). The didactic lesson includes Yizhak’s insistence on overcoming his “thin and weak” constitution via sports activity, which accords him fortitude as well as physical strength. Nonetheless, Yizhak’s story is in some respects atypical. Sabras were mostly portrayed as naturally robust; and whereas Yizhak came across as a serious individual who acted alone, sabras were usually depicted as a light-hearted and boisterous collectivity of friends (h.evrayah).15 Pierre Bourdieu notes that the “[g]loriﬁcation of sports as the training-ground of character . . . always implies a certain anti-intellectualism,”16 and indeed, sabra athletes were often fondly described as singing, joking, and eating heartily.17 The journalist who accompanied Hapo’el athletes on their way to the fourth Workers’ Sport Olympics in Liège admiringly portrayed the simple manners of this “bunch of sturdy, energetic, and witty youngsters. They can tell a joke with Israeli, sabra-like grace, and also know how to ‘receive’ a joke gracefully when it is made at one of the h.evrayah’s expense.”18 Sabras prided themselves for their bluntly honest manner of speaking (dugri),19 constantly giving and receiving verbal put-downs that supposedly toughened them as individuals and reinforced their group cohesiveness. For sabras, as with athletes, toughness—both physical and mental—was a virtue.20 Soccer, the most popular sport in the Yishuv, remained the most popular sport after the establishment of the state of Israel.21 The second-favorite sport, basketball, was played from the 1930s but was less organized until a national league was founded in 1954.22 A reader’s letter published in a sports magazine in 1955 claimed that instead of promoting the qualities of determination and perseverance, “exhibition games” such as soccer and basketball mainly provided young Israeli athletes with opportunities to compete abroad.23 This might indeed explain their choice, in addition to the fact that soccer and basketball were relatively easy and cheap to arrange and therefore could be played almost anywhere by children and amateurs.24 Moreover, from the point of view of spectators, team sports are widely preferred to individual competitions. This preference is brilliantly deciphered by Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, who claim that “[s]ome forms of sports whose design most closely resembles that of a real battle between hostile groups have a particularly strong propensity for stirring up emotions, for evoking excitement.”25 Elias and Dunning view modern sports as a competitive exertion that excludes, to the extent possible, violent actions that can seriously hurt the competitors.26 Yet others stress that sports can also serve as a means of creating future soldiers. Richard Holt quotes a French student who said in 1913: “La guerre . . . c’est le sport pour le vrai,”27 and George L. Mosse maintains that after the First World War, sports was meant to keep alive the challenge and masculinity of war.28 Writing on the militarization of Soviet sports, David L. Hoffmann explains that physical culture programs were viewed in the U.S.S.R. as a crucial component both in the preparation for war and in the country’s uniﬁcation, since “[t]he Soviet system was born at a moment of total war when the mobilization and defence of the state took precedence over everything else.”29 Israel, too, was founded in wartime and, since its earliest days as a sovereign state, braced itself, conceptually and institutionally, for a lasting violent conﬂict.30 Thus the new Israeli was primarily a soldier and sports was

106

Anat Helman

channeled toward his training.31 In 1949, the (Revisionist Zionist) Betar sports journal announced that the main goal of all sports clubs in Israel must be the education of the youth, the turning of “this [human] material into practiced military men with powers of endurance.”32 Three years later, a government ofﬁcial deﬁned sports as “a means for generating discipline and training youths for our country’s duties.”33 Signiﬁcantly, before deciding to place the Physical Education Department under the aegis of the Ministry of Education and Culture, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion toyed with the idea of subordinating it to the Ministry of Defense.34 Following the War of Independence, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) emerged as a central and unifying institution in the young state, an “army of the people” engaged in settlement, education, and social missions far beyond its direct military role. Ze’ev Drori notes that within Israel’s “statism,” the border between the army’s military and civil functions was unclear.35 Since army service was mandatory and most potential athletes, namely young physically ﬁt people, were conscripted for several years, it is not surprising that IDF teams were so prominent in Israel’s ﬂedgling sports. Sports was part of the soldiers’ basic training. The army held seasonal internal competitions between different corps and units, founded a soccer league, and initiated competitions and races; in addition to participating in civilian national matches, its teams sometimes played internationally.36 Civil and military tournaments and competitions were held in honor of highly decorated units that had fought in the War of Independence and in commemoration of fallen soldiers.37 The leading sports maga38 zine, H . adshot hasport, published a regular column titled “Sports in the Army” and boasted of its popularity among soldiers: “If you check the army camps on Sunday 39 mornings, you’ll ﬁnd more H . adshot hasport papers than polished shoes.” 40 An ambiguous relationship between sports and the military, and perhaps an intentional tendency to link the two, was clearly expressed in the linguistic sphere, where military terms were regularly employed in sports discussion.41 On the one hand, words such as “ﬁghting” and “battles” were frequently used to describe matches and competitions.42 The term mivz.’a, generally used in the sense of a military operation, was also widely used to describe non-military actions, including those connected with sporting events. The opening ceremony of the 1950 Maccabiah included marching and driving “operations,” the conference of the Hapo’el sports organization was similarly described as a successful “operation,” and an account of an organized, nighttime swim across the Sea of Galilee in 1955 was headlined “A Daring Moonlight Operation.”43 On the other hand, sports terms were borrowed for discussions of military issues. The disagreements among members of the 1955 international armament committee with regard to increasingly violent border clashes between Israel and Egypt were criticized by a local communist paper as a “ping-pong match,” and a 1956 caricature protesting the arms race of the Arab states pictured it as an international bicycle competition titled “Tour d’Israel.”44 H . erut, the newspaper of the right-wing opposition party, made metaphorical use of the Israel-Greece soccer match of 1954 when it critiqued Israel’s defensive strategy. The Israeli government, it argued, was reluctant to attack any opposing country’s “goal,” for fear of becoming embroiled in “adventurous complications.”45 As noted, the ideal “new Israeli,” incarnated in the sabra, was an unaffected, straightforward, tough, ascetic yet cheerful youth who directed his strength and

Sports in the Young State of Israel

107

courage toward military service and other collective tasks of nation-building. To be sure, many young Israelis did not quite ﬁt into this elevated ideal. Scorned by Israeli ideologues as uncommitted and egotistic, middle-class youths who did not dedicate themselves to the national goal were sarcastically known as the “golden” or “salon” youth.46 Alongside sports’ explicit function of molding an ascetic, soldier-like Israeli, it was being used by some segments in Israel’s emerging society to nurture an individualistic and pleasure-seeking lifestyle. This hedonistic facet of local sports can be traced back to the pre-state era, but since it clashed with Zionist hegemonic pioneering ideology, it was expressed discreetly rather than being ﬂaunted.47 After the establishment of the state, the middle classes asserted their cultural preferences more openly.48 Still, in a country facing difﬁcult economic, military, and national challenges, undisguised hedonism was generally regarded as distasteful and unpatriotic.49 Body-building exempliﬁes the dual cultural functions of sports. Rafael Halperin, an accomplished wrestler, founded the ﬁrst professional body-building gym in Israel in 1949 and named it Shimshon (Samson) after the biblical hero. Seven years later, he opened a special gym for women that, interestingly, was named for Venus, the pagan goddess of love.50 Halperin completed his training in the United States, from whence he imported (in addition to new training machines and techniques) the ideal of a “selfmade man.” Inaugurating his gym, Halperin declared his main goal to be the transformation of Israeli youth into a healthful and strong generation of heroes—in particular, through improving the state of the weak and the sickly. Halperin developed an individualized training program and believed that anyone who trained “seriously and willingly” could succeed as he had.51 Alongside familiar national rhetoric, Halperin’s gym program promoted an individualistic ethos of body grooming. His advertisements extolled the female’s “desired body proportions,” and the competitions he arranged were designed to show off the male’s “developed and symmetrical” body.52 Whereas the text of Halperin’s advertisements stressed health and strength, the accompanying photographs visually promoted body-building as an aesthetic activity.53 Writing on the physical ﬁtness movement of the late 19th century, Christopher Breward comments that, despite its condemnation of the vanities of fashion, bodybuilding in fact “encouraged a narcissistic attention towards the beauty of the exercised body.”54 Indeed, the weekly tabloid Ha’olam hazeh explicitly noted that local body-building competitions allowed men to ﬂaunt their “advantages” just as women did in beauty contests.55 A 1950 caricature portrayed this symmetry: in the ﬁrst frame a soldier’s wife is unable to drag him away from a magazine featuring photographs of well-endowed women; in the following frame he, in turn, cannot pull her away from where she is standing, happily transﬁxed, by a poster advertising the national body-building championship.56 The function of sports in promoting physical beauty was further enhanced by the scheduled appearance of Israeli beauty queens at various sports events.57 According to one sports journal, spectators of a more unsavory type also attended sports events for the sole purpose of being seen by others: This unique kind of spectator arrives [at the event] not to watch it but rather to be watched. You will always see these fellows in the ﬁrst rows, near the arena or the swimming pool, full of themselves and showing off. Men of this sort usually wear vulgar ties and “loud”

108

Anat Helman

hats and cannot arrive at the event unless accompanied by a made-up blond. The organizers know how to take advantage of this type’s weakness, his willingness to purchase the most expensive tickets just to be seen.58

Thus, while sports promoted the ideal new Israeli and further exalted the sabra’s image, it simultaneously played a part in different and even contrary Israeli lifestyles.

Sports as a Window to the World Israelis craved international recognition. The gravity with which they regarded every gesture, such as visits to Israel paid by VIPs of all types –whether statesmen or entertainers—far exceeded diplomatic protocol. It was as if the country’s recent founding was perceived both as a momentous event and as a fact in need of constant validation.59 If Zionists claimed that Jews were “a people like all other peoples,” then Israelis wanted Israel to be treated as a state like all other states. Paradoxically, this self-conscious attitude toward statehood and the insatiable need to be recognized and approved is precisely what distinguished Israel from other, long-established states that were more secure and more nonchalant. Sports, with its international rules, competitions, and organizations,60 played a part in Israel’s evolving self-deﬁnition as a new state vis-à-vis the world community. Thus, whereas practicing sports on an international level was considered vital for improving the standard of local soccer and other games, the symbolic aspect of the Israeli presence abroad was also clearly noted.61 Israeli sports delegations were viewed as cultural ambassadors representing the Jewish state. As such, they brought pride not only to those at home but also to Jews in the various diaspora communities—not surprisingly, local Israeli diplomats were conspicuously involved in these events.62 In 1951, after the Hapo’el Tel Aviv soccer team returned home after participating in a series of matches in England, a spokesman for the team summarized the trip as a success, despite the team’s many losses. “No doubt Hapo’el players have rendered the state a good and useful service,” he noted, “better than hundreds of [ofﬁcial] envoys.”63 In a similar vein, when the Israeli envoy in Moscow was asked about the high cost of funding Israel’s participation in the 1952 volleyball championship, he replied that “the Red Army band played ‘Hatikvah’ twice . . . the Israeli ﬂag was twice raised in the Dynamo stadium, forty thousand Soviets stood to the sounds of ‘Hatikvah,’ and [Russian] Jews were moved. To sum up—it was worth it!”64 The symbolic national importance of participating in international sports was emphasized in the lead-up to the Olympic games held in Helsinki in 1952. In advance of the games, all members of the Israeli Olympic delegation were required to replace “foreign” names with Hebrew ones.65 As the games commenced, however, excited media coverage soon gave way to accounts expressing bitter disappointment with the Israeli athletes.66 Nehemiah Ben-Avraham, a locally famous sports reporter and radio commentator who accompanied the delegation, found this general discontent uncalled for. In his view, such a peevish reaction would be justiﬁed only if, four years hence, there was no overall improvement in the athletes’ performance.67 Nonetheless, Israeli sports journals harshly attacked the organization, management, and conduct of

Sports in the Young State of Israel

109

the Olympic delegation. As rumors about various athletes’ improper and undigniﬁed behavior began to circulate, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion established a special committee to investigate the delegation’s performance.68 Finding no proof of misconduct, the committee nevertheless found fault with the project’s organization and dwelt extensively on the need to promote sports in Israel.69 Israelis who had unrealistically expected world records and medals had to console themselves with the fact that at least their country had been ofﬁcially represented in the games.70 In addition to sending various delegations overseas, Israel regularly hosted sports teams from abroad. The local media covered these events in great detail, with large headlines and photographs,71 and the Israeli foreign ministry was involved in welcoming the foreign teams, whose visits were seen as a testimony to their countries’ recognition and support of the state of Israel.72 Even events that were professionally and aesthetically disappointing were deemed important “from the national-political angle.”73 Israelis were hypersensitive about the way in which their country was perceived by tourists and visitors, and visiting athletes’ favorable opinions were eagerly sought after.74 Since sports events were meant to display Israel at its best, leaving a bad impression on outsiders was considered a national disgrace.75 Complaints about poor conditions in sports facilities were often voiced by local spectators,76 but received an additional element of urgency during visits by foreigners.77 In 1950, a sports reporter claimed that lessons should be learned from international soccer matches: Hapo’el Tel Aviv’s stadium was too small, he wrote, the tickets too expensive, the seats uncomfortable. He suggested hiring more ushers and making sure they behaved politely toward spectators, “as beﬁts a civilized people.” In addition, he wrote, the games’ organizers “must show our guests that we, too, have order and discipline.”78 This desire to present Israel to outsiders as a model of decorum was as understandable as the image itself was manifestly untrue: order, discipline, and especially politeness were qualities often lacking in Israeli society.79 During the Mandate period there were open borders with neighboring Arab countries. Following independence, however, the new state became acutely isolated within its immediate surroundings. Israelis both experienced and described a “besieged” reality, a claustrophobic atmosphere that was exacerbated by administrative and economic constraints such as the need to get ofﬁcial exit permits for leaving the country and restrictions on the amount of foreign currency that could be taken out of Israel.80 Such obstacles only ampliﬁed Israelis’ “travel fever.”81 International sports played into this context both as a pretext for travel and as an opportunity for Israelis at home to hear about various foreign lands and cultures. In its coverage of athletic competitions held in Ankara in June 1952, a sports journal included topics such as “Israelis viewed by Turks, Turks viewed by Israelis,” and “What have we learned from the country of Ataturk?”82 In the course of reporting on sports events in Scandinavia in September 1955, a daily newspaper added an informative article about the lifestyles of local Jewish communities.83 Writing about Israel’s sports delegation in Hong Kong under the sensational headline “The Sabra Talked Chinese,” Ha’olam hazeh went into lurid details about an Israeli woman who had married a British subject and who subsequently became a leading socialite in Hong Kong.84 Some sports events provided the opportunity for rare glimpses into life behind the Iron Curtain,85 or even rarer encounters with Arab athletes.86 Sports could thus serve as a window to the great world lying beyond Israel’s narrow borders.87

110

Anat Helman

For athletes and sports ofﬁcials, sports events abroad were a real boon. Aside from the opportunity to travel, such events offered some culinary beneﬁts.88 Both the rationing regime of 1949–1951 (z.en’a) and the recession of 1952–1953 affected the amount and variety of local Israeli food.89 Extra rations were sometimes granted to athletes before an important local sporting event,90 but the depressingly monotonous fare was no match for the epicurean delights to be had outside of Israel. In one newspaper account of August 1951, Hapo’el players traveling to Liège were described as lusty eaters who were “very fond of the waiters. There is no z.en’a on board. Here meat and other dishes, attainable back home only in the black market, are served bountifully.”91 Basketball players traveling abroad also demonstrated great appetites and gained some weight during their trip,92 as did the volleyball players in Moscow (“Our lads did not suffer from the z.en’a”).93 The members of the 1952 Olympic delegation were invited to parties held in their honor by the local Jewish community, where wonderful dishes, served with no rationing or coupons, were “gorged” by sabra athletes with a typical lack of elegant table manners.94 Although the sabras’ appetite was a source of pride, as it was part and parcel of the image of the healthful new Israeli, overindulging in food and other entertainments while Israelis back home were experiencing rationing and economic austerity could be viewed as improper.95 General doubts about sending sports delegations abroad were raised as well, often sarcastically. What was it, exactly, that soccer players learned when they went overseas? According to one sportswriter at Sport yisrael, the players already knew how to miss a penalty kick, and in these days of z.en’a, such a “tuition fee” seemed much too high.96 In another article, the same journalist expressed his doubts as to whether a hastily organized boxing team should be sent to the United States, “although we wouldn’t wish, God forbid, to ‘rob’ eight boxers of their passports.”97 Are we so lacking in failures, asked another journalist at the paper, that we need to spend $1,000 sending our volleyball team to fail in Moscow? Such money should be spent on sports facilities at home, instead of surrendering to the pressure exerted by a bunch of youngsters who fancied traveling abroad.98 An article in Herut also objected to sending Israeli soccer and basketball teams abroad; it suggested ironically that the state send all of its citizens abroad at random, since they couldn’t perform any more miserably than the sports delegations.99 In 1955, Nehemiah Ben-Avraham claimed that the only reason for sending an oversized Israeli delegation to the upcoming Olympic games in Melbourne would be “the ardent and determined desire of a group of busybodies to visit Australia.”100 In the end, because of the Sinai Campaign, the Olympic delegation was reduced to a mere six athletes.101 As noted, Mandatory Palestine had open borders with the surrounding Arab countries. Before 1948, Palestinian sports teams, including those with Jewish athletes, played against competing Arab teams.102 After 1948, however, the Arab states included sports in their general anti-Israel political and economic boycott—a classic case of sports being used as a tool in international relations.103 Israel’s attitude toward sports in the 1950s reveals a continued ambivalence: on the one hand, Israel protested against its exclusion from international events; on the other, Israelis accentuated their cultural difference (and superiority) over the neighboring countries. Locally isolated, Israeli athletes were forced to travel elsewhere in order to ﬁnd alternative sports

Sports in the Young State of Israel

111

venues, further enlarging the gap between the young state’s eastern geographic location and its aspired-for western cultural identity. Interestingly, Sport yisrael reported very sympathetically on the ﬁrst Mediterranean Games in Alexandria in 1951, even though Israel had been excluded from play.104 In 1955, the Arab states increased their attempts to boycott Israeli sports, and Israel was excluded from the second Mediterranean Games in Barcelona.105 “Plotting Against Us Continues” announced H . adshot hasport, in reporting the decision to have the third Mediterranean Games take place in Beirut; this decision, the magazine added, excluded Israel once again and was a great victory for the Arab states in their attempt to isolate Israeli sports.106 In face of the Arab ban, Israel tried to achieve some form of regional sports integration via its non-Arab neighbors—Cypress, Greece, and Turkey.107 Yet while Israeli sports organizations were trying hard to integrate into European sports, the Foreign Ministry insisted on ﬁnding a way for the country to integrate into Asian sports, in spite of increasing, often successful, Arab sanctions and higher costs of travel. Such attempts, however, were somewhat successful: Israel began to participate in the Asian Games in 1954 and, two years later, the Asian soccer championship.108 In what was described as a rare opportunity to take a “ ‘peek’ beyond the sand curtain of Syria and Lebanon,” H . adshot hasport ran a feature on a soccer team from the Austrian town of Kapfenberg that toured the Middle East in 1956.109 Yet the occasion was also used for measuring Israel’s strength in comparison to its enemies, and when Kapfenberg’s players and managers all agreed that Israeli soccer was far better than the Arab version of the game, they were asked to explain “Israel’s superiority.” Kapfenberg’s coach responded that Arab soccer teams in Lebanon, Syria, and Libya depended on physical strength, whereas individual players were technically weak and teams lacked tactical skills. Even good Yugoslavian coaches could not implant proper techniques and attitude in Arab players. “The game played by Arab teams is primitive,” the coach concluded, adding that it lagged behind Israeli soccer, with its thoughtful players and more methodical teams.110 This account, though undoubtedly based on the Austrian coach’s comments, probably received its ﬁnal form at the hands of the Israeli reporter, since the choice of words mirrors prevailing Israeli notions about Arabs’ incurable primitiveness and reliance on force, in contrast to Israelis’ greater cleverness and rationality. The Israeli self-image as superior to its Levantine surroundings was also manifest when the American basketball virtuosos, the Harlem Globetrotters, visited the country in 1955. Israeli fans expected to behold the players’ glorious skills and were bitterly disappointed when the Globetrotters at ﬁrst concentrated on their comic routine. “It is a shame and a pity that our Negro guests tried to capture our enthusiasm and sympathy by assuming that the Oriental mentality in this geographical area requires emphasis on the circus aspect of their show, even here in Israel,” one reporter noted indignantly (in response to such criticisms, the team expanded the “serious basketball” part of the program).111 The assumption was that an inferior “Oriental mentality” in fact existed, but that Israel, albeit located geographically in the area, was an obvious exception. Hence, its basketball fans—discriminating connoisseurs—should have been treated differently. Most accounts of sporting events during the 1950s that pitted the United States against the Soviet Union were reported without bias toward either side.112 However,

112

Anat Helman

Israeli sports, like other ﬁelds of mass cultural consumption, were affected by American role models.113 In 1949, local basketball was boosted and considerably improved when an American Jew, the legendary coach Nat Holman (“Mr. Basketball”) visited Israel under the sponsorship of the U.S. State Department in order to develop basketball clinics.114 On a visit to Israel three years later, the renowned American Jewish athlete and coach Irving Mondschein trained local physical education teachers in addition to coaching the Israeli Olympic track and ﬁeld team.115 The increasing popularity of basketball and volleyball was not extended to baseball, which was practiced and watched solely by North American immigrants to Israel and employees at the American and Canadian consulates.116 But boxing, which formerly had a strongly European character, became increasingly associated with the American version of the sport.117 The American word “managers” was adopted in Hebrew (managerim) when referring to local boxing, and H . adshot hasport’s humor column was titled “KnockOut.”118 Detailed media coverage of American sports events elevated the popular image of the United States as the country of sports.119 Still, when the U.S. soccer team lost to the local Hapo’el Tel Aviv in 1951, Sport yisrael commented that “Uncle Sam would have been wiser to have sent athletes, basketball players, swimmers and even . . . dollars, instead of soccer players.”120 American inﬂuences notwithstanding, as long as soccer (known, of course, as “football”) remained Israel’s most popular spectator sport, European authority was maintained. Although the 30-year presence of British army and police teams in Palestine no doubt boosted local soccer, its popularity in the Yishuv did not stem from straightforward cultural emulation of the British.121 On the contrary, soccer’s appeal had to be (and was) strong enough to overcome the resistance within the Yishuv to adopting anything British.122 Although soccer was invented in Britain and English technical terms were used in the game, it had spread rapidly since the late 19th century and had emerged in the following century as the world’s most popular team sport.123 Jewish soccer players in Palestine were mostly inﬂuenced by the Continental, rather than British, style of play; as Amir Ben-Porat notes, the British based their play on the “long ball,” whereas Jewish teams preferred dribbling and short passes.124 Once the state of Israel had been established, soccer, for Israelis, was freed of its negative imperial associations. Despite some lingering mutual suspicion between Israel and Great Britain, citizens of the former country were now willing to acknowledge British inﬂuence on the game and to openly admire it.125 Technical English and distorted English terms remained in formal and popular use (“cup-ﬁnal,” “offside,” and “pendel”—a corrupted form of “penalty”—among others),126 local soccer coaches were known by English nicknames, and the English coach Jack Gibbons even trained the Israeli national team of 1956.127 However, despite soccer’s proletarian aura, Britain remained associated with an upper-class pretentiousness. Thus, when Lamerh.av, a leftwing newspaper, voiced its objection to founding a golf course in Caesarea, it wryly pictured the desired Israeli character as antithetical to that of the British: Do we want, it asked, strange people in checkered trousers who smoked pipes and strolled around with sticks in their hands? Do we want to nurture idleness and snobbery in Israel? What next? Introducing cricket or fox hunting on horseback?128 In sum, sports provided Israelis of the 1950s with an opening to the world. Yet this world was selectively constructed according to political forces, diplomatic dictates,

Sports in the Young State of Israel

113

economic constraints, and rooted cultural concepts. Israeli sports was oriented mostly westward.129 However, as we shall see, the most prominent sports event of the 1950s was connected with the U.S.S.R.

Fragmentation and Unity Since sports is part of a complex cultural system, it can function simultaneously on various—sometimes even contradictory—levels.130 This was the case in Israel of the 1950s, when sports mirrored and enhanced social and political divisions but at the same time functioned as a kind of national uniﬁer. The most noticeable divisive facet of Israeli sports was its partisan nature, an inheritance from the Yishuv era. Haim Kaufman describes how attempts to organize sports on a nonpartisan Zionist basis were thwarted by the politicization of sports clubs according to their founding or patronizing political factions:131 Maccabi became identiﬁed with the centrist factions (the “civil circles”), Hapo’el was originally founded by the socialist faction as a workers’ sports club, Betar was the Revisionists’ sports club, and Elizur the sports club of Hapoel Hamizrahi religious Zionists.132 Whereas European sports organization strongly reﬂected and fortiﬁed class distinctions,133 sports organization in the Yishuv was ﬁrst and foremost political, reﬂecting this immigrant community’s loose class structure, on the one hand, and its intense politicization, on the other.134 The founding of the state, its formal unifying policies, Ben-Gurion’s “statism,” and the establishment of centralized national sports institutions—none of these could eradicate earlier political afﬁliations. Furthermore, as state recognition and investment in sports increased, so, too, did political inﬁghting over budgets.135 Notwithstanding a cooperative agreement that was signed in 1948, the hostility between the Maccabi and Hapo’el sports clubs hampered their cooperation in practice. By 1951, matters had come to such a pass that the two clubs attempted to establish two separate national Olympic Committees. Only when faced with the threat of not being allowed to participate in the Helsinki games did Hapo’el and Maccabi ﬁnally overcome their differences. Their agreement became known as the “ﬁfty-ﬁfty” deal, according to which Maccabi and Hapo’el would have equal representation in the Sports Association, the National Olympic Committee, and in all future national sports institutions.136 Betar and Elizur were not included in the deal, and Betar, frequently protesting this discrimination, compared its exclusion from sports to what it regarded as the exclusion of the Herut party from the political sphere.137 In a memoir about his childhood as a soccer fan in Jerusalem of the 1950s, Haim Baram depicts sports partisanship in Israel’s capital. His father, the chair of the Jerusalem Workers’ Council, wrongly believed that soccer players in Hapo’el were devoted socialists like himself (in fact, whereas fans were vehemently hostile toward rival teams, the players were usually politically neutral and on friendly terms with one another).138 Moshe Baram regarded Hapo’el matches against Betar as part of the overall socialist struggle against fascism in Jerusalem. Naturally, Haim and his brothers were staunch supporters of Hapo’el. Although most children were not interested in ideological issues per se, they were strongly afﬁliated to Israeli

114

Anat Helman

political-cultural “tribes” according to their parents’ party membership, the schools they attended, their youth movements, and the newspapers they read. Soccer afﬁliation was an inseparable part of this sharply drawn political culture: left-wingers supported Hapo’el and right-wingers supported Betar.139 Shlomo Reznik also notes the political aspect of Jerusalem soccer rivalry. Most Betar fans, he writes, were Sephardim from the city’s poorer neighborhoods, people of low socioeconomic status who supported the Herut party and its leader, Menachem Begin, and who attributed their party’s underdog status to plotting by the ruling Mapai party.140 Thus, the partisan nature of soccer in Jerusalem of the 1950s probably had less to do with ideological afﬁliation than with ethnic and social issues. Baram describes Betar fans as “cast-offs of the establishment” (nidh.ei hamimsad) whose hatred was directed against the ruling Ashkenazic power structure.141 Occasional violence was not absent from soccer stadiums even in the Yishuv era.142 By the 1950s, Betar Jerusalem soccer fans had acquired a reputation both for intimidating players, linesmen, and judges, and for terrorizing rival fans.143 According to Elias and Dunning, modern sports is based on a balance between several polarities, including that between the enjoyment of aggression by individual players and the curb imposed upon such enjoyment by written and unwritten rules. Modern sports gradually reduced and strictly limited the amount of allowed violence within a game. Permanent agreed-upon rules must be respected and maintained at all times, the passion to win notwithstanding. The pleasure of sports stems from the excitement evoked by vigorous yet nonviolent physical conﬂict. Sports allows ordinarily suppressed feelings to be experienced, but these are checked by constant self-control and are vented without seriously endangering oneself, the other, or society. Sports violence is therefore a regressive deviance and clear distortion of modern sports’ basic assumptions and structure. Elias and Dunning interpret sports hooliganism as being practiced by “outsiders” in the social world who are remote from the institutional or social mechanisms that inculcate individual self-control. Through exclusion or marginalization, these people have not internalized the necessary control over aggression, and even regard violence as a positive value.144 Baram claims that Betar fans of the 1950s considered victories by rival teams, especially in their Jerusalem home stadium, to be “illegitimate” and as justifying the use of violence. In a game held in 1955, the fans bombarded a rival goalkeeper with stones until one of the Betar players, Asher Berenblum (a renowned local athlete and a devoted Revisionist), admonished them. After a short embarrassed silence, one of the fans shouted back: “Asher, don’t you be a gentleman at our expense!” Berenblum retreated, and the stone-throwing was resumed.145 This incident demonstrates the existence of incompatible views regarding proper behavior in the soccer stadium and, more fundamentally, abiding by the rules versus giving way to violence. Elias and Dunning’s explanation of sports hooliganism sheds new light on the issue by associating the violent behavior in Israeli sports of the 1950s not so much with ideological doctrines as with social marginalization. Sports both reﬂected and accentuated other divisions within Israeli society, such as those between Israeli Jews and Arabs;146 Orthodox Jews and the secular majority;147 residents of the coastal plain and those in peripheral settlements;148 and men and women.149 In Israel’s immigrant society, and despite an ofﬁcial “melting pot” policy,

Sports in the Young State of Israel

115

sports also retained particular ethnic identities.150 Greek immigrants ﬂocked to listen, as a collective, to the radio broadcast of the Israel-Greece soccer match of 1953,151 and the boxer David Elbaz was dubbed the “idol of the North African immigrants.”152 Certain sports were practiced and watched solely by immigrants from speciﬁc countries. South Africans, for instance, brought with them unique sports traditions such as rugby and lawn bowls.153 They also played cricket. A sportswriter reporting on this “Anglo-Saxon game in Israel” in 1955 was decidedly unenthusiastic. He accurately predicted that cricket would never appeal to Israeli crowds, quoting the taxi driver who was present at the match: “Such a cold game—just like the English.” Israelis, the sportswriter added, were used to “hotter” sports and were therefore unlikely to take to this “gentlemen’s sport.” Moreover, a referee’s ruling in cricket was decisive and uncontested—an unheard of idea.154 Six years after independence, the dominant Israeli “mentality” was sufﬁciently consolidated to consider such sports un-Israeli, suitable only for “Anglo-Saxon” minorities.155 In this regard, it is interesting to note that when a late 19th-century story set in a British public school was translated into Hebrew in 1953, the track and boat races were fully described but details regarding a cricket match were entirely omitted, indicating the translator’s sensibility that the local young readers neither knew nor cared about this particular sport.156 Yet sports in an immigrant society can also serve as a common denominator, a form of acculturation and a route to social mobility.157 The physical education department of the Ministry of Education and Culture declared that “rehabilitating the immigrants, that is, restoring their health, productivity, and normal social life”158 was one of its most important roles, indicating how longtime Israelis generally viewed newcomers as unhealthful, unproductive, and antisocial.159 The integrative role of sports was apparent when ﬁve basketball players, new immigrants from Egypt, “quickly assimilated” among the sabra members of Hapo’el’s delegation.160 Sabra youths who volunteered to work in an immigrant camp in 1949 encountered a group of uncooperative young Moroccan men who remained inactive and indifferent until “sports and soccer were mentioned,” at which time they were suddenly mobilized to spend four days enthusiastically weeding and clearing land in order to prepare a local soccer ﬁeld.161 One year later, in the midst of general poverty and misery, children in a squalid immigrant camp had a rare joyous experience when their teacher acceded to their request and took them to a nearby basketball ground. Local native schoolchildren came along and played with the new immigrants: “The children were so amicable I could hardly believe my eyes,” related their teacher. “They engaged in brisk and lively conversation conducted in the immigrant children’s broken Hebrew and the sabras’ idiomatic Hebrew.”162 Sports could momentarily connect natives and newcomers across the prevailing socioeconomic, linguistic, and cultural rift. In a young state trying to consolidate and clarify its national identity and to overcome ethnic and political fragmentation, sports was intentionally employed as a uniﬁer. Pierre Arnaud distinguishes between sports’ representation of states and nations.163 We have already encountered sports’ role in the external representation of Israel as a state (athletes chosen by their government as “ambassadors” to represent the political regime);164 yet it was also a focus of popular national identiﬁcation—that is, through its national representatives, sports helped generate internal

116

Anat Helman

solidarity. Nations are enshrined in sports via ﬂags, anthems, and the national colors of a team’s uniform, but even more so, as Martin Polley writes, in popular imagination, where a national team can take on the guise of the nation itself, symbolizing unity and strength.165 Matti Goksøyr notes that modern sports became a compelling form of national popular culture once people began to follow “our” representatives and to witness matches between “us” and “them” (whether on the spot or by means of radio or, later, television). By creating a new form of “experienced community,” it “gave the sometimes elusive concept of national identity a new dimension.”166 Sports was woven into the fabric of Israeli annual holidays. This was partly because of practical considerations—both parents and children were off on holidays, and sports activities added to the general appeal of holiday events. Beyond this, sports was linked to the history, customs, or folklore of speciﬁc holidays.167 The new and modern holiday celebrating the state’s existence and its prowess—Independence Day—included various sports events,168 and holidays that had religious Jewish origins could also be tied to a more modern, civic form of celebration via sports. Hanukkah is a salient example: whereas the original holiday celebrated the deliverance of the Jews by means of a divine miracle, the Zionist version attributed the historic Hebrew victory over the Hellenists to the heroic deeds of the Maccabees (Hasmoneans).169 Since 1944, the Maccabi sports club, named after the Maccabees, had conducted a torch race beginning in Modi’in, the Macabbees’ hometown and the site where the Hasmonean revolt broke out.170 In 1949, Betar’s sports journal covered “this sporting-national race” with particular emotion, since the race that year was to culminate in the lighting of a menorah at the Knesset (located at the time in Tel Aviv). The torch was “brought from the graves of the Hasmoneans, liberators of the homeland and puriﬁers of the temple; and with it came the command never to surrender the temple, never to forsake our holy city—our eternal capital, Jerusalem.”171 This text ties the ancient Hasmonean military victory to Israel’s recent victory in the War of Independence (also known in Hebrew as the “war of liberation”) while at the same time expressing Betar’s ﬁrm stand on Jerusalem’s status as Israel’s eternal capital. The sporting activity serves as a ceremonial link, drawing a geographic line from Modi’in to Jerusalem as well as a historic one from 168 BCE to 1949 CE. In the following year, the Hanukah torch race was integrated into the opening ceremony of the Maccabiah Games. Although the games were referred to as “the Jewish Olympics,” the Olympic origin of torch lighting was not mentioned. Instead, a daily newspaper declared that the torch was a bridge to “our people’s great history.” The torch, symbolizing the ﬁre of bravery in the hearts of the ﬁrst Maccabees in Modi’in, was used to light a memorial ﬂame that was dedicated both to the millions of Jews slaughtered during the Holocaust and to “the dear lads who fell in the War of Independence.” Breaking through the “clouds of the gloomy past,” the memorial torch united Israelis in its new, strong, healthy, and optimistic prayer.172 Thus sports assumed a redeeming national quality that went above and beyond its unifying mission. The Maccabi and Betar sports clubs always boasted of their national character, and even in Hapo’el, supposedly a socialist sports club for the workers, a national tendency was manifest.173 This, despite the fact that sports’ nationalizing function contradicts the Marxist notion of a universal class-based categorization. Marxist

Sports in the Young State of Israel

117

scholars have traditionally seen sports as a mechanism for ensuring state domination by providing distracting spectacles, enlisting and militarizing young people, enhancing hierarchic and authoritative values, stabilizing society, and pacifying the working classes.174 The negative approach toward national sports, as toward nationalism in general, is not limited to Marxist scholars. While various collective identities (sexual, ethnic, class-based) are frequently hailed as authentic and legitimate, national identities are often categorically condemned as both artiﬁcial and destructive.175 However, nationalism is not inherently or unavoidably destructive; nor is it entirely artiﬁcial.176 Moreover, while it is true that nationalism can lead to positive in-group and negative out-group stereotyping and violent ethnocentrism, so too can any kind of human grouping.177 Some scholars associate national sports with “a certain malaise in respect of foreign nations,” and view it as nothing but the exacerbation of chauvinism and xenophobia.178 Indeed, as J.A. Mangan notes, sports became an important part of Fascist socialization: “Sport develops muscle and muscle is equated with power—literally and metaphorically. War, the essence of Fascism, demands physical ﬁtness and sport helps promote this ﬁtness.”179 Nevertheless, an attitude equating any national sports with chauvinism does not make ample allowance for diversity, since the intensity and nature of the national component in sports can vary considerably.180 Violence in sports, as we have seen, is not necessarily linked to nationalism or aimed at national rivals. A negative interpretation of national sports assumes that nationalism, chauvinism, and xenophobia are inevitably conjoined, but it may just as readily be argued that modern sports can also promote a more benign version of nationalism. Whereas traditional sports were tied to the speciﬁc community and reﬂected its social order, modern sports are autonomous: they are separated from the social order and neutralize it by assuring equal and binding rules for all participants. Sports were played in the past according to vague local conventions, but modern sports are regulated by clearly formulated rules and speciﬁed formal codes, set by experts, that enable their universal practice. Although national, racial, social, religious, and other tensions may be reﬂected in the game, its autonomy and regularity are the basic conditions for its existence.181 Equality is one of modern sports’ main principles, and therefore any exclusion “is clearly an anomaly within the structure of modern sports.”182 International sports demand that all participants abide by the same rules, thus assuming a fundamental equality between playing nations. While one may prefer and support one’s national team, one must also acknowledge the fair chances of the rival national team. Chauvinism sharply deviates from modern sports’ original structure and intent. To be sure, manifestations of violence, chauvinism, and racism among fans (and some athletes) are common.183 Yet these should not be regarded as an inherent, predetermined aspect of modern sports, but rather as their downright abuse. The paramount athletic event of Israel’s ﬁrst years is a striking example of sports’ potential for evoking a non-chauvinist mode of national unity—namely, a positive feeling of “in-group” sentiment without any accompanying negative feeling for the “out group.” In 1956, as part of the run-up to the Melbourne Olympics, Israel’s national soccer team was to play against the U.S.S.R.184 Although the Soviet Union had supported the establishment of a Jewish state, the relationship between the two

118

Anat Helman

countries had soon deteriorated, and in 1953, Moscow severed diplomatic relations.185 Formal ties were renewed after Stalin’s death later that year but remained volatile and hesitant. The ﬁrst months of 1956 saw a certain improvement in the Soviet attitude toward Israel,186 and the forthcoming soccer matches were played in the context of this détente.187 Playing against the “Soviet giant” evoked a wave of national fervor among Israelis. However, this national uniﬁcation around a representative sports team was combined with respect for the rival national team and renewed public interest in the country it represented. Russia already held a special, though informal, status in Israel. Zionist pioneering was strongly associated with immigrants from Russia, and even after Russian Jews became a numerical minority within the various ’aliyot, they were disproportionately represented among the Zionist leadership. In addition, the Russian language and culture signiﬁcantly inﬂuenced Zionist socialist ideology, modern Hebrew language and literature, “folk songs,” and, in the 1950s, visual art as well. Only a minority supported the Soviet Union politically, and many objected to its foreign policy and domestic dictatorship. Still, among left-wing Israelis there was lingering admiration for Soviet bravery and gratitude both for the Red Army’s rescue of Jews from pogroms during the Russian civil war and later, for its role in liberating Jews from Nazi camps at the end of the Second World War.188 This strong albeit complex “Russian connection” probably intensiﬁed interest in the forthcoming event. Before the ﬁrst match in Moscow, the sportswriter Nehemiah Ben-Avraham called upon Israeli players to use their “secret weapon” – “the Israeli spirit”—on the Dynamo stadium playing ﬁeld. Although this quality was abstract and elusive, he wrote, such an Israeli spirit does exist, allowing for occasional sports victories against all odds.189 Such spirit was certainly evident in Israel, where the ﬁrst match turned into a national event: the streets were vacant, stores were shut, and movie attendance plummeted, as even those who had never before taken any interest in sports ﬂocked around radio sets in private houses and cafés to listen to the broadcast from Moscow. H . adshot hasport claimed that the Israeli broadcasting service had not drawn such an audience since May 1948, when it had proclaimed Israel’s independence.190 Losing only 5–0 to the formidable Russian team in Moscow was considered a “digniﬁed defeat.” Israelis fully acknowledged Russian superiority, such that their national pride did not depend on a victory—it was enough to perform well.191 Excitement mounted when the Russian team arrived at Israel for the return match. The Russian players were entertained lavishly according to Israeli standards of the 1950s, and they were described by the local media in admiring detail. The match itself, held on July 31, 1956, turned into a festive national holiday. Israelis stopped working at noon, and those who were not lucky enough to be included among the 60,000 spectators listened to the match on the radio. When Israel scored a goal, bringing the score to 1–1, the crowd went into ecstasy. The fact that the game ended in a 2–1 victory for the U.S.S.R. did not in the least diminish the local joy.192 The match was described in euphoric terms. According to one account, the game pitted “[t]wo hundred million Russians against two million Israelis, struggling on the ﬁeld for ninety minutes of a brilliant game.”193 In the words of another report: “As the stadium was gradually vacated, a grand day was written into history.”194 In the usual course of things, Israelis tended to arrive late to movies, not caring whether

Sports in the Young State of Israel

119

they missed the local newsreels shown before the featured ﬁlm; in early August 1956, however, it was noted that cinema houses were packed with viewers when the newsreels included the Israel-U.S.S.R. match—“this time no one was late!”195 Israelis from almost all sectors felt united around this central sporting event. National pride stemmed from the fact that an Israeli team had managed to penetrate the invincible Russian goal.196 At the same time, no hostility or aggression was expressed toward the rival team or the state it represented. On the contrary, Israel’s achievement was actually fortiﬁed by the deference shown towards its rival’s strength. The tolerant aspect of the occasion was visually expressed in the entrance ticket to the match. On its back was a drawing of two similar-looking players, smiling and shaking hands,197 visibly manifesting ideals of fair play, equality, and sporting friendship beyond national borders. To be sure, Israel’s soccer match versus Russia in 1956 was an exceptional occasion—its diplomatic effect was totally marginalized a couple of months later, when the Sinai Campaign brought about a new and harsher crisis in Israel’s relations with the Soviet superpower. Yet this uncommon affair epitomizes sports’ potential for being both exhilarating and amiable. It illustrates how pride in one’s country does not automatically entail chauvinistic malevolence toward other countries. Rather, when the rules of modern sports are not transgressed, international athletic events can festively unite a nation while at the same time connecting it, on equal grounds, with others.

Notes This article is part of an ongoing research project on popular culture in Israel of the 1950s, supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 032.2321). I would like to thank my research assistants, Erez Hacker, Arik Moran, and Shira Meyerson, for their invaluable help. 1. “Pelota Vasca,” or “Basque ball,” later developed into the game known as “cesta punta,” or jai alai. 2. Maariv (4 Dec. 1949), 4. 3. See, for instance, advertisements in Beterem (Feb. 1949), 51; Gazit (Nov.–Dec. 1949), 60; Maariv (21 June 1950), 3; ibid. (14 July 1955), 4; Zemanim (24 Dec. 1953), 1; ibid. (12 July 1954), 4; H . erut (6 Jan. 1956), 7. 4. See, for instance, Ellis Cashmore, Making Sense of Sports (London: 1998), 94; Grant Jarvie and Joseph Maguire, Sport and Leisure in Social Thought (London: 1994), 55–56, 95– 96, 113, 124–125, 135–144; Joan Chandler, “Sport is Not a Religion,” in Sport and Religion, ed. Shirl J. Hoffman (Champaign, Il.: 1992), 55–61. 5. Douglas Booth, “The Consecration of Sport: Idealism in Social Science Theory,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 10, no. 1 (1993), 16. 6. See the following articles in Haim Kaufman and Hagai Harif (eds.), Tarbut haguf beyisrael bameah ha’esrim (Jerusalem: 2002): Mordechai Naor, “ ‘Mish.akei Reh.ovot’, 1908–1914” (pp. 81–88); Yehuda Gabai, “Hitpath.ut hakaduregel beyisrael” (pp. 191–196); Uriel Zamri, “Darko shel hakadursal lema’amad hasport hayiz. ugi mispar ah.at shel yisrael” (pp. 210–211); Uri Goldbourt, “Toledot haatletikah bitkufat hayishuv uvimdinat yisrael” (pp. 223–229); Uri Yaron and David Sivor, “Kavei yesod letoledot sport hamayim beyisrael” (pp. 256–262); Amichai Alperovich, “Yisrael vehatenu’ah haolimpit: lo rak sport” (pp. 302–304); Roni Darom, “Sport hanashim beyisrael” (pp. 418–419). 7. Michael Bar-Eli and Uriel Zamri, “Hamediniyut hamamlakhtit bith.um hasport beyisrael,” in ibid., 282–283. On increasing state intervention in sports, see Martin Polley, Moving the Goalposts: A History of Sport and Society since 1945 (London: 1998), 20, 29.

120

Anat Helman

8. Gabai, “Hitpath.ut hakaduregel beyisrael,” 197–198; Alperovich, “Yisrael vehatenu’ah haolimpit,” 305–306; Zamri, “Darko shel hakadursal,” 211; Yaron and Sivor, “Kavei yesod letoledot sport hamayim beyisrael,” 263; Amir Ben-Porat, Kaduregel uleumiyut (Tel Aviv: 2003), 74. 9. Pierre Bourdieu, “How Can One Be a Sports Fan?,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London: 1993), 343–344. 10. Max Nordau, “Yahadut hasheririm,” in idem, Max Nordau el ’amo: ketavim mediniyim (Tel Aviv: 1936), 169–178. 11. Naor, “ ‘Mish.akei Reh.ovot’,” 85; Gideon Reuveni, “Sport and the Militarization of Jewish Society,” in Emancipation through Muscles: Jews and Sports in Europe, ed. Michael Brenner and Gideon Reuveni (Lincoln, Neb.: 2006), 44–61. 12. See Oz Almog, Haz.abar – dyokan (Tel Aviv: 1997), 111–118, 226–242. 13. A reference to Wadi Musrara near Tel Aviv, now known as the Ayalon river. 14. Sport la’am (30 Dec. 1951), 3. 15. Almog, Haz.abar, 359–376. 16. Bourdieu, “How Can One Be a Sports Fan?,” 344. See also J.A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: The Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology (Cambridge: 1981), 106–110. 17. See, for example, Sport la’am (29 June 1952), 3; H . adshot hasport (17 Aug. 1955), 3. 18. ’Al hamishmar (16 Aug. 1951), 2. 19. Tamar Katriel, Milot mafteah.: defusei tarbut vetikshoret beyisrael (Haifa: 1999), 209–210. 20. Almog, Haz.abar, 334–338. 21. Yehuda Gabai, “Hitpath.ut hakaduregel beyisrael,” 205. 22. Rimon (15 Aug. 1956); see also Zamri, “Darko shel hakadursal,” 212–214; Yair Galili, “Playing Hoops in Palestine: The Early Development of Basketball in the Land of Israel, 1935– 1956,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 20, no. 1 (2003), 144–145, 149. 23. H . adshot hasport (9 Oct. 1955), 2. 24. The popularity of basketball is apparent in numerous visual images of the time; see, for instance, photo of a basketball match in Magdiel, June 1951, Central Zionist Archives (CZA), photo no. 1329823; Youth Aliyah poster, 1953, General Zionist Archive, KRA 203; Tevel (22 April 1954), 16; photo by Fritz Cohen showing basketball practice at Tira secondary school, 5 Oct. 1955, The National Photograph Collection (http://www.gpo.gov.il) (henceforth: NPC), photo no. D472–038. On basketball teams in prison, see Maz.pen (3 Nov. 1954) 5, 11. See also the newsreel showing a basketball match in Ramat Gan in October 1954— Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive (henceforth: SJFA), Geva newsreels, VT GE 07. 25. Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, The Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (Oxford: 1986), 49; Dunning, Sport Matters: Sociological Studies of Sport, Violence and Civilization (London: 1999), 77–79, 104–105. 26. Elias and Dunning, Quest for Excitement, 23. 27. Richard Holt, “Contrasting Nationalisms: Sport, Militarism and the Unitary State in Britain and France before 1914,” in Tribal Identities: Nationalism, Europe, Sport, ed. J.A. Mangan (London: 1996), 42. 28. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: 1985), 101. 29. David L. Hoffmann, “Bodies of Knowledge: Physical Culture and the New Soviet Man,” in Language and Revolution: Making Modern Political Identities, ed. Igal Halﬁn (London: 2002), 283, 279–281. 30. See Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak, Mez.ukot beutopyah: yisrael – h.evrah be’omes yeter (Tel Aviv: 1990), 241. 31. Zemanim (27 Sept. 1954), 3. 32. Hasport haleumi (7 Aug. 1949), 1. 33. Protocol of the committee investigating the performance of the Israeli delegation to the 15th Olympic Games in Helsinki (henceforth: “Israeli Olympic delegation protocol”), 15 Sept. 1952, Israel State Archives (henceforth: ISA), 47/c-5548/4 (p. 5).

Sports in the Young State of Israel

121

34. Bar-Eli and Zamri, “Hamediniyut hamamlakhtit,” 287. 35. Ze’ev Drori, “Utopia in Uniform,” in Israel: The First Decade of Independence, ed. S. Ilan Troen and Noah Lucas (New York: 1995), 609–610. 36. See, for example, Bamah.aneh (1 Sept. 1949), 3; Yedioth Ahronoth (15 Jan. 1950); Israeli Olympic delegation protocol (16 Oct. 1952), ISA, 47/c-5548/4 (pp. 1–7). See also BenPorat, Kaduregel uleumiyut, 83–85; idem, “Nation Building, Soccer and the Military in Israel,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 17, no. 4 (2000), 123–140; Hillel Raskin, “Hasport ha’amami beyisrael,” 406; sports day in the air force (November 1951) and in the artillery force (April 1954), SJFA, Geva newsreels, VT GE 03 and VT GE 05. 37. Hasport haleumi (7 Aug. 1948), 1; poster showing a bicycle race, 7 Dec. 1950, The National Library Poster Collection (hereafter: NLPC), V1985–8(18); newsreels of motorcycle race commemorating Shu’alei Shimshon (“Samson’s Foxes”), a jeep unit in the War of Independence (1951), and the annual foot race on Mt. Tabor in memory of Yitzhak Sadeh (December 1954), SFJA, Geva newsreels, VT GE 03 and VT GE 07. See also Yaron and Sivor, “Kavei yesod letoledot sport hamayim beyisrael,” 263. 38. See Israel Paz, “Hasport ba’itonut haketuvah beerez. yisrael uvimdinat yisrael,” in Kaufman and Harif (eds.), Tarbut haguf beyisrael bameah ha’esrim, 353–354. 39. H . adshot hasport (15 Sept. 1955), 2; Ben-Porat, Kaduregel uleumiyut, 83. 40. See, for instance, Hasport haleumi (17 July 1949), 2; see also Horowitz and Lissak, Mez. ukot beutopyah, 250. 41. Ha’olam hazeh (8 April 1954), 16–17; ibid. (21 June 1956), 15; H . adshot hasport (9 Dec. 1954), 2. 42. Hasport haleumi (21 Aug. 1949); ibid. (28 Aug. 1949); ibid. (4 Sept. 1949); Sport la’am (21 Oct. 1951), 6; ibid. (18 Nov. 1951), 5; ibid. (9 Dec. 1951), 2; Israeli Olympic delegation protocol (6 Dec. 1952), ISA 47/ c-5548/3. 43. Maariv (17 July 1950); Sport la’am (17 April 1952); ibid. (20 April 1952); H . adshot hasport (17 Aug. 1955), 3; see also Devar hapo’elet 15, nos. 8–9 (1949), 205; Raskin, “Hasport ha’amami beyisrael,” 405. 44. Smol – shavu’a tov! (13 March 1955), 2; caricature by Zeev, Devar hashavu’a (24 May 1956), 2. 45. H . erut (12 March 1954), 2. 46. Ha’olam hazeh (18 Feb. 1954), 3–5; Amnon Dankner and David Tratkover, Eifo hayinu umah ’asinu (Jerusalem: 1996), 42, 79, 130; Almog, Haz.abar, 328–332. 47. Anat Helman, “Zionism, Politics, Hedonism: Sports in Inter-War Tel-Aviv,” in Jews, Sports and the Rites of Citizenship, ed. Jack Kugelmass (Urbana: 2007), 95–113. 48. See, for example, the 1951 election posters of Herut and the General Zionists, NLPC, V2156/7 and V2156/2(13); see also Ha’olam hazeh (22 March 1956), 16. 49. See, for example, Yedioth Ahronoth (1 April 1949); Alonekh, no. 2 (Oct. 1950), 1; Devar hashavu’a (17 July 1952), 4; Haz.ofeh (19 Jan. 1954), 2. 50. See Rafael Halperin poster, Sept. 1949, NLPC, V1970/5(26); H . adshot hasport (24 Oct. 1956), 2; Rimon (24 Oct. 1956). Halperin came from a religious background and later became a rabbi and owner of a chain of optics stores. 51. Hasport haleumi (18 April 1949), 2. 52. “Shimshon” poster, 1949, NLPC, V1985/8(18); Yedioth Ahronoth (1 Jan. 1950), 1. 53. Yedioth Ahronot (4 April 1950), 1; Sport yisrael (25 Nov. 1951), 1; Shimshon club members exercising on the seashore, September 1951, SJFA, Geva newsreels, VT GE 03; Devar hashavu’a (19 June 1952), back cover; Ha’olam hazeh (30 April 1953), 15; Frontpage (17 June 1954), 17. 54. See Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life, 1860–1914 (Manchester: 1999), 245. 55. Ha’olam hazeh (27 April 1955), 15; Lagever (20 Jan. 1954), 4–5; Kolno’a (27 May 1954), 15. 56. Bamah.aneh (13 April 1950), 13. 57. Dagesh (13 July 1950), 31–35; ibid. (9 Aug. 1950), 31–34; Ha’olam hazeh (9 April 1953), 6–9; H . adshot hasport (4 Dec. 1955), 3; Rimon (5 Sept. 1956), 7.

122

Anat Helman

58. Sport yisrael (25 Nov. 1951), 4. 59. Letter from A. Hermann to D. Yosef (25 Dec. 1949), ISA, 47/c-200/33; Maariv (24 Nov. 1950), 4; Devar hashavu’a (2 Aug. 1952), 2; Davar (28 April 1955), 1; ﬁlm star Danny Kaye arriving at Lydda airport, 1 April 1956, NPC, photo no. D783–047. 60. Pierre Arnaud, “Sport—A Means of National Representation,” in Sport and International Politics: The Impact of Fascism and Communism on Sport, ed. Pierre Arnaud and James Riordan (London: 1998), 5. 61. On improving the level of local games, see, for example, Sport la’am (30 Dec. 1951), 5; on the symbolic aspect, see Hagai Harif, “ ‘H.ashuv sheanu nakeh bagoyim’: hamashma’uyot haleumiyot shel mish.akei hakaduregel bein nivh.arot yisrael uverit hamo’az. ot, kayiz. 1956,” Cathedra 109 (2003), 111–112. 62. See, for example, Devar hashavu’a (13 Sept. 1951), 12–13. Sports events could initiate new ties or cement existing ones with Jewish communities. See, for example, Sport la’am (30 March 1952), 5; Davar (8 July 1955), 7; report on soccer team’s visit to the Soviet Union (1956), ISA, 47/c-5548/1. See also Gabai, “Hitpath.ut hakaduregel beyisrael,” 200; Zamri, “Darko shel hakadursal,” 212–213; Ben-Porat, Kaduregel uleumiyut, 79–83; Harif, “ ‘H.ashuv sheanu nakeh bagoyim’,” 122–124. 63. Sport yisrael (14 Oct. 1951), 2. 64. Sport la’am (14 Sept. 1952), 2. 65. Sport la’am (20 April 1952), 6. Name changing into Hebrew was compulsory for state ofﬁcials and army commanders. See Ruth Bondy, “Ma heriz. et shinui hashemot bereshitah shel medinat yisrael?,” Gesher 144 (2002), 73–82. On Israel’s participation in the Olympics, see Alperovich, “Yisrael vehatenu’ah haolimpit,” 305–307; Goldbourt, “Toledot haatletikah,” 231. 66. Devar hashavu’a (14 Feb. 1952), 12; Sport la’am (30 March 1952), 5; ibid. (27 April 1952), 3; ibid. (29 June 1952), 3; ibid. (23 July 1952) 2; Sport yisrael (15 June 1952), 1; ibid. (27 July 1952), 2; ibid. (24 Aug. 1952), 2; ibid. (18 Sept. 1952), 3. See also Paz, “Hasport ba’itonut haketuvah,” 348. On the tendency of the Zionist press to ﬂuctuate “between an exaggerated optimism on the one hand and pessimism and depression on the other,” see Nahum Sokolow quoted by Gideon Koutz, “Zionism and the Jewish Press: Between Propaganda and ‘Objective Journalism’,” in Propaganda in the 20th Century: Contributions to Its History, ed. Jurgen Wilke (Cresskill, N.J.: 1998), 105. 67. Sport yisrael (24 Aug. 1952), 2; see also Haim Kaufman, “ ‘Ha’am roim et hakolot’, Neh.emya Ben-Avraham (1921–1979),” Qesher 20 (1996), 87–92. 68. Israeli Olympic delegation protocol (Sept.-Oct. 1952), ISA, 47/c-5548/4. 69. Israeli Olympic delegation protocol (6 Dec. 1952), ISA, 47/ c-5548/3. 70. Photographs in Sport la’am (3 Aug. 1952), front page; also see Hah.inukh hagufani (July-Sept. 1952), 1, 11. 71. Hasport haleumi (12 Feb. 1950), 1; poster of Betar Tel Aviv-Bern match, June 1951, NLPC, V1985–8(18); Dundee soccer team signing autographs in Magdiel, summer 1951, CZA photo no. 1402526; advertisement for Maccabi Tel Aviv-Djurgarden in Haaretz (9 Nov. 1951), 7; Ha’olam hazeh (25 May 1955), 16–17. On international matches in local newsreels, see Yedi’ot hitah.adut ba’alei hakolno’a beyisrael (2 May 1954), 13; Dundee-Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer match (1951) and Lazio Roma-(joint team of) Hapo’el and Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer match (June 1954), SFJA, Geva newsreels, VT GE 02 and VT GE 06. 72. Sport yisrael (27 Jan. 1952), 3; ibid. (15 June 1952), 1; ibid. (22 June 1952), 6; Ha’olam hazeh (3 May 1956), 12. Conversely, cancellations were also regarded as a political statement—see protocol of Jerusalem municipal council (21 Oct. 1956), Jerusalem Municipal Archive, 1751/16. 73. Sport yisrael (21 Oct. 1951), 2. 74. Sport yisrael (27 Jan. 1952) 3; H . adshot hasport (26 Feb. 1956), 5. 75. See, for instance, Sport la’am (9 Dec. 1951), 2. 76. See, for instance Hasport haleumi (12 Feb. 1950), 1. 77. See, for instance, Sport la’am (9 Dec. 1951), 2; see also Kibbutz Hamadyah bulletin (22 Jan. 1954), the Jewish National and University Library (Jerusalem).

Sports in the Young State of Israel

123

78. Hasport haleumi (29 Jan. 1950), 2. 79. In fact, to some extent, impoliteness was encouraged in the Israeli sabra subculture (see Almog, Haz.abar, 332–334). During this period, such rudeness was emerging as an Israeli deﬁning trait; see, for example, Jerusalem Post (12 Dec. 1952), 2; Yedi’ot hitah.adut ba’alei hakolno’a beyisrael (18 Aug. 1953) 25. For an account of spectators’ verbal rudeness during an international match, see Maariv (5 Feb. 1950), 3. 80. See, for instance, Yosef Klausner, Habedidut shel medinat (Tel Aviv: 1956). See also Mordechai Bar-On, “Habith.onizm umevakerav: 1949–1967,” in Etgar haribonut: yez.irah vehagut ba’asor harishon lamedinah, ed. Mordechai Bar-On (Jerusalem: 1999), 71, 89–91. On economic and administrative constraints, see Jerusalem Post (15 Dec. 1949), 4; Haz.ofeh (24 Jan. 1950), 2. 81. Maariv (29 Nov. 1950), 4; Ha’olam hazeh (10 June 1954), 10–11. 82. Sport la’am (29 June 1952), 3. 83. Davar (14 Sept. 1955), 5. 84. Ha’olam hazeh (26 Sept. 1956), 10–11. 85. See, for example, Sport la’am (23 July 1952), 2; H . adshot hasport (15 Sept. 1955), 9. See also Harif, “ ‘H.ashuv sheanu nakeh bagoyim’,” 112–115. 86. Sport la’am (7 Sept. 1952), 2; H . adshot hasport (14 Aug. 1955), 2. 87. In one newspaper, the international section within the sports column was actually titled “A Window to the World”—see Omer (25 May 1955), 7. Although local and international sports events appeared in newsreels shown in movie theaters, Israeli television began broadcasting only in 1968; on the centrality of radio in pre-television Israel, see Derek Jonathan Penslar, “Transmitting Jewish Culture: Radio in Israel,” Jewish Social Studies 10, no. 1 (2003), 9–20. 88. H . erut (4 July 1952), 2. 89. See Nachum T. Gross, “The Economic Regime during Israel’s First Decade,” in Troen and Lucas (eds.), Israel: The First Decade of Independence, 231–241; Orit Rozin, “Hamaavak ’al haz. en’a: ’akrot-habayit vehamemshalah,” Israel 1 (2002), 81–118. 90. Maariv (14 Sept. 1949), 1. 91. ’Al hamishmar (16 Aug. 1951), 2. 92. Sport la’am (29 June 1952), 3. 93. Sport la’am (14 Sept. 1952), 2. 94. Sport yisrael (24 Aug. 1952), 2; Davar (10 Aug. 1952), 3; Israeli Olympic delegation protocol (7 Oct. 1952), ISA, 47/c-5548/4 (p. 17). 95. Sport yisrael (7 Sept. 1952), 2; Israeli Olympic delegation protocol (16 Sept. 1952), ISA, 47/c-5548/4. 96. Sport yisrael (21 Oct. 1951), 2. 97. Sport yisrael (7 Sept. 1952), 2. 98. Sport yisrael (3 Aug. 1952), 6. 99. H . erut (12 Nov. 1954), 4. 100. H . adshot hasport (9 Oct. 1955), 2. 101. Bar-Eli and Zamri, “Hamediniyut hamamlakhtit,” 288. 102. See, for instance, Gabai, “Hitpath.ut hakaduregel beyisrael,” 196; Zamri, “Darko shel hakadursal,” 210. 103. See Arnaud, “Sport,” 11–12. 104. Sport yisrael (7 Oct. 1951), 3. 105. Dvar hashavu’a (10 Feb. 1955), 13; see also Amichai Alperovich, “Israel and the Mediterranean Games,” in Sport and Physical Education in Jewish History: Selected Papers from an International Seminar Held on the Occasion of the 16th Maccabiah, ed. George Eisen, Haim Kaufman, and Manfred Lammer (Netanya: 2003), 40–47. 106. H . adshot hasport (27 July 1955), 2; ibid. (23 Oct. 1955), 2. 107. Hasport haleumi (12 Feb. 1950), 1; Sport la’am (18 Nov. 1951), 5; ibid. (27 April 1952), 3; Maavak (13 Nov. 1953), 7; Ha’olam hazeh (21 June 1956), 15. See also Gabai, “Hitpath.ut hakaduregel beyisrael,” 200; Goldbourt, “Toledot haatletikah,” 233; Harif, “ ‘H.ashuv sheanu nakeh bagoyim’,” 112.

