Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sport and the American Jewish Experience (review)

Abstract

178 SHOFAR Fall 1994 Vol. 13, No. 1 those who have lapsed, become indifferent or secularized, or intermarried. The desiccated Sephardim are also inconsequential; Reform and liberal Jews may be tolerated even if seen to be scarcely Jews at all. Alderman's favored Jews keep themselves to themselves, live somewhat crabbed, if economically successful, lives between Golders Green and Colindale. While this move up from Whitechapel or St. George's in the East speaks profoundly to the lives of many, perhaps even a majority, of English Jews, it will, for some readers, omit too many and too much. Eugene C. Black Department of History Brandeis University Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sport and the American Jewish Experience , by Peter Levine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 328 pp. $25.00. Peter Levine's Ellis Island to Ebbets Field is an engaging study of the athletic experience of second-generation Eastern European Jews, primarily from the perspective of ethnicity rather than theology. Levine seeks to recreate the world of second-generation male immigrants (primarily in Brooklyn) and analyze their ability to shape their world and the impact their sporting legacy has on the continual survival of American-Jewish identity. He argues that historians like Irving Howe have stereotyped American Jews as people of the book, and places this study more in the context of recent scholarship on Jewish manliness, or toughness, particularly in the underworld. Levine argues that sport helped redefine ethnic identity, helping to determine what it was to be American and Jewish. Sport participation taught American values and possibilities, mitigating the shock of assimilation while furthering it. The agency expressed in sport helped counter feelings of helplessness and alienation in ways that encouraged claims to legitimacy and full participation while at the same time providing a sense of ethnic solidarity and identity. Partaking in a common American experience enabled Jews to dispel negative attitudes towards them, while their achievements encouraged assimilation and acceptance. Sport is described as a middle ground shaped by interactions between the community and the core culture, Jews and other ethnics, and immigrants and their children. The middle ground involved the adaptation of traditional practice to new American settings and the transformation of Book Reviews 179 American experiences into ethnic ways. The American-born could nurture communal beliefs tied closely to. Jewish traditions and culture while reinforcing mainstream American values. The narrative begins by analyzing the debate in the immigrant community about the propriety and purpose of sport, demonstrating sport's popularity with the second generation and describing the development of Jewish organizations to promote sport under Jewish auspices. Levine then examines basketball, baseball, and boxing in detail, and scrutinizes intercollegiate sport, giving special attention to Marty Glickman, who was dropped from the 400-meter relay team in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The final chapter analyzes the contemporary Jewish sporting experience as a continuation and counterpoint to the second generation. Levine's three chapters on basketball emphasize the game's role in interwar Jewish working-class communities. His illuminating discussion is soundly based on oral interviews with ex-professionals and recreationcenter players. Levine provided a case study of the Ducs, a Brownsville five, organized by high school underclassmen who collected dues, arranged matches, and took bets, as typical ofJewish neighborhood teams across the country who were considered positive community representatives . "Engaging sport as a middle ground, participants in this world of basketball and Jewish community acquired American ways while absorbing Jewish sensibilities, even as they moved inexorably away from the Jewish world of their immigrant parents" (p. 38). Levine emphasizes basketball's value as a middle ground between parents and youths. Levine points out that the immigrant generation supported basketball more than other sports, reserving their main objections to lost educational and economic opportunities rather than loss of traditional Jewish life. His discussion needs to take into account the factors of timing and generation. Ballplayers whose parents grew up in the United States seem to have been more supportive than the Europeanreared . Furthermore, Jewish boys who grew up after World War I seem to have had more parental support for their sporting pastimes than youths of an earlier era. Levine goes on to describe the...