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Muscling in on New Worlds: Jews, Sport, and the Making of the Americas ed. by Raanan Rein, David M. K. Sheinin

2016; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 100; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ajh.2016.0008

1086-3141

Harry Brod,

Jewish Identity and Society

Reviewed by: Muscling in on New Worlds: Jews, Sport, and the Making of the Americas ed. by Raanan Rein, David M. K. Sheinin Harry Brod (bio) Muscling in on New Worlds: Jews, Sport, and the Making of the Americas. Eds. Raanan Rein and David M. K. Sheinin. Leiden: Brill, 2015. xiii + 203 pp. This volume contains ten enlightening essays on Jewish identity and sport, exploring linkages and disjunctions between how both are culturally constructed in specific times and places. It is also a book whose parts are greater than their sum. That is to say, the introduction, epilogue and eight essays that form the body of the book are all valuable in their own right, but the attempts in both the editors’ introduction and Ari Sclar’s epilogue to create a unifying vision among them remain problematic. There are many ways to categorize the essays that make up this volume. At the risk of oversimplification, one way would be to dichotomize those that primarily provide a chronicle of Jews in sports, giving us the who, what, where and when of Jewish athletes (primarily, though not exclusively, well-known figures in major sports) vs. those focus more on the why and how, giving us analyses of major trends and underlying causes. Each essay naturally includes aspects of the other genre too, but the different foci yield decidedly different kinds of essays, which sometimes complement each other but sometimes seem to inhabit different realms of scholarly discourses. Extensive bibliographic notes make visible the frames of reference in which these authors place their scholarship. [End Page 163] In the former camp are David M. K. Sheinen’s “What Ray Arcell Saw in the Shower: Victor Galindez, Mike Rossman, and the Two Fights that Put an End to Jewish Boxing”; Raanan Rein’s “‘My Bobeh was Praying and Suffering for Atlanta’: Family, Food and Language among the Jewish-Argentine Fans of the Club Atlético Atlanta”; Jeffrey S. Gurock’s “The Clothes They Wear and the Time They Keep: The Orthodox Athletes’ Tests of Tolerance in Contemporary America”; and Gerald R. Gems’s “Jews, Sport and the Construction of an American Identity.” (To spare the reader the suspense, what was claimed to have been seen in the shower referred to in Sheinin’s titillating title was the ostensibly uncircumcised penis of boxer Max Baer [16]). In the latter camp we find the editors’ introduction, “Making an Adjustment”; Rebecca T. Alpert’s “The Macho-Mensch: Modeling American Jewish Masculinity and the Heroes of Baseball”; and Ari Sclar’s “Redefining Jewish Athleticism: New Approaches and Research Directions.” Standing apart from these are essays that are not primarily about sports in the traditional sense one would expect: Eleanor F. Odenheimer, Rebecca Buchanan and Tanya Prewitt’s “Adaptations of Yoga: Jewish Interpretations”; Nathan Abrams’s “Muscles, Mimicry, Menschlikyat [sic] and Madagascar: Jews, Sport, and Nature in US Cinema”; and Alejandro Meter’s “Jewishness and Sports: The Case for Latin American Fiction,” the latter two dealing with artistic representations of the book’s subject matter more than with the topic itself. The editors’ willingness to go outside the traditional parameters of who and what we would expect to be included in a discussion of sports enhances the volume and is evidenced early on in the introduction by the statement that “Perhaps the greatest Jewish athlete in the Americas was Harry Houdini” (8). Abrams’s essay significantly expands the book’s theoretical scope by bringing in post-colonial theory and the history of imperialism to the exploration of the development of Jewish identity and thereby greatly advances the intention announced by the book’s subtitle to relate Jews and sport to the making of the Americas, rather than simply focusing on Jews and sport in the Americas. In terms of my earlier distinction between the primarily chronicling vs. analytical essays, the latter group contributes more to this project than the former. Abrams’s essay also contains the enlightening observation that the “sports at which Jews tend to excel – boxing, table tennis, fencing, swimming, and chess – take place indoors” (125). One should note that while the book’s subtitle describes it as being about “the Americas,” it is really about the...