Muscling in on New Worlds: Jews, Sport, and the Making of the Americas.
Brod, Harry
Muscling in on New Worlds: Jews, Sport, and the Making of the
Americas. Eds. Raanan Rein and David M. K. Sheinin. Leiden: Brill, 2015.
xiii + 203 pp.
This volume contains ten enlightening essays on Jewish identity and
sport, exploring linkages and disjunctions between how both are
culturally constructed in specific times and places. It is also a book
whose parts are greater than their sum. That is to say, the
introduction, epilogue and eight essays that form the body of the book
are all valuable in their own right, but the attempts in both the
editors' introduction and Ari Sclar's epilogue to create a
unifying vision among them remain problematic.
There are many ways to categorize the essays that make up this
volume. At the risk of oversimplification, one way would be to
dichotomize those that primarily provide a chronicle of Jews in sports,
giving us the who, what, where and when of Jewish athletes (primarily,
though not exclusively, well-known figures in major sports) vs. those
focus more on the why and how, giving us analyses of major trends and
underlying causes. Each essay naturally includes aspects of the other
genre too, but the different foci yield decidedly different kinds of
essays, which sometimes complement each other but sometimes seem to
inhabit different realms of scholarly discourses. Extensive
bibliographic notes make visible the frames of reference in which these
authors place their scholarship.
In the former camp are David M. K. Sheinen's "What Ray
Arcell Saw in the Shower: Victor Galindez, Mike Rossman, and the Two
Fights that Put an End to Jewish Boxing"; Raanan Rein's
'"My Bobeh was Praying and Suffering for Atlanta':
Family, Food and Language among the Jewish-Argentine Fans of the Club
Atletico Atlanta"; Jeffrey S. Gurock's "The Clothes They
Wear and the Time They Keep: The Orthodox Athletes' Tests of
Tolerance in Contemporary America"; and Gerald R. Gems's
"Jews, Sport and the Construction of an American Identity."
(To spare the reader the suspense, what was claimed to have been seen in
the shower referred to in Sheinin's titillating title was the
ostensibly uncircumcised penis of boxer Max Baer [16]). In the latter
camp we find the editors' introduction, "Making an
Adjustment"; Rebecca T. Alpert's "The Macho-Mensch:
Modeling American Jewish Masculinity and the Heroes of Baseball";
and Ari Sclar's "Redefining Jewish Athleticism: New Approaches
and Research Directions." Standing apart from these are essays that
are not primarily about sports in the traditional sense one would
expect: Eleanor F. Odenheimer, Rebecca Buchanan and Tanya Prewitt's
"Adaptations of Yoga: Jewish Interpretations"; Nathan
Abrams's "Muscles, Mimicry, Menschlikyat [sic] and Madagascar:
Jews, Sport, and Nature in US Cinema"; and Alejandro Meter's
"Jewishness and Sports: The Case for Latin American Fiction,"
the latter two dealing with artistic representations of the book's
subject matter more than with the topic itself.
The editors' willingness to go outside the traditional
parameters of who and what we would expect to be included in a
discussion of sports enhances the volume and is evidenced early on in
the introduction by the statement that "Perhaps the greatest Jewish
athlete in the Americas was Harry Houdini" (8). Abrams's essay
significantly expands the book's theoretical scope by bringing in
post-colonial theory and the history of imperialism to the exploration
of the development of Jewish identity and thereby greatly advances the
intention announced by the book's subtitle to relate Jews and sport
to the making of the Americas, rather than simply focusing on Jews and
sport in the Americas. In terms of my earlier distinction between the
primarily chronicling vs. analytical essays, the latter group
contributes more to this project than the former. Abrams's essay
also contains the enlightening observation that the "sports at
which Jews tend to excel--boxing, table tennis, fencing, swimming, and
chess--take place indoors" (12.5).
One should note that while the book's subtitle describes it as
being about "the Americas," it is really about the United
States and Argentina, with only passing references to other nations
(Brazil, Canada, etc.). Certain key tropes are invoked in several
essays: baseball players Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax not playing on
Jewish holidays (discussed most enlighteningly by Alpert), renowned
Jewish boxers like Barney Ross and Benny Leonard, anti-Semitic taunting
of Jewish athletic competitors by sports fans (to the extent of fans of
the opposing football/ soccer teams throwing pieces of ham and even soap
onto the field, the latter especially striking in Argentina, given the
country's reputation for harboring Nazis after the war).
As is typical in discussions of the construction of Jewish identity
vis-avis a Christian dominant culture, some consider the Jewish
difference as one of religion, others as one of ethnicity. The major
analytical threads running through the volume are the two linked themes
of participation in sports as a vehicle for Jewish entry and
assimilation into mainstream culture through what Sheinen calls an
"identity bridge," and of sports as a refutation of belittling
stereotypes of Jewish men as physically weak and non-athletic, as people
of the book rather than the body (13). The essays by Alpert and Abrams
most explicitly theorize this gender dimension and thereby add
analytical acuity to the volume. Others are de facto about men rather
than women (though women receive some attention in places, such as Senda
Berenson's role in developing women's basketball as well as
discus, shot put and javelin champ Lillian Copeland, both in Gems's
essay) but for the most part they leave this undertheorized.
Sclar's concluding essay offers useful ways of placing this volume
in a larger context in the field, and points to some ways forward
through the fertile intersection of Jewish studies and studies of sport.
Harry Brod
University of Northern Iowa
