Review by New York Times Review
It's hard to imagine two words less likely to appear in the same sentence than "Jewish" and "jocks." The very image is something of a punch line. Scroll back to the 1980 slapstick classic "Airplane!" The flight attendant is walking down the aisle with an armful of bulky reading material. She comes upon an extremely frail woman who asks for "anything light." The flight attendant reaches into the pile and pulls out a pamphlet the size of a takeout menu. "How about this?" she purrs. "Famous Jewish Sports Legends." Times have changed. In recent years, a cottage industry has grown up around the Jewish athlete. Want to know the first Jew to have a "substantial career" in the National Hockey League? It was Alex (Mine Boy) Levinsky, according to "The Big Book of Jewish Sports Heroes," by Peter S. Horvitz. Interested in learning the identity of the shortest player in the history of the National Football League? The Jewish Sports Review leads us to Jack (Soapy) Shapiro at 5 feet ½ inch. How about the least popular major league position for Jews? The answer, apparently, is third base. "You'd think the bag was made of pork," says Howard Megdal, author of "The Baseball Talmud." This is a testy bunch, to be sure. There isn't even agreement on what constitutes a Jew. The strict constructionists include only athletes who have at least one Jewish parent. The loose constructionists allow for one grandparent, thus lowering the bar to welcome the likes of the tennis great Pete Sampras and (maybe) the 1930s heavyweight champ Max Baer, whose roots remain controversial. In a world where ethnic pride is fueled by athletic minutiae, these details matter a lot. As my dear, late mother liked to say, "Who knew?" "Jewish Jocks" represents the high end of this quirky pursuit. Edited by Franklin Foer and Marc Tracy, both of The New Republic, the book gathers 50 brief portraits from some of the biggest names in journalism and academia. Their essays follow no particular pattern, the common denominator being the exceptionally high quality of the writing. Jews are profiled in everything from broadcasting and management to fencing and bullfighting. It's an odd mix, but it works for two reasons. First, much of the Jewish influence in sports has occurred beyond the locker room. Second, let's be honest: the Jewish bench is far too thin to support 50 tales of athletic immortality. The book opens with a terrific essay by the historian Simon Schama on Daniel Mendoza, the heavy-fisted 18th-century British pugilist who mocked the notion of Jews as a tribe "of knuckle-cracking misers, wispy-bearded dotards, shuffling hawkers of oranges and rags with greasy ringlets falling down their faces." What follows, however, tilts mostly toward American shores. For immigrants, the lure of sports was, and remains, an essential part of the assimilation process, and for Jews pouring through Ellis Island in the early 1900s, the key sport was boxing. Their first great hero, the lightweight champion Benny Leonard, both encouraged and undermined Jewish stereotypes of the time. "Of all the fistic mama's boys," Foer writes, "Leonard was the most slavishly devoted." As a young professional, he dared not tell his mother what he did, knowing she'd be ashamed. His father, seeing Benny come home one night with a wad of bills, was less judgmental. "You got that for the fight?" Getting no response, the father asked. "When are you going to fight again?" Leonard set the tone for Jewish boxing - and beyond. Where Irish and Italian fighters were viewed as brave and tough, Jews were seen as brainy and elusive. Leonard won by ducking, counterpunching and piling up points. He bragged about his diction, once challenging Bertrand Russell to a debate. His scientific style deeply offended Ernest Hemingway, who railed against wimps in the ring, but his fights drew such huge crowds that Jewish boxers who once had hidden their ethnicity behind aliases like "Mushy Callahan" began wearing the Star of David on their trunks. Sports teams took notice. Robert Weintraub's essay, "The Hunt for the Hebrew Ruth," follows the Giants manager John McGraw's futile attempt to trump the Yankees by finding a Jewish version of "the Babe." An exhaustive search turned up a prospect named Mose Solomon, likened in the press to an exotic animal. ("McGraw Pays 50K for Only Jewish Ballplayer in Captivity") Solomon, sadly, was no Ruth. He couldn't hit much, Weintraub says, and his glove "was made out of kugel." But McGraw kept at it, reaching rock bottom in 1928 when he turned down a high school prospect from the Bronx: "Henry (better known as Hank) Greenberg has been scouted by the Giants," he wrote, "and will never make a ballplayer." Greenberg - the real "Hebrew Ruth" -wound up in Detroit, where he cracked 58 homers in 1938. Ira Berkow's essay traces one of the most persistent conspiracy theories in the annals of Jewish sports: that anti-Semitic players and umpires denied Greenberg the chance to break Ruth's single-season record of 60 by pitching around him and making unfair calls. Interviewed by Berkow some years ago, Greenberg denied it. If anything, he said, the reverse was true: in one game, a player deliberately dropped a foul ball to give him a second chance; in another, the home plate umpire ruled him safe in his attempt at an inside-the-park home run when he clearly was out. "Pure baloney," Greenberg insisted. A fair number of these essays are unconnected to Jewish influence in sports. They simply profile an athlete who happens to be Jewish. Buzz Bissinger captures the essence of the welterweight champ Barney Ross in a streaming sentence punctuated by several dozen semicolons. It's eccentric, but devilishly well done. Howard Jacobson hilariously covers the