The Pride of the Ghetto: a Brief History of the Jewish-American Pugilistic Tradition, 1890-1940
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The Pride of the Ghetto: A Brief History of the Jewish-American Pugilistic Tradition, 1890-1940 Ryan Dondero Introduction The sport of boxing has, for much of human history, been an important cultural institution; one that has its beginnings amongst history’s earliest civilizations. Although the actual “sport” of boxing did not appear as a prescribed Olympic event until 688 BCE, contests which included fisticuffs date back to as far as the third millennium BCE. Mesopotamian stone relief carvings and Egyptian relief statues provide historians with some of the earliest glimpses of pugilists engaging in combat. “Since then,” writes boxing cultural historian Kasia Boddy, “there has hardly been a time in which young men, and sometimes women, did not raise their gloved or ungloved fists to one other [sic].”1 Boxing entered into the modern era in Great Britain toward the close of the seventeenth century, where illegal pugilistic bare-knuckle, no-rules bouts would regularly take place in the Royal Theatre of London. The sport steadily began to grow in popularity throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain, both amongst the “lower orders” and aristocratic nobles of the British Isles, and by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, first penetrated the American cultural lexicon.2 The “sweet science” first entered into the United States with returning aristocratic young Virginians whom, throughout the eighteenth century, were commonly sent to England in order to complete their education. Whilst there, some of these young men witnessed British prize fights, while others even enrolled in boxing academies. Thomas Jefferson, in a letter written to John Banister, feared that in learning about “drinking, horse racing and boxing,” these young men might acquire a “fondness for European luxury and dissipation, and a contempt for the simplicity of [their] own country.”3 Ironically, despite the fact that boxing was seen in the eyes of the young American nation as an un-republican sport, the first American boxers were slaves whom were trained by slave masters in search of gambling opportunities. Although boxing entered into the United States in the late eighteenth century, for much of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, most Americans were unaware of the fact that boxing matches in their country even occurred.4 While pugilism was, according to historian Elliot J. Gorn, slowly becoming “part of an oral culture based on powerful community ties,” for the most part, the sport was looked upon with disdain by the majority of American society due to its “violence and brutality, the gambling associated with the contests, and the nefarious characters that comprised the boxing community.”5 Although boxing remained prohibited nearly everywhere in the United States, the sport was, however, “slowly being woven into the texture of lower-class male street life,” particularly amongst immigrants.6 The Irish, above all these immigrant groups, dominated the “square circle” for roughly the entire nineteenth century; a fact that is well known to those familiarized with the history of boxing in the United States. What is perhaps less well known is that for nearly a half a century, beginning approximately around 1890, there developed a distinct and distinguished boxing tradition amongst second-generation Jewish-Americans. 1 Kasia Boddy, Boxing: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 7. 2 Encyclopedia Britannica, “Boxing (sport).” 3 Boddy, Boxing, 44. 4 Elliot J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Fighting in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 40. 5 Steven A. Reiss, “A Fighting Chance: The Jewish-American Boxing Experience, 1890-1940,” American Jewish History 74 (1985), 224. 6 Gorn, The Manly Art, 40. 1 The rise in Jewish-American pugilism found, for the first time, Jewish-American males participating in a professional sport in considerable numbers. American Jews, most of who were of East European descent, absolutely dominated the ring from the end of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century. Despite this fact, it seems to be an area in both the history of boxing and the history of American Jews that is oft-overlooked. This paper aims to provide a brief history of this fifty year period and the unique Jewish-American boxing tradition it helped create. In doing so, I hope to first explore the foundations of this distinctive institution and of Jewish-American involvement in sport. Here I will discuss East European Jewish migration to the United States after 1870 and how the conditions of this migration and subsequent settlement would foster the beginnings of Jewish participation and interest in sport. I will then delve into the start of the actual Jewish-American pugilistic tradition and the circumstances that gave rise to the engagement of Jewish Americans in the sport of boxing. Finally, I would like to briefly discuss the “golden age” of Jewish-American boxing and its effect on the experiences of American Jews in the United