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Is There a Jewish Style of Sport? (1993)

Ellis Island to Ebbets Field (1993) opens with its author, Peter Levine, a Brooklyn boy who is now a history professor at Michigan State, discovering photographs of his late “father as a college athlete—playing basketball, posing with his lacrosse buddies, and alone, in his football togs, on the field at Lewisohn Stadium.” Wishing to recreate “the world of sport and the Jewish community that was also my father’s,” he devotes the opening chapters to Jews involved in semi-professional physical sports (in contrast to chess and checkers) around New York City in the 1920s and 1930s, both covering a lot of forgotten names, rather than focusing upon the familiar stars, and incidentally reminding us that basketball was at the time commonly portrayed as a “Jewish game.” So whereas the careers of famous baseballers Hank Greenberg and Moe Berg merit four pages and two respectively, the pitcher Sandy Koufax and the sprinter/sportscaster Marty Glickman get more attention, because they too were from Brooklyn (and Levine’s father happened to be Koufax’s history teacher at Lafayette High School). Even the choice of photographs reflects this provincial orientation. More than once I felt this “Oxford Book of Jewish Sports Anecdotes” was designed to sell to the hiers of a lot of otherwise forgotten New York City athletes.

This focus upon a particular city, if not a particular borough, at a particular time perhaps accounts for the omission of several prominent figures you would expect to see at least mentioned in a thick book sub-titled “Sport and the American Jewish Experience”—the baseball player Steve Sax, the basketballer/executive Ernie Grunfeld, or Benny Kauff, a lefthanded outfielder who played in the majors between 1912 and 1920. There is no notice of the boxer Mike Rossman, briefly a light heavyweight champion, though you’d think that Levine would be responsive to the symbolism of a New Jersey youngster with an Italian father fighting under his mother’s Jewish name, with a Star of David emblazoned on his trunks. I found no mention of Steve Tannen, Randy Grossman, or Ron Mix, who were all professional footballers a decade or two ago. (While other players were individually wishing national television viewers a Merry Christmas during a playoff game a few years ago, Grossman announced “Happy Hanukah.”)

Levine doesn’t deal with reported converts to Judaism, such as the baseball stars Lenny Randle, Elliot Maddox, and Rod Carew. Nor does the book mention the current black boxing champion, Andrew Toney, who “looks Jewish” if only because he too sports a Star of David on his trunks (reportedly in honor of his woman manager, with whose family he resides). No more interested in female Jews than black Jews, Professor Levine mentions Nancy Lieberman only in passing, even though she was in her time thought to be the greatest woman basketball player ever (and from the Rockaways). Though Al Schacht is introduced as “the Clown Prince of Baseball,” Levine follows with a thumbnail biography, rather than illustrating Schacht’s reputation. On the other hand, he introduces athletes previously unfamiliar to me, whom I for one would like to know more about, such as Joe Chonski, a nineteenth-century San Francisco boxer, “born in 1868 to a middle-class family of intellectuals,” whose “father, Isadore, [was] one of the first Jews to attend Yale.” My sense is that while Levine began a book about his father’s world, his publisher asked him to produce another.

In a book so filled with details mistakes are perhaps as inevitable as omissions, yet some are ludicrous. Not unlike other Brooklyn boys, Levine has trouble with Manhattan geography. The boxer Benny Leonard, he tells us, “grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in New York’s East Village near Eighth Street and Second Avenue.” Well, the epithet “East Village” didn’t come until many years later, while the intermediate street parallel to Seventh and Ninth, running between Avenue A and Third, has long been called St. Marks Place. Only a few pages before Levine has Hank Greenberg “born on Perry Street in New York’s Lower East Side.” However, Perry Street is on the other side of town, in what is now called the West Village. Methinks the reference should be ~Cherry~ Street, which, thanks to housing projects, now has only a fraction of its former length. (Worse yet is the remark at the top of page 252 about Mark “Spitz, who had planned all along to leave Berlin immediately after his [Olympic] competition,” whereas the venue in 1972 was Munich; the Berlin Olympics, at which Glickman was slighted, took place in 1936. The study of history apparently does not ensure competence in geography or chronology.)

Though Levine discusses the basketball betting scandals of the early 1950s, he misunderstands “point shaving” as he describes a game between Missouri and CCNY in which the former were favored by fourteen points. “City fell apart in the first half and trailed by 31-14 at the intermission,” Levine writes. “Concerned that members of the first team were purposely not playing their game, [assistant coach] Sand urged Holman to put in his second-string in order to press Missouri into mistakes. Holman, however, stayed with his frontliners. City lost 54-37.” However, the idea of point shaving has interested gamblers bribing key members of the favored team to win by less than the “point spread,” in this case fourteen points, if only to save their reputations as players: a seventeen-point loss is a measure of a complete collapse. (I’m reminded of the federal government’s similarly naive prosecution some years ago of Jewish meatpackers’ conspiring to fix wholesale prices, which they probably did. The government’s problem was that the retailers all paid different prices for similar merchandise, so accustomed were its salesmen at improvising prices “special for you,” needless to say undermining the conspiracy and, incidentally, a prosecution that failed to understand Jewish salesmen.)

I had hoped Levine’s book would address what I take to be the central question of any ethnic cultural history—is there a Jewish style of sport? Most would agree that blacks play basketball differently from whites and that there are subtle general differences between black baseball players and Latinos, say. Most would agree as well that Jewish enterprise in America is generally different from gentile and that the Israeli style of warfare differs from that practiced elsewhere. Some have endeavored to identify common traits in art and literature produced by Jews. Having likewise been trained in American studies, where we were taught always to ask of what is unique about any body of culture, I expected Levine to deal with this question, even if to deny a conclusion. However, he is too involved with his detailed naming and anecdotes to confront such larger issues. In lieu of his default, let me note only that in physical sports Jews tend to be smart strategists, like the baseball catcher Moe Berg and the basketball impresario Red Auerbach, or aggressive and tough (proto-Israelis) in the mold of Hank Greenberg and Al Rosen.

The absence of Jews is contemporary professional sports raises the question of whether, given the temper of the times, affirmative action might be appropriate to ensure to both sides of a basketball team, say, should have at least two Caucasian players on the team at all times. (That should handicap them evenly, much as preferential policies equitably handicap universities nowadays.) After all, one valuable theme in Levine’s book is reminding readers that there used to be a helluva lot of anti-Semitism in America. I find myself frequently telling young (and not-so-young) people that when I applied to college, thirty-five years ago, even Ivy League schools had quotas ~limiting~ (rather than prescribing) the number of Jews, or suspected Jews (since applications were forbidden to ask), in each entering class. Likewise, only a decade or two before, even Hank Greenberg and Al Rosen suffered public abuse when they played. Don’t forget it.