124

Anat Helman

108. H . adshot hasport (2 Oct. 1955), 3; see also Bar-Eli and Zamri, “Hamediniyut hamamlakhtit,” 286–287; Goldbourt, “Toledot haatletikah,” 232–233; Gabai, “Hitpath.ut hakaduregel beyisrael,” 202. 109. H . adshot hasport (19 Feb. 1956), 3. 110. H . adshot hasport (26 Feb. 1956), 5. 111. Devar hashavu’a (21 July 1955), 18. “Negro” (kushi) was not intentionally used as a derogatory term; on the 1950s Israeli craze for African-American performers, see, for example, Haaretz (24 Dec. 1950), 3; Tropicana Ballet poster, April 1951, NLPC, V1978–1; Devar hashavu’a (29 Nov. 1951), 12; Ha’olam hazeh (3 Feb. 1955), 10–11; ibid. (17 March 1955), 18. 112. See, for instance, the socialist sports journal Sport la’am (23 July 1952), 2; ibid. (3 Aug. 1952), 1. Only the communists expressed staunch unequivocal support of Soviet sport—see, for instance, Smol—shavu’a tov! (27 Feb. 1955), 3; ibid. (27 March 1955), 4. 113. On the Americanization of sports, see Alan Bairner, “Isolation or Expansion? Nationalism and Sport in the United States,” in his Sport, Nationalism and Globalization: European and North American Perspectives (Albany: 2001), 91–113. 114. See Zamri, “Darko shel hakadursal,” 211; Galili, “Playing Hoops in Palestine,” 146. 115. Israel Government Printing Ofﬁce, Shenaton hamemshalah tashya’’g (Jerusalem: 1952), 91. 116. Jerusalem Post (8 July 1949), 5; ibid. (3 Dec. 1950), 3; H . adshot hasport (14 Dec. 1954), 2; ibid. (22 July 1956), 5. 117. Devar hashavu’a (5 July 1951), 13; Ha’olam hazeh (30 April 1953), 15. 118. Ha’olam hazeh (21 June 1956), 15; H . adshot hasport (15 Sept. 1955), 9; voiceover of boxing exercise being conducted as part of a sports day in school (Feb. 1954), SJFA, Geva newsreels, VT GE 04. 119. See, for example, Yedioth Ahronoth (9 Dec. 1949), 7; American tennis championship, October 1951, SJFA, Geva newsreels, VT GE 03; Yehudah Radai, Haz.a’ad harishon (Jerusalem: 1956), 75. 120. Sport yisrael (21 Oct. 1951), 2. 121. See Allen Guttman, Games and Empires: Modern Sport and Cultural Imperialism (New York: 1994), 70. 122. See Marcella Simoni, “ ‘The Only Corner of the Great British Empire in Which No One Ever Played Cricket’: Reciprocal Relations in British Palestine: Health and Education (1930–39),” in Jewish Studies at the Turn of the 20th Century, vol. 2, ed. Judit Targarona Borrás and Angel Sáenz-Badillos, (Leiden: 1999), 383. See also Iddo Nevo, “Sport vepolitikah bebritanyah, araz. ot habrit veyisrael” (Ph.D. diss., The Hebrew University, 2005), 224. On the Irish case, see Holt, “Contrasting Nationalisms,” 49. 123. See Dunning, Sport Matters, 102–103. 124. See Amir Ben-Porat, “ ‘Linesmen, Referees and Arbitrators’: Politics, Modernization and Soccer in Palestine,” in Europe, Sport, World: Shaping Global Societies, ed. J.A. Mangan (London: 2001), 143. 125. Devar hashavu’a (13 Sept. 1951), 12–13; Sport yisrael (27 Jan. 1952), 3; Sport la’am (23 Dec. 1951), 3; H . adshot hasport (14 Aug. 1955), 2. On the Israeli-British relationship, see Yemima Rosenthal, “Mediniyut hah.uz. shel yisrael—bein bitah.on lediplomatiyah,” He’asor harishon, ed. Zvi Zameret and Hanna Yablonka (Jerusalem: 1997), 187–189. 126. H . adshot hasport (27 Nov. 1955), 6; Haim Baram, Adom, z.ahov, shah.or (Tel Aviv: 2004), 88–90. 127. Sport la’am (24 Aug. 1952), 3; H . adshot hasport (12 Feb. 1956), 2. 128. General Zionist Archive, S71/2612 (clip from Lamerh.av, 3 June 1956); photo by Fritz Cohen of guests playing miniature golf at the Dolphin House hotel, 4 Oct. 1954, NPC, photo no. D442–044. On enduring anti-British feelings, see Shlomo Reznik, “Agudat hasport Betar: sport vepolitikah beh.evrah mefuleget,” in Kaufman and Harif (eds.), Tarbut haguf beyisrael bameah ha’esrim, 172. 129. This orientation was reﬂected in the places abroad to which Israeli sports correspondents were sent: during the early 1950s, Sport yisrael had reporters stationed in the United

Sports in the Young State of Israel

125

States, Johannesburg, Brussels, Cypress, and Turkey; H . adshot hasport writers reported from the United States, Canada, England, France, Greece, Turkey, and Brazil. 130. See Helman, “Zionism, Politics, Hedonism.” 131. Haim Kaufman, “Agudot hasport haz. iyoniyot – misport leumi lesport politi,” Zemanim 63 (1998), 81–91. 132. Haim Kaufman, “ ‘Makabi’ mul ‘Hapo’el’: hivaz. ruto shel hapilug hapoliti basport haerez. -yisreeli,” in Kaufman and Harif (eds.), Tarbut haguf beyisrael bameah ha’esrim, 89–112; Reznik, “Agudat hasport Betar,” ibid., 160–183; “Igud hasport hadati ‘Eliz. ur’,” ibid., 184–185; Yaakov Goldstein, “Sport Association and Politics: The Case of Igud Hasadran,” in Eisen et al., Sport and Physical Education in Jewish History, 94–102. 133. See Bourdieu, “How Can One Be a Sports Fan?,” 340–355; Eric Hobsbawm, “MassProducing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm (Cambridge: 1989), 288–290; Ross McKibbin, Classes and Culture: England 1918–1951 (Oxford: 1998), 357–370, 384–385. 134. Helman, “Zionism, Politics, Hedonism,” 101–105. 135. On state investment in sports and the political strife that can ensue, see Bourdieu, “How Can One Be a Sports Fan?,” 349. 136. Sport la’am (21 Oct. 1951), 2. See also Bar-Eli and Zamri, “Hamediniyut hamamlakhtit,” 287; Gabai, “Hitpath.ut hakaduregel beyisrael,” 197–198; Ben-Porat, Kaduregel uleumiyut, 76. 137. Reznik, “Agudat hasport Betar,” 168, 171, 173. In 1954, the Soccer Association decided to replace the “50–50” deal with free democratic elections—see H . adshot hasport (5 Dec. 1954) 2; ibid. (9 Dec. 1954), 2; ibid. (31 Aug. 1955), 2; ibid. (2 Oct. 1955). 3. 138. Reznik, “Agudat hasport Betar,” 176. 139. Baram, Adom, z.ahov, shah.or, 28–29, 39–41, 43. See also Gabai, “Hitpath.ut hakaduregel beyisrael,” 207; Ben-Porat, Kaduregel uleumiyut, 84. Partisan sports was reﬂected in sports journalism—see Paz, “Hasport ba’itonut haketuvah,” 353. 140. Reznik, “Agudat hasport Betar,” 176–179. 141. Baram, Adom, z.ahov, shah.or, 78, 124. In later decades, Betar Jerusalem fans became notoriously anti-Arab in orientation. 142. Kaufman, “ ‘Maccabi’ mul ‘Hapo’el’,” 99; Gabai, “Hitpath.ut hakaduregel beyisrael,” 192–193, 206. 143. Sport la’am (9 Dec. 1951), 2; H . adshot hasport (2 Oct. 1955), 3; see also Baram, Adom, z.ahov, shah.or, 70, 77–78, 84–85, 93. Jaffa was also known for violence on the part of its soccer fans and players; see, for instance, Frontpage (15 July 1954), 17; Smol—shavu’a tov! (17 April 1955), 1. 144. See Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, Practices (Baltimore: 1997), 134–139, 142–143; Elias and Dunning, Quest for Excitement, 54–57; Dunning, Sport Matters, 77–78. See also Jarvie and Maguire, Sport and Leisure, 35. 145. Baram, Adom, z.ahov, shah.or, 78, 82, 84–85. 146. See, for example, Sport la’am (27 April 1952), 3; Nevo, “Sport vepolitikah,” 252–253. 147. See, for example, Palestine Post (15 July 1949), 3; Hamodi’a (6 Oct. 1950), 3, ibid. (21 Sept. 1956), 4; Carmel hador (30 March 1954), 1. 148. See, for example, Sport la’am (2 Dec. 1951), 2; Kibbutz Dorot bulletin (29 March 1954), 5–6 (the Jewish National and University Library); Hof Ashkelon Local Council, Yediot hamo’ez.ah (15 May 1953), 11. See also Yaron and Sivor, “Kavei yesod,” 262; Nevo, “Sport vepolitikah,” 231. 149. See, for example, Devar hapo’elet 15, nos. 8–9 (1949), 205; Laishah (28 Sept. 1953), 2; Alonekh, no. 1 (1955), 14; ibid. 6, no. 2 (1955), 14; Baram, Adom, z.ahov, shah.or, 29. Cf. Polley, Moving the Goalposts, 105. 150. Nevo, “Sport vepolitikah,” 225–228, 232. 151. Ha’olam hazeh (5 Nov. 1953), 14; H . adshot hasport (15 Sept. 1955), 2. 152. Ha’olam hazeh (21 June 1956), 15. 153. On rugby, see, for instance, Sport yisrael (29 June 1952), 2; H . adshot hasport (28 Nov. 1954), 6.

126

Anat Helman

154. H . adshot hasport (11 Dec. 1955), 5; photo by Moshe Pridan, showing the South African Maccabi cricket team, 1955, NPC, photo no. D450–124. 155. On the Englishness of cricket, see Richard Holt, “Cricket and Englishness: The Batsman as Hero,” in European Heroes: Myth, Identity, Sport, ed. Richard Holt, J.A. Mangan, and Pierre Lanfranchi (London: 1996), 48; Richard Cashman, “Symbols of Imperial Unity: Anglo-Australian Cricketers, 1877–1900,” in The Cultural Bond: Sport, Empire, Society, ed. J.A. Mangan (London: 1992), 129. 156. Cf. Talbot Baines Reed, The Willoughby Captains (London: 1948) with the Hebrew version by “R. Talbot,” Ziknei beit hasefer bevilbai (Tel Aviv: 1957), trans. Aryeh Achirav. 157. See Polley, Moving the Goalposts, 142. 158. Government Printing Ofﬁce, Shenaton hamemshalah tashy’’ah (Tel Aviv: 1950), 96. 159. See, for example, Orit Rozin, “Tenaim shel selidah: higyenah vehorut shel ’olim mearaz. ot haislam be’einei vatikim bishnot hah.amishim,” ’Iyunim bitkumat yisrael 12 (2002), 195–238. 160. ’Al hamishmar (16 Aug. 1951), 2; see also Galili, “Playing Hoops in Palestine,” 147; Nevo, “Sport vepolitikah,” 230. 161. Ashmoret (4 Aug. 1949), 16, 18. 162. ’Al hamishmar (13 Jan. 1950), 5; see also photo of boys in an immigrant camp performing gymnastics in Ashmoret (18 Jan. 1951), 9. 163. Arnaud, “Sport,” 6. 164. See, for example, Hasport haleumi (1 Jan. 1950), 1; A.A. Mandelbaum and R. Persitz, Tah.arut omanim beshah.mat (Tel Aviv: 1953), 84; bulletin of the Israeli Sport Association (24 Oct. 1956), ISA, 47/c-5548/1 (p. 3). 165. Polley, Moving the Goalposts, 35. 166. Matti Goksøyr, “The Popular Sounding Board: Nationalism, ‘The People’ and Sport in Norway in the Inter-war Years,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 14, no. 3 (1997), 112; see also photo in Frontpage (17 June 1954). 167. Passover poster featuring Maccabi Tel Aviv (1950), NLPC, V1969/3; Hasport haleumi (1 Jan. 1950), 1; Sport la’am (9 Dec. 1951), 2; H . erut (26 April 1951), 1. 168. Government Printing Ofﬁce, Shenaton hamemshalah tashy’’ab (Jerusalem: 1952), 89; Independence Day race (1951), SJFA, Geva newsreels, VT EG 02; Hof Ashkelon Local Council, Yedi’ot hamo’ez.ah (31 July 1951), 5; municipal poster of “Haifa’s Independence Football Championship” (May 1954), Haifa Municipal Archives, 21/2471, no. 73808. On the Independence Day race from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, see Goldbourt, “Toledot haatletikah,” 231; Raskin, “Hasport ha’amami,” 405. 169. See Shmuel Dotan, “Me‘h.ag hah.anukah’ le‘h.ag hah.ashmonaim’ ,” Meh.karei h.ag 10 (1999), 29–53; Orit Bashkin, “H.ag hah.anukah basiah. haz. iyoni,” Zemanim 61 (1997–1998), 38–50; Nili Aryeh Sapir, “Tahalukhat haor,” Cathedra 103 (2002), 131–150. 170. See Raskin, “Hasport ha’amami,” 407. 171. Hasport haleumi (18 Dec. 1949), 1. 172. Maariv (27 July 1950), 2; see also Bamah.aneh (23 Dec. 1954), front cover photograph. 173. See, for instance, Sport la’am (13 April 1952), 1. 174. See Jarvie and Maguire, Sport and Leisure, 96–98; Cashmore, Making Sense of Sports, 94. 175. Moreover, “nationalism” and “chauvinism” are commonly regarded as synonyms— see Barbara Ann Kipfer, Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus (New York: 1999), 123. 176. Hedva Ben-Israel, “Bikoret sefarim,” Historiyah 12 (2003), 98; see also Gregory Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation (Princeton: 2001). 177. See Lance Workman and Will Reader, Evolutionary Psychology (Cambridge: 2004), 207–213. 178. Discussed by Arnaud in “Sport,” 7, 11–12. 179. See J.A. Mangan, “Prologue: Global Fascism and the Male Body: Ambitions, Similarities and Dissimilarities,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 16, no. 4 (1999), 1.

Sports in the Young State of Israel

127

180. See Holt, “Contrasting Nationalisms,” 44–46; Arnaud, “Sport,” 4. See also Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 50. 181. Chartier, On the Edge, 136–138; see also Galili, “Playing Hoops in Palestine,” 147. 182. Allen Guttman, From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sport (New York: 1978), 32, 26. 183. See, for instance, Dunning, “Soccer Hooliganism as a World Social Problem,” in Sport Matters, 130–158; John Efron, “When Is a Yid Not a Jew? The Strange Case of Supporter Identity at Tottenham Hotspur,” in Brenner and Reuveni (eds.), Emanicipation through Muscles, 235–256. 184. For a detailed description of the event and its diplomatic signiﬁcance, see Harif, “ ‘H.ashuv sheanu nakeh bagoyim’,” 111–138. 185. See Yaacov Ro’i, “The Deterioration of Relations: From Support to Severance,” Journal of Israeli History 22, no. 1 (2003), 21–22, 27, 29, 32. 186. See Yosef Govrin, Yah.asei yisrael–brit hamo’az.ot, 1953–1967 (Jerusalem: 1990) 53–91. 187. Report on soccer team’s visit to the Soviet Union (1956), ISA, 47/c-5548/1 (p. 11). 188. Posters announcing the Soviet Army exhibition (in May 1949) and the October Revolution exhibition (in Nov. 1949), NLPC, V1971/2, V2487/2(35); Alonekh no. 6 (1951), 5; Omer (5 Oct. 1952), 3; ibid. (8 May 1953), 6; Yehuda Margolin, Shalosh harz.aot neged hakomonizm (Tel Aviv: 1953); Haboker (19 Nov. 1954); Hayim Shorer, Arba’im yom bevrit hamo’az.ot (Tel Aviv: 1955). On the Israeli left’s attitude toward the Soviet Union, see Zeev Tsahor, “Hakomunism keneh.amah,” in his ’Iz.uv hayisreeliyut (Tel Aviv: 2007), 138–148. 189. H . adshot hasport (1 July 1956), 2. 190. H . adshot hasport (15 July 1956), 5; Kaufman, “Ha’am roim et hakolot,” 91; Harif, “ ‘H.ashuv sheanu nakeh bagoyim’,” 117–118. 191. For another example, see Maavak (13 Nov. 1953), 7. 192. H . adshot hasport (29 July 1956), 1; see also photo titled “Supporters at the Ramat Gan Stadium Cheering as Israel Scored a Goal during the Soccer Match against Russia” (31 July 1956), NPC, photo no. D448–093; Ben-Porat, Kaduregel uleumiyut, 86–88; Gabai, “Hitpath.ut hakaduregel beyisrael,” 201; Baram, Adom, z.ahov, shah.or, 105–108. 193. Rimon (8 Aug. 1956), 3–8. 194. H . adshot hasport (5 Aug. 1956), 3. 195. H . erut (10 Aug. 1956), 4. 196. See Harif, “‘H.ashuv sheanu nakeh bagoyim’,” 119–120, 129–130. 197. Photograph in Gabai, “Hitpath.ut hakaduregel beyisrael,” 200.

Why Did Beit Shean Let Betar Win? Latent Ethnic Solidarity and the Sports Ethic in Israel Tamir Sorek (university of ﬂorida)

“You are not going to believe what you are about to see,” the Spanish television broadcaster warned his audience. He was reporting on a soccer game in Israel—not a subject of everyday interest for the international news media. Yet this particular match between Hapo’el Beit Shean and Betar Jerusalem, which took place on May 2, 1998 in the Kiryat Eliezer stadium in Haifa, was very much out of the ordinary. In fact, it was one of the strangest soccer games ever seen in Israel. A huge headline in Yedioth Ahronoth on May 3, 1998 summed it up in one word: “Shame.” What had happened? During the ﬁnal eight minutes of the game, with the score tied at 2–2, the Beit Shean team had “moved aside” and allowed Betar to score a winning goal. In the words of a Yedioth Ahronoth commentator: “I have watched soccer for 25 years, and I do not remember ever seeing such a bizarre, embarrassing, and shameful spectacle as the last eight minutes in Kiryat Eliezer.”1 Taking place in the penultimate round (29 out of 30) of the 1997–1998 soccer season, this game was particularly important. As in European countries, Israeli soccer teams compete in a hierarchical framework of leagues, the top two of which are known (since 1998) as Ligat ha’al (the premier league) and Haligah haleumit (the national league). Twelve teams compete in each league, and at the end of each season, the bottom two teams in Ligat ha’al are relegated to the national league, while the top two national league teams are promoted to the premier league. Betar at this point was in ﬁrst place in the premier league, and a victory in this game meant an almost certain championship over its rival, Hapo’el Tel Aviv, which was scheduled to play at the same time against Hapo’el Petah Tikvah. Beit Shean, in contrast, was situated close to the bottom of the top-ranked league, such that a loss to Betar entailed the real risk of being relegated. In this regard, a third game taking place on May 2 was also signiﬁcant: that between Hapo’el Beersheba and Hapo’el Jerusalem, which was being played at the Teddy stadium in Jerusalem. In the event that Beersheba lost its game, Beit Shean would be able to retain its position in the premier league even if it lost the game against Betar. 128

Latent Ethnic Solidarity and the Sports Ethic in Israel

129

All three games had been scheduled for the same time, 5:45 p.m. At the last minute, however, the match between Betar and Beit Shean started nine minutes late. This delay proved to be crucial. The start of the game augured well for the underdog team. After four minutes, and against all odds, Beit Shean scored a goal and led 1–0. In the middle of the ﬁrst half, word came that Beersheba was trailing in its match against Hapo’el Jerusalem, 0–1. Thirty-nine minutes into the game, Beit Shean received a penalty kick, giving it an opportunity to widen its lead to 2–0. Eitan Tayeb, a gifted defensive player, took the kick but sent the ball well over the goal post. It was the ﬁrst penalty he had missed in ﬁve years of professional play. Five minutes later, Betar scored a goal and tied the score at 1–1. In the middle of the second half, Betar scored another goal and pulled ahead 2–1. Television cameras ﬁlming the scene focused on one of Betar’s players talking to Eitan Tayeb. “If in Teddy [stadium] it’s all over,” the Betar player appeared to be saying, “no one [inaudible], okay?” Tayeb nodded as if in agreement.2 Players on both teams did not appear to be playing very hard for the next few minutes. Meanwhile, Betar’s rival, Hapo’el Tel Aviv, scored a goal to take a 1–0 lead in its match against Petah Tikvah. And, ten minutes before the end of the Betar–Beit Shean match, the Beersheba-Jerusalem game ended with a victory for Hapo’el Jerusalem. The situation was now as follows: Betar needed to be assured of a clear victory over Beit Shean, not merely a tie, in order to clinch the championship; whereas Beit Shean’s place in the premier league was secure, regardless of whether it won or lost. As word spread regarding Beersheba’s defeat, there was a perceptible shift of mood in the bleachers. As reported by Arel Segal, a journalist and avowed fan of Betar, “during the second half, the fans of Beit Shean broke into a loud song. They were not chanting for their team, they were chanting for Betar. From the second they heard that Beersheba’s game was over, they suspended their local partisanship and switched to the anthem of “Yerushalayim, Yerushalayim [Jerusalem, Jerusalem]”.3 Then, in the 86th minute of play, the unexpected occurred. Almog Hazan, a young player on the Beit Shean team, scored his ﬁrst goal in a professional match, kicking the ball in from 20 meters to tie the game at 2–2. With this, Betar’s championship was put into jeopardy. In theory, Hazan’s fellow players should have been ecstatic—yet very few of them came over to congratulate him. David Amsalem, a Betar defense player, murmured some words in the direction of Hazan: “But why?! You didn’t go down [to the lower league]! You didn’t go down!”4 From that moment until the end of the game, about eight minutes in all, Betar was given no less than 12 opportunities to score a winning goal, which it ﬁnally did in the very last seconds of play. The match is remembered in Israeli soccer folklore as the “shoelaces game,” a reference to the fact that Eitan Tayeb was ﬁlmed in the act of tying his shoelaces in the middle of a corner kick that eventually resulted in Betar’s winning goal. Tayeb had already tied his shoelaces four minutes earlier, in the course of another Betar attack. Tayeb became the tragic hero of this game. Only a day before the match, in an interview appearing in Kol ha’ir, a Jerusalem weekly, he was quoted as saying that his lifelong dream was to play for Betar. Speaking about the upcoming game between

130

Tamir Sorek

Beersheba and Hapo’el Jerusalem, he noted that “if [Hapo’el] wins, and we know that, then it will be an open game, a completely different game.” During the same week, ﬁve of Beit Shean’s players were quoted in a local newspaper in Haifa, saying that they were rooting for Betar to win the championship. Among the sports commentators in every Israeli newspaper there was total consensus: the players of Hapo’el Beit Shean had been strangely passive during the last minutes of the game, essentially letting Betar win the game and, with it, the Israeli championship (alifut haligah). Even more interesting, however, was another view agreed upon by all: “this is not about selling out for money. . . . Beit Shean is a nice team that doesn’t ask for payment—everything comes for free, wrapped up as a holiday present.”5 In other words, this was not a normal case of corruption (which is not an unknown phenomenon in Israeli soccer). No one claimed that Beit Shean “sold” the game. Why, then, did the team do what it did? The answer, it appeared, was self-evident, something every Israeli sports fan “should know,” although it was not explicitly stated. Local newspapers were less subtle and more upfront in identifying the reason. Yehudah Nuriel, another fan of Betar, wrote in ’Iton Tel Aviv: Recently we wrote about the distinction, which is somewhat rough, but still essentially correct, between “black teams” and Ashkenazic teams in the league. . . . Dear friends: from the 60th minute, the fans of Beit Shean started to cheer for Betar. Why? Because they are from our family. Because they really want us to succeed. . . . When the team’s considerations are irrelevant, the black fan will almost always prefer the success of a sister team over a white team.

Nuriel was referring to a well-known demographic fact, namely, that the vast majority of both Betar and Beit Shean fans were Mizrahim—that is, Jews of Middle Eastern or North African origin. Hapo’el Tel Aviv, in contrast, has always been known as an “Ashkenazic” team, even though its fan base is actually quite heterogenous. The claim that Hapo’el Beit Shean threw the game because of ethnic solidarity was made only by sports commentators such as Nuriel and not by the players or fans of the team. Even those among them who admitted that there was something unusual in the game explained it as a sudden decline in motivation after Beit Shean’s place in the premier league was secured, or else cited concerns regarding a violent reaction on the part of Betar fans should their team lose. None of them explicitly expressed the ethnic solidarity ascribed to them by Nuriel. Two aspects of this particular incident are worthy of analysis: the widespread coverage and almost unanimous condemnation of Beit Shean by the mainstream media; and the fact that, generally speaking, the “reason” behind the game’s outcome was stated only implicitly, the assumption being that it was a matter of common knowledge. As I will show, the Beit Shean team’s display of ethnic solidarity contradicted two major aspects of the popular consensus. First, ethnic solidarity in and of itself contradicts the sporting ethic, according to which athletes are expected to make their best effort to win. Their identity as athletes should overshadow any other attributes—ethnic, religious, or racial—and it should be strong enough to eliminate any potential sympathy with their adversaries. Second, according to classic Zionist ideology, Jews constitute one nation, and loy-

Latent Ethnic Solidarity and the Sports Ethic in Israel

131

alty to this nation should transcend any other allegiances. The expression of Mizrahi ethnic identity (mizrah.iyut) is often regarded as clashing with this ideology and, as such, illegitimate. Whereas certain expressions of Mizrahi solidarity are often to be found, particularly in such “non-political” spheres as sports and music, Beit Shean’s players and fans went one step too far when they gave priority to ethnic solidarity over the sports ethic. As will be seen, they paid a steep price in consequence.

Mizrahi Political Consciousness in Israel Following the wave of mass immigration in the 1950s and 1960s, Israel developed into an ethnically stratiﬁed society, with the population of the middle and upper classes largely comprised of Ashkenazim. Mizrahim occupied an intermediate place between the Ashkenazim and the Israeli Arab citizens who were relegated to the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy.6 Although the boundaries between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim are much more diffused and blurred than those between Arabs and Jews, inequality between different Jewish ethnic groups is evident. The income gap between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim is tangible and, for second-generation men, has even been growing since the 1970s.7 In 1988, 20 percent of foreign-born Ashkenazic men were professionals, managers, or technicians, compared with only 6 percent of foreign-born Mizrahi men. Among the Israeli-born members of the two groups, the gap was even wider: 50 percent and 20 percent, respectively.8 Gaps in the occupational status of Mizrahim and Ashkenazim remain even after controlling for differences in educational attainment and socioeconomic status.9 Many of the Mizrahi immigrants of the early years of the state were directed to housing in urban slum neighborhoods, or else were sent to “development towns,” including Beit Shean, that were mainly located on Israel’s periphery. According to varying estimates, a total of 25–40 percent of the Mizrahi population lives in 28 development towns.10 A cornerstone of Israel’s national project of “Judaizing” the country, these development towns have resulted in the creation of segregated and low-status Mizrahi ethnic spaces. In a study from 1995 that ranked all 118 Israeli Jewish urban localities according to their aggregate quality of life indicators, 18 of the lowest-ranking 20 towns were development towns. Such gaps have led to silent grievances and to public protest, as well as to the emergence of a low-status Mizrahi ethno-class of ﬂuctuating political orientation.11 Beginning in the 1960s, development towns became a bastion of opposition to the ruling Labor party, which was considered to be responsible for a discriminatory policy against Mizrahim. Collective grievances, however, did not translate into a viable and effective Mizrahi political consciousness.12 Some scholars have pointed to the partial inclusion of Mizrahim in the Zionist project as a reason for this absence of consciousness. Yehouda Shenhav, for example, has shown how the dynamics of collective identiﬁcation by Israeli Mizrahi Jews were informed by Zionism, both in its colonialist and nationalist aspects. Whereas the colonialist aspect of Zionism led to Mizrahim being viewed as the “other” and as a separate ethnic group, the nationalist aspects of Zionism deﬁned Mizrahim as part of a homogenous Jewish community in order to mobilize them for the project of nation-building.13 One interesting aspect of the

132

Tamir Sorek

tension between these two aspects of Zionism is that Mizrahi identity has developed, on the one hand, as both a powerful subjective experience and as a tangible political force; on the other hand, there has been little legitimacy for public and explicit political displaying of this identity. Nonetheless, an implicit sentiment of solidarity has evolved, based both on the similar origin and culture of Mizrahim and their shared social and economic marginality in Israel.14 The most serious attempt to develop an assertive Mizrahi ethnic (as opposed to religious) political consciousness was made by the Black Panther movement of the early 1970s, which spearheaded neighborhood-based ethnic protests in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Yet by not using the Zionist rhetoric, the Black Panthers placed themselves outside of the popular consensus and were easily delegitimized. Within a relatively short period of time, the movement was essentially co-opted by mainstream political parties. Following this, Mizrahi political protest became channeled to the ballot box, where the right-wing Likud party emerged as the biggest winner.15 Although the Likud never deﬁned itself as a Mizrahi movement and its candidates for prime minister were always Ashkenazim, it followed a strategy of promoting young Mizrahi leaders from the development towns within its ranks. (The most successful among them was David Levy, formerly a construction worker from Beit Shean, who eventually rose to second place on the party list.) In the 1981 elections, the Likud garnered 48.9 percent of the development town vote, compared with 37.1 percent nationwide.16 Studies of voting preference from the early 1980s revealed that an individual’s continent of origin was a valid predictor for voting Likud even when education, age, occupational status, socioeconomic status, and level of religiosity were controlled for.17 It is important to note, however, that whereas voting for Likud has long been a form of cultural and social protest, it has not been an expression of national ideology or explicit Mizrahi political activism.18 In this regard, the striking exception to the non-political character of Mizrahi activism is Shas, a haredi (ultra-Orthodox) religious Mizrahi party established in 1984. Since 1992, Shas has garnered between 8–14 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections, with much of its support coming from lower-class Mizrahi voters (many of them traditional in their religious orientation, but not strictly observant). Nonetheless, the manifestly religious nature of the party makes it a less attractive option for many Mizrahi voters who have a more secular worldview.19

Mizrahim and Soccer With the exception of Shas, Mizrahi solidarity within politics has been manifested either implicitly (for instance, via collective protest voting, though not for parties with a Mizrahi agenda) or in marginal ways (for instance, the explicit Mizrahi agenda promoted by small groups with limited power). This solidarity, however, has been much more “legitimate” in non-political spheres, with various aspects of popular Israeli culture being far more accessible and receptive to the expression of mizrah.iyut. Music is a prime example. According to Motti Regev, by virtue of its “well maintained image of having a mass appeal and of being grass-roots music of oriental Jews,” such

Latent Ethnic Solidarity and the Sports Ethic in Israel

133

music became, by the 1990s, “the cultural form most unequivocally associated with mizrakhiut.”20 Soccer may well be the second most popular site of Mizrahi identiﬁcation—less popular than music only because women are mostly uninvolved.21 During the ﬁrst years of the state’s existence, most Israeli soccer players were Ashkenazim, since they constituted the vast majority of the pre-state Jewish population.22 This situation changed with the mass immigration from Muslim and Arab countries. By the end of the 1960s, about half of the players were Mizrahim,23 although they did not yet account for a majority of players either in the top league or on the Israeli national team. Over time, soccer stadiums in Jewish localities became spaces dominated by the Mizrahi working class. The class and ethnic character of contemporary Israeli soccer is evident in municipal authorities’ support for local teams.24 In an analysis carried out in 1998, I found a positive and statistically signiﬁcant correlation (0.58) between ﬁnancial support for soccer teams and the relative share of the town or city’s population whose continent of origin was Asia or Africa. Similarly, there was a negative and statistically signiﬁcant correlation (−0.65) between municipal support for soccer clubs and the relative share of inhabitants whose continent of origin was Europe or America. Soccer, it would appear, is most avidly followed in predominantly Mizrahi towns. The overrepresentation of economically and politically marginalized ethnic groups in hegemonic sports is a very common phenomenon.25 Beyond offering a seemingly easy path to economic mobility, success in these sports can play an important role in boosting collective self-esteem and ethnic pride. It is noteworthy that Moshe Karif, one of the founders of the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow (Hakeshet hademokratit hamizrah.it),26 chose to begin his book about the movement with a story concerning the surprising victory of Maccabi Jaffa (whose fans are mostly Jews of Sephardic Bulgarian origin), over the “rich” team of Maccabi Tel Aviv in the 1976–1977 season. As the winning goal was kicked, he writes, he was ﬁlled with a sense of mission, a feeling that it was now “possible to make it without a home stadium, without resources, in the face of frowning countenances and endless arrogance. I saw from up close that it was possible to beat the system. Here was the proof: Albert Levy [the player who scored the goal].”27 The 1970s, a decade of turbulent Mizrahi activism, was also an era of up-andcoming Israeli soccer teams with a largely Mizrahi fan base. Mizrahi youths from working-class backgrounds gradually became the dominant group among the players. Many of them viewed soccer as an “educational detour,” an alternative channel for mobility, though a systematic examination of this assertion has proven that this hope was mostly illusory.28 As early as 1968, Bnei Yehudah, the team representing the poor (and mainly Mizrahi) Hatikvah neighborhood in southern Tel Aviv, became the ﬁrst “Mizrahi” team to win the Israel state cup. Two additional landmarks were the championships won by Hapo’el Beersheba in 1975 and 1976. Hapo’el Beersheba, whose original players were mostly immigrants from Eastern Europe, underwent a gradual transformation during the 1950s and 1960s and became almost entirely Mizrahi in composition. With the change in players came a change in image, well illustrated when the team defeated Hapo’el Ramle 9–0 in the 1962–1963 season. Fans of the latter team considered the outcome an act of ethnic betrayal;

134

Tamir Sorek

years later, an article in Maariv noted that even the fans of Beersheba were convinced that, in previous years, games between “the two sisters” had reﬂected a mentality of “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” among players who had grown up together in North Africa.29 The Mizrahi “ﬂagship” among soccer teams was Betar Jerusalem—a fact that is not so surprising, considering the intimate relationship between Israeli sports and politics. Even before the establishment of the state, Israeli sports were organized along political lines. Maccabi teams were part of the non-socialist wing of Zionism. Hapo’el teams were part of the Histadrut (General Federation of Labor Unions), controlled by the socialist Mapai (later the Labor) party, which led the country until 1977. Betar was the outgrowth of the revisionist Zionist youth movement founded in 1923 by Zeev Jabotinsky, later linked to the Herut (and afterwards, the Likud) party. Betar Jerusalem was founded by the Jerusalem branch of Betar in 1936. In the 1940s, most of the teams’ players were members of either the Irgun or the Lehi, which resulted in the British authorities’ expelling some of them from Palestine. Whereas Hapo’el Jerusalem was the team of the establishment, Betar attracted all the outsiders, the oppressed, and the victimized. The Betar circle of fans developed into a kind of political opposition, and it is no coincidence that their main slogan in those decades, “evel bahistadrut” (“mourning in the Histadrut”) referred not to the team but to the political identity of Betar’s main adversaries. Betar’s transformation from a locally based club to a team with a national following is related to the close link between the team and Likud leaders, as well as the co-appearance of Betar’s ﬁrst major achievements (winning the state cup tournament in 1976 and 1979) with the political upheaval that brought Likud into power in 1977. In fact, the demographic coalition enabling Likud’s victory was reﬂected in the growing circle of Betar fans.30 Throughout the 1980s, the triangle relationship of LikudMizrahim-Betar was crystallized. Betar became very popular among Likud voters, to the extent that the Labor party’s opening television campaign of the 1984 elections featured famous actors in the role of Mizrahi Betar fans who declared that choosing Likud the last time around had been a mistake. The message was that one could be a Mizrahi fan of Betar and nonetheless vote for Labor. Betar’s successes over the course of the 1980s and 1990s (three championships and three state cups) made the team popular among wider circles of fans, including many Ashkenazim and even Arab citizens. However, it remained especially popular in what was once termed “the second Israel,” namely, among Mizrahim, especially in the development towns. In a survey commissioned by the Israel Football Association (IFA) in 1997, 46 percent of development town residents declared themselves to be fans of Betar.31 Almog Hazan, the young player whose goal almost deprived Betar of the championship, told the media that, upon scoring, he felt sorry for Betar but was also afraid of the thousands of Betar fans who tried to swarm onto the playing ﬁeld. To which Arel Segal of ’Iton Tel Aviv responded: It’s a lie, I was there [ . . . ] the masses stormed the ﬁeld only after [Betar’s] goal. What Mr. Hazan did not tell the press was that he was afraid as well of the reaction of his Beit Shean neighbors in the commercial center on Sunday morning. Nobody in the development town would have forgiven him had he buried Betar’s championship.32

Latent Ethnic Solidarity and the Sports Ethic in Israel

135

In the past, most of these development town fans had not been required to choose between their loyalty to their local team and their love of Betar, since teams from the periphery rarely made it to the top league. Every so often, however, a peripheral team achieved temporary success and became the darling of the media (which, of course, is always attracted to rags-to-riches success stories). Hapo’el Yahud, for instance, played in the top league from 1976 to 1984, and even won the state cup in 1982. Between 1982 and 1987, the town of Yavneh was represented in the top league by Maccabi Yavneh. In 1994, it was the turn of Beit Shean.33 Hapo’el Beit Shean, representing the smallest and poorest town among those in the top league, turned out to be a scrappy survivor. It retained its position in the top league (often just barely) during the next four seasons, and it became even more popular after its members starred in what became a classic Israeli sports movie, a documentary called “Underdogs: A War Movie” (1996), directed by Doron Tsabari and Rino Tzror. This movie, which followed the team’s progress in the course of the 1994–1995 season, turned out to be a perfect drama: in the last round, played in the Kiryat Eliezer stadium, Beit Shean had to defeat the wealthy national champion, Maccabi Haifa, in order to remain in the league. Initially trailing 0–2, Beit Shean achieved the unbelievable and wound up winning the game 3–2. Following this season, Beit Shean became the second-favorite team of many Israeli soccer fans. But two years later, in the very same stadium, team members chose to prioritize ethnic allegiance over a fundamental element of sporting ethics. As a result, their popularity plummeted.

Ethnic Solidarity in Sports In both popular and academic discourse, modern sports constitutes a powerful representation of modernity. Functionalist scholars view sports as a modern substitute for traditional foci of solidarity such as religion, family, and guilds.34 From a Weberian perspective, Allan Guttman regards sports as a reﬂection of both the modern-industrial reality and the scientiﬁc world.35 Similarly, C.E. Ashworth claims that sports provides a quasi-scientiﬁc test in which all differences between competitors, except athletic talent, are suspended, such that “real” ability is exposed.36 Christian Bromberger, referring speciﬁcally to soccer, argues that the game provides a dramatization of modern society’s basic values. In its emphasis on talent, performance, and competition among equals, soccer embodies in most dramatic fashion the concept of “achieved status” (as opposed to “ascribed status”) that is one of modernity’s outstanding features.37 It follows that whenever an individual or a team deﬁes this “scientiﬁc” spirit by choosing to lose a game out of a sense of afﬁnity with the opponent, such behavior will be widely denounced as “non-sportive”—a very serious accusation. Games in which ethnic sympathy prevailed over competition are both remembered and condemned. An example is the 1982 World Cup soccer tournament in which West Germany played against Austria in the last match of the ﬁrst round. Both sides knew that only a 1–0 West German win would allow the two German-speaking teams to qualify for the next round (while sending the Algerian team back home). West Germany scored after 10 minutes; after that, both teams sat back for the next 80 minutes. The game

136

Tamir Sorek

was dubbed the “Anschluss Game” by bitter fans, and it is still considered one of the most scandalous games in World Cup history. In similar vein, a Maariv sports commentator, Eyal Levy, summarized the Beit Shean-Betar match as “a sad day for soccer, and nobody should say that this is sports, because it is not.”38 Another senior commentator, Sagi Cohen, charged that soccer as played in Israel was a game “in which there is no real respect for the notion of competition, which is driven by a distorted understanding of achievement, and which is a disgrace to everything sports is supposed to symbolize.” More speciﬁcally, he noted the right of fans to wonder what the Beit Shean players saw when they looked into the mirror on the morning after the game. “One thing is certain,” he wrote of the players, “they did not see sportsmen.”39 Cohen was not the only one who identiﬁed a “cultural problem,” implying that soccer, as played in Israel (and more implicitly, Israeli society as a whole), was backward. Amir Efrat, a sportswriter at Yedioth Ahronoth, recalled games played in the English league in which both teams fought like lions even though the outcome of the game was not at all signiﬁcant. “If the stories from England teach us something,” he wrote, “it is that, among sportsmen, the fact that your place is secure is not what counts. The Beit Shean players did not behave as sportsmen yesterday, and for this they need to be called to account.”40 Another commentator in that day’s Yedioth Ahronoth, Aviad Fohorlis, wrote: “Yesterday was a disaster for me. As far as I’m concerned, Israeli soccer is ﬁnished. I buried it a dog’s burial, and I consider it completely dead.”41 Fohorlis and Efrat are both Ashkenazim and fans of the rival Hapo’el Tel Aviv, the team that paid the price for the alliance between development town Mizrahim and Betar. Not surprisingly, the “shoelaces” game evoked furious reactions among Hapo’el Tel Aviv fans, who cast Hapo’el Beit Shean as public enemy number one, singling out Eitan Tayeb for special opprobrium. Some of these fans continue to remember May 2, 1998 as a day of infamy. A CD that was produced and distributed by Hapo’el Tel Aviv fans in 2000 features songs with extremely violent lyrics, including explicit threats to murder Tayeb. Asked for his reaction to these threats, Tayeb revealed that his hatred for Hapo’el Tel Aviv had a long history: I want to make something clear. Hapo’el Tel Aviv is a club I hated long before that incident. I have hated them ever since I can remember. . . . Any survey taken in this country will prove that I am right, that this is the most hated team around. It is politically identiﬁed with the left—since the day it was founded, Hapo’el Tel Aviv was named “the ﬂagship of the Histadrut and the Labor party.”42

Tayeb, who was born and grew up in Beit Shean, was expressing a bitterness shared by many development town residents. As noted, many Mizrahim blame Labor party policies for much of the current ethnic stratiﬁcation of Israeli society. In the realm of soccer, such resentment has made Hapo’el Tel Aviv a very unpopular team, particularly in the development towns but also among Mizrahim in general. In one instance, a fan of another predominantly Mizrahi team (Bnei Yehudah) was interviewed in ’Iton Tel Aviv following violent clashes between Bnei Yehudah fans and those of Hapo’el Tel Aviv. He characterized the latter as follows: Hapo’el fans are unbearable. They’ve always been the elites, dandies, real “Europeans.” They have this patronizing attitude. They tell you to your face that theirs is the right

Latent Ethnic Solidarity and the Sports Ethic in Israel

137

way . . . that white is the nice color. They’re left-wing and we’re right-wing; they’re rich and we’re poor; they’re successful and we’re losers; they’re beautiful and we’re ugly.43

As if to emphasize the ethnic basis of the animosity to the “dandies,” when the same fan was asked if he would have thrown stones at Betar Jerusalem’s fans, he responded incredulously: “Are you out of your mind? Betar is our big sister—you don’t hit family members.” Even though the last statement was later proven to be wrong, as harsh conﬂicts did break out between the “two sisters,” the rhetoric is signiﬁcant. Hapo’el Tel Aviv has no chance of being regarded as a “sister” of Bnei Yehudah or Betar Jerusalem. In the “shoelaces game,” these ethno-political preferences gained priority over the sports ethic and put a question mark on the legitimacy of both Tayeb in particular and the Beit Shean team as a whole. There is another dimension, however, to the anger toward Beit Shean. The same modernist discourse that provides the philosophical underpinnings for modern sports also deals with the emergence of the nation-state and modern national communities. In this context, sub-national ethnic identities are considered to be remnants of the premodern past that will gradually dissolve in the course of the modernization process.44 In Israel, the hegemonic discourse considers Mizrahi identity to be “ethnic.” In a study conducted in the late 1980s by Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Stephen Sharot, for instance, Israeli Ashkenazim were shown to have a tendency to deﬁne Mizrahim in ethnic terms and to take it for granted that their own culture was the Israeli culture. In addition, they tended to expect Middle Eastern “ethnics” to “modernize” by adopting what they perceived to be their own “non-ethnic” culture.45 Put somewhat differently, the “modernity” of the nation-state is what delegitimizes political expressions of ethnic identity. In line with this perception, sports is often regarded as a vehicle to transcend ethnic differences and crystallize a homogeneous national community. Hapo’el Beit Shean’s action, however, not only deﬁed the sports ethic but also demonstrated the latent power of ethnic divisions within Israeli society. Such a reminder was highly unwelcome, since it both contradicted Zionist ideology and was perceived to be a threat to the “modern” Israeli self-image. It is no coincidence that those commentators who interpreted the “shoelaces” game as an expression of ethnic solidarity were themselves identiﬁed with an explicit Mizrahi political identity. Yehudah Nuriel, who made the distinction between “black” and Ashkenazic teams, is one of them. Similarly, Moshe Karif, one of the founders of the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow, made mention of the “non-latent sympathy for Betar Jerusalem among those in Beit Shean.”46 Interestingly, three years after the match, Tayeb admitted that he and other Beit Shean players had in fact stopped investing their efforts in the game after the score had been tied. He blamed the club director, Avi Levy, for instructing the players to hold back, but made no mention of what might have motivated this action.47

Conclusion and Epilogue Although Mizrahi ethnic identiﬁcation has had major implications for Israeli politics, it has rarely translated into explicit and large-scale political activity. Instead, sentiments of Mizrahi solidarity have either remained implicit in the political sphere

138

Tamir Sorek

or else have gained importance in the realm of popular culture, with soccer being one of the most signiﬁcant venues. In theory, ethnic solidarity is incompatible with both Zionist ideology and the basic philosophical infrastructure of modern sports. So long as expressions of Mizrahi ethnic identity were conﬁned to fans’ support for teams such as Betar Jerusalem, they were widely tolerated among the general public. However, when such sympathy proved to be stronger than the spirit of competition, which is a fundamental element in the sports ethos, it was considered a serious offense. Following the “shoelaces” game, Hapo’el Beit Shean was not formally penalized—but was nonetheless severely punished. In the following season, the team suffered a series of humiliating defeats. Once known as the second-favorite team of many soccer fans, Beit Shean was now portrayed in the media as the worst example of a group displaying “non-sporting” behavior, even though Israeli soccer had witnessed other cases of serious corruption. Financial donations for the team stopped coming in, and the team could not survive in the top division. Uri Suissa, who was an equipment manager for the team, told a Haaretz reporter four years after the game: We lost our soul. It dismantled the team from inside. All of our team spirit, the real power behind Hapo’el Beit Shean’s motivation—it was all over. You feel hated, ﬁnished, throughout the country. . . . At one time, following an out-of-town game, we needed to choose between competing dinner invitations. But since that game, we’ve been rejected.48

Prior to its fateful game, Hapo’el Beit Shean had retained its place in the top league for four consecutive seasons. Eight years after the game, it had deteriorated to the ﬁfth league, the second-lowest in the hierarchy. In August 2006, in the face of accumulated heavy debts, the Beit Shean municipality—the only remaining ﬁnancial backer of the team—decided to dissolve it. The possibility of such an outcome was probably not in the minds of Beit Shean’s fans when they started to cheer for Betar in the 60th minute of the fateful game of May 2, 1998.

Notes 1. Udi Trelo, “Path.u raglayim,” Yedioth Ahronoth sports section (3 May 1998), 2. 2. Kobi Shem Tov, “Shevitat haneshek be H.aifah. hith.ilah badakah ha-63,” Maariv sports section (6 May 1998), 14. 3. Arel Segal, “Alifut,” ’Iton Tel Aviv (8 May 1998), online at www.tam.co.il/8_5_98/ sport3.html. 4. Yisrael Antebi in Maariv sports section (5 May 1998), 2. 5. Eyal Levy in Maariv sports section (3 May 1998), 9. 6. See Gershon Shaﬁr and Yoav Peled, “Citizenship and Stratiﬁcation in an Ethnic Democracy,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21 (1998), 408–427. 7. Yinon Cohen and Yitzchak Haberfeld, “Second-Generation Jewish Immigrants in Israel: Have the Ethnic Gaps in Schooling and Earnings Declined?,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21 (1998), 507–528. 8. Gershon Shaﬁr and Yoav Peled, Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship (Cambridge: 2002), 82. 9. Ya’akov Nahon, “Ma’amad ta’asukati,” in ’Edot beyisrael umikuman hah.evratit, ed. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Moshe Lissak, and Ya’akov Nahon (Jerusalem: 1993), 50–75; cf. Sergio

Latent Ethnic Solidarity and the Sports Ethic in Israel

139

DellaPergola, “ ‘Sephardic and Oriental’ Jews in Israel and Western Countries: Migration, Social Change, and Identiﬁcation,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 22, Sephardic Jewry and Mizrahi Jews, ed. Peter Y. Medding (New York: 2007), 17–21. 10. Efraim Ben-Zadok, “Oriental Jews in Development Towns: Ethnicity, Economic Development, Budgets and Politics,” in Local Communities and the Israeli Polity: Conﬂict of Values and Interests, ed. Efraim Ben-Zadok (Albany: 1993), 91–122; Oren Yiftachel, “Social Control, Urban Planning and Ethno-class Relations: Mizrahi Jews in Israel’s Development Towns,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24, no. 2 (2000), 418–438. 11. Yiftachel, “Social Control, Urban Planning and Ethno-class Relations”; report of the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Construction and Housing, Socio-economic Ranking of Local Governments in Israel (Jerusalem: 1996), quoted in ibid., 429. 12. Sami Shalom Chetrit, Hamaavak hamizrah.i beyisrael: 1948–2003 (Tel Aviv: 2004), 307–320. 13. Yehouda Shenhav, Hayehudim ha’aravim: leumiyut, dat, veetniyut (Tel Aviv: 2003), 17. 14. For a different view taking issue, to some extent, with the notion of similar origins and culture among Mizrahim, see Chen Bram and Harvey E. Goldberg, “Sephardic/Mizrahi/ Arab-Jews: Reﬂections on Critical Sociology and the Study of Middle Eastern Jewries within the Context of Israeli Society,” in Medding (ed.), Sephardic Jewry and Mizrahi Jews, 227–256. 15. Chetrit, Hamaavak hamizrah.i beyisrael, 175. The central factor in the Likud’s 1977 victory was the Mizrahi support for the party. See Yonathan Shapiro, The Road to Power: Herut Party in Israel (Albany: 1991), 164. 16. Ben-Zadok, “Oriental Jews in Development Towns,” 112. 17. See Ya’akov Nahon, ’Ovdim ’az. mayim, in Eisenstadt, Lissak, and Nahon (eds.), ’Edot beyisrael umikuman hah.evratit, 76–89; Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Stephen Sharot, Ethnicity, Religion and Class in Israeli Society (Cambridge: 1991), 179–185. 18. Chetrit, Hamaavak hamizrah.i beyisrael, 314. 19. Ibid., 309. For further discussion of Shas, see Kimmy Caplan, “Studying Haredi Mizrahim in Israel: Trends, Achievements, and Challenges,” in Medding (ed.), Sephardic Jewry and Mizrahi Jews, 173–177. 20. Motti Regev, “To Have a Culture of Our Own: On Israeliness and Its Variants,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 23 (2000), 238. 21. Tamir Sorek, “Threatened Masculinities and Women’s Exclusion in Israeli Soccer,” online at www.barnard.columbia.edu/sfonline/sport/sorek_01.htm. 22. Amir Ben-Porat, Mimish.ak leseh.orah: hakaduregel hayisreeli 1948–1999 (Sdeh Boker: 2002), 201. 23. Gadi Yatziv and Ya’akov Nahon, Meh.kar h.evrati ’al hakaduregel beyisrael (Jerusalem: 1969) (publication of the Israel Ministry of Education and Culture). 24. Although there are several privately owned professional teams, mainly in the two upper leagues, most Israeli soccer teams rely on municipal budgets for the bulk of their funding, supplemented by allocations from the Sports Gambling Council, private donations, and corporate sponsorships. 25. Andrei Markovits and Steven Hellerman deﬁne “hegemonic sports cultures” as those that “dominate a country’s emotional attachments,” being “what people breathe, read, discuss, analyze, and historicize.” See their book, Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism in Sport (Princeton: 2001), 10. 26. The Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow is an extra-parliamentary movement established in 1996, most of whose members are second-generation Mizrahim. The movement strives to improve the political, social, and economic status of Mizrahim in Israel. 27. Moshe Karif, Hamizrah.it: sipurah shel hakeshet hademokratit hamizrah.it vehamaavak hah.evrati beyisrael, 1995–2005 (Tel Aviv: 2005), vii. 28. Moshe Semyonov, “Occupational Mobility through Sport: The Case of Israeli Soccer,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 21 (1986), 23–33. 29. R. Aryeh, “Mih.aluz. ei 1949 ’ad alufei 1975,” Maariv (18 May 1975), 34.

140

Tamir Sorek

30. Shlomo Resnik, “Agudat hasport Betar: sport vepolitikah beh.evrah mefuleget,” in Tarbut haguf beyisrael bameah ha’esrim, ed. Haim Kaufman and Hagai Harif (Jerusalem: 2002), 179. 31. Ibid., 178. 32. Arel Segal, “Alifut.” 33. Since 1996, Arab towns have also promoted successful soccer teams. Three of them have played in the top league, and in 2004, Ittihad Abnaa Sakhnin (Bnei Sakhnin) won the state cup. See Tamir Sorek, Arab Soccer in a Jewish State (Cambridge: 2007). 34. James Curtis, John Loy, and Wally Karnilowicz, “A Comparison of Suicide-Dip Effects of Major Sport Events and Civil Holidays,” Sociology of Sport Journal 3 (1986), 1–14; Harry Edwards, Sociology of Sport (Homewood, Il.: 1973). 35. Allen Guttmann, From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports (New York: 1978). 36. C.E. Ashworth, “Sport as Symbolic Dialog,” in The Sociology of Sport, ed. Eric Dunning (London: 1970), 40–46. 37. Christian Bromberger, “Football as World-View and as Ritual,” French Cultural Studies 6, no. 3 (1995), 293–311. 38. Eyal Levy in Maariv sports section (3 May 1998), 9. 39. Sagi Cohen, ibid., 2–3. 40. Amir Efrat, “Ibdu et hakavod ha’az.mi,” Yedioth Ahronoth sports section (3 May 1998), 2. 41. Aviad Fohorlis in Yedioth Ahronoth sports section (3 May 1998). 42. Tal Berman interview with Eitan Tayeb, appearing on the website of Maccabi Tel Aviv’s fans, http://www.ultras.co.il/one_news.asp?IDNews=843 (22 April 2003). 43. Sarah Angel, “Bayom sheyisgeru lanu et haiz. tadyon, nisrof et Bloomﬁeld,” ’Iton Tel Aviv (25 Oct. 2002). 44. Edward Shils, Center and Periphery—Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago: 1975. 45. Ben-Rafael and Sharot, Ethnicity, Religion and Class in Israeli Society. 46. Moshe Karif, “Bah.ayim, kemo besport,” Haaretz (10 May 1998), B-2. 47. Doron Bergfroind, “Hapo’el Tel Aviv mez. apah shehahitah.dut lekaduregel takhriz ’alehah kaalufah shel ’onat 1997/8,” Haaretz (6 July 2001). 48. Horesh Nitzan, “Moshik Teomim mevakesh lehazkir,” Haaretz sports section (14 April 2002).

Dream and Disenchantment: Massimo Della Pergola and the Invention of the Italian Totocalcio Sergio DellaPergola (the hebrew university)

The introduction of a weekly betting pool on football (soccer) games is generally regarded as one of the salient features of post-Second World War Italian society.1 The pool, which eventually became known as Totocalcio (pronounced kalcho, lit. kick), became the subject of widespread discourse, a source of hope for sudden and large revenues in a culture already imbued with a lottery tradition, and a crucial tool for the public ﬁnancing of sports activities. It was later copied and adopted in many other countries, and it has become a routine feature of contemporary leisure worldwide. This article reconstructs the invention of the Totocalcio by an Italian Jew, Massimo Della Pergola.2

A Jewish Family in Italy Massimo Della Pergola was born in 1912 in Trieste (then part of Austria-Hungary), the third son of Rabbi Raffaello Della Pergola and Alice Prister. This marriage was a paradigm of the currents of acculturation, identity afﬁrmation, and socioeconomic change among Italian Jewry during the late 19th century and at the turn of the 20th century.3 The Della Pergolas were a religious Jewish family that had migrated from the small town of Pitigliano in southern Tuscany during the early 19th century, establishing themselves at the core of the Jewish community in Florence. The family name indicated its origin in Pergola, another small town in the Marche, the region east of Tuscany in the central-northern part of the Italian boot. The town was founded comparatively late, in the 13th century,4 and Jews settled there soon after, probably coming from the town of Gubbio as part of the trickle of moneylenders and artisans who at the time were moving northward from Rome.5 The Marche became part of the Church’s domains, and it is probable that when Pope Paul IV ruled in 1555 that Jews either had to enter the ghettos of Rome and Ancona or else leave the papal state 141

142

Sergio DellaPergola

altogether, Massimo’s ancestors wisely chose to leave, adopting the local toponym as their family name. They apparently moved north into the more liberal domains of the Este family in Ferrara6 before ﬁnally settling in Tuscany, which, under the Medici and later under the Habsburg-Lorraine families, provided a comparatively decent environment for the Jews prior to emancipation.7 David Della Pergola, Massimo’s grandfather, who made a modest living from trading in clothes, used to tell about his being part of Garibaldi’s expedition that had brought about the uniﬁcation of most of Italy in 1861. Considering his year of birth and other biographical details, this story was never taken very seriously. It was, however, an indication of the patriotic Italian feelings of that generation. David had seven children, starting with Ester, Giuseppe (an upholsterer), Cesare (who worked for a while as a shoh.et and as a h.azan in the Florence community), Emma, and Giulia (who ran a small kosher pension in Florence that hosted many young Jewish intellectuals who had come from various parts of Europe in order to study at the university—among them, the famous historian Cecil Roth). The youngest, Alberto, who had a beautiful tenor voice, became the chief cantor in the Spanish synagogue in Bucharest. But the most accomplished was Raffaello, one of the most esteemed pupils of Rabbi Samuel Margulies, who had established at the Collegio Rabbinico in Florence a small but vibrant center of Italian Jewish cultural and religious revival.8 In 1905, Raffaello Della Pergola became the ﬁrst ordained rabbi from the college, which shortly afterwards ordained Umberto Cassuto and several other religious leaders of the Italian Jewish community. The Prister family, from the northeastern sub-Alpine area of Friuli, enjoyed a better socioeconomic standing and was also much more integrated into general society. The family derived from a certain Jacob Cohen, who had reached the Italian-speaking Habsburg lands from Nikolsburg in Moravia at about the turn of the 19th century, had Germanized his name under the prevailing ordinances, and had married within the small but growing cosmopolitan Italian Jewish community in the area. This was one of the ﬁrst “Italian” areas in which the Jews had been granted a degree of emancipation, and where there was rapid cultural integration into the general surroundings.9 The Pristers moved from the small town of Gradisca to the provincial town of Gorizia, and from there to the regional capital of Trieste, which served as the main Hapsburg port on the Adriatic. They owned a plant for the treatment of animal skins and dreamed of the reunion of Trieste with the Italian motherland. Moshe Prister and his wife, Amalia (née Pincherle), had ﬁve children, two of whom—Renzo and Lucia—bore the names of the protagonists of Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, one of the classics of post-Risorgimento Italian literature. As a young man, Renzo was nearly arrested for circulating anti-Austrian, pro-Italian propaganda. A second son, Marco, who had joined the Italian army ﬁghting against the Austrians in the First World War, had been killed in action. There were also two other daughters, Margherita and Alice. The latter had gone “abroad” to study literature at the University of Florence—a sign of her intelligence and independent character. In Florence, this modern, acculturated, and multilingual woman met Raffaello Della Pergola, the young rabbinical student, and soon thereafter they married. In 1903, possibly owing to the family connections of the Pristers, the not yet ordained Raffaello was appointed rabbi of the Gorizia community, which at the time

Massimo Della Pergola and the Invention of the Italian Totocalcio

143

numbered some 350 individuals. He acquitted himself well in this position and, seven years later, successfully applied to become the chief rabbi of Alexandria, Egypt. At the time the Jewish community there was experiencing rapid growth, increasing in size from 15,000 in 1907 to 25,000 in 1927; it was cosmopolitan and its elites were mostly French-speaking, but it had as well a large Italian-speaking component. Raffaello played an important role in Alexandria, among other things providing assistance to the many Jews displaced from Palestine by the Turks.10 He was active in the Zionist initiatives that led in 1915 to the creation of the Zion Mule Corps, which fought with the British in the First World War (and of which he was appointed honorary chaplain), and he participated in laying the cornerstone of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on Mount Scopus in 1918.11 When he died in 1923 at the age of 47, Alice and her three children returned to Trieste, abandoning the traditional and picturesque—if fractious—world of the rabbinate in Alexandria in favor of the far more secular and Italian-oriented environment of her family of origin. This is where young Massimo grew up. For Jews born in early 20th-century Italy, or more precisely, within Italy’s cultural sphere of inﬂuence, the First World War and its geopolitical consequences marked a high point in the long process of integration into Italian society and culture, which had begun with the gradual abolition of the ghetto. This process was accompanied by rapid upward social mobility. Many young Jews had volunteered for the war on behalf of the Italian homeland, which, after all, had allowed them a status and dignity above the norm of other European societies. The presence of Jews was signiﬁcantly growing not only in the professions and in academic circles, but also in the state administration—notably among the military and political elites. Luigi Luzzatti, a highly acculturated Jew who did not, however, disavow his origins, was appointed Italy’s prime minister in 1910.12 The war enhanced the Jewish tendency to regard the Italian nation as a benevolent environment, admittedly Catholic but with some space for a different religious identity. Not surprisingly, the annexation to Italy of Trieste, Istria, and Trentino-Alto Adige at the end of the conﬂict was celebrated by most Jews. Characterized by a sense of belonging to a separate community, the Jewish identity of most Italian Jews at this time was subordinate to their Italian identity. For many of them, Jewishness was a complex of rituals, notions, memories, and beliefs, but also— and perhaps more importantly—social cohesion and respectability. During the ﬁrst two or three decades of the 20th century, very few Italian Jews could genuinely afﬁrm that they felt more Jewish than Italian, given the fact that Italy appeared to offer them nearly unlimited opportunities for economic achievement and a peaceful family framework. With the rise of Fascism in Italy, the post-Risorgimento dream of individual mobility through trust in the protective political and social system began to erode. Some of the most perceptive Italian Jews, including the tiny core of well-educated religious Zionists (among whom Raffaello Della Pergola had belonged), were neither pleased with the triumph of the right nor taken by surprise. Others embraced the new regime, whereas some, especially by the early 1930s, became militant anti-Fascists. Among the majority of Italian Jewry, however, the sudden awakening occurred at the end of the summer and in the autumn of 1938, with the promulgation of the anti-Jewish racial laws.13

144

Sergio DellaPergola

In the spring of that year, Massimo Della Pergola and Adelina Pinto had met one another at a Passover seder held at the home of common acquaintances in Alexandria. Massimo was traveling as part of his managerial job in Istriana Cementi, a large Italian company that supplied cement for the maintenance of the Suez Canal. He was also sending occasional travel articles to Italian daily newspapers. Adelina, born in Florence to a family that combined elements of Sephardic Jewish tradition with the clear aspiration to fully participate in Italian culture, was a young teacher currently employed in the Italian school system’s foreign service in Egypt. By the time they married a few months later, the impact of the new racial laws was already being felt.

