Jewish Girls, Gender, and Sport at the Chicago Hebrew Institute: Athletic Identity in Jewish and Cultural Spaces Linda J. Borish (bio) Introduction The development of physical exercise and sport for Jewish girls at the Chicago Hebrew Institute (CHI), founded in 1903 to serve Jewish immigrants, expanded sporting opportunities for Jewish girls. Located on Chicago’s lower West Side, and a forerunner of the Jewish Community Center (JCC), CHI promoted the moral, physical, religious, and civic welfare of Jewish immigrants and residents. The institute combined physical and spiritual training in its Americanization programs for Jewish girls. In its early years, the CHI instituted a program of physical education and paid particular attention to the need for physical culture for Jewish boys and girls. This paper explores how gender and ethnicity shaped sport for Jewish girls at the CHI in the early twentieth century.1 Proponents of Jewish girls playing basketball, engaging in swimming, and running track and field, and Jewish girls themselves, acted as agents of change to gain access to cultural spaces and sports instructors. Using archival records, annual reports, scrapbooks, the American and Jewish press, and material culture sources, this essay examines the significance of Jewish girls at CHI in sport in gender and ethnic contexts. Gender, Jewish girls, and sport have received little attention from scholars in American Jewish history, women’s and sport history, and gender history. The research that has been done in gender, ethnicity, and sport indicates the important place of Jewish girls and women in American Jewish history and sport history.2 In the study of American sport and ethnicity, historians must include Jewish women’s experiences. As sport historian Jennifer Hargreaves has written, “There is a tendency for generalizations to be made about all women in sports from examples of white women,” and these stereotypically refer to white, Western, bourgeois women.3 In fact, studies of sport and Jews typically focus on the male gender and how American Jewish men participated in certain sports to demonstrate masculinity and to challenge the stereotype of the weak, frail, non-athletic Jew portrayed [End Page 149] in accounts of white middle-class Protestant viewpoints in the Progressive Era. As scholar Alan Klein asserted, “Popular cultural conceptions of Jews have them about as far removed from the sporting soma-type as one can imagine.” In terms of gender, “the historical tendency to bifurcate genders (masculine as contrasted with feminine) and to assign a range of traits to each has . . . led to placing Jewish men in the feminine camp.”4 In his study, Klein thus discusses Jewish men: “I show that in the U.S., Jews used sport as a vehicle for assimilation and in certain sports put up impressive numbers. The first half of the twentieth century had Jews performing at an elite level in boxing and basketball.” This refers certainly to “Jewish men” who “made names for themselves”; Klein remarks that “the continuation of perceptions of them as weak and unfit serves as a sober reminder that prejudice is immune to rational argument.”5 Moreover, in such publications as Jews and the Sporting Life: Studies in Contemporary Jewry, An Annual (2008), almost all the articles focus on Jewish men in sport. Editor Ezra Mendelsohn commented, “For the young American Jewish community . . . interest and participation in local sports activities was a hallmark of acculturation, and the heroics of Jewish sportsmen a source of ethnic pride on the part of a people often derided for its lack of physicality for its ‘softness’ and its ‘femininity.’”6 The emphasis in scholarly works typically spotlights the male gender in Jewish sport history. Historian Steven Riess explains, “Sport was regarded as almost inherently a male sphere, inappropriate for Victorian women, and the contemporary press described nearly all sports as manly.” Manliness and sport identity went hand in hand so that middle-class men developed their physical and spiritual self in building character and building their bodies. Riess states, “Sport boomed as a middle-class recreation in the late nineteenth century and contributed significantly to the redefinition of middle-class manliness.”7 However, Jewish women, as well as men, strove to participate in a range of sports as part of gaining access...
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Mar 13, 2019
Jo Coghlan 
Open Access
