Within the Jewish popular imagination, Jews and sports have long remained the domain of a particular brand of apologetic narratives. What began as an activity that was taken, at least in part, as a defense against antisemitism, has become, in some contemporary Jewish contexts, a space for articulating a paradigm of Jewish heroism and physical prowess purposefully posed to undercut popular narratives of Jewish feebleness and an excessive devotion to intellectual pursuits. Though constituting both an important sphere of Jewish social activity and a rich body of collective memories and interpretations of the meanings of those activities, accounts of a shifting Jewish relationship to sports and athleticism have not yet received the kind of cultural and social historical analysis and attention they deserve.

More than simply filling this gap in Jewish studies, Jack Kugelmass's volume Jews, Sports, and the Rites of Citizenship significantly advances a variety of debates about the social and cultural significance of sports. This volume of essays breaks new and important ground in bringing together fresh and insightful analyses about the relationships between Jewish history, culture, sports, and the body. In representing one of the first academic volumes to take up Jewish sports from an international perspective (Michael Brenner and Gideon Reuveni edited a volume on Jews and sports in Europe, published one year earlierFootnote ¹), this interdisciplinary collection focuses on sports as a lens for observing the process of Jewish modernization. In the broadest sense, as Kugelmass explains, a cultural analysis of Jews and sports serves as a means of examining the “observation, establishment, maintenance, transgression, dismantling and redefining of boundaries between Jews and the coterritorial populations among whom they reside” (6). The topic of citizenship serves as a central organizing theme, allowing individual contributors to explore the shifting strategies by which Jews as a group have aligned themselves politically and defined themselves within the nation while simultaneously retaining a distinct sense of themselves as a separate ethnic group. Probing the relationship of citizenship and sports leads to an examination of how the nation and ethnos are constituted and how collective memories are constructed. If the modern nation is defined through “the embodiment of ideal specimens of male and … female bodies,” as Kugelmass writes (11), this collection of essays elaborates on the ways in which the bodies of those deemed marginal or subordinate have participated in the representation of the nation. With their focus on sports and culture, the essays in this volume parallel, and in many ways extend, the project begun by David Biale in his Cultures of the Jews, by focusing on sports as a realm of Jewish cultural production that both shapes and, in turn, is shaped by interactions with surrounding cultures.Footnote ²

The individual contributions to the volume pursue some already well-developed themes in an emerging literature on Jews, sports, and the body and take them in some compelling new directions. In both American and European contexts, interest in Jews and sports has been rooted in the strength and persistence of the image of the weak, unfit, and unathletic Jew, and Stephen Whitfield's essay poignantly and often humorously evokes these resonances in American literature. Jeffrey Gurock's essay on Orthodox Jewish adaptations to the American cult of sports traces how, despite their initial stance, different Orthodox groups began to incorporate secular sports into religious lifestyles, and in the case of Yeshiva University in the 1940s, even used sports as a marketing tool to compete with liberal Jewish denominations to attract young men to study. John Hoberman traces European and American narratives about Jewish lack of physical prowess, focusing on equestrian pursuits. While Jews' reputed inability to ride horses had historically been put forward as a sign of the male Jew's lack of manliness, dignity, and military prowess, Hoberman documents how this phenomenon shaped Jewish self-perception in such a way that Jews came to see their lack of equestrian pursuits as a reflection of their separate and diminished social status. Hoberman adds a nice twist to this internal Jewish narration of identity when he notes how the equestrian affinities of Michael Bloomberg's children were discussed during his 2001 New York mayoral run by a prominent Jewish newspaper in a way that was ostensibly illustrative of the fact that Bloomberg was “at the assimilated end of the spectrum.” Where a certain lack of proclivity once suggested Jewish difference, Jews on horseback can now be read as a sign of excess assimilation.

One of the significant Jewish responses to views of Jews' social and physical inferiority in the increasingly nationalist contexts of Central and Eastern Europe was the formation of sports movements and organizations that often allied themselves with specific political orientations. Jack Jacobs demonstrates how the differing ideologies of Jewish workers' sports movements in interwar Poland led them to promote specific kinds of sports, while Joshua Shanes examines the Jewish nationalist gymnastics movement in Galicia, a phenomenon much less documented than, and quite distinct from, its counterpart in Germany. With reference to Palestine, Anat Helman reconstructs collectivism and hedonism in Zionist attitudes toward sport in Tel Aviv, while in reference to the United States, Edward Shapiro explores why a famous basketball and gambling scandal at the City College of New York that involved numerous Jews did not provoke antisemitic reactions.

If sports was often used as a means of promoting individual mobility and collective integration in democratic societies, how did it function in societies where citizenship did not offer the possibility of equality? One of the volume's great strengths is in its inclusion of North Africa and Israel as sites for analysis. Harvey Goldberg traces the tradition of Sabbath games in nineteenth-century Tripoli and shows how individual Jews took part in games neither to defend Jews against antisemitism nor to achieve benefits of social mobility as in the American context. Instead, he argues, Jews took part in sports not as individuals who were formally equal but in a clearly defined system in which Jews occupied a subordinate status in relation to the dominant Muslim group. Much in the same way, André Levy's ethnographic account of Jewish and Arab soccer games in Casablanca during the 1990s suggests the complexity of a subordinate (and numerically small) Jewish group engaging in competitive games with the dominant Muslim group.

Finally, Tamir Sorek's essay on Arab soccer teams in Israel brings the nineteenth-century history of Jews and sports seemingly full circle. In his contribution, we see a clear reversal of the dynamic of the social domination of Jews to social domination by Jews. Arab soccer fans in Israel face a tension between supporting a team in a manner that offers an opportunity for collective integration within Israeli Jewish society or gives expression to Palestinian national pride and grievance. Sorek finds that the soccer stadium serves as an “integrative enclave.” In the stands, Arabs in Israel seek to blur national and ethnic tensions, emphasizing the common denominator with the Jewish majority. He sees this in the use of Hebrew, rather than Arabic, as symbolic of attempts toward integration, even within intra-Arab interactions. Thus, just as sports served as a means of expressing a diverse array of attitudes and relationships toward the dominant group and nation within the Jewish Diaspora, Sorek finds that Arab soccer fans maintained “a diversified arsenal of meanings concerning their status in the state and their relations with the Jewish majority” (170).

Ultimately, it is the surprising range of the volume's essays, which cover a breathtaking variety of locations, periods, and social contexts, that is one of the most impressive features of the book. Kugelmass's collection provides a notable contribution to a field of study that is only beginning to take shape and suggests a model for future work that will not be limited by the constraints of national context or period. In that regard, Jews, Sports, and the Rites of Citizenship provides an excellent example for conceptualizations of interdisciplinary work in Jewish studies that may have applications for a variety of topics beyond those immediately concerned with sports and conceptualizations of the Jewish body.