Jews, Sport, and the Construction of an American Identity

chapter 5 Jews, Sport, and the Construction of an American Identity Gerald R. Gems For centuries Jews faced oppression and persecution in the Christian countries of Europe. Catholics had long held Jews responsible for the death of Jesus Christ, and the assassination of Czar Alexander II of Russia in 1881, blamed on a Jewish conspirator, only exacerbated murderous attacks and pogroms. The 1894 Dreyfus Affair in France, spurred by false charges of treason against a Jewish officer of the French general staff that resulted in his imprisonment, further heightened anti-Semitic passions. A Zionist movement, already under- way by the late 19th century, sought a Jewish state as a place of refuge. It would be another half century before Jews could realize such a dream. Until then many sought greater freedom and opportunity in a Jewish diaspora that sent more than two million immigrants to the United States between 1880 and 1924.1 Enterprising Sephardic Jews had traveled to the Americas as early as the 17th century; but by the 1830s increasing numbers of Ashkenazi, Yiddish-speaking German and Polish Jews settled in the United States. By 1837 the Jews had established a synagogue in New York City, and a Reform movement led by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise eventually spread throughout the country. A Chicago synagogue was founded in 1847 and San Francisco’s first synagogue appeared only two years later. The early immigrants quickly assimilated and fared well in their adopted land. In New York August Belmont became a banker, statesman, and a breeder of racehorses that attracted the socially elite. John Brunswick left Switzerland for the United States and founded a company in Cincinnati that built billiard tables, and later bowling equipment and bars for saloons that catered to the leisure and recreational pursuits of the bachelor subculture.2 In 1874 Albert Valvrojenski traveled from Vilnius (in present day Lithuania) to Boston and soon changed the family name to Berenson. His daughter, Senda, secured a position as a physical education instructor at the all-female Smith College in 1892. She adapted the game of basketball, recently created by the 1 Chuck Willis, Destination America (New York: dk Publishing, 2005), 80–85. 2 Rick Kogan, Brunswick (Skokie, il: Brunswick Co., 1985). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004284494_007 <UN> 86 Gems ymca, for women’s play, and the sport soon became an American phenome- non among college women and high school students. Sport became an increasing part of Jewish lives for the second generation of Jewish youth.3 After 1880 the majority of Jewish migrants emanated from central and Eastern Europe and the lands of the Russian empire. Sixty percent of the trav- elers settled in the urban centers of Boston, Chicago, and New York. By 1920 nearly three and a half million Jews resided in the United States, nearly half of them in New York City, which assumed the role of the “new Jerusalem.”4 While the federal constitution of the United States guaranteed freedom of religion, the communal, Orthodox, Yiddish speakers, especially those of peas- ant background, did not fit so readily into the American mainstream culture. They lacked the “whiteness” of the nativist, Anglo-Saxon Protestants (wasps) who spoke English, worshipped on Sunday, and adhered to a capitalistic econ- omy that promoted individualism. The Orthodox Jews were perceived as back- ward “others” who sought the benefits of American democracy without the full intention of assimilating to its norms, standards, and values. The conservative Hasidic Jews, with their distinctive clothing, lifestyles, and resistance to mod- ernization, seemed especially problematic for the nativists.5 3 Betty Spears, “Senda Berenson Abbott: New Woman, New Sport,” in eds. Joan S. Hult and Marianna Trekell A Century of Women’s Basketball: From Frailty to Final Four (Reston, va: National Association for Girls and Women in Sport, 1991), 19–36; Ralph Melnick, Senda Berenson: The Unlikely Founder of Women’s Basketball (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006). 4 Wills, Destination America, 81–83, 199; James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, and Janice L. Rieff, eds., The Encyclopedia of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 436; Tom McNamee, “Video Captures Jews’ Journey,” Chicago Sun-Times, May 4, 1997, 8. Stephen Steinberg, in The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 225, states that 1,225,000 Jews resided in New York City by 1910. 5 Richard T. Ely, ed., Hull House Maps and Papers (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1970 [1895]), 105, 107. For a more detailed description and analysis of whiteness studies, see Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo- Saxonism (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1981); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1999 [1991]). Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race: Racial Oppression and Social Control (London: Verso, 1998); Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1998); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000); David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White, The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005); Eric <UN>.

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