was back to being considered a laughing matter. Today, while Jews play an outsized role in the ownership ranks of North American professional sports, there are only about a dozen Jewish players in the NHL, and only slightly more than that playing in major league baseball. In the two sports that Jews dominated in the interwar period, boxing and basketball, there are virtually no Jews participating at an elite level. The decline began in the years after the Second World War. As the Jewish commun- ity grew and became more prosperous, it left the cohesive downtown neighbour- hoods that had been the breeding grounds for so many athletes in the years between the wars. The children of those athletes were more assimilated, more comfortable interacting with the non-Jewish world, and had far more educational and professional opportunities available to them. If you could feed your family and be upwardly mobile without getting punched repeatedly in the head, why not take advantage of that? But the contributions made by that first generation of “muscular Jews” should not be minimized or forgotten. They helped shatter long-standing stereotypes that in- sisted Jews lacked the physical and mental strength to compete successfully in sports. They opened doors to a wider world that others could walk through, whether or not they were athletes. And they did it not by minimizing their Jew- ishness to make non-Jews feel more com- fortable with them but by asserting their Jewish pride at every opportunity. In 1980, Budd Schulberg, the great American boxing correspondent, wrote about his experience watching Benny Leonard fight: “To see him climb into the ring sporting his six-pointed Jewish star on his fighting trunks was to an- ticipate sweet revenge for all the bloody no- ses, split lips, and mocking laughter at pale little Jewish boys who had run the neigh- bourhood gauntlet.” In 1907, the president of Harvard, Charles Eliot had told the university’s Menorah So- ciety that Jews were “distinctly inferior in stature and physical development...to any other race,” and he lamented the loss of a “martial spirit” among Jews since the days of the Maccabees. The generation of Jewish athletes who came of age in the years after Eliot made those remarks did indeed re-kin- dle that martial spirit. For a time, they were the new Maccabees.
Proudly and unabashedly Jewish, star athletes used sports to gain acceptance into the Canadian mainstream.
every day between 1932 and 1936. “I was the most written about person in the whole city,” he declared. While he described some of the coverage as “loose and inaccurate and vulgar and tasteless,” he added, “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t crave the ink those sportswriters of the thirties gave me. My passion to see my name or my picture in print was as uncritical as it was boundless.” When, in 1936, he beat Frankie Genovese, the pride of Toronto’s Little Italy, in front of more than 5,000 people at Maple Leaf Gardens, to win the Canadian welterweight crown, Luftspring recalled, “I went home that night to a neighbourhood that was mine for the asking. I was king, I was emperor. I was God. I was Judah the Maccebee in Star of David shorts.” I n a scene from the hit 1980 movie com- edy Airplane! , written by three Jewish writers from Wisconsin, a stewardess is handing out reading material to passengers. “Do you have anything light?” an older woman asks. “How about this leaflet,” the stewardess replies handing her a small piece of paper. “‘Famous Jewish Sports Legends.’” Stanley Frank would not have been amused. More than half a century after he had de- clared that Jewish athletes were bursting the bonds of an old legend and creating a new order, the notion of Jewish athleticism
Jewish athletes o en drew attention—for good and for ill—for their identities.
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