Ping-Pong purist Marty Reisman, a true meshugeneh, whose refusal to switch from a wood paddle to a sponge paddle (which provides greater spin but deadens the game's "musicality") derailed a brilliant career. Judith Shulevitz provides an adroit, if depressing, portrait of the swimmer Mark Spitz, whose nine Olympic gold medals failed to inspire a national love affair. It's tough being a pitchman nobody much likes. Is there a "Jewish type" in sports, akin to Benny Leonard? The consensus here is yes. Jews initially excelled in basketball, several essayists agree, by emphasizing constant movement, pinpoint passing and precise outside shooting - skills that leveled the court in favor of shorter, more cerebral players. The Chicago Bears' Sid Luckman was football's first thinking quarterback - "Hebrew mind, Cossack body." Even Ron Mix, the enormous all-star tackle for the San Diego Chargers, was called "the Intellectual Assassin" for his love of literature. "Jewish Jocks" extends this premise to non-athletes as well. Two of the more entertaining examples are David Remnick's spot-on remembrance of Howard Cosell, whose pushy self-promotion and insufferable blather (often, it must be said, in support of noble causes) made him the most influential and despised sportscaster in America; and Steven Pinker's novel take on Red Auerbach as the guy "who never paid retail." The son of a Brooklyn deli owner, Auerbach coached the Boston Celtics to nine N.B.A. titles in one 10-year stretch. As a coach and a general manager, Pinker notes, he succeeded by accumulating overlooked draft picks and undervalued players with the feel of a shtetl middleman. Auerbach is best remembered for his role in racially integrating the N.B.A. and then choosing Bill Russell to be its first African-American coach. Yet he was neither politically correct nor a supporter of affirmative action. (When Russell once spoke of abandoning basketball for the Hollywood life, Auerbach replied, "Russ, how many roles do you think there are for a 6-foot-9 schvartze?") What drove him, Pinker says, was nothing more - or less - than the innate commercial spirit of his ancestors. "Racism, because it favors color over talent, is bad for business." Mazel tov, Red. David Oshinsky, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, leaches history at the University of Texas and New York University.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 2, 2012]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This is an entertaining and enlightening collection of essays about the lives and exploits of many influential Jewish sports figures that gives the lie to the jokes about Jews and sports that have been told by everyone from Don Rickles to Jon Stewart. The 50 figures profiled by such writers as David Remnick and Deborah Lipstadt cover a wide range: Benny Friedman and Sid Luckman, who together "invented the quarterback position as we know it" for the Chicago Bears; Barney Sedran, "the shortest player ever inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame"; and Howard Cosell and Marvin Miller. Dahlia Lithwick observes Sandy Koufax-perhaps the greatest Jewish sports hero ever, who stymied the New York Yankees' Mickey Mantle while leading the Los Angeles Dodgers to win the 1963 World Series. None of the essays are purely biographical or hagiographic-the authors consistently deliver fascinating insights into the highs and lows of Jews in sports. Ron Rosenbaum, for example, notes that what Arnold Rothstein, the mob gambler blamed for fixing the 1919 World Series, "reminds us about sport in America is that it has never been the pure refuge from everyday grimy and gritty realities like greed." (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A collection of essays about the most influential Jews in sports history. New Republic editor Foer (How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, 2005) and New Republic staff writer Tracy present a diverse collection of Jewish athletes celebrated by Jewish authors. Many of the 50 athletes included--e.g., Hank Greenberg, Sandy Koufax, Sid Luckman, Mark Spitz--will be familiar even to non-Jewish sports fans, while others--table-tennis star Marty Reisman, Nazi-era German fencing champ Helene Mayer, kung-fu instructor Harvey Sober and "the Ben Franklin of Competitive Eating," Don Lerman--will not. The list of contributors is also distinguished, with several Pulitzer Prize winners, Ivy League professors, novelists and even former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers. The essays range from standard profiles to personal reminiscences. Most, but not all, of the athletes are American. In addition to Joshua Cohen's piece on Mayer, there is Simon Schama's fascinating essay about English pugilist Daniel Mendoza, David Bezmozgis' profile of Soviet strongman Grigory Novak and Timothy Snyder's piece on Austro-Hungarian author Max Nordau, whose speech to the 1898 Second Zionist Congress called on Jews to develop their muscles to overcome weakness. This theme of athleticism counteracting the stereotype of the Jew as weak victim runs through many of the essays, though it may be slightly undermined by the application of the "jock" title to Nordau and other nonathletes, such as gambler and 1919 World Series fixer Arnold Rothstein, Washington Post sports columnist Shirley Povich and broadcast legend Howard Cosell. Their inclusion on the basis of their significant impacts on the landscape of sports is, however, well-defended by Foer and Tracy. Other highlights include Jonathan Safran Foer on Bobby Fischer, Steven Pinker on Red Auerbach, Buzz Bissinger on Barney Ross and George Packer on Mark Cuban. A must for the bookshelf of any Jewish sports fan.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
