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How Arnold Horween, an unsung Jewish Harvard hero, changed American sports
(JTA) — Decades before Sandy Koufax sat out the first game of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur, and 18 years before Greenberg chased Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record in the late 1930s, a college athlete made some overlooked Jewish sports history.
Arnold Horween, a burly Chicagoan, became the first Jewish captain of the Harvard University football team in 1920 — an achievement that sent ripples through American culture.
Horween, who would later play and coach in the early years of what would become the NFL, was born to Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. He became a star player at Harvard, helping the Crimson go undefeated in both 1919 and 1920 after returning from serving in World War I. (His brother Ralph also played at Harvard and in the NFL, and they were the first and only Jewish brothers to play in the NFL until Geoff and Mitchell Schwartz.)
But it was Horween’s unanimous selection as the team’s captain, and more importantly, his appointment in 1926 as the team’s coach, that would prove unprecedented.
“In American Jewish culture, the only thing greater than being the captain of the Harvard Crimson, the only higher station in American culture might have been the president, or the coach of Harvard, which he eventually becomes,” said Zev Eleff, the president of Gratz College and a scholar of American Jewish history.
Eleff explores Horween’s story and its impact in his recent book, “Dyed in Crimson: Football, Faith, and Remaking Harvard’s America,” released earlier this year. He traces the history of Harvard athletics in the early 1900s, exploring how Horween, along with Harvard’s first athletic director, Bill Bingham, altered the landscape of America’s most prestigious college.
Horween’s ascendance came at a time when Harvard instituted quotas to limit the number of Jewish and other minority students it accepted — a practice the school would employ throughout the 1920s and 30s. His story also took place amid a political landscape that featured the rise of Father Charles Coughlin, the antisemitic “radio priest,” and the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan.
As Eleff underscores in the book, Horween did not fit the model of a “Boston Brahmin,” the class of elite, Christian, aspirationally manly men whose supremacy was unquestioned at Harvard Yard. Horween broke that mold, instead instilling a team culture where a love of the sport was almost as important as winning — the Ted Lasso effect, if you will.
“Dyed in Crimson” also uses early 20th century Harvard as an allegory for the broader theme of how sports can change society.
“The theme of the book, something that’s uniquely American, is how the periphery can influence the mainstream,” said Eleff. “How people on the sidelines can really make an influence.”
Eleff spoke to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about how Horween’s story fits into the pantheon of Jewish American sports legends and what it says about Jews’ ability to succeed in America.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Let’s dig into Horween’s story. I liked the idea of him as like an earlier version of Koufax or a Greenberg, but to be honest, I had never heard of him. Why do you think his story isn’t as well known as other Jewish athletes?
I think it has everything to do with the emergence of Major League Baseball. College football was America’s sport in the 1910s and 1920s. It was a big money sport, when there was very little money outside of the New York Yankees. And I think that Horween’s star started to sort of decline with Harvard football, but also the emergence of other sports.
The other reason is because the idea of the Jewish ballplayer loomed large. The New York Giants, for decades, tried to identify a Jewish superstar. They actually passed on Greenberg. There was a thought after Greenberg that there was Jewish DNA for baseball, and the signing of Koufax was directly linked to this notion. It was this eugenics-like link that you need a Jewish ballplayer. For the Giants, it was ticket sales. So the commotion about Greenberg and Koufax is more about Jewish identity. And baseball is, as a professional sport in New York, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, different than college football, particularly in New England at this time. Frankly, Jews lived near the Polo Grounds, they didn’t live near Harvard Yard.
Arnold Horween shown in The Baltimore Sun on November 16, 1927. (Wikimedia Commons)
For Horween, obviously he’s not at the level of a Greenberg or Koufax talent-wise, but he also didn’t seem to care as much personally about his Jewish identity. You write in the book that there were some Jews who took issue with the fact that Horween was not practicing, but there were also many Jews who were simply proud he was Jewish. What do you think about that dynamic?
There becomes a sort of disconnect between lived religion and the perception and what they come to represent — the mantle that they wear almost towers above the practice. Horween eschewed the opportunity to claim the mantle of Jewish leadership, Jewish celebrity. But we do see in its moment that he is the topic of rabbinic sermons, that The American Hebrew and other Jewish press are reporting on him. They are elated. In American Jewish culture, the only thing greater than being the captain of the Harvard Crimson — it’s hard for people to realize, but in the moment when they were part of the big three [alongside Princeton and Yale] — the only higher station in American culture might have been the president, or the coach of Harvard, which he eventually becomes.