Persecution and Flight In Trieste of the late 1920s and early 1930s, a young Jewish adult from a welleducated middle-class family was expected to learn a trade and attain independence as quickly as possible. Following its annexation to Italy, the city was losing the regional importance it had possessed under the Austrians, although it maintained its economic vitality by being the home base of two very large international insurance companies, the Assicurazioni Generali and the Riunione Adriatica di Sicurtà (RAS). A Jewish family, the Stocks, owned an important distillery and the Istriana Cementi factory, and Jews in Trieste were generally well-integrated and respected. Massimo Della Pergola studied at the local high school, possibly aspiring, as had his two older brothers before him, to get a job either in insurance or in some other local business. Around this time, however, Massimo discovered his passion for journalism, and he began to contribute occasional pieces to the local dailies, Il Piccolo and Il Popolo di Trieste. Although his main income derived from his employment at the cement business, this was his main source of satisfaction. Having engaged in track and ﬁeld and soccer in his youth, his writing interests gravitated toward sports. At age 25, in 1937, Massimo was accepted in the Albo, the ofﬁcial press association registrar. This organization recognized two categories of journalists: full-time professionals, and publicists such as Massimo, who practiced part-time. At the beginning of September 1938, following a violent antisemitic campaign that had lasted throughout the summer, the Fascist racial laws were promulgated (a few weeks before the Munich conference). Anticipated by a manifesto of racist scholars signed by a group of Fascist university professors,14 the new rules excluded Jews from all public areas of economic and intellectual activity, limited their property rights, and abolished the civil rights that they had previously been granted. Under the headline “Jews Eliminated from the Press Club,” the Popolo di Trieste reported the following: The executive of the Press Club, in its regular meeting, declared that its Jewish members were to be considered as having resigned. There are eight such members, two professionals, Ida Finzi and Federico Levi, and six publicists, Mario Bolafﬁo, Aldo Cassuto, Massimo Della Pergola, Edvige Levi Guanachi, Vito Levi, and Alice Pincherle. The Press Club’s decision met with full approval by the Black Shirts of the Popolo di Trieste. It was

Massimo Della Pergola and the Invention of the Italian Totocalcio

145

logical that the Jews could no longer be part of what we consider to be our home and family. Fascist journalism is an advanced outpost of the Revolution that must be led by men pure of blood and heart, by faithful soldiers entirely devoted to the Cause. Hence, Jews must be excluded.15

Massimo was now jobless, and he had also been expelled from the university, which prevented him from completing his degree in economics. At the same time, Adelina, his ﬁancée, had been ﬁred from her teaching job in the Italian school system. In 1938, Italian Jews faced the double reality of being brutally ousted from civil and economic life by the same people who had been their colleagues the day before; but also of ﬁnding unexpected new friends who were willing to take risks on their behalf. An example of the latter was a non-Jewish journalist friend of Massimo, Ernesto Oncia, who agreed to “lend” him his name so that Massimo could continue with his writing and thus earn a modest income. On November 17, 1938, the Italian government issued a new decree forbidding marriages between Jews and “Aryans,” beginning on December 3. The concept of “Aryan”—a central tenet of the racial doctrine—was totally foreign to Italian culture and was misunderstood to the point that, on December 1, the municipal clerk in Naples who was preparing the papers toward the future marriage (still dateless) of Massimo and Adelina, called the ﬁancée and warned her that all marriages of Jews would be forbidden. Within 24 hours, the couple was married in the synagogue of Naples. In the following years, Italian Jews suffered increasing marginalization. Economic life became more and more precarious, antisemitism in public circles grew, the alliance with Nazi Germany became stronger, and the weak performance of the Italian military in the war made Mussolini increasingly dependent on Hitler. The more prescient among Italian Jewry, who had seen the storm approaching and who had the means to do so, left the country—to North and South America, to other West European countries, and to Palestine. Several thousand others were baptized on the assumption that this would bestow upon them the protection of the Catholic Church. The majority, however, were trapped in Italy. In September 1942, a son was born to Massimo and Adelina. These were the months of the crucial battle of Stalingrad. Massimo believed that if the Russians held fast, there might be hope for the Jews. Thus, he decided to give his son a name beginning with S, for Stalin. On July 25, 1943, the Fascist Grand Council passed a no-conﬁdence vote against Mussolini. On September 8, Italy signed an armistice with the Allied powers, who had occupied the southern half of the country. From that moment onwards, northern and central Italy were under direct German rule with the collaboration of the puppet government of the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, and the manhunt for Jews began. In August 1943, Massimo, Adelina, and their infant moved from Trieste to Florence. Both Massimo and Adelina had relatives there—the stronger among them had gone into hiding, while the older and less healthy had remained. Several would eventually be deported to Auschwitz. Florence was now occupied by the Wehrmacht. The young household was lodged in a little pension and then hid in a mental hospital where, with the support of the anti-Fascist director, they faked mental illness. Later, thanks to the initiative and courage of a pious Catholic teacher, Ms. Sarcoli, they took up residence in her apartment while she retired to a convent. The teacher had been inﬂuenced by a sermon preached by Florence’s cardinal, Elia Dalla Costa: “In these moments there

146

Sergio DellaPergola

are people who suffer and are seriously endangered. They are our brethren. Do help them.” Other Jews in Florence, among them Rabbi Nathan Cassuto and his wife, Anna (Massimo’s cousin), were arrested and deported. Italians in Tuscany, including some Jewish collaborators, were actively involved in seeking out Jews and handing them over to the Germans.16 Massimo made contact with the Giustizia e Libertà partisan movement afﬁliated with the liberal-socialist Partito d’Azione. A woman by the name of Silvestri supplied food and also put Massimo in touch with an American known as James Woods, who headed Allied intelligence in Florence. Woods asked Massimo, who was quite ﬂuent in German, to collect information by traveling on local trains and listening to Wehrmacht soldiers. One day a number of ofﬁcers were talking about the imminent landing of two Stukas at the Peretola airﬁeld in Florence. The news was quickly transmitted to London, and the same night the Allied air force destroyed the two planes on the ground. Woods was pleased, and promised Massimo a safety pass to Switzerland. On December 23, 1943, Woods urged Massimo to equip himself with warm clothes. Massimo, Adelina, and their infant, along with Massimo’s mother, a few other relatives, some other Jews, and (at ﬁrst unbeknownst to them) a number of Italian partisans and disguised British and American soldiers, were dispatched to take the next northbound train. The American air force staged a fake bombing of the train in order to frighten off the German patrols. Arriving in Milan, Massimo was directed by a man at a coffee bar to take another train to Laveno, on Lake Maggiore. From there, he was given a signal to take the next boat to Cannobio, further to the north—on the boat, it became clear, was an entire group of people who were ﬂeeing Italy. Reaching Cannobio, the group was urged by a voice in the darkness to “run to the hills.” They reached a cabin where local smugglers promised to lead them to the Swiss border. It was the night of December 24. Early the next morning, James Woods, who had meticulously organized the whole operation, reappeared and gave further directions. After a long uphill march, the smugglers at some point stopped and directed the group to a steep downhill path. At the bottom was a tiny creek covered with ice. Adelina, with the baby, had fallen down during the descent, and when they raised their eyes, they saw a soldier with a riﬂe and a German helmet, who tried to take the child to him. The mother cried: “Not the child!” The soldier replied: “I am Sergeant Pellegrini, madame, I am Swiss; and if you don’t move that one last step, you are still in Italy.” Members of the group walked to a small frontier outpost nearby, where the ofﬁcer in charge ﬁrst declared that only the mother, the infant, and the elderly could stay, whereas the others would have to go back to Italy. He relented, however, at the sight of Adelina’s acute distress and agreed to call the central command in Bern. The answer came that, because it was Christmas, the Swiss would make an exception and would admit the entire party. The Swiss soldiers put the child in a makeshift crib and sang Christmas songs in German.17

Project “P” Massimo and his family were now displaced persons in Switzerland. The Swiss divided the women and children from the men. Adelina was sent to a residence in

Massimo Della Pergola and the Invention of the Italian Totocalcio

147

Täsch in the Canton Valais, where most of the residents were young mothers who had lost their husbands and older children at the hands of the Nazis. Massimo was sent to a work camp in Pont de la Morge in the Canton Valais, in the Rhone Valley near the town of Sion. Conditions at Pont de la Morge were quite similar to those of a prison camp. Most of the inmates were Italian soldiers who had found refuge in Switzerland after northern Italy’s occupation by the German army in September 1943, though there were also Jewish and political refugees. It was very cold in the wooden barracks, and the weekly shower was two kilometers from the camp. Residents of the camp wore grey-green overalls with numbers on them. In subsequent years, Massimo would frequently recall his number, 21915. The 200 or so inmates, guarded by soldiers and a sergeant major, were supposed to work at the drainage of the Rhone Valley. Each inmate had to excavate eight cubic meters of earth and stones a day, which was deﬁnitely too much for the group of eight Jewish intellectuals from northern Italy, including Massimo, who were unaccustomed to hard physical labor. They became good friends and helped one another. Some of the less educated and physically more robust among the inmates did an extra hour of digging on behalf of Massimo and his friends, in exchange for their help in reading and writing letters to the soldiers’ families and to the Swiss authorities. All of the inmates received two francs a day for their labor, which were used to buy cigarettes, stamps, and food. A less pleasant feature of life in the camp was the guards, who were quite unfriendly. One day, Massimo decided to organize a protest—all the inmates agreed to stay away from breakfast. But when the sergeant major arrived, the others, despite their earlier assurances of solidarity, rushed to the refectory. Massimo alone stayed behind and was punished. From that point on, he had to clean the camp, including the sergeant’s room. He took advantage of the situation by stealing a pencil, a folder, and a few sheets of paper that he concealed under his mattress. On the folder, he wrote a big capital “P”—standing for his project. Like other Italians, Massimo was concerned about the heavy damage his country was sustaining from daily bombings on the part of Allied forces. Because he was a sports journalist, he worried not only about houses and bridges, but also about stadiums, gymnasiums, and swimming pools that would need to be reconstructed. Massimo began to think about a practical plan to reconstruct the postwar Italian sports system, making it viable and self-sufﬁcient. He considered the British bookmakers and sports lotteries that already existed in Switzerland and Sweden, pondering the need for something that would appeal both to the Italian love of lotteries and to the national passion for soccer. What he came up with was a schedina (skeDEE-nah, schedule) that would include 12 soccer games, whose results would be designated in advance by those who ﬁlled it out. For each of the games appearing on a given column, there would be options to indicate a home team victory, a visiting team’s victory, or a tie. Massimo considered labeling the options 1-2-3 (too infantile) or A-B-C (too didactic) before deciding on 1 (home victory), 2 (visitors’ victory), and X (tie). Further, he conceived of the idea of creating a Bank of Sport. Instead of a prize, the winners of the weekly contest would receive their money in a savings account. Massimo considered as well the possibility of buying a paper mill and a printing house to print the schedules, as well as Sport Hotels to host traveling teams and supporters. All of these ideas found their way into his folder.

148

Sergio DellaPergola

After the Allied landing in Normandy in the summer of 1944, the Swiss attitude toward the inmates changed radically. Massimo was transferred from the drainage works in Pont de la Morge to Saint Cergue, where he worked at a refugee camp telephone exchange, exploiting his ﬂuency in several languages. He asked to be reunited with his family and was transferred to Tenero, a village near Locarno in the Italianspeaking canton of Ticino, which had a friendly local population. Massimo was given responsibility for a federal government survey of egg production. A rationing program was in effect, and Massimo’s method of conducting the survey was to ask the local producers to provide their own numbers; this resulted in somewhat lower federal estimates but some marginal egg, bread, and sugar beneﬁts for his wife and son. Massimo also contacted two Ticinese journalists in Lugano, Geo Molo and Fabio Jeger, whom he had met in Italy a few years before, and who published the weekly Sport Ticinese. The two asked him to write for the newspaper, even though refugees were forbidden to work. Massimo accordingly used a pen name, Maximus, and in this way returned to journalism. He received ﬁve francs per article, covering soccer games but also writing colorful pieces on postwar fantasies and even horoscopes. The public loved his writing, and sales of the sports weekly increased. The publishers were pleased and got him transferred with his family to Lugano. Here he had to be back home at 9 p.m., but he had an ofﬁce at the newspaper and a monthly salary. The real identity of Maximus was a well-guarded secret.

The Birth of SISAL In July 1945, the Swiss police escorted the Italian refugees, including Massimo and his family, to the frontier post in Chiasso and returned all the valuables that had been impounded, aside from those that had been sold in order to partially cover the refugees’ living expenses. Returning after 19 months away from Italy, the refugees were excited and optimistic until they arrived in Milan and saw the widespread destruction there. In Trieste, family possessions had been looted. Most tragically, Massimo learned that he and Adelina had lost no less than 17 close relatives in the Holocaust, including his older brother Steno. Massimo carried on with his project. First, he rented a room in a small hotel next to Italy’s premier sports daily, La Gazzetta dello Sport, and went to see Bruno Roghi, the editor-in-chief. Roghi was not only a sports journalist but also a deeply cultured man and a brilliant and highly esteemed writer. He had heard of the vicissitudes of the young and gifted “Maximus,” and he immediately appointed Massimo his second-incommand, putting him in charge of the all-important soccer section. Massimo could once again write under his own name. He hired some younger colleagues destined to have bright careers, among them Giorgio Fattori, who was to become one of the leading ﬁgures in Italian publishing. Traveling all over northern Italy to cover matches, he witnessed the terrible destruction of war. Old trucks substituted for railways, and boat bridges crossed the main rivers. In Trieste, the postwar border issues were not yet resolved. The city was under British military occupation, and Yugoslavia insisted on recovering both Trieste and additional territories from what it considered to be

Massimo Della Pergola and the Invention of the Italian Totocalcio

149

Italian occupation. Poverty was widespread, and the need to reconstruct not only the infrastructure but also the psychological state of the nation was overwhelming. Amid the squalor, Massimo believed, his project could save one thing, at least—Italian sports. However, when he shared his plan with his revered editor, Roghi dismissed it, suggesting instead that Massimo focus on his journalistic career and promising him that he would be Roghi’s successor as La Gazzetta’s editor-in-chief. Yet Project P was too compelling. The search for investors started. On September 3, 1945, together with two partners—Geo Molo and Fabio Jeger, the two Swiss sports journalists with whom he had worked—Massimo established a company, headed by him, whose goal was to run a national weekly betting contest on soccer games. In seeking a catchy name, Massimo operated on the principle that the trick was to use a word with three consonants and two vowels, following the example of Kodak or Xerox. The name that was selected, SISAL, stood for Sport Italia Società a Responsabilità Limitata. To achieve the optimal acronym, the “r” of Responsabilità was dropped—generating some sarcastic comments among the lawyers. In fact, SISAL was to become a vastly popular catchword in postwar Italy; the phrase “to win at SISAL” even found its way into the dictionary as a synonym for being lucky. With the company established, it was now necessary to contact key people in the state administration in Rome in order to obtain the appropriate licenses on a national scale. At the Italian National Olympic Committee (Comitato Olimpico Nazionale Italiano) (CONI), people were bewildered by the proposal. CONI’s interim commissioner was Giulio Onesti, an intelligent if somewhat lazy lawyer and socialist who, at the request of Pietro Nenni (the head of the Socialist party), had been appointed to his position after Rome’s liberation in 1944, with the goal of closing down the organization. Onesti was not initially a sports fan, but he was a quick learner who also knew how to maneuver in Italy’s volatile political environment. In fact, after the postwar normalization, he became the permanent commissioner and held the post for the following three decades. At the outset, he was primarily worried by CONI’s debt of nearly 8 million lire, which, since there was no income, paralyzed the committee. After listening to Massimo’s explanation of his project, Onesti said that the Ministry of Finance had already promised an income of one lira per car registration. This would produce an income of 500,000 lire, he explained, so that there was no need for Massimo’s odd proposal. Massimo answered that he was offering an income from many millions of betting form schedules, a share of which would go every week to CONI, to the Italian soccer federation (Federazione Italiana Giuoco Calcio) (FIGC), and directly to the state. The skeptical Roman bureaucracy followed the efforts to launch the new project with a combination of scorn and indifference. Massimo’s appearances at government ofﬁces were followed by comments such as “Santa Claus has arrived with a basket of millions.” Some ofﬁcials at the Ministry of the Interior expressed the fear that the new game would have negative effects on public order. Finally, however, they became convinced that everyone would beneﬁt. On January 4, 1946, the General Directorate of Public Security, Police Division, issued a lengthy directive signed by Italy’s interior affairs minister, Armando Spataro, which acknowledged the existence of clandestine betting on soccer games and which declared that it was better to recognize

150

Sergio DellaPergola

betting as a “necessity” and to submit it to stringent police controls and taxation. Two weeks later, CONI decided to promote the new plan and directed Onesti to entrust its management to SISAL. The following week, the ﬁnal “Regulation of Betting Pools Tied to Soccer Games Organized by C.O.N.I.” was issued. At this stage, it became imperative to create a countrywide organization, establish rules, hire personnel, rent ofﬁces, develop a distribution network, advertise, and perform numerous additional chores. The patents ofﬁce rejected the request to issue a trademark on the symbols of the betting—1, X, 2—explaining that letters of the alphabet as well as numbers were in the public domain. Instead, SISAL succeeded in copyrighting its logo: a horseshoe magnet with the words “Sport Italia” printed in white capital letters against a black background, with a soccer ball and the symbols 1, X, 2 inside the horseshoe and the word SISAL at the bottom (see ﬁg. 1). The organization, which set up its central headquarters in Milan, had 12 regional branches and 90 trustees charged with collecting the betting schedules in each Italian province. It was crucial to have the schedules widely available at easily reachable “receiving ofﬁces” (ricevitorie). One day, Massimo entered the Bar Si in the Milan Gallery and asked for an aperitif. The cashier said “thirty lire.” Two ideas occurred to him. One was that the distribution points could be bars, of which there were plenty, and some of which had a license to sell tobacco, cigarettes, and postal stamps. These places would, of course, get a percentage of the betting. Although many proprietors were initially unenthusiastic, perceiving the betting sideline to be little more than a nuisance, it soon proved its proﬁtability. Within a period of a few months, there were 2,500 ricevitorie, a number that soon grew to more than 10,000. Massimo’s second insight was that the cost of betting should be about the same as a single glass of vermouth. Although many people later speculated that the price of the schedules must have been determined by a sophisticated marketing study, the truth was far simpler. To create support for the pools and to disseminate the necessary information among bettors, Massimo began to put out a new weekly, Sport Italia, which eventually reached a circulation of 250,000. In the opening editorial, he proclaimed his credo: The SISAL contest pursues a clear goal: to ensure Italian sports the necessary means to provide at least partially for the Olympic Committee and Soccer Federation. At a particularly difﬁcult moment for state ﬁnances, sports must act on its own, without government subsidy. Sportsmen themselves, by participating in the contest, will contribute to strengthening sports and to providing CONI with the necessary means to prepare for the Olympic games. Financing of CONI may later allow for the reduction of taxes on sporting events and of payments by soccer clubs to the FIGC.

On Sunday, May 5, 1946, the betting pool was ﬁnally launched. That afternoon, Massimo was at Milan’s San Siro stadium, reporting on the Internazionale-Juventus soccer game on behalf of La Gazzetta dello Sport. The stadium was packed. Millions of Italians were listening from home on the radio. Inter won the game, and Massimo marked “1” on the empty schedule he had brought with him, which he later saved as a keepsake (see ﬁg. 1).

Massimo Della Pergola and the Invention of the Italian Totocalcio

151

Figure 1. Empty schedule marked at ﬁrst soccer game after launch of betting pool

Triumph The initial regulation of the Totocalcio allocated 45 percent of the betting revenues to winners. Of the remaining 55 percent, 16 percent went to state taxes and to the Ministry of Interior for welfare needs, 12 percent to the major sports organizations (CONI and FIGC), 7 percent to the ricevitorie, and 20 percent to SISAL. At the end of the 1946–1947 season, the share of major sports organizations rose to 20 percent, and that of SISAL was reduced to 12 percent. (As will be seen, this division of revenues was to become a bone of contention.) With regard to the 45 percent divided among the winners, half of the share was to be divided among those who had correctly guessed the outcomes of all 12 games, and the other half to those who had correctly guessed 11 out of 12 results. If no one had correctly guessed all 12 games, the sum was distributed among those with 11 correct results, and if no one had correctly guessed 11 results, the sum was distributed among those with 10 correct results. In the event that one or two of the 12 games could not be played because of bad weather, the schedule included two substitute games The odds against someone’s guessing 12 correct results were quite high, as there were 531,441 possible combinations for 12 games in which the outcome was either 1, X, or 2, whereas there were 177,147 possible combinations for 11 games and 59,049 possible combinations for 10 games. In theory, it was possible to achieve a sure win by betting on all the possible combinations, but this would be so costly as to make the venture not worthwhile. Moreover, the odds were not the same for all combinations—obviously, the better teams were more likely than the underdogs to win, and in soccer, unlike some other sports, the home team has a deﬁnite advantage

152

Sergio DellaPergola

over the visiting team. In fact, 44 percent of all games ended in a home team victory as opposed to 37 percent in a tie and 19 percent in a visiting team’s victory. Correct betting thus involved some knowledge of the game (which most Italians believed they had). At the same time, the big wins would come about precisely when very few bettors shared the total revenue, with smaller wins resulting from a situation in which relatively many bettors guessed the correct outcomes of the games. Scrupulous controls were introduced to keep the Totocalcio fair and aboveboard. The schedule consisted of three parts, each of which had to be ﬁlled out in identical manner (see ﬁg. 1). When the form was handed in, the receiver would stick a band of glued paper across the upper part of the schedule. Then the three parts of the ﬁlledout form were separated: one part remained with the bettor, one went to SISAL, and the third went to a notary who put it in a safe with two different locks—one key going to SISAL and the other remaining with the notary. Opening and closing of the safe had to be done with both keys simultaneously. Later, thousands of people were hired to sort the millions of schedules, searching for those with correct guesses. When these were found, the three parts had to be reunited. The band of glued paper had to match perfectly; if someone had substituted his part of the schedule for another one, the trick would be instantly exposed. A problem with serious ﬁnancial implications was the demand for payment on the part of people who maintained that their winning schedule had been lost by SISAL. Human error was of course possible, and whenever it was detected, it was immediately corrected. In fact, the organizers of the game had no interest in concealing a winning schedule. The whole share of revenues went to the winners; an extra winner would simply cause the same amount of money to be divided up among more persons. The extraordinary “coincidence” was that numerous such claims regarding lost forms tended to be voiced only in weeks when the number of winners was very small and the prizes according high. For such a situation to occur, four “miracles” were necessary: • by deﬁnition, luck is blind, yet only winning schedules ever appeared to be lost; • the reported lost schedules always contained 12 accurate game results, which would award a larger win than would 11 accurate results; • in any given week, there were several million schedules, and presumably very few of these were winners; yet a signiﬁcant portion of these winners were the ones reportedly lost; • whereas the claim was that Part 2 of the schedule had been misplaced by SISAL at some stage of its being transferred to the outside readers who veriﬁed the winning results, Part 3—the one with the notary—was also never found, and therefore it never could be proved that the actual bet had ever been placed. A ﬁfth “miracle” later occurred when, after a few cases had been brought to court, the Supreme Court cleared SISAL of any wrongdoing and established rules and sanctions to prevent fraud on the part of bettors. From that time onward, hardly any more schedules were “lost.” The ﬁrst contest, held on May 5, 1946, was actually a big disappointment. Five million schedules had been printed and distributed, but only 34,000 had been ﬁlled

Massimo Della Pergola and the Invention of the Italian Totocalcio

153

out. Many of the 4.9 million unused schedules ended up in barber shops where they were used to clean shaving cream from razors. Yet there was also a fortunate aspect to the ﬁrst round of the Totocalcio: six consecutive ties on the list of 12 results, with only one person, Emilio Biasetti of Milan, correctly guessing all 12 outcomes. Biasetti took home 463,846 lire, about the equivalent of $1,000, a respectable sum in postwar Italy. The second week, 80,000 schedules were ﬁlled, and the numbers gradually increased, from 150,000 in the third contest to 300,000 in the 12th. But it was the 1946–1947 season that deﬁnitely established the contest. From 281,000 schedules in the ﬁrst week of the season, the numbers increased to one million in the ﬁfth week; to three million in the ninth week; seven million in the 17th week; ten million in the 19th week; and 13 million in the 21st—the last number representing nearly one of every three inhabitants of Italy. In later weeks, the average was around ten million, declining to four million in the last ﬁve weeks of the season. While the initial schedule had a single column, later schedules contained two, six, and occasionally eight columns, allowing players to try different combinations of game results. SISAL’s research division, headed by Massimo’s older brother Franco, who had a good background in statistics, developed a “system with logical reduction,” which made possible an improvement in betting performance by increasing the probability of wins.18 Weeks with big wins, usually due to surprising results in the matches, alternated with weeks whose results were more predictable. In October 1947, a single schedule ﬁlled in by ﬁve workers in Pieve di Cadore, a small town in the northeast, won 45 million lire. In February 1948, the highest prize to date, 64 million lire, went to Piero Amelotti, a cofﬁn maker from Treviglio. At the opposite extreme of prize amounts were those awarded one week in 1948 to 37,000 people who had ﬁlled in 12 correct results—each of them received 839 lire, or approximately one dollar—and to another 225,000 people who had ﬁlled in 11 correct results (each received 123 lire, or approximately 15 cents). Initially, people had to write their names and addresses on the back on the schedule, and in case of a win they received a check at home. Later, winners had to claim their own money, and surprising amounts of money were in fact never claimed. A survey a few years later indicated that 68 percent of all men and 44 percent of all women in Italy at least occasionally ﬁlled out a SISAL schedule. Among those who did, 45 percent did so every week, 14 percent one to three times a month, and 41 percent less frequently.19 About half ﬁlled in the schedules alone, and half with associates. About one third had never seen a soccer game in their lives. Massimo understood the importance of public relations and was adept at inventing slogans, jingles, and gimmicks. Once he rented the Milan central rail station for a night and had the sorting of hundreds of thousands of schedules carried out in front of an amazed public. The national press was initially unimpressed, but when the game became a nationwide fad it became necessary to devote ample coverage to it. There was also tragedy, as when the director of the SISAL branch in the city of Bari, while in the process of transferring the weekly revenues, was assaulted, robbed, and killed. Overall, however, the beneﬁts of the Totocalcio for national sports became increasingly evident. Giulio Onesti, the CONI commissioner, summarized the situation: “Della Pergola, you deserve a statue in each Italian square.”

154

Sergio DellaPergola

The State Takes Over After 94 weeks, the adventure of SISAL came to an abrupt end, or at least this was the fate of its Totocalcio contest. CONI, not satisﬁed with having covered all of its debts in just a few initial weeks of income from the game, asked for a reduction of SISAL’s share of the total revenue. Negotiations on the matter took place during the 1946–1947 season, chaired by a former prime minister, Ivanoe Bonomi. A new regulation allocated 12 percent of the income to SISAL and 6 percent to the ricevitorie, with these percentages increasing in the event of a decline in overall betting. Strangely enough, when the new contract was ﬁnally drafted, the entire senior staff of CONI approved it, yet it was never signed. Instead, on April 14, 1948, the Italian government issued a legislative decree signed by Enrico De Nicola, Italy’s president (from the Liberal party), Alcide De Gasperi (the Christian Democratic prime minister), Giuseppe Pella, the ﬁnance minister, Mario Scelba, the minister of the interior, and Antonio Segni, the minister of agriculture,20 which reserved to the state the right to organize betting contests and handed over control of existing contests to CONI and to the Union Nazionale Incremento Razze Equine (UNIRE), the national authority for horseracing. This decree effectively nationalized the initiative begun by SISAL. Interestingly, it came into effect only four days before the most sharply fought national elections in postwar Italian history, which involved a confrontation between the Christian Democrats and the Social-Communist Popular Front. Apparently, dispossessing SISAL was related to the ﬁght for political hegemony over postwar Italy. CONI insisted on further reducing SISAL and the ricevitorie share of revenue to a total of 14 percent, threatening to create a competing company called SAGA under its own control. On July 7, 1948, at the end of the soccer season, Massimo was in Rome to negotiate a solution to these difﬁculties with the leading triumvirate of the Italian sports administration—Onesti, Ottorino Barassi (the president of FIGC), and Bruno Zauli, FIGC’s general secretary. At the meeting’s lunch break, he went to a restaurant and heard the radio news announcing that the betting pool had been nationalized and had passed under the direct control of CONI, thus depriving SISAL of any further revenue from the contest. Appalled, he asked for a meeting with the recently elected new president of the republic, Luigi Einaudi, a Liberal who was a senior economist and a staunch supporter of free-market initiative. Massimo asked the president—who, by law, had to countersign government decisions—how he could have acted to nationalize an enterprise that was a shining example of free and innovative entrepreneurship. Einaudi answered that, because he saw so many documents, he felt obliged to trust the ministers who had already signed them. On Einaudi’s advice, Massimo then went to the minister of ﬁnance, Ezio Vanoni, a Christian Democrat. The latter counseled patience and promised that something would be done to rectify the matter. Time passed and nothing happened; it became increasingly clear that one of the architects of the maneuver was Giulio Andreotti, then the undersecretary of state with a mandate for sports and entertainment, who eventually served (several times) as Italy’s prime minister. In retrospect, Massimo’s thorough plans had overlooked one important element in Italian political culture—the connection between money and power—that would be exposed several decades later in the Tangentopoli

Massimo Della Pergola and the Invention of the Italian Totocalcio

155

(city kickback) scandal. To regain at least some portion of its initial investment, SISAL had to sue CONI with the help of a number of leading Italian jurists. Initiated in 1950, the case went from court to court over a period of six years until the Italian Supreme Court ﬁnally ruled in its favor. Under CONI, the contest continued its spectacular success, and several innovations reﬂected improved technologies and the growing number of participants. Mechanical and later computerized schedule processing were introduced. The number of correct bets was raised to 13, and the share of total revenue given to the winners was further reduced, to 32 percent. The scale of major wins grew spectacularly. The highest price ever awarded to a single winner was paid on November 7, 1993—5,549,756,245 lire (some ﬁve million dollars). Thanks to growing revenues, Italy and CONI were able to organize the 1956 Winter Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo, the 1960 Rome Olympic Games, the 1990 Soccer World Cup, and numerous other major sports events, along with Italy’s participation in those events abroad—all of which required huge budgetary resources. But none of Massimo’s dreams, such as the Bank of Sport or other similar initiatives, were ever implemented. Massimo and his associates at SISAL started a new initiative, a national contest on horse races based not on the classic rules of betting on horses but rather on the same symbols, 1, X, and 2, that had become so popular with soccer.21 Horses were divided into three groups named after the three symbols, and the group of wining horses had to be guessed. The game was called TOTIP, an acronym for Totalizzatore Ippico (horserace betting pool)—once again, the name was chosen according to the principle that a good acronym should alternate three consonants and two vowels—and its revenues were shared with the state and with UNIRE. This new venture never attained the popularity of the soccer contest, but it did allow for the continuation of SISAL, which still exists. Massimo, however, was not interested in horseracing, and he decided to quit. In a long letter sent to his SISAL partners and collaborators on May 5, 1955, he wrote: Eleven years have elapsed since the day when, ﬁrst vaguely, then more intensely, an idea took form; ten years since the idea became operative; nine years since SISAL started its uninterrupted activity. Since then we have spent a long eventful period together, full of work, struggles, and successes. From that distant ﬁrst schedule, tens and hundreds of weeks followed, as betting pools attained amazing growth and conferred national importance on our SISAL activities. Today, after years of struggle, things are going along smoothly. All promises have been fulﬁlled, all plans have been executed. SISAL has settled with CONI and has received high praise from UNIRE because of the efﬁcient help provided to Italian horseracing. Today it is time for me to move out of the command cabin, to leave the vessel’s helm and go ashore. Goodbye, old SISAL.

Aftermath After leaving SISAL, Massimo Della Pergola returned to sports writing. In spite of the Nazi-Italian fascist persecution, his Italian cultural roots and patriotism had never been called into question. Yet for Massimo—as for many other Italian Jews—a more active Jewish identity emerged over the course of the subsequent years, which

156

Sergio DellaPergola

in his case was expressed through voluntary activities in several Jewish organizations in Italy and in Israel. In 1961, he was elected chairman of the Italian Maccabi Federation; he led the Italian delegation to the Maccabiah games in Israel for three decades, and he was appointed to the International Maccabiah Games Committee and to the Maccabi World Union executive. In 1977, after many years of activity in the Union of Italian Sports press association (Unione Stampa Sportiva Italiana) (USSI), he was elected secretary general of the International Sports Press Association (known by its French acronym, AIPS). For 12 very active years he contributed signiﬁcantly to expanding its world membership, and he was an outspoken advocate of the right of Israeli sportswriters to participate in international conventions and on various committees. (His professional and diplomatic activity was remarkably successful in view of the obstacles created by the powerful Soviet bloc during the last years of the Cold War, as well as by the numerous delegations of sportswriters from Arab countries.) Eventually, he was appointed AIPS honorary vice-president for life. For all these achievements in the realm of general and Jewish sports causes, Massimo was elected to the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in Netanya in 1989.22 In 1996, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the creation of SISAL and the Totocalcio, Massimo was invited by Mario Pescante, the president of the Italian Olympic committee, to the inauguration of its luxurious new building in Rome. Nearly a thousand people greeted him with a standing ovation and a silver plaque—representing the ﬁrst SISAL schedule—was presented to him. The president of Italy granted him the rank of Grande Ufﬁciale della Republica, one of Italy’s highest national awards. When he died in 2006 in Milan, his passing was reported on Italy’s prime-time television news and was extensively covered by the national press. Headlines lauded him as “the inventor of the schedina,” “Mr. 1-X-2,” and “San Gennaro” (the patron saint of the city of Naples, who has the prerogative of bestowing riches on the poor). Looking back on his life, one wonders what made Massimo Della Pergola what he was. How could the son of an outstanding rabbi become the maverick who dealt with prime ministers, invented the ﬁnancial basis that saved Italian sports, and created thousands of new millionaires in Italy? One key might be found in the socialpsychological approach developed by Erik Erikson, Kurt Lewin, and Simon Herman, who argued that human personality, identities, and behavior emerge from the integration of several possible spheres of identiﬁcation that are available to an individual over the course of his or her life.23 In the modern world, apart from family ties, the three core identiﬁcational ﬁelds that complement one another (and somewhat compete with one another) are religious-ethnic identity, national-geopolitical identity, and occupational-social class identity.24 On the ﬁrst account, Massimo Della Pergola was a deeply committed, and eventually even militant Jew. On the second, during the crucial years of his work to promote the future welfare of Italian sports, he acted as a true Italian patriot. But perhaps the innermost and dominant facet was the one he repeatedly stressed during the interview he gave quite late in his life, in 1998, to Steven Spielberg’s audio-visual project on Shoah survivors. From the time he was a teenager, Della Pergola said, he felt he was a sports journalist.

Massimo Della Pergola and the Invention of the Italian Totocalcio

157

Notes 1. Antonio Ghirelli, Storia del calcio in Italia (Turin: 1967); Giuseppe Brunamontini (ed.), 50 Years of Totocalcio in Literature and Reality (Rome: 1996); Tonino De Juliis, “The Origins of Totocalcio,” in ibid., 105–113. 2. The author of this essay—the son of the ﬁgure it proﬁles—has made an effort to write in as objective a manner as possible. The central sections of this essay rely heavily on the autobiography of Massimo Della Pergola, Storia della SISAL e del suo inventore (Milan: 1997). 3. See H. Stuart Hughes, Prisoners of Hope: The Silver Age of Italian Jews, 1924– 1974 (Cambridge, Mass.: 1983); Sergio Della Pergola, Anatomia dell’ebraismo italiano: Caratteristiche demograﬁche, economiche, sociali, religiose e politiche di una minoranza (Rome-Assisi: 1976); Corrado Vivanti (ed.), Storia d’Italia: Gli ebrei in Italia, 2 vols. (Turin: 1997); Bernard D. Cooperman and Barbara Garvin (eds.), The Jews of Italy: Memory and Identity (Bethesda: 2000). 4. Sandro Sebastianelli, “L’inﬂusso di Fonte Avellana nello sviluppo dell’area cesanese nei secoli XIII–XVI,” in Fonte Avellana, nos. 5, 6, 7 (1980), 193–223. 5. Ariel Toaff, Love, Work and Death: Jewish Life in Medieval Umbria (London: 1996). 6. A certain Menahem ben Eliezer MiLapergola was circumcised by R. Azaryah MiFano in Ferrara on June 1, 1572; see Reuven Bonﬁl, “Yedi’ot h.adashot letoledot h.ayav shel R. Menahem ’Azaryah mifano utkufato,” in Perakim betoledot hah. evrah hayehudit bimeihabeinayim uva’et hah.adashah, mukdeshet leprofessor Ya’akov Katz, ed. Emanuel Etkes and Yosef Salmon (Jerusalem: 1980), 98–125. 7. Lionella Viterbo, La Comunità ebraica di Firenze nel censimento del 1841 (Florence: 2005). 8. Shmuel Riccardo Si Segni, “Moshe David Cassuto uveit hamidrash lerabanim haitalki leﬁ netunim midoh.ot beit hamidrash,” in Umberto (Moshe David) Cassuto, Italia, Studi e Ricerche sulla Storia, la Cultura e la Letteratura degli Ebrei in Italia (Conference Supplement Series 3), ed. Robert Bonﬁl (Jerusalem: 2007), 73–105. 9. See Gianfranco Todeschini and Pier Cesare Ioly Zorattini (eds.) Il mondo ebraico: Gli ebrei tra Italia nord-orientale e Impero asburgico dal Medioevo all’Italia contemporanea (Pordenone: 1991), especially the essay by Sergio DellaPergola, “Trasformazioni sociodemograﬁche degli ebrei a Trieste e in Italia nord-orientale (XIX e XX secolo),” 517–552. 10. John H. Patterson, With the Zionists in Gallipoli (London: 1916). 11. Yom h.ageinu: pirtei hah.agigah shel hanah.at even hapinah levinyan hauniversitah ha’ivrit birushalayim bet’’u menah.em-av 1917–18 (Jerusalem: 1918). 12. Luzzatti, who had completed his tenure as prime minister in 1911, the year before Massimo Della Pergola was born, sent a personal message on the occasion of the formal inauguration of the Hebrew University in 1925. 13. See Iael Orvieto-Nidam, “Bein haﬂayah lirdifah: yehudei italiyah nokhah. mashber mitgaber, 1938–1943” (Ph.D. diss., The Hebrew University, 2003). 14. See Enzo Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei: Le leggi razziali in Italia (Bari: 2003); Joshua D. Zimmerman (ed.), Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922–1945 (Cambridge: 2005). 15. The status of discriminated (in the sense of favorable discrimination) could be requested by Jews who had exceptional merits in the framework of the Fascist regime, or else extraordinary military or economic achievement. Under the rules, “eligible” Jews were exempted from some of the limitations imposed by the racial laws. See Renzo De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo (Turin: 1961); Meir Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews: German-Italian Relations and the Jewish Question in Italy, 1922–1945 (London: 1978); Susan Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue and Survival (New York: 1987). 16. Enzo Collotti (ed.), Razza e fascismo: La persecuzione contro gli ebrei in Toscana (1937–1943), 2 vols. (Rome: 1999). 17. This story is documented from the perspective of the smugglers in Erminio Ferrari, Contrabbandieri: Uomini e bricolle tra Ossola, Ticino e Vallese (Verbania: 1996), 87–96;

158

Sergio DellaPergola

and from the perspective of the Swiss in Renata Broggini, Terra d’asilo: I rifugiati italiani in Svizzera 1943–1954 (Bologna: 1993). 18. SISAL, Totocalcio (Milan: 1947); Franco Della Pergola, La scheda sistemistica a riduzione logica: Il criterio del sistema delle accoppiate e sua applicazione al TOTIP (Milan: 1949). 19. Pierpaolo Luzzatto Fegiz, Il volto sconosciuto dell’Italia: Dieci anni di sondaggi Doxa (Milan: 1956). 20. Pella, Scelba, and Segni later became Italian prime ministers, and Segni also served as president of Italy. 21. The ﬁrst contest was held on May 30, 1948, two weeks after the state of Israel had been declared. 22. Joseph Siegman, Jewish Sports Legends (Washington, D.C.: 2000), 122–123. 23. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: 1950); Kurt Lewin, Field Theory in Social Science (New York: 1951), Simon Herman, Jewish Identity: A Social Psychological Perspective (Beverly Hills: 1977). 24. Sergio DellaPergola, “Jewish Identity/Assimilation/Continuity: Approaches to a Changing Reality,” Cadernos de Lengua e Literatura Hebraica 3 (São Paulo) (2001), 17–51.

Essays

This page intentionally left blank

Reﬂections from “Hutz La’aretz”: Responses of Reform Rabbis to Israeli Statehood Matthew Silver (max stern college of emek yezreel)

In 1951, Meyer Levin published a sardonic story titled “After All I Did for Israel,” which featured an American Jew who was active in the UJA and who wrote checks for Israel, yet was more than happy to keep Israel at a safe distance from his own comfortable suburban home.1 Several years later, a study published by sociologist Albert Gordon noted: “Most suburban Jews have a friendly, though at times uneasy, feeling about the State of Israel. . . . There is an interest and a readiness to support the State of Israel, even though Jewish suburban men do not belong to any organization speciﬁcally dealing with Israel.”2 The classic “Lakeville” study of suburban Chicago Jews co-authored by Marshall Sklare and Joseph Greenbaum (1967) contained a chapter titled “The Lakeville Jew and Israel” that dealt with American Jews’ engagement with the newly established Jewish state. Far more frequently cited, however, was its table ranking 22 measures of what it meant to be a “good Jew.” Several years after the Second World War, this table showed, only 21 percent of the respondents believed that supporting Israel was an essential part of being a good Jew. In fact, Israel ranked 14th on the list, behind a roster of American-based desiderata such as “work for the equality of Negroes” and “help the underprivileged improve their lot.”3 Despite some questions concerning the accuracy of this table’s surveying techniques,4 the most inﬂuential studies of Jewish politics in the post-Holocaust era routinely relied on it as a barometer of American Jewry’s post-1948 “sense of distance and separateness from Israel,” as one of many Lakeville-inﬂuenced scholars phrased it.5 The 1950s was a period of enormous growth for Reform (and also Conservative) congregations in the suburbs.6 Thus, ﬁndings in studies such as those of Gordon and of Sklare and Greenbaum about suburban Jewish apathy toward Israel tended to conﬁrm the perception that the attitude of Reform Jewry toward the newly established Jewish state was lukewarm, at best. Leon Jick, a historian of American Reform Judaism, noted that passion for Israel was no more than a “tolerated deviation” in the Reform movement. Recalling his own days as a rabbinical student at the Hebrew Union College during the 1950s, he wrote: “If there was a Zionist on the faculty, he kept his inclinations to himself. The prevailing sentiment among both faculty and the student body was disinterest.”7 Similarly, The Story of Reform Judaism, an 161

162

Matthew Silver

educational work published in 1953, included only three brief, incidental references to Israel. This Hebrew school textbook for eighth-graders was characteristic of other Reform publications of the time in its formal acceptance of Zionism alongside practical disinterest in the realities of Israel.8 To what extent are such perceptions about Reform Jewry’s attitude toward Israel true? This essay, focusing on unpublished sermonic literature of Reform rabbis in the ﬁrst years of Israeli statehood, seeks to present a more nuanced view. I would argue that, whereas the American Jewish attitude toward Israel can be characterized in many and sometimes contradictory ways, familiar assumptions about disinterest or ignorance cannot be validated by a review of these source materials, which point instead to complex and committed initial responses to the Jewish state. To be sure, Reform rabbis are not necessarily representative of what the “American Jewish community” thinks about any given subject. During the period in question, Reform rabbis, unlike the wider American Jewish community, were contesting with some issues speciﬁc to their own movement—in particular, Reform’s residual legacy of anti-Zionism.9 It is, of course, also the case that the sermonic texts (and accompanying documents from personal archives and published sources) utilized in this research are neither exhaustive nor meticulously representative. Not all rabbis donate their personal papers to archives, nor do they have a consistent way of composing and recording their thoughts for sermons. Nonetheless, as publicly articulated statements that carry weight in the organized Jewish community, Reform synagogue sermons do provide some good indications as to what Jews in local, mostly suburban, settings were “really” thinking at the time. Given the rapid succession of events surrounding Israeli statehood in the weeks and months before and after May 1948, rabbis did not have the luxury of presenting belabored, stylized views on Israel. These sermons, many of them marked by unusual spontaneity, capture a speciﬁc moment and mood among the American Jewish public and some of its spiritual leaders. When the state of Israel was proclaimed in May 1948, it was not entirely clear what would be the responses of the non-Orthodox denominations. Within Conservative Judaism, whose leading thinkers and rabbis had for decades been more consistent than their Reform counterparts in their support of Zionism (particularly the “cultural Zionism” espoused by Ahad Ha’am), certain misgivings were expressed in the 1948–1949 period, with some rabbis wondering whether Jewish nationalism would supersede Jewish religion in the new state.10 How would Reform Judaism, with its more ambivalent, and once even hostile, track record regarding Zionism, respond to the challenges posed by the creation of a Jewish state? Among other issues and obstacles, the Reform movement had few institutions based in Israel through which to spread American Reform principles and values.11 For a Reform rabbi in May 1948, the prime source of optimism regarding the future relationship between his movement and the new state was to be found in a number of recent developments. Beginning in the 1930s, Reform’s historic hostility to Zionism began to wane. The movement’s rapid and intense adoption of Zionist principles during and immediately after the Holocaust period was symbolized by a number of transitions and events, including efforts made by key ﬁgures such as Julian Morgenstein, the president of Hebrew Union College (HUC), to wed their longstanding commitment to Reform’s “universal” mission with Zionism’s practical nation-

Responses of Reform Rabbis to Israeli Statehood

163

alist agenda of Jewish rescue and revival.12 This wartime marriage of Reform and Zionism was exempliﬁed dramatically by Abba Hillel Silver’s ascendance within the American Jewish communal leadership following his galvanizing orations at the Biltmore Conference of 1942 and the American Jewish Conference of 1943, in which he championed the need to establish a sovereign Jewish state (between 1945 and 1947, Silver, a Reform rabbi from Cleveland, served concurrently as president of Reform’s Central Conference of American Rabbis, and as president of the Zionist Organization of America).13 But would this marriage last? Silver’s career attests to the complexity of this question as well as to the difﬁculty of extrapolating future Reform Jewish trends on the basis of the movement’s impassioned pro-Zionist activity during both the Second World War and the postwar international diplomatic struggle that preceded Israel’s establishment. As historian Michael Meyer observes, Silver was “the only strongly identiﬁed Reform rabbi who had played a major role in Jewish political history.”14 This historic role, however, seemed to be exhausted once the Jewish state came into being. Just months after Israel’s declaration of independence, Silver was ousted from leadership roles in the world Zionist movement, largely as a result of reorganization in the pro-Israel fundraising network (Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and his Labor Zionist associates preferred to work with compliant American non-Zionists such as former Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr.).15 During the ﬁrst years of Israeli statehood, when Harry Truman served in the White House and David Ben-Gurion dominated Israeli politics, Silver was outside the political mainstream wherever he operated, since he was both a Republican in American politics and a General Zionist in Jewish nationalist politics. His unconventional views concerning Middle East neutrality during the Cold War made Israel’s leadership nervous, especially as the 1950s progressed and Silver gained direct access to ofﬁcials in the Republican administration headed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.16 It remains unclear why Silver, who spoke Hebrew and (as will be seen) spoke passionately in favor of aliyah, chose after 1948 to remain in Cleveland instead of seeking a preeminent leadership position in (or for) the Jewish state. Zohar Segev, who has uncovered material regarding an array of heretofore unknown efforts undertaken during the 1950s by Silver and his American Zionist associate Emmanuel Neumann in ﬁelds such as economics and education, tends to emphasize the political rivalry between General Zionist supporters of Silver and the Mapai (Labor Zionist) leadership headed by Ben-Gurion.17 Meyer, for his part, portrays Silver as a deeply committed American Reform rabbi who, beholden to “Isaac Mayer Wise’s ebullient hopes for American Judaism,” was unable to devote himself to the development of Judaism outside of the American context.18 The historian Hasia Diner emphasizes Silver’s attachment to American liberal Progressivism and his belief that Zionism would revitalize Jewish life in the American democracy. According to Diner, Silver believed that only Zionism could bring about the coalescence of American Jews into a “mass, popular, united front that did not squeeze Jewishness into a narrow deﬁnition.”19 Diner’s interpretation suggests that the creation of a Jewish state in 1948 did not substantively change Silver’s lifelong focus on the interplay between Judaism, Zionism, and American democracy. In many ways, the rabbis discussed in this article followed a path charted by Silver. These Reform rabbis, like Silver, had a deep conviction that the Second World War

164

Matthew Silver

experience linked America and Zionism in a campaign for democratic freedom—yet in the Cold War era after 1948, they needed to translate this emotional idealism into a rational explanation of why support for the Jewish state would not interfere with political loyalty to the United States.20 They admiringly thought of Israel as the spiritual or political center of Jewish life (or both), yet they adamantly refused to think of American Jewish life as being located on the periphery or as galut (exile).21 And, as with Silver, who in 1956 reportedly opposed the establishment of Reform institutions in Jerusalem,22 these rabbis wondered whether Reform Judaism should assertively seek a presence in a Jewish state that was then facing existential challenges of dire security threats, mass immigration, and economic instability.

The Ideology of “Hutz La’aretz” In a sermon titled “Out of Zion,” which he delivered on February 6, 1953, Harold Saperstein, a graduate of Cornell University and the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and the rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in Lynbrook, New York, proposed the concept of “Hutz La’aretz” in his discussion of the relationship between American Jewry and Israel. This relationship, he explained, could be compared to that between Babylon and Israel in the Second Temple period. The rich spiritual life of the Jews of Babylon could not be considered galut, Saperstein argued. Instead, Jews in that ancient period lived in “two great centers, each enriching each other.” According to Saperstein: “We are in much the same position today. . . . Haaretz, in the land of Israel, hutz la’aretz, in America.”23 Although he was a long-time Zionist, Saperstein did not relegate American Jewry to second-class status, as an auxiliary or helpmate to the new Jewish state. “Hutz La’aretz” to him meant more than its literal translation, “outside the Land.” Rather, he saw it as referring to one of two great, emerging centers of modern Jewish life. His faith in the vitality of Jewish experience in Christian America had been strengthened during the Second World War, when he served as a U.S. army chaplain in Italy, France, and Germany and attended many interfaith memorial services.24 Just as Jews and Christians interrelated in ways that enriched American life, so too, Saperstein believed, modern Jewish existence would be renewed by the evolving connection between American Jews and Israelis. Israel’s struggles and triumphs would nourish new forms of respect for Jews in America and elsewhere in the diaspora; conversely, American Jews would make vital contributions to Israel. “None of us in America want to continue to be the rich uncle of Israel forever,” he explained. “There is something else America can send to Israel—the democratic idea.”25 Richard Hertz, at the time an assistant rabbi at Chicago Sinai Congregation (having served during the war as a military chaplain at Fort Ord, California) delivered a sermon on May 16, 1948 in which he proudly proclaimed that “this is the July 4, 1776 of Israel.”26 Interpolating his own comments while reading Israel’s Declaration of Independence to his congregation, Hertz made liberal use of American models as his frame of reference (among other things, he portrayed Ben-Gurion as “Israel’s George Washington”). Yet at this early stage, virtually in the ﬁrst hours of Israeli statehood, he also pushed beyond such inevitable yet simplistic comparisons, asking

Responses of Reform Rabbis to Israeli Statehood

165

the central question: “What shall be the relationship of American Jews, who have given our blood and our dreams to building and defending America,” to the new Jewish state? While American Jews would undoubtedly have much to learn from Israelis, he suggested, they would be wrong to allow the triumph of the new state to revive the bygone Zionist principle of “denial of the diaspora” (shelilat hagolah). Rather, he said, “our brethren in Palestine have much to learn in appreciation and understanding of American life.”27 Hertz’s words here indicate that American rabbis did more than grapple with the realization of Zionist dreams and ideals in the wake of Israeli independence. Beyond this, they expected that the responsibilities of statehood would force Zionist ideologues to mature—among other ways, by abandoning radical critiques of diaspora life that had been utilized for decades in order to energize settlement efforts of the Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv). More than anything, “Hutz La’aretz” was developed as a counter-ideology to that of shelilat hagolah.28 The idea that American Jews did not live in a degrading galut was inscribed by the president of the American Jewish Committee, Jacob Blaustein, in an elaborately formulated exchange of principles with Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in the summer of 1950, which historians have identiﬁed as the closest thing to an “ofﬁcial” agreement between American Jewry and Israel during the 1950s.29 For Reform rabbis, however, this was no new formulation. Beginning with the afﬁrmation in 1841 of the Beth Elohim synagogue, Charleston’s “Reformed Society of Israelites,” that “this country [America] is our Palestine,”30 Reform rabbis had long contested the notion that they lived in galut. Thus, their revolt against galut imagery after May 1948 had a pedigree that could not be matched by any other organized or deﬁned segment of American Jewry. The Hutz La’aretz doctrine gained formal, movement-wide footing at the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) annual convention held in Cincinnati in June 1950. Indeed, a number of addresses at this gathering convey the impression that Reform rabbis may have been devoting as much energy to the defense of the legitimacy of Jewish life in America as to defending the legitimacy of the new Jewish state. For instance, in an address titled “Israel and the American Jew: A Design for Cultural Independence,” Samuel Blumenﬁeld made use of the Hutz La’aretz concept as the antidote to shelilat hagolah theories of Jewish disappearance in the diaspora that were being promulgated by the Zionist thinker Jacob Klatzkin, among others.31 Blumenﬁeld declared passionately: Only those of us who live in, work for and love America could speak with conviction that America is different. . . . As rightful and dutiful members of the American Commonwealth the Jews must do all that is in their power to maintain and preserve the America they know and cherish; this kind of America is also a guarantee for the continuity of a free society, including a free Israel.32

The relationship between Israel and American Jewry would have to be a “two way passage,” Blumenﬁeld continued. “In Jewish history there is ample precedent for such relationships among communities in many lands and different climes, the better known being those between Babylon and Palestine.” He cited passages from the talmudic tractate Ketubot (75a and 110b-111a) to buttress his contention that Jewish

166

Matthew Silver

life in America was not necessarily spiritually inferior to that in the new state of Israel.33 Probably the most carefully reasoned and nuanced presentation of the Hutz La’aretz ideology was delivered in Hollywood, of all places. From his pulpit at Temple Israel, Max Nussbaum, who had served as the community rabbi (Gemeinde Rabbiner) in Berlin during the ﬁnal years of the 1930s and who had been active in Germany’s Zionist organization, searched earnestly for a formula that could fuse his immigrant’s enthusiasm for America with his emotional response to the birth of the Jewish state. Having survived the terrifying period of Nazi rule in Berlin, Nussbaum viewed Israel expectantly as an antidote to the scourge of antisemitism. Sermonizing shortly after Israel’s declaration of statehood, he predicted that the sudden emergence of citizens deﬁned nationally as Jews would make “an unparalleled, positive contribution to the psychology of Jewish-Gentile relationships.” In the modern world, he noted, Gentiles had never before “had a real photograph of us,” and so “our friends judged us by cartoons and our enemies by caricatures.” Israel’s existence would enable the Christian world “to judge us as we really are.”34 Yet Nussbaum generally chose not to elaborate upon this optimistic forecast during the ﬁrst months of Israeli statehood. Rather, his main concern was to explicate how “the state of Israel will normalize intra-relationships between Jew and Jew.” Grasping for formulas to describe ties between the diaspora and the new state, he reﬂected that “the Israeli nation is part of the totality of Jewish peoplehood, but the Jewish people outside Israel is not a part of the political structure of the state of Israel.”35 Nussbaum had compelling personal reasons to ascribe near messianic import to Israel’s establishment while at the same time opposing strands in Zionist thought that negated the vitality of Jewish life in America. For him as for many other Reform rabbis, the Hutz La’aretz ideology was appropriately inclusive. However, unlike American-born Reform peers such as Saperstein, Nussbaum tended not to describe the America-Israel relationship in terms of spiritual parity. For him, Israel appeared to have primacy. “Hutz la’aretz is a middle line between the two extremes of Eretz Yisrael and Galut,” he declared in an address given in Buffalo in June 1952, at the CCAR’s 63nd annual convention. “I have a deep affection for this beloved land of ours,” he continued, referring to America. “But in historical terms it is not Eretz Yisrael. It does not have the Kedusha [holiness] that comes from God’s calling it Artzi [my land], or from Israel’s calling it Eretz Yisrael.”36 Indeed, Nussbaum looked ahead to a new Jewish epoch “in which Galut, in the real sense of the word, will soon come to an end,” and he eloquently described relations between Hutz La’aretz and Israel, the loci of Jewish experience after the end of galut: Israel today is a State, and we are not. They are politically independent and we are citizens of another land. But above the new State in the Middle East and the Jewish people here towers the immortal name of “Israel” which has always meant to our people much more than the ethnic connotation of Yehudim, because the term Israel has consistently proclaimed the spiritual quality of our people in its attachment to God. . . . While we are not a political part of Israel, the Israelis are a part of our Jewish people, a section of which lives here on this soil. All of us together, then, are bound to each other by the historic name of Israel. . . . Taking the name seriously we, the state of Israel and American Israel,

Responses of Reform Rabbis to Israeli Statehood

167

can create a new future, erect a structure for Jewish survival, and become again a blessing to mankind.37

All told, in the ﬁrst few months following May 1948, Reform rabbis developed formulas and conceptual frames that resisted a deferential perception of Israeli centrality. That America was “outside the Land” did not necessarily mean that American Jewish experience was subordinate to Jewish life in Israel. These responses anticipated Reform Jewish opposition to the concept of Israeli centrality that was articulated in later decades. In 1989, for instance (even before a torrent of post-Zionist studies aggressively attacked ideas of Israeli centrality in the post-1948 Jewish experience), one informed commentator on Reform Judaism observed: “Different models—the two foci of an ellipse, the two strands of the double helix, the two sides of the coin, capture the self image of American Jewry more than the model of the circle and the language of centrality. Such alternative models are clearly compatible with contemporary Reform thought.”38 Like other aspects of the Reform response to Jewish statehood in May 1948, the development of the Hutz La’aretz ideology between 1948 and 1952 suggests that American Jewish attitudes toward Israel evolved on a continuum. Rather than being a story of apathy surpassed by newfound love and devotion after 1967 (or some other turning point), the post-1948 saga is about a continuing search for a two-way street.

Whose Flag Is It, Really? The Loyalty Issue In 1947, Abba Hillel Silver turned over the president’s mantle of the Central Conference of American Rabbis to a childhood friend, Abraham Feldman.39 The Kiev-born Feldman had attended a Talmud Torah in Pinsk and, at age 16, had immigrated with his family to New York’s Lower East Side. In New York, he attended the Baron de Hirsch School for Immigrant Children of the Educational Alliance. There he also joined a Herzl Zion club, where he spoke Hebrew with Silver and other enthusiastic young Zionists. Feldman later attended the University of Cincinnati and the Hebrew Union College, and his Zionist enthusiasm colored his work as president of the local branch of the Menorah Society. In the fall of 1947, Feldman lobbied vigorously for the partition of Palestine and Jewish statehood, at one point bringing his message personally to President Truman and Secretary of State George Marshall. At the time of Israel’s establishment, Feldman was serving as rabbi at West Hartford’s august Congregation Beth Israel, whose members were predominately German Jewish and largely antagonistic to Zionism.40 Despite his lifelong association with Silver and his consistently proclaimed Zionism,41 Feldman did not usually incorporate his passions for Jewish nationalism in his working life as a rabbi. The list of his pulpit sermons reﬂects his reluctance to speak too often or too assertively about a subject that was not very popular with inﬂuential congregants.42 Feldman’s disinclination to speak about a topic of deep personal interest stemmed not merely from deference to congregational mores; his understanding of professional norms precluded Zionist preaching from the pulpit. The tension between Feldman’s professional sensibility and his Zionist ideological passion comes across in a collection of lectures on homiletics that he delivered at

168

Matthew Silver

Hebrew Union College in 1958.43 In these lectures, Feldman conspicuously avoided dealing with topics relating to Zionism and Israel—his sole reference being a telling recollection from his student days at Hebrew Union College at the time of the First World War, which pivoted around his confrontation with the anti-Zionist Kaufmann Kohler, then president of HUC.44 From his rostrum at the CCAR, Feldman spoke strongly about Israel after May 1948, but his dithyrambic words about how “Jewish history and Jewish life will never be as if this event had never happened” generally dodged complicated questions about personal loyalty. At the CCAR’s 59th annual convention, held in Kansas City in late June 1948, the ecstatic Feldman confessed that he was too “overwhelmed” to put the meaning of Ben-Gurion’s proclamation of statehood in historical perspective.45 Yet following Israeli independence, anti-Zionist pronouncements in the vein of those of the American Council for Judaism began to arouse Feldman’s ire, prompting him to abandon his ingrained patterns of deference to congregational or professional patterns. For instance, rather than causing him anxiety, innuendos regarding “double loyalty” prompted Feldman to marshal his impressive rhetorical abilities in order to elucidate the nature of his ties to Israel. One of the articles angering Feldman was a broadside appearing in Reader’s Digest in September 1949, titled “Israel’s Flag is Not Mine.” This piece was authored by Alfred Lilienthal, a Washington lawyer and former State Department ofﬁcial who came from a well-established German Jewish family that had connections with prominent members of Feldman’s Beth Israel congregation in West Hartford.46 Declaring stridently that “my one and only homeland is America,” Lilienthal decried the way in which the new state of Israel potentially blurred American Jewish loyalties. “Whenever I read of Americans singing the Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem . . . I am outraged,” he wrote. He compared American Jewish activity on Israel’s behalf to the “Bundists of the 1930s, who tried to tell Americans of German ancestry that they owed loyalty to Germany.” Jews who resisted pressures of the melting pot and accentuated their separateness, claimed Lilienthal, were still trapped mentally within “the long imprisonment of the ghetto.”47 Directly after the publication of the Reader’s Digest article, Feldman delivered a blistering attack against Lilienthal’s main premises. Rejecting Lilienthal’s fervid warnings about divided loyalties, the Reform rabbi explained that his familial love for Israel was perfectly natural. Lilienthal’s anti-Zionism was tantamount to “saying that because I am married to a lady and love her and owe her my complete devotion, I must therefore have no ties with, no longings for, and feel no responsibilities to, my mother and father, my brothers.” Feldman bristled at the suggestion that his emotional ties to the new state of Israel meant that he could not be a good American citizen. “What an outrageous, brazen calumny that is,” he exclaimed, referring to Lilienthal’s theory that pro-Israel activity disqualiﬁed Jews from integration in the American melting pot. For whatever it lacked in philosophical comprehensiveness, Feldman’s memorable sermon evinced genuine emotional depth: Look at me! Do I look like a split personality? Do I behave like one? I assure you, I have no nightmares about anyone under my bed. I think I am completely integrated. I have no conﬂict as an American and as a Jew. I am, frankly, both an American and a Jew, without apologies for either, with love and loyalty to both. Interestingly enough, my fellow Americans of other faiths seem to agree with me.48

Responses of Reform Rabbis to Israeli Statehood

169

Initial reckonings with the loyalty issue after Israel’s establishment drew upon conceptual frames and tactics developed by famed American Zionists of earlier generations, among them Louis Brandeis. Along with many others, Richard C. Hertz echoed the fabled Supreme Court Justice’s ingenious claim that Zionist fulﬁllment would not compromise Jewish citizenship status in America, but would instead mold Jews into better Americans.49 On May 16, 1948, when Hertz spoke at Chicago Sinai Congregation, he chose for analysis a “question that is disturbing the minds of thoughtful American Jews, and that is: what shall be the relationship of American Jews to the new Jewish state?” He continued: “This much should be said: the loyalties of the right-thinking American do not conﬂict when he supports a just cause on foreign soil. The desire of the Irish in America to help in the establishment of free Ireland does not impair loyalty to America.” Hertz’s conclusion could have been lifted from one of Brandeis’ Zionist addresses 30 years earlier: As Hertz put it, Jewish Americans, like Americans of Irish or Greek ancestry, “were better Americans when they tried to spread the American idea of freedom, political equality and democracy” in foreign, ancestral homelands.50 Elsewhere, Reform rabbis acknowledged that examples like the Irish-American case might be useful and instructive, but did not span the entire range of loyalty issues posed to American Jews by Israel’s establishment. For instance, speaking at the CCAR’s 59th annual convention in Kansas City on June 22, 1948, Phillip Bernstein admitted that “there is no exact precedent for the relationship of American Jews to the Jewish homeland.” In his address on “The New Israel and American Jewry,” Bernstein, from Temple B’rith Kodesh of Rochester, New York, explained that the examples closest to American Jews “would be a combination of the attitudes of the Czechs and Irish to their people’s home states, both of which were established after their settlement in the US.” However, even this comparison was far from perfect, since “we are not only a national group, a people, as are the Czechs and Irish, but we are also a religious group as are the Catholics.”51 In June 1948, as American Jews around the country passionately mobilized in lobbying, philanthropic, and procurement efforts for the new Jewish state, the Reform rabbis at their annual meeting recognized that disavowals of all forms of “political” ties with Israel were disingenuous. In the rigidly patriotic climate of the early Cold War, discussion about political loyalty was likely to be somewhat constrained; yet the rabbis nonetheless dropped hints about their inability to view loyalty issues through monochromatic lenses.52 Thus, responding to Bernstein’s presentation, at least one rabbi spoke unguardedly in favor of multiple loyalties. James Heller declared: “For a long time in my life . . . a deep instinct in me has rebelled against the exclusive type of loyalty which nations believe are owing to them in the world of today, and I am inclined to regard this as one of the moral ills of our time . . . that one cannot have two loyalties at the same time is, I think, a moral heresy in the world in which we live.” Heller’s bold conceptualization must have challenged the patriotic American sentiments of many CCAR members; the same could be said of pro-aliyah sentiments delivered at this meeting by America’s most prominent Zionist rabbi, Abba Hillel Silver, who declared: “We should not think of Israel as a little country only for those who are already there, but as a great and secure commonwealth for Jews from many parts of the world.” This sort of sweeping statement in favor of the Zionist concept

170

Matthew Silver

of kibuz. galuyot, the ingathering of the exiles, posed the question of where CCAR members should position themselves—emotionally, if not physically. Challenged by the responses to his address, Bernstein sought to reﬁne and reclassify the concept of loyalty. Familial forms of loyalty, he pointed out, were expressed as unlimited love and devotion, whereas loyalty of political duty is “carefully deﬁned by the U.S. Constitution.” The new circumstance of Israeli statehood, Bernstein concluded, “will involve the clearest kind of separation from political involvement in Palestine, but this is separate from this other type of [familial] devotion, which is endless in its responsibilities and which can be the most rewarding thing for us and [Israel].” From his pulpit in Los Angeles, the “rabbi to the stars”—Edgar Magnin of the imposing Wilshire Boulevard Temple—gave expression to the mainstream position on the loyalty issue in particularly colorful fashion. Magnin, a San Francisco native and HUC graduate who took up rabbinical duties in Los Angeles in the 1920s, generally shunned vexing theological and ideological issues. According to Deborah Dash Moore, a historian of post-Second World War Los Angeles Jewry, Magnin viewed his work as “a business like lawyering” and happily indulged in the material amenities of professional life in prospering Los Angeles.53 His blunt, anti-intellectual style can be inferred from his recollections of a trip to Mandatory Palestine he made in 1936, which formed part of a sermon delivered at the Wilshire Temple on May 14, 1949, the ﬁrst anniversary of Israeli statehood. This sermon cast the future Jewish citizens of Israel in the role of his Los Angeles congregants—dynamic, practical achievers who had a keen appreciation of the arts but little time to waste on ethereal mental pursuits. In contrast, Muslims nursed “hotbeds of fanaticism and superstition,” and clerics at Islamic universities in Cairo and elsewhere were even worse than his East Coast rabbinical colleagues, who (as Magnin complained elsewhere) wasted their time at annual meetings on “silly things like theology or Jewish survival rather than talking about . . . how to succeed in religion.”54 Despite his sardonically expressed disdain for ponderous theological discussions, Magnin did give thought to the meaning of Israel’s establishment and its potential impact upon his love and loyalty for America. In two sermons delivered in late 1950, he presented his responses to two newly published books, Maurice Samuel’s The Gentleman and the Jew and Ludwig Lewisohn’s The American Jew. Neither writer really appealed to the rabbi (“I think both authors are frustrated men who are seething with bitterness,” Magnin peremptorily declared), but he utilized their works to reﬂect on his own powerful yet somewhat confused feelings about the new state of Israel.55 Samuel was initially dismissed by Magnin as a “yeshiva bochur” who had grown up as “a poor little Jewish boy in a ghetto, with thick glasses, who is probably scared of all the kids in the neighborhood who will beat him up with a stick.” For this reason, he claimed, the author of The Gentleman and the Jew was inclined to be conﬂicted about Israel’s military triumphs (“Samuel has a hard time skirting around the fact that the Jews have made wars all through the centuries and had to ﬁght. They had to ﬁght their way into Palestine”).56 Yet he found himself in agreement with Samuel’s statements regarding loyalty: He says our political allegiance is not to Israel. We have an ethnic relationship in Israel. They are our people. We have a traditional relationship to them. They speak the language in which we read our prayers. But, he says, politically, we are Americans. It doesn’t mean

Responses of Reform Rabbis to Israeli Statehood

171

that because we help Israel we are any less patriotic, [just as] if an Irish-American wants to help Ireland, he is not any less American. I think this is true.57

Magnin also suspected that, after 1948, outspoken Zionists who lived in the diaspora were hypocrites. In his comments about Lewisohn’s The American Jew, Magnin declared that his desire to help Israel was no less fervent than that of the author. However, in contrast to Samuel and Lewisohn, Magnin did not talk about Israel “as though it were the only place on earth and then live here on the fat of the land.”58 Apparently, in Magnin’s view, American life was not inferior to that in Israel. Jews created communities of their own in Israel or California to promote one shared goal: to preserve and perfect their religion (“When you come right down to it, it comes down to this Ladies and Gentlemen, you take it from me, this is it: Jews remained separate in ancient days, and up to this minute, because Jews wanted to preserve their religion”).59 Ultimately, however, the Wilshire Boulevard Temple rabbi found this formula about the preservation of Judaism to be unsatisfactory. His solution was to frame the loyalty issue in emotional terms rather than as meticulously deﬁned ideological formulas. Israel, he explained, helped restore his pride as a Jew after the devastation of the Holocaust, and this renewal of Jewish self-conﬁdence could only make him a better person and a better American. In a sermon delivered in May 1953, following his ﬁrst visit to the land of Israel in 17 years, he fused themes of Holocaust and rebirth in the Jewish state in an extended discussion of the loyalty issue. Some Zionists, he noted, would never fully accept him because he regarded Israel as only “part of the entire total Jewish picture of the world.” And yet Israel was a special part of that picture. Moreover, whereas the Stars and Stripes would remain his only ﬂag, his understanding of what Israel’s ﬂag meant to Jews would enhance his understanding of freedom and inspire his work as a rabbi. The emotional tenor of his sermon is apparent in this excerpt describing Magnin’s feelings when he visited the Technion institute in Haifa on Israel’s Independence Day: I saw little children waving ﬂags. That Jewish ﬂag is not my ﬂag. My ﬂag is America’s. I was born in America. I pray to God we will always be able to live here. . . . But that little ﬂag is their ﬂag and Hatikvah is their anthem. And there were the kids, some of whose parents died in concentration camps. . . . These were the kids of the next generation, cleanfaced, nicely dressed, proud little Jews. They don’t have to whisper, they don’t apologize for existence. They have no shame, they don’t feel second or third rate. It was a joy to see them.60

Jewish freedom in Israel was consistent with the ideals America had always fought for, and the triumph of the Jewish state could not legitimately be used to impugn the worthiness of Jews who were American citizens. (“Despite the McCarthys and people like that,” Magnin went on to declare, “we hope that there will always be liberty and freedom.”) Evincing no sympathy for the Arabs who had lost in the War of Independence, Magnin assumed that American Jews’ identiﬁcation with a democratic state that had triumphed over its enemies was both natural and even desirable at a time when Americans in general viewed themselves as ﬁghters and winners: I want to tell you something: until the Jews whipped those Arabs, everybody thought a Jew was a coward. Many a Jew died in the world wars. Many a Jew came back wounded,

172

Matthew Silver

blinded, with the skin burnt off his face. But still the Jews were always parasites and cowards. We never could ﬁght. We don’t want to work, to build. Well, it’s a lie. We can ﬁght, we can build and work. We can be farmers. They’ve proved it. And I want the world to know that I belong to a people who can do things like that.

