Jews and the Olympic Games: The Clash between Sport and Politics , and: Barney Ross (review)

Reviewed by: Jews and the Olympic Games: The Clash between Sport and Politics, and: Barney Ross Jeffrey S. Gurock Paul Taylor . Jews and the Olympic Games: The Clash between Sport and Politics. Brighton and Portland, Oreg.: Sussex Academic Press, 2004. Pp. xi + 268. Douglas Century . Barney Ross. Jewish Encounters. New York: Nextbook-Schocken, 2006. Pp. xvii+216. Neither Paul Taylor's look at Jewish participation in—and problems with—the modern Olympic Games nor Douglas Century's sympathetic biography of the boxer Barney Ross appreciably advances serious study of the intersection between modern Jewish life and the world of sports. Over the past decade or so, significant strides have been made in raising "Jewish sports books" beyond the apologetic and celebratory tomes that for so long characterized this area of research. Rather than listing Jewish sports achievers and champions or recounting those heroes' most famous performances, the better works now appearing in this field use the metaphor of Jewish sports involvement to more fully understand the course of Jewish emancipation, the processes of group acculturation, gender differences, and the state of traditional Jewish practices and mores under conditions of freedom. Peter Levine's Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sports and the American Jewish Experience(New York, 1992) offered the first worthy synthetic treatment of athleticism's impact upon America Jewish immigrants and their children, focusing primarily on the games Jews played and the bouts fought in this country's great cities. Steven A. Riess' compendium Sports and the American Jew(Syracuse, N.Y., 1998) brought together a wealth of thoughtful scholarly articles, including the best piece written on what the trials and travails of the baseball slugger Hank Greenberg say about American Jewish status and self-image. More recently, Jack Kugelmass's collection, Jews, Sports and the Rites of Citizenship(Champlain, Ill.), and Michael Brenner's edited volume Emancipation through Muscles: Jews and Sports in Europe(Lincoln, Neb.), both from 2006, asked comparable , insightful questions about what sports activity tells us about level of Jewish integration in the modern world. Concomitantly, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute is taking a close look at how women's roles were affected and defined through the athletic [End Page 156]realm. And I will immodestly add my own work , Judaism's Encounter with American Sports(Bloomington, Ind., 2005). Unfortunately, Taylor and Century's books do not follow through on their promises to address many of these more complex and substantive issues comprehensively. Jews and the Olympic Gamesis the more disappointing of the two works. Taylor makes the obvious point that those with nefarious political ends have frequently exploited these international youthful gatherings that supposedly were to be venues for fair play and the promotion of understanding among peoples. As Taylor is clearly concerned with the tragic fate that world Jewry suffered in the past century, predictably the Berlin Olympiad of 1936 looms largest in his analysis. Accordingly, he recounts in substantial detail the oft-told saga of Hitler's attempt at propaganda victories and the victimization of Jewish athletes—both those who were barred from the German squad in violation of tacit international sports protocols and those American Jews denied their chances at Olympic glory—because their country's sports officials, many of whom were anti-Semites themselves, did not want to embarrass the Fuhrer with the sight of Jews on the victory stand. The 1972 Munich Games also occupy much of Taylor's attention as he reminds readers of the horrific political statement that Palestinian terrorists made when they tried to advance their cause on the international stage through the murder of eleven Israeli athletes. But Taylor wants to do more than to speak through sports of Jewish marginality in the pre-Holocaust world and of the unfavorable position Israel today occupies geopolitically. Writing in a triumphalist vein—so reminiscent of the old "great Jews in sports" historiography—he seeks to answer retrospectively the victimizers of Jews through recounting sagas of those who, through athletic excellence, put the lie to Hitler's racist-athlete theories. Apparently, some sixteen Jewish athletes from Canada, the United States, Hungary, Belgium, and pre-Anschluss Austria won medals at Berlin in the less-publicized sports like water polo...

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