One of the parts of this book that I enjoyed learning about is the extent to which college football in the early 20th century was all about honor, masculinity, gentlemanliness. And at the time, that kind of stands in contrast to how Jews were viewed — that Jews were not masculine, Jews couldn’t fit into that mold of the “Harvard man.”
Being on the sports team, that was probably far beyond Jewish expectations. Not to say that Jews could not be athletic, but very often the varsity players weren’t picked for their talent but rather their surnames. What the sea change at Harvard is, [within] gentlemanly culture — in which “gentlemanly” is a Protestant, Christian masculinity — Horween is not Protestant. What allows him a pathway into that elite group is that drive to win. And as a player, he’s good luck. He never loses. He becomes a signature player for victory who even wins the Rose Bowl.
But as a coach, he subverts that. What he and Bill Bingham do is their campaign isn’t necessarily for winning, it’s for having fun, it’s for enjoying the game.
In the 1910s and 20s, college football was the peak of American sports, but that’s certainly not the case anymore. What do you think would be the modern comparison for someone like Horween?
Is Becky Hammon with the Spurs, the first woman [to act as] head coach in basketball, something like that? Or the very important discussions about people of color as coaches in the NFL? Sports and education are, for some reason or another, where change is made in American life. Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 ends, at least officially, segregation. Title IV, what is basically American law for anti-discrimination based on sex, is based on women’s college sports. You have the breaking down of color barriers and Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali and Vietnam. You have the first [openly] gay athletes, you have questions of breaking the glass ceiling for women and Serena Williams.
It’s absolutely 100% true that sports doesn’t matter. Who wins the World Series is of no great consequence to most people’s lives. Although it’s interesting, if you drive up I-95 on a Sunday, you will see that the bumper stickers and the flags change. There is some sort of passion, obviously, about sport. But it’s absolutely true that for some reason or another in the 20th century and 21st century in American sport, really important social and cultural decisions, and political decisions, are made in American sport.
Zev Eleff, president of Gratz College and author of “Dyed in Crimson.” (Courtesy)
Another main topic in the book is that the goal for immigrants, especially Jews, was Americanization, assimilation — that to become part of the mainstream was the marker of success. But that seems to be the case for Jews in a very different sense than it is for Catholics and for Blacks.
The major contribution of this book to American Jewish history beyond telling this story is to complicate notions of Americanization. Jews and Catholics in particular view Americanization very, very differently. The Catholic experience is to create parallel systems. If you’re a good Catholic boy with immense football talent, play for Notre Dame, play for Boston College. Don’t play for the Protestant mainstream. Cream them on the football field. Create parallel systems.
The Jewish experience is not so. Outside of Orthodox day schools in the early 20th century, it was anathema, it was considered almost heretical, for American Jews to [go] to private schools. To the contrary, the so-called golden citadels of the public schools — that is the agent of Americanization. Jews don’t establish their own educational systems. They somehow Americanize and acculturate into the mainstream. We don’t compete with Harvard, we get into Harvard.
Thinking about the antisemitism of that time — the quotas, Father Coughlin, all of that — how do you think that compares to what we’re seeing today?
Historians disagree about the 1920s. Was it a time of great prominence of American Jews? There was affluence in the roaring ’20s. There were institutions that were created, there was creativity, from the Orthodox and Mordecai Kaplan certainly, across the board, the Jewish Theological Seminary. American Judaism was at a certain high point in the 1920s. At the same time, there were quotas, and there was rising antisemitism. I think today we also have to deal with the tension of, on the one hand, there are great opportunities for Jews in the United States; at the same time, there is antisemitism. And so from the 1920s to the 2020s, 100 years later, you see a model for how to grapple with those tensions.
What do you hope, more than anything else, someone takes away or learns from your book?
It’s a book that begins like a punch line: a working class Protestant, a Catholic and a Jew walk into a football field. But it ends with something I think a lot more pronounced, which is, it’s a story about change. As a historian, I study change, particularly in American Judaism, broadly in American religion and Jewish Studies. Change is the best asset that a historian has to study. I wasn’t interested in just finding another Sandy Koufax story, replicating that story. This is a story that isn’t just about a Jew who happened for his moment to become quite successful and quite famous, or a Catholic or a former mill hand turned first athletic director in college history. It’s really about how people on the periphery influence the mainstream.