States. East European Migration and the Rise of Jewish Participation in Sport For approximately a half a century following the American Civil War, the city of New York began to drastically and fundamentally change. The city which had, at one time, been a seaport “city of masts and spires” was now transforming into “the skyline symbol of the Western Hemisphere” and a place that inspired awe amongst Americans and foreigners alike.7 While the city was active in altering and renovating its physical landscape, the ethnic and national makeup of the city was also drastically being remade. During this period, according to historian Moses Rischin, New York “more so than ever before…became the gateway, toll station, and hostelry through which immigrants passed in their abandonment of the Old World for a better life in the New.”8 At first, many of the newly arrived were of Irish or German descent, but by 1870, there was a marked change in the makeup of New York immigrants as a major East European migration entered “into the epic of New York’s growth.”9 The factors that lay behind this increase in emigration are many. For one, a decrease in Central European emigration led German trans-Atlantic shipping companies to increasingly seek new passengers for their ships elsewhere. In the Jews of Eastern Europe, these shipping companies found many willing customers. A series of disasters, which included a cholera epidemic in 1868, a Polish famine in 1869 and an Odessa pogrom in 1871, compelled many of East Europe’s Jews to make the cross-Atlantic trip to the New World. The condition of East European Jewry at the time would lead to the spread of “mild emigration fever” amongst Jewish sections of the region, and by the end of the 1870s, some 40,000 East European Jews had migrated to the United States; a number that would eventually grow to approximately two million on the eve of the First World War.10 Upon arriving in New York, the East European Jews of this period, like many immigrants of the day, decidedly settled with those who shared their religion, their culture, and/or their language. The neighborhood in which these newly arrived immigrants largely congregated would, by the close of the century, be seen as a sort of “immigrant Jewish cosmopolis” in the 7 Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870-1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 3. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 19. 10 Ibid., 20. 2 New World. That neighborhood would be the Lower East Side.11 It would be from within this famous Jewish-American neighborhood that second-generation Jewish youths would first discover and pursue the sport of boxing in large numbers, thus sparking the start of the unique Jewish-American boxing tradition. The first-generation Jewish immigrants who made the Lower East Side their home would be far different from the children they would eventually come to have and raise in New York City. For the most part, the men and women who migrated to the United States in the 1870s and beyond were Orthodox Jews of Russian and Polish descent. They came from pre-modern sections of Europe and wished to maintain much, if not all, of their “old world customs, religious institutions, and traditions.”12 When they were not working, these immigrants often spent their limited leisure time with family, “among landsleit at benevolent societies, clubs and saloons” or at the Yiddish theatre.13 They were overall very traditional and displayed little or no interest in aspects of American society and culture that they saw as useless. One such area was American sports. First-generation Jewish parents were strongly opposed to their children taking part in athletics. They brought with them a general unfamiliarity with sports whilst in the Old World, and saw sports as a waste of time that “served no useful function and, if anything, was a dangerous force that taught inappropriate social values, drew children away from traditional beliefs and behavior, and led to overexertion and accidents.”14 As far as these first-generation parents were concerned, nice Jewish boys and girls don’t enjoy or participate in sport and Jewish youths would be better served studying Jewish culture and tradition rather than wasting their time with athletics.15 Though these parents strongly discouraged it, Jewish American youths in the ghettos of the Lower East Side quickly became enamored with American sports. To these second-generation Jewish boys, interest and participation in American athletics offered both increased social acceptance and a refutation of the belief that Jewish kids were “greenhorns.”16 This interest in sports, according to historian Allen Guttmann, “became a central metaphor for the entire process of Americanization of which it was a small but vital part.”17 Because the concept of sports and athletics were so foreign to the Orthodox tradition of many first-generation Jewish immigrants, it provided “an especially powerful metaphor of contrast” for the Jewish boys now welcoming this truly American institution.18 While all of these factors played a large part in Jewish youth’s curiosity with sport, the primary reason for their interest was standard: they found athletics fun.