Partisan Rabbis and the Evolving Arab-Israeli Dispute One of the ideal role models for Jewish communal leaders in the 1948 period was the morally conscripted rabbi, that is, one who condoned or proactively supported temporary infringement of American laws in the name of a higher code of Jewish survival, and who regarded the real or reported travails endured by Arabs in the new state as more than outweighed by Jewish needs and moral claims stemming from the Holocaust. Charles Shulman was one such rabbi. In 1927, at the age of 27, the Ukrainian-born Shulman had received ordination from Hebrew Union College; he also held a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.61 A year before Israel’s establishment, he helped establish the Riverdale Temple in the Bronx, where he served as rabbi until his death in 1968. During his career, he expressed his Zionist ardor in a number of ways— serving, for instance, on the editorial board of The American Zionist. Shulman’s sermons frequently surveyed the politics of the Israel-Arab dispute in an engaged, highly detailed fashion. He was a mobilized, informed preacher on Israel’s behalf. For instance, on April 9, 1948, several weeks before Israel’s proclamation of statehood, he furiously castigated reversals in U.S. State Department policy toward the Yishuv. He described the Jewish state-in-the-making as a “democratic country misled by willful betrayers of democracy who cast the die in favor of feudal and backward and antidemocratic Arabs whose sole record in recent years is warfare for the Axis.”62 Truman administration policy toward the Middle East, Shulman declared, was “inﬂuenced by ﬁve things—oil, Arabs, Russia, national defense and American interests,” and pro-Arab policy recommendations forwarded by U.S. foreign service careerists such as Loy Henderson were “nefarious.”63 In the months and years following statehood, Shulman continued to express his thoughts about Israel—sometimes in the context of ﬁre and brimstone homiletics but also in the form of humorous observations, as when he noted in a 1958 sermon (following the launching of the Soviet sputnik) that technology-driven Israel would need to develop two ﬂying saucers, one for meat and one for dairy.64 At more serious moments, he did not limit his moral focus to “Arabist” U.S. diplomats. Although his strong attachments to Zionist ideology and the new state were manifest, Shulman was clear-eyed with regard to Israel’s faults, and his sermons were occasionally punctuated by criticism of Israeli society and of the viewpoints articulated by its leaders, particularly David Ben-Gurion.65 More than anything, however, Shulman’s Israel-related sermons were marked by partisanship. Especially during the crucial War of Independence period, the rabbi delivered sermons as though he were speaking in support of troops of the Israel Defense Forces. When it came to Jewish survival in the post-Holocaust world, Shulman was convinced that Israel’s resort to arms was necessary and just, a point he drove home in a sermon given on November 19, 1948:

Responses of Reform Rabbis to Israeli Statehood

173

The Arabs cannot conquer the Jews. They have tried and they have failed disastrously. The Jews have control of practically the entire area of Palestine and they have the power to curb the Arabs. They know it and the Arabs know it. The Negev will not be taken from Israel. In a world where force counts, the Israelis have shown force. . . . 66

A particularly thought-provoking example of American Reform partisanship during the War of Independence period and its aftermath can be found in the proceedings of the 61st annual CCAR convention, which was held in Cincinnati in June 1950.67 Shulman spoke at this gathering, and passages in the debate prompted by his address indicate that other Reform rabbis, who were well acquainted with the controversial circumstances surrounding the exodus of some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs during the War of Independence, were willing to draw upon American moral coordinates of the 1950s in order to justify or rationalize this exodus. Shulman set the initial militant tone: Another question has interested me a great deal, and bears comment: the beginning of Israel and the beginning of America. I cannot help but feel that there is a strong comparison: we shot down Indians, we took away their lands, we were a pretty crude outﬁt as Americans. I am not the only one to say so – books [that have come] out in the last decade and a half speak volumes. But it was all right. It is an honorable thing. We shouldn’t be ashamed of the antecedents. So Israel has to struggle.68

Interestingly, one participant at this convention spiritedly defended Israeli writers and political activists who, during the ﬁrst years of Israeli statehood, had asked pointed questions about the mass Arab departure. During the discussion prompted by Shulman’s remarks, Rabbi Ezra Spicehandler called attention to S. Yizhar’s somber portrayal of the destruction of a Palestinian village by an Israeli ﬁghting unit, declaring it to be “one of the best Hebrew short-stories ever created.”69 The militant tone of Reform rabbinical sermons about Israel emanated from an array of objective and subjective sources, some of them connected to the personal histories of the speakers and others to the dramatic circumstances of the new state. In Shulman’s case, there was a third factor: some of the most inﬂuential members of the Riverdale Temple were passionate enthusiasts of the campaign for Jewish statehood who had made enormous sacriﬁces, and endured personal risk, on Israel’s behalf. The fever pitch of some of Shulman’s orations thus reﬂected his congregants’ sense of near total immersion in the life-or-death struggle of the War of Independence. Among the members of Shulman’s congregation was Rudolph Sonneborn, a prosperous businessman who came from a leading Baltimore Jewish family. Years before many of its details were divulged to the public, Shulman was fully apprised of the dramatic story of the “Sonneborn Institute.”70 This group of 20 American Jewish businessmen and industrialists ﬁrst met at Sonneborn’s home in 1945 to hear BenGurion explicate the Yishuv’s defense needs. Subsequently (as Shulman retrospectively informed his congregation), members of the group got together for the “express purpose of obtaining weapons of combat as well as other necessities” in the ﬁght to establish Israel.71 After the war, when Ben-Gurion visited the United States in 1951, ostensibly to help launch the ﬁrst Israel Bonds campaign, his “real interest and concern was connected with a small group of people headed by our congregation’s member, Rudolph Sonneborn.” At a reunion meeting of the Sonneborn Institute, which

174

Matthew Silver

Shulman and his wife attended, Ben-Gurion “spoke for some two hours on the motivations and philosophy that determined his actions in the Independence struggle.”72 Through his relationship with Sonneborn, Shulman maintained an ongoing sense of involvement in Israel’s military struggle. In one of his sermons, he explained how he came to understand that American Zionism had been inextricably involved in the Yishuv’s ﬁght against Arab antagonists from the ﬁrst moments of British control of Palestine, at the end of the First World War.73 At that time, Shulman explained to his congregation, the 20-year-old Sonneborn was serving as a deputy member of the Zionist Commission, which represented Yishuv interests to the British authorities.74 In the spring of 1919, commission members received alarming reports concerning an Arab insurgency planned for the Nebi Mousa holiday. An Italian member of the commission, Levi Biancini, used his inﬂuence “to prevail on his government to send a few troops to Palestine to protect Jewish life.” Some time later, Biancini (who “would have become one of the outstanding Jews of his time”) was murdered by “Arab bandits”—an event that forever changed Sonneborn’s Jewish outlook.75 The moral of the Biancini story was that inﬂuential diaspora Jews could assure Israel’s survival, if they were sufﬁciently disciplined and courageous. Shulman fully exploited the power of his pulpit to disseminate the Sonneborn Institute’s adaptation of this moral. He told mesmerizing tales about the Sonneborn Institute’s purchase of the Chesapeake Bay steamer that eventually became the Exodus, its procurement of ambulances and other materials for the Haganah, and its establishment of the Tel Litwinsky (now known as Assaf Harofe) hospital. In these and other anecdotes, the rabbi described how Sonneborn, a well-established congregant who was married to the granddaughter of Jacob Schiff, skirted legal boundaries in the ﬁght to establish the Jewish state. (Sonneborn, he explained, instructed the Institute to keep within the scope of American law, and “it generally did so.” At the same time, Arabs in America knew about the Institute’s operations, and they “even hired Pinkerton detectives to keep watch on them.”)76 By repeatedly telling Sonneborn’s tale, which spanned a period of decades through Israel’s early statehood, Shulman inculcated the message that American Jewish support for Israel was not a passing fancy but in fact had a generations-long pedigree. In the period of Israel’s establishment, the Riverdale Temple offered an intriguing example of blue-blooded Reform Jewish zeal for Israel.

Religious Pluralism in the New State: Origins of the “Who Is a Jew” Debate In a sermon given on January 21, 1949, Harold Saperstein of Temple Emanu-El of Lynbrook posed a broad question—“Is the new Jewish state a theocracy?”—that reﬂected anxieties about religious parties’ involvement in Israeli politics. This was a somewhat unusual sermon, since inchoate Reform objections to the status of Judaism in Israel were not easily expressed in a period when adulation for the new state was running high in American Jewish congregations. By and large, the Reform rabbinical sermons on this topic during the ﬁrst years of Israeli statehood were unfocused—it was often not clear whether they were objecting more to speciﬁc practices (in areas

Responses of Reform Rabbis to Israeli Statehood

175

such as conversion or marriage) or, on principle, to the commingling of religion and state. Just as conspicuously, their criticism lacked a coherent thematic slogan. To complain about the absence of “religious freedom” in Israel would have rhetorically positioned the new Jewish state perilously close to the tyrannical Soviet bloc, and however frustrated the Reform rabbis might have been with their Orthodox rabbinical foils in Israel, they had no wish to draw comparisons between the Israeli chief rabbinate, on the one hand, and Stalinism, on the other. Nor was it deemed appropriate or even particularly useful, given the triumphal mood of the time, to raise the banner of “Who is a Jew?” since congregants would miss the point of the question and assume that it referred to the assertive and resilient Israelis. Although American Reform rabbis strongly desired recognition of their movement’s principles and practices in the new state, they were well aware that Israel’s establishment had given a tremendous boost to Jewish self-conﬁdence in the post-Holocaust world. Thus their dilemma: despite their own feelings of love and pride for the newly established state of Israel, they could not sidestep the fact that their own movement had very little place in it. Such concerns were expressed more concretely in Reform movement forums such as the annual CCAR conventions. For instance, at the CCAR gathering in Cincinnati in June 1950, Bertram Klausner, from Austin, Texas, bluntly exclaimed: “We need to prepare for the possibility that the [Orthodox] religious bloc, when it achieves a majority, will ram down the throat of the country its particular religious principles regarding freedom or lack thereof, and a coalition of Church and state.”77 Other speakers at the convention expressed their sense of urgency that Reform Jews needed to do something (usually not speciﬁed), because Israeli Jews did not have tangible contact with non-Orthodox forms of Judaism. Striking this chord, Herbert Bloom, from Kingston, New York, stated: “I feel the Conference ought to think about stimulating some form of liberal Judaism in Israel, though not necessarily the American form.”78 How could Reform rabbis come to terms with realities and trends that pointed toward the explicit or implicit delegitimization of their movement’s principles and practices in Israel? From the start, Reform rabbis mulled over the tactical and normative dimensions of this question. “The Reform movement in Israel has long agonized over the question of confrontation versus persuasion and accommodation,” one well-informed insider observed in 1976, several years before the confrontation option gained the upper hand in divisive “Who is a Jew” debates.79 But in the earlier years of Israeli statehood, from 1948 to 1951, the predominant feeling in the Reform movement was that any public pronouncement on the question was tantamount to heresy. Israel had too many existential problems to deal with, and American Jews were too appreciative of the new Jewish state’s trials and triumphs, for there to be any sustained discussion about religious pluralism. Thus, many members of the movement were rankled when, at the CCAR’s 60th convention in Bretton Woods in June 1949, the outgoing president, Abraham Feldman, encouraged his movement to put on record a measured comment in favor of pluralism in Israel’s religious sphere. Indulging in some barbs, Feldman pointedly noted that religious freedom in the new state applied to Christians and Muslims, but not to Reform Jews, and he declared that “no Jews ought to be constrained to be in

176

Matthew Silver

galut in Eretz Yisroel, which is precisely the position of the Jewish liberal there!”80 He gave speciﬁc examples of where Reform sought legitimacy in the new state— Reform rabbis, he complained, “are being subjected to the indignity of being compelled to conform in such matters as marriage and divorce to a type of hashgah.ah supervision not unlike that of the shochet and the butcher in a kosher meat market.”81 Nonetheless, these were highly qualiﬁed remarks. Feldman meticulously noted the extenuating circumstances of war, mass immigration, and economic hardship, all of which forestalled reforms in Israel’s religious sphere;82 in its resolutions, the CCAR ofﬁcially concurred with Feldman’s resolutions, but dutifully inserted a disclaimer stating that “our President clearly explains that he does not intend this portion of his message to constitute in any way a condemnation upon the government or the people of the state of Israel.”83 Not surprisingly, the initial post-1948 discussions about the propriety of criticizing religious affairs in Israel sometimes became contentious. For instance, at the CCAR convention held in 1950, some rabbis agonized about fall-out from the previous year’s resolution.84 One frustrated rabbi was Ezra Spicehandler, from Temple Emanu-El in Westﬁeld, New Jersey. Spicehandler understood that Israelis could be acutely sensitive about American Jewish criticism of their country, and he was embarrassed by Israeli newspaper coverage of the matter. It was “idiotic,” he declared, to challenge the new state’s policy on religion in any way. Feldman, outraged at the implied attack on his position, asserted his authority as a life-long Zionist who had spoken Hebrew with Abba Hillel Silver. “Long before you were born,” he retorted, “your father and I trotted the streets of the East Side of New York selling shkollim [membership fees to the Zionist movement], selling National Fund stamps, and making speeches on the street corners on behalf of Zionism. I don’t think I need any instructions, ‘idiotic’ as I may be, in Zionism or Zionist loyalty.” Feldman’s defensive outburst exposed the Reform movement’s raw nerves in an era when nobody was sure whether besieged Israel could afford the luxury of debate about Jewish culture and religion: There is a position . . . which Rabbi Spicehandler represented in this discussion. . . . It is that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, wrong in Israel; everything that they say, everything that they do, every policy they pursue, so long as it bears the imprint of Tel AvivJerusalem-Haifa, et cetera, is absolutely right and kosher, and if you and I dare, if you and I presume to say that something is not right in Israel, that thereby we, no matter how long we have been Zionists, no matter how much we have given of our life and service throughout our days, we have a pegimah [ﬂaw], we must be suspect and thereafter not be trusted as being friends and lovers and devoted servants to the cause.85

Feldman related further that, following his “Presidential Message,” he went to Israel and spoke to government leaders and public commentators. Across the board, he claimed, he was given a clear message: “keep needling us: this ﬁght, the Kulturkampf, this struggle between the religious bloc and the establishment of a free religious life in the country is going to come some day.” Feldman concluded that Israel would take up the issue of religious pluralism in earnest once it solved its military and economic problems and successfully absorbed its masses of new immigrants. A turning point in Reform rabbinical responses to Israel came with a taboobreaking address delivered by Joshua Trachtenberg at the CCAR annual convention of 1952, which took place in Buffalo.86 Trachtenberg, a self-identiﬁed Labor

Responses of Reform Rabbis to Israeli Statehood

177

Zionist and a distinguished scholar of medieval Jewish beliefs and antisemitism, was ordained by HUC in 1936 and had served for several years as rabbi at Congregation Covenant of Peace in Easton, Pennsylvania.87 On assignment from the CCAR, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, and the Alumni Association of HUC and the Jewish Institute of Religion, he spent six months in Israel, from November 1951 to March 1952, where he claimed to have spoken “intimately and frankly with hundreds of people,”88 including government ofﬁcials, taxi drivers, kibbutz farmers, and university academics. His scathing critique of cultural and spiritual vacuity in the young Jewish state astonished the CCAR membership: some of the responses were so vitriolic that they were omitted from the ofﬁcial transcript of the proceedings.89 Trachtenberg cited two prominent Israeli scholars who had trenchantly raised the issue of religion in the new state. Ernst Simon had asked, “Are there still Jews in Israel?” whereas Joseph Klausner preferred an even more pointed formulation of the question: “Is there a future for Judaism in Israel?” For his part, Trachtenberg analyzed problems that had been addressed in synagogue sermons and at CCAR gatherings before this 1952 turning point. Like others, he wondered whether Israel’s outwardly secular culture would lose its spiritual core once its pioneering values were completely eroded.90 New immigrants, he unhappily observed, were “untouched by halutz ideals.” Whereas kibbutz idealism had dominated Yishuv culture before 1948, “today the prevailing mood is determined by rapid urbanization and competitive industrialization.” Moreover, he said, Israel’s ofﬁcial rabbinate “has been shut up too long behind its stockade of formalisms to have any points of contact with the realities of Israeli life. . . . Its reliance upon political stratagems to enforce its will has permanently alienated the deep democratic instincts of the community. . . . Outside the tiny minority of fanatically Orthodox there is seething resentment against the persistent interference of the religious bloc in private life and public affairs.”91 These corrosive remarks set a precedent for subsequent denunciation of Orthodox control and the absence of religious pluralism in Israel.92 At the same time, Trachtenberg included a series of constructive recommendations in his address. He spoke, for instance, of the need to add a “liberal religious zerem [stream] in Israel’s school system,” which anticipated the establishment of the Tali school network in 1988 (though this network was actually founded by the Israeli masorati [Conservative] movement). He called for the founding of “pilot” Reform congregations in Israel, and he spoke about the fusion of Reform values in a renewed kibbutz movement (“I have encountered groups of American halutzim by no means all from Reform homes, so distinctive in their thinking and relationships that with a halutz rabbi they could create overnight the precedent shattering pattern of a pioneering liberal [Reform] community. Should we not attempt the fantastic?”).93 These were all ideas whose time would come.94 More important than these practical proposals and effects, however, was the change in tone evoked by Trachtenberg’s address. Going well beyond the topic of the Orthodox monopoly on religious affairs, his critique covered an array of issues. There might not be a future for Judaism in Israel because the country had rapidly succumbed to spiritual malaise, he implied. Strict welfare state and rationing policies forged rampant hypocrisy (“the black market is ubiquitous . . . It has sapped the principles of even the most upright. It has debauched virtually every home”).

178

Matthew Silver

Trachtenberg was unusually candid about cultural realities in the new American Jewish-Israeli relationship, and he was perceptive in his analysis of how they might leave Israelis disinclined to listen to the preaching of Reform rabbis. Whereas Israel’s founding Zionist ideology apotheosized an ethos of Jewish economic independence (via concepts such as “Jewish labor” and “auto-emancipation”), Israelis now found themselves dependent upon American Jewish charity. Trachtenberg spoke about the “galling humiliation” endured by Israelis receiving aid from America in the form of “contributions and grants-in-aid and loans and bond sales, bundles of clothing and food packages and scrip.” In addition, the large-scale immigration of Jews from Asian and African lands had given rise to “color prejudice”—according to Trachtenberg, “the hostility and contempt of larger sections of the older community and of the recent immigrants from Europe for the shechorim [blacks] is as manifest as it is distressing.”95 Trachtenberg’s diatribe included several unfounded fears (for instance, that the “inadequate diet” of Israeli youngsters could have “grave effects in later years”),96 but its speciﬁc points were less important than the mode of discourse it represented. Trachtenberg was saying, in effect, that Israel’s thousand days of grace must now draw to a close. Reform rabbis should no longer indulge in total adulation of Israel, nor should they limit themselves to idealistic discussions of Zion as a “projection of America as it ought to be,” in Jonathan Sarna’s astute phrase.97 Instead, Reform rabbis might talk about Israel in terms of a potential nightmare: a Jewish state bereft of the form of Judaism they cherished. Trachtenberg’s polemic anticipated future showdowns in which Reform rabbis would take up the cudgel of “Who is a Jew” polemics not as a kind of instinctive, inchoate reﬂex, but rather as a reasoned instrument in a sustained campaign for legitimacy in Israel.

Conclusion This examination of Reform sermonic literature from the years 1948 to 1952 indicates the need to revise widespread views regarding American Jewry’s initial reactions to the new state. If there is a prevailing theory concerning the American Jewish-Israel relationship in the 1950s, it appears to hold that a conjunction of circumstances in the 1945–1948 period, mostly connected to the urgent need to settle Holocaust victims, compelled dramatic forms of American Jewish commitment toward the Jewish statein-the-making. After May 1948, however, American Jewry settled into a comfortable mode of organized philanthropy and cultural disinterest with regard to Israel. This prevailing pattern was broken only as a result of subsequent events such as the SixDay War.98 While this view undeniably describes salient American Jewish behavioral patterns in the 1950s, it presents an incomplete picture that unjustiﬁably denigrates the high level of engagement vis-à-vis Israel on the part of key American Jewish groups, including Reform rabbis. To be sure, empirical studies such as the “Lakeville” survey consistently pinpointed Reform Jews as the American Jewish subgroup with the least pronounced commitment toward Israel, and Reform Jews also constituted the segment of organized American Jewry from which there emerged an active anti-

Responses of Reform Rabbis to Israeli Statehood

179

Zionist group, the American Council for Judaism. Nonetheless, it is misleading to characterize the post-1948 Reform Jewish attitude in terms of disinterest or emotional distance. Reform rabbis had a very clear idea of “where” they were in relation to the new state. Although the answer given by some, “Babylon,” may have lacked originality, it exhibited a sustained effort to perceive a challenging new relationship through plausible examples and precedents of Jewish history. Far from being unconcerned about the ﬂedgling state’s military needs, inﬂuential rabbis were caught up in Israel’s struggle during the War of Independence. With regard to the issue of political loyalty, they experimented with analogies and imagery (Irish Americans; the distinction between familial love and political loyalty) that never seemed fully satisfactory. Yet their insistence that Israel’s democratic ﬁber was fully compatible with American democracy, and that support for Israel could therefore not be construed as anti-Americanism, was deeply felt. Finally, more vociferously than has been realized, the rabbis debated about the propriety of criticizing Israel for its lack of pluralism on religious matters. On this key issue of religious diversity, the eruption of “who is a Jew” controversies in later periods appears not to have been the result of a post-Six-Day War sea change in the Jewish world, or even the consequence of accumulated resentment about perceived Israeli ingratitude or malfeasance. Instead, the “who is a Jew” debate reﬂected very different religious realities in Israel and the United States that were recognized and acknowledged from the outset. Whereas scholars have generally not identiﬁed nonOrthodox American Jewish involvement in “Who is a Jew” controversies in Israel before 1970,99 the fact is that, from the ﬁrst years of Israeli independence, American Jews and their Israeli counterparts were engaged in an ongoing conversation regarding how Jews were to be deﬁned. As this survey of Reform sermonic literature indicates, Reform rabbis were both aware of and troubled by these issues long before they became the focus of scholarly research.

Notes Research for this essay was undertaken at the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives and made possible by a Loewenstein-Wiener Fellowship awarded by the Marcus Center. I thank Dr. Gary Zola, Mr. Kevin Profﬁtt, Dr. Frederic Krome, and all other members of the Center for this fellowship research opportunity. 1. Meyer Levin, “After All I Did for Israel,” Commentary 12 (July 1951), 57–62; story cited in Melvin Urofsky, We Are One! American Jewry and Israel (New York: 1978), 269; and Andrew Furman, Israel through the Jewish-American Imagination: A Survey of JewishAmerican Literature on Israel 1928–1995 (Albany: 1997), 37–38. 2. Albert Gordon, Jews in Suburbia (Boston: 1959), 224–225. 3. Marshall Sklare and Joseph Greenbaum, Jewish Identity on the Suburban Frontier: A Study of Group Survival in the Open Society (New York: 1967), 322. 4. Sklare himself expressed puzzlement regarding the efficacy of his survey techniques when he returned to “Lakeville” a few months after the Six-Day War and once again obtained results indicating apathy toward Israel. See J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (Reading: 1996), 147–148. 5. Peter Y. Medding, “Segmented Ethnicity and the New Jewish Politics,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 3, Jews and Other Ethnic Groups in a Multi-Ethnic World, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn (New York: 1987), 34.

180

Matthew Silver

6. Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: 2004), 285, 288, 289; Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: 1988), 354–355. 7. Leon Jick, “The Reformation of Zionism—the Zionization of Reform,” Journal of Reform Zionism 1, no. 1 (March 1993), 37. 8. Sylvan Schwartzman, The Story of Reform Judaism (New York: 1953), 156, 176, 177. The textbook’s explanations of Reform’s anti-Zionist heritage were facile and inaccurate (for instance: “Early Reform rabbis had objected to the Orthodox idea of a Messianic return of all Jews from exile to Palestine, and not to the Zionist movement of the 20th century” [p. 133]). Formulated for bar- and bat mitzvah-aged American Jews, the book’s intention in this regard appeared to be to present Israel as a conventional and (passively) accepted entity. Generally, in the years following 1948, the Reform movement relied on Jewish Agency publications when it disseminated information on Israel; see CCAR Yearbook 60 (New York: 1950), 80. 9. The well-known story of the marginalization of the American Council for Judaism, an anti-Zionist group that in some ways branched off from the Reform movement, is not emphasized in this essay. For a full-length treatment of the organization’s origins, see Thomas Kolsky, Jews against Zionism: The American Council for Judaism 1942–1948 (Philadelphia: 1992). Also well known is Reform Judaism’s early recoil from organized Zionism—see, for instance, Naomi Cohen, “The Reaction of Reform Judaism in America to Political Zionism, 1897–1922,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 40 (New York: 1950–1951), 361–394. 10. Referring to the immediate post-1948 period, Marshall Sklare wrote: “Conservative rabbis have become increasingly critical of the general Zionist movement and of developments in Israel. . . . There has been a tendency to discover tensions between Jewish nationalism and religion” (Conservative Judaism: An American Religious Movement [New York: 1955; rpt. 1972], 221). 11. Michael A. Meyer, the leading historian of Reform Jewry, notes that three Reform (Liberal) congregations that sprouted in the pre-1948 period were “essentially Landsmannschaften, ethnically based societies of German Jews.” After 20 years of effort during the later period of the Mandate, he adds: “Progressive Judaism in what was now the state of Israel had to start anew” (Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism [New York: 1988], 345). For an overview of the ﬁrst Reform congregations in the state of Israel, see Ephraim Tabory, “A Sociological Study of the Reform and Conservative Movements in Israel” (Ph.D. diss., Bar-Ilan University, 1980), 101–104. According to Tabory, a full decade passed before the ﬁrst Reform institution in Israel, Jerusalem’s Harel congregation, was founded in 1958. 12. Ofer Shiff, Yehudim mishtalvim: universalizm reformi amerikani mul z.iyonut, antishemiyut veshoah (Tel Aviv: 2001). 13. On Silver’s emergence at the Biltmore and American Jewish conferences, see Marc Lee Raphael, Abba Hillel Silver: A Proﬁle in American Judaism (New York: 1989), 77–96. 14. Michael A. Meyer, “Abba Hillel Silver as Zionist within the Camp of Reform Judaism,” Journal of Israeli History 17 (1996), 30; the article, along with others from the same issue of the journal, is reprinted in Abba Hillel Silver and American Zionism, ed. Mark Raider, Jonathan Sarna, and Ronald Zweig (London: 1997). 15. Raphael, Abba Hillel Silver, 174–182. 16. Zohar Segev, “Z.ionei arz. ot habrit bimdinat yisrael bishnot hah.amishim—opz. iyah politit vealternativah liberalit,” ’Iyunim bitkumat yisrael 12 (2002), 512–513. 17. Ibid., 510–511. 18. Meyer, “Abba Hillel Silver as Zionist within the Camp of Reform Judaism,” 30. 19. Hasia Diner, “Zion and America: The Formative Visions of Abba Hillel Silver,” Journal of Israel History 17 (1996), 65. 20. Ibid., 45–46. 21. Meyer, “Abba Hillel Silver as Zionist within the Camp of Reform Judaism,” 30. 22. Segev, “Z.ionei arz. ot habrit bimdinat yisrael bishnot hah.amishim,” 502. 23. Harold Saperstein Papers, American Jewish Archives (hereafter: AJA), collection 718, box 2 (unpaginated sermon: “Out of Zion,” 6 Feb. 1953).

Responses of Reform Rabbis to Israeli Statehood

181

24. Deborah Dash Moore, GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation (London: 2004), 144–148. 25. Saperstein, “Out of Zion.” 26. Richard C. Hertz Papers, AJA, collection 675, box 2 (unpaginated sermon: “Americans and Judaism, A Study in Coalescing Loyalties: The Republic of Israel—Our Relationship to It as American Jews,” 16 May 1948). During the 1950s, Hertz became an inﬂuential American Jewish leader from his base at Temple Beth El in Detroit. 27. Ibid. 28. Arnold Eisen, Galut: Modern Jewish Reﬂection on Homelessness and Homecoming (Indianapolis: 1986), 148–180. 29. Zvi Ganin, An Uneasy Relationship: American Jewish Leadership and Israel 1948– 1957 (Syracuse: 2004); Naomi Cohen, Not Free to Desist: The American Jewish Committee 1906–1966 (Philadelphia: 1972), 310–313. 30. On Rabbi Gustav Posnansky’s declaration in Charleston, see Sarna, American Judaism, 84–85; Henry Feingold, Zion in America (New York: 1974), 99. 31. Samuel Blumenﬁeld, “Israel and the American Jew: A Design for Cultural Interdependence,” CCAR Yearbook 60, 300. 32. Ibid., 302. 33. Ibid., 304. The relevant passages in Ketubot are: “All countries are [like] dough toward the land of Israel, and the land of Israel is [like] dough toward Babylon. . . . Whoever lives in Babylon is accounted as though he lived in the land of Israel.” 34. Max Nussbaum Papers, AJA, collection 705 (undated and unpaginated sermon: “The State of Israel and American Jewry”). 35. Ibid. 36. Max Nussbaum, “Eretz Yisrael, Galut and Chutz La’aretz in their Historic Settings,” CCAR Yearbook 62 (New York: 1952), 509. 37. Ibid. 38. Marc Saperstein, Tanu Rabbanan: Our Rabbis Taught: Essays on the Occasion of the Centennial of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, CCAR Yearbook 1989 (New York: 1990), 2:111. 39. Biographical information on Abraham Feldman is taken from David Dalin and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Making a Life, Building a Community: A History of the Jews of Hartford (New York: 1997), 95–102, 125–129. 40. Congregation Beth Israel in Hartford was founded around 1847, moved from Orthodoxy to Reform a few decades later, and remained solidly German Jewish for at least a century after its founding. On its members and anti-Zionist orientation, see ibid., 96–97, 127–128. 41. Abraham Feldman, Hills to Climb: Eight Discourses (Hartford: 1931), 89–102. 42. Feldman delivered 23 Friday night sermons a year. In 1949–1950, Feldman delivered sermons on at least ﬁve topics connected with Israel (“This is Not My Flag,” “Religion in Israel,” “What about the Arab Refugees,” “The People in Israel,” “But Then, No Israel”), but the list of his sermon topics thereafter does not include any references to Zionism or Israel until 1952–1953, when he spoke on “Chaim Weizmann, the Greatest Jew of Our Generation.” See Abraham Feldman Papers, AJA, collection 38, box 43. Feldman saved his Zionist lobbying for the local Jewish newspaper, the Jewish Ledger, for which he wrote extensively, beginning in the 1930s. See Dalin and Rosenbaum, Making a Life, Building a Community, 127. 43. Feldman Papers, box 5 (“Aspects of Jewish Homiletics”). 44. Feldman related that, in response to an assignment given by Kohler, he chose a passage from the Song of Songs as a base for an “attack on the then current vogue among Reform rabbis to overstress universalism and to scorn Jewish particularism.” The HUC President then launched into a semi-facetious attack: “With mock sternness [Kohler] said: ‘that’s the trouble with you Zionists’ ” (Ibid.). 45. CCAR Yearbook 58 (New York: 1949), 196. 46. Dalin and Rosenbaum, Making a Life, Building a Community, 128. 47. Alfred Lilienthal, “Israel’s Flag is Not Mine,” Reader’s Digest (Sept. 1949), 40–41. 48. Feldman Papers, box 43 (unpaginated sermon: “Israel’s Flag is Not Mine,” 30 Sept. 1949).

182

Matthew Silver

49. Jacob De Haas, Louis D. Brandeis, A Biographical Sketch (New York: 1929), 181. 50. Hertz, “Americans and Judaism, a Study in Coalescing Loyalties.” 51. Phillip Bernstein, “The New Israel and American Jewry,” CCAR Yearbook 58, 287. 52. The following responses are culled from the unedited transcript of the 59th CCAR Annual Convention, Kansas City, June 22–23, 1948, AJA, collection 34, box 38. 53. Deborah Dash Moore, To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A. (Cambridge, Mass.: 1994), 114. Magnin’s preference for the good life comes across in a passage of the sermon described below, in which he expressed his distaste for Egypt: “like all the Arab countries, a few people have everything. The rest are ﬁlthy . . . I wouldn’t want to sleep overnight in any of the villages I went through to Carnack on the way to Luxor, except in a hotel for tourists.” 54. Edgar F. Magnin Papers, AJA (collection 344), box 11 (untitled and unpaginated sermon, 14 May 1949); Moore, To the Golden Cities, 114. 55. Magnin Papers, box 11 (untitled and unpaginated sermons, 20 Oct. and 3 Dec. 1950). 56. Magnin Papers, box 11 (untitled sermon, 20 Oct. 1950). Magnin’s disdain for Samuel reﬂected an admiration for “tough Jews” that was widespread in Los Angeles and other burgeoning postwar Jewish communities. See, for instance, Moore, To the Golden Cities, 227–234 and, more generally, Paul Breines, Tough Jews: Political Dilemmas and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry (New York: 1990). 57. Magnin Papers, box 11 (untitled sermon, 20 Oct. 1950). 58. Ibid. (untitled sermon, 3 Dec. 1950). 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. (untitled sermon, 15 May 1953). 61. On Shulman, see Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem: 1971), 14:1478. 62. Charles Shulman Papers, AJA, collection 124, box 6 (unpaginated sermon: “The Palestine Solution,” 9 April 1948). 63. Ibid. On Henderson, see Robert Kaplan, The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite (New York: 1993), 89–98. 64. Shulman Papers (unpaginated sermon: “Israel Laughs at Its Troubles,” July 1953). 65. For instance, in a January 13, 1960 sermon at the Riverdale Temple (“Ben Gurion and Godless Jews”), and in another address from 1961 (“Can Judaism Survive in the US?”), Shulman took issue with various pronouncements made by the Israeli leader about the extent of American Jewish assimilation, and about settling in Israel as a precondition for a spiritually full Jewish life (ibid., box 3). Shulman’s informed, empirical approach with regard to Israel is exempliﬁed by a 1964 sermon devoted to Israel’s secondary school system. Warning about the development of “two Israels,” Shulman noted that Sephardic Jews constituted 50 percent of Israel’s population, but that only 25 percent of Israeli high school pupils were Sephardic (ibid., box 6, unpaginated sermon: “Israel’s Great Education Venture”). 66. Ibid., box 6 (unpaginated sermon: “The Outlook for Israel,” 19 Nov. 1948). 67. The following responses are culled from the unedited transcript of the 61st CCAR Annual Convention, Cincinnati, June 1950, AJA, collection 34, box 38. 68. Shulman’s comments are reﬁned in CCAR Yearbook 60, 322. After the remarks about how “we [Americans] shot Indians and took their lands,” the edited transcript reads: “Israel’s beginnings are not exactly in a messianic style. That is part of the process of building a city or establishing a continent. The incidents around the ideal core of a struggle are not always ﬂattering to the core.” 69. Ibid., 313. For a discussion of Yizhar’s iconoclastic story, see Anita Shapira, “Hirbet Hiza: Between Remembrance and Forgetting,” Jewish Social Studies 7, no. 1 (2000), 1–62. 70. Leonard Slater, The Pledge (New York: 1970), 12–13; Doron Almog, Harekhesh bearz.ot habrit, 1945–1949 (Tel Aviv: 1987), 31–32. 71. Shulman dramatically narrated the Sonneborn Institute story to his congregation in sermons delivered in the 1950s. See Shulman Papers, box 6 (unpaginated sermon: “Ben Gurion at 70,” 5 Oct. 1956), and ibid., box 8 (unpaginated and undated sermon: “The Rudolph Sonneborn Story: An Untold Epic of American Zionism”). 72. Shulman, “Ben Gurion at 70.”

Responses of Reform Rabbis to Israeli Statehood

183

73. Shulman’s explication of Sonneborn’s early connections with Zionism and Ben-Gurion is more detailed and accurate than the treatment accorded in the Slater and Almog studies (see n. 70), which merely mention that Sonneborn, who later served as a naval aviator in the Second World War, traveled to the Versailles Peace Conference as a secretary to the American Zionist delegation (at Louis Brandeis’ request), and subsequently “toured” in Eretz Israel. 74. The Zionist Commission was headed by another scion of a prominent Baltimore Jewish family, the ophthalmologist Dr. Harry Friedenwald. See Matthew Silver, “A Cultural Model for America—Holy Land Studies,” in America and Zion: Essays and Papers in Memory of Moshe Davis, ed. Jonathan Sarna and Eli Lederhendler (Detroit: 2002), 164–178. 75. Shulman, “The Rudolph Sonneborn Story.” 76. Ibid. 77. The quotes that follow appear in the unedited transcript of the CCAR 61st Annual Convention, box 39. 78. Ibid.; for the edited version of Bloom’s remarks, see CCAR Yearbook 60, 311–312. 79. David Polish, Renew Our Days: The Zionist Issue in Reform Judaism (Jerusalem: 1976), 251–252. 80. CCAR Yearbook 59 (New York: 1949), 206. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid., 205. 83. Ibid., 168. 84. After a 15-day visit to Israel in 1950, one member of the UAHC executive board, J.S. Ackerman of Chicago, argued that the CCAR resolution condemning discrimination against Reform (Liberal) rabbis in Israel was “based on incorrect information.” See Allen Lesser, Israel’s Impact 1950–1951 (New York: 1984), 102. 85. For versions of the exchange between Spicehandler and Feldman, see the unedited transcript of the CCAR 61st Annual Convention, box 39; cf. CCAR Yearbook 60, 313–314, 323–327. 86. Joshua Trachtenberg, “Report from Israel,” CCAR Yearbook 62, 464–480. 87. Trachtenberg earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1939 and subsequently published Jewish Magic and Superstition (1939), and The Devil and the Jews (1943). He served as rabbi at a Reform synagogue in Teaneck, New Jersey until his death in 1959. See Encyclopaedia Judaica 15:1294. 88. Trachtenberg address, CCAR Yearbook 62, 464. 89. Polish, Renew Our Days, 239. 90. For the most part, American Zionists and pro-Israeli spokesmen seem to have adapted quickly to the transition from pre-1948 pioneering (h.aluz.) rhetoric to post-1948 imagery stressing nonpartisan sacriﬁce and devotion to the state (known as mamlakhtiyut). See Arthur Aryeh Goren, “Anu banu arza in America: The Americanization of the Halutz Ideal,” in Envisioning Israel: The Changing Ideals of Images of North American Jews, ed. Allon Gal (Detroit: 1996), 112–113. 91. Trachtenberg address, CCAR Yearbook 62, 474. 92. Trachtenberg’s controversial 1952 address was not, of course, unprecedented. Dissatisfaction with the religious status quo in Israel was expressed in Reform sermons in the 1951–1952 period in response to events such as a visit to the United States by Israel’s minister of religion, Yehuda Leib Maimon. The criticism was often vehement. For instance, in a March 1951 sermon at Chicago Sinai Congregation, the normally thoughtful and polished Richard Hertz issued a tirade in response to Maimon’s visit. “I am worried about the status of religion in the state of Israel,” he exclaimed, and went on to say that the policies of Ben-Gurion’s government might “lead to a theocracy,” to “religious authoritarianism.” A note of personal resentment is evident in this sermon (“If I went to Israel tomorrow, I would not be permitted to ofﬁciate at a Jewish marriage”), and its conclusion is scorching (“So when Rabbi Maimon comes to the US and patronizingly parrots that there is ‘freedom of religion in Israel,’ one wonders for whom – Christians, Yes! Muslims, Yes. But for Jews, No! Rabbi Maimon on Conservative and Reform [Judaism] is like the Pope on Protestantism”). See Hertz Papers, box 3 (unpaginated sermon: “Status of Religion in the State of Israel,” 18 March 1951).

184

Matthew Silver

93. Trachtenberg address, CCAR Yearbook 62, 480. 94. The Tali network currently consists of 120 schools and preschools with some 22,000 students. Ideas about founding a Reform kibbutz surfaced at a ground-breaking meeting of the CCAR held in Jerusalem in 1970, which eventually resulted in the establishment of Kibbutz Yahel, in the Arava, in 1976. A small Reform congregation established in Jerusalem in 1958 appears to have been a study circle for the “renewal of religious life.” By 1983, there were 15 such groups that sponsored High Holiday services. For surveys about the spread of Reform Judaism in Israel, see Meyer, Response to Modernity, 348–352; Polish, 243–247. 95. Trachtenberg address, CCAR Yearbook 62, 470. 96. Ibid., 471. 97. Jonathan Sarna, “A Projection of America as It Ought to Be: Zion in the Mind’s Eye of American Jews,” in Gal (ed.), Envisioning Israel, 41–59. 98. Arthur A. Goren, “A Golden Decade for American Jews, 1945–1955,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 8, A New Jewry? America since the Second World War, ed. Peter Y. Medding (New York: 1992), 6. 99. Identifying himself as a “Diaspora Jew who lives in Israel,” Charles Liebman in 1977 cited a number of issues and controversies in Israel’s religious sphere that had engaged American Jewish groups since 1948. These included controversies over education in the ma’abarot (immigrant tent camps) in 1949–1950 and debates about the National Service Law for Women in 1953–1954. American Jews do not feature in Liebman’s analysis of pre-1967 issues. See his Pressure without Sanctions: The Inﬂuence of World Jewry on Israeli Policy (London: 1977), 61–117.

1953/1954: A Year in Yiddish Literature Jan Schwarz (university of chicago)

The Yiddish writer in America is forced not only to make an “accounting of the soul” but also to stand at “Judgment Day.” He must continuously confront himself: Where do I stand? How far do my words reach? What are the chances of an echo? Where is the forest from which an echo can come? —A. Leyeles In case, God forbid, American Jewry sinks into a spiritual abyss, then let at least a dream remain, somewhere, around that abyss, hanging on an overturned tree trunk. And if good is destined, then let the poem be raised up from dust; remember that back then, in that year, somebody dreamt about the future . . . Montreal, the summer of 1953. —Melekh Ravitsh

In 1953, the Yiddish poet Melekh Ravitsh published an epic poem, Di kroynung fun a yungn yidishn dikhter in amerike (The coronation of a young Yiddish poet in America).1 Written in rhymed four-line stanzas and divided into 13 chapters, the poem depicted the semi-autobiographical narrator’s encounter with an Americanborn Jewish child named Yosef ben Yisroel. The main part of the poem is set in New York during the Second World War, which provides the background for the narrator and his protégé’s vision of the future of world Jewry. Ravitsh made use of Theodor Herzl’s renowned statement “If you will it, it is no dream” (Oyb ir vilt—iz es nisht keyn maysele) as the poem’s epigraph, while at the same time acknowledging the paradox of using Herzl’s Zionist call to action in a poetic vision concerning the revival of Yiddish culture in America. The poem insists that the future of world Jewry and the Jewish state are both dependent on the direction taken by the Jews of America, representing half of the world’s Jews. American Jews could either turn their backs on their past and “sell their birthright for a pot of lentils” by embracing material comforts and assimilation, or else they could revive Yiddish, the language of the martyrs (loshn kedoyshim yidish), in a manner similar to the resurrection of Hebrew (loshn koydesh) in the land of Israel.2 The narrator and his student, Yosef ben Yisroel, are visionaries pointing the way toward Yiddish cultural regeneration. The poem depicts Yosef ben Yisroel’s quasimessianic coronation at a Yiddish cultural event in honor of Y.L. Peretz. Ravitsh’s poetic alter ego represents the “world Jew” (velt-Yid) in America who, in the poem’s ﬁnal chapter, addresses his poet friends from prewar Warsaw: the Zionist Uri Zvi 185

186

Jan Schwarz

Greenberg in Israel and the communist Peretz Markish in Moscow. The latter, unbeknownst to Ravitsh in 1953, had been executed on Stalin’s order the previous year, along with many other Soviet Jewish writers. With the exception of a description of Yosef’s childhood in Harlem (where he falls in love with a black girl from the neighborhood) and references to the Lower East Side, the poem seems far removed from the city of New York. Even “Jewish” New York, the locus of the poem’s visionary resurrection of the East European Jewish heritage, seems vague and intangible. Written both in Montreal (where Ravitsh settled in the 1940s) and in Tel Aviv (during the years 1948 through 1953), “The Coronation of a Yiddish Poet in America” was inspired, Ravitsh wrote, by his conversations with two refugees from Vilna (vilnius), the Yiddish poets Chaim Grade and Avrom Sutzkever.3 In his epilogue, Ravitsh mentions that he originally intended to publish the poem in a bilingual Yiddish/English version: “The poem should ﬁrst of all inﬂuence those—who do not yet, or not at all, know Yiddish in America.”4 However, Ravitsh did not accomplish this task, which accounts for the poem’s invisibility for the vast majority of American Jewish readers. The poem’s religiously colored language, messianic symbolism, Yiddish diasporism, and references to Yiddish writers such as Uri Zvi Greenberg, Peretz Markish, and Dovid Edelshtat would have made it completely obscure to most Jewish Americans in 1953. Ravitsh’s poem, one of many Yiddish literary publications in the year 1953/1954,5 highlights the fact that Yiddish literature after 1945 was shaped by a new vanguard of writers, almost all of them refugees and recent immigrants. The most important of these writers were Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991; Warsaw to New York, 1935), Aaron Zeitlin (1898–1973; Warsaw to New York, 1940), Chaim Grade (1910–1982; Vilna to New York, 1948), Melekh Ravitsh (1893–1976; Warsaw to Montreal, 1940), Mordechai Strigler (1921–1998; Zamosz [Poland] to New York, 1953), Avrom Sutzkever (b. 1913; Vilna to Tel Aviv, 1947), Y.Y. Trunk (1888–1961; Warsaw to New York, 1941), Leib Rochman (1918–1978; Minsk-Mazowieck [Poland] to Jerusalem, 1950), Chava Rosenfarb (b. 1921; Lodz to Montreal, 1950), Kadya Molodovsky (1894–1975; Warsaw to New York, 1935), and Rokhl Korn (1898–1982; Przemysl [Poland] to Montreal, 1948). These writers would be responsible for the ﬁrst resurgence of Yiddish literary creativity in the post-Holocaust period. In New York, the postwar capital of Yiddish letters, an old guard of Yiddish writers, among them Reuben Ayzland, A. Leyeles, Y.Y. Schwartz, and Yankev Glatshteyn (Jacob Glatstein) continued to embody the modernist sophistication of American Yiddish high culture.6 But with the arrival of writers such as Singer, Zeitlin, Molodovsky, and Grade, a very different set of ideological baggage and literary agendas was brought into play. As with previous waves of Jewish immigration to the United States, the postHolocaust inﬂux set the stage for a new phase in Yiddish literary history that reﬂected the speciﬁc worldview and background of the émigrés. As noted by Hana WirthNesher and Michael P. Kramer: “The history of the Jews in America is not linear. It unfolds as successive, largely discrete waves of immigration . . . and each produced a literature reﬂecting both its distinct heritage and its peculiar experience of acculturation.”7 Most of the new arrivals were marked by their experiences in the Nazi ghettos and camps or by the Soviet totalitarian system (or both). For the American Jewish

1953/1954: A Year in Yiddish Literature

187

world, including the Yiddish community, these recent émigrés were foreign, exotic, and out of step with the zeitgeist of upward social mobility. Yet at the same time, as will be seen, permeable boundaries existed between Yiddish and Anglo-Jewish writing, and the year 1953/1954 was distinguished, among other things, by the increased availability of Yiddish literature in English translation. Nonetheless, the ﬂowering of Yiddish culture in the post-Holocaust period was utterly incompatible with the concerns and goals of the majority of American Jews. According to Jewish historian Arthur Hertzberg, these concerns and goals were encapsulated in the important ideological role that the new Jewish state played for upwardly mobile American Jews. Israel offered a vision of renewal through a rejection of the East European Jewish past: But here was another, even deeper connection—hidden and never deﬁned—between the new Israel and the post-war Jewish community in America. The Israelis were giving the Americans something even more precious than vicarious pride; they were offering forgiveness. Israel was proclaiming that the Jewish past had been a mistake; one could feel proud, and not guilty, of starting a new life in deﬁance of Jewish memory. In the deep subconscious of American Jews, in mid-century, this message resonated: they, too, had the right to fresh beginnings. In the new land they, too, had the right to fashion their own new lives, of success and well-being.8

Conversely, in poems, essays, and stories published during 1953/1954, Yiddish writers evoked the lost world of their childhood; mourned the destruction of their people and homelands and the decline of their language; voiced their disillusionment with modernism and socialism; and offered their own particular visions of America and of Israel. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Yiddish writing in that year was its sheer scope, variety, and quality. It was almost as if the horrors of what had occurred in Europe had been transcended, as if Yiddish writing was now continuing under “normal circumstances.” The past, however, was far from being forgotten or neglected, and in a variety of works published in 1953/1954, the transformation of Yiddish culture into “a culture of retrieval,” past-oriented and inward-looking, was readily apparent.9 The “silver age” of Yiddish literature, as it has recently been termed, has not been investigated comprehensively.10 Typically, the scholarly narrative depicts the rise of Yiddish culture (press, theater, literature) in late 19th-century Eastern Europe and the United States, which culminated in the interwar period’s “three centers”—Warsaw, Moscow, and New York.11 With the exception of a highly selective engagement with a small group of works (most of them by I.B. Singer), there has been relatively little discussion of Yiddish writing after the Holocaust.12 Rather, the emphasis has been placed largely on the pre-Second World War period, with Yiddish writing most often discussed, in the American context, either as part of the immigration narrative or else in connection with radical politics associated with trade unionism and the Soviet Union.13 As Tony Michels recently pointed out, the “otherness” of Yiddish culture in the American (Jewish) context has mostly been excluded from American Jewish history: Themes of loss, alienation, ambivalence, disappointment, and rebellion—all prominent in American Jewish ﬁction and autobiography (in Yiddish and English)—barely exist

188

Jan Schwarz

in the major works of American Jewish history. Subjects that might reveal a less-thansanguine version of the past have been ﬁltered out or relegated to the background. In the success story that American Jewish history has become, the radical experience has been made irrelevant.14

By the early 1950s, the immigration narrative had become passé as a consequence of the successful integration and upward mobility of second-generation American Jews; whereas Stalin’s antisemitic campaign of the late 1940s (culminating in the execution of leading Soviet Yiddish writers on August 12, 1952) resulted in a signiﬁcant defection from the socialist cause among the shrinking group of Yiddish writers who had previously maintained their loyalty to the Soviet Union. Although New York, as noted, had become the world capital of Yiddish letters following the destruction of the Jewish centers in Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna,15 the Yiddish culture that had ﬂourished there from the 1880s through the Depression had already shown signs of decline by the 1940s. In addition, the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 shifted the focus of American Jews toward Israel and Hebrew. Nonetheless, Yiddish writers in New York such as Yankev Glatshteyn, A. Leyeles, Kadya Molodovsky, Aaron Zeitlin, I.B. Singer, and Chaim Grade wrote some of their best work after 1945. New York had six Yiddish dailies in 1950, with a total of 238,500 readers, alongside high-quality publishing houses with a stable annual production of Yiddish books16 and a growing Orthodox Yiddish-speaking population. The infusion of tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors into the greater New York Jewish community added signiﬁcant numbers of Yiddish speakers. Meanwhile, outside of New York, Yiddish publishing ﬂourished in a number of other centers, notably Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv, and Montreal, where a cultural infrastructure was in place and publishing costs were low. At this time, distinguished editors and writers initiated a number of important journals and book series: Avrom Sutzkever’s Di goldene keyt (Tel Aviv [1949–1995], 141 vols.); Mark Turkov’s Dos poylishe yidntum (Buenos Aires [1946– 1966], 175 vols.); Shmuel Roszanski’s Musterverk (Buenos Aires [1957–1984], 100 vols.); and Melekh Ravitsh’s Mayn leksikon (Montreal [1945–1982], four volumes). Holocaust commemoration and testimony was the ground note that sounded through Yiddish writing in 1953/1954, in sharp contrast to the general lack of interest in discussing the Holocaust within the broader American Jewish community.17 In a 1954 article in Commentary, the Yiddish poet and Anglo-Jewish writer Judd L. Teller addressed the new conditions of the American Yiddish writer after the Holocaust. Teller argued that the American Yiddish writer would be able to reach a new generation of American readers only by confronting the radically new circumstances in all their starkness. Yiddish modernism as inspired by Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Moyshe Leib Halpern had reached a dead end. Replacing the American Yiddish writer’s “overlong dalliance in the Lotus Land of non-sectarian yidishkeyt and his lack of concern with anything Yiddish but the tongue itself” was a new reality that brought such writers “face to face with the outside world” after the mass extermination of Yiddish-speakers in Eastern Europe. Teller concluded his article by stating: Few American Yiddish writers, barring refugees of the Nazi and postwar periods, are now under ﬁfty. Many celebrated their ﬁftieth birthdays in the last several years and

1953/1954: A Year in Yiddish Literature

189

were hailed on these occasions as “young and promising” by elders on either side of sixty. . . . The depressing atmosphere of a convalescent home to which afﬂuent children retire their perfectly healthy but aging parents hovers over American Yiddish letters today. These people, sound of mind and of sturdy constitution, are eager to make themselves useful, but few want their skills.18

In fact, this isolation from a readership and from contemporary cultural concerns was—for a brief moment—broken in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Yiddish writers took on a new mission of mourning and bearing witness to the catastrophe. This enabled them to reach American Jews with close ties to the destroyed communities in Europe. Yet these were mostly isolated groups of survivors and their supporters in the Yiddish and Anglophone Jewish world. Among the larger American Jewish community, mainstream organizations adapted quickly to the new Cold War era and, rather than focusing on the six million victims of the Holocaust, oriented their political support and fund-raising efforts to the “free world’s” ﬁght against Communism and to the support of Israel. In four articles published in the premier Yiddish literary journal Di goldene keyt in 1953/1954, the Yiddish critic A. Mukdoni summarized the state of Yiddish letters in America as being surprisingly vibrant despite the bleak prognosis for its future.19 He compared Yiddish literature in America with a mortally ill patient who harbored an enormous will to survive. As Mukdoni pointed out, this was expressed in the variety of newly published Yiddish historical works, criticism, ﬁction, memorial (yizker) books, and Holocaust memoirs. He was particularly impressed with the high publishing standards of these new works, which stood in sharp contrast to the cheap paper and poor binding typical of Yiddish works published prior to the Second World War. Despite all of this, however, the undeniable fact was that most Yiddish writers were in their 50s and 60s, and there was no young generation in sight. As Mukdoni put it, “der emigrant iz gekumen keyn amerike mit zayne shraybers un er vet avek fun der velt mit zey [the immigrant came to America with his writers and he will leave the world with them].”20 One of the books mentioned in Mukdoni’s article was Shaye Miller’s In di shvartse pintelekh (In the world of letters), a short story collection published in 1953. One of the stories in this collection, “Reb Odem” (Mr. Adam), deals with the predicament of Yiddish writers in New York. This story is an American parallel to Chaim Grade’s story “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,” published the same year in English translation in Commentary (November 1953). The religious, cultural, and spiritual distance between these two stories—Grade’s tale of a postwar encounter between two Vilna-born survivors in Paris, versus Miller’s portrayal of two New York writers—is evident in their vastly different perspectives. Grade’s characters, both of them ex-yeshiva students, argue about God, art, and the meaning of life in a richly textured Hebraized Yiddish ﬁlled with learned references to religious sources. In contrast, Miller’s story is sprinkled with English words indicating the characters’ close ties to American life. And whereas Grade’s characters focus their conversation on the survival of the Jewish people and the collapse of Western civilization, Miller’s characters talk about the threat of American consumer culture to their artistic integrity, using the opposition between “high literature” and shund (commercialism) as a springboard for the debate about possible artistic responses to the Holocaust.

