The Macho-Mensch Modeling American Jewish Masculinity and the Heroes of Baseball

chapter 6 The Macho-Mensch Modeling American Jewish Masculinity and the Heroes of Baseball

Rebecca T. Alpert

As recently as January 2012 an episode of the popular u.s. animated television series, “Family Guy,” began with the following scene. As Peter and his family return home one evening they hear noises coming from their Jewish neighbor Mort’s house. The scene switches to Mort’s basement, where we see a group of overweight and near-sighted men, one sporting payis (sidecurls) and a streimel (black hat), standing around naked from the waist up. Mort provides the instructions for the evening’s activities: “First rule of Jewish Fight Club is if somebody says ‘ow’ you stop.” One man pokes another in the arm, and the second responds, “ow,” to which Mort replies, “OK, let’s eat.” The stereotype of the unathletic and effeminate Jewish man has persisted throughout Jewish history and diminished but not disappeared even today. Like any stereotype, it has its basis in a particular reading of a cultural norm that represents Jews as a People of the book, not a People of the body. As a result of the failure of the Bar Kochba rebellion to take back power from the Romans in the second century of the Common Era, rabbinic Judaism disavowed the ancient Jewish martial heritage exemplified by biblical heroes like Jacob, Samson, and David, the post-biblical Maccabees, and some of the rabbis themselves who were also Roman gladiators. The rabbis emphasized prayer and study, and intellectual prowess rather than physical strength. Those cultural tendencies were reinforced by laws in medieval Christian Europe that barred Jews from physical professions such as farming, military service, and sporting activities like hunting and dueling. The absence of Jewish men from this world of physicality also generated vicious anti-Semitic images of them as weak and “unmanly.”1 In response many Jews affirmed the traditional value

1 Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991). These anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jewish men as “like women” had the additional effect of erasing the existence of Jewish women, as does my work here. See Ann Pellegrini, “Whiteface Performances: ‘Race’, Gender, and Jewish Bodies.” In Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies, eds. Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 108–149; and Riv-Ellen Press, Fighting to Become Americans: Assimilation and the Trouble between Jewish Women and Jewish Men (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999) for their analysis of the difficulties this perspective creates for Jewish gender relations.

102 Alpert of what Daniel Boyarin has termed “edelkayt,” masculinity predicated on gentleness and goodness and the repudiation of the muscular.2 Yet even the Eastern European Jews who lived out a more traditional set of values under- stood that sometimes Jews needed to protect themselves, as folklore concern- ing the creation of a Golem (an inanimate creature brought to life to protect Jews against anti-Semitic attacks) attests. With the approach of modernity and the opening of certain European societies to Jewish citizenship, some Jewish men seized these opportunities to engage in more physically oriented pursuits. As they attempted to assimilate to European values and expectations, some voluntarily entered the military and reclaimed ancient Jewish martial tradi- tions, while others took up athletics, creating sporting clubs that they named after ancient Jewish heroes like Bar Kochba and the Maccabees. The Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century rejected the possibil- ity of assimilation and assumed that meaningful Jewish life could only exist away from European hatred for and oppression of the Jew. But like the assimi- lationists, Zionist leaders Theodore Herzl and Max Nordau fully accepted the truth of the anti-Semitic stereotype of the weak and unmanly Jew and rejected the alternative masculinity of “edelkayt.” They built their program of Jewish normalcy on the concept of “muscular Judaism,” arguing that the new Jew should shed his cultural proclivity towards the meek and gentle, and aspire to the Christian European model of powerful and aggressive virility.3 The Holocaust was used as evidence that validated the Zionist view that the Jew could not survive in Europe, and that the values of male meekness and gentleness had to be repudiated. Tales of the brave fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto who stood up to Nazi intimidation provided a counter narrative and evidence that the Jewish man could overcome docility. The establishment of the State of Israel made triumphant the image of the new Jewish man, whose masculinity conformed to the ideals of power and aggression based on physical strength and the capacity for self-protection through violence if necessary, as mythologized for American audiences in Leon Uris’ Exodus. Yet American Jews remained uncomfortable with this model. Steeped in the Ashkenazi Judaism of Eastern Europe, Israel could only be welcomed as tough and powerful if the state also remained moral, “a conqueror state with a conscience.”4

2 Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 3 David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (New York: Basic Books, 1992). 4 Breines, Paul, Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 20.