punch, hit a ball, shoot a basket, or score a goal, you would not only be accepted, you would be celebrated—within your own com- munity and also among people who other- wise would have no time for you. Those young Jewish athletes, this first generation of muscular Jews, were acutely aware that they were helping to redefine how a Jew looked and sounded. “I have always believed that the Jewish people are far su- perior in every way to everyone else,” the ex-Dodger Goody Rosen told the historian Peter Levine in 1984. “We took care of our- selves, we gave as good as we got, and we emerged stronger than ever.” O f all the sports that Jews excelled in, perhaps none was more unexpected— ran more counter to the stereotype of the meek and cowardly Jew—than boxing. Boxing had several advantages over other sports that a ghetto kid might have been interested in. Unlike hockey or baseball, it required very little physical space. It also didn’t cost much to become a boxer, and if you were good, there was actual money to be made, even as an amateur: promot- ers would routinely slip $25 or $30 to their young fighters under the table after a bout. That was a big deal for young, impover- ished Jewish fighters. And with Jews heav- ily involved as managers, trainers, and promoters, boxing was one sport where antisemitism was not really an issue. And besides, knowing how to give and take a punch was a useful skill to have outside the ring as well. Many of these young boxers had found inspiration in the career of Benny Leonard from New York’s Lower East Side, the world lightweight champion between 1917 and 1925. He was the first ghetto kid to achieve international sports super-stardom, and he did it while proudly wearing the Star of David on his trunks. So too did Sammy Luftspring and many other young boxers of the time. In making such choices, these athletes were both expressing their Jewish pride and helping to sell tickets. Promoters were looking for Jewish boxers to get Jewish fans into their arenas; potential audiences saw American boxer Abe Attell marketed as “the little Hebrew” and Joe Bernstein described as the “pride of the ghetto.” Jewish boxers were such a surefire draw that even non-Jewish fighters would some- times pose as Jewish. When American heavyweight Max Baer fought German Max
studying Torah as well as other pursuits that might better prepare their children for life in the new world. Those children had other ideas. They were looking to find their places within a main- stream culture that was strange and often hostile. Sports could help bring them clos- er to that goal, allow them to escape the cloistered geographic and cultural world of their parents. “People didn’t get out of their neighbourhood too much in those days,” Luftspring wrote in his memoir, Call Me Sammy , published in 1975, “nor was there much reason they should.”
leather dust caused him to spend years in a sanitorium, and an accident suffered while serving in the Polish army had left him with one leg shorter than the other, making it difficult to walk. He was, in many ways, the “undersized and puny” European Jew that Frank had written about. His son Sammy, who became a Canadian champion and one of the top-ranked welter- weights in the world, represented the new order—part of a remarkable generation of young Canadian athletes who were excel- ling on the ice, the field, the court, and in the ring in the 1920s and ‘30s. Proudly and unabashedly Jewish, they were shattering any lingering notions that Jews lacked the mental and physical toughness to become champions, and at the same time, they were using sports to gain acceptance into the Canadian mainstream. I n some ways, this golden generation of Jewish athletes was fulfilling a dream that dated back to the earliest days of the Zionist movement. In a speech to the Second Zionist Con- gress, in 1898, Max Nordau (who co-found- ed the World Zionist Organization with Theo- dor Herzl) argued that a Jewish homeland needed to be more than a place where Jews could go to escape religious discrimination. He called for the emergence of a “new Jew,” a “generation of muscular Jews” to replace the “nervous Jews” of the European dias- pora who were weak of mind and body. These new Jews would be men and women with solid stomachs and hard muscles who would possess the physical and mental toughness to build a Jewish homeland and change the world’s image of the Jew. Inspired by Nordau’s writings, the teach- ing of gymnastics became an integral part of the Zionist project in Palestine. But Jews like Yossel Luftspring, who had fled to North America from the shtetls of Eastern Europe, had little time for or interest in gymnastics, or sports of any kind. He had six children and a wife to feed. After Prohibition came to Ontario in 1916, he and Sammy’s mother ran a successful bootlegging operation out of their kitchen, but those good times ended when the law was repealed in 1927, and the family slipped into poverty. Besides, Yossel was deeply Orthodox, and Jews were supposed to be the “people of the book,” not of the playground or the sports field. Like many of his generation, he thought athletics took time away from
“The Jewish athlete at last has burst from the bonds of an old legend and is creating a new order.”
This was a new generation. By the time he turned 20, Sammy Luftspring had al- ready travelled all over Canada and boxed in 11 American cities. He had friends who were Irish, Italian, and Protestant. Mean- while, his parents rarely ventured beyond the Jewish ghetto of Spadina Avenue and College Street. For better and for worse, these young Jews would be drawn into the great urban eth- nic mosaic that Toronto had become. They would play the sports that other Canadians played—boxing, basketball, baseball, hock- ey—and they would play them better, without sacrificing their identity. In the 1930s, there were “no Jews al- lowed” signs at some Toronto beaches. Universities had quotas on Jewish students. Some golf clubs and resorts would not ac- cept Jewish guests. Sports represented a different world, a world that was as close to a meritocracy as many of those young Jews would ever encounter. If you could throw a
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