190

Jan Schwarz

One of the protagonists in Miller’s story, Aron Libson, makes a comfortable living as a journalist who writes for the Yiddish press. He wants to help a writer friend, Shakhne Cohen, and suggests that the latter can make some money by writing Yiddish advertisements for kosher chicken soup. Cohen is suffering from writer’s block. He has attempted to write about the Holocaust, but lacking direct experiences to validate his words, he feels himself a liar; as a result, he has not written anything for six months: “Sutzkever, Shtrigler, Shpigl, nokh a por, fun di vos zenen geven dortn, zey lignern nit, zey megn shraybn, aﬁle shlekht shraybn megen zey, un lomir dir zogn, eynike fun zey shraybn gut, ober mir do, mir . . . [Sutzkever, Shtrigler, Shpigel, and a couple of others among those who were there: they don’t lie, they are allowed to write, even badly, and let me tell you, some of them write well, but we here, we . . . ].”21 According to Cohen, Yiddish writers in America view the Holocaust in stark categories of heroes and villains; in the absence of a direct experiential perspective, their work is devoid of psychological insight and depth. Cohen argues that Yiddish storytelling should address the Holocaust by adding a fourth gift to the “three gifts” [dray matones] of Y.L. Peretz’s classic tale of martyrdom. Peretz’s story is steeped in a traditional universe of premodern antisemitism that, according to Cohen, is insufﬁcient to address the martyrdom of the Holocaust. However, in order to depict what he calls “Reb Odem,” that is, the human being who was annihilated in Auschwitz, something radically different is required: something even Yiddish survivor writers such as Sutzkever, Shpigl, and Strigler could only approximate. Libson, passionately defending humanism, has the last word, secretly leaving a twenty-dollar bill for his unemployed friend, yet the story ends with a question mark. In Grade’s story, the two protagonists, the secular Yiddish writer and his Orthodox friend from the musar yeshiva, embrace one another in a plea for Jewish rapprochement in the aftermath of the Holocaust. In 1953, Yankev Glatshteyn published a new collection of poems, Der tatns shotn (My father’s shadow). Both in style and in content, this collection is vastly different from the poet’s previous artistic explorations of his inner self in kaleidoscopically crafted free-verse, in poems from his 1921 collection Yankev Glatshteyn through Yidishtaytshn (Yiddish meanings) (1936). As its title indicates, the shadow of his father, who was murdered at Treblinka, now lingers over Glatshteyn’s poetic universe. The proudly declared individuality of his ﬁrst book has been subsumed by the collective task of mourning the destruction of East European Jewry. Glatshteyn’s inzikhist vision of a Yiddish high modernism and a new secular yidishkeyt has been crushed by history. The poem “Yidishkeyt” from this work of 1953 traces the end of his prophetic dream of a new secular yidishkeyt—a new Great Synagogue—inspired by Peretz’s vision of integrating Jewish values and content into a universal modernism. Instead, this dream has been reduced to the language of folklore; nourishment for old men’s nostalgia: Nisht mer vi a meshoyrer bistu, vos iz yoytse far zikh mit an omen in khor fun untergang. Mir hobn zikh tsuﬁl farlozt afn zikorn, biz s’hot tropnveyz fun undz

1953/1954: A Year in Yiddish Literature

191

alts oysgedenkt. Itst zenen mir farbenkt nokh a zemerl, nokh a gram, nokh an oysgeveptn tam. Arum undzere kep dreyen mir ale a kapoyre-hon, ober der gepreplter tokhn geyt undz mer nisht on. Benkshaft-yidishkeyt iz a vig-lid far skeynim, vos tshkayen eyngeveytikte khale. Zoln mir tsushteln di veykhe krishkes, di verter oysgelebte un hoyle, mir vos hobn gekholemt fun a nayer anshe-kneses hagdoyle? [You’re no more than a choirboy, content with an amen-chime in a chorus of decline. We staked too much on memory till bit by bit it dripped out of mind. Now we pine for a tune, for a rhyme, for some stale savor. We whirl the sacriﬁcial hen around our heads for sin’s redress, but the muttered essence does not touch us. Longingkeyt-Yidishkeyt is merely a lullaby for old men whose gums knead soaked challah. Should we provide the soft shreds, the bare, the outlived words, we who dreamed of a new Great Synagogue? (translated by Richard Fein)]22 Reviewing Glatshteyn’s book in Di goldene keyt (1954), the critic Yehoshua Rappoport criticized the poet for burdening his poems’ musicality and linguistic inventiveness with “moral messages.” The exceptions, according to Rappoport, were the Khurbn and Bratslaver poems that Glatshteyn had introduced in his earlier volume Gedenklider (Remembrance poems) (1943). Like Glatshteyn’s long poem Yosl Loksh fun Khelm (Yosl Loksh of Chelm), published in Yidishtaytshn and reprinted as a separate book in 1944, the persona of the Bratslaver enabled Glatshteyn to employ an alter ego from a Hasidic universe. In this voice, he could address poetic, spiritual, and religious concerns detached from the destruction of European Jewry. While Hasidic masters had previously been employed as subjects in Yiddish poetry, Glatshteyn was the ﬁrst to utilize the Brastlaver as a vehicle through which he

192

Jan Schwarz

expressed the soul-searching of modern people. Like Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Milkman and Abramovitsh’s Mendele the Bookseller, the Bratslaver’s colloquial voice conjured up an entire Jewish world. In his review, Rappoport praised the poem “Faran aza gekekhts vi hunger” (Such a dish as hunger exists) in which Glatshteyn self-critically exposed his poetry’s commitment to collective mourning as a threat to his poetic and existential “hunger”: Zing mir nisht keyn lidelekh fun hunger, zog mir nit keyn troyerike reyd, dertseyl mir nit keyn moralishe mayselekh. Zey toygn ale af toyznt kapores. Kenstu dos gezang fun boykh grimenish, Fun leydike kishkes, Dos gezang fun der farlederter tsung, Fun dem eypishdikn moyl, Vos zayn eyntsik keykhts Iz shlingen eygn shpeykhts. Moyl, zing mir nisht keyn lider. [Don’t sing me any songs of hunger, Speak no sad talk, Tell me no moral tales. They all are worth a thousand times nothing. Do you know the song of colic, Of empty intestines, The song of the leathery tongue, Of the stinking mouth, Whose only nourishment, Is to swallow its own spit. Mouth, don’t sing me any songs.]23 The distance from the actual, lived hunger experienced by Jews in the ghettos and the camps highlights the poet’s lack of understanding, his empty words, and his moralishe mayselekh (moral stories). This self-ironic approach to national themes and forms serve to tone down the pathos of Glatshteyn’s Khurbn and Bratslaver poems. Avrom Sutzkever’s Griner akvarium (Green aquarium), published in 1953/1954 in Di goldene keyt, bears out Miller’s point in “Reb Odem” about the experiential gulf between Holocaust survivors and American observers. When Sutzkever was in the Vilna ghetto, he experienced poetry as a means of defying death; he literally believed that it had the power to keep him alive. He would turn this experience into a literary credo that made his life dependent on his ability to create lasting art. Sharing the fate of most Vilna Jews up until their murder in Ponar, Sutzkever was caught in the same quandary as the Yiddish writers in New York. Both he and Glatshteyn insisted that their poetry was a means of rescuing the shards of a civilization cut down in its prime. But Sutzkever’s experiences in the Vilna ghetto and partisan groups suffused his poetry with urgency and richness of metaphor that Glatshteyn’s meditation on memory and loss rarely matched.24

1953/1954: A Year in Yiddish Literature

193

Irving Howe recalled in his memoir, A Margin of Hope (1982), that “one day in 1953” he received a note from the Yiddish poet Eliezer Greenberg, which initiated a partnership “in the editing-and-translating-Yiddish business.” This collaboration resulted in the publication of six collections of Yiddish prose and poetry in English translation during the next two decades. While working on their ﬁrst anthology, A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, published in 1954, Greenberg showed Howe a story by I.B. Singer. Howe then persuaded Saul Bellow, a native Yiddish speaker, to translate the story into English. During a three- or four-hour session, Bellow translated sentence by sentence while Greenberg read the story in the original. Howe sent Bellow’s translation to Partisan Review editor Philip Rahv, who had never heard of Singer. The story “Gimpel the Fool” was accepted for publication and became “Singer’s entry into the American world.” Howe’s retrospective account emphasizes the indifference of American Jewish writers “to the presence of a vibrant Yiddish culture that could be found, literally and symbolically, a few blocks away.”25 The invisibility of Yiddish culture in the eyes of New York Jewish writers brings to mind the observation made by the Polish poet Czeslow Milosz in his memoir, Native Realm (1968), that, while he participated in Polish cultural life in Vilna in the 1930s, he knew nothing about Yiddish literary life in the Jewish part of town. It was only after Milosz immigrated to the United States in the 1950s that he discovered Yiddish literature in Howe and Greenberg’s 1954 anthology. Yiddish literature, as packaged for an American readership in Howe and Greenberg’s introduction to A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, emphasized the collective ethos of East European Jewry as a means of glorifying the anti-heroic, powerless East European Jew. Like Abraham Joshua Heschel’s idealized depiction of “the inner world of the Jews in Eastern Europe” in his The Earth Is the Lord’s (1949) and the anthropological study Life is with People (1952), Howe and Greenberg intended to erect a monument to an organic, otherworldly, and morally superior shtetl community. This Yiddish literary ethos, “characterized by attitudes we should look to with admiration, perhaps even yearning,”26 was meant to be a Yiddish utopian alternative to the Americanization and memory loss that characterized second- and third-generation Jewish Americans. In order to bring this point home, the otherwise clearheaded Howe gave vent to this rhetorical outburst: Because of its own limitations, the world of the East European Jews made impossible the power-hunger, the pretensions to aristocracy, the whole mirage of false values that have blighted Western intellectual life. The virtue of powerlessness, the power of helplessness, the company of the dispossessed, the sanctity of the insulted and the injured—these, ﬁnally, are the great themes of Yiddish literature.27

Fortunately, the stories selected for the anthology contradict this sanitized image of Yiddish literature. The “power-hunger” is at full display in the stories by Isaac Meir Weissenberg and I.J. Singer; the pretension to aristocracy has a long distinguished career in Yiddish storytelling, as is evident in the stories of Y.L. Peretz, Sholem Asch, and Chaim Grade. “The whole mirage of false values that have blighted Western intellectual life” is a central theme of Sholem Aleichem’s, Grade’s and Dovid Bergelson’s stories, and the list goes on. Finally, “the insulted and the injured” as depicted in Jonah Rosenfeld’s “Competitors” and I.B. Singer’s “Gimpel

194

Jan Schwarz

the Fool” raise troubling questions about sexual abuse and economical exploitation of Jews by Jews. To their credit, Howe and Greenberg included these and other stories, thereby presenting a literary image of East European Jewry more complex than their own critical introduction.28 Language provides a key to understanding the year 1953/1954 in Yiddish literature. To write in Yiddish in the 1950s was to address a segment of the Jewish population that was particularly receptive to the cataclysm of the Holocaust. In contrast, by writing in English, Jewish writers were mostly signifying their downplaying of Jewish concerns and literary models. This division by language among American Jewish writers was dramatically accentuated during and after the Holocaust.29 A good example is Saul Bellow’s breakthrough novel The Adventures of Augie March, published in 1953. It is an American rag to riches story; the opening lines state as much: “I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make a record in my own way.”30 Bellow made the urban environment a central trope of his work. Jewishness became a metaphor, a state of consciousness or a spiritual vantage point from which he would depict his American Jewish roots in Chicago.31 Bellow’s novel was an American bildungsroman in which Augie March and his family were only indirectly characterized by a Jewish sensibility or Jewish cultural references. A brief review of Augie March appeared in A. Mukdoni’s survey of Yiddish culture in America. In a passage that is indicative of American Yiddish writers’ disparaging attitudes toward Jewish writers in English, Mukdoni concludes: [The book] presents a gallery of well portrayed Jewish characters, but these characters could as well have been Italians, Greeks etc. . . . I think it is an empty book, a naked book. . . . For the world it is a Jewish book, but like all “Jewish” books in English, it will disappear in the great ocean of English books and will be listed in the registry of English literature.32

In a 2001 interview with Jonathan Rosen, Bellow shed interesting light on the state of his mind while writing Augie March in Paris: Bellow recalled writing “The Adventures of Augie March”—the grand freewheeling novel that made his reputation—in Paris in the late 1940s. Holocaust survivors were everywhere . . . and, as a Yiddish speaker, he had access to the terrible truths they harbored. But, as Bellow put it, he was not in the mood to listen. “I wanted my seven-layer cake.” . . . He did not wish to burden his writing at that early moment in his career with the encumbering weight of Jewish history.33

Only much later in his career did Bellow begin to address the Holocaust in works such as Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1971) and the story “Something to Remember Me By” (1990). I.B. Singer’s breakthrough as an American writer was made possible by the appearance of a new generation of New York writers who redeﬁned American prose in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Additionally, with the sudden death of his older brother, the popular Yiddish novelist I.J Singer, in 1944, the oedipal shadow lost most of its power. Thus Singer, the obscure fabulist of dark tales from the forgotten past of Polish Jewry, avoided the likely fate of being reduced to a footnote in the annals of Yiddish literature. Singer ﬁrst won notice with his chronicle of prewar

1953/1954: A Year in Yiddish Literature

195

Polish Jewry, The Family Moskat (1950), which was modeled on his brother’s realist novels. Then Saul Bellow, as previously recounted, translated his story “Gimpl tam,” which was published as “Gimpel the Fool” eight years after it had originally appeared in the Yiddish journal Tsukunft. This story catapulted Singer into the mainstream of American letters, appearing as it did at an auspicious time for American Jewish literature. The 1950s saw the emergence of African-American, Jewish, and Beat writers, all of whom departed from the dominant social realism of the 1930s.34 Like the “invisible man” in Ralph Ellison’s eponymous novel of 1952, Saul Bellow’s Augie March, and Jack Kerouac’s Sal Paradise in On the Road (1956), Gimpel the Fool was a shlemiel and a luftmentsh who lived on the margins of society. Like Ellison, Kerouac, and Bellow, I. B. Singer—in colorful, colloquial language—reported from a hitherto unknown world. In his stories of the 1950s, the nihilistic vision of mass psychosis and the triumph of evil that were present in some of his early works, notably Satan in Goray (1935), were balanced by humor, compassion, and sometimes even hope. The cuckolded Gimpel leaves behind his life as baker and head of a household. He becomes a wandering storyteller, abandoning his family’s static world for mobility and self-discovery. As with the works by Bellow, Ellison, and Kerouac, self-creation in monologue form took precedence over social realism and mimesis. While joining forces with the American literary vanguard of the 1950s, Singer began tapping the humorous, farcical potential of the other immortal Yiddish writer, Sholem Aleichem. In lifting his stories out of the gloomy realm of shtetl dwellers ﬁghting their collective demons, he suffused them with a postmodern, skeptical sensibility removed from the characters’ social-historical conditioning. Gimpel; the “Little Shoemakers”; Jacques Kohn in the story “A Friend of Kafka”; and Singer’s semi-autobiographical characters were direct descendants of the shtetl inhabitants that Sholem Aleichem had depicted a generation earlier. While most Yiddish writers collectively lamented the murdered European Jews by keeping the memory of them alive in mimetic replicas of a destroyed world, Singer deepened his imaginary vision. As a storyteller and novelist, his work was eminently translatable. In contrast, the great Yiddish poets Yankev Glatshteyn, Avrom Sutzkever, Aaron Zeitlin, Kadya Molodovsky, and Chaim Grade contributed dirges (kines) to the modern Book of Lamentations that to this day languish in obscurity outside Yiddish circles. And although Grade’s stories and novels situated in Vilna (known as the Jerusalem of Lithuania) were destined to become classic chronicles of the split between secular and religious forces among Lithuanian Jewry, a far larger and broader readership preferred Singer’s post-modern survivor tales whose turbulent plots teemed with the action of postwar America in the grips of radical social transformation.35 In his review of Yankev Pat’s Shmuesn mit yidishe shrayber (Conversations with Yiddish writers) (1954), A. Leyeles observed that “seven Yiddish writers of the fourteen with whom Pat conducted his interviews (now collected in a book) have left the land of the living. The conversations took place recently. . . . The seven are: Dovid Ignatoff, Yosef Opatoshu, Mani Leib, Tsvien, Avrom Reisen, Shmuel Niger, H. Royzenblat. That is a huge part of the Yiddish artistic world in America, a massive part of our world literature.”36 The other seven writers included in the book were similarly signiﬁcant for 20th-century Yiddish literature: Dovid Einhorn, Yankev Glatshteyn,

196

Jan Schwarz

A. Leyeles, Y.Y.Trunk, H. Leyvick, Itsik Manger, and Y.Y. Schwartz. The longest conversation was the one with H. Leivick, who praised the variety and richness of contemporary Yiddish literary works, including those by younger writers saved from the Holocaust (Strigler, Rokhl Korn, Sutzkever, Isaiah Shpigl). Despite the many new Yiddish titles on his desk, Leivick summarized the Yiddish literary state of affairs as “the sadness of being the last.” For Leivick, the year 1953/1954 was characterized by a surplus of high-quality Yiddish publications by middle-aged or older writers and a rapid decline in readership. Pat’s conversation with Leivick also took stock of Yiddish culture prior to the Holocaust. This retrospective approach is evident as well in Leivick’s tribute “Tsu amerike” (1954) in which he paraphrased his own poem “Yidishe poetn” (Yiddish poets): . . . vos, nokh mit draysik yor tsurik, hob ikh unter di himlen dayne getroyert tif in zikh, geklogt zikh az ikh trog mayn yidish lid in angst, durkh dayne gasn un durkh dayne skvern, farklamert tvishn mayne tseyn, vi s’trogt a kats an elnte vi ketslekh ire, zukhndik far zey a ru-ort in a keler vu; az ven ikh trakht nor vegn mayne brider—yidishe poetn— nemt zeyer goyrl vi a klamer mikh arum, un s’vilt zikh tﬁle ton far zey, far zeyer mazl,—un grod demolt vern ale verter shtum. Avade iz es mayn shuld, un nit dayn, oykh haynt, ven nokhn opgang fun yene draysik yor tut troyern mayn harts af s’nay elegish vos haynt, nokh mer vi ven es iz, hot s’beyze mazl tseslaydert ale yidishe poetn iber nay-sibirn, un undzer ﬂaterdike dikhter-shif faryogt in thom fun shturems, in thom fun shturems oykh af dayne vasern, amerike, . . . [That thirty years ago I mourned under your skies Deep inside me, lamented that I carry my Yiddish song In fear, through your streets and through your squares, Clenched in my teeth, as a forsaken cat might carry Her kittens, in search of a cellar, a place of rest; That when I think of my brothers—Yiddish poets—their destiny Embraces me like a clamp, I want to pray for them, For their lot—and then all words grow mute. Certainly, it is my fault, not yours, when even now After thirty years have passed my heart mourns again, An elegy on how, now more than ever, the evil lot Has scattered all Yiddish poets over New-Siberias And chased our trembling poets’ ship into an abyss of storms, Into an abyss of storms on your waters too, America, (translated by Benjamin Harshav)]37 In his poem Yidishe poetn (1932–1940) Leivick used the metaphor of the mute tongue (zayn shtume tung) to express his sense of alienation, poverty, and disgrace. The muteness originated in the wretched immigrant life of New York in which the writing of Yiddish poetry was a quixotic activity as insigniﬁcant as the fertility of

1953/1954: A Year in Yiddish Literature

197

cats. In bearing witness to the “New-Siberias” in Tsu amerike, Leivick extends the muteness (vern ale verter shtum) to Yiddish writers all over the world. The poem has become an elegy for the poet’s murdered people, evoking the famous lines of his poem In treblinke bin ikh nit geven (I was not in Treblinka): “I was never in Treblinka/nor in the death camp of Maidanek./But stand upon their threshold [ganek]/at their very edge.” The rhyme maydanek/ganek (which also can translate as “porch”) illuminates the gulf that separates Leivick and the victims of the Holocaust. As Leivick’s literary reputation was built on his suffering and martyrdom in Siberia prior to the First World War, the tendency to elegiac gloriﬁcation of the six million came easily to the poet, as is evident in his article “Tsvey dokumentn” (Two documents), which appeared in the Yiddish newspaper Der Tog on March 17, 1952. Leivick’s article triggered a strong response from the Polish Jewish historian Ber Mark (in Warsaw), and this in turn sparked a contentious debate in the Yiddish press about the role of the Judenrat in the ghettos.38 In his article, Leivick represented the dominant view among the Yiddish writers in New York: all Jews, regardless of their roles in the ghettos and camps, shared a common martyrdom. Any attempt to address the various kinds of Jewish collaboration with the Germans among the ghetto police, Judenrat, and kapos was considered a sacrilege to the sacred memory of the victims. Opposing this view, Ber Mark presented documentation (in the form of facsimiles of handwritten documents rescued from the Warsaw ghetto) showing that the division and hostility between different strata of the Jewish ghetto population was widely acknowledged by the ghetto Jews themselves, including the historian Emanuel Ringelblum, the organizer of the Oyneg Shabes archive. As David Roskies points out, the clear winner of the debate was Ber Mark, but his was . . . a Pyrrhic victory, for the series of Yiddish wartime writings that he managed to publish from 1948 to 1955—novels, short stories, reportage, prose poems, diaries, and a variety of other genres that, even suffering from political censorship ought to have formed the primary canon of Holocaust literature—was morally inassimilable to their intended audience in the west. They languish in obscurity to this very day.39

Holocaust literature in Yiddish was typiﬁed by its elaborate use of archetypes that blurred the distinction between historical fact and ﬁctional artiﬁce. Many of these works ﬁrst appeared in the Yiddish press in serialized form, addressing a readership that closely followed the evolving tragedy in the daily newspaper. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Yiddish reader was bombarded with newspaper reportage, eyewitness accounts of survivors, and documentary ﬁction about the same topics. The Argentine book series, Dos poylishe yidntum, encapsulated this mixture of facts and myths in a wide-ranging series of works that depicted Polish Jewish life before and during the Holocaust.40 Staunchly secular Yiddish writers such as Glatshteyn and Molodovsky used religious metaphors in their response to the catastrophe without reclaiming the God of Israel or becoming bal teshuves (newly religious). Like the survivor writers, most of whom came from traditional religious backgrounds, the New York Yiddish writers employed religious vocabulary and archetypes in a secular manner. Irving Howe, for instance, summed up Glatshteyn’s use of God imagery in his Holocaust poetry:

198

Jan Schwarz

The God that ﬁgures in these poems is hardly the omnipotent one of traditional belief, yet neither is he a mere construct of modern religiosity; he is an indestructible presence in Jewish life beyond acceptance or denial. “The God of my disbelief is magniﬁcent”—this is as far Glatstein could go in reconciliation.41

In his Holocaust poetry, Glatshteyn drew on classic 19th-century Yiddish ﬁction that in various ways expressed the modern Jew’s loss of faith and struggle with modernity in narrative forms that utilized a religious vocabulary. Y.L. Peretz had created the neo-romantic Hasidic tale in the collection Khsidish for his exposition of faith and doubt and the rupture of traditional Jewish values. In 1947, Glatshteyn wrote an important essay, “Peretses yerushe” (Peretz’s heritage), that gloriﬁed this Yiddish writer as the Maimonides (Rambam) of the 19th century. The Yiddish literary historian Shmuel Niger published a 500-page biography of Peretz in 1952 that for the ﬁrst time delineated the author’s work and life in a grand synthetic portrait. Melekh Ravitsh began his four volumes of mini-biographies of Polish Jewish writers, Mayn leksikon (1945–1982), with a ﬁctional introduction by Peretz. These works were part of the voluminous assortment of memoirs and autobiographies that highlighted the centrality of Peretz’s literary heritage for Yiddish culture after the Holocaust.42 The centrality of Peretz was also stressed in Eliezer Greenberg’s article “Di yidishe literatur un di literatur af English,” appearing in Di goldene keyt in 1954, which addressed the growing number of Yiddish works in English translation. Acknowledging the importance of making Yiddish literature available in “the most widely spoken and read language in the world,” he ended the article with a quote from Peretz, “whose vision for Yiddish literature today is as relevant as when he ﬁrst wrote it [in the early 20th century].”43 Greenberg paid tribute to Peretz’s vision of humanism and socialism as the ideological drive behind Yiddish culture in America. Yet the cultural and ideological distance between Yiddish writers and their American-born sympathizers such as Irving Howe and Isaac Rosenfeld was rapidly widening. Yiddish writers pledged their artistic careers to keeping alive the memory of the East European Jewish heritage while closing ranks with fellow writers in Yiddish centers worldwide. In contrast, the vast majority of Jewish Americans and Israelis were preoccupied with “making it” in an English and Hebrew cultural environment that pushed Yiddish and the Holocaust to the margin. In Israel, the Zionist promise of reclaiming the biblical land and reviving Hebrew as a spoken language set the daily agenda. In the United States, the remaining educational, racial, and social impediments to Jews’ equal participation in the American dream were signiﬁcantly reduced in the 1950s. The process of fully embracing America as the new homeland was realized in the white suburbia that became home to an increasing number of Jews: “In America of the 1950s Jews could carve out a comfortable place for themselves in the American landscape as white European children of immigrants who practiced Judaism.”44 A symposium titled “Yisroel, der yidisher shrayber, un di yidishe velt” (Israel, the Jewish writer, and the Jewish world), convened by the organization of Yiddish writers and journalists in Israel, took place in Tel Aviv during Passover of 1954.45 Of the three main speakers—Dovid Pinski, M. Gros-Zimerman, and Avrom Sutzkever—the last provided the most succinct overview of the state of Yiddish culture. Sutzkever emphasized the importance of “ahoves erets-yisroel un ahoves yidishe literatur” (love

1953/1954: A Year in Yiddish Literature

199

of the land of Israel and love of Yiddish literature) in the diaspora. Predicting that the current political repression of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union would be lifted and that the result would be a resurgence of literary talent (which actually occurred, beginning in the late 1950s), he conveyed his experience from visiting Yiddish centers in South Africa and Argentina. In these communities, Yiddish literature and Israel provided equally important rallying points for Jewish identity and continuity. The ﬂowering of Yiddish literary works in the year 1953/1954 held great promise for the revival of Yiddish culture. However, the sense of being the “last Mohicans” was deeply ingrained in the small group of Yiddish writers who remained in perpetual exile from their East European Jewish homelands. The new phase in Yiddish literary history after 1945 was primarily shaped by European refugees and immigrants to the Americas and the land of Israel, who brought with them a deep skepticism about political ideologies and modernism’s individualism and aestheticism. Writers such as Chaim Grade, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Aaron Zeitlin continued their artistic quest into the collective archetypes and conﬂicts of East European Jewry. Migration and exile deﬁned the artistic world of the newly arrived Yiddish writers in New York, Buenos Aires, Montreal, and Tel Aviv who burst onto the literary scene after 1945. Yiddish literature in 1953/1954 expressed the tension between commemoration of, and confrontation with, the “little Jewish world” that even before the catastrophe was rapidly disintegrating as a result of modernity, secularization, and migration. What gave this literature its tragic and deeply human quality was its juxtaposition of elegy and confrontation and of glorifying and critical approaches to the lost world of East European Jews. Yiddish writers were coming to terms with the debris of the political, religious, and cultural ideologies of interwar Warsaw and Vilna; for some in Nazi-occupied Europe and the Soviet Union, these had deﬁned their artistic beginnings. The year 1953–1954 in Yiddish literature spanned all of these contradictions, indicating that it was vibrantly alive.

Notes 1. Melekh Ravitsh, Di kroynung fun a yidishn dikhterin amerike (Montreal: 1953), viii. 2. Ibid., 32 and 44. 3. Ibid., v. 4. Ibid., 69. 5. This corresponds to the Hebrew year 5714, which began on Rosh Hashanah in September 1953. The Hebrew year is what appears on the copyright page of most Yiddish books published at the time. 6. Among the titles published by these writers in the immediate post-Holocaust era were Ayzland’s Fun undzer friling: literarishe zikhroynes un portretn (From our springtime: literary memoirs and portraits) (1953); Leyeles’ Kholem tvishn volknkratsers (Dreaming amid skyscrapers) (1948); and Schwartz’s Yunge yor: (Young years) (1952). 7. Hana Wirth-Nesher and Michael P. Kramer, The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (Cambridge: 2003), 3. 8. Arthur Hertzberg, A Jew in America: My Life and a People’s Struggle for Identity (New York: 2002), 204. 9. For a discussion of Yiddish as a “culture of retrieval,” see Eli Lederhendler, New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity (Syracuse: 2001), 69–78.

200

Jan Schwarz

10. According to Zachary M. Baker: Yiddish literary activity during the postwar decades is a rather undervalued phenomenon, and the new core collection’s composition implicitly supports the contention that the quarter century following the end of World War II was a “Silver Age” of the Yiddish book. The inclusion of volumes belonging to such distinguished publishing initiatives as Dos poylishe yidntum and Musterverk fun der yidisher literatur, both from Argentina, testiﬁes to that assertion, as do so many of the books appearing in Israel under the labels Hamenora, I.L.Peretz, and Israel Book. (Baker, “An Embarrassment of Riches,” Pakntreger 50 [Spring 2006], 40) A list of “Essential Yiddish Books, 1000 Great Works from the Collection of the National Yiddish Book Center,” compiled by Baker, is online at www.yiddishbookcenter.org. 11. In a seminal 1926 article titled “Dray tsentern” (Three centers), Dovid Bergelson cast his lot with the Yiddish center in Communist Moscow and rejected the Yiddish centers in New York and Warsaw. See In shpan 1 (1926), 84–96. 12. For an analysis of Yiddish literary expression in the 1950s and 1960s, see Lederhendler, “A Culture of Retrieval” in idem, New York Jews, 63–93. Both Jeffrey Shandler’s Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language & Culture (Berkeley: 2005) and Joseph Sherman’s edited volume Yiddish after the Holocaust (London: 2004) focus primarily on non-literary phenomena, with the exception of Yiddish literature in Israel and the translation of Yiddish literature. Moreover, they do not speciﬁcally address the primacy of New York as a Yiddish cultural center after 1945. 13. See Dovid Katz, “The Days of the Proletpen in American Yiddish Poetry,” in Proletpen: America’s Rebel Yiddish Poets, ed. Ameila Glaser and David Weintraub (Madison: 2005), 13. 14. Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, Mass.: 2005), 19. See also Michels’ article “Socialism and the Writing of American Jewish History: World of Our Fathers Revisited,” American Jewish History 88, no. 4 (Dec. 2000), 521–546. 15. State-sponsored Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union thrived in the interwar period and during the Second World War, but was destroyed by Stalin in 1948. Not until the early 1960s were Yiddish cultural institutions again allowed, though on a much lower level than before 1948. Soviet Yiddish culture (including the Yiddish centers in Warsaw and Moscow) is not addressed in this essay. See Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse: 2005); Jeffrey Veidlinger, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (Indianapolis: 2000); David Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918–1930 (Cambridge: 2004); and Anna Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Indianapolis: 2006). 16. New York at this point became the world’s largest Yiddish literary center, publishing approximately 75 books out of an annual world total of about 125 between the years 1950 and 1960. See Lederhendler, New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity, 29. 17. Not until the Eichmann trial in 1961, which coincided with the ﬁrst publication of seminal Holocaust memoirs in English translation, would the Holocaust become of central importance for the self-deﬁnition of American Jewry. See Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: 2000), which, however, mostly ignores the proliﬁc output of Yiddish material on the Holocaust in the United States. Seminal Holocaust memoirs were made available in English translation in the early 1960s: Elie Wiesel’s Night (1960), Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz (1961), and André Schwarz-Bart’s The Last of the Just (1960). Moreover, as Jules Chametsky points out, “even though detailed accounts of the genocide had surfaced in America as early as 1943, in the Black Book of Polish Jewry, along with diaries and memoirs from the 1940s onward, it was not until 1961 that studies such as Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews and Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution reached a wide audience” (Jewish America Literature: A Norton Anthology [New York: 2001], 582). 18. Judd L. Teller, “Yiddish Litterateurs and American Jews: Have They Come to a Parting of the Ways?” Commentary 18, no. 1 (July 1954); quotes from 39–40. See also David G. Roskies,

1953/1954: A Year in Yiddish Literature

201

“What Is Holocaust Literature?” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 21, Jews, Catholics, and the Burden of History, ed. Eli Lederhendler (New York: 2005), 172–182, which delineates the response to the Holocaust in the Yiddish press and literature in America and elsewhere. 19. A. Mukdoni, “Yidishe kultur in amerike,” Di goldene keyt 17 (1953), 194–196; Di goldene keyt 18 (1954), 113–125; Di goldene keyt 19 (1954), 172–184; and Di goldene keyt 20 (1954), 240–252. 20. Mukdoni, “Yidishe kultur in amerike,” 189. 21. Shaye Miller, In di shvartse pintelekh (New York: 1953), 12. 22. Yankev Glatshteyn, Selected Poems of Yankev Glatshteyn, trans. Richard J. Fein (Philadelphia: 1987), 139–141. 23. Yankev Glatshteyn, “Faran aza gekekhts vi hunger,” in idem, Fun mayn gantser mi (New York: 1956), 185. 24. See my article, “The Voice of the Yiddish Poet: Avrom Tabatshnik’s Interview with Yankev Glatshteyn in New York, 1955,” in Yiddish After the Holocaust, ed. Joseph Sherman (Oxford: 2004), 74–91. 25. Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope (New York: 1982), 260, 263, 265. 26. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (eds.), A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (New York: 1954), 2. 27. Ibid., 38. 28. See Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland, 109–110. 29. See Anita Norich, Discovering Exile: Yiddish and Jewish American Culture During the Holocaust (Stanford: 2007). 30. Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (New York: 1953), 3. 31. See my article “Second City: Jewish Culture in Chicago,” in Zutot: Perspectives on Jewish Culture, vol. 3, ed. Shlomo Berger, Michael Brocke, and Irene Zwiep (Amsterdam: 2003), 142–149. 32. A. Mukdoni, “Yidishe kultur in amerike,” Di goldene keyt 17 (1953), 196. 33. The Forward (27 Oct. 2001). 34. See Morris Dickstein, Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945–1970 (Cambridge, Mass.: 2002); idem, “The Complex Fate of the Jewish American Writers,” in A Mirror in the Roadway : Literature and the Real World, ed. Morris Dickstein (Princeton: 2005), 168–183. 35. See my article, “ ‘Better a Jew without a Beard than a Beard without a Jew’: Confrontation and Elegy in the Novels of Chaim Grade,” in The Multiple Voices of Modern Yiddish Literature, ed. Shlomo Berger (Amsterdam: 2007), 30–55. 36. A. Leyeles, Velt un vort, 286. 37. This poem appears in Benjamin and Barbara Harshav (eds.), American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (Berkeley: 1986), 767. 38. For a review of the debate between Ber and Leivick, see Roskies, “What Is Holocaust Literature,” 179. Leivick’s article was published on March 17, 1952 in Der Tog. Ber’s rebuttal appears in Bleter far geshikhte 5, no. 3 (1952), 63–115. 39. Roskies, “What is Holocaust Literature,” 179–180. 40. See my article, “A Library of Hope and Destruction: The Yiddish Book Series Dos poylishe yidntum, 1946–1966”; and “Appendix: List of 175 Volumes of Dos poylishe yidntum,” POLIN: Studies in Polish Jewry 20 (2007), 173–196. 41. Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: 1976), 456. Roskies makes the same point in “What is Holocaust Literature,” 62. 42. On Yiddish memoirs and autobiographies after the Holocaust, see my Imagining Lives: Autobiographical Fiction of Yiddish Writers (Madison: 2005), 127–158. 43. Eliezer Greenberg, “Di yidishe literatur un di literatur af English,” Di goldene keyt 18 (1954), 181. 44. Wirth-Nesher and Kramer (eds.), Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (Cambridge: 2003), 218. 45. “Yisroel, der yidisher shrayber, un di yidishe velt,” Di goldene keyt 20 (1954), 181–185.

Denigrating Israel, Israeli Style

Shlomo Ben-Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 354 pp. Gideon Biger, The Boundaries of Modern Palestine, 1840–1947. London: Routledge, 2004. ix + 257 pp. Ahron Bregman, Elusive Peace: How the Holy Land Defeated America. London: Penguin Books, 2005. 337 pp. Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conﬂict Can Be Resolved. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2005. 203 pp. Isaiah Friedman, Palestine: A Twice Promised Land? The British, the Arabs & Zionism, 1915–1920 (vol. 1). New Brunswick: Transaction Press, 2000. 411 pp. (Hebrew edition: Yeshayahu Friedman, Mitus shel kefel hahavtah.ot. Sdeh Boker: Makhon Ben-Gurion, 2004. 398 pp.) Zeev Maoz, Defending the Holy Land. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006. 714 pp. Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in the Modern World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. 831 pp. So extraordinarily convoluted and so interminable are the two-tiered ZionistPalestinian and Arab-Israeli conﬂicts that the only questions of abiding interest for historians or of immediate concern for world leaders are: First, what instigated the spiral of enmity, and how might it have been arrested along the way? And second, is there really a compromise solution, and, if so, when and exactly how will these conﬂicts play themselves out? This cluster of seven books addresses the unresolved quarrel at both chronological ends, from obscure start to elusive ﬁnish. One central focus is on early disputed origins and precipitating causes in late 19th- and early 20th-century Jewish, British, and post-Ottoman history leading up to Israel’s creation (Sachar, Friedman, Biger). Another focus is the equally contentious course of events since then, which centers on four major crossroads occurring in 1948, 1967, 1993, and 2000 as well as on the derivative issue of where the two directly concerned parties may be heading or may need to move, given the recent negotiating impasse (Maoz, Bregman, Dershowitz, Ben-Ami). Generally speaking, these books offer substantive and methodological perspectives. They provide insights into the historical, geopolitical, and diplomatic background of the Middle East dispute—its conﬂict-shaping issues, events, and personalities—as 202

Denigrating Israel, Israeli Style

203

well as examining the manner in which the dispute is framed, interpreted, and often manipulated to serve different political agendas or author preferences. Several of the works under review also shed light on the sort of analysis and commentary currently favored by the editorial boards of reputable publishing houses.

Casting the Blame What sells best nowadays are studies singling out Israel for censure—all the more so, if written by people with otherwise gold-plated credentials. Former high-ranking ofﬁcials embedded in the Israeli policy establishment qualify, as do academics representing the Israeli intellectual midstream or, alternatively, their surrogates (residing in the Jewish and expatriate Israeli diasporas), whose self-assigned mandate is nothing less than saving Israel from itself. In their competitive zeal to promote books on the blood-splattered, seemingly unending, and ever-controversial Middle East conﬂict, academic and trade publishers alike continue to offer a steady ﬂow of fresh studies. Lately, however, there has been a subtle shift in the types of works being published. Increasingly, the sagging bookshelf featuring works on the two linked subjects of contemporary Israel and its role in the Israeli-Arab conﬂict showcases a literature that, while varying widely in terms of quality and writing techniques, nevertheless points to a pronounced and particularly worrisome trend: the loss of proportionality. The most prominently advertised volumes of late are those subjecting Israel to unsparing criticism. Books whose blurbs laud the contents within as authoritative, fair-minded, or scientiﬁcally rigorous are often patently subjective and unbalanced and hence neither credible nor constructive. This is not to say that Israeli policies are infallible or immune to criticism. However, the nature and severity of the criticism in such books—along with their often dazzling theoretical conceptualizations, personalized accounts, eloquent and erudite turns of phrase, and massive footnoted source materials—can easily lead the uninformed reader to the conclusion that the key to ending the Israeli-Arab conﬂict is, as it always has been, in Israel’s hands. It is as though peace and security are Israel’s alone to deposit or to forfeit and as though Palestinian leaders and Arab states constitute less than 50 percent of the problem, or the solution. For the longest time, but especially after Israel’s lopsided victory in the Six-Day War, accountability for the Palestine tragedy tended to divide rather predictably into two basic schools of thought: symmetric versus asymmetric. According to the former, the Israeli-Arab quarrel is an example par excellence of dyadic, or two-player, hostile interactions, wherein each side contributes its full share of missed opportunities to the chronicle of conﬂict by means of its respective errors of omission or commission. The latter school, by contrast, assigns primary (if not exclusive) blame to one side. At one time, the Arabs were indicted. Now it is Israel’s turn. Blaming Israel, to be sure, is neither new nor remarkable. Until recently, though, one could rely in the main on avowed members of the enemy camp to denounce and, in effect, to delegitimize the Jewish state: the Ahmadinejads, the Edward Saids and the Khalid Mashals both in the West and in the Muslim and Arab worlds, in

204

Review Essays

chorus with Arab-subverted United Nations agencies and media-adept Palestinian advocates. For them, the entire Jewish national project, and especially the state entity it engendered—conceived in sin and deformed by the attendant naqba of dispossession and homelessness inﬂicted upon an altogether innocent Palestinian community in 1948—bears sole, undivided responsibility for whatever ails Arab society and politics, the broader Middle East region, America’s overseas standing and, indeed, the entire world order. There is really nothing surprising, nothing exceptional, and certainly nothing original in this Arab form of openly anti-Zionist narrative. The same can be said of the political left’s radical and romantic wings in the United States and Europe, with their traditional and by now ritualistic placing of the onus squarely on Israeli shoulders. Here, too, discerning students of the discourse on the conﬂict have long since become fully alert to the disqualifying ideological biases and stridency of, say, Noam Chomsky, Avi Shlaim, or Ilan Pappé. What we are now witnessing, however, is a special brand of Israel-bashing, distinctive both for the source and direction from which it is coming and for its subtlety and reﬁnement. Inside Israel, and in ostensibly pro-Israel quarters, there is a trend afoot. Arrows of criticism are now being loosed, not just by fringe “revisionist historians,” “new sociologists,” or “post-Zionists” but also by people of good Zionist pedigree, and as part of otherwise serious commentary. The trend is not so much toward deeper self-introspection, as toward self-censure so unsparing as to verge on self-abasement. Again, let us be clear. Self-criticism can be a healthy societal and policymaking trait that counters the inclination toward self-righteousness and often leads to selfcorrection. But this trait has value only so long as the introspection is kept within reason and within bounds. Otherwise it can quickly lead to self-doubt, from there to demoralization, and eventually, perhaps, even self-destruction. This applies particularly to the realm of enduring international conﬂicts if, within efforts at mutual accommodation, one’s adversary is less inclined to engage with equal candor in a comparable cleansing process. Here is arguably one of the great imbalances in the current phase of the IsraeliArab encounter. For all their shortcomings, the vast majority of Israelis have long since begun the wrenching process of questioning their country’s founding myths, whereas intellectual and political leaders in the Palestinian-Arab camp offer little evidence of having even begun to acknowledge their own failings or to face up to their missed opportunities—not to mention airing their criticisms for external or even domestic consumption. Denial on the part of Palestinians does not mean that Israelis and Zionist sympathizers should refrain from soul-searching and truth-telling. But doing so entails the risk of violating the principle of proportionality twice over if fault-ﬁnding is carried to excess or if accepting a disproportionate share of the blame, which widens rather than narrows the gap between respective Israeli and Palestinian narratives, weakens Israeli resolve while reinforcing Arab convictions of rectitude and victimization. In this scenario, Arab conﬁdence in ultimate vindication is bolstered, and victory, through a policy of steadfastness and armed resistance, begins to seem possible.

Denigrating Israel, Israeli Style

205

These misgivings are provoked by three of the books under review. Scars of War, Defending the Holy Land, and The Case for Peace are otherwise important studies authored by individuals enjoying deﬁnite name recognition in their respective Israeli-academic-Jewish circles: Shlomo Ben-Ami, a noted historian and ex-foreign minister; Zeev Maoz, a widely published political scientist (formerly of Tel Aviv University and now at the University of California at Davis); and Alan Dershowitz, Harvard law professor, proliﬁc writer, “defense attorney extraordinaire,” and leading Jewish activist. I do not impugn any of these authors’ abiding concern for the security and welfare of the state of Israel, or their conscientiousness in trying to extract, from the deepest recesses of the Palestinian maze, various behavior patterns and negotiating lessons that are essential to the mission of peacemaking. The trouble is less with the authors’ motives than with the theses, the conclusions, and the policy recommendations they put forward with such supreme self-conﬁdence. In essence, all three of their works are Israel-centric in terms of the focus they give to the conﬂict and the demands they make of Israel, in contrast to the relatively little weight given to the Arab side. Consequently, a reader might all too easily get the wrong impression that, ﬁrst, Israel bears primary responsibility for the conﬂict and, second, that it lies in Israel’s power, through the diplomatic and security measures its government adopts, to make peace—almost irrespective of Arab moves and attitudes. Ben-Ami combines an insider’s vantage point with the historian’s craft to present an eminently readable interpretation of the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation. Second only to Dennis Ross’ The Missing Peace (also published in 2004), Scars of War, Wounds of Peace is at once sweeping in scope, brilliant in parts and yet marred in places by egregious errors of fact and detail that are inexcusable from someone so much “in the know.”1 Ben-Ami’s propensity for not taking Israel’s side, or at least giving it the beneﬁt of the doubt, is profoundly worrisome, given the fact that the author is a former senior government minister who, as recently as 2000–2001, ofﬁcially represented and actually bargained on behalf of Israel. Indeed, given BenAmi’s deep misgivings as expressed in this very personal book, one wonders how he ever managed to bring a credible degree of conviction to the negotiating table. It is beside the point whether Ben-Ami’s censuring of Israeli policies might be traced back to political disillusionment or personal disgruntlement in the wake of the failure to achieve a peace breakthrough at Camp David II or in the Taba talks (despite a number of desperate, last-minute conciliatory efforts and concessions to Yassir Arafat, which are characterized by Ben-Ami [p. 116] as “magnanimous creativity in peacemaking”). More relevant are the numerous fundamental misreadings deriving from the author’s basic preoccupation, conscious or not, with Israel’s wrongdoing. For example, Ben-Ami altogether misrepresents one of the true turning points in the history of the struggle: the Peel Commission’s proposal of 1937 with regard to the partition of Palestine. Ben-Ami argues that, for the Zionist leadership, “probably the most appealing article” in the Peel Commission’s recommendation was the forced transfer of Arabs from the future Jewish state, and that, by endorsing partition, Ben-Gurion “did not necessarily mean to relinquish the Zionist claim for the entire Eretz-Israel.” Moreover, he argues, Ben-Gurion’s implicit longer-term strategy of evolutionary phases essentially provided a “copyright” for later Palestinian strategy

206

Review Essays

(pp. 24–25). In the ﬁrst place, transfer was a British idea; it referred to an agreed population exchange, and it thus made eminent sense as part of an ethnic and national “two-state solution.” Second, Jewish statehood, not the transfer of Arabs, was the Zionists’ goal. Third, Ben-Gurion’s conception was the polar opposite of the tactics pursued by the Palestinian national movement. The former was based on peaceful competition—each side testing the other’s staying power to see who would be more deserving of the land—whereas the latter is manifested through what even Ben-Ami deﬁnes as “armed struggle” and “armed liberation.” Finally, the author does not bother to underscore the categorical Palestinian rejection of this earliest peace initiative based on territorial compromise or to examine how Arab shortsightedness was to affect later events in 1948. As he warms to his project of exposing Israeli shortcomings, Ben-Ami makes use of overheated prose and throwaway lines so liberally and on so many especially sensitive points as to disqualify the possibility of their being accidental or merely a matter of personal writing style. Thus, in writing about events of 1948, he describes “an Arab community in a state of terror facing a ruthless Israeli army whose path to victory was paved not only by its exploits against the regular Arab armies, but also by the intimidation, and at times atrocities and massacres, it perpetrated against the civilian Arab community” (p. 42, emphasis added). In a similar vein, the state of Israel is described as being “born in a storm of military superiority” (p. 47), and the road to Sinai in 1956 is said to have been spurred by “Israel’s paranoiac sense of siege” and “its inbred tendency” to assert its military superiority” (p. 71). In a key passage about 1967 he renders the verdict that Israel’s “orgy of political drunkenness and military triumphalism blinded the eyes of her leaders from seeing the real, not the Messianic, opportunities that her lightning military exploits opened for her.” Consequently, the “opportunity was missed to turn the tactical victory in war into a major strategic victory for Zionism that could have made the Six Day War into the last major war of the Arab-Israeli conﬂict. The truth of the matter was that when the Arabs ﬁnally called, Israel’s line was either busy, or there was no one on the Israeli side to pick up the phone” (p. 116). Only after extensively taking Israel to task for this alleged oversight does BenAmi ﬁnally get around to recalling the September 1967 Khartoum Resolutions of “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it,” volunteering (almost as an aside) his view that “there is, of course, much reason to doubt whether, even if formalized as an ofﬁcial peace proposal, the Arabs would have accepted the government’s peace guidelines as the platform for a full-ﬂedged peace agreement with Israel. Israel’s shortcomings notwithstanding, the Arabs were by all accounts not yet ready for such a deal.” Lest this be read as a sharp reprimand of the Arabs for their missed opportunity, Ben-Ami hastens to soften his criticism by adding— without citing any supporting documentation—that the notorious three “no”s of Khartoum were “seemingly somewhat less categorical than they sounded,” but that Israel “was in no mood to enter into a Talmudic interpretation of the ﬁne print in the protocol and the resolutions of the summit” (p. 126). Spread out over more than 300 pages of text, Ben-Ami’s hard-hitting analysis of Israel is most often unﬂattering but at times crosses the line into outright misrepresentation. One might easily be deceived into thinking that large sections of this book

Denigrating Israel, Israeli Style

207

had been scripted by a gifted propagandist from the opposing camp and not by a member of Israel’s ivory tower and policy-making elites.

The Loss of Evenhandedness: More Evidence Ben-Ami’s pronounced tendency to downplay Arab culpability by way of censuring Israel—effectively placing Israel’s Arab antagonists in a secondary rather than a corresponding role—is closely echoed by Zeev Maoz’s book, whose subtitle is “A Critical Analysis of Israel’s Security and Foreign Policy.” Like Ben-Ami’s work, this book is both Israel-centric and judgmental to an extreme about Israeli policy. Indeed, the publisher’s release openly promotes the book as a “scathing and brilliant revisionist history” of Israel’s wars, which are described not only as being “all wars of choice—or, worse, folly” but also as the outcome of “deliberate Israeli aggression, ﬂawed decision-making, and misguided conﬂict management strategies.” After this, the contents are pretty much a foregone conclusion. Setting out to analyze why Israel is “by far the most conﬂict-prone state in modern history” (p. 5), the ﬁrst chapter, titled “The Israeli Security Puzzle,” opens on a promising note, offering a useful and systematic outline of basic assumptions underlying Israeli political and military behavior over the past six decades. As beﬁts a book dedicated to subjecting Israeli policies and policymakers to the most relentless scrutiny, the questions are those of a disciplined social scientist. However, the categorical and often extreme nature of Maoz’s critique results at times in arguments that are fundamentally wrong, especially when he applies “strategic analysis” and “retrospective evaluation” (that is, second-guessing) to Israel’s behavior. Why, indeed, is Israel so conﬂict prone? Why does it still live by the sword? For Maoz the reasons are patent. His list of principal ﬁndings includes those with a psychological base (“barriers that cause both leaders and the public to vacillate between paranoia and arrogance”), an ethos of militarism (the “proclivity to amass and use excessive force,” which reﬂects a “culture of trigger happiness” despite “diminishing [!] threats”), a reluctant peace policy (“Never Missing an Opportunity to Miss an Opportunity”), and ﬁnally, the domination of “a centralized, narrow-minded, selfserving, and self-perpetuating security community.” Over the course of the book, however, Maoz’s central arguments lose their robust explanatory power. Bordering on the obsessive, his unremitting criticism becomes entirely counterproductive, detracting from the basic fault-ﬁnding rather than validating it. Israel, to be sure, has at times resorted to exaggerated military force, has upon occasion missed opportunities, and does suffer from an institutional imbalance between its security and diplomatic arms. Given all this, it may at ﬁrst appear as though Maoz deserves credit for speaking truth to power and for taking on the defense establishment. Yet much of his initial capital is squandered as he increasingly displays a loss of scholarly detachment and a penchant for academic overkill. One might have wished for greater restraint, greater circumspection, and greater modesty in avoiding numerous blanket pronouncements. To cite merely one conspicuous example, Maoz argues that “not one instance” of intervention by Israel in intra-Arab affairs has contributed signiﬁcantly to Israel’s security. But surely Israel’s unambiguous

208

Review Essays

commitment to Jordan’s political stability in September 1970 contributed in the most meaningful way to the strengthening of its relationship with two strategic bulwarks, Jordan and the United States. In enabling King Hussein to weather his crisis, Israel helped pave the way to a peace treaty with Jordan, as well as earning America’s esteem as a responsible regional actor. Similarly, one might have preferred to see Israeli policymaking evaluated and taken to task within the accepted states-as-actors model. With its emphasis upon the operational environment, this multivariate framework more realistically mirrors the constraints that Israel, like other countries (but arguably even more than most others) faces. Such constraints include the imperative of having to engage in constant risktaking within a self-help international system and a complex Middle East regional subsystem—this, while coping with a very real security dilemma, at times acute, under conditions of uncertainty, with imperfect information, limited power capabilities and (Maoz notwithstanding), no safety net or attractive options and not much margin for error.

Ripe for Remaindering Whereas Ben-Ami and Maoz err in their Israel-centrism, Alan Dershowitz is tripped up by egocentrism. The celebrated author conﬁrms that chutzpah comes in many different guises, and that the road to peace may be paved with good intentions but also blocked by intellectual conceit and personal agendas. Having made the case for Israel in a book of that name published in 2003, Dershowitz now turns his abundant energies and ego to Israeli-Arab reconciliation, promoting his personal prescription with characteristic passion. Unfortunately, the task requires less passion and less advocacy, and more down-to-earth practicality and greater expertise, than he can deliver. As a result, the Dershowitz Protocol, crammed with platitudes and generalities, comes across as superﬁcial, naive, and, for added measure, quickly superseded by developments even before and certainly since its publication. (An example of the last is his assessment that “now, following Arafat’s death, the new Palestinian leadership seems interested in territorial compromise” [p. 9].) Dershowitz the peace architect prefaces his “sensible” peace plan by setting down a series of premises that are more akin to magisterial pronouncements: “The time has come for compromise, reconciliation, healing, and a permanent end to the violence” . . . “The season of peace may be on the horizon” . . . “The time is ripe” . . . “The good news is that the elements are all in place.” If only Hamas leaders shared these glad tidings, how reassured the average Israeli might feel. Although Dershowitz does a credible job in demolishing the binational one-state solution in favor of his own preferred two-state compromise, this idea, upon closer reading, is little more than a reworking of the Clinton parameters, the Bush road map, and the Geneva initiative. The author’s minor embellishments are offered with liberal sprinklings of “I” and “my” (“I consider,” “I propose,” “my ideas,” and the like). Reduced to its essentials, Dershowitz’s case for peace—“obvious to all reasonable

Denigrating Israel, Israeli Style

209

people”—calls for two states based on Israeli withdrawal from all of the Gaza Strip and “nearly all” of the West Bank, with “territorial adjustments”; “some symbolic recognition” of the rights of Palestinian refugees; a division of greater Jerusalem; a renunciation of all forms of violence; and an end to targeting Israel for demonization and delegitimation. The elusive peace now neatly outlined, its minor details needing only to be completed by all those “reasonable people” in deﬁance of the “radical naysayers” and “anti-peace extremists,” Dershowitz is free to deride those unworthy opponents who are the true scourges of Middle East peace. Who are these opponents—Hamas? the Al Aqsa Brigades and the Tanzim faction of Fatah? Hezbollah? Ahmadinejad? jihadists? shaheeds? No. Dershowitz’s targeted opponents are none other than Noam Chomsky, the MIT professor and noted linguist; Norman Finkelstein, “an obscure but proliﬁc” assistant professor of political science at DePaul University; and Alexander Cockburn, the extremist columnist for the Nation and editor of the radical political on-line magazine Counterpunch who, besides defaming Israel, have joined forces to make Dershowitz the “prime target” of their “campaign of viliﬁcation” (pp. 169–170). A fair-minded reader is likely to rate Dershowitz’s ad hominem counterattack against his nemeses on a scale between tangential and juvenile, given the life-or-death struggle still raging between Israel and its neighbors. Readers are also likely to consider Dershowitz’s concluding nostrums to be less than helpful. From his vantage point in the academic bubble of Harvard, the author advises Israel to be conciliatory and more forthcoming in the matter of making tangible concessions, even as he recuses himself from a more detailed and speciﬁc blueprint on the grounds that “the particulars belong to the participants” (p. 202). The learned counsel wraps up his case for peace: “a hope for two homelands, side by side and prospering, with mutual respect for democratic governance, and an enduring season of shalom and salaam” (p. 203). And let us say “Amen.”

Honorable Mention It is disappointing to ﬁnd these judgmental books representing what passes nowadays for serious scholarship intended to help its readers acquire a better and more balanced perspective on Arab-Israeli relationships, past, present, and future. How easy it is for studies of real scholarly merit to go unnoticed in the competition for reader recognition, thereby sharing the same fate of a short shelf life, but undeservedly so. All the more important, therefore, to acknowledge four different types of research and to recommend them to the serious student determined to study Israel and the Arab-Israeli conﬂict from a variety of perspectives. In A History of the Jews in the Modern World, Howard Morley Sachar of George Washington University wields the broad brushstrokes of an experienced historian to position the Zionist idea and the attraction of the state of Israel where they rightfully belong—within the grand sweep of Jewish history. One key to understanding the struggle of the Jewish people over the last 150 years is the Jews’ desire to reenter world history and to resume their

210

Review Essays

proper place in the community of nations. Just as it is incumbent upon all concerned with peacemaking to understand where Palestinian nationalism is placed in terms of the Arab historical narrative, so, too, is it mandatory for all concerned to appreciate the powerful Jewish connection and historical claim to the “Holy Land.” Israel, policy warts and all, still embodies the scars, the wounds, the insecurities but also the hopes of the Jewish people, as Sacher shows so successfully in his eminently readable survey. Whereas Sachar contributes to the subject by means of his expansive grasp of large themes, another seasoned practitioner of the historian’s art, Isaiah Friedman of Ben-Gurion University, offers a rigorous account of one particularly fateful and still controversial issue centering on Palestine proper. Solidifying his reputation as a foremost specialist on Palestine’s history in the ﬁrst decades of the 20th century and on imperial Britain’s initial involvement with it, Friedman laboriously retraces the series of uncoordinated undertakings by London during the course of the First World War that, by 1919, would leave all the concerned parties—French, Arab, Jewish, and British—both territorially ambitious and mutually at odds. Albeit a specialized monograph, Friedman’s study nonetheless contains a larger message. It illustrates just how muddled, misplaced, and mischievous were England’s policies in Palestine and its efforts at mediating Arab-Zionist relations. Second, it presents England as a metaphor for contemporary world actors who would be honest brokers and peacemakers. Contrary to Ben-Ami’s desperate call for “active and robust involvement of the international community” (p. 311) as the correct course, Friedman shows how outside interventionists risk being broken by the experience, and only after complicating rather than facilitating the peace process. Sachar and Friedman may best exemplify the virtues of the traditional, cautious historical approach, with its reliance both on the longer time frame and on primary sources. This approach cannot easily deal with recent historical events, however, especially when classiﬁed documents are still locked away. For this reason, Ahron Bregman utilizes at least one imperfect but increasingly indispensable modern research technique—the direct interview—in a book focusing on U.S. diplomacy during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. Based on conversations conducted with many of the direct participants (27 Israelis, 29 Palestinians, 18 Americans, and assorted others) in Middle East diplomatic efforts between the years 1999 and 2004, Elusive Peace shows how the United States tried and failed to make peace during the Clinton presidency and then largely gave up during the administration of George W. Bush. Bregman relies heavily on insiders’ candid, ﬁrst-hand accounts, in effect underscoring the dominant impact and interplay of personalities. This, of course, contrasts sharply with the preoccupation of the other authors with impersonal factors, whether historical forces (Sachar), interests (Friedman), issues (Ben-Ami), policy processes (Maoz), or abstract formulas and panaceas (Dershowitz). Besides giving us a colorful and at times dramatic behind-the-scenes account, Bregman furnishes us with a timely reminder: ultimately, war and peace, like life and death and the fortunes of nationals and national movements, are entrusted to mortal, fallible leaders grappling with conﬂicts that are at once enduring and in a constant process of transformation.

Denigrating Israel, Israeli Style

211

Back to Basics Amply reﬂected in these books is the recurring dialectic in the cognate ﬁelds of Israel studies and Middle East conﬂict analysis, which revolves around different representations of the Israeli correlates of war and peace vis-à-vis the Arabs. The fulcrum characteristically tends to oscillate between rival sets of poles, the ﬁrst being “decoupling,” which involves isolating and studying a factor in its narrow context, and the second, “linkage,” which draws connections and emphasizes interactions. Should one stress the pole of simpliﬁcation or of complexity, the personal or the impersonal, immediate or longer-term causes, the transient phenomenon or the permanent and recurring? Given the tendencies to decouple (as in willfully divorcing the Zionist enterprise and the Israeli state from its Jewish sources, or unilateral Israeli decisions from the regional context), to personalize (Arafat’s war, Sharon’s policy), to simplify, and to emphasize the current prevailing constellation of forces, there is also profound value in being reminded now and then of one of the forgotten constants in this particular conﬂict: its territorial-geographical dimension. Gideon Biger, of Tel Aviv University’s department of geography, is to be commended for writing a book of solid scholarly worth that, while unlikely to compete in popularity or sales performance with those of Dershowitz, Maoz, Ben-Ami, or even Bregman, should outlast them in utility. Indeed, his The Boundaries of Modern Palestine ought to be required reading for the statesman as well as for the advanced student. Depicting Palestine in its multiple roles of prized arena, contested territory, and scarred battleground where Arab and Jewish nationalist dreams are rudely circumscribed, Biger returns us, literally, to facts on the ground. In the end, it all comes down to “the small notch” that constitutes Israel and the imagined entity of Palestine. Modern Palestine, with its demography, topography, and contentious boundaries, serves as the essential backdrop to the monumental struggle, in the same way that contemporary Israel’s geopolitical vulnerability and porous borders are signiﬁcant factors underlying many of its security policies. Without an appreciation for the impact of these spatial variables, one is liable to lose sight of the fact that, long before the struggle for Palestine assumed the proportions of an intercommunal, interArab, or interfaith war, it was (and remains) a primeval turf war. Added conﬁrmation is seen in the daily contest between Israelis and Palestinians over Jerusalem’s city limits as well as over each and every dunam, square kilometer, and hillside in the contested areas. Biger conﬁdently traces how the modern map of Palestine was delimited and demarcated through a series of political negotiations on its northern and southern extremities—a process extending from the 1840s to 1947–1949. Particularly praiseworthy is his treatment of the 1937 and 1947 partition plans, which, because they were never implemented, resulted in a still unresolved eastern boundary. Among its many other virtues, this important book does not allow anyone to evade one of the incontrovertible and enduring historical truths of this conﬂict or of the respective Israeli and Palestinian roles in its perpetuation. Regarding the Peel Commission’s

212

Review Essays

original recommendation for territorial compromise, Biger writes: “In the end this aspiration did not become a reality. The Zionist Organization accepted the partition proposal—or at least the principle—but the Arabs of Palestine resisted it, and they started a war . . . in order to defeat it” (p. 219). Here might be the appropriate start for revising revisionist history of the past and for resuming the quest for mutual accommodation in the future. Aharon Klieman Tel Aviv University

Note 1. Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (New York: 2004).

Polish Antisemitism: A National Psychosis?

Robert Blobaum (ed.), Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. x + 348 pp. Jan T. Gross, Fear: Antisemitism in Poland after Auschwitz. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. xv + 303 pp. Theodore R. Weeks, From Assimilation to Antisemitism: The “Jewish Question” in Poland, 1850–1914. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006. x + 242 pp. . . Andrzej Zbikowski, U genezy Jedwabnego: Z ydzi na kresach północno-wschodnich II Rzeczpospolitej, wrzesien´ 1939—lipiec 1941 (The genesis of Jedwabne: Jews and the southeastern borderlands of the second Polish republic, September . 1939–July 1941). Warsaw: Zydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2006. 416 pp.

In 2004, Anna Bikont, a Polish writer and journalist of Jewish origin, published an extraordinary book about the slaughter of the Jews of Jedwabne and nearby villages by the Polish population in July 1941.1 One of the most gruesome massacres took place in the village of Radziłów.2 Among its victims was a girl of about 18, Fruma Dorogoj, the daughter of a Jewish shoemaker, who was murdered by two brothers. It was a ghastly act: severe abuse followed by decapitation. Bikont interviewed two of the witnesses to this event, Jan Skrodzki (who as a six-year-old observed it from a window of his home), and his cousin, Halina Zalewska. Sixty years later, Zalewska remains convinced that there was a reason for the killing: “She threw stones at the Holy Cruciﬁx and cursed. I don’t justify cutting off her head, but let’s be frank about it: she was a member of the Komsomol.”3 This statement tellingly captures the popular, stereotyped, and deeply rooted elements of Polish antisemitism. It reveals two formative and shaping motives—the . Jew who deﬁles the values of the nation’s Catholic faith and the Z ydokomuna (Jewcommunist). The “Jedwabne shock” instigated a rediscussion of the Polish nation’s attitude toward the Jewish minority that lived in its midst, and a number of recent studies have gone on to investigate the impact of the Jedwabne revelations. Jan T. Gross’ book Fear: Antisemitism in Poland after Auschwitz mainly complements and expands on his seminal work, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (2001), whereas the other volumes reviewed here focus more directly on the larger issue of enduring Polish antisemitism.4

213

214

Review Essays

Images of the Enemy in our Midst Should Polish antisemitism be regarded as a dominant, permanent element that characterized eras, regimes, and economic and political realities from the middle of the 19th century until the last major Jewish exodus from Poland in the late 1960s? Is there a thread that connects the political and publicistic activities of Jan Jelen´ski and Roman Dmowski, two of the most important crafters of Polish antisemitism in the 19th century, and the hordes of workers, police, soldiers, security police, and ordinary local citizens who employed indescribable brutality against the Holocaust survivors in Kielce in July 1946? From Assimilation to Antisemitism, by Theodore R. Weeks, examines the development of Polish–Jewish tension from the middle of the 19th century until the First World War. Weeks derives his frame of analysis from Polish history, and the prism through which he examines Polish-Jewish relations is almost exclusively Polish. Two main players dominate the court: the Russian regime with its cynical policy in Congress Poland (also known as the Kingdom of Poland), and the Polish intellectuals who tirelessly considered the likelihood or unlikelihood of integrating the Jews into the Polish nation. Weeks also addresses himself to a third active participant in the debate, albeit presented here as a bit player—the “assimilationist” Jewish intellectual or businessman who believed that the Jews could change their ways and become good and loyal Poles of the Mosaic faith. Weeks states correctly that even though the Jewish presence in Poland is centuries old, the two national groups hardly interacted until the middle of the 19th century. They spoke different languages, had different sets of rights and obligations, and, of course, painstakingly upheld separate religious, cultural, and community customs. The Jewish Enlightenment, coupled with initiatives of local governors who had been posted to Poland from Russia, transformed the status of the Jews of Congress Poland in the middle of the 19th century and made them equal citizens. This, however, was a far cry from transforming them into Poles. In the end, Polish liberalism (positivism) and socialism shared a basic assumption regarding the Jewish question: the Jews must change their ways and become a modern cultural and religious group instead of an insular tribe rooted to its past. That is, they must forgo their traditional ways of life, their bizarre dress, their crude zhargon (Yiddish), and the education of their children in kheyder or yeshiva. They must also reshape their patterns of economic activity so as to become a productive population contributing to society. This belief in the ultimate victory of enlightenment remained strong until the beginning of the 20th century, when it fell apart with the ascendancy of modern Polish nationalism. Jan Jelen´ski, the spiritual patriarch of modern antisemitism in Poland, and Roman Dmowski, the father of modern Polish nationalism, viewed the Jews as an ethnic and cultural group that stood no chance of coexistence in the national, Catholic, and culturally monolithic Poland that they envisaged. Thus, the debate began to focus more on how to disengage from the Jews rather than on the prospects of their integration. One of the main driving forces behind Polish antisemitism was the Church. From the 1880s until the early 20th century, Catholic thinkers and intellectuals associated with the Church debated the place of the Jews in Polish society. In his article

Polish Antisemitism: A National Psychosis?

215

about the Polish church and the Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which appears in the volume edited by Robert Blobaum, Brian Porter points to an intensive debate on a much broader issue within the Church, namely, the attitude toward modern Polish nationalism and modernity in general. Attempts made by Pope Leo XIII to build bridges to modernity were rejected by the Polish church leadership. August Cardinal Hlond, indisputably the most inﬂuential Catholic leader in Poland in the ﬁrst half of the 20th century, was the person most responsible for the Church’s hostility toward modernity, cultural progress uncoupled from the spirit of the faith, and the liberal nation-state. The Church’s role as the main actor in the struggle for the soul of the ethnic Polish nation made it a natural ally of the antisemitic camp. In the 1930s, the debate surrounding the Jews in Catholic journals took on characteristics that paralleled those of the Nazi German press and in social-Darwinist antisemitic movements in Western Europe. Defects of the Jewish soul were depicted as innate and hereditary, and Jewish practices were portrayed as toxic, deﬁling, and destructive to the Polish nation and its spirit. The “Semitic” spirit of the Jew was contrasted to the “Aryan” spirit of the ethnic and Catholic Pole.5 The result was a merger between ethno-Catholic chauvinist nationalism and ethno-national Catholicism, which shaped Polish nationalism up until the Second World War.6 At the grassroots level, a slightly different process took place. From the early 20th century to the beginning of the Second World War, the word “Jew” almost ceased to signify an individual who belonged to a religious, national, or cultural group. Fear for Poland’s social purity and hygiene, as preached in particular by the Church in its war on modernity, endowed the “Jew” with a collection of traits and endeavors that shaped his image. It was the Jew who disseminated prostitution, practiced misogynistic white slavery, and spread pornography. The criminalization of the Jew made him synonymous with the thief, the exploiter of the Polish peasant, the disseminator of alcoholic beverages, and the entrepreneur of shady businesses. The folk strata of Polish society were fed to saturation with such images. As Alina Cała has shown, the Jew was transformed from a ﬂesh-and-blood human object into a demonic, criminal, and corrupt concept.7 Nonetheless, expelling the Jew from the ethno-national and Catholic domain and identifying him as a threat did not necessarily translate into the adoption of antiJewish violence. Church doctrine ruled out violence, and physical attacks on Jews were rare in Poland until the First World War. Even during the interwar era, they became more common only from the mid-1930s. During the Nazi occupation and the initial postwar years, however, they became both widespread and largely tolerated or forgiven by large sectors of Polish society.

Violence The wave of pogroms that swept the Pale of Settlement in 1881 received little sympathy in Poland. Church journals warned that the Jews must not be touched, and the violence was diagnosed as a manifestation of the cultural inferiority of the Ukrainian perpetrators. However, Alexander S´wi¸etochowski, the leading positivist intellectual, noted that the Polish press was perceptibly hostile toward the Jews, emphasizing

216

Review Essays

among other things the “problem” posed by the concentration of Jews in the southern provinces of the Pale of Settlement. On December 25, 1881, anti-Jewish violence broke out in Warsaw in the aftermath of a Christmas mass service held at a church on Nowy S´wiat Street. In the middle of the service, panic erupted when worshippers heard rumors of a ﬁre outside the building. After people in the street accused Jews of having spread the rumor in order to rob the worshipers, Jewish-owned shops were attacked and looted; thousands of Jewish families suffered severe economic damage over the next two days. Attacks against individuals, however, were almost nonexistent. Seventeen years later, in 1898, antiJewish violence broke out in the Nowy Sa˛cz district of western Galicia, then under Habsburg rule. Polish peasants attacked taverns, agrarian estates, ﬂour mills, and other properties run by Jews. The Austrian authorities responded ﬁrmly: soldiers shot several rioters to death, the area was placed under martial law, and mass arrests took place. These two spurts of anti-Jewish violence have one common denominator amid much dissimilarity. In both cases, the masses focused their rage on Jewish property, which they attacked and looted, but there were was little violence against individuals and no Jews were murdered. The circumstances leading to the attacks, however, were quite different. The background to the Christmas pogrom in Warsaw remains unclear to this day. Some pin the blame on anti-Jewish propaganda originating in Russia or Germany; others blame the Russian censor for not containing such propaganda (Weeks, pp. 79–80). In any event, it is difﬁcult to characterize the pogrom in Warsaw as the opening shot in the development of anti-Jewish violence based on a coherent worldview. In contrast, the violent incidents in western Galicia were the outcome of economic tensions that had escalated in the late 19th century in the agrarian areas of Galicia. The establishment of the Polish Peasants Party (Stronnictwo Ludowe) in 1898, the antisemitic propaganda that it employed during the campaign preceding the Vienna Reichsrat elections, and the severe economic distress that afﬂicted the area that year—there were many instances of starvation in the rural sector—set the stage for a violent eruption. It is no wonder that the perpetrators of the pogroms focused on destroying, looting, and plundering Jewish property. As Keely Stauter-Halsted shows in her essay in the Blobaum volume, the Jews, members of the middle-class economy, were perceived as the peasants’ main enemy. It is a telling fact that the principal target of the pogroms was Jewish property rather than Jewish lives. This choice indicates that anti-Jewish violence at the turn of the century cannot be diagnosed as a symptom of ethno-national hostility toward an enemy who menaced the nation’s existence. Rather, it was the potent combination of Jewish wealth and local problems, rather than hostility based on “race” or national hatred, that touched off the violence against the Jews. During the interwar era, as Joanna Michlic demonstrates, such violence did come to characterize ethnic nationalism as formulated in the ideology of the National Democratic Party (Narodowa Demokracja—the “Endecja”). It was manifested in various ways: attacks on property, Jewish institutions, and synagogues; vicious verbal abuse, and physical assault. As Michlic notes, “the myth of the Jew as a national threat constituted a premise for the legitimization of anti-Jewish violence as national self-defense.”8 However, she does not explain why this dramatic development took

Polish Antisemitism: A National Psychosis?