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Why Jewish teens aren’t speaking out about the NYC mayoral election, despite their strong feelings
This article was produced as part of the New York Jewish Week’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around New York City to report on issues that affect their lives.
As a teen reporter I work hard to amplify the voices of young people on issues that affect them. That’s why I was excited about my assignment from the New York Jewish Week to gather teens’ reactions to the upcoming New York City mayoral election. While many of these teens aren’t old enough to vote, I hoped to present a range of opinions from young people who care about their city and its future.
But when I started to report on the issue, I kept hitting the same wall: None of the teens I tried to interview would go on the record with their names or their political beliefs. All eight said they didn’t want that type of exposure in such a politically divisive time.
The teens I met aren’t the only ones who feel this way, and it isn’t just the mayoral election that’s keeping young adults quiet. According to Education Week, “young people are reluctant to discuss politics, especially without a space to safely navigate those discussions in such a polarized environment.” The article found that teens often worry that if they speak up in school, their voices will be dismissed, criticized or misunderstood. A lack of confidence could play a role, too: A 2023 study by CIRCLE, Tufts University’s research organization focused on youth civic engagement, found that only 40% of students feel “well-qualified” to participate in political conversations.
Nonetheless, in private conversations, the New York City teens I talked with shared fascinating insights about the mayoral race. The discussions broadly fell into two camps: Teens felt conflicted over the morality and beliefs of the candidates, and they also feared that if they said the wrong thing, their opinions would follow them for the rest of their lives.
Zohran Mamdani, the frontrunner, is a progressive and a staunch critic of Israel who won the Democratic nomination. His closest challenger, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, is seeking a political comeback after resigning as governor in 2021 amid a barrage of sexual harassment allegations. Trailing the pack is Republican Curtis Sliwa, the red beret-wearing founder and CEO of the Guardian Angels.
To Jewish teens, none of these candidates seem suitable to run their beloved city — something my sources were eager to express, albeit anonymously.
“On the one hand, it feels morally wrong to consider electing Andrew Cuomo, given the numerous allegation of sexual harassment. As a woman, I believe elected officials should embody the values of respect and integrity,” one Jewish teen living on the Upper West Side told me. “On the other hand, while Zohran Mamdani’s policies often sound compelling, in theory, I consistently find myself questioning what a sharply critical view of Israel might mean for a city with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.”
Another Upper West Side teen, a senior at a private high school, echoed a similar sentiment: “This election has been so frustrating because it feels like I have to give up one set of values to protect another.”
The teens I spoke to had strong beliefs. Why had they declined to attach their names to their statements?
Well, according to a junior at a Manhattan public high school, “although I am not yet old enough to vote, I’ve found this mayoral race both confusing and frustrating. I don’t want my name attached to either one of these candidates.”
“I do not want my name to be linked to a political figure,” explained one Upper East Side teen, “because it can follow me into the future and change how others automatically view me when they meet me for the first time.”
This last quote, in particular, touched a nerve with me, as it highlights just how aware teens are of growing up in a society that increasingly lives online. Teens applying for colleges and thinking about their future career path start thinking at a young age. The last thing we want is for a future employer to find — and disagree with — something we said about a politician when we were 16.
As a teen reporter, my job is to give teens an opportunity to be seen and heard. My editor, who has worked with teen journalists for over 30 years, told me that she’s seen more and more young sources ask for anonymity over the past five years. As our lives become inextricably tied to the internet, it’s easy to see why: Doxxing — the malicious release of private information — has become a “mainstream public safety concern,” according to Safe Home, which conducts yearly research on doxxing. According to their report, 57% of Americans say they avoid sharing political views online out of fear of being targeted.
Doxxing over perspectives related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been common in recent years, with both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian voices experiencing the practice.
So as a 17-year-old who is constantly on social media and always with my friends, I understand why my peers are worried about sharing too much. But this also means my role as a reporter who focuses on teen issues has become significantly more difficult. I worry that as the city becomes more polarized by politics, teens and young adults will feel less and less comfortable sharing their views and, as a result, news articles can’t reflect the community fully and policies can’t be responsive to young people’s needs. When that happens, we all lose.
