Jewish Jocks:
An Unorthodox Hall of Fame is a
collection of essays compiled and edited by Franklin Foer
and Marc Tracy of The New Republic magazine. It’s a
portrait of fifty Jewish individuals and the role they played
in sports. This compilation is about Jews from different areas
of the world, and playing different sports, and also include
executives and coaches.
Tracy commented, “Franklin Foer and I are big sports
fans who identify with our Jewishness, and are also fans of
good writing. There was the realization that this book could
be a way to gather great writers, most who were Jewish, but
were not professional sports writers; yet, loved sports. I
am talking about big names such as: David Remnick, the editor
of The New Yorker, Simon Schama, a superstar English historian
who wrote about the boxer Daniel Mendoza, Mark Leiborvich,
of the New York Times, and Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury
Secretary, who wrote about Harold Solomon, the tennis player.”
The athletes chosen included a range of players from Bobby
Fischer to Sandy Koufax. Fischer was born and raised Jewish;
yet, later in his life he hated his own people and became
an Anti-Semite. There was also the discussion about Sid Luckman
and Benny Friedman, who pioneered the game of football while
playing for their respective teams, the Chicago Bears and
the New York Giants. They revolutionized football with the
forward pass, and having the quarterback as the superstar.
Rich Cohen stated in the essay about these two players, “It
was the birth of the quarterback as we know him: the general
who calmly leads his team down the field.”
The most powerful part of the book was the discussion of the
1972 Munich Olympics. Tracy noted, Lipstadt fabulously pointed
out how these athletes came to Germany to compete in peace
and instead were murdered. The Munich massacre maybe showed
what we write in our introduction, that Jewish athleticism
originally comes out of the instinct for self-defense. How
Zionism sprung from the violence against Jews. This is also
emphasized in the essay by Shalom Auslander who wrote about
an older Jewish man, confronted by two black kids, on a New
York subway, “And he turned around and pushed them back-hard-and
they fell back down in the seat…And he said, ‘We’re
Jews, we won this war, we beat our enemies, we don’t
take this stuff anymore.”
Another interesting point is how Mark Spitz and Shep Messing
responded differently to this horrific event in Jewish history.
Messing, a soccer player for the US team reunited with David
Berger, an Israeli weightlifter with whom he had become close
friends. While being sequestered along with other Jewish athletes
he learned that a group of Palestinian terrorists had taken
eleven members of the Israeli team hostage, killing his friend
Berger. He was described as being overcome with grief and
rage, that “a Jewish wire in him that even he hadn’t
known existed had been tripped.” Compare that to Mark
Spitz who was described as ignoring questions about his feelings
and was more bitter about being hustled out of Munich, not
for the Israeli athletes who died, but “that he never
got to stop at the Mercedes-Benz factory and pick up the 450
SL he had been promised.”
Tracy described Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame
as showing how “Jews in sports is a microcosm to the
story of sports in America. The story of Jews in sports is
the story of sports. From Al Davis who was a path breaker
by integrating the NFL for head coaches to Hank Greenberg
who, as the general manager of the Indians, mistreated one
of his players, Al Rosen, solely because he did not want to
be seen as playing favorites to one of his own, another Jewish
slugger.” This book is an interesting read for both
Jew and non-Jew alike since it involves interesting facts
and tidbits about some of the most important athletes in sports
history.
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