217

place after the First World War. If, as she states, the Jew had already become a “national threat” by the late 19th century, and if the struggle against Jews was tantamount to self-defense, then why did the national forces wait until after the First World War to begin to attack the enemy? Does a consistent thread indeed run, as Michlic assumes, between, say, the pogrom by Józef Haller’s soldiers against the Jews of Lwów in November 1918 and the expulsion of Jewish students from the universities in 1938? William W. Hagen, in his contribution to the Blobaum collection, offers a more complex explanation for the horrendous event that occurred in Lwów in November 1918. At the time, the city lay at the core of a national struggle between the Ukrainians, who regarded it as the capital of the republic of Western Ukraine that they wished to establish, and the Poles, who considered it an inseparable part of the Polish state that was being reconstituted. The Polish population of Lwów did not believe the Jews’ afﬁrmations of neutrality in this conﬂict and were convinced that they were collaborating with the Ukrainians. The town roiled with rumors concerning the heavy price the Jews were about to pay for their “betrayal” of the Poles. On November 25, 1918, Polish armed forces entered Lwów and imposed martial law. According to Jewish testimonies, the Polish soldiers who took part in the violence said that they had been given 48 hours to “deal” with the Jews. At least 73 Jews were murdered, hundreds were wounded, and much Jewish property was damaged and looted. It was the ﬁrst large pogrom by Poles against Jews in the 20th century. The political system’s response to the pogrom largely refutes the theory that the attack was part of a Polish “national project” against the Jews. The provisional Polish government and all political parties, including the National Democrats, condemned the violence. Investigations of the event concluded that the rioting Polish soldiers had been allowed to disrupt the social order so as to satisfy their powerful urge to loot. Both onlookers and survivors described the pogrom as a bizarre ritual of violence and plunder that was powered by psychosocial urges that had developed in the nihilistic climate of violence; such urges were typical of the last days of the First World War. The moral justiﬁcation that the rioters offered for their actions was based on their self-perception as Christians and their deeply held conviction that the Jews owed them their property, their money, and even their lives. Their motives, however, were far from genocidal, and it is doubtful whether they were inﬂuenced by the antiJewish propaganda of the Endecja or other antisemitic bodies in the Polish political ﬁrmament. One may, of course, dispute various components of this analysis of the pogrom in Lwów. However, examination of several cases in which anti-Jewish hostility in Poland manifested itself in severe violence and murder shows that they almost always occurred under similar historical circumstances. The Jews of Jedwabne were brutally murdered in 1941 at a time when one regime was collapsing and another was replacing it, which created an exceptional opportunity to settle scores with a reviled minority. The hundreds of instances of murder of Jews in Poland between 1944 and 1946, especially the Kielce pogrom, took place amid a partial civil war in which a detested regime was trying to consolidate itself in a shattered, wounded country that had lost its economic infrastructure. The wish to keep Jewish property that had been stolen after its owners had been deported (alongside the looting and extortion of Jews

218

Review Essays

who had survived and had returned to Poland after the war) is evident in numerous cases, as described in detail by Jan Gross (pp. 39–47, 104–108).

From “Intellectual Racism” to Collaboration in Genocide The Second World War and the Holocaust present several new problems in the effort to explain Polish antisemitism. Trends that gained force between 1939 and 1949 led to the coalescence of a previously unknown strain of antisemitism that was “eliminationist” in character. Jan Błon´ski, the Polish intellectual, originally identiﬁed the onset of this development as occurring before 1939. By the late 1980s, however, he had come to believe that the trends had not come to fruition before the war and that the Catholic imperative against murderous hate had proved decisive at the last moment.9 The massacres and acts of violence that took place during and after the war proved that this situation had changed. From 1939 on, the attitude of the Polish church, society, and underground political activists toward the Jewish question evolved amid the reality of a double-edged occupation, German and Soviet. One might think that the perception of the Jews as an existential enemy of the Polish nation might have been reexamined in view of the brutal persecution of Polish Jews by the Nazi occupier and the partitioning, occupation, and repression of the entire country by two totalitarian regimes. In fact, there was a sudden upsurge in manifestations of Polish antisemitism. How can this be explained? Was it the violence, terror, and murderousness of the two occupation regimes that created the conditions under which a synthesis became possible between the “spiritual racism” (rasizm duchowy) that typiﬁed the cultural and national mentality of the Polish right in previous years, as Andrzej Friszke deﬁnes it,10 and the biological racism of Nazism? The tipping point—the exact time when a world of demonic antisemitic images was transformed into eliminationist antisemitism—is extremely difﬁcult to pinpoint in either historical or sociological terms. Yet one cannot disregard the fact that the double occupation made an immense contribution to the changeover that took place, from deﬁning and identifying the satanic enemy to acquiescing in its obliteration. From 1939 on, Polish society inhabited an existential setting of ongoing (and, in the case of the Jews, genocidal) violence that eroded the social organism, overturned former systems of life, undermined traditional values, and challenged the nation’s very ability to exist. Amid this disintegration, one particular antisemitic myth—that . of the Z ydokomuna—acquired a different contextualization and inﬂuenced the attitude toward the Jews in both in the Soviet- and the German-occupied parts of the country. . As is the case with myths in general, the Z ydokomuna myth cannot be examined solely through the prism of statistical data. Despite the fact that Jews had never been a majority among the prewar Polish Communists and that the Soviet . wartime regime had actually regarded them with hostility (Gross, pp. 192–212), Z ydokomuna was regarded as an existential reality both in the northeastern Polish borderlands (kresy) and elsewhere. The delayed-action fuse of this powder keg was activated in September 1939 and eventually set off the wave of murders of Jews by their Polish

Polish Antisemitism: A National Psychosis?

219

neighbors in 1941. Events during those two years reinforce the premise that the reality of the war had a crucial impact on the advent of murderous Polish antisemitism. Let us bear in mind that, apart from a few exceptions, this area had experienced no particularly extreme antisemitic events until the late 1930s. Reports from the local administration show that the Jews were a disliked but tolerated minority, although they were not considered Poles in the national sense and were thus not perceived as having the well-being of the Polish state in mind.11 . Andrzej Zbikowski, who investigated Polish–Jewish relations in the frontier areas before the war and during the Soviet and German occupations, describes a sharp conﬂict between three narratives: the Jewish, the Polish, and the Soviet. The turnaround began with the Jews’ welcoming the Red Army as it invaded the Polish frontier. This welcome was a function of the Jewish minority’s preference for political stability over a threatening vacuum—the presence of the Soviet power was perceived as assuring such stability after the disintegration and disappearance of the Polish state. The Jews also believed that the Soviet presence would avert the menace of a Nazi incursion. Some Jews were optimistic enough to hope that the Soviets would stamp out antisemitism, and there were those who . looked forward to new occupational and educational opportunities. According to Zbikowski, various Jewish sources indicate that the Jews in the borderlands did in fact ﬁnd life easier to negotiate under the . Soviets (Zbikowski, p. 23ff). The Polish narrative may be encapsulated in two words: “Jewish collaboration.” Reports from the Polish resistance described the Jews’ conduct not only as opportunistic but also as a manifestation of sympathy for Communism and an expression of . passionate hatred for Poland and the Polish nation (Zbikowski, pp. 100–105). In the Polish historical memory, it was not the ﬁrst time that the Jews had proved disloyal to the Polish nation; this had also occurred back in Lwów in 1918. Indeed, Polish sources from the beginning of the war cite the events in Lwów, which of course had evolved into a murderous pogrom against the Jews, as an indicator of the Jews’ identiﬁcation with Poland’s enemies.12 But the reality was that, in 1939, the Soviets were the least of all evils. The choice made by some Jews to integrate into the Soviet regime is indicative, above all, of the Polish state’s failure to instill in them a sense of national solidarity with their non-Jewish neighbors. Be that as it may, the myth of Jewish treason and collaboration was so widespread in Polish society that it became the primary justiﬁcation for the Poles’ attitude toward the Jews during and after the war. Katherine R. Jolluck illuminates one of the lesser known aspects of this hostility: the attitude of Polish women toward Jewish women who had been deported with them from the eastern annexed areas to labor camps in the Soviet Union in 1940 and 1941. In their written testimonies about their stay in the camps, they described the Jewish women as informers who looked out for themselves and their friends, sympathizing with the Soviet regime and its agents. “Jewish women were largely seen by Poles as collaborators and traitors,” Jolluck concludes (in Blobaum, p. 217). Poles in the German-ruled Generalgouvernement were similarly hostile to the Jews. The stance of the church hierarchy with regard to the extermination of the Jews is especially interesting. Before the Final Solution in the Generalgouvernement got underway, the church leadership in Poland took little interest in what was happening

220

Review Essays

to the Jews. Admittedly, these clergymen had very little maneuvering room, living as they did in constant fear that the Germans would ban all church activity in the areas over which they ruled. The policy that took shape during this period, as crafted by Archbishop Adam Sapieha, the primate of Poland during the occupation, was one that limited church involvement to efforts to assist converted Jews who had run afoul of the racial laws. Yet even once the extermination campaign had begun, clandestine letters sent by Sapieha and other senior clergy to the Vatican made no reference to the bloodbath that was taking place on Polish soil. The problem was not one of lack of information, according to Dariusz Libionka, another of the contributors to the Blobaum volume (pp. 233–264). The local clergy knew very well what was happening in the towns and villages; the information reached Sapieha as well. Senior church ofﬁcials, however, were afraid that attention to the Jews’ suffering would cause the Vatican to take less interest in the plight of the Polish population. Their motivation for ignoring the Jews’ plight was antisemitism, or else calculated political cynicism, or else both. The grassroots clergy, for its part, had no interest in complex diplomatic calculations and viewed the Jews’ fate with hostility and callous disregard. Reports from the Polish resistance to London note that antisemitic attitudes were rampant among the clergy. Clergymen often criticized the government-in-exile for being too liberal in its attitude toward the Jews and the Polish left. Their communications repeated all the familiar allegations: the Jews were sucking the blood of the nation’s depleted economy, deﬁling the nation’s soul by spreading corruption and pornography, encouraging people to drink, and corrupting Poland’s national literature and arts. Given the reality of Jewish life and extermination in occupied Poland at the time, these reports raise grim questions. Manifestations of anti-Jewish violence were also not lacking. Although they did not escalate into murderous pogroms as in Jedwabne, they were dangerous nonetheless. One such manifestation was the denunciation of Jews to the authorities. Barbara Engelking, who researched several hundred denunciation letters that were sent to the Gestapo in Warsaw in 1940–1941, found that about 30 percent of them pertained to Jews, and she points to antisemitism (along with more personal motives such as envy or the desire to settle scores with neighbors or economic rivals) as a major factor. Interestingly, many of these letters implicated Jews as Communists or as collaborators with the Soviet Union.13 Jan Grabowski, who examined the phenomenon of the szmalcownicy—extortionists and denouncers of Jews—in Warsaw, concludes that no matter how widespread the phenomenon was, its perpetrators were hardly ever condemned or punished. Both the law and the Polish resistance deﬁned those who extorted from Jews as criminals. However, it was clear to the szmalcownicy, and to the members of the Polish “blue” police (the auxiliary police force set up by the German occupiers in the Generalgouvernement) who at times caught them in the act, that the victims were outside the Polish national consensus. The Jews were the traditional “other,” aliens in the best case and dangerous enemies in many others.14 The practice of extorting and denouncing them was carried out not only by shady, criminal types, who made a good living from it, but also by ordinary Polish citizens who were eager to spot Jews living on false identity cards.15

Polish Antisemitism: A National Psychosis?

221

Eliminationist Antisemitism The years of Soviet and German occupation created the environment in which the seeds of Polish eliminationist antisemitism could grow to maturity, beginning with the massacres in 1941 and continuing through the Polish uprising in August 1944. During the uprising, dozens of Jews were murdered by members of the two major Polish resistance organizations, the Armia Krajowa (AK) and the ultranationalist Narodowe Siły Zbrojne (NSZ). The journalist Michał Cichy, who researched and published an article on this phenomenon, estimates that at least 60 Jews who were living in hiding on the “Aryan” side of town were murdered by the partisans. Thus, in the midst of a heroic uprising aimed at liberating the Polish capital before the Red Army could enter, some of the combatants found time to settle scores with the detested internal enemy. Cichy quotes from the testimony of one of them, who justiﬁed his actions by accusing the Jews of having spied for the Germans—how else, he argued, could they have survived until the summer of 1944?16 For about two years, starting in the summer of 1944, Jews were beaten and murdered on Polish soil—by Poles. Following the Warsaw uprising, violence against Jews spread to the district of Lublin, which the Red Army had liberated at the end of July. In its very ﬁrst report, issued in September 1944, the Jewish Survivors Relief Committee in Lublin stated that Jews who had survived in the towns and villages were beginning to leave these localities for fear of their lives: “Instances of murder of Jews even after the Germans left, occasionally recurring until this very time, are driving the few surviving Jews to despair. . . . ”17 The various levels of Polish society—the peasantry, the urban working class, the intelligentsia, and the church—shared the desire to rebuild the nation after the war. Not all of them regarded xenophobia, antisemitism, and hostility toward minorities as part and parcel of this process. However, in view of the powerful forces opposing them, namely, the Polish Communists and their imported Soviet backers, more and more segments of Polish society were drawn into aggressive Catholic ethnic nationalism. . The legacy of the mythical Z ydokomuna treachery during the war, the sympathies of quite a few surviving Jews for the new Communist regime, and the conspicuousness of Jews both among the leadership and within the institutions of the Communist Party marked the Jew as the Poles’ principal enemy.18 The “national assault” on Jewish survivors in postwar Poland comprised a number of underlying elements. One of the most important, as discussed by Gross, was the struggle over Jewish property that had gone over to Polish ownership after the Jews had been deported. In historical and national terms, the Polish population did not think of itself as having stolen other people’s property. It was the Nazis who had driven the Jews out of the Polish socio-national domain, and yet the Jews had not belonged to this domain to begin with. During the war, when rumors concerning the impending deportation began to circulate, there were Poles who sought to come to a business agreement regarding the transfer of their neighbors’ property and who were surprised when their offers were rejected. “What, would you rather the Germans take it?” was their frequent rejoinder. For the Jews, such encounters with their Polish neighbors were often more traumatic than the actual loss of their property. For local postwar bureaucrats, the surviving Jews were a considerable nuisance. Jewish community property that had survived in one piece was soon expropriated

222

Review Essays

by the state and put to local public needs. Subsequently, whenever survivors put in a request to establish a synagogue or communal center, the matter became snarled in red tape. The Jews were perceived as a demanding and manipulative group that cared only for its particularistic needs. Although the leaders of the state and its constituent institutions ruled out any manifestation of antisemitism, they fell far short of taking action to stamp it out.19 At the level of local bureaucracy, traditional hostility toward Jews was prevalent, especially since much of this echelon came from circles associated with the traditional Polish nationalist right (Gross, pp. 58–64).20 In this intensely anti-Jewish atmosphere, the murder of Jews in towns, on trains, and along roads was almost a normative social phenomenon. “What really made the murders of Jews a social phenomenon,” Gross notes, was that “they were anticipated—as punishment is anticipated in a case of transgression” (p. 36). Thus, the pogrom in Kielce in July 1946, which was preceded by at least two incidents of violence that could easily have escalated into mass murder (in Rzeszów in June 1945 and in Kraków in August 1945), symbolizes the culmination of a process that had begun much earlier. Speciﬁc political conditions (the Polish government plebiscite and its falsiﬁed results) were the ﬁnal spark touching off the explosion. In Gross’ view, the pogrom in Kielce and the responses to it by the government and the public marked the ﬁnal maturation of the postwar “national project” of expelling the Jews from the domain of Polish society. The pogrom was incited by rumors to the effect that a Christian boy had been kidnapped and concealed in a building at 7 Planty Street, where Holocaust survivors were living. Members of the secret police, the military, and the regular police took part in the bloodbath that ensued at the building, joined by local citizens and groups of workers who set out from a nearby factory to the site of the event. The murders and the looting proceeded for many hours on the morning of July 4, 1946, and continued afterwards in the streets and in areas near town. Jews were removed from trains that stopped at the municipal station and were then murdered. Jews who had been injured were dragged out of the hospital by rioters who were eager to ﬁnish them off. Jews were taken from their apartments by thugs who led them out of town, assisted by drivers who agreed to transport them to a grove of trees, where the victims were murdered (Gross, pp. 82ff). It was not a pogrom; it was a genocidal massacre in which various people, often strangers to one another, collaborated and cooperated. Later, almost everyone in the public and political arena attempted to shirk responsibility for the slaughter. Local party and police ofﬁcials in Kielce passed the buck. The church leadership responded to the events with a laconic statement that linked a general condemnation of violence with criticism of the way in which the Jews had allegedly fomented hostility by means of their political and economic activities. Internal reports from local church ofﬁcials implied that most Jews in Poland were pro-Communists who, protected by the secret services, carried out arrests and tortured and murdered their victims. This, the reports continued, explained why the population, which loathed Communism and reviled Gestapo methods, hated them so (Gross, p. 147). Thus the Jewish Holocaust survivor in Poland became the disciple and successor of Satan himself. The only social stratum in Poland that was horriﬁed by the murderous eruption was the intelligentsia. Various publications identiﬁed with the intelligentsia

Polish Antisemitism: A National Psychosis?

223

expressed disgust with the violent antisemitism that was sweeping the country. More than presenting a physical menace to the Jews, it was argued (the Jews were in any event leaving Poland en masse), such violence was likely to scar the nation’s moral ﬁber. Jan Gross, noting that the intelligentsia reacted to the Kielce pogrom as though it were a desert sandstorm at the North Pole, concludes that the postwar Polish liberal intelligentsia, seemingly the last vestige of the tradition of elitist Polish positivism, was wholly out of touch with the processes taking place at the grass-roots levels of society. The intelligentsia did not take seriously the antisemitism of the peasantry and the lower classes, judging it to be merely another trait of the “downstairs” of Polish society. When peasants murdered Jews in distant provinces, the intelligentsia hardly noticed; but events at Kielce were on a different scale of magnitude (pp. 186–188).

Conclusion What were the reasons for Polish antisemitism, what factors set it in motion, and how can one explain its uninterrupted presence for more than a century? Is it really an inseparable link in the chain of modern Polish nationalism, part and parcel of the Polish national identity and the weltanschauung of the Polish individual? Does careful and critical research corroborate the controversial statement made in 1989 by Yitzhak Shamir, then Israeli prime minister, that “the Poles imbibe antisemitism with their mothers’ milk”?21 Theodore Weeks concentrates on the transitional phase that began in the late 19th century, when disillusionment over the idea of integrating the Jews set in and the thinking turned toward segregating the Jews, culturally and afterwards also physically, from the Polish nation. He emphasizes the structural changes that Poland was undergoing in the realm of urban and rural economy, trade, and the social structure of the urban and rural domains. The mass migration of Jews to the cities, their entrenchment in the new urban economy, the crisis in the rural economy, and the advent of new Jewish and Polish political organizations and movements in the early 20th century comprise the context in which this transition took place. Weeks’ conclusions, however correct, suffer from two weaknesses: one methodological and the other concerning his explanation of the failure of Jewish assimilation. He bases his book almost entirely on the far-reaching debate in the Polish press concerning the status of the Jews and how to integrate them into, or segregate them from, Polish society. Thus, when all is said and done, his book portrays the “Jewish question” in Poland as an abstract issue that was of interest mainly to the Polish and Jewish intelligentsia. The spectrum of publications that Weeks examines is highly impressive, presenting a comprehensive and penetrating picture of the dimensions of the debate. However, the voices of rural Polish “masses” and of Jews in the shtetl are barely heard. In fact, Jewish integration in Poland was doomed from the outset because the alternative it offered the Jews was not attractive enough to offset the way of life they were being urged to relinquish. Jews were asked to embark on a process that would eventually transform them into “almost” Poles, rendering the wealth of their culture, language, and spiritual world into nothing more than a withered vestige

224

Review Essays

of tribal folklore. The promise of political rights or equal civic status was not a large enough inducement for Jews to go down this path. With respect to the years 1939–1946, Weeks stresses that one cannot possibly draw a straight line from Jelen´ski to Hitler and the Holocaust, since violence against Jews had never been part of Jelen´ski’s worldview. Admittedly, the anti-Jewish hostility of the Endecja and its support of boycotts, incentives to the Jews to emigrate, and social exclusion of the Jews contributed to the creation of a climate in which Poles could more easily acquiesce in the murder that took place on their soil, or even assist it in various ways. However, very few Polish antisemites in the interwar period fully accepted the logic of biological racism—which makes it even more difﬁcult to understand . how a strain of eliminationist antisemitism could have developed in Poland. Z bikowski frowns on any attempt to draw parallels between events in the borderlands before the war and the pogroms and violence of 1941. He makes an interesting attempt to examine the patterns of life that took shape among Jews, Poles, and the new regime in the areas that the Soviet Union annexed in September 1939. The result is a picture of conﬂicts of interest, stereotypes that the realities of Soviet occupation seemingly turned into truth, and, above all, a civil society collapsing under an oppressive totalitarian rule. The Soviet regime consolidated its grip by various means, ranging from . propaganda and social and economic meddling to mass arrests and deportation. Zbikowski accuses the Soviets of bearing considerable responsibility for the creation of an anti-Jewish climate. The regime’s attitude toward the Jews was totally manipulative. Secret service reports from the annexed territories in Polish Belarus indicate clearly that the Jews were not great supporters of the Communist ideology. The regime, however, encouraged Jews to cooperate with it for pragmatic purposes. Polish antisemitism played into the Soviets’ hands by further inducing Jewish cooperation with the regime. Thus, the Jews fell into a double trap: Polish hostility and the lack of an alternative pushed them into the arms of the Soviet regime, and the latter welcomed them because it needed the Jews in order to further consolidate its rule. . The picture arising from Zbikowski’s painstakingly documented book leads to a clear conclusion: the Jews, at the end of the day, were the . only victims of all the forces that competed for power in the kresy from 1939 on. Zbikowski accepts Gross’ conclusion, in Neighbors, that there is no proof of active German involvement in the massacre at Jedwabne. He, too, regards the wish to gain ownership of Jewish property as a principal motive behind many of the murders. According to Gross, it is the connection between Judeophobia and the urge to seize Jewish property that explains the anti-Jewish violence in postwar Poland. Apparently, his conclusions are an attempt to close a circle that he began to draw in his earlier book about Jedwabne. He states: One could not explain the nearly universal presence and intensity of anti-Jewish prejudice in Polish society on the ground of anti-Communism and belief in ritual murder unless one allowed for a complete disjunction between actual experience, on the one hand, and social action (as well as collective mentalities), on the other (p. 246).

This social dynamic, however, is not enough for Gross. He goes on to state that the war is of immense importance in explaining the behavior of Polish society. The war

Polish Antisemitism: A National Psychosis?

225

years had transformed Poland into a country of opportunists that treated Jews as a menace to its members’ material security, stability, and even conscience. Since the Poles had plundered and looted the Jews’ property during the war, those Jews who had survived and returned were a burden on the Polish conscience; there was now the need to ﬁnd a way to explain Polish collaboration with the Nazi murderers. Thus, according to Gross, Poles assaulted Jews not because the Jews were believed to be bloodsucking Communist stooges or ritual murderers of children, and not because the Poles had adopted Nazi biological racism as their own, but rather because they viewed themselves as acting in defense of their true interests. These true interests, moreover, were no less psychological than economic. The antisemitism that surfaced at this time was the outgrowth of a genuine fear: the Jews were indeed perceived as a material threat. Polish society was unable to mourn for the millions of Jewish citizens who had been murdered on its soil, or to display compassion toward the victims of the genocide, precisely because its citizens had witnessed the genocide and because so many had either stood aside or else had cooperated with it in diverse ways. As Gross puts it: “Living Jews embodied the massive failure of character and reason on the part of their Polish neighbors and constituted by mere presence both a reminder and a threat that they might need to account for themselves” (p. 248). This is a complicated and troubling conclusion for two reasons. First, it neutralizes the national, ideological, and political aspects of Polish antisemitism and conﬁnes it to the domains of psychology and the struggle over property. Second, it places much of the responsibility on the Germans. One of the claims lodged against Neighbors was that Gross belittled the importance of the German factor in the murders at Jedwabne. Even though the Germans had not given an order or organized the massacre, their presence in the area and the reports about their extreme anti-Jewish policy created the supportive political climate that allowed the Polish murderers to do what they did. Gross’ conclusions about the reasons for the Poles’ anti-Jewish violence after the war raises a troublesome question: Had the Germans not murdered the Jews on Polish soil but rather had deported them to the Ukraine, and had the Poles not been allowed to dispossess the murdered persons with impunity, would they have been less antisemitic after the war, when the Jewish survivors came home? And if so, would they also have shown compassion and sorrow over the nearly three million Polish citizens of Jewish origin whom the Nazi occupier had slaughtered? Jan Błon´ski, in one of his brilliant essays, attempts to understand the complexity of the attitude toward the Jews of the important Polish writer Zoﬁa Kossak, author of the famous August 1942 manifesto of the Polish Revival Front (Front Odrodzenia Polski). This Catholic writer, who held traditional antisemitic views, appealed to the Poles’ conscience, urging them to set aside their justiﬁed hostility toward the Jews and not to turn a blind eye as the Germans murdered them. Blon´ski tries to understand how it is possible to ﬁnd room within one soul, within one political outlook, for the commingling of hostility and compassion. He ﬁnds the answer in the dialectic between Catholicism and Polish nationalism, summing it up as follows: “Zoﬁa Kossak was prepared to offer her life for the Jews, but if by some miracle the Jews were to vanish without any injustice being done to them, she would surely have felt relief.”22 The conclusion that is shared by all the studies reviewed here is that

226

Review Essays

for many Poles, the disappearance of the Jews, in whatever way, was indeed a goal, albeit one that could be attained only by a miracle. Yet for several generations, the Poles invested considerable efforts in making this miracle come true: by formulating the idea, establishing the appropriate social climate in the national structure that they had adopted, and providing practical support when the right conditions came about. Daniel Blatman The Hebrew University

Notes 1. See the review. by Joanna Michlic in this volume, pp. 231–234. . . 2. See Andrzej Zbikowski, “Pogromy i mordy ludnos´ci z ydowskiej w Łomzyn´skiem . i na Białostocczyz´nie latem 1941 roku w s´wietle relacji ocalałych Zydów i dokumentów sa˛dowych,” in Wokół Jedwabnego, vol. 1, ed. Paweł Machcewicz, Krzystof Persak (Warsaw: 2002), 231–259. 3. Anna Bikont, My z Jedwabnego (Warsaw: 2004), 147. 4. In addition to the works reviewed in this essay, see the review of Joanna Beata Michlic’s Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present by Theodore Weeks in this volume, pp. 241–243. In Michlic’s view, from the middle of the 19th century onward, the Polish church and the political and intellectual elites developed a set of antiJewish images that became entrenched in the national culture. 5. Dariusz Libionka, “Alien, Hostile, Dangerous: The Image of the Jews and the ‘Jewish Question’ in the Polish-Catholic Press in the 1930s,” Yad Vashem Studies 32 (2004), 227–267. 6. Michlic, Poland’s Threatening Other, 85. 7. See Alina Cała, The Image of the Jew in Polish Folk Culture (Jerusalem: 1995), 63–64. 8. Michlic, Poland’s Threatening Other, 109. 9. Jan Błon´ski, “Biedni Polacy patrza˛ na getto,” in Jan Błon´ski, Biedni Polacy patrza˛ na getto (Krakow: 1994), 23. . 10. Andrzej Friszke, “Publicystyka Polski podziemnej wobec zgłada Zydów 1939–1944,” in Polska-Polacy-mniejszos ´ci narodowe, ed. Wojciech Wrzesin´ski (Wrocław: 1992), 210. . 11. Andrzej Zbikowski, “Poles and Jews in the Kresy Wschodnie—Interethnic Relations in the Borderlands, 1918–1939,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 1 (2002), 41–53. 12. David Engel, “Lwów, 1918: The Transmutation of a Symbol and Its Legacy in the Holocaust,” in Contested Memory: Poles and Jews during the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, ed. Joshua D. Zimmerman (New Brunswick: 2003), 32–44. 13. Barbara Engelking, “Szanowny panie gistapo,” Donosy do władz niemieckich w Warszawie i okoliach w latach 1940–1941 (Warsaw:.2003), 99–103. . . 14. Jan Grabowski, “Ja tego Zyda znam!” Szantaz owanie Zydów w Warszawie, 1939–1943 (Warsaw: 2004), 34–35. 15. Ibid., 43–47. . 16. Michał Cichy, “Polacy-Zydzi: czarne karty powstania,” Gateta Wyborcza (29 January 1994). 17. David Engel, Bein shih.rur livrih.ah: niz.olei hashoah bePolin vehamaavak ’al hanhagatam, 1944–1946 (Tel Aviv: 1996), 52. 18. Michlic, Poland’s Threatening Other, 200. . 19. August Grabski, Działanlnos´c´ komuistów ws´ród Zydów w Polsce (1944–1949) (Warsaw: 2004), 29–30. 20. Daniel Blatman, “The Encounter between Jews and Poles in Lublin District after Liberation, 1944–1945,” East European Politics and Societies 20,. no. 4 (2006), 610–621; Józef Adelson, “W Polsce zawnej ludowa˛,” in Najnowsze dzieje Zydóa w Polsce, ed. Jerzy Tomaszeaski (Warsaw: 1993), 401. 21. Interview with Yitzhak Shamir, Jerusalem Post (8 Sept. 1989). 22. Jan Błon´ski, “Polak-katolik i katolik-Polak,” in Błon´ski, Biedni Polacy, 51.

Book Reviews

This page intentionally left blank

Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide

David Bankier (ed.), The Jews Are Coming Back: The Return of the Jews to Their Countries of Origin after WWII. New York: Berghahn Books; Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2005. xi + 311 pp.

There is a common assumption among most scholars and members of the general public that the history of European Jewry ended in the ﬂames of Auschwitz. Those who have bothered to examine the fate of Jewish survivors on the Continent have generally conﬂated their experiences with those of DPs (“displaced persons”) in camps in occupied Germany, Italy, and Austria. Little or no attention has been paid to the tens of thousands of liberated Jews who returned to their countries of origin. The Jews Are Coming Back, which focuses on the attitudes and reception of returning survivors in ten different European countries, is a signiﬁcant and welcome exception. A close reading of the 14 essays included in the book reveals that the return of survivors in the immediate postwar period held many different meanings for Jews and for their fellow citizens. Tens of thousands of Jews in Eastern Europe never actually “returned” but rather came back only temporarily—to search for loved ones and to try to recover property—before moving on. In contrast, those who had resided in Western Europe before the war generally chose to remain in their former homes. Nevertheless, they struggled for many years to regain their legal status as citizens and permanent residents and to reacquire their expropriated property. Ideology often colored survivors’ perceptions of their return to their countries of origin. While Zionists were intent on promoting mass emigration from Europe to Palestine, communists and socialists were convinced that the future for European Jews lay in their joining forces with “progressive” elements in their homelands or adopted countries in order to build a more equitable and democratic society. For their former neighbors, the sight of returning Jews occasioned mixed feelings. Some were undoubtedly relieved to see their fellow countrymen back safe and sound. For others, the appearance of Jewish survivors rekindled prewar prejudices and conjured up bitter memories of wartime collaboration. Many had assumed that the Final Solution had removed Jews permanently from the fabric of their societies. They now feared that survivors would seek revenge upon fellow citizens who had betrayed them, or at the least would demand back their property and their jobs. Though many of the essays rightly emphasize the all-pervasive nature of antisemitism in European society after 1945, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, anti-Jewish sentiment was not always the major factor in the mistreatment of returning survivors. This was especially true in Western Europe. As Frank Caestecker and 229

230

Book Reviews

Derek Hondius show in their respective essays on Belgium and the Netherlands, the desire by West European governments to eliminate all forms of wartime persecution and prejudice often had the opposite effect. Ofﬁcials who pledged themselves to uphold liberal values of nondiscrimination actually exacerbated the condition of returning survivors by refusing or failing to recognize the distinctive plight of Jewish survivors. In the case of “hidden” children, for example, the efforts by the French, Belgian, and Dutch governments to emphasize family harmony, coupled with their refusal to recognize the claims of the Jewish community, led to the decision to leave thousands of orphaned Jewish children in the Christian homes that had adopted them during the war. Similarly, in restoring German nationality to Jewish refugees who had ﬂed from the Third Reich before and during the war, West European governments often ended up deﬁning them as “enemy aliens” and throwing them into prison—at least temporarily—alongside pro-Nazi Germans. In his excellent essay, Pierre Lagrou offers two additional reasons why the special plight of Jewish survivors was ignored—the creation of national myths of collective victimization as a means of unifying war-torn countries, and the predominance of anti-fascist rhetoric in postwar discourse. In France and Belgium, for example, Jews were perceived merely as “victims by accident” of Nazism, rather than as the far more numerous “victims of duty” who had participated in resistance movements. While recognizing the victimization of “racially persecuted” men and women, socialist and communist leaders of postwar governments in both Eastern and Western Europe tended to create a hierarchy of victims in which those who had suffered persecution were seen as less signiﬁcant than the “ﬁghters” against Nazism. As I have discovered in my own research on the European Jewish revival after 1945, returning Jews also suffered as a result of societal indifference. In the face of crushing economic, political, and social challenges, postwar governments and citizens tended to ignore the few Jewish survivors who did return home. Politicians and journalists, who might normally have been expected to be sensitive to the needs of Jewish victims but who had rarely interacted with Jews before or during the war, were understandably more concerned with the fate of their own friends and relatives. In the years between 1940 and 1945, Nazi policies had effectively segregated the Jews from the general population in most countries. After 1945, it was hard for many Europeans to accept their reintegration into general society. Derived largely from a conference held at the Hebrew University in 2001, the essays in The Jews Are Coming Back reﬂect a wide variety of interests and approaches. Most of the authors examine the question of the return of the Jews from the viewpoint of either the survivors or the larger society. Only a few, including most notably Renée Poznanski in her article on France and Mario Toscano in his examination of Italy, present the events of post-1945 as a complex dialectic between the expectations and demands of returning Jews and the fears and misunderstandings of European ofﬁcials and the general public. Several essays, such as Yaakov Ro’i’s study of the reconstruction of Jewish communities in the Soviet Union, draw upon recently released or newly discovered documents; others such as Hondius’ essay on the Netherlands represent summaries of previously published works. The articles by Manuela Consonni on survivor memoirs in Italy and by Joanna Michlic on the attitudes of Polish intellectuals toward Jews are fascinating, but they do not easily ﬁt in

Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide

231

with the general theme of the book. I was especially troubled by Kinga Frojimovic’s essay on the work of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the “Joint”) in Hungary. Though the essay contains much useful information, her conclusion that, in attempting to reintegrate returning Jewish deportees into East European economic life, the American relief organization “condemned hundreds of thousands of survivors and their offspring to live under various phases of dictatorship” (p. 279) is not only grossly unfair but also profoundly ahistorical. The book would have been improved by tighter editorial control and by an introduction summarizing and synthesizing the major themes. Despite these shortcomings, The Jews Are Coming Back is a signal contribution to a much neglected ﬁeld. In emphasizing the variety of ways in which Jews and non-Jews in Europe coped with the aftermath of the Holocaust, it opens up important new avenues for further research. David Weinberg Wayne State University

Anna Bikont, My z Jedwabnego (We from Jedwabne). Warsaw: Prószyn´ski i S-ka SA, 2004. 417 pp.

First published in 2000, Jan T. Gross’ slender book, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, presented a great challenge to the collective memory of the Polish experience during the Second World War as well as to the Polish memory of the destruction of Polish Jewry. The power of the book lay in Gross’ presentation of an event that was long dismissed as a “non-happening” both in Polish history and in Holocaust studies. In the lengthy debate over Neighbors, two main reactions could be discerned—on the one hand, acceptance of Gross’ main thesis concerning ethnic Polish participation in the murder of the Jews of Jedwabne and a positive response to his call for writing modern Polish history anew; on the other, rejection of Gross’ position, often in a manner that was strongly tinted with anti-Jewish prejudice. This latter position afﬁrmed the post-1945 model of writing the history of Poland and Polish-Jewish relations during the Second World War, according to which Polish society during the Nazi occupation was a community of victims and heroes, the great majority of whom sympathized with Jews and assisted them as much as they could. Anna Bikont’s My z Jedwabnego (We from Jedwabne) is a ﬁrst-class journalistic account of the formation, dynamics, and scope of these two Polish historiographic trends as they are expressed in the interpretations given to the events that took place during the hot summer of 1941, when Jews were massacred by their ethnic Polish . neighbors in 67 small towns and villages in the northeastern region of Łomz a.1 Her account, which covers the period from the early stage of the Jedwabne debate in late August 2000 up until the late spring of 2004, demonstrates the immense impact of the self-defensive approach on the contemporary cross-generational Jedwabne community, in part through its portrayal of the chief and most aggressive local protagonists of this stance (among them, the late Rev. Father Edward Orłowski). Conversely, it paints a moving portrayal of those individuals who espoused and publicly proclaimed the self-critical approach: Krzysztof Godlewski, one of a few representatives of

232

Book Reviews

the local Jedwabne elites who actively supported and participated in the ofﬁcial commemoration of the Jedwabne massacre in July 2001, and Leszek Dziedzic, who cherished the memory of his grandmother, Leokadia Dziedzic (née Dmoch), who rescued Jewish fugitives from the massacres. Bikont poignantly describes the heavy toll exacted on Godlewski and Dziedzic and their respective families—verbal abuse and physical threats, loss of jobs and social stigma, and ﬁnally, self-imposed exile from their homes and communities. My z Jedwabnego is also a serious journalistic attempt to reconstruct the facts concerning the largest anti-Jewish massacres, which occurred in Jedwabne, Radziłów, Wizna and Wa˛sa˛cz, and the reasons for those horriﬁc crimes. Its ﬁndings point to multiple and interwoven factors such as the intense ideological and political antisemitism of the prewar period; the persistence of earlier forms of anti-Jewish stereotypes during the Second World War, reinforced by the Soviet occupation of the region between September 17, 1939 and June 22, 1941; economic greed; “the interregnum moment” after the Soviets ﬂed the region and Nazi Germany had not yet established its power; the Nazi condoning of the massacres; and a strong, primordial-like desire to kill on the part of its chief instigators and perpetrators, including the Laudan´ski brothers. Bikont’s investigation suggests that the Jews of Jedwabne in the summer of 1941 were, to use the term coined by the psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, “a designated victim.”2 As such, they were denied the right to live, in order to allow the local ethnic Polish community to reassert its power and reafﬁrm its rule after 22 months of harsh Soviet occupation. The detailed and gruesome descriptions of the theatre of violence also suggest that the perception of Jews as cultural outsiders played a salient role in the way the massacres were rationalized by their perpetrators. (This aspect of the anti-Jewish violence begs for a fuller interpretation and comparative analysis.) My z Jedwabnego touches as well upon the under-researched subject of the role of women in inciting both the massacres and the robbery of remaining Jewish possessions in the wake of the violence. Yet the book’s greatest strength and achievement lies in the investigation of contemporary memory of these crimes among the former Jewish survivors and their families, the Polish rescuers of Jews and their families, the former perpetrators and their supporters, and various eyewitnesses. In a sense, My z Jedwabnego is both an anthropological and a psychological study of a deeply troubling memory of the darkest crimes in the history of Polish-Jewish relations, over which a veil was drawn for more than 60 years. Like Agnieszka Arnold’s documentary ﬁlms Gdzie mój starszy brat Kain (Where is my elder brother Cain, 1999) and Sa˛siedzi (Neighbors, 2001), and Sławomir Grünberg’s documentary ﬁlm The Legacy of Jedwabne (2005), My z Jedwabnego is a chilling voyage to a reality in which individuals and small communities manage to keep deeply troubling memories from disturbing everyday consciousness. It also depicts many instances of how these memories, triggered by a certain event, instantly resurface and lead to vivid recollections—“ﬂashbulb memories”—and to a sense of re-experiencing the past. The latter is not only a characteristic feature among the former Jewish survivors, but also among those Christian Polish eyewitnesses who felt deep empathy for their Jewish neighbors and who were shocked by, and privately condemned, the crimes committed by their fellow citizens—or else, as in the case of

Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide

233

Stanisław Mordasiewicz of Radziłów, took a more active stance in order to help or honor the victims. Mordasiewicz dug up the massacred corpse of his Jewish neighbor Wolf Szlapak, buried by his murderers in his own garden, and transferred it to the Jewish cemetery. In contrast, the moving portrayal of an aged couple, the former survivor Marianna Ramotowska (Rachela Finkelsztejn) and her rescuer, Stanisław Ramotowski, sheds light on the causes of repression of the painful past in some survivors and rescuers. Until the early 2000s, the Ramotowskis lived in close proximity to the site of the Jedwabne massacre. Yet for most of their lives they preferred to repress their memories of the summer of 1941, which was marked by the killing of Rachela’s family, her hasty conversion to Catholicism followed by a rushed marriage to Stanisław, and their subsequent going into hiding together. There is no doubt that, for this couple, such “forgetting” assisted them in preserving their emotional equilibrium; it was a defense mechanism that permitted them to lead an ordinary existence. Nevertheless, their seemingly ordinary lives were permeated, especially in the early postwar period (when they were receiving death threats from some of the perpetrators of the massacres), with the fear of being killed or of being robbed. Marianna [Rachela] Ramotowska paid a heavy price for living with that fear and stress in the late 1940s: a stillbirth, followed by diagnosed infertility. Selective memory, repression, and visceral fear have also been an intrinsic part of the life of Antonina Wyrzykowska, to whom Bikont, as in the case of the Ramotowski couple, devotes an entire chapter. Between November 1942 and January 1945, Wyrzykowska and her ﬁrst husband, Aleksander (who were then living in the hamlet of Janczewka, near Jedwabne), provided refuge for seven Jewish men and women who had survived the massacres. In the aftermath of the German defeat in January 1945, they were harassed and physically abused by neighbors who suspected that they were hiding Jews: Wyrzykowska was severely beaten by local men and, over the years was forced to move from her home three times. Even at present, after the ofﬁcial recognition of Wyrzykowska’s deeds by the state authorities during the commemorative ceremonies of July 10, 2001, and despite her relatively quiet life . (she divides her time between the Łomz a region and the United States), she remains silent about those who assaulted and threatened her with death in the early postwar period. Her story is a salient example of what it means to be a rescuer of Jews in the context of a community that strongly disapproves of rescue efforts, not only during the war but long afterward. Wyrzykowska’s case, and others like it, should be studied in depth in order to arrive at a better understanding of the position of dedicated Christian rescuers of Jews in Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe. Fear of a very different kind was an intrinsic part of the life of Szmuel Wasersztajn, another key ﬁgure in Bikont’s book. Wasersztajn, a survivor of the Jedwabne massacre, wrote a detailed testimony that he deposited with the Jewish Historical Commission in 1945, shortly before his emigration from Poland. Nonetheless, he remained concerned (with good reason) that the world at large might never learn what had happened to the Jews of Jedwabne on July 10, 1941. Accordingly, his life was devoted to holding on to that traumatic history and to ﬁghting oblivion with “unheard words” and an increasingly fragile memory. Bikont’s portrayal of Wasersztejn indicates that his strong imperative to articulate and make the Jedwabne massacre known was motivated by external considerations such as a perceived duty to record the events

234

Book Reviews

for posterity and to honor the vanquished. At the same time, the recording and retelling of the past events brought him some solace. Wasersztejn did not live to be present at the Jedwabne commemorative ceremonies (he passed away in 2000, in Costa Rica). Nonetheless, his desperate voice and his early postwar testimony, made public both by Agnieszka Arnold and by Jan T. Gross, recalls a voice from Louise Glück’s poem The Wild Iris: . . . It is terrible to survive as consciousness buried in the dark earth . . . ... You who do not remember From the other world I tell you I could speak again: whatever Returns from oblivion returns to ﬁnd a voice.3 In its structure, the 15-chapter My z Jedwabnego is a mosaic of interviews, reportage, and commentary, interwoven with notes and citations from testimonies, newspapers, and other archival sources and supported by secondary historical studies. It also contains a brief introduction in the form of a diary about Bikont’s ﬁrst encounter with the Jedwabne massacre and a short appendix, “Virtual Shtetl Radziłów,” based on the recollections of Jose Goldstein, a great-grandson of the Gutsztein family, whose many members perished in Radziłów on July 7, 1941. Although My z Jedwabnego also contains heartwarming material about Bikont’s friends and family, as well as an account of the author’s quite recent discovery of her own Jewishness and her daughter’s embrace of that lost Jewish heritage, it is not for the faint of heart. The stories about the Jedwabne massacre and about the subsequent human dramas of the survivors and the rescuers unfold vividly on its pages and hit the reader in the gut, in the heart, and in the mind. This book—which, it is hoped, will one day be translated into English—is highly recommended not only for scholars and students of Polish-Jewish relations and the Holocaust and of the memory of these events, but also for scholars and students of other 20th-century genocides. My z Jedwabnego also demonstrates that ﬁrst-class, indepth journalistic investigations can inform historical analyses of interethnic conﬂicts and anti-Jewish violence during the Holocaust in Central and Eastern Europe, interacting in novel and mutually beneﬁcial ways with conventional historical studies. Joanna B. Michlic Lehigh University

Notes

. . 1. Andrzej Zbikowski, U Genezy Jedwabnego. Zydzi na kresach północno-wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej, wrzesien´ 1939–lipiec 1941 (Warsaw: 2006). 2. Cathy Caruth, “An Interview with Robert Jay Lifton,” in Trauma: Exploration in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: 1995), 139. 3. Louise Glück, “The Wild Iris,” in idem, The Wild Iris (New York: 1992), 1.

Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide

235

Christopher R. Browning, Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. x +105 pp.

Christopher Browning is a proliﬁc scholar and one of the most distinguished contemporary historians of the Holocaust. Like most scholars of Nazi Germany, he has relied heavily on archival documents and has used them to draw extremely important conclusions regarding the nature, timing, and decision-making processes concerning the murder of the Jews. His reliance on archival evidence has at times led to studies of the perpetrators with little corresponding attention as to how their victims experienced the crimes committed against them. Postwar reconstruction of the murderous events in memoirs and oral histories, both by perpetrators and the victims, is often regarded with suspicion by historians, who note the distortion of memory as a result of elapsed time, changing cultural and political inﬂuences, and the emergence of narrative structures that tend to blur individual experience in favor of a grand narrative shared by a community. Most important, surviving victims may be overwhelmed by emotions that color their memories, while perpetrators may alter their accounts to avoid self-incrimination. Ordinary Men (1992), Browning’s important study of one of the civilian Einsatzgruppen units sent to Poland to commit murder, was based primarily on the postwar depositions of the killers prior to their trials, which took place 20 years after the murders. In reconstructing the history of the group, Browning recognized that such depositions would be self-serving, particularly concerning the killers’ motivations and antisemitism. Attentive to nuance, he was able to cull signiﬁcant information from these suspect sources. His new book, Collective Memories, spells out an agenda of how historians can fruitfully use postwar testimony as well as private recollections, deﬁning a set of criteria by which the historian can sift through postwar interrogations and the memory of survivors to distinguish between reliable and unreliable evidence. The book, based on a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Wisconsin in memory of the great historian George L. Mosse, examines two different cases: the testimony Adolf Eichmann gave to his Israeli interrogators, and the recollections of survivors of the Starachowice labor camp. Eichmann’s testimony is examined by Browning for its accuracy in relation to the archival evidence regarding the timing of events that led to the genocide decision, but he also analyzes it for evidence regarding Eichmann’s own motives and the judgments of historians regarding Eichmann’s role. As noted, the overriding reason for his examination of both Eichmann’s testimony and the testimonies of the labor camp survivors is Browning’s effort to construct objective criteria to guide historians in using memory as evidence. Among the criteria he develops are “unusual attention to details of visual memory” (p. 11) as well as possibility and probability; others are statements that run against the self-interest of the perpetrator. For example, Browning considers Eichmann’s statement regarding when he learned of Hitler’s order to kill the Jews—in the fall of 1941—as an important conﬁrmation of other evidence pointing to October 1941 as the moment when Hitler issued his decision (as Browning reconstructs it in two other books, Fateful Months [1985] and The Origins of the Final Solution [2004]). Based

236

Book Reviews

on the same judgment, Browning rejects as unreliable Eichmann’s statements regarding his alleged mental torment over the murder of the Jews, since these are obviously rooted in his legal defense strategy. Similarly, Browning faults Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), for constructing an image of Eichmann that too readily reﬂected the strategy constructed by his defense attorneys. The last two chapters of the book describe a network of forced labor camps in south-central Poland, in Starachowice, with intensive examination of the testimonies of 173 survivors of the camp that were written or conveyed orally in the years since the war’s end. Here, too, Browning is primarily concerned to delineate the criteria by which a historian can determine the accuracy and reliability of survivor testimony in reconstructing the history of the camp. Always cautious and aware that such testimony can be distorted by “archetypal images broadly disseminated in popular consciousness” (p. 82), Browning insists that survivor testimony be subjected to rigorous standards of historical evaluation. He does not, however, reject such testimony, noting that the survivors’ memories of certain events in Starachowice are marked by an uncanny similarity despite differences in certain details. The similarities in their testimony may provide important information about the texture of life among Jews in camps and transports, but their accuracy has to be analyzed carefully. Browning notes that survivor memory may be affected by images and accounts of similar events promoted in ﬁlms and books. He notes, for example, that only one survivor among the Starachowice prisoners recalled, in 1948 testimony, that water rather than gas fell from the shower-heads at Birkenau. Yet after a similar scene in the ﬁlm Schindler’s List, six survivor testimonies “recalled” the same incident, leading Browning to note the “powerful capacity of popular media, especially ﬁlm, to implant images and to shape the way in which stories are retold” (p. 84). While Browning recognizes that survivor testimony can be “often conﬂicting and contradictory, [and] in some cases even clearly mistaken,” it can nonetheless be used to construct a history that otherwise would be lost (p. 39). For example, survivor testimony of the Starachowice labor camp prisoners provided conﬂicting details about an attack by one of them, Guta B., on the chief guard in July 1944. Browning evaluates the testimony based on plausibility and corroborating historical evidence, and in so doing rejects Guta B.’s claim that the prisoners had been lined up, about to be shot, when the attack occurred. Browning concludes that Guta B.’s life was saved not because of a “miracle” or because of the guard’s respect for her heroism, as some have suggested, but rather because of a collective bribe offered by the prisoners. Their self-sacriﬁce of hidden resources, such as a diamond, that they might have saved for subsequent bribes for their own lives, indicates, Browning points out, a remarkable solidarity of prisoners in face of a camp system designed to pit prisoners against one another (p. 68). Browning’s book is important both for its circumspection in relation to the evidence and for the original and frequently groundbreaking nature of the conclusions he draws. His prudent criteria for evaluation lend greater complexity to the picture he draws. The depravity of the perpetrators and their hatred of Jews, which Daniel Goldhagen urged us to recognize, take on far greater nuance in Browning’s studies. Browning notes that Starachowice had the highest rate of typhus of any Nazi labor camp alongside a relatively high survival rate, which he attributes to the control of the camp by factory managers rather than SS ofﬁcials. The former ﬁrst unleashed a

Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide

237

reign of terror in the camp, but subsequently, driven by economic aims, promoted moderation in killing, whereas the SS were driven by a ruthless ideology. Toward the end, however, increasing corruption allowed Jews to bribe commanders. The perpetrators, Browning concludes, fell into different categories: those who were sadistic, those who were corrupt and open to bribery, and the very few who were decent and humane. Survivors who recognized those differentiations not only revealed the reliability of their testimony, but also demonstrated one reason for their survival—recognizing the nature of each type of perpetrator, and acting in response to that type, was crucial for remaining alive. In short, in this volume, Browning offers an example of uncommon methodological sophistication in a scholarly ﬁeld marked by complexity and often distorted by passion. Susannah Heschel Dartmouth College

Steven T. Katz and Alan Rosen (eds.), Obliged by Memory: Literature, Religion, Ethics. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006. 188 pp.

Over the course of an uncommonly productive career, Elie Wiesel has written on a range of subjects and in a variety of literary genres, but at the heart of his diverse and copious oeuvre, now numbering some 40 books, there lies a unifying concern with memory—its historical power and necessity, its moral and ethical obligations, but also its frailties, weaknesses, and vulnerability to distortion and exploitation. More than most writers, Wiesel has seen it as his task to keep the past alive, both as a tribute to the dead and as a warning to the living. “If there is a single theme that dominates all my writing, all my obsessions,” he has remarked, “it is that of memory—because I fear forgetfulness as much as hatred and death.”1 It is ﬁtting, therefore, that this collection of 10 essays in honor of the author’s 70th birthday has been organized around the claims of memory. Like all multi-authored books of this kind, Obliged by Memory is a volume of varied interest and accomplishment. Cynthia Ozick’s lead essay, “The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination,” is a highly engaging analysis of the contrasting authorities of visual and verbal representations of the Nazi persecution and mass slaughter of the Jews. Given her preeminence as a writer, one might have expected Ozick to favor words over images, but, in fact, she argues that the camera, rather than verbal and especially ﬁctional treatments, has been more faithful to the historical record. After reviewing a number of iconic images that were produced contemporaneously with the ravages of the Holocaust and then examining three well-received but seriously ﬂawed literary works of more recent years—Helen Demidenko’s The Hand that Signed the Paper, Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, and William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice—Ozick concludes: “In the beginning was not the word, but the camera—and at that time, and in that place, the camera did not mislead. . . . The word came later, and in some instances it came not to illumine but to corrupt” (p. 18). While Ozick’s polemical point is well taken with respect to the three books she discusses, recent studies of Holocaust photography

238

Book Reviews

have revealed that parts of the visual record of the Nazi period are also highly problematic and should not be taken necessarily as unadulterated documentary evidence. The camera could also distort and lie, and, at times, it did. In her own thoughtful reﬂections on memory and its relation to historical truth (“Do Facts Matter in Holocaust Memoirs?”), Susan Rubin Suleiman also examines the strange case of Binjamin Wilkomirski and argues persuasively that Fragments is not so much a fraudulent memoir as a “deluded” one (p. 35). Unlike Ozick, who reads Fragments as a counterfeit or bogus text and, on these grounds, dismisses it, Suleiman ﬁnds Wilkomirski’s book to have substantial literary merit; in acknowledging it to be a “false memoir,” though, she confesses that she does not know where to place it in the landscape of Holocaust literature. In entering this argument between the claims of history and those of imagination, John Silber recognizes the close ties between the two but insists that “works of imagination when they intersect history must observe scrupulously all the facts of history” (p. 64). He lauds his Boston University colleague Elie Wiesel for his ﬁdelity to these facts, but unfortunately passes up a chance to confront those critics who have pointed out what they claim to be ﬁctive elements in Wiesel’s memoiristic writings. Silber’s case would have been stronger had he seen ﬁt to consider these claims critically and, if he so found, had shown them to be ﬁctions themselves. Recollecting the past and imagining it may be separate acts of the mind, but they are closely related in the writings of every author who has ever chosen both to retrieve earlier experiences and to reproduce them on the page. Silber acknowledges as much but then foregoes a chance to bring substantive discussion on this important point back to Wiesel. In other notable contributions to this book, Geoffrey Hartman writes perceptively and appreciatively about the “creative melancholy” of many of Wiesel’s protagonists; Jeffrey Mehlman reﬂects shrewdly on the Papon trial in France in 1998 and its implications for the claims of memory; Alan Berger deliberates interestingly on “memory transfusions” in several of Wiesel’s ﬁctional works; Shlomo Breznits makes some useful distinctions between semantic memory and episodic memory; and Nehemia Polen offers a detailed and learned response to the intriguing question, “Does God have a memory?” (the answer, as Polen seeks to demonstrate on the basis of many textual citations, is “yes”). Paula Frederiksen’s “Augustine on God and Memory” is similarly learned but seems largely anomalous within this book, for the essay never makes a case for seeing Wiesel’s work against that of the Confessions of the famous 4th-century bishop of Hippo. Like Frederiksen, Nancy Harrowitz approaches Wiesel more implicitly than explicitly in her essay on Primo Levi, the great Italian Jewish memoirist, whom she comes uncomfortably close to labeling a collaborator because of his work as a chemist in Auschwitz. The volume concludes with a brief afterword by Wiesel himself, in which he reﬂects on the complexities of being a survivor-writer. His commitment to memory is clear, as are his doubts about the efﬁcacy of his writing—and all writing—to transmit the past both faithfully and compellingly to later generations. This skeptical note aside, most of the contributions to this book conﬁrm what has long been known and justly celebrated: Elie Wiesel has been a devoted and important voice for Holocaust

Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide

239

remembrance for several decades, and has done more than most writers, intellectuals, and educators to inform a large public about the Nazi crimes against the Jews. Whatever his own doubts about his success, he has ably met the obligations of memory. Alvin H. Rosenfeld Indiana University

Note 1. Quoted in Elie Wiesel, From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences (New York: 1990), 9.

Walter Laqueur, The Changing Face of Antisemitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. x + 228 pp.

The “Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision” conference in Tehran in 2006, which brought together notorious far-right “revisionists” (Holocaust deniers) and Islamists, illustrated a disturbing trend that observers have noted for some time: a nexus between the white supremacist and antisemitic far right, and radical Muslim extremists. Is this a metamorphosis of an old hatred long known for its protean nature? In ancient times, pagan hostility mutated into Christian anti-Judaism, which centuries later mutated into “racial” antisemitism. Since 1945, hatred of Jews has taken many new forms, including anti-Zionism, regarded by some as a sanitized form of antisemitism. It has moved from the right to the left while being appended in more recent years to anti-Americanism and anti-globalism. Thus the sight of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, the French “revisionist” George Thiel, and the Australian Holocaust denier Colin Tobin rubbing shoulders with Islamist clerics and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should not come as a surprise. The ever-shifting nature of “the longest hatred” is carefully analyzed and documented by Walter Laqueur, a renowned scholar and incisive analyst. In Laqueur’s sophisticated and wide-ranging discussion of the causes and nature of antisemitism, he reminds us that the term antisemitismus was coined only in the 1870s (by Wilhelm Marr, a one-time German radical) to accord with a more scientiﬁc age. It replaced “Jew hatred” (Judenhass or Judenhetze), which had become outmoded as secularism gained in strength and religious hostility was increasingly regarded as obscurantist and backward. As noted, the roots of that hostility reach back to the pagan world, although scholars disagree on the substance of that antipathy and the extent to which it deserves the appellation “antisemitism.” It did, however, prepare the way for sustained Christian hostility, driven by the Church Fathers. By the late Middle Ages, the Jew had attained diabolical status, rooted in the Christian religious imagination. From the 15th century there are indications that medieval “anti-Judaism” was giving way to modern “racial” antisemitism. By the 18th century, anthropological

240

Book Reviews

categories were characterizing Jews as having innate characteristics. These ideas ﬂowered through the 19th century, merging with Charles Darwin’s notion of natural selection and Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the ﬁttest.” Whereas in the medieval world, conversion to Christianity had often been possible, the new race-based antisemitism that deﬁned Jews as immutably alien precluded this option. It ultimately came to justify “war on the Jews,” supported by inﬂammatory texts such as the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Initially the Protocols was relatively obscure. But in the wake of the Russian Revolution, its noxious ideas percolated into the West. Notwithstanding its exposure as a crude forgery, it spread throughout the world and was translated into many languages. In the words of historian Norman Cohn, the Protocols served as a “warrant for genocide”—the “Final Solution,” or the murder of nearly six million Jews. Although antisemitism declined substantially in Western Europe in the wake of the Second World War, anti-Jewish charges were common in the Soviet Union. A powerful anti-Zionist message emanated from Moscow after the Six-Day War, culminating in the Soviet Union’s sponsorship in 1975 (together with some Arab states) of a United Nations resolution condemning Zionism “as a form of racism and racial discrimination.” The resolution (revoked in 1991) was part of a continuing attempt to delegitimize the Jewish state. While Laqueur argues that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are not axiomatically the same, he does show that much anti-Zionist rhetoric—especially in the Arab/Muslim world—reveals classic anti-Jewish motifs that go beyond the bounds of normal political conﬂict. He also shows that such rhetoric is relatively new in the Muslim world, where hostility toward Jews lacked the vitriolic character of Christian hatred in the medieval period. From the 13th century, however, humiliation and degradation of Jews began to characterize Muslim-Jewish relations. European colonialism and its Christian inﬂuences further undermined the Jewish condition in the Muslim world. Antisemitic calumnies such as the “blood libel” entered into Muslim discourse in the 19th century amid the looting, rape, and killing of Jews in numerous cities and towns. Against a backdrop of Zionist settlement and the complicated question of “the right to the land,” Arab nationalism and the growth of Islamism fueled hostility. A vast anti-Jewish Arabic literature now makes use of texts such as Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the Protocols. Extremist groups such as Islamic Jihad and Hamas have appropriated ideas of a world Jewish conspiracy in what they consider to be a holy war against “Satanist Zionism.” Such invective takes on the features of delusional Christian antisemitism at its height. Jews are characterized as a malignant disease, bent on global domination. These accusations merge effortlessly with Holocaust denial, similarly delusional, but initially the preserve of the far right. Given this mindset, Ahmadinejad’s desire to wipe Israel off the map has some logic. It will resonate widely in Arab countries and indeed beyond. To be sure, the world has disproportionately focused on the JewishArab conﬂict, notwithstanding other clashes of far greater magnitude. “According to peace researchers,” writes Laqueur, “25 million people were killed in internal conﬂicts since World War Two, of them 8000 in the Israeli-Palestinian conﬂict, which ranks forty-sixth in the list of victims.” And yet, continues Laqueur, “Israel has been

Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide

241

more often condemned by the United Nations and other international organizations than all other nations taken together” (p. 8). This lopsidedness will not easily be eradicated. Antisemitism is deep rooted. Its idiom and intensity have not always been the same, but its ability to mutate has been a constant. Sadly, laments Laqueur, the last chapter has not been written. Given his balanced, sober, and judicious judgments, the sharpness of his insights and the breadth of his erudition, this comes as little comfort. Milton Shain University of Cape Town

Joanna Beata Michlic, Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. 386 pp.

Ever since Casimir the Great invited Jews to come and settle on Polish lands nearly seven centuries ago, Poles and Jews have enjoyed—if that is the word—a special relationship. Despite this fact, the amount of serious scholarship on Polish-Jewish relations and forms of Polish judeophobia, leaving aside the issue of whether to speak of “antisemitism,” is rather limited. While the Jewish Historical Institute . (ZIH) in Warsaw has sponsored much excellent research that is often published in its important Biuletyn, many sensitive topics, in particular that of Polish antisemitism as a popular movement, have remained off limits. Joanna Michlic’s book is an important step toward a better understanding of the “image of the Jew” among Poles from the late 19th century to the 1980s. Although Michlic is more concerned with how Poles perceived Jews than with Jewish history per se, her book represents a signiﬁcant contribution to the growing scholarly literature on Polish-Jewish relations. In her introduction, Michlic states that the main aim of her book is to analyze “the structure and dynamics of anti-Jewish idioms over a long time period” (p. 8). As a sociologist, she is interested in explaining how this “anti-Jewish idiom” played out in certain aspects of social development—as a means of political and social mobilization, as a rationalization of projects for ethnic “purity” within a nation-state (that is, removing non-Poles by one means or another), as incitement and justiﬁcation of anti-Jewish violence, and as a tool in delegitimizing political opponents (by claiming, for example, that they were “in the pay of the Jews”). Michlic points to pervasive anti-Jewish strains in much of postwar Polish journalism and historiography (which also came to the fore during the debate on Jan Gross’s Neighbors) but rejects any claims that Polish antisemitism is characterized by “unique vehemence.” The book is organized chronologically and is based for the most part on published sources—press, pamphlets, memoirs, historiography. The ﬁrst two chapters focus on the creation of the myth of the Jew as “the threatening other” from the prewar period to 1939. Subsequent chapters look at the link between this myth and antiJewish violence in the interwar period, Polish perceptions of Jews during the Second World War and in the immediate postwar period (1945–1949), under Communist

242

Book Reviews

rule, and ﬁnally in the post-1989 period. Throughout, Michlic successfully documents the continued existence and importance of this myth while arguing for its weakening after 1989. One hopes this is true, although the existence of a right-wing populist party calling itself “Self-Defense” (Samoobrona) in the present Polish parliament (and, until recently, in the government), makes one wonder whether Polish right-wingers may have learned simply to avoid taboo topics in public discourse. It is also possible to argue that Michlic’s examples are too exclusively negative and do not reﬂect sufﬁciently the more pro-Jewish (or anti-nationalist) trends in Polish society, but in a sense this one-sidedness (if that is what it is) is inevitable in a book of this kind. There seems no reason to doubt, however, the pervasive functioning of this myth in Polish politics and society throughout the 20th century, as Michlic’s examples clearly show. Although Poland’s Threatening Other makes a serious contribution to our understanding of Polish-Jewish relations in the twentieth century, it has its weaknesses. Various historical errors mar the text. It is not true that the National Democrats introduced “anti-Jewish images and stereotypes” in Poland in the 1880s (p. 1), since at that time the party did not yet exist. As Keely Stauter-Halsted and others have shown, it is simplistic to blame the anti-Jewish riots in Galicia in 1898 on Father Stanisław Stojałowski (p. 62), his propaganda being more a symptom than a cause. It is also not true that Eugeniusz Jagiełło was the only non-antisemitic candidate in the election to the Fourth Duma in 1912, as no one seriously accused the main Polish candidate, Jan Kucharzewski, of antisemitism (p. 64). More broadly, Michlic presents a persuasive argument concerning the dangers of “ethnic nationalism” but does not provide a plausible scenario by which “civic nationalism” could have trumped the ethnic variety in Poland. Speaking of the “civic vision of Poland” advocated by Marshall Piłsudski seems a bit naïve, considering the government policies of the early 1930s (although, to be sure, the situation did deteriorate considerably after Piłsudski’s death). The strongest parts of the book consider the situation after 1939. Michlic argues that the fact of the Shoah made no impact on Polish nationalists’ demand for a Poland free of Jews (even among those Polish nationalists who tried to save Jews and fought the Germans). Indeed, as Jan Gross argues in his Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (2006), the example of Hitler’s “solution” may have encouraged Polish antisemites to terrorize Jewish survivors in order to convince them to leave Poland for good. Michlic terms the postwar anti-Jewish violence a form of “ethnic cleansing,” an attempt to convince all Jews that there was no place for them in a Polish nation-state. While the Polish communists opposed these attacks, they were on the whole more concerned with not exacerbating their strained relations with the Polish public—the Communists were well aware of their weak public support—than with protecting Jews. Moreover, once Communist rule had been ﬁrmly established in Poland, and in particular with the coming to power of Władysław Gomułka in 1956, many of the highest-placed Jews in the party apparatus found themselves demoted or even expelled from the party. Michlic’s portrayal of a pervasive myth of “Jewish threat” used both subconsciously and instrumentally by Polish antisemites will not convince everyone. But no

Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide

243

one can deny that this important book is required reading for all specialists in Polish history, antisemitism, and inter-ethnic relations. Theodore R. Weeks Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

Robert Satloff, Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands. New York: Public Affairs, 2006. 251 pp.

