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March 27, 2007 | 10:55 am

The lost Jewish athletes

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Last summer, when the former Dodger Shawn Green took the field of Shea Stadium as a Met for the first time, a Jewish fan held up a poster with Green’s photo and the words, “The messiah has arrived.“

Whether Shawn Green wanted to be, NY fans saw him as the second coming of Sandy Koufax. In an article today posted at The Forward about the limited history of anti-Semitism in American sports, the author suggested that was due, in part, to the lack of Jews in professional sports. Jews are sports writers and team owners, league commissioners and coaches. But they’re not often all-star athletes.

The author of the article, Gerald Eskanazi, is himself a member of the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. Inductees include baseball greats Koufax and Hank Greenberg but also Sid Tanenbaum, who only played two years in the ABA.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the reason Jews have not been more successful at professional sports. A colleague of mine, a native New Yorker with a collection of Jewish baseball cards, once told me he suspected our mothers have something to do with it. “They place such an emphasis on education and being successful,“ he said. I blame genetics. At 5’10”, slower than fast and unable to muscle up past 170, I can’t imagine competing at anything more than desk jockeying.

* My good friend David McGrath Schwartz noted basketball was at a time considered a Jewish sport, likely because of its urban connection. Red Auerbach, the greatest coach in professional basketball history, was Jewish. Moses Malone was not.

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Blaming genetics is ridiculous. Every minute, the ‘progressives’ are back to racial theory. Watch out for the projection. There was always anti-semitism in sports, but less than racial prejudice.

The reason Jews are not more prominent in sports is the same reason they are not more prominent in the Mafia. That is, they (each) were prominent in their day, but culturally they did not want their kids to go into the business. The Jews once owned basketball, when Jews were poor and looking to get out of the ghetto, just like the minority kids today. Matisyahu’s (the very tall Hasidic reggae singer) grandfather, presumably also tall, was one of those Jewish basketball players. A third of boxers were Jewish from 1917 to 1951 too, for the same reason.
Book references - “Allen Bodner’s “When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport” http://www.amazon.com/When-Boxing-Was-Jewish-Sport/dp/027595353X, others on that page etc.
Book review of “BARNEY ROSS by Douglas Century (Nextbook/Schocken, 216 pages, $19.95),
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/16/AR2006011601153_pf.html

Your New York friend was correct. There were Italian and Jewish kids that adopted Irish names to get bouts, but at least one Irish kid that adopted a Jewish name.
From an exhibit called “Sting Like a Maccabee: The Golden Age of the American Jewish Boxer”, worth reading “Sting Like a Maccabee: The Golden Age of the American Jewish Boxer at http://www.nmajh.org/nmajh-boxing.PDF
THEY TELL this story about Benny Leonard (Leiner), fighting Irish Eddie Finnegan in a dusty coal mining town, early part of the last century. The crowd, fueled by booze and bigotry, screamed for Finnegan to “kill the kike.“ Leonard, furious, lashed at Finnegan, staggering him repeatedly. Grappling into a clinch, Finnegan pleaded for mercy, gasping in Yiddish that his real name was Seymour Rosenbaum.“I tell people,“ fight promoter J Russell Peltz says, “that Jewish fighters were as tough as they come…but they were afraid of their mothers. Which is why so many changed their names…

The real reason today is that sports becomes some people’s way of life, almost a religion. I am happy your blog entry promted me to find an article I read in the NY Daily News several years ago (wow, 1995); it is an interview with the Coach Halprin of the Yeshiva University basketball team who were about to play the (“taller, faster” and just between us, ‘minority’) New Jersey Institute of Technology at Madison Square garden. The coach expects to lose
Here it is: (http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/sports/1995/02/03/1995-02-03_more_than_a_game__yeshiva_s_.html)
“"They were all stars on their high school teams,“ he says. “They all have egos, they all have pride. They want to win. They compete as hard as anyone.

“The only difference is how they perceive basketball. For them, it’s more recreational; it doesn’t define their lives. They’ll all be doctors or lawyers. If they lose, they’ll be down for 10, 15 minutes. But then they have to study. If I made them practice five times a week, we wouldn’t have a team.“

Comment by Ben Plonie on 6/30/08 at 12:04 pm

Let me clarify: I don’t blame Jewish genetics on the whole. I blame my genetics. I’m just not tall enough or quick enough, or strong enough, to be an exceptional basketball player. Of course there are amazing Jewish athletes: Kevin Youkilis and Ryan Braun come to mind, as do the Jewish boxers of yore.

Comment by Brad A. Greenberg on 6/30/08 at 12:11 pm

I responded to the LOJ (‘lack of Jews’) comment and the “It’s difficult to pinpoint the reason Jews have not been more successful at professional sports.“ statements which seem to speak to a broader phenomenon. We should remember that we see through a keyhole of our experience at any given time.

I forgot to mention above - until the Holocaust wiped them out, the Greek port of Salonika was closed on Shabbos because all the longshoremen were Jewish. Not exactly sports but something.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 6/30/08 at 2:08 pm

It could be worse you could be english we suck at all sports. take cricket we inveted the game and we suck at it lol. Maybe you should buy a Punch Bag and practice a little more.

Just a little light hearted fun

Comment by Punch Bag Destroyer on 8/06/08 at 9:09 am

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