into the Ring A century ago, a new wave of Jewish sports stars upended stereotypes—inside the Jewish community as well as outside of it
BY IRA BASEN
I n 1936, a 27-year-old sportswriter for the New York Post named Stanley B. Frank published an extraordinary book called The Jew in Sport . The reason for writing the book, Frank declared in his opening chapter, was to counter a statement made by General Charles H. Sherrill, an American member of the International Olympic Committee. The general had travelled to Nazi Germany in 1935, and had several meetings with Adolf Hitler about the participation of Jewish ath- letes in the upcoming Berlin Olympics. After getting Hitler to agree to allow one Jewish athlete on the German team, Sherrill told reporters that he thought the issue of Jewish participation was rather overblown because “there never was a prominent Jew- ish athlete in history.” Frank was outraged. He described Sher- rill’s statement as “a vicious libel” and a “preposterous concept of the Jew,” even while conceding that the idea of Jewish athletic inferiority had some legitimate his- torical roots. Jews had faced centuries of discrimination and oppression in Europe. “Forced by soci- ety to live in terribly overcrowded, unsani- tary ghettos,” Frank wrote, “the Jew became undersized and puny. His meagre existence, his very life, depended on his mental agility and keenness of perception.” Under those circumstances, it was hard- ly surprising that “physical proficiency or
achievement was of profound unimportance and disinterest to him.” But that was the old world of Europe. The new world of North America presented dif- ferent challenges for Jews. “Influenced by his environment, the Jew, as always, tried to conform to the culture pattern of his new community,” Frank continued—and that meant embracing the culture of sport. “Sports are a tremendously important fac- tor in modern civilization,” Frank argued, and he was convinced that, freed from the con- fines of the ghetto, the Jew could be “a com- manding and prominent figure in sports—if given half a chance to prove his ability.” By 1936, that’s precisely what Jewish ath- letes in the U.S. were doing: winning Olym- pic medals, starring in American college and pro sports, dominating the ranks of basket- ball and boxing. “The Jewish athlete at last has burst from the bonds of an old legend and is creating a new order,” Stanley Frank concluded. I n his review of Jews who were excelling in sports, Frank scarcely bothered to cast his gaze northward to Canada. He asserted (incorrectly) that “the population of the Do- minion is practically non-Jewish.” Had he looked, he would have discovered that, in those years between the world wars, Canadian Jewish athletes were also forging a new order. Many of them were children of the first generation of Jewish immigrants
from Eastern Europe who had come to Can- ada in the early years of the century. Many had to overcome their parents’ disapproval to pursue their passion for sports. A rugged defenceman from Toronto’s downtown St. John’s Ward named Alex Levin- sky was starring in the NHL. Another ghetto graduate named Goodwin George “Goody” Rosen was playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Baseball and basketball teams composed of Jewish kids from Toronto’s Elizabeth Street playground, who called themselves the “Liz- zies,” were consistently rated among the best in the country. And a multi-sport star named Fanny Rosenfeld, known as “Bob- bie,” won gold and silver medals in track at the 1928 Olympics; she was—and was widely acknowledged to be—one of the most accomplished woman athletes in the world. But it was in boxing, described by Frank as “the most fundamental of all sports,” that Jews, both in the U.S. and Canada, were really making their mark. Twenty-two Jewish boxers won world championships between 1908 and 1936. For Frank, this repre- sented “the clinching proof of the Jew’s in- herent spiritual and physical toughness.” Few boxers anywhere were tougher than Sammy Luftspring, Born in 1916 in Toronto’s Jewish ghetto, Luftspring’s father, Yossel, was a Polish émi- gré, a boot maker by trade, who suffered from a variety of health issues. Respiratory problems caused by breathing in too much
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