Robert Satloff, executive director of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy, has written a book with an unabashedly public mission. Recognizing that the issue of the Holocaust and its memory—or its denial—perpetuates a deep chasm between Jews and Arabs, and dismayed by the rising tide of antisemitism and Holocaust denial in the Arab world, he apparently wondered whether the championing of an “Arab Schindler” or an “Arab Wallenberg,” as the jacket of the book suggests, might serve as an effective instrument for changing attitudes about the meaning of the Holocaust, and as a consequence, toward Jews and Israel. Citing the Quran (“whoever saves one life, saves the entire world”), Satloff asserts rather innocently that: “if I could tell the story of a single Arab who saved a single Jew during the Holocaust, then perhaps I could make Arabs see the Holocaust as a source of pride, worthy of remembering, not just something to avoid or deny” (p. 6). He reveals his cause: to have the ﬁrst Arab recognized among the thousands of “Righteous among the Nations” (h. asidei umot ha’olam) at Yad Vashem. He also connects the imagery of 9/11 to the Holocaust: “the plume of smoke rising over the wounded towers conjured to me the chimneys of the death camps” (p. 4). Thus, he tells us that “the most useful response I could offer to 9/11 was to combat Arab ignorance of the Holocaust” (p. 5), a project launched from his home in Rabat, where he lived with his family for two and a half years. Despite the focused political objective stated in the introduction, what follows is a compelling account of the experience of Jews living in the shadow of the Holocaust under Vichy, German, and Italian fascist rule in North Africa during the Second World War. Part history, part journal, Satloff takes us on a personal journey in which he recounts his own travels to ﬁnd the long-forgotten labor camps established by Vichy in the Moroccan desert bordering Algeria, his search for Arab rescuers of Jews and their descendants, especially in Tunisia, and his visit to the head of the Great Mosque of Paris to discover or conﬁrm the role played by the mosque and by Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the imam during the war, in sheltering North African Jews. Satloff’s research yielded relatively few Arab rescuers, and of those he did ﬁnd, their descendants often had little interest in or were even hostile to remembering their heroic deeds. In the end, the book has more to say about the role played by Arabs as willing participants in the persecution of Jews under Vichy, German, or Italian occupation, of Arab guards who tormented Jewish prisoners at forced labor camps, or of Muslims who betrayed their Jewish neighbors.

244

Book Reviews

But Satloff also heard testimony regarding a number of Arabs who helped Jews: anonymous, ordinary people remembered by the survivors. There were also a few well-known leaders who took stances in favor of Jews, such as the Muslim reformist leader Shaykh Taieb el–Okbi in Algiers in 1942, who ordered Muslims not to attack Jews as they were being urged to do by French fascists, or Si Ali Sakkat, prominent in Tunisian government service, who sheltered Jews on his country farm. Satloff tells the story of the Moroccan sultan, Mohammed V, and Moncef Bey of Tunisia, whose reputed actions in support of their Jewish subjects, though discreet and somewhat ambiguous, are still celebrated by Moroccan and Tunisian Jews. In a very poignant chapter, “Anny’s Story,” he recounts the testimony of a Tunisian Jewish woman from Mahdia whose family was hidden by Khaled Abdelwahhab—suggested in the book as a potential candidate for the ﬁrst Arab to be recognized as one of the “Righteous among the Nations,” and who in fact was subsequently nominated by Satloff. Yet the record of heroism among the few righteous that Satloff was able to locate is sometimes more ambiguous than he acknowledges. According to one testimony, Si Kaddour Benghabrit, leader of the Great Mosque of Paris, was responsible for sheltering “no fewer than 1,732” resistance ﬁghters in the mosque, of whom Jews “were by far the most numerous,” a claim that has not been corroborated by surviving witnesses. As noted, Satloff interviewed the current head of the mosque, Dalil Boubakeur, who conﬁrmed the role of the institution in helping Jews but was unwilling to acknowledge the individual role played by Benghabrit. The story casts doubt on the number of Jews who were sheltered, although there is evidence that the mosque produced certiﬁcates of Muslim identity for Jews. A Vichy document handed to the author by Boubakeur reports that the authorities called on the imam to stop the mosque from fraudulently issuing Muslim certiﬁcates to Jews. Satloff remarks that in other instances the mosque’s leader rejected Jews’ claims to be Muslims, which meant that they would be considered Jews by the authorities. Still, Satloff concludes with the suggestion that the fundamentals of the story are what matters: “Whether Benghabrit the person or the mosque as an institution deserves recognition for helping to save Jews is less important than the fact that acts of rescue took place” (p. 158). A more complex reality has been revealed by Ethan Katz who, in the course of researching his doctoral dissertation on Muslim-Jewish relations in France, found evidence that Benghabrit maintained quite warm relations with Vichy’s Commissariat Générale aux Questions Juives. In a random sampling of the archives, he also discovered that in four cases (involving eight individuals) in which Benghabrit was consulted, he did not identify the claimants as Muslims, which meant that they would have been classiﬁed as Jews by Vichy.1 Satloff’s analysis is thus very much shaped by his present concerns and goals, which sometimes undermines his accuracy and understanding of the historical context. The book makes a number of overarching generalizations about Arabs and Jews of Arab lands that are inaccurate or incomplete, such as the process by which Jews obtained French citizenship in North Africa, and although he admits to the diversity of ethnic groups among Muslims and Jews, he often resorts to easy stereotypes of Arabs and of Jews in Arab lands, blurring the many distinctions in time and place. While Satloff is undoubtedly correct in his generalization on the tendency of Arabs to deny or ignore the Holocaust in order to delegitimize the Jews’ claim to

Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide

245

Palestine, the degree to which Arabs were exceptional in their ignorance and denial of the Holocaust is somewhat overblown. His remark that “historians in most Arab countries are more like court chroniclers of long-dead dynasties” is certainly not the case for Morocco and Tunisia, the two countries that receive the most attention in his book. Indeed, Satloff frequently cites Mohammed Kenbib, a Moroccan historian who has researched and published on Moroccan Jews under Vichy.2 Yet Satloff does make an important contribution to understanding the experience of Jews of the Maghrib under Vichy, Italian fascist rule in Libya, and the short-lived German occupation in Tunisia from November 1942 to May 1943. He is not the ﬁrst to tell this story, and he draws from other authors such as Michel Abitbol and Michael Laskier. What makes his account unique are the personal, often poignant narratives of Jews and Muslims whom he interviewed; this is why his book will likely have a greater impact than the more scholarly studies that are mainly known to specialists. That Jews in North Africa suffered greatly during the war because of the “Holocaust’s long reach into Arab lands,” only spared much greater calamity because of logistics and the fortunes of war, is still largely unknown to the general public. Satloff’s story also correctly points to the lacunae in our knowledge, the recognition that there is little time left to locate and interview remaining survivors to tell their stories. Gaps in his account invite further work in the archives to complete the picture of the experience of Jews in Arab lands during the Second World War. Such research would likely reveal both a far greater number of Arab heroes and villains, and a much more ambivalent stance of some of the public ﬁgures who continue to be revered by Jews from Arab lands and by Satloff in this book. Finally, a more comparative study might show that the attitudes and actions of Arabs during the war were not so exceptional, no better or worse than other populations under fascist and Nazi rule in Europe. Daniel J. Schroeter University of Minnesota

Notes 1. “Identities on Trial: Jews and Muslims in France during the Second World War,” paper delivered at the Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies, Toronto, 16 Dec. 2007. Benghabrit’s letters are not in the archives, but are rather alluded to in the documents (personal communication from Ethan Katz, 17 Jan. 2008). 2. Mohammed Kenbib, Juifs et musulmans au Maroc, 1859–1948 (Rabat: 1994).

Gary Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. xiii + 266 pp.

Gary Weissman’s Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust makes the important point that, for many of us, the challenge of the Holocaust is not that its horrors seem so overwhelming as to be impossible to

246

Book Reviews

confront, but, on the contrary, that the events of the catastrophe have come to seem painfully remote and inaccessible. Hence, in Weissman’s view, the desire of many Holocaust scholars and artists to bring the events closer, to ﬁnd a way to experience the horror for themselves. “Many of us [who think and write about the Holocaust] are searching for ways to gain access to and ‘remember’ the Holocaust that eludes us” (p. 5), writes Weissman simply and matter-of-factly. Yet what Weissman means by this apparently straightforward statement is, despite the collegial “us,” hardly as neutral as it might at ﬁrst seem. Weissman does more than remind us, as have scholars such as Dominick LaCapra, that each of us views the Holocaust from a very speciﬁc position, which it is incumbent upon us to take into account. Rather, he sees in many of the studies of the Holocaust that have been produced over the last ﬁfty years a decided tendency on the parts of individual scholars toward an over-identiﬁcation with Holocaust victims (both those who survived, and, perhaps, even more problematically, those who did not). There is, he suggests, a tendency toward projecting onto the story of the Holocaust one’s own private fantasies, wishes, and designs. Speaking speciﬁcally of Alfred Kazin and Elie Wiesel but summarizing much of his general argument, Weissman notes that the Holocaust “serves as that site where our own identity crises can gain dramatic intensity and be lent profound meaning” (p. 39); “through an identiﬁcation with the right survivor, one’s own spiritual struggle or existential crisis may be endowed with an aura of pathos and gravity, an intensity by association” (p. 40). In order to support this weighty accusation, Weissman focuses on four major interpreters of the Holocaust. Two of them are literary critics: the aforementioned Alfred Kazin and Lawrence Langer. Two are ﬁlmmakers: Steven Spielberg and Claude Lanzmann. For Kazin, Weissman argues, the writings of Elie Wiesel served as a vehicle for the expression of his own religious crises, making Kazin’s motivations in writing about Wiesel nothing less than “selﬁsh”—even though much of Kazin’s critique of Wiesel, Weissman concedes, may well be credible (p. 77). In relation to Lawrence Langer, an early pioneer in the ﬁeld of Holocaust literature and most famous, perhaps, for his writings on survivor testimony, Weissman is even more critical. His “sympathy for ‘former victims,’ ” writes Weissman, “competes with contempt for ‘survivors,’ ” because, according to Weissman, “he desires to get close not to the person, but to ‘the Holocaust experience’ that may be extracted from the person’s life story” (p. 118). This tendency toward literally experiencing the Holocaust is realized in an even more objectionable fashion in Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, “which moves viewers closer to the illusory experience of being there to witness the Holocaust for themselves” (p. 206). Though Claude Lanzmann criticizes Spielberg on just these grounds, Shoah, in Weissman’s view, also “marks the desire for the real . . . indeed, a desire to come closer to the horriﬁc reality of the death camps seems a prerequisite for wanting to watch a nine-and-a-half hour documentary ﬁlm on the Nazi death camps” (p. 205). “Shoah,” Weissman concludes, “whets the appetite for a ﬁlm like Schindler’s List” (p. 206). Although Weissman’s study focuses on these particular instances of such projective fantasies of witnessing, the book’s sweep is extremely broad, touching on many different ﬁgures, issues, and terminologies in the ﬁeld of Holocaust studies. This is part of the strength of the book: it is thoroughly researched, well-informed, and

Antisemitism, Holocaust, and Genocide

247

comprehensive. It provides important materials and striking insights into those materials. But the breadth of Weissman’s book is also somewhat troubling, as is the rather idiosyncratic selection of ﬁgures on whom he focuses: Alfred Kazin, for example, for all of his importance as an intellectual and as a literary critic, is not the ﬁrst name that springs to mind as a major scholar of Holocaust literature. Weissman’s detailed, often fascinating analysis of Kazin’s relationship to Elie Wiesel, which also contains some penetrating comments on Wiesel, belongs more to a study of Kazin and/or Wiesel than to Holocaust studies generally. To be sure, there is all manner of misuse, appropriation, and sensationalistic, lurid imagining that has gone on, both in Holocaust art and in historical, literary critical, and many other sorts of commentaries. Yet in Weissman’s book almost all of us in the ﬁeld of Holocaust studies stand accused of exploiting the Holocaust to our own ends—except, one has to note, Weissman himself, which makes one want to interrogate his subject position as well (at the very least, he should have done this himself). What fantasy and projection is served for Weissman by his wholesale condemnation of a group of highly serious, intelligent, and, it seems to me, extremely perceptive scholars, who do acknowledge precisely what Weissman would have them acknowledge, namely “that the experience of listening to, reading, or viewing witness testimony is substantially unlike the experience of victimization” (p. 20)? Take, for example, the coining of a series of terminologies that Weissman ﬁnds suspect. He writes that, “in an effort to distinguish between the actual witnesses who lived through the Holocaust and those who know the Holocaust only in mediated form, some commentators refer to the latter as ‘secondary witnesses,’ ‘vicarious witnesses,’ ‘retrospective witnesses,’ ‘witnesses by adoption,’ or, ‘witnesses through the imagination.’ ” Yet, Weissman continues: “I resist these terms because I believe that such a broadening of the term witness, as well as similar uses of the terms memory and trauma, contributes to a wishful blurring of otherwise obvious and meaningful distinctions between the victims and ourselves, and between the Holocaust and our own historical moment” (p. 20). Therefore, Weissman coins the term nonwitness. But isn’t this neologism just as problematical as the terms Weissman is hereby rejecting? After all, he constructs the word out of the same word “witness” that he ﬁnds so inappropriate and ill-considered in the use of other scholars. In a book as negative as this one, the fact that Weissman’s use of the term “witness” proceeds through a process of negating it, only deepens the problem. The term nonwitness carries with it the troubling possibility of a wish not to witness. There are, of course, those who, for whatever reasons, know nothing about the Holocaust nor are ever likely to and who might therefore be referred to, nonjudgmentally, as nonwitnesses. But for those of us who do know, what would it mean to claim of ourselves that we are nonwitnesses? After all, to “witness” isn’t to be so narrowly deﬁned as to mean only and exclusively seeing or knowing by personal presence, which is only the fourth of ﬁve deﬁnitions my dictionary gives. To witness is also to testify to, to provide evidence of, even to constitute the scene of, as when we speak of bearing witness, say, to our beliefs, or to someone else’s pain. To witness in this sense has an “as if” quality to it, as when, during the Pesach seder, Jews take upon themselves to experience the exodus from Egypt, as if it had happened to them.

248

Book Reviews

To be sure, there can be a psychotic or narcissistic collapsing of distance between then and now, between me or us and those who died or survived a living hell none of us will ever truly know or understand. Many of the terms employed in Holocaust studies could do with a good airing. But it seems to me that terms such as “vicarious witness” are precisely attempts to place oneself in the position of the as if: to witness, which is to say, to respond to another’s suffering (what Dori Laub, Emanuel Levinas, and others would have us do), and by so doing to validate that suffering, as well as to oblige victims, survivors, and witnesses in their request that we credit these events as having happened and that we not let them be “forgotten.” Hence the problematical term memory, which in its inaccuracy does nonetheless astutely register what is being asked of the generations following the Holocaust: not simply to ensure that it makes its way into the history books but that we somehow “remember” it—whatever that might mean. Much of the terminology of the ﬁeld (including Weissman’s term “nonwitness”) expresses the honest struggle to comprehend. It represents a groping toward a speciﬁc kind of knowledge that isn’t only factual, but emotional as well, and it is an attempt to bear witness as best we can to the pain of others. To put my criticism of Weissman’s book as simply as possible, it lacks generosity. And being ungenerous, it needlessly sacriﬁces depth and nuance. One may disagree with Kazin’s reading of Elie Wiesel, for example. One might even concur in Weissman’s extended and often brilliant analysis of the tug-of-war between these two writers. But to be unable to imagine that these men, or Langer, or Spielberg, or Lanzmann, or, for that matter, the rest of us Holocaust scholars (including Weissman himself), do not bring to their arguments a sense of pain, ambivalence, helplessness, responsibility, and a host of other complex emotions is to miss too much of what the ﬁeld is about. Dominick LaCapra once said concerning the temptation to silence in relation to what can and cannot be said about the Holocaust that “there is a sense in which silence may indeed be the only way to confront a traumatic past, but . . . this contention does not justify a speciﬁc silence concerning something that can be said or with respect to the problem of attempting to say what can be said in the face of the risk that language may break down in a more or less telling manner.”1 I would adapt LaCapra’s wisdom in the following way: nonwitnessing may indeed be the only decorous way of signaling that we who now write and speak about the Holocaust were not there, and yet this acknowledgment does not justify refusing to witness what can be witnessed. Because of the way he approaches his material, Wiessman becomes a nonwitness not only to the tragedy of the Holocaust but to the ﬁeld of scholarship he seeks to critique. Emily Miller Budick The Hebrew University

Note 1. Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: 1994), 122–123.

Cultural Studies and Religion

Samantha Baskind, Encyclopedia of Jewish American Artists. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2007. 323 pp.

This volume offers short biographies, usually accompanied by illustrations (some in color), of 85 artists, sculptors, and photographers who were (or still are) both Americans and Jews. Artistically speaking, they have little in common: they work in various styles and are members of different schools, ranging from social realism (the Soyers) to pop art (Lichtenstein) to abstract expressionism (Newman and Rothko, among others). Some are famous, others quite obscure, at least to me. A few had deep roots in East European Jewish culture (Chaim Gross and Max Weber, for example), but most are second– or third-generation Americans, well integrated into American culture and far removed from the old country. Does this volume belong to the well-known genre of Jewish apologetics, or does Samantha Baskind really wish to convince us that these artists have participated in the creation of a corpus of “Jewish art?” If the latter is her intention, she is not very successful. In her introductory material she agonizes over the meaning of “Jewish art” but fails to come up with a satisfactory deﬁnition, perhaps because there is none. One possibility is that “Jewish art” focuses on Jewish themes, whether religious or secular. However, such subject matter can just as easily be painted, sculpted, or photographed by non-Jews (Rembrandt, for example). Can non-Jews, then, create “Jewish art?” Was Rembrandt a “Jewish artist?” If a French artist paints a Spanish landscape, would that be considered “Spanish art?” I doubt it. Then there is the problem of dealing with artists of Jewish origin who do not take the slightest interest in Jewish themes of any kind—Modigliani, for example, or Pissarro. Are they “Jewish artists” in any meaningful sense of the word? In such cases the determined researcher will hunt for subtexts that might reveal a Jewish message, no matter how well concealed from the innocent observer. Our author embraces this strategy with enthusiasm. She claims (p. xiv) that Raphael Soyer’s moving depictions of homeless people during the Depression derive from the Jewish notion of “tikun ’olam,” repairing the world, even though he does not say so. One might also argue that his concern with the poor was the result of his left-wing political views and were unrelated to anything in his Jewish background. Our author’s rejoinder would be, no doubt, that his socialism derived, consciously or unconsciously, from his understanding of Judaism. And so it goes. Baskind admits that some of her artists explicitly denied that they were creating “Jewish art.” An example is Philip Pearlstein, who, when asked whether there was 249

250

Book Reviews

anything Jewish about his work, answered: “almost nothing” (p. 217). But such denials, to the experienced expert on Jewish affairs, can, paradoxically, reveal an interest in Jewishness (after all, to paraphrase a well-known saying, a Jew who denies his or her Jewishness is still a Jew). The author is nothing if not an industrious and relentless investigator, and to her credit she has discovered that many of these artists do in fact deal with Jewish themes, at least sometimes. Probably the most famous case is that of the recently deceased R.B. Kitaj, the American-born ﬁgurative artist who spent much of his life in London; Kitaj produced many works on explicitly Jewish themes, and even wrote about his interest in Jewish history (this is quite unusual). Another example is Ben Shahn, who published a well-known Haggadah. Max Weber, the pioneer American cubist, made several memorable depictions of Jews at prayer. But others listed here never came close to Jewish themes in their paintings and photographs, an example being the popular photographer Irving Penn. As for the great Alfred Stieglitz, we learn that he promoted the careers of such Jewish artists such as Abraham Walkowitz and Max Weber, but that is about it. Concerning his famous photograph “The Steerage,” which depicts immigrants of undetermined ancestry returning to Europe from America, Baskind writes that “it may be possible to understand Stieglitz’s initial attraction to the scene as related to his Jewishness” (p. 275). Well, maybe, but this sounds like special pleading to me. A particular challenge is the work of the abstract expressionists, who by deﬁnition did not paint identiﬁable subjects. Concerning the most celebrated, Mark Rothko, Baskind cites the art historian Matthew Baigell’s claim that “no other artist explored the Holocaust as consistently as Rothko” (p. 231), a claim for which no proof is offered but which is accepted by our author as the gospel truth. She also thinks, again following Baigell, that those of Rothko’s compositions that contain “Christian religious imagery” are also related to his Jewishness. With this approach, one cannot lose. Baskind’s forte is not analysis, and she can make some unintentionally hilarious comments, as when she describes the feminist painter Judy Chicago (née Cohen) as “the daughter of assimilated parents—her father descended from twenty-three generations of rabbis . . .” (p. 73). Whether or not this is true, Chicago did produce an important work explicitly relating to the Holocaust. Baskind does not take up the possibly fruitful idea that there is a Jewish artistic tradition of universalism, often (but not always) linked to the political left, and found in the works of such diverse Jewish artists as Oppenheim, Chagall, and Gropper. Speaking of the left, Baskind avoids any discussion of the fact that some of her artists were deeply involved in the cultural work of the Communist party in America. This was certainly true in the case of William Gropper, whose work as cartoonist for the Yiddish communist newspaper Di Frayheyt is not emphasized here, and it was also true of Louis Lozowick and the Soyers, among others. Whether this signiﬁcant omission is caused by ignorance, or by a desire to repress unpleasant aspects of these artists’ biographies, I do not know. It is not surprising that her inadequate bibliography does not include two important books that have much to say about Jewish artists and the left in America— Andrew Hemmingway’s Artists on the Left (2002) and Bram Dijkstra’s American Expressionism (2003).

Cultural Studies and Religion

251

Despite its rather low level of analysis, this is a useful volume for historians of Jewish culture in America. It is surprising how many good artists of Jewish origin one can ﬁnd, if one looks hard enough. Baskind’s interviews with some of the artists provide interesting material. Jewish American Artists takes its place alongside similar compilations of Jews in sports, in the cinema, and so forth, and makes us feel good that we belong to such an artistic nation. Ezra Mendelsohn The Hebrew University

Menachem Butler and Zev Nagel (eds.), My Yeshiva College: 75 Years of Memories. Brooklyn: Yashar Books, 2006. 386 pp.

Yeshiva University today consists of a network of undergraduate and graduate schools whose core is the yeshiva itself, now known as the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS), the successor to the Etz Hayyim yeshiva founded in immigrant poverty in 1896, and Yeshiva College, which opened in 1928 and underwent many hardscrabble years. As a rule, undergraduate male students must attend simultaneously the yeshiva and the college; consequently they are committed to a heavy but rich program of studies. (Women undergraduates study at Stern College, situated in midtown Manhattan, a distance away from the main campus in Washington Heights.) In this volume, memory and nostalgia are focused on the men’s college and the yeshiva. It contains the reﬂections and recollections of 64 alumni ranging from the 1930s until the opening of the 21st century. But it also includes words of criticism and evaluation. The editors, both of them recent graduates of Yeshiva College, explain that the contributors to My Yeshiva College were asked to recall their time at the school and to make recommendations for its future. However, matters turn out somewhat differently. Certain articles are memorial tributes to rashei yeshivah (yeshiva heads) who taught at the yeshiva only, not at Yeshiva College. Some of these scholars, moreover, by no means sympathized with the institution’s professed idea of torah umad’a (Torah and secular learning), and preferred instead torah lishm’a (Torah for its own sake). However, the towering presence of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, an academically trained philosopher and powerful Talmudist who exempliﬁed torah umad’a in his own life, offset his colleagues’ reservations. Despite the lack of a memorial article devoted to him, Soloveitchik, who is referred to simply as “the Rav,” looms constantly in the memory of alumni as teacher, intellectual mentor, and model; he is always spoken of in superlatives. My Yeshiva College is divided into three parts corresponding to the three presidents of the institution, Bernard Revel, the founder who died in 1940, Samuel Belkin, and Norman Lamm, who recently retired. The contributors range in age from the 20s into the 80s and perhaps even beyond. About half of them have been rabbis and educators, including at Yeshiva itself, and most of the others have pursued careers in the secular academic world, mainly in mathematics, law, and the natural sciences. There are also some practicing lawyers and businessmen.

252

Book Reviews

This book goes beyond being a simple, affectionate collection of tributes and memories since it includes evaluations and suggestions offered in response to the editors’ invitation. The most enlightening seem to be those originating in the secular academic world, many from men who admit they no longer practice Orthodox Judaism. Yet they too express their indebtedness to the intense textual study at Yeshiva that stressed the penetrating grasp of central problems, especially as taught to them by the peerless Rabbi Soloveitchik. Several contributors look back to the late 1960s, when Yeshiva, although not buffeted by the storms that beset many other campuses in America, passed through a period of open discussion of nearly everything, with no—or almost no—holds barred. Such discussion was led by Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, Aharon Lichtenstein, and the late Charles Liebman; the last two later settled in Israel. Yeshiva students and the contributors are very articulate, but those few years were probably the only time that they could have felt part of the great American campus. The very openness of that period, however, distressed many students and their teachers. Contributors who lived through the 1960s at Yeshiva express their unhappiness today that the institution has shifted to a more rigorous Orthodoxy, although they imply that such a shift originates more in changes in students’ thinking rather than in rulings by the administration. There are also some scores being settled. Yehuda Mirsky complains of the unfair treatment of his deceased father, David Mirsky, who taught English at Yeshiva, and Norman Lamm ruefully recounts how a quirky teacher (praised by others in the book) caused him to quit studying philosophy. Lamm’s recollections are of special interest because they record how, as a former pupil of a “narrow and restricted education” at the Torah Va Daath yeshiva, he was captivated upon his being exposed to torah umad’a at Yeshiva. Also noteworthy is a sharp (and very recent) passage at arms between Aharon Lichtenstein and Irving Greenberg. The reader will ﬁnd this and other pleasures in this stimulating volume. Lloyd P. Gartner Tel Aviv University

Alyson Pendlebury, Portraying ‘the Jew’ in First World War Britain. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006. xiv + 256 pp.

Since the 1980s, the University of Southampton has established itself as an unlikely but ﬂourishing center for Jewish studies in England. This book is a product of a new generation of students produced by Southampton. It reﬂects the research preoccupations of a faculty that, just a few years ago, comprised almost the entire younger generation of historians of 20th century Anglo-Jewry, including Tony Kushner, David Cesarani, and Mark Levene (who wrote the foreword). Once dubbed the “Young Turks” of the ﬁeld, they have now graduated to become the establishment. Alyson Pendlebury’s background is in English literature and, as she herself acknowledges, her work has been strongly inﬂuenced by Brian Cheyette (another of the 1980s

Cultural Studies and Religion

253

generation), whose inﬂuential book, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945, appeared in 1993. This is her ﬁrst book, based on her doctoral dissertation, and the academic dissertation writing style has not been completely shaken off, especially in the careful summings-up at the end of each chapter. She explores British society’s “views on the Jews” during the First World War through the prism of varied texts ranging from political speeches, fringe pamphlets, and newspaper articles, through religious tracts and sermons by leading clergymen, to popular novels. She systematically dissects this material, whether “wacky” or heavyweight (for instance, from the anti-vice National Social Purity Campaign, the millenarian Prophecy Investigation Society, and the proto-fascist The Britons Publishing Company), in the light of her chosen themes—which she terms “tropes”—all of them drawn from the dominant Christian religious context: Crusade, Holy War, Conversion, Cruciﬁxion, and Apocalypse. These themes are applied in turn to the politics of the period: the struggles and sacriﬁces of the Great War, fears of “alien” invasion, contamination by disease, white slavery, and Communism, and reveal an apparent preoccupation with “the Jew” at the center of the story. For this was the era of the Red Scare, of “Boche, Bolshie and the Jewish Bogey,” when wartime insecurities were projected onto Jewish immigrants in the East End of London who, at the time, were (barring the Irish) the only “ethnic” minority in the country.1 Even the London Times brieﬂy gave credence to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, until that newspaper’s own correspondent unmasked it as a tsarist forgery in 1921. The chapters take both the broad and the long view, going back as far back as the Crusades and projecting forward, in the conclusion, to Mel Gibson and the recent resurrection of the blood libel. The result is not an entirely satisfactory read because the construct is essentially artiﬁcial. While the literary analysis is honed and the theology is clearly explained, Pendlebury’s grasp of historical context is not quite so sure. The chapters do not always hang together, sometimes confusingly wandering from external “views on the Jews” to Jewish self-perceptions. Pendlebury has dug up several deservedly obscure writers, some of whom were of Jewish origin, or else were living on the margins of the Jewish community—in many cases insufﬁcient biographical information is given to be entirely sure. Their identities are ambivalent and their work is decidedly second-rate. It is a moot point whether detailed academic analysis of melodramatic novels or mawkish poems, which cannot seriously contend with Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, or even Israel Zangwill, is really warranted or tells us anything fresh about England in the Edwardian era and in the early 1920s. Still, Pendlebury’s study casts light on some of the stranger byways of English society in the early 20th century. Sharman Kadish University of Manchester

Note 1. Sharman Kadish, Bolsheviks and British Jews: The Anglo-Jewish Community, Britain and the Russian Revolution (London: 1992), 10.

254

Book Reviews

Daniel Rynhold, Two Models of Jewish Philosophy: Justifying One’s Practices. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 262 pp.

Two Models of Jewish Philosophy is a clearly written, closely reasoned, and wellresearched but ultimately misleading work. “Its central aim,” Daniel Rynhold states, “is the construction of a model for the rationalization of practices in general” (p. 3). This is a difﬁcult philosophical question that continues to be discussed in professional circles, having particular relevance in the area of ethics—which is, after all, a special class of practices. Yet this “central aim” is relegated to the subtitle. According to Rynhold, “this model can be found in the sources of Jewish philosophy, those being the contrasting approaches to the subject of ta’amei hamitzvot (rationalizing the commandments) of Moses Maimonides and Joseph Soloveitchik” (pp. 2–3). By the end of the book, however, the Jewish dimension has been scaled down to the following: “I have attempted to take certain threads which are present within the Jewish tradition and place them within a philosophic framework” (p. 237). From this concluding chapter and from the book’s title, it is clear that the author’s primary focus has been to apply his thesis, which he calls “priority of practice” (“Practice [itself] contains its own rationality in that it yields a reasoned conﬁdence in itself” [p. 175]), to Jewish philosophy. The “Two Models of Jewish Philosophy” referred to in the title are ﬁrst, the traditional approach, termed “priority of theory,” which is represented by both Maimonides and R. Soloveitchik, and second, Rynhold’s proposed priority of practice model. There are thus three vantage points from which a reviewer might judge this work: as a new approach to Jewish philosophy; as a model for the justiﬁcation of practice in general; or as an examination of the signiﬁcance of “Jewish sources” for the author’s proposed theory. I would like to focus on the last point. At the center of Rynhold’s work lies the philosophical question of the conditions of adequacy of “rationality” and “justiﬁcation.” That is, what are acceptable reasons for holding a belief or performing an action? In everyday life, it is generally accepted that one rationally justiﬁes one’s beliefs by presenting adequate evidential grounds for holding them (otherwise, they may be regarded as foolish, false, or even dangerous), whereas practices can be rationally justiﬁed by showing how they lead to a desired end (otherwise, they are judged to be aimless and erratic). Religious beliefs and moral systems, however, traditionally have had problems with these commonsense standards. Religious beliefs seem to lack empirical evidence, and while moral systems can show, for example, that certain practices conform to principles such as justice or benevolence, they have difﬁculty justifying the choice of these principles as ends. Religion, however, generally has not had a problem with justifying practices because of its claim that its practices (whether moral or ritual) bring the performer closer to God, an end whose value should be self-evident. With this background, it is surprising that Rynhold should hope to ﬁnd ideas that could be applied to the problems of justifying practices in general in the writings of two Jewish (traditional) theologians on the subject of ta’amei hamiz. vot. At times, Rynhold seems to be aware of this but evades addressing the basic objection. Neither

Cultural Studies and Religion

255

Maimonides nor R. Soloveitchik discuss ta’amei hamiz. vot in the sense of trying to justify why one chooses to perform certain acts. Since for both of them these are commandments ordained by God, to whom obedience is self-evident, there is no need for such justiﬁcation. Rather, on the premise that God is rational, Maimonides wishes to determine why God commanded these particular practices, whereas R. Soloveitchik’s preference for what he calls “descriptive hermeneutics” over teleological explanation stems not from a need to justify performance but from his special interest in analyzing the unique structure and underlying concepts of halakhah.1 Therefore, to say, as does Rynhold, that R. Soloveitchik has taken “the ﬁrst step towards forming a genuinely alternative method of rationalization” (p. 102) is hardly warranted. Additional “threads” in Judaism that Rynhold ﬁnds suggestive of his priority of practice approach are the emphasis on practice, as in placing na’aseh (“we will do”) before nishm’a (“we will hearken”), the acceptance of plural views in the Agadah, and the distinction between obligations for Jews as opposed to non-Jews. Yet these unusual but integral aspects of Jewish theology take their essential meaning from the whole in which they are embedded. Rynhold’s project involves cutting off these “threads” from the fabric of Judaism and weaving them into a new “garment.” Clearly, however, the Jewish origin of these “threads” is irrelevant to the question of the adequacy of the new “garment” either as a theory for justifying practices in general or for Jewish philosophical use. In my judgment, Rynhold’s priority of practice approach to the general philosophical problem of justifying one’s practices will ﬁnd an appreciative audience primarily among those who, like him, have given up on the traditional priority of theory approach. That is, they have concluded on logical grounds that theory or general principles can never justify practices. Such individuals may be persuaded to grapple with the idea that repeated practice, that is “habituation” and the “reasoned conﬁdence” it breeds, can somehow be construed as a sort of practical wisdom or knowledge. But this would be a radically new and different concept of “rationality” that I, for one, see no need to adopt. In applying his priority of practice approach to Judaism, Rynhold states: “Jewish philosophy is an enterprise whereby we uncover the concepts and ideas embodied within the practice” (p. 245). In order for us to take this proposal seriously, Rynhold must tell us what speciﬁc practices he is referring to; why he has chosen these particular practices; by what method he intends to “uncover” the embodied concepts; and ﬁnally, assuming that he does “uncover” certain “ideas” or “concepts,” what signiﬁcance these would have. Perhaps he can do this in his next publication. Shubert Spero Bar-Ilan University

Note 1. See my article “The Role of Descriptive Hermeneutics in the Thought of the Rav,” BDD [Bekhol Derakheha Daehu] Journal of Torah and Scholarship, no. 18 (April 2007), BarIlan University, 29–43.

History and the Social Sciences

Nathan Abrams, Commentary Magazine, 1945–59: ‘A Journal of Signiﬁcant Thought and Opinion.’ London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2007. xx + 201 pp.

One wonders why Edward Luttwak, a military strategist and expert on international relations, was chosen to write the foreword to this book on American and Jewish culture as reﬂected in Commentary; but he has written a concise summary of Nathan Abrams’ narrative: “Commentary [would be] contradictory anywhere in the world except in the United States: it is both a political journal that addresses the largest issues of the day in articles that routinely attract both national and international attention, and an emphatically Jewish magazine, committed to the promotion of both the culture and the religion of the Jews (p. ix).” In the postwar United States, at least until 1970, the magazine was certainly central to American intellectual life, which it helped illuminate and shape. Indeed, an article in Public Opinion Quarterly in 1971 said that only the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker had more inﬂuence on U.S. intellectuals than did Commentary magazine. Abrams has thus chosen an important subject. He has read widely and has been indefatigable in his pursuit of archival materials. But since there are no citations, I have to assume he has not had access to the Commentary ﬁles themselves. Why he fails to tell us about this is a mystery. His interviews—more than three dozen, by my count—with most of the relevant parties, including Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Norman Podhoretz, Sylvia Cohen, Irving Kristol, and Robert Warshaw, only partially make up for this deﬁciency. The most critical ﬁgure was Elliot E. Cohen (1899–1959), the founder of the magazine. A child prodigy born in Iowa but raised in Mobile, Alabama, Cohen was admitted to Yale at 14. He emerged as an extraordinary, somewhat arrogant polymath and leftist who joined a number of Communist front organizations, but never the party. He shifted from the Stalinist left to the Trotskyist left in the 1930s, and then, parting from his MarxistModernist friends who built Partisan Review, became a dedicated anti-Communist. Cohen, Abrams tells us, told a young student that “Commentary had been created by the American Jewish Committee to prove to the world that there were anti-Communist Jewish intellectuals” (p. 48). But right-of-center ideology did not deﬁne the magazine when its ﬁrst issue came out in 1945, and even when it began to do so during the Cold War, Commentary remained open to a wide variety of viewpoints and included authors who collectively deﬁed political homogenization. Under the leadership of Cohen, who had a great eye for literature, the magazine published (among other writers of note) Delmore Schwartz, Meyer Levin, Saul Bellow, Randall Jarrell, Isaac Babel, Norman Mailer, George Orwell, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. 256

History and the Social Sciences

257

Abrams also shows that, starting with its very ﬁrst issue and for several years after its founding, Commentary was affected by the gray cloud of Holocaust shock (belying, incidentally, the conventional notion that this historic enormity was little discussed before the 1960s). Given the fact that nearly half of European Jewry was extinguished, Cohen, as Abrams shows, felt a great responsibility for promoting a common Jewish culture and spiritual heritage, and at the same time hoped to inspire some post-Holocaust synthesis of Jewish thought. Indeed, it seems that this drive was the primary reason for starting the magazine. It was not so much anti-Communism that was the impetus for Commentary, but more the belief, correct in my opinion, that the United States would soon become the hub of Jewish cultural and intellectual civilization, and that Jewish life and experience would become an essential part of American experience. Through 1959 (the point at which Abrams unfortunately ends his study), Commentary had moved away from the parochially Jewish while continuing to publish provocative articles on international and domestic affairs, including a series on racial issues and economic justice. Black authors who wrote for the magazine included the social psychologist Kenneth Clark and the young James Baldwin, whose ﬁrst published short stories appeared in Commentary. Moreover, throughout the 1950s, Commentary was rightly considered a liberal periodical. Even when it began to make anti-Communism its central focus, the magazine’s “liberal anti-Communism” was distinguished from Senator Joseph McCarthy’s thuggish version. Yet there were difﬁculties; on the editorial board and among readers and letter writers there was much grumbling. Commentary editors did note that “protecting American institutions from Communist inﬁltration without at the same time defeating our own traditions of civil liberty” was a “devilishly complex” problem.1 But ultimately (and especially after the Communist takeover in China in 1949, and during the war in Korea), the magazine found itself in the camp of those liberal anti-Communists who were more worried about the threat of Communism and Soviet expansionism and less about civil liberties; more worried about conspiracy and less about a viable future for the anti-Communist left in the United States. This was revealed most clearly in an article by Irving Kristol in 1952. Kristol did not approve of McCarthy; indeed, he labeled him “irresponsible” and a “vulgar demagogue.” Yet he went to considerable lengths to disparage the idea that the senator from Wisconsin constituted a serious threat to American liberties. Kristol himself confessed later: “I did not disassociate myself from McCarthy as vigorously as I should have.” Instead, he attacked liberals—harshly and directly. Several paragraphs in his essay unjustly called into question the authenticity of the anti-Communism of everyone on the liberal left, including the anti-Stalinists. “Liberals,” Kristol wrote, are convinced that it is only they who truly understand Communism and who thoughtfully oppose it. They are nonetheless mistaken, and it is a mistake on which McCarthy waxes fat. For there is one thing the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing. And with some justiﬁcation.2

Later in the same year, Elliot Cohen underscored Kristol’s dismissal of the menace of the Wisconsin demagogue. McCarthy, Cohen wrote, “remains in the popular mind an unreliable second-string blowhard; his only support as a great national ﬁgure is from the fascinated fears of the intelligentsia.”3 Such statements by Cohen and Kristol (and similar

258

Book Reviews

ones by Nathan Glazer) constituted, in the words of Irving Howe, editor of Dissent and an anti-Communist socialist, “a kind of backhanded apology . . . for McCarthyism.” Glazer himself admitted later that he was uneasy with the positions he and other Commentary writers had taken on McCarthyism.4 Even Norman Podhoretz, a third-generation New York intellectual and long-term editor of Commentary, who evolved from left of liberal in the 1950s and early 1960s to neoconservative by 1970, said in 1998 (long after he had dropped the “neo”) that combating Stalinist “ideas and activities through demagogic congressional investigations, and . . . putting people in prison or throwing them out of work, was disgraceful and disgusting.” According to Podhoretz, “the hard anti-Communists around Partisan Review and Commentary in the early 1950s had been more concerned with ﬁghting against the ideas of the Communists and their liberal fellow-travelers than with defending them against their congressional inquisitors.”5 Abrams has written a workmanlike study of Commentary; unfortunately it is as dull as its title. That is surprising given the character and quality of the individuals involved in the history of the magazine (whose circulation increased from 4,341 in 1945 to 20,000 in 1950), the brutal inﬁghting and betrayals among them, and the weighty issues they dealt with. We would, I think, have had a more exciting book (it is, after all, only 186 pages long) had Abrams gone beyond 1959 and dealt with the era of Norman Podhoretz. Perhaps his project can be redeemed by writing, with a little more verve, a second volume. In the meantime, a very good anthology edited by Murray Friedman, Commentary in American Life—which goes beyond 1960, and whose contributors include Nathan Glazer, Terry Teachout, Ruth Wisse, and Abrams himself—will have to do. Gerald Sorin State University of New York at New Paltz

Notes 1. Irving Kristol, “ ‘Civil Liberties,’ 1952—A Study in Confusion,” Commentary 13 (May 1952), 229; Kristol, quoted in Joseph Dorman, Arguing the World: The New York Intellectuals in Their Own Words (New York: 2000), 121. 2. Kristol, quoted in Dorman, Arguing the World, 122, 124. 3. Elliot Cohen, “The Free American Citizen, 1952,” Commentary 14 (September 1952), 229. 4. Howe and Glazer quoted in Dorman, Arguing the World, 122, 124. 5. Norman Podhoretz, Ex-Friends (New York: 2000), 130.

Karen H. Adler, Jews and Gender in Liberation France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xii + 273 pp.

At the conclusion of the Second World War, a liberated France undertook policies to restructure itself and, along the way, to create a foundation narrative that would thoroughly differentiate itself from the Vichy regime. Karen Adler questions the extent to which continuities may have been overlooked in the process of emphasizing the republican contrast with Pétainist ideologies and policies. In her

History and the Social Sciences

259

dissenting version of the story, Adler refutes the notion that Vichy was a “parenthesis” in French history. Postwar attitudes toward Jews and women, including measures to promote a higher birthrate and to attract “desirable” immigrants, bear a striking similarity and continuity with those of both Vichy and the Resistance. Building on Gérard Noiriel’s 1999 book, Les origines républicaines de Vichy, which found republican roots in Vichy’s ethnic policies, Adler’s work emphasizes the continuity of assimilationist goals from the Third Republic through the postwar period. Adler reminds us that republican France, from the time of the Revolution, always required of its citizens some sort of assimilation or conformity to certain requirements. She correctly notes the inherent self-contradiction in the theory of assimilation—it simultaneously embraces notions of immutability of “blood” groups yet not only advocates, but plans for assimilation. Similarly, discussions of “race” slip back and forth between biology and culture, with no clear distinction made between the two (p. 87). Adler, herself, however, calls “Jewishness” a “race” (p. i). She also rejects Patrick Weil’s assertion that assimilation ceased to be a part of French immigration policy in the postwar years (p. 98). Turning to Resistance notions of women, Adler examines the clandestine press, especially those publications destined for women, and ﬁnds them to be of a domestic, rather than a general, political nature. These publications sought to address women’s concerns such as meager rations and the desire for a “normal” home in which fathers were not absent because of war and mothers were not needed in the work force. Even the kind of “anonymous” work that women did in the Resistance prepared them for a return to their traditional place in the postwar period, Adler claims. For example, “the success of the women’s press had relied partly on the fact that any woman could produce a journal in her own kitchen; now, after liberation, the kitchen remained to all intents and purposes her place, and it would be another twenty-ﬁve years before it once again became a site of resistance” (pp. 66–67). Studying the ways in which wartime images were gendered, Adler finds that both Vichy and the Resistance concentrated on defending the French family. Vichy saw it threatened by Jews and immigrants; the Resistance ascribed that role to the Germans, although the paramount importance of population increase was a point on which both sides could agree. This logic leads Adler to a pivotal figure, Georges Mauco, secretary of the Haut Comité Consultatif de la Population et de la Famille, who was appointed by Charles de Gaulle soon after the war (and, thanks to this connection, whitewashed by a purge committee despite his flagrant racist and antisemitic affiliations during the war). Mauco held this position until 1970, and during that long tenure, Adler argues, he was able to create policy encouraging childbirth, as well as to plan for population growth through immigration of desirable groups. Ranking potential immigrants as more or less capable of assimilation, the committee tottered on the brink of biological racism when it endowed supposed ethnic or cultural traits with immutable characteristics. Jews, too, were perceived not as individuals but rather with reference to their collective assimilatory capacity. According to Adler, such modes of thinking about Jews and Jewishness became a model for concepts of national identity and

260

Book Reviews

assimilation that were applied to other groups seeking to immigrate. Jews, unlike women, did fare better in postwar France than they had under Vichy. Yet Adler ﬁnds that they continued to be victims of stereotyping or, as the contemporary jargon would have it, “essentializing.” They were marginalized by their exclusion from the joyous French national experience of liberation. In French public mourning, there was no place for commemorating Jewish deportations, and there were no efforts made to reintegrate the survivors. Jews could not participate in what Adler deems the national unity symbol of liberation France, an image of a mother mourning her son. For Jews, the war would not be remembered as a time when mainly young men had died. Moreover, the Christological reference to Mary mourning Jesus, inherent in that imagery, would deﬁnitively exclude them (pp. 176–178). There are a number of conceptual problems with this book, the ﬁrst being its title. This book is not about Jews, nor about gender, nor about “Liberation France.” In studying the ways in which ideologues and policymakers conceived of Jews, Adler does not study the Jews themselves. As for gender, nothing is said about images of men or masculinity, although there is ample opportunity to do so in a book that concentrates on representations of the consequences of war. Gender here simply means women. Although Adler endeavors to contrast the views held about women and about Jews with the actual reality experienced by them, the evidence she produces is thin. Finally, the term “Liberation France” is misleading, since the time period under consideration embraces pre-war France, Vichy, and the post-liberation Republic. Moreover, Adler expands “Liberation” to mean the triumph of liberal values, especially those regarding women and Jews, not only over Nazi and Pétainist ideology, but also over traditional conservative, church-inﬂuenced right-wing doctrines. Whereas other scholars who have used the term “long liberation” would end it with the establishment of the Fourth Republic in 1947, for Adler it is a highly elastic phrase. She suggests several possible cut-off dates, including 1954, 1968, or even 1995 (p. 5). In her understanding of the French Jewish experience of the postwar period, Adler sees the glass half empty. Indeed, the problems facing Jews were real. They did encounter difﬁculties if they attempted to reclaim apartments and property. It is true, too, that the Jewish speciﬁcity of the war experience was initially minimized by a grieving France. One could even add additional examples, such as the fact that the legal deﬁnition of “deportee” adopted in the aftermath of the war required the individual to have been a French citizen or a resister. De Gaulle and the semiofﬁcial newspaper, Le Monde, largely ignored the Jewish tragedy. That newspaper even managed to publish an entire article on the survivors of the death camps, which spoke of 280,000 deportees and 25,000 survivors, without once mentioning the word “Jew.”1 However, it is also possible to consider the glass as half full. Despite French prejudice, European Jews continued to ﬁnd France an attractive country of destination. Indeed, the acceptance and settlement of approximately 35,000 Jews from Eastern Europe during the ﬁrst three years after the war is noteworthy. Demographic studies suggest that about 80,000 Jewish immigrants—who were

History and the Social Sciences

261

neither deportees nor from countries in North Africa—arrived in France between 1944 and 1970.2 Adler might have done better to avoid using Jews to illustrate the ethnic and racial prejudices of the individuals who set immigration policy for France, because she does not demonstrate an adequate continuity of Jewish hardship in this domain. Had she broadened this category from the outset to foreigners and ethnic groups, the argument regarding continuity might have been easier to sustain. The volume has a large number of major themes, and an even larger number of secondary topics. Unfortunately, the text tends to meander from one theme to another, offering little by way of a roadmap to guide the reader, and frequently losing sight of more signiﬁcant arguments. The chapters often bear titles that state one topic, whereas the text wanders into lengthy digressions. For example, chapter 3 is supposed to discuss “the gendered nation in print,” but it includes long arguments about antisemitism and attitudes toward children and child orphans, both before and after liberation. The most disturbing aspect of Adler’s work, however, is the lack of substantiation of several claims and the descent into polemic. For example, Adler’s defense of oral history (which I did not ﬁnd persuasive) is written as a polemic against its critics, chief among them Annette Wieviorka. When Adler refutes “populationist” notions that the multiple allegiances of women and Jews render them inferior citizens, she counters with the argument that multiple allegiances actually make them superior; simple allegiances, she claims, are more often nefarious than beneﬁcial. When her interviewees state that women felt as unsafe in the streets after the war as they did during it, Adler links this sense of insecurity (without adducing any clear cause and effect) to pro-natalists, for whom “it provided the evidence they needed to dispatch women to the home” (p. 158). An ambitious book, Jews and Gender in Liberation France draws a parallel between two categories of people who cannot assimilate into the dominant group of male Christian Frenchmen. Its underlying premise, one that remains to be proved, is that Jews’ and women’s histories can in some signiﬁcant manner inform each other, and that this insight can suggest proﬁtable directions in future historical research. Phyllis Albert Harvard University

Notes 1. In some cases, demonstrations against the returnees degenerated into near-riots, evoking the cry, “La France aux français!” Even Témoignage Chrétien and the philosopher Gabriel Marcel voiced complaints concerning the “overweening presumption” of the Jews and their urge to “take everything over.” See Tony Judt, Postwar, a History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: 2005), 821. 2. Doris Bensimon and Sergio DellaPergola, La Population juive de France: sociodémographie et identité (Jerusalem: 1984), 36; David Weinberg, “The Renewal of Jewish Life in France after the Holocaust” (Shoah Resource Center, n.d.).

262

Book Reviews

Bat Ye’or, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005. 384 pp.

Western public discourse in the past decade has been punctuated by Spenglarian (The Decline of the West, 1918) chords. The tectonic changes in the makeup of the post-communist world order—globalization, the consolidation of immigrant diasporas in the West, global electronic networking, and the emergence of the European Union (EU) as a bloc aspiring to serve as a counterweight to the United States—have led to ambiguities in the self-identities of all the involved parties. European countries’ particular identities have evinced a staying power vis-à-vis the newly created all-European identity, despite the much debated “weakening of the nation-state.” Concomitantly, foreign immigrant communities are playing upon western ideals of multiculturalism and doctrinaire liberalism as a means of retaining their speciﬁcity, or even as a justiﬁcation for demanding the “re-invention” of the host country’s identity. European efforts to accommodate the growing foreign communities, especially those of Muslims, the most resistant to assimilation, have resulted in the latter’s enhanced presence in the public sphere, both physically (in dress and urban residential clustering) and culturally (in religious education and public discourse). Muslim weight in the EU has been further bolstered by the adoption of an independent western foreign policy motivated by economic interest in oil and imported cheap labor, hence overtly pro-Arab. Yet the realities created by attitudes of appeasement toward Arab countries and Arab/Muslim diasporas have in turn sparked a European awareness of the imbalance between what appears to be an afﬂuent but dependent Europe, decadent, soft, and bereft of conﬁdence, and the vigorous, self-assured, and sometimes ﬁercely dedicated Muslim groupings. Such awareness has been further accentuated by the activities of Muslim terrorist cells, some of them founded by Western-born militants. Old anxieties of cyclical civilizational decline have thus resurfaced: is Europe standing fast in preserving its culture? Does it still stand triumphant both morally and physically? The bluntest clarion call, though not the only one, was sounded by the popular and bold Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci. “Europe is no longer Europe,” she stated in 2003, but was rather teeming “with mullahs, imams, mosques, burqas, chadors” and “thousands of Islamic terrorists,” a “province of Islam, as Spain and Portugal were at the time of the Moors.”1 Much more signiﬁcant was an interview given by the doyen of Middle Eastern studies, Princeton’s Bernard Lewis, to the Hamburg-based daily Die Welt on July 28, 2004, whose headline was “Europe Will be Islamic by the End of this Century at the Very Latest.” Coming from an established academic historian, renowned for his scrupulous research and broad knowledge of the Muslim world, this prediction sent shock waves across the world, affecting attitudes toward current political issues (such as Turkey’s bid to become a member of the EU) and adding fuel to existing demographic, cultural, and religious debates. Fritz Bolkestein of the Netherlands, the outgoing European Union competition commissioner, warned in an address at the University of Leiden (October 2004) that “the liberation of Vienna [from Turkish armies] in 1683 will have been in vain,” and Niall Ferguson, the respected British historian, wrote a piece titled “The Origins of the Great War of 2007—and How It Could Have Been Prevented.”2 As Fallaci summed it up in an interview appearing in the Wall Street Journal on June 23, 2005, “Europe is no longer Europe, it is ‘Eurabia,’ a colony of Islam.”

History and the Social Sciences

263

Eurabia was originally the name of a little-known journal that appeared in the mid1970s, edited by Lucien Bitterlein, the president of the Association for Franco-Arab solidarity, and published collaboratively by the Groupe d’Études sur le Moyen-Orient (Geneva), France-Pays Arabes (Paris), and the Middle East International (London). The articles and editorials in this publication called for common Euro-Arab positions at every level—social, economic, and commercial—and were consequently biased against Israel. In Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, Bat Ye’or takes both the term and its connotation one—huge—step further. Whereas preceding debates mostly dealt with the tipping scale of demographics in favor of Muslims as opposed to Europeans, or else with the vigor of Islamic civilization and religious fervor as compared with the complacency of post-Christian Europe, for Bat Ye’or the issue is no less than a total transformation of Europe’s cultural identity in a predetermined, unidirectional process. Her book warns against “a new Eurabian culture with its own dogma, preachers, axioms and rules” (p. 36), a “new faith,” and a “Euro-Arab human, economic and political symbiosis motivated by European greed and fear” (p. 147). In sum: “The new European civilization in the making can be called a ‘civilization of dhimmitude’ ”(p. 10). “Dhimmitude” is a Bat Ye’or coinage that puts in contemporary conceptual (and inﬂated) terms the historical term dhimmi, a reference to “protected” monotheistic, nonMuslim subjects under Muslim rule. The term “refers to subjugated, non-Muslim individuals or people that accept the restrictive and humiliating subordination to an ascendant Islamic power to avoid enslavement or death” (p. 9). For Bat Yeo’r, this historic legal and social status applies as well to contemporary “Europe, [which] as reﬂected by the institutions of the EU, has abandoned resistance for Dhimmitude and independence for integration with the Islamic world of North Africa and the Middle East . . .” (p. 10). The core of Bat Ye’or’s thesis is that the process of turning Europe into a nation of “dhimmis” was executed by clandestine, meticulous planning on the part of highlevel European and Arab leaders. According to the author, Eurabia was envisaged in 1973 through a system of informal alliances between, on the one hand, the nine countries of the European Community (EC) which, enlarged, became the European Union in 1992 and, on the other hand, the Mediterranean Arab countries. The alliances and agreements were elaborated at the top political level of each EC country with the representative of the European Commission, while Arab counterparts met with the Arab League’s delegate. The ﬁeld of Euro-Arab collaboration covered every domain: from economy and policy to immigration. This was essentially a political project for a total demographic and cultural symbiosis between Europe and the Arab world, according to which Israel would eventually dissolve and America would be isolated and challenged by an emerging Euro-Arab continent. To make this intricate conspiracy less obvious, it was hidden behind “the little known” and inoffensive name of “Dialogue,” that is, the Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD) established in Copenhagen in December 1973 and in Paris in July 1974, each of whose committees was headed jointly by a European and an Arab delegate. The EAD was intended to “open new horizons in every domain: political, economic, social and cultural” (p. 94). In domestic policy, it established close cooperation between Arab and European television and radio stations, journalists, publishing houses, academic and cultural institutions, student and youth associations, and tourist agencies. Church interfaith dialogues were determinant in the development of this policy. “Till this day,” Bat Ye’or claims, “the

264

Book Reviews

Euro-Arab Dialogue is totally unknown to Europeans, even though its occult machinery has engineered Europe’s irreversible transformation through hidden channels” (p. 268). In fact, there is no clear proof for its existence. According to Bat Ye’or, the project was so compromising for Europe that it could not be set forth in written documents and treaties; proceedings and decision-making took place in closed sessions, with no ofﬁcial minutes. But “EEC and subsequently EU documents reveal the development of a new ideology that is producing demographic and cultural change for the purpose of creating conditions for the fulﬁllment of the Eurabian vision” (p. 10). The exposition of such documents constitutes the bulk—dense and almost archival—of the book. In addition to nine appendixes that comprise one-sixth of the book, including the protocols of the Venice Euro-Arab seminar of 1977, the Fez Islamic Conference of 1980, and the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly of 1991, the argument is presented mostly through a plethora of citations from meetings, declarations, letters, and historical statements, some of them dating back to the Qur’an. Eurabia’s main undertaking is to denounce the EU’s biased pro-Arab/Muslim/ Palestinian policy, which in turn spawns the potentially politicidal delegitimization of Israel’s very existence, with its corollary of noxious antisemitism. Bat Ye’or is also determined to expose the problematic rising inﬂuence of Islamism and its concomitant cultural and physical menace to western civilization: terrorism and brutal disturbances on the one hand, and the tyranny of political correctness that takes the prohibition on “hurting the taboos of other cultures” to the extent of banning free speech, on the other. The author’s studious compilation of texts is impressive, as is her painstaking analysis. However, the credibility and hence the efﬁcacy of her work are undermined both by its inﬂamed polemical tone and by its exaggeration in order to create a theoretical model. Particularly self-defeating is the carrying of her thesis to phantasmal extremes, in the style of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion—in this case the Protocols of Mecca and Brussels. Muslim spokespersons do indeed indulge in the eschatological grand design of an ideological-religious takeover of the western world, and the newly reviving identity of a transnational Muslim “ummah,” facilitated by the communications revolution in the global era, provides hope for the realization of this vision. Even though this takeover is supposed to come about mainly through peaceable means, the triumph of the ultimate truth of Islam—the historical notion of jihad, widely applied to isolated political conﬂicts and warfare—does indeed carry the classical overtones of holy wars against the inﬁdels. This, however, is not enough of a basis for proving a concerted Islamic jihad plot, involving all Arab governments, both Islamic and not, to subjugate Europe. As in the case of the Elders of Zion, the assumption that a secret parliamentary body has the ability to transform all of Europe’s political, economic, and cultural institutions into subservient instruments of “jihad” without any of the continent’s population being aware of it, or identifying with it, is untenable. Nor is the sober and balanced quality of much of the author’s analysis well served by applying the historical maxims of Islamdom to present times, such as describing Europe at present as “rapidly assuming the role that dhimmis held in traditional Muslim societies. Dhimmis had to walk to the left side of the Muslims, in the gutter, and accept insult and blows without responding . . . forbidden to carry or possess arms . . . with services, money and humility, they begged forgiveness for their existence” (p. 204).

History and the Social Sciences

265

Similarly, whereas the value systems of most Muslims and most westerners are indeed incongruous, and at some points even antithetical, there is no sign that “Islamist Jihadist values subvert the whole European conception of knowledge, human rights, and fundamental individual liberties” (p. 269.) In fact, it is the very adherence to western values such as liberalism, humanism, and pluralism that led European institutions to appease and accommodate Muslim diaspora communities. Nor are Europeans unaware of certain negative aspects of Muslim culture and values: a comprehensive survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project shows that many in the West see Muslims as fanatical, violent, and as lacking tolerance.3 Formal institutions as well have been known to take a similar stance, as in the issue of the hijab (Islamic dress) both in France and more recently in Britain. Further undermining the validity of Bat Ye’or’s conclusions is the fact that her argument focuses on Europe alone. There is no reference to the strong links between the United States and a number of Arab regimes, including Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the assistance given to prewar Iraq by the U.S. government and U.S. businesses, and its pursuit of economic interests, all of which are denounced, in the case of Europe, as “greed.” Yet the United States is just as eager to accommodate its immigrant Muslim communities as well as to tighten its relationships with Arab/Muslim countries—through the ofﬁcial mission of the U.S. State Department emissary Karen Hughes to improve America’s image in the Arab/Muslim world, through joint cultural, political, and strategic enterprises, and through scholarly exchange programs with Muslim countries.4 Eurabia’s major merit resides in its underscoring the crisis of western identity and the failure of multiculturalism. Both intellectuals and the grass roots, not only in Europe, but also in the United States and even Canada (whose very identity is declared to be multicultural), are having second thoughts about policies aimed at granting equal status and dignity to subaltern minority cultures by accommodating their traditions and self-identities. It is becoming increasingly evident that neither the western nor the Muslim tradition is content with being allowed to thrive within its own boundaries. Both western and Muslim cultures consider themselves as essentially superior and universal, that is, applicable to all humankind not only by right but by necessity. While both parties are pragmatically accepting various modes of co-existence, occasional deviations or outbursts—whether purely ideological or prodded by economic or political drives—are showing that, eventually, the striving for “uniculturalism,” rather than multiculturalism, is the guiding spirit of the day. Whereas the United States is still struggling to project its western value system upon the globe, Europe is awakening to the menace of diluting it. A western nerve, desensitized by global competition, political correctness, and liberal “fundamentalism,” but nevertheless very much alive, is touched and troubled. Rivka Yadlin The Hebrew University

Notes 1. Orianna Fallaci, “The Rage, the Pride and the Doubt,” Wall Street Journal (13 March 2003).

266

Book Reviews

2. Daily Telegraph (15 Jan. 2006); see also George Weigel, “Is Europe Dying? Notes on a Crisis of Civilizational Morale,” European Outlook (March–April 2005); Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within (New York: 2006); and Walter Laqueur, The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent (New York: 2007). 3. Pew Global Attitudes Institute, “The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other” (22 June 2006). 4. On one such enterprise, the educational exchange plan brokered between President George W. Bush and King Abdallah of Saudi Arabia, see Associated Press report of 9 Sept. 2006, online at www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14743889.

Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Michail Liubansky, Olaf Glöckner, Paul Harris, Yael Israel, Willi Jasper, and Julius Schoeps, Building a Diaspora: Russian Jews in Israel, Germany and the USA. Leiden: Brill, 2006. 374 pp.

