My Son the Slugger: Sport and the American Jew

Abstract

In 1924, a Yiddish daily observed at the end of the High Holidays that old [rejoiced] over the Torah, the middle-aged-over the business page in the newspaper, the young-over the sport page. Indeed, many first-generation parents worried that their sons' preoccupation with sports was fast eroding their identity as Jews and leading them toward a non-Jewish associational life. Yet looking back, the parents' concerns were exaggerated. The second generation was not abandoning, but redefining, its Jewishness. For example, Deborah Dash Moore, who did not examine the role of sport, found that the second generation, residing in neighborhoods more ethnically homogeneous than those of their parents, working in occupations that remained heavily Jewish, and elaborating a Jewish institutional life, associated and played largely with each other.' Now Peter Levine has added, in Ellis Island to Ebbets Field, that Jewish involvement in sport, even as it reflected a certain acceptance of the values of the mainstream society, never served as a vehicle of assimilation. Rather, Levine contends that Jews used sport in part to serve their own ends, to reinforce bonds with each other, and even, in many cases, to draw the first generation closer to the second. At the same time, however, they also used sport to forge a new, Jewish-American identity as tough, fighting men. In forming this new persona, Levine argues, the Jews were directly challenging age-old stereotypes developed and long promoted by anti-Semites that held that Jews were not a physical people. For centuries, Christians had maintained that Jews as a race were weaker and less virile than they, in the medieval period even insisting that Jewish men menstruated. The negative stereotype was even enshrined in humor. George Orwell observed that jokes disparaging Jews resembled Scotch jokes, except that the Scot was depicted as hardy and the Jew as weak-illustrated by the joke in which a Jew and a Scot arrived at a meeting advertised as free only to discover that a collection was being taken, whereupon the Jew fainted and the Scot carried him out.2