Riess, Steven A., ed. Syracuse, NY:  Syracuse University Press, 1998. 337 pp. $24.95 (USD). ISBN: 0815627610.

[1]  Sports and the American Jew, well edited by Steven A. Riess, represents an important scholarly contribution to the growing fields of Jewish studies and sports studies. Covering issues as diverse as team ownership and the role of Jews in the institutionalization of the marathon, this collection blunts the stereotype of Jews as a bookish, non-athletic people. The essays included in this volume are grouped around the theme of the acculturation and assimilation of second-generation Jews in America, but as the authors demonstrate, sports were not just a means of Americanization but of buttressing Jewish identity as well. 

[2]  Riess’s opening essay on Jews in American sports provides historical context for the essays that follow and demonstrates that there is still much primary material left to be examined concerning the place of Jews in sports. His article on Jews and boxing illustrates how, beginning in the last decade of the nineteenth century, a number of young Jewish males in large cities took up the gloves, “shock[ing]” the religious sensibilities of their first-generation immigrant parents, and “surpris[ing]” non-Jews with their accomplishments (60).  However, as he illustrates, with growing economic prosperity and greater social acceptance, Jews in postwar America moved out of the ring as fighters and became prominent as “trainers, managers, and promoters” (104).  Riess’s anecdotes about the prizefighters, especially the great Barney Ross, make this essay a special delight.

[3]  The other contributors rounding out the collection take up Reiss’s challenge and explore some of these other issues of Jewish involvement in American sports.  Pamela Cooper examines Jewish involvement with professional and amateur marathon running, illuminating some of the ethnic tensions and biases that faced Jews in the first half of the twentieth century; her discussion of the arguments for and against the decision to participate in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin is especially valuable.  Gerald Gems’s analysis of the Chicago Hebrew Institute demonstrates how second-generation American Jews were eager to be considered equal to gentiles while at the same time maintaining a distinct religious faith.  William Simons’s article on Hank Greenberg (who goes from being “the Jewish first baseman” to “Captain Henry,” 206) illustrates the power of ethnicity in sports, describing how journalists focused on presumed Jewish qualities: the obsession with learning and the absence of a tough skin.  Donald Fisher’s article on Lester Harrison, who owned the Rochester Royals immediately following World War II, chronicles the changing fortunes of professional baseball as it shifted from a regional to a national sport.  Allen Guttmann’s article on the literature about Jews in sports (by such authors as Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Mark Harris) notes that, while baseball particularly was once the “central metaphor for Americanization” (243), as Jews have grown to be part of the larger culture the fixation on Americanization has waned (253).  Finally, Eric Solomon’s article on Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s novel The Celebrant examines how the novelist weaves together Jewish, Christian, and pagan elements, mixing the “myth and fact” of Americanization and baseball (256), comparable to Malamud’s The Natural.

[4]  Only two essays in Sports and the American Jew deviate from analyses of lower- and middle-class Jewish men.  Peter Levine’s essay examines Jewish country clubs in the decade following WWI. Prohibited from joining non-Jewish country clubs, Jews (particularly wealthy Jews from Germany) set out to make themselves American in spite of discrimination. Traditionally “WASP”-ish pursuits such as “golf, polo, and yachting” were taken up by Jewish country clubs, which separated them from the “waves of east European Jewish immigrants” (165); yet encroaching anti-Semitism eventually brought them together.  Linda Borish’s article investigates the establishment of athletic institutions—such as the YWHA and various settlement houses—which were designed for the “spiritual and bodily well-being of Jewish females” (113) and which quickened the pace of Americanization. This essay is particularly important for highlighting cultural and economic differences among Jewish women. Upper- and middle-class German Jews were the primary founders of these athletic institutions which were intended for lower-class—presumably less cultured—Eastern European Jewish women.

[5]  Outside its obvious value to scholars of Jewish studies and historians of sport, Sports and the American Jew should appeal as well to those studying immigrant cultures and the tensions of assimilation that arise between generations. The essays are clear and concise, and the scholarship is solid. Sports and the American Jew would make a fine addition to any academic library.

Matthew LaGrone
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario
matthew.lagrone@utoronto.ca