Sammy Lu srping (pictured at right with his father, Yossel) relished the attention an “aggressive little Jew boy” received from the public and the press. A er he won his championship at a bout in Maple Leaf Gardens, he wrote, “I was Judah the Maccabee in Star of David shorts.”
Newspapers, particularly The Daily Star , covered amateur sports extensively and helped make local heroes out of Luftspring and other Toronto Jewish athletes. But that coverage came at a cost. Writers and editors exploited tribal loyalties and eagerly pitted ethnic communities against one another to sell papers. In 1933, when Luftspring lost a controversial decision to a boxer from Ham- ilton named Chick McCarthy, the headline in the Toronto Daily Star was “Fans Raise Ter- rific Howl When Irisher Beats Hebrew.” Most young Jewish athletes welcomed the publicity, the recognition, and the opportun- ities that the press coverage brought them, both inside and outside their communities. That was especially true of boxers, who were celebrated in ways that stars of team sports rarely were. And they would have had no reason to object to being called tough, aggressive, rugged, or any other quality that ran counter to traditional male Jewish stereotypes. Luftspring, by his own account, wore the mantle of “aggressive little Jew boy” with pride. In his memoir, Luftspring boasted about being in the newspaper practically
to convince fans that their newly acquired goalie, Lorne Chabot, was actually named Lorne Chabotsky. Seven years later, Rangers manager Les- ter Patrick, facing declining attendance at Madison Square Garden, mused to re- porters that “maybe McGraw was right.” Two months later, he purchased the con- tract of Alex “Mine Boy” Levinsky from the Maple Leafs. That nickname had been bestowed on Levinsky by a local Toronto sportswriter who claimed Levinsky’s father used to sit in the stands and yell “that’s mein boy” when his son made a good play. The story was almost certainly untrue. Levinsky’s father was born in Toronto and didn’t speak with an accent. But the nickname stuck, and Levinsky never publicly objected. That was typical of an era when sportswrit- ers focused on identity and played to stereo- types in ways that would be unimaginable today. Levinsky was variously referred to in the Toronto press as a “curly-haired Jew,” a “clever Hebrew performer,” and “the only Litvak lad in major league hockey.” Lufts- pring was an “aggressive little Jew boy.”
Schmeling in June 1933, the fight was billed as the Jew vs. the Nazi. The problem was that Schmeling wasn’t a Nazi, and Baer didn’t clearly identify as a Jew. (His mother was not Jewish, and his father was the son of a Jewish father and a gentile mother.) But there were rumours that Baer had been cir- cumcised for the fight. When he entered the ring wearing a Star of David on his trunks, the 60,000 fans who packed Yankee Sta- dium cheered wildly. I t wasn’t just boxing promoters hoping to cash in on Jewish athletes. John McGraw, the manager of the New York Giants baseball team from 1902 to 1932, liked to talk about how racial rival- ries contributed to “the great melting pot of sport.” He estimated that half the crowd attending baseball games in New York were Jewish, and they would love to see one of their own in a Giants’ uniform. “A home- run hitter with a Jewish name in New York would be worth a million,” he told a repor- ter in 1920. The NHL’s New York Rangers were on a similar quest. In 1927, team publicists tried
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