This book deals with the important topic of transnational diaspora formation, exploring experiences of displacement and home-building among Russian-Soviet Jews (RSJ) on three continents. In the last decade, social scientists in the countries in which large numbers of RSJ reside have found this group to be a gold mine for research. Sociological and ethnographic aspects of their life in the Soviet Union were largely unmapped; paradoxically, these gaps began to be ﬁlled only after the U.S.S.R. ceased to exist and nearly two million Jews emigrated. Apart from investigations carried out in the countries of the former Soviet Union, most of the scholarly work devoted to RSJ has focused on communities that emerged in Israel, the United States, and Germany. This vast body of literature showed convincingly that similarities in the “insertion processes” of RSJ in various countries signiﬁcantly outweigh the differences caused by diverse realities of the receiving societies. The time has now come for a broader panoramic view and comparative work, and this project, undertaken by an international team of researchers from three countries and coordinated by Eliezer Ben-Rafael, proves the urgency of the task. Building a Diaspora is a truly interdisciplinary endeavor. The team included two sociologists, a historian, a demographer, a scholar of culture, a psychologist, and a political scientist, each contributing expertise from his or her respective ﬁeld, which ensured the holographic view of the group under study. The rationale behind this research project is that, in their attitudes and behavior, RSJ challenge the conventional notion of Jewishness—yet as an active and demographically crucial part of the present-day Jewish world, they contribute to its reshaping. The reason for this is not merely a matter of numbers but lies as well in the ﬂexibility demonstrated by this population in confronting change and in their will to succeed in the new environment. The authors were also interested in investigating the nature and dynamics of the transnational ties of the RSJ, which they view as a major case of contemporary diaspora-building. The primary, three-fold aim of the project was to scrutinize the mechanisms of community-building in the three countries, the shaping and evolution of collective identities, and the articulation of self-representation. The study poses several research questions, the most important of which are as follows:

History and the Social Sciences

267

• What behavioral strategies do RSJs adopt when they ﬁnd themselves in various social cultural and political domains? • How open are they to the rediscovery of the Jewish culture that was suppressed in their country of origin? How does the newly founded legacy interact with behavioral patterns and cultural symbols of their pre-emigration life? • What transnational ties have developed among the various RSJ communities, and what serves as the basis for their interconnectedness? The book introduces the reader to various perspectives from which to understand immigration. It dwells on the interaction of push and pull factors that motivate migration. It elaborates on the creation of multiethnic societies in which multiculturalism can be shaped by a top-down strategy of governance or imposed by bottom-up pressures of the migrant groups aspiring for their distinctiveness to be recognized by the rest of the society. The authors revisit such cornerstone concepts of migration theories as assimilation, integration, and acculturation and conclude that, since the 1990s, it has become more appropriate to speak of insertion. Insertion is understood to be a process enabling newcomers to ﬁnd their way in the host society without being pressured to abandon their own culture or detach themselves from their community of origin. Borrowing from the sociolinguistic notions of additive and subtractive bilingualism, the authors introduce the concepts of additive and subtractive multiculturalism. Subtractive multiculturalism, characteristic of assimilation, signiﬁes that the original culture of a migrant group retreats, giving way to the culture of the host society, while additive multiculturalism means that the two coexist and contribute to the hybridity of individual and collective identities. Building a Diaspora also discusses the important issue of what it means to be a diaspora in the globalizing world, where cultural uniformity based on the export of the western model goes hand in hand with the heterogenization of western societies that are increasingly affected by non-western communities found in their midst. The authors’ premise, convincingly proven by the analyses of their material, is that formation of transnational diasporas is part of the twofold process of homegenization and heterogenization: on the one hand, transnational diasporas exist by virtue of common culture and values; on the other, dispersed communities are inevitably inﬂuenced by the cultures of their host societies and, as a result, turn into agents of pluralization. Having established that convergence and divergence of collective experiences are the key issues in the evolution of transnational diasporas, the authors turn to the concept of “collective construction.” This notion is derived from their vision of a collective identity as a complex interaction of beliefs, attitudes, allegiances, behaviors, and actions. Identities are constantly evolving; similarly, a collective is always in the making and is continuously subject to change. Building a bridge between the theoretical and empirical parts of their project, the authors present a model of an evolving community in which they single out three phases of collective construction. First, institutions and organizations are built, which help co-ethnics reconstruct a familiar environment, remain cohesive, and feel comfortable. In the next phase, the group members’ descriptions, values, and interpretations of the group’s singularity are negotiated. The unifying effect of this phase is achieved by self-positioning of the collective vis-à-vis various “others.” Finally, in the third phase, speciﬁc features

268

Book Reviews

of the group’s discourse stabilize and the collective’s uniqueness is stated publicly in confrontational or non-confrontational terms. Consistent with the deﬁnition of collective construction, these three phases demonstrate the interplay of objectively observable facts and more subtle, subjectively expressed understanding of the collective identity. The model is utilized in the subsequent analyses of the data and serves as an analytical tool to evaluate the maturity of the three communities. Having established the theoretical foundation of the study, the book gives a brief history of the great exodus, outlining the factors that triggered Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union in different periods. Importantly, it also seeks to create an ethnographic proﬁle of the émigrés of the 1990s, without which it would be next to impossible to understand common features in the insertion processes in different countries. The resulting portrait emphasizes such traits as pragmatism, overwhelming secularism, high educational and professional status, and attachment to RussianSoviet culture, which in a sense was a substitute for religion in the U.S.S.R. The authors point to ambivalent attitudes toward the country of origin, in which pride in its history and cultural tradition is mixed with resentment against state antisemitism and the regime that caused political instability and economic deprivation. The focus then shifts to different realities confronting émigrés in their different destinations with respect to political stability, economic opportunities, and the status of Jewish communities. These different realities dictated different insertion strategies to newcomers and account for divergences in the communities that evolved. In pursuit of their research objectives, the team deftly employed methodological triangulation by conducting identical surveys and in-depth structured interviews. In addition, they carried out content analyses of the immigrant media and the host societies’ mainstream media covering RSJ. This multifaceted approach ensured cross validation of the statistical data and ﬁeldwork and at the same time enabled the researchers to observe how RSJ build new patterns of social life and how they relate to their country of origin, to host societies, and to other RSJ communities. Even this brief summary of the theoretical and methodological sections of the monograph reveals its importance not only for the study of the RSJ communities but for the investigation of transnational diasporas in general. The rest of the 19 chapters present data analyses and conclusions drawn from them. Given the wealth of material gathered and analyzed, I would like to point out that the structure of the book is extremely reader-friendly: each part is devoted to speciﬁc aspects of collective construction. These are discussed with reference to the material collected separately in each of the three communities, after which comparative analyses are presented and conclusions relevant to the whole of the transnational diaspora of RSJ are made. I will now dwell on the ﬁndings that seem of particular interest. In some studies devoted to RSJ, their stubborn secularism, unwillingness to abandon the language and culture of origin, and strong network ties with co-ethnics are seen as evidence of ghettoization tendencies; in Israel, such tendencies have even been viewed as a threat to the coherence of the Jewish sector of the country. The authors of this study present a much deeper view of what they call “unwillingness to disappear in the crowd.” They indicate that, even before emigration, RSJ were marked by ambivalence. Acculturated and proud to be exponents of Russian culture, most of them were alienated from the languages and culture of their ancestors and ignorant of Jewish history. Yet they did

History and the Social Sciences

269

preserve the perception of their distinctiveness as a minority group, a phenomenon particularly worthy of attention in the absence of institutions and organizations. What was this obscure quality that bound the group together? The authors suggest that it was a perception of common fate shaped by decades of persecution and the necessity to survive and succeed, making the best of every opportunity and resource available. One valuable resource was the Russian language, another was investment in education, still another was informal networks ensuring mutual support. This pattern to a large extent prevails after immigration. In all three communities, the preference for Russian culture and Russian-Soviet models of education and leisure activities has resulted in the creation of services attractive to Russian-speaking consumers. Demand for these services has opened up economic opportunities for some of the newcomers, providing employment and an impetus for transnational economic ties among the RSJ. Strong attachment to the Russian language and culture does not prevent them from acquiring elements of the culture of the host societies. Building a Diaspora clearly shows that in all three cases, albeit to different degrees, RSJ demonstrate additive multiculturalism. In the ﬁrst years after immigration, this primarily serves instrumental purposes of succeeding in a new society, but gradually its orientation expands and acquires symbolic meaning as well. The authors compellingly show that RSJ seek both insertion and autonomy. In all three countries, original cultural characteristics are cornerstones of communitybuilding, yet these communities are by no means directed exclusively inwards. In Israel, many organizations that emerged in the framework of Russian communitybuilding successfully cater to the needs of society at large, and there are signs that their co-ethnics in Germany and the United States are following suit. In addition, all three communities try to solidify business and cultural relations with one another and in this way remain an integral part of the Russian Jewish world—fragmented, yet united by various ties. The authors justly show that creation of transnational communities depends on the will of individuals. I believe in the case of the RSJ diaspora, we should not underestimate the fact that post-Soviet Russia, which sees itself as the heir to the Soviet Union, is encouraging the creation of its own diaspora of Russian-speakers. Consciously or unconsciously, many RSJ are affected by these efforts. Unfortunately, this theme remained outside the authors’ purview. I am convinced that many aspects of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of RSJ, including many similarities in the collective construction in different host societies, are rooted in their pre-immigration experience and practices. Missing in this work are references to the investigations conducted in the former Soviet Union in the last 15 years that shed light on the past and present of Russian-Soviet Jewry, which could have served as a valuable source of information for the team. These criticisms notwithstanding, Building a Diaspora: Russian Jews in Israel, Germany and the USA is an insightful and thought-provoking study. It makes a valuable contribution to the scholarship, and it is a necessary source for those who study ethnicity, immigration, and diasporas in the epoch of globalization. It contains many implications for further research, and I am sure it will ﬁnd many interested readers. Maria Yelenevskaya Technion—Israel Institute of Technology

270

Book Reviews

Michael Brenner and Gideon Reuveni (eds.), Emancipation through Muscles: Jews and Sports in Europe. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. 277 pp.

The subject of Jews and sports, as Michael Brenner admits in his ﬁne introductory essay, almost always elicits a joke. When he announced that a conference would take place on the topic, the response he received was: “Oh, this is certainly going to be a brief meeting.” Yet, as this volume makes clear, Jews were deeply engaged with sports in Europe. Most of the essays focus on the signiﬁcance of sports for Jewish self-perception and self-reformation, and the importance of sports in antisemitic discourse. Scholars of modern Jewry, as Brenner notes, have all but ignored the role of sports in the making of the modern Jew. One looks in vain for discussions of sports in the major textbooks and sourcebooks that most of us use in our survey courses on modern Jewish history. The Jew in the modern world is still, for the most part, a thinker, a writer, a rabbi, a political activist. Despite the emergence of a mini-industry around the fascinating subject of the Jewish body, the “physical Jew” remains in the shadow of the “intellectual Jew.” The great exception, of course, is Zionism and (at a later stage) Israeli Jews. While a number of the authors in this volume make it clear that an enthusiasm among Jews for organized sports was by no means limited to Jewish nationalists, the focus in many of these essays is nonetheless on Zionism and the way in which Zionists used sports as part of a broader ideological agenda of Jewish renaissance and regeneration. Readers will learn a great deal that is valuable and important about sports and Zionism, and the way in which Max Nordau’s well-known dream of a Muskeljudentum was played out in sports clubs and athletic activities. There is also a good deal here about sports and antisemitism, and how self-identiﬁed Jewish teams such as Hakoah of Vienna became lightening rods for interwar anti-Jewish hostility. Indeed, according to most of the essays, antisemitism and the Jewish response were the driving forces in the Jewish engagement with sports. Much of the cultural power and import of the emergence of Jewish sports is the result of the older and deeply entrenched image of the weak, emasculated, degenerated Jewish body. This held true for Britain as well as Germany and Austria. The degenerate, feminized male Jewish body imagined by the antisemite had to be confronted by the strong, masculine Jewish body. While the term “emancipation’” is never clearly deﬁned or discussed, it is clear that we are talking about an emancipation from both antisemitic stereotypes and liberal bourgeois forms of Jewish identity, again mainly in the form of Jewish nationalism. (At any rate, the term surely does not mean what it usually means in histories of modern European Jewry: civil or legal emancipation). In their focus on Zionism, the essays on Central Europe pay little or no attention to how sports might have functioned as a mechanism of ongoing integration or assimilation. It is not at all clear whether this is due to the authors’ particular interests and focus, the oversized role that gymnastics, fencing, and other sports played in the self-image of Zionists, or the fact that the vast majority of Jews really were not that interested in sports—or, at least, sports did not play so important a role in their on-going self-deﬁnition. Yet Brenner makes reference

History and the Social Sciences

271

to Peter Gay’s vivid recollections, recounted in his memoir My German Question, of the signiﬁcance of soccer and the fate of Jewish soccer players and teams to a boy growing up in Weimar Germany. There are also references in other essays to the more widespread interest among non-Zionist Jews in sports. But there is no sustained analysis along these lines in this volume, so we are left with very little sense of what sports meant for most Jews (since most Jews were not Zionists) in continental Europe. In contrast, Tony Collins, in a wonderful essay on Jews, antisemitism, and sports in Great Britain, argues that for Jews in Britain, sports did serve as an assimilatory mechanism, as a means by which the large numbers of immigrant Jews, in particular, could be made British: “The social and athletic organizations that were set up by Jews in Britain from the 1880s onwards were based on emphasizing the Britishness of British Jewry, not its Jewishness” (p. 144). He shows that sports, and speciﬁcally boxing, held enormous signiﬁcance for Jews in Britain, especially among the working class. There was a long history of Jewish involvement in boxing in Britain, and boxing held an obvious attraction as a ﬁghting sport that might counter antisemitism. Already in the early 1800s, one commentator noted that after the great Jewish champion Daniel Mendoza came to the public’s notice, young Jews took up boxing in larger numbers, and it was no longer safe to insult a Jew. Observers noted a similar phenomenon in the 1930s. Sports, the volume reminds us, was often one more realm in which anti-Jewish sentiment found visceral expression. Non-Jewish teams at times refused to play against Jewish sports teams; when Jewish sports teams played in general arenas, fans and players from opposing teams attacked them, at times physically. Jewish players were called “Jewish pigs” and other such names, and shouts of “Death to the Jews” were commonplace. Jews sometimes responded in kind. According to Michael John, in his essay on antisemitism in Austrian sports, Jewish fans joined in the ﬁghting at times; Jewish commentators saw this as further proof of the existence of a proper sense of Jewish dignity and self-conﬁdence. Here we are offered a sense of the broader or deeper resonance of sports, its impact—at least potentially—on Jews who were not athletes and yet appear to have been profoundly invested in the fate of Jewish players and teams. Yet too many of the essays fail to address the larger or broader context, at least not in any sustained way. How did events in the world of sports resonate in the larger culture and society? Did Jews who were not directly involved in soccer or gymnastics—and of course that must have been the vast majority of Jews—care at all about any of this? Did it affect the emergence of “Jewish sports” in Germany or Austria? What of the reaction of the larger, nonJewish population? Despite its limitations, Emancipation through Muscles is a signiﬁcant contribution to the literature on the modern Jewish experience. Without exaggerating the import of sports for Jewish life in the 20th century, this volume goes a long way toward contributing to a much-needed corrective in the synthetic narrative of modern Jewish history. Mitchell B. Hart University of Florida, Gainesville

272

Book Reviews

Hasia R. Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. x + 437 pp. Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. xx + 490 pp.

Two histories of American Jewry of impressive quality have been published almost at the same time by respected university presses. This simple fact is noteworthy to one who recalls the ﬁeld as it was some 50 years ago, and when the quality of these two books is compared with most of the poor products that constituted American Jewish historiography in those days. It is safe to predict that these new works by Hasia R. Diner and Jonathan D. Sarna, unlike those of that earlier generation, will be treated attentively by American historians; we shall do likewise here. As indicated by her book’s title, Hasia Diner seeks to cover American Jewish history in its entirety, whereas Jonathan Sarna’s explicit intention is to conﬁne himself to the history of the Jewish religion in the United States. But Judaism as a religion needs Jews for its existence, as Sarna is of course aware, so a fair amount of the history of American Jews is quite properly found within his study of American Judaism. The grand theme of immigration is conspicuously present in his volume, although the Jewish labor movement and Jewish politics in general are left out. The move to the suburbs after the Second World War enjoys detailed attention, but Jews who distinguished themselves in the arts and sciences are absent. It is surprising, moreover, that American Jewish literature and Jewish studies are not considered. In Diner’s volume, in contrast, nothing about American Jews is ruled out. At the same time, her work often reads like an essay, short on names and other hard data—unlike that of Sarna, who revels in names and events and incisive quotations. Sarna also introduces suggestive parallels with trends within Christian denominations. About half of Diner’s notes, mainly to the latter half of her text, regrettably provide only titles without page numbers for the works she cites. Happily, each of the books has a detailed and useful index. Diner’s history often uses evidence from local communities, which is welcome. American Jewish history has too frequently been seen through the prism of a single leading community, for example, Philadelphia during the 18th and part of the 19th centuries, or New York City during the period of mass immigration. Historians now are more cautious about assuming any one community’s preponderance, thanks in part to numerous competent local histories in which readers can recognize the distinct character of the cities and regions that Diner mentions. Immigrant neighborhoods in, say, Baltimore or Milwaukee are not taken merely as miniatures of New York’s Lower East Side. She is also attentive to women’s history, with special emphasis given to women who headed Jewish institutions, in the main those dealing with charity and education. Near the end of her book, Diner offers a strongly sympathetic account of the contemporary Jewish feminist movement. Sarna also takes up the history of American Jewish women, but without giving it such centrality. A less appealing aspect of Diner’s study is its excessive number of references to immigrants’ joining, entering, reaching, or aspiring to “the middle class”—that almost indeﬁnably vague category—as they got ahead in the world.

History and the Social Sciences

273

Diner does not emphasize religious affairs, and she seems even to make a point of mentioning movements and organizations that avoided connection with the synagogue. Religious movements, which have been central in American Jewish history, enjoy less than adequate treatment. She dwells on the famous treyf (nonkosher) dinner served at the ﬁrst ordination celebration of Hebrew Union College in 1883, because of which some offended guests walked out. What dishes were served that night has long been in question—frog legs, or shrimp, or clams? (Sarna settles the matter at last by reproducing the menu: all of those dishes were served, along with others equally non-kosher.) The banquet, for which Isaac Mayer Wise offered no apology, was a symbolic prelude to the much more signiﬁcant and long-lasting Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, which Diner passes over too quickly. Those opposing the Reform platform, not yet “Conservative” but deﬁnitely anti-Reform, may perhaps be called the Historical School, as argued by Moshe Davis; at any rate, it is not characterized clearly enough by Diner. Citing a few of this movement’s trenchant statements, such as those of the rabbinic scholar Solomon Schechter (mistakenly called a “Semitist” by Diner), who was brought from England to serve as its head, would have clariﬁed its position. Meanwhile, the Orthodox plight during those years is exempliﬁed by the travails of Rabbi Jacob Joseph. Arriving from Vilna in 1888, he was not intended to be “Chief Rabbi of the United States,” as Diner states (p. 124), but rather the chief rabbi of New York City in conjunction with a longtime resident rabbi, Abraham Ash. The latter, however, died before Joseph arrived, and the newly arrived Joseph, a pious innocent, was abandoned by most of the Orthodox. When he died in 1902 after years of neglect and illness, his massive funeral procession was dishonored by malicious provocation on the part of local workingmen and police brutality against Jewish mourners who retaliated. Diner also gives inadequate attention to the early years of two major Jewish institutions, the Etz Hayyim yeshiva (which ultimately became Yeshiva University) and the Jewish Theological Seminary. Another important subject, education, which rightly includes the topic of Jewish children in the public schools, receives its due, though the discussion is not well focused. The schools set up in many cities by German Jewish immigrants in the mid-19th century existed mainly to teach children their parents’ German and to avoid the overt Protestantism of the public schools. Their rapid disappearance, after the public schools adopted such changes as the teaching of German and the cessation of Protestant indoctrination, goes unexplained. Similarly, the larger meaning of modern Hebrew education is not put before the reader. Sarna deals in persuasive fashion with the break between traditionalists and Reform. After he sets forth the treyf banquet episode and the Pittsburgh Platform in thoughtful detail, and deals as well with the founding of the Jewish Theological Seminary, he covers the years between those events of the 1880s and the arrival of Schechter in 1902 by sketching the Seminary’s shaky early years and the endeavors of the young American men who founded Keyam Dishmaya. This strangely named, long-forgotten little association in New York and Philadelphia worked with some success to advance the goal of a traditional or Orthodox religious revival. Sarna discusses astutely the tortuous stages until the Orthodox and the Conservatives ﬁnally became clearly separate in the 1950s, and he also displays an impressive knowledge of trends within American Orthodoxy. The revision of Reform Judaism’s Pittsburgh Platform by the

274

Book Reviews

hotly debated Columbus Platform of 1937, barely mentioned by Diner, is treated in detail. Sarna is at home in the workings of Jewish religious movements and their leading, frequently arresting personalities, and he is not only familiar with obscure secondary literature but also employs oral sources for post-Second World War history. The architecture of the hundreds of newly built post-Second World War synagogues and the music heard in and out of them also receive discerning notice. Finally, I know of no other work in American Jewish history in which a citation is brought from the Babylonian Talmud—Shavuoth 39a (see page 403, n. 27). Judaism in America of the last half century has generally been the realm of sociologists; the contributions of the late Marshall Sklare and Charles Liebman spring to mind. It is fortunate that the historian Jonathan Sarna has now taken a ﬁrm grasp of the subject. Diner gives the Zionist movement before 1948 scant notice, and she does not discuss clearly the differences between the Biltmore Conference of 1942 and the American Jewish Conference of 1943. In contrast, the role of Israel in American Jewish life after 1948 is effectively presented—not only in its political and philanthropic dimensions. Travel to Israel and study programs are taken into account, as is the cooperation of American Orthodoxy with the Israeli religious establishment. Diner also looks at the struggle for recognition in Israel by both the American Conservative and Reform movements, whereas Sarna has surprisingly little on this topic. The deep meaning for the diaspora, America included, both of Israel’s very existence and of its wars requires more study. Diner demonstrates in commendable detail how American Jewry early memorialized the Holocaust—though the term had not yet come into widespread use—in the immediate postwar years, and she proceeds to a discussion of Jews and the anti-communist fervor of the 1950s, followed in the next decade by Jewish prominence in the civil rights struggle. These are not found in Sarna’s study, which concentrates instead on religious movements during this period, with particular attention to demography and suburbanization. Altogether, American Judaism is authoritative as well as readable, and earns its place as one of the foremost and indispensable works on American Jewish history. Diner’s study, too, despite its ﬂaws, is a work of conspicuous merit and is notable for its attention to Jews in secular and liberal movements. Lloyd P. Gartner Tel Aviv University Marion A. Kaplan (ed.), Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. xii + 529 pp.

Four leading scholars of German Jewish history—Robert Liberles, Steven M. Lowenstein, Marion A. Kaplan, and Trude Maurer—have joined forces to produce a splendid “Alltagsgeschichte” of German Jewry during the three centuries preceding its destruction. Drawing on the memoirs, diaries, and letters of ordinary Jews, they divide their attention between internal Jewish life and interactions with the nonJewish environment. This approach provides a richness of detail that usefully complicates the necessarily general approach to social history taken in the four-volume

History and the Social Sciences

275

synthesis German-Jewish History in Modern Times, edited by Michael A. Meyer. The four sections of Jewish Daily Life in Germany are divided chronologically, each containing essays dedicated to environment, family life, education, economic life, religion, and social relations. Robert Liberles portrays the 17th and 18th centuries as a time of transformation rather than isolation and decline for German Jewry. He persuasively argues that Jewish religious and communal life underwent complex changes that were fundamentally inﬂuenced by the increased availability of printed sources, but that it remained vital throughout the early modern period. Relations with Gentiles were characterized by increasing communication and trust, resulting in “overlapping spheres” rather than “ghetto separation.” Liberles is clearly uncomfortable with traditional views of the Haskalah as the central inﬂuence on greater integration of Jews into German society, arguing that changes in their material life were far more signiﬁcant. The Jews’ residential and economic restrictions and close family ties, with relatives dispersed over wide areas, led them to construct broader spatial horizons than were typical of Germans at the time. Castigated as evidence of rootlessness by detractors, these elements of Jewish life enabled the Jews to diversify occupations—from moneylending to a rich variety of commercial enterprises—which positioned them to take advantage of the rapid economic changes that were to come. Steven M. Lowenstein skillfully delineates the accelerating pace of change in Jewish lives in the era of emancipation and German uniﬁcation. Change was perhaps most dramatic in the realm of education, with traditional schools replaced by modern public and Jewish schools and the Yiddish language by German. By 1870, Jews were overrepresented in German secondary schools and universities, illustrating yet another remarkable transformation: the entrance of a great many Jews into Germany’s urban middle class and their absorption of its values, including German nationalism. Industrialization and the triumph of laissez-faire opened doors to Jews in the wholesale and retail trades as well as in light manufacturing. The integration and acculturation of Jews was mirrored in the increasing numbers who joined bourgeois social and political associations, even though most social interaction was still with coreligionists. These changes were profound, but Lowenstein may exaggerate a bit when he argues that the Jews were more deeply inﬂuenced by industrialization than was the German population as a whole. Peasants and artisans who were driven or attracted to urban factories experienced completely transformed worlds, whereas Jews could build upon established mercantile skills and contacts. German Jewry’s solidiﬁcation of its middle-class status in Imperial Germany is analyzed by the book’s editor, Marion A. Kaplan, who underlines the primacy of home and family in maintaining religious and ethnic identities in a time of unprecedented social mobility and increasingly pliant loyalties. The redeﬁnition of Judaism in a more secular sense, with the family as its cornerstone, placed new demands on wives and mothers. Jewish men were preoccupied with establishing themselves as respectable businessmen, leading, perhaps inevitably, to generational backlash. By the eve of the First World War many of their sons were spurning family businesses in favor of the free professions. By that time, too, more Jews than ever were interacting with non-Jewish Germans while still inhabiting a world of their own. The persistence of social antisemitism, the dominance of Christian values in public schools,

276

Book Reviews

and barriers to certain professions reminded Jews of their otherness and reinforced social distance and reserve. Nevertheless, their rise during the 19th century had been nothing less than spectacular. Kaplan persuasively portrays this minority as more or less comfortably inhabiting two worlds and accepting ﬂuid identities that required no artiﬁcial reconciliation. Few thought themselves exclusively German or painfully divided in their identities. Trude Maurer’s survey of Jewish everyday life in Germany after the First World War devotes far more attention to the 12 years of the Third Reich than it does to the 14 years of the Weimar Republic. This disparity may be justiﬁed insofar as prewar trends carried over into the republican years, but in some areas it risks deﬂecting developments of the Nazi period into an earlier era. The great strength of her contribution to this volume is her description of the agony of German Jews trying to make sense out of incoherent Nazi policies after 1933. Maurer leaves no doubt that Jewish families and communities were decisive in shielding many of their members from the worst effects of ofﬁcial efforts to exclude them from German society. Jewish women who had tasted the new freedoms of the Weimar years now had little choice but to resume traditional roles or, in some cases, to become breadwinners for their families. Jewish communal institutions acquitted themselves well, with the unintended result that some Jews delayed leaving Germany until it was too late. Maurer strives for fairness in assessing Gentile reactions to Nazi persecution, showing that it was anything but uniform. She is probably correct, however, in concluding that popular criticisms of antisemitic violence were not grounded in any fundamental sympathy with the Jews. Marion Kaplan’s strong editorial hand is evident in a conclusion that draws some general trends from the great variety of individual experiences. The chief overall ﬁnding of this research is that, to the end and with few exceptions, Germany’s Jews accepted and even relished their otherness and their status as a hybrid community. This volume demonstrates that German Jewish “otherness” took many forms, changed over time, and was not quite as fragile or as unstable as has been supposed. Donald L. Niewyk Southern Methodist University

Fred A. Lazin, The Struggle for Soviet Jewry in American Politics: Israel Versus the American Jewish Establishment. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005. xii + 356 pp.

“We Are One!” trumpeted the Federation network and the United Jewish Appeal during their joint campaigns for American Jewish dollars during the 1980s. Nowhere was this locution less in evidence than in the disputes between Israelis and American Jews—and within the American Jewish community—in the course of the battle on behalf of Soviet Jewry. Fred Lazin’s well-researched narrative, The Struggle for Soviet Jewry in American Politics, is the most comprehensive work to date on this central issue in Israeli-U.S. diaspora relations.

History and the Social Sciences

277

To be sure, other books have chronicled how the “struggle” on behalf of Soviet Jewry evolved into a full-ﬂedged “movement,” notably Henry L. Feingold’s recent Silent No More and Murray Friedman and Albert D. Chernin’s A Second Exodus.1 Feingold’s thesis is straightforward: Soviet Jewry was the major Jewish foreignpolicy success in the post-Second World War era, or indeed in any era. But Feingold does not bring forth in detail the fascinating debates on tactics that characterized the movement, as do the essays edited by Friedman and Chernin in their ﬁne book. Lazin’s volume, in contrast, is devoted exclusively to the ongoing conﬂict between the Israelis and Americans regarding the question of “whither the emigrants?”—in which the Israelis, at the end of the day, prevailed. Few issues in American Jewish public life remain as contentious as the campaign on behalf of Soviet Jewry. When did the movement start? What were its tactics? What weight should be assigned to the role of the Jewish leadership versus grassroots popular protest? And above all, were the movement’s goals achieved because of the movement’s advocacy efforts, or was it the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev and the collapse of the Soviet Union that effected the changes?—all these remain controversial issues up to the present day. The question of “dating” the movement is of special interest, because it implicates the agendas of various actors in the movement. Some Jewish organizations and leaders designated the year 2007 as the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the Soviet Jewry movement; the linkage to the Six-Day War and the growth of a popular movement within the U.S.S.R. must have seemed a “natural.” I would argue, however, that the movement’s genesis, at least in the United States, was in 1963–1964. It was during 1963 that growing concern about the Soviet persecution of Jews caused American Jews at the highest echelons—including the top national Jewish leadership, the rabbinate, members of academia, and government ofﬁcials—to become involved in what was, until then, a low-proﬁle and low-priority issue. President John F. Kennedy raised the immigration issue with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko that year; Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel made an impassioned appeal at one of the ﬁrst conferences on the matter; and representatives of national Jewish groups met to explore the launching of a national campaign for Soviet Jewry. A national conference on Soviet Jewry was held in April 1964, and shortly thereafter, the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry was established (in 1971, it became known as the National Conference on Soviet Jewry). In short, it was during the crucial year of 1963 that the struggle for Soviet Jewry became an advocacy movement. In Israel, however, activities on behalf of Soviet Jews had begun back in the 1950s, with the establishment of a government liaison bureau (lishkat hakesher) initially working out of the Foreign Ministry and later reporting to the prime minster’s ofﬁce. This bureau engaged in behind-the-scenes efforts to foster Jewish identity and culture in the U.S.S.R., with Israeli representatives working with local Jewish individuals and groups. As a result, until 1967, the Israelis were far better informed than their American Jewish counterparts about the situation of Soviet Jews. This important point, which is well developed by Lazin, has been overlooked by most historians of Soviet Jewry. Lazin is also very good in his general discussion regarding the “turf issues” at the core of his book; indeed, the eponymous Struggle for Soviet Jewry in America had

278

Book Reviews

as much to do with the question of where Soviet Jews ought to go, once they were allowed to emigrate. The Israelis demanded that all the emigrants be channeled to Israel, whereas the Americans, following a pluralist vision, felt that the emigrants themselves should decide where they wanted to go. At a certain point, the issue of neshirah, or dropping out—a reference to the fact that more and more emigrants opted to go to the United States instead of to Israel—brought the issue to a crisis. Lazin’s discussion of the matter is splendid. Another absolutely crucial dimension of the story is that involving American Jewish intramural strife. This is an oft-told tale, recounted here once again and very well indeed. Yet it is here where Lazin trips over a few paper clips. He is not quite sure-footed when it comes to the history of the organizational dynamics of the movement—or, for that matter, with the organizational structures themselves; Lazin’s interviews with Jewish communal professionals and leadership ought have served him better. The fact is that, when it came to Soviet Jewry, there were at least four extremely different groupings on the American Jewish map that reﬂected well-established patterns of American Jewish pluralism on public affairs. There were the “establishment” organizations such as the National Conference on Soviet Jewry and the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (themselves subjected to much intramural buffeting). There were more activist groups that came out of the grass roots, such as the Union of Councils on Soviet Jewry and the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (why are only 20 lines devoted to the latter group? The students were more than the mere “side-show” that Lazin suggests they were). There were rabbinic leaders such as Pinchas Teitz, Arthur Schneier, and various ﬁgures in the Chabad movement who advocated a non-confrontational, “behind-the-scenes” approach; and then there was Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League, whose aggressive and occasionally violent tactics called attention to the movement but which were ultimately counterproductive, because they, and not Soviet Jews, became the “story.”2 The conﬂict among these voices within the American Jewish community had implications both for the tug-of-war between Israelis and American Jews and, ultimately, for the larger campaign. One does not get the nuances of these debates from The Struggle for Soviet Jewry in American Politics. Moreover, Lazin’s ear is occasionally not sufﬁciently attuned to organizational dynamics. For one thing, the Council of Jewish Federations was not a “weakly-organized umbrella” with little clout. By the 1960s, the CJF’s General Assembly had evolved into the gathering point, the very nexus, of local, national, and international Jewish decision-making; this alone assured that the CJF would have international impact, quite apart from its powerful leadership structure. And did Theo Bickel (surely Lazin means Bikel), representing the American Jewish Congress, really call for “national rights” for Soviet Jews rather than emigration? I think not. We ought to note as well a larger change that was taking place in the history of American Jewish advocacy, a “sea-change” between the 1940s and 1960s. Historian Henry Feingold points out that Jewish leaders of an earlier era, caught up in a universalist social agenda, “had laid aside their Jewish identity as part of the transaction for social status, and did not feel impassioned by what was being done to their brethren in Europe.” They were therefore “peculiarly ill-suited to discharge the responsibility that

History and the Social Sciences

279

history and kinship assigned to them.”3 Not so the postwar generation, whose leadership and grass roots embraced the Soviet Jewry movement wholeheartedly. On this issue, the activism of Jewish political leadership was extraordinary.4 This dimension, more than a mere nuance of history, is important in understanding the advocacy movement in America, yet it is missing from The Struggle for Soviet Jewry in American Politics. These reservations notwithstanding, Lazin’s book is an important contribution. It will broaden and deepen our understanding—and appreciation—of a time in which the American Jewish communal agenda, and American Jewry’s relationship with the state of Israel, moved in radically new directions. Jerome A. Chanes Brandeis University

Notes 1. Henry L. Feingold, Silent No More: Saving the Jews of Russia, The American Jewish Effort, 1967–1989 (Syracuse: 2007); Murray Friedman and Albert D. Chernin, A Second Exodus: The American Movement to Free Soviet Jewry (Hanover, N.H.: 1999). Another (forthcoming) book, by the journalist Gal Beckerman, explores the depth and breadth of Soviet persecution of the Jews. 2. A ﬁfth “voice”—that of Jewish businessmen who were doing business with the Soviet Union—advocated an “accommodationist” stance. 3. Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 226. 4. This was evident as well, of course, in Israel advocacy after the 1967 Six-Day War.

Alexander Paritsky, Molitva (Prayer). Jerusalem: Verba, 2006. 496 pp.

The memoirs of the Zionist activist Alexander Paritsky offer a detailed account of the way in which a representative Soviet Jew was gradually transformed into a ﬁghter for civil and national rights. Of course, this is not the ﬁrst work of this kind. What distinguishes it is its setting: Kharkiv (Kharkov), which, though a large city, is located far from the central cities—Moscow, Kyiv (Kiev), Riga, St. Petersburg (then Leningrad)—in which so many Soviet Jewish activists were to be found. Sociopolitical processes taking place in the Soviet Union had already had a profound effect on Paritsky’s family by the time Alexander, the third son, was born in 1938. His father, for instance, had been a member of the Red Guard but had been expelled from the Communist party at the beginning of the 1920s. Following this, he and his wife attempted to reach Palestine via Georgia and Turkey. However, they were unsuccessful in gathering the money needed to cross the border, and they returned to Kharkiv in 1924. Shortly after Alexander’s birth, the father was arrested. Although he was set free a mere three months later (in the context of a mass amnesty following Lavrenty Beria’s appointment as head of the NKVD), his health was ruined. Although Paritsky’s description of this period is naturally based on the evidence of his parents, he conveys a clear account of events pertaining both to society at large (in particular, the Stalinist terror) and to members of his immediate family (who were

280

Book Reviews

ostracized by other relatives, and often helped by near strangers). His ﬁrst personal recollections appear to be those connected with wartime evacuation, ﬁrst to Bishkek (then Frunze) and later Tashkent. Upon their return to Kharkiv in 1944, the Paritskys encountered a more severe form of antisemitism than Alexander had previously experienced, and the atmosphere of imminent threat to the Jews continually worsened. In coping with insults from neighbors and schoolmates, it became necessary to deny the very fact of Jewish existence as a people with a unique culture and history. Paritsky recalls that his elder brother Izya, a demobilized frontline soldier who could not ﬁnd any work, one day burned all of his books on Jewish themes. During this time, the Soviet media seized upon rumors concerning a Jewish “doctors’ plot” against Stalin. With this the stage appeared to be set for Stalin’s version of the “ﬁnal solution of the Jewish question”—which was averted by the dictator’s sudden death in March 1953. Yet Paritsky’s mother cried upon hearing of Stalin’s demise, regarding him as the only person who protected Jews from antisemites, and Paritsky himself was later stunned when, as a college student, he heard about Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in which the excesses of Stalinism were exposed and denounced. One of the most interesting phenomena during this period was the sociocultural orientation of Soviet Jews toward higher education. Despite a precarious economic situation brought about by the father’s death and the older sons’ difﬁculties in ﬁnding employment, Alexander’s family decided not to send him to vocational school but rather to ﬁnance his secondary school studies. Following graduation, restrictive quotas kept him from obtaining entry to any of the more prestigious post-secondary institutions, and he was forced to settle for a local mining college, from which he graduated with honors. But here, once again, anti-Jewish restrictions came to the fore: in deﬁance of the normal procedure, he was denied entrance to the Kharkiv Mining Institute. Consequently, Paritsky went to work as a technician in the mines while also taking correspondence courses at the institute. Eventually he was allowed to become a regular student, and at a later stage he transferred to the department of cybernetics at the Kaunas (Kovno) Polytechnic Institute, even though this obliged him to learn Lithuanian. The atmosphere of thaw in the Soviet Union during the ﬁrst phase of the Khrushchev era made it easier for Paritsky to question his faith in the ideological dogmas of the Soviet system. Even earlier, despite his being a committed Marxist, he had perceived all of the professed achievements of Soviet national policy in light of his own personal experience. Now, doubts about the very essence of the system came into play. The years of study in Soviet Lithuania contributed to Paritsky’s new perceptions. He realized, ﬁrst, that not only Jews but also the representatives of other peoples felt discriminated against in the “united family of fraternal peoples” rather than sharing in the joys of the victories of the Soviet system. Somewhat later, during the period of economic stress prior to Khrushchev’s resignation from the party leadership in 1964, Paritsky began to have even more basic doubts concerning the foundations of Marxism-Leninism. Eventually, he completely abandoned his previous ideological position. Unfortunately for the reader, Paritsky’s path to Zionism is discussed in much less detail. Compared with others, he became a Zionist relatively late—only in

History and the Social Sciences

281

1975, following his reading of a samizdat collection of Zev Jabotinsky’s articles, did he suddenly come to the conclusion that Jews needed to ﬁght for their national rights. During the same period, Paritsky also seems to have developed a more pronounced Jewish religious sensibility, which is further elaborated toward the end of the book. From the middle of 1976, Paritsky became active in the struggle for the right to emigrate to Israel. He and other Jewish activists used the legal possibilities open to them to ﬁght for other rights as well, among them, that of commemorating the memory of Holocaust victims. While local authorities in Kharkiv did not refuse the demand to clean up the neglected Drobitsky Yar, where thousands of Jews had been murdered during the Second World War, they were adamant in blocking all public discussion and commemoration of the Holocaust, resorting to physical violence when Paritsky and his friends persisted in holding unsanctioned gatherings. Paritsky’s circle of contacts gradually extended beyond the narrow framework of the Kharkiv group as connections with Moscow refuseniks and with various non-Jewish dissident groups were established. Not surprisingly, the authorities attempted to prevent such contacts. In addition, there was a certain amount of internal dissension among the activists; some of the Kharkiv group were opposed to collaborating with non-Jewish groups, while Moscow-based refuseniks did not always pool their information and foreign contacts with their colleagues in the periphery. Thus, for instance, when Paritsky was imprisoned in a work camp and his wife, Polina, attempted in Moscow to call for outside intervention on his behalf, the local activists preferred to speak to foreigners about their own problems. Nonetheless, refuseniks from the periphery succeeded in establishing their own contacts with sympathetic parties in Israel, the United States, and Western Europe. (One important contact was Edith Frankel of the Hebrew University, who helped in obtaining materials for the semi-clandestine “Jewish university” set up by Paritsky and a number of friends.) Paritsky provides a four-page list of individuals and organizations that voiced support for his family at the end of his book, and he also notes speciﬁc visits to Kharkiv by a number of these individuals. Although such contacts were seen by the KGB as a provocation, Paritsky regards them as a powerful weapon in his battle against the regime. Along with his own story, Paritsky writes of other refuseniks and dissidents, among them Mark Pechersky, Yuri Tarnopolsky, Ida Nudel, and Yuli Edelstein. His frank account deals as well with individuals sent by the KGB to inﬁltrate the activists’ ranks and others who, under the pressure of the authorities, eventually betrayed their comrades (one of them eventually testiﬁed against Paritsky). The most substantial part of his memoirs is devoted to his arrest in August 1981, his trial, and his three-year exile to a distant prison camp in Siberia. Paritsky recounts his relations both with the camp authorities and with the criminals who constituted the vast majority of those in the camp. He discusses how political prisoners attempted to survive under conditions of constant moral and physical stress, and the ways in which global events (for instance, the ﬁrst Lebanon War, and Yuri Andropov’s ascension to power) inﬂuenced the ways in which political prisoners were treated. In this section, he relies

282

Book Reviews

on the fragments of correspondence that reached his family, making use as well of the recollections of his wife and several loyal friends who attempted to be of help during this difﬁcult period. Returning to Kharkiv in 1984, Paritsky found that personal quarrels, suspicion, and fear of repression had essentially reduced the Jewish activist movement to “ruins.” He could not gather a group of old comrades for a joint celebration of Jewish holidays, or collect signatures on behalf of opening a new synagogue. At this point, he began to make the acquaintance of a group of religiozniki—Jews who placed greater focus on religious observance rather than on Zionism. Although Paritsky had grown more attuned to religion over the years (during his time in the camp, for instance, he perceived on several occasions a form of divine providence), he is quite critical of those whose chief concern was scrupulous religious observance. In fact, the appearance of such marginal religious groups, he believes, was engineered by none other than the KGB, who hoped in this way to divert energy from the secular Zionist movement. In any event, the ﬁrst tentative harbingers of change—both in Soviet society as a whole and vis-à-vis the Soviet Zionist movement in particular—began to appear soon after Mikhail Gorbachev took power in 1985. The pressure on Jewish activists and their families was eased; a number of activists were released from prisons and camps; and the number of exit permits gradually increased. Toward the end of 1987, Paritsky’s older daughter was given permission to leave the Soviet Union, and shortly thereafter, he, his wife, and their younger daughter were also allowed to emigrate. Thus ended 12 years of struggle with the Soviet system. Partisky’s memoirs do not end with the family’s arrival in Israel. In his concluding section, he describes the initial period of euphoria in which he met with friends, relatives, and others who had fought for his release, but then continues with a more sober assessment of life in the Jewish state. Not wishing to rest on his laurels as a “Prisoner of Zion,” Paritsky soon resumed his activity in the ﬁeld of physics (after nearly 15 years of absence) and eventually established a high-tech company. Without naming names, he is nonetheless blunt in his critique of an Israeli economic system characterized, in his opinion, by stagnation, levantinism, and nepotism. Interestingly, this section is almost devoid of the religious terminology that frequently appears elsewhere. However, Paritsky concludes his book with several short essays dealing both with various biblical texts and with the meaning of Judaism. Partisky’s recollections are not free of certain problems. Attentive reading reveals some factual mistakes and generalizations that are based, in many respects, on the limited experience of the author and his friends; there is also a tendency on Paritsky’s part to perceive his personal story as located at the center of larger processes within the Soviet Union. However, autobiographical works such as this are invaluable in enabling us both to obtain knowledge about the formation of the Jewish national movement in the different parts of the Soviet Union and to enter into the atmosphere of everyday life of Soviet people in general and of Soviet Jewry in particular. Paritsky’s memoirs should be of great interest to all scholars of the U.S.S.R. Samuel Barnai The Hebrew University

History and the Social Sciences

283

Karen Hunger Parshall, James Joseph Sylvester: Jewish Mathematician in a Victorian World. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. xiii + 461 pp.

The career of James Joseph Sylvester is practically unknown to historians of modern European Jewry. A mathematical prodigy, Sylvester was one of the ﬁrst Jews to study at England’s ancient universities, matriculating at St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1831. Although he left without taking a degree since he could not subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of faith of the Church of England, he was appointed to several academic posts in Great Britain and the United States—at University College, London; the University of Virginia; the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich; the Johns Hopkins University; and, at the end of his life, Oxford University. On his election to the Savilian professorship in geometry in 1883, he became the ﬁrst Jew to hold a chair at Oxford or Cambridge. He was considered a path-breaking mathematician during his lifetime and was showered with honors, including election both to the Royal Society and to learned societies on the Continent. Although Karen Hunger Parshall’s biography of Sylvester is written primarily for historians of mathematics (readers without advanced training in mathematics will ﬁnd much of the book incomprehensible), it also addresses, if less satisfactorily, questions about Jewish emancipation and integration into the academy. Sylvester’s teachers at a Jewish boarding school in northwest London where he was a student from age 7 to 12 recognized and encouraged his mathematical talent, while his parents afforded him opportunities to nurture it; this was unusual at a time when few English Jews received more than a smattering of secular education. At age 14, he entered the newly established London University, England’s only institution of higher learning with no religious test. The immature Sylvester had several episodes of serious misbehavior—threatening a fellow student with a kitchen knife, for example. As a result, he was withdrawn and sent to the Royal Institution School in Liverpool, where his relations with students and masters were also less than harmonious. Part of the problem was his Jewishness, about which other students taunted him. However, Sylvester’s temper, irascibility, and sense of intellectual superiority compounded the problem, as Parshall acknowledges. The question of what created more difﬁculty for him—his background or his personality—is critical, because his relations with students and colleagues were often rocky. Parshall reluctantly admits that Sylvester had “a difﬁcult personality”—without, however, giving due weight to his prickliness in evaluating the tribulations of his academic career. In 1831, Sylvester went up to Cambridge, which, unlike Oxford, did not impose a religious test on incoming students. Parshall does not say much about his social experience at St. John’s (at a time when Oxbridge colleges were a training ground for the Anglican ministry) or even whether he attended chapel, which was mandatory. Unlike the average student, Sylvester devoted most of his time to study and did brilliantly on the grueling ﬁve-day Mathematical Tripos (honors exam). Yet, as already noted, he left Cambridge without a degree, since that required subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles. Moreover, the Anglican character of the university made a college fellowship, the usual reward for high wranglers, impossible, and so he had to look elsewhere for employment. Because he wanted, above all, to be a full-time mathematician, he was forced to take positions for which he was often ill-suited and

284

Book Reviews

overqualiﬁed. He lasted only four months, for example, at the then undistinguished University of Virginia, where rowdy undergraduates threatened him with physical violence (not necessarily because he was a Jew). When he was denied a post at Columbia University because he was Jewish, he returned to London and was forced to support himself as an actuary for more than ten years. He even prepared for the bar—without, however, ever practicing. His most satisfying years were those he spent at Johns Hopkins, which had been established on a nonsectarian basis and whose mission, in imitation of German universities, was to encourage original research and to train researchers. The portrait of Sylvester that emerges from Parshall’s biography is that of the professional man of science who lives only for, and identiﬁes completely with, his scientiﬁc work. Although born and raised a Jew and subject to discrimination as a Jew, being Jewish was not something that seems to have mattered very much to him. Despite Parshall’s claim that he served Anglo-Jewry as “a standard bearer of sorts,” Judaism and the Jewish community did not much concern him. His closest friends were other scientists, none of whom were Jews. About whether he even mixed in Jewish social circles, of which there was no shortage in London and Baltimore, Parshall is silent. When he sought—unsuccessfully—to marry, the women he courted and to whom he proposed (Parshall mentions at least two) were Christians. There is no sign that he attended synagogue or observed any Jewish rituals. The only evidence of his participation in communal life that Parshall produces, aside from his burial in a Jewish cemetery, is his attendance at a festive dinner of the Anglo-Jewish Association in 1887. To say this is not to brand him a “bad” Jew but to emphasize how the pursuit and practice of science could provide an alternative identity for Jews in the modern world. Moreover, as Parshall’s biography unwittingly demonstrates, Jews were few and far between in scientiﬁc and academic circles in 19th-century English-speaking lands. Jews who chose to pursue careers in the academy excluded themselves from Jewish company, even if that was not their primary intention. Todd M. Endelman University of Michigan

Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East

Avi Bareli, Daniel Gutwein, and Tuvia Friling (eds.) H . evrah vekhalkalah beyisrael: mabat histori ve’akhshavi (Society and economy in Israel: historical and contemporary perspectives). Sdeh Boker: Ben-Gurion Institute, 2005. xxii + 876 pp.

This two-volume edited collection of 27 original articles, part of the “Thematic Series” published by the journal ’Iyunim bitkumat yisrael, seeks to provide a multidimensional and historically informed view of economy and society in Israel. Given the vast scope (some 900 pages) of this endeavor, I will focus on its strengths and limitations as a collection rather than detailing individual contributions. Surprisingly and regrettably, Society and Economy in Israel has no concluding chapter, and the introductory chapter is only ﬁve pages long. It is clearly impossible to capture a wide array of issues and perspectives in so few words, and the editors provide no compass to help readers navigate the sea of materials that they have assembled. Rather than offering an integrated perspective on the contents of their two volumes, Avi Bareli, Daniel Gutwein, and Tuvia Friling propose some general guidelines for researching the liberalization that Israel has experienced in recent decades. Their claim is that the socioeconomic structure of Israel has experienced nothing short of a revolution, which is characterized by widening socioeconomic gaps, withdrawal of the state from intervention in the economy, and abandonment of an egalitarian ideology. They rightly point to the dangers of treating such transformations as the inevitable outcome of new economic rules of the game brought about by globalization. Bareli, Gutwein, and Friling argue that this type of explanation would be insufﬁcient or simply wrong, as it is not only ahistorical and apolitical but also ignores what they regard as the uniqueness of the Israeli case. They also warn that deterministic accounts serve to ratify the changes that Israel has experienced rather than explain them. The alternative perspective advocated here calls for research that traces the historical processes that preceded Israel’s socioeconomic transformation, awards due weight to its political causes and consequences, and recognizes that Israel is a unique case in which changes were more rapid and profound than in other countries. In practice, the inﬂuence of these guidelines is only partially apparent in the articles included in the collection. The starting points of some chapters ﬂagrantly contradict them. Others challenge them implicitly. Most chapters no more than partially abide by the editors’ declaration of principles. Several contributions vigorously adopt the deterministic perspective that Bareli, Gutwein, and Friling set out to challenge. Ben-Zion Zilberfarb’s essay describes the building of “ﬁscal institutions” (by which he means legal mechanisms aimed at preserving 285

286

Book Reviews

ﬁscal discipline) over the last two decades, and suggests that these disciplinary arrangements have made a crucial contribution to Israel’s economic progress. By assuming a dichotomy between the political and the economic, portraying politics as inimical to economic progress, and referring to ﬁscal discipline as a necessity in the global era, this essay clearly repudiates the research guidelines proposed by the editors. The same is true of Yitzhak Klein’s article on the advantages of free-market policies for Israel. My point is not that these contributions should necessarily have been excluded from the collection, but rather that the editors owed their readers an explanation of the rationale for including contributions that run counter to their own analytical perspective. Many other essays raise serious doubts regarding the declared agenda of Society and Economy in Israel, particularly the assumption that the Israeli case is unique. Bareli, Gutwein, and Friling assert that the distinctive feature of this case is not the liberalization process itself, but rather Israel’s starting point as a country previously characterized by extensive social and economic engineering and an unusually egalitarian socioeconomic structure and ideology. I ﬁnd this claim difﬁcult to accept. This idealized portrait of Israel in the ﬁrst few decades after independence is strongly reminiscent of the rosy images promoted by the state-socialist countries of Eastern Europe. It also seems improbable that Israel was more egalitarian than the Scandinavian countries or more interventionist than many Latin American states. Indeed, as several of the essays in this book conﬁrm, the egalitarian veneer of Israel of the collectivist era coexisted with decidedly inegalitarian ideologies and practices. Avi Picard’s article describing the discriminatory socioeconomic policies adopted with regard to North African immigrants in the 1950s, and John Gal’s demonstration of the ambivalence of policymakers toward the plight of the unemployed, both demonstrate the limits of Israel’s “golden age” as a pure case of egalitarian social democracy. Other essays contribute in only limited ways to the editors’ research agenda. Some, like Elazar Leshem’s piece on immigrants from the former Soviet Union or Yaakov Kop’s examination of the Israeli economy during the 1990s, are mainly descriptive surveys that furnish useful information but do not add much to our understanding of the phenomena they describe. Almost none of the contributions follow Bareli, Gutwein, and Friling’s implied prescription of combining domestic historical and political explanations with an international or comparative perspective. The editors might have tried to tie these various threads together by pointing to linkages between different essays. Instead, the only evidence of their intervention are instances in which articles on a related topic are grouped together, as is the case of those dealing with immigrant absorption (Leshem, Picard, Esther Meir-Glitzenstein, and Orit Rozin), the articles by Gal and Abraham Doron on policy toward the unemployed, and two papers discussing Ben-Gurion’s political thought (by Nir Kedar and Paula Kabalo). But since other contributions follow no clear order, there is no visible thematic logic in the book. This leaves it up to the reader to draw systematic inferences. One domain that invites analysis is labor-market liberalization, an issue dealt with from several perspectives. In this area, the logic of state action has dramatically altered, as one can learn from comparing Sylvie Fogiel-Bijaoui’s essay on the gendered aspects of a globalized labor market with Zvi Zameret’s discussion of Zalman Aranne’s education policy, which was targeted at proletarizing the Mizrahi Jews in Israel. In accordance with the assumption of radical change in Israel’s political economy, we learn from these pieces that direct efforts

Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East

287

to shape the labor force (which were completely acceptable in the 1950s and 1960s) were abandoned from the 1980s onwards. However, after reading these articles, along with the contributions by Uri Cohen, who writes on the Hebrew University’s function in maintaining the socioeconomic superiority of Ashkenazim, and Moshe Semyonov and Tamar Lerenthal’s analysis of labor migration to Israel, it is apparent that Israel did not experience a sharp transition from egalitarianism to inequality. On the contrary, inequality appears to have had deep historical and political roots. Liberalization did not create inequality, but has rather given inequality new forms and expressions. To sum up, the lack of editorial leadership limits the potential for this book to acquire the status of a core text in contemporary Israel studies. Previous collections with a similar goal succeeded, where this project does not, in offering a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts. Examples are the volumes edited by Uri Ram, Gershon Shaﬁr and Yoav Peled, and Hanna Herzog, which placed individual contributions within a more comprehensive framework.1 This failure is unfortunate, since Society and Economy in Israel offers some important insights on Israel that should not be neglected. Many of the volume’s essays contribute to our understanding of speciﬁc periods in Israel’s history. This is especially true for the 1950s, on which there are pieces covering numerous aspects of social policy, including those pertaining to education, health, employment, welfare, and immigrant absorption. However, while the vast majority of Israeli social scientists have come to recognize that it is impossible to discuss inequality in Israel without mentioning the country’s Palestinian citizens and non-citizens, they are strikingly absent from this collection. The sole exception is a chapter by Amal Jamal. Standing alone, it suggests that the editors are guilty of ignoring precisely what its author calls for, namely, an examination of the ways in which this minority was excluded from every dimension of social and political life in Israel. Ronen Mandelkern The Hebrew University

Note 1. Uri Ram (ed.), Hah.evrah hayisreelit, heibetim bikortiyim (1993); Gershon Shaﬁr and Yoav Peled (eds.), The New Israel: Peacemaking and Liberalization (Boulder: 2000); Hanna Herzog (ed.), H . evrah bemarah: lezikhro shel Yonatan Shapiro (Tel Aviv: 2000).

Orna Sasson-Levy, Zehuyot bemadim: gavriyut venashiyut baz.ava hayisreelit (Identities in uniform: masculinity and femininity in the Israeli army). Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2006. 265 pp.

Since the establishment of the state of Israel, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have stood at the helm of national institutions and have fulﬁlled central functions in Israel’s war-saturated society. Many sociologists have pointed to the far-reaching inﬂuence of the military system both at the societal and individual levels, well beyond Israel’s compulsory military service or reserve duty. Orna Sasson-Levy’s book belongs to a

288

Book Reviews

rich tradition of research dealing with the range of connections between masculinity (and therefore also femininity), the military, and the state of Israel. In this work, which presents a critical, feminist, sociological, and contemporary approach, she shows how the personal approaches of young men and women to issues pertaining to the military and to civilian life both express and conﬁrm the gender-oriented, ethnic, and class relations within Israeli society. Sasson-Levy makes use of qualitative empirical research to examine the formation of gender and civilian identities within the military organization. She is interested in exposing the links between gender, ethnicity, class, and military employment as expressed both in the discourse of soldiers and in their identities. Her analysis attempts to dismantle the uniform perception of military masculinity through an examination of four groups of draftees. First are the (male) combat soldiers, who have always been perceived as representative of the masculine hegemony and of “good Israeli citizenship.” Next are soldiers in blue-collar support (jobnik) roles, such as cooks and drivers, who are mostly of Mizrahi origin or else are new immigrants, and who represent, in the author’s opinion, alternative masculine identities that undermine the perception of masculinity and citizenship of the ﬁrst group. The third group consists of non-combat soldiers in white-collar positions (such as computer specialists or members of intelligence units), who are mostly of middle-class Ashkenazic background. Finally, there are female soldiers who serve in “male” roles in the military, who enthusiastically adopt the masculine ﬁghting approach. I would like to focus on the chapter summarizing the author’s ﬁndings on these female soldiers, which are based on in-depth interviews with 12 women who served in “male” capacities or in a masculine environment in the army, mostly as teachertrainers for male combat soldiers in the ﬁeld. Sasson-Levy has found that, much like ﬁghting men, these women saw in the army an opportunity for self-realization and personal gain. Most of them have positive stories about the military, emphasizing it as an empowering experience that enhanced their sense of independence and self-esteem. Through an analysis of numerous quotations, Sasson-Levy documents her claim that these female soldiers’ sense of power and autonomy derives from their adoption of new gender identities. These identities, which are founded on greater similarities between men and women, are nonetheless shaped according to the masculine norm. There is a conscious (and, at times, subconscious) imitation of various “male” customs, such as refraining from appearing too spruced up or adorned, an attempt to speak in a more masculine tone of voice, and the use of more masculine language. This “alternative” identity connects between female and male patterns, and in this manner the women subvert the assumed gender order—which has always formed the basis of the military institution—undermining their traditional tag as “girls.” Nevertheless (and this is an excellent example of the complexity of Sasson-Levy’s analysis), in exhibiting this “male” behavior, the female soldiers are essentially expressing a patriarchal approach that holds women to be inferior to men. A related ﬁnding demonstrates that women who serve in male military roles hold themselves aloof in various ways from more traditional women, whom they perceive as weak and foolish. In this way, they empower themselves by means of adopting a misogynist approach that is typical of the hegemonic ideology of patriarchal societ-

Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East

289

ies. Moreover, these female soldiers rarely think about the sexual harassment they or their friends underwent, viewing it as a trivial custom, a “characteristic” or “normal” aspect of army life that is best laughed at or ignored. In a brilliant analysis, SassonLevy shows how the mere acknowledgement or recognition of sexual harassment, or of the status of women as potential victims, is enough to place female soldiers at the margins of the army (as weak and in need of protection), thus lessening their ability to function as equals. At the end of this chapter, Sasson-Levy presents the entirety of the ﬁndings on women and military service from various feminist perspectives—liberal, cultural, radical, and Mizrahi. She also offers a more personal conclusion, arguing that, whereas abolishing the draft would serve to increase their marginality in Israeli society, “there is no point in placing the integration of women into ‘male’ positions in the army at the top of the list of feminist priorities in Israel” (p. 191). This chapter displays an excellent integration of rich empirical material (as expressed in the fascinating quotes from the interviews) with a body of broad theoretical and empirical data (derived from many sources, Israeli and foreign) on issues of identity, masculinity, the military, and citizenship. So, too, in her theoretical chapter, Sasson-Levy confronts the various military-masculine identities and stresses that many voices exist in this ﬁeld—perhaps to the extent that the hegemonic status of the Israeli combat soldier is in the process of being undermined. She concludes by saying that only a signiﬁcant peace process, which will weaken the role of the military in shaping the image of Israeli society, as well as strengthening democratic processes within it, can cause new perceptions of masculinity and citizenship to blossom. Israeli society is currently undergoing deep changes as it moves from its collectivist origins toward an ever-growing focus on individualism. The interviews in this book were conducted between 1995 and 1999, and one can assume that many of the processes emphasized by Sasson-Levy have intensiﬁed since then, as evident, for example, in the growing attention paid by the Israeli media to the phenomenon of draft-dodging. Sasson-Levy’s multi-voiced, fascinating, and in-depth commentary presents existential dilemmas in all their complexities. Her book is a noteworthy addition to the literature on Israeli sociology and an important contribution to theoretical feminism. Amia Lieblich The Hebrew University

Studies in Contemporary Jewry XXIV Edited by Jonathan Frankel and Ezra Mendelsohn

Symposium—Jews and Protestants Yaakov Ariel, The One and the Many: Unity and Diversity in Protestant Attitudes toward the Jews Julius Bailey, The Black Churches in America and Their Attitudes toward Jews and Judaism Haim Genizi, The Attitude of the World Council of Churches to the Israeli-Palestinian Conﬂict Susannah Heschel, Confronting the Past: German Protestant Theology in the Postwar Era Moti Inbari, “The Universal Temple”: Jewish-Christian Cooperation in Plans to Establish the Third Temple Christopher Leighton, The Presbyterian-Jewish Impasse Peter Pettit, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and Its Ramiﬁcations Kurt Anders Richardson, The “Jewish Jesus”: Recent Scholarship from Protestant and Jewish Scholars Mark Silk, American Jewry and “the Protestant Question” Timothy P. Weber, American Evangelicals and Israel: A Complicated Alliance . . . plus essays, review essays, and book reviews

290

Note on Editorial Policy

Studies in Contemporary Jewry is pleased to accept manuscripts for possible publication. Authors of essays on subjects generally within the contemporary Jewish sphere (from the turn of the 20th century to the present) should send two copies to: The Editor, Studies in Contemporary Jewry The Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry The Bebrew University Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel 91905

Essays should not exceed 35 pages in length and must be double-spaced throughout (including intended quotations and endnotes). E-mail inquiries may be sent to the following address: studiescj @savion.huji.ac.il. Abstracts of articles from previous issues may be found via our website: http://icj. huji.ac.il/StudiesCJ/studiescj.html.

291

Jews and the Sporting Life: Studies in Contemporary Jewry XXIII

Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Volume XXI: Jews, Catholics, and the Burden of History (Studies in Contemporary Jewry) (v. 21)

Studies in Contemporary Jewry: Volume XVIII: Jews and Violence: Images. Ideologies, Realities (Studies in Contemporary Jewry, 18)

Sephardic Jewry and Mizrahi Jews (Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Vol XXII)

Studies in Contemporary Jewry: Volume V: Israel: State and Society, 1948-1988 (Studies in Contemporary Jewry)

Studies in Contemporary Jewry: Volume XIX: Jews and the State: Dangerous Alliances and the Perils of Privilege (Studies in Contemporary Jewry, 19)

Jews and Gender: The Challenge to Hierarchy (Studies in Contemporary Jewry, 16)

Studies in Contemporary Jewry: Volume XIII: The Fate of the European Jews, 1939-1945: Continuity or Contingency? (Studies in Contemporary Jewry)

Studies in Contemporary Jewry: Volume IX: Modern Jews and Their Musical Agendas (Vol 9)

Rooney: A Sporting Life

Studies in Contemporary Jewry: Volume VII: Jews and Messianism in the Modern Era: Metaphor and Meaning (Vol 7)

Rooney: A Sporting Life

Studies in Contemporary Jewry: Volume III: Jews and Other Ethnic Groups in a Multi-ethnic World (Vol 3)

Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger (Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies 6) (Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies)

Studies in Contemporary Jewry: Volume VIII: A New Jewry? America Since the Second World War (Vol 8)

Jews in America (Religion in American Life)

Studies in Contemporary Jewry: Volume XII: Literary Strategies: Jewish Texts and Contexts (Vol 12)

Studies in Contemporary Jewry: Volume XII: Literary Strategies: Jewish Texts and Contexts (Vol 12)

The Jews of Yemen: Studies in Their History and Culture

The Jews in Australia

The Boxing Scene (Sporting)

Sporting Dystopias

Byzantine Jewry in the Mediterranean Economy

Sporting Blood

The Left and the Jews: The Jews and the Left

Sporting Blood

Sporting Blood

Sporting Wood

Aquinas and the Jews

Milton and the Jews

Heidegger and ''the jews''

Jews and the Sporting Life: Studies in Contemporary Jewry XXIII

Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Volume XXI: Jews, Catholics, and the Burden of History (Studies in Contemporary Jewry) (v. 21)

Studies in Contemporary Jewry: Volume XVIII: Jews and Violence: Images. Ideologies, Realities (Studies in Contemporary Jewry, 18)

Sephardic Jewry and Mizrahi Jews (Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Vol XXII)

Studies in Contemporary Jewry: Volume V: Israel: State and Society, 1948-1988 (Studies in Contemporary Jewry)

Studies in Contemporary Jewry: Volume XIX: Jews and the State: Dangerous Alliances and the Perils of Privilege (Studies in Contemporary Jewry, 19)

Jews and Gender: The Challenge to Hierarchy (Studies in Contemporary Jewry, 16)

Studies in Contemporary Jewry: Volume XIII: The Fate of the European Jews, 1939-1945: Continuity or Contingency? (Studies in Contemporary Jewry)

Studies in Contemporary Jewry: Volume IX: Modern Jews and Their Musical Agendas (Vol 9)

Rooney: A Sporting Life

Studies in Contemporary Jewry: Volume VII: Jews and Messianism in the Modern Era: Metaphor and Meaning (Vol 7)

Rooney: A Sporting Life

Studies in Contemporary Jewry: Volume III: Jews and Other Ethnic Groups in a Multi-ethnic World (Vol 3)

Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger (Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies 6) (Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies)

Studies in Contemporary Jewry: Volume VIII: A New Jewry? America Since the Second World War (Vol 8)

Jews in America (Religion in American Life)

Studies in Contemporary Jewry: Volume XII: Literary Strategies: Jewish Texts and Contexts (Vol 12)

Studies in Contemporary Jewry: Volume XII: Literary Strategies: Jewish Texts and Contexts (Vol 12)

The Jews of Yemen: Studies in Their History and Culture

The Jews in Australia

The Boxing Scene (Sporting)

Sporting Dystopias

Byzantine Jewry in the Mediterranean Economy

Sporting Blood

The Left and the Jews: The Jews and the Left

Sporting Blood

Sporting Blood

Sporting Wood

Aquinas and the Jews

Milton and the Jews

Heidegger and ''the jews''

Recommend Documents