Compounding the reluctance of young people to speak publicly about politics is the hesitancy of politicians and media to seek their opinions. Meira Levinson, a professor of education and society at Harvard University, writes about the “civic empowerment gap.” She describes how young people, especially those still in school, are often encouraged to care about politics but are rarely given the opportunity to express their views in a meaningful way. Candidates almost never make the effort to integrate teen concerns into their campaign.
Our communal politics need to create a safe space for young people to share their opinions. And candidates should solicit teens’ views if they want to make New York City a safe and inclusive city for all.
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Hamas Expands Terror Operations Across Europe Amid Gaza War, Exploiting Criminal Networks and Weapons Caches
Palestinian Hamas terrorists stand guard on the day of the handover of hostages held in Gaza since the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack, as part of a ceasefire and a hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, Feb. 22, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hatem Khaled
Hamas has expanded its terrorist operations beyond the Middle East, exploiting a long-established network of weapons caches, criminal alliances, and covert infrastructure that has been quietly built across Europe for years, according to a new report.
Earlier this month, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center released a study detailing how Hamas leaders in Lebanon have directed operatives to establish “foreign operator” cells across Europe, collaborating with organized crime networks to acquire weapons and target Jewish communities abroad.
“Hamas has never carried out a successful terrorist attack outside of Israel, the West Bank, or Gaza — but not for lack of plotting,” Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow and counterterrorism expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote in the report.
“European and Israeli officials fear that Hamas has taken the decision to go global and carry out plots abroad, marking a significant departure from the group’s prior modus operandi,” he continued.
For example, the study cited a failed Hamas plot in which an alleged operative in Germany traveled to Lebanon to “receive orders from the Qassam Brigades [Hamas’s military wing] to set up an arms depot for Hamas in Bulgaria,” part of a broader, multi-year effort to cache weapons across Europe.
However, German authorities foiled the plot, detaining four Hamas members in late 2023 on suspicion of planning attacks.
Earlier this year, the four suspects went on trial in Berlin in what prosecutors described as Germany’s first-ever case against members of the Palestinian terrorist group.
According to German officials, the weapons “were intended to expand Hamas’s activities in Europe.”
During the investigation, German authorities also found evidence on a defendant’s USB device showing that the Hamas operatives were planning attacks on specific sites in Germany, including the Israeli embassy in Berlin.
Similar weapons depots were established in Denmark, Poland, and other European countries, with Hamas members repeatedly trying to retrieve them to support their operations and plan potential attacks.
The newly released report identified Hamas’s operational headquarters in Lebanon as the command center for its activities abroad, with senior leaders directly managing plots across Europe.
“Even before Oct. 7, Hamas leaders periodically threatened to carry out attacks abroad,” Levitt explained in his report, referring to the Iran-backed Islamist group’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel in 2023.
“The increased Hamas terrorist activity abroad correlates to the establishment of a Hamas operational component in Lebanon driven by senior Hamas leaders,” he said, noting that such network “developed over time, as senior Hamas leaders left Turkey and Qatar and later made their way to Lebanon.”
The study also reported that Hamas operatives established alliances with European organized crime networks to secure weapons and logistical support for their operations.
For example, another major plot was foiled earlier this year, when a member of the Danish, banned Loyal to Familia (LtF) gang was indicted for purchasing Chinese drones intended for attacks in Denmark or Sweden. Local authorities later revealed that the gang had been working with Hamas, which has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades.
This month, German authorities foiled another planned terrorist attack, arresting three suspects on the eve of Yom Kippur who were preparing to target Jewish institutions.
According to the report, analysts remain uncertain whether these plots signal a permanent strategic shift or reflect a short-term tactical adjustment in response to the Gaza war.
“It remains unclear how decisions about such operations are made and if this includes input and approval from a broad range of Hamas leadership or just a select few,” Levitt said.
Given the loss of Hamas’s leadership and the resulting decentralized decision-making, the report noted that external operations may now be possible where they were previously constrained by internal disagreements.
“With Hamas operational capabilities in Gaza severely degraded, and the group under pressure from both Israeli and Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank, the group’s military commanders may find that acts of international terrorism carried out by small cells … may be a more central component of Hamas’s attack strategy,” Levitt concluded.
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British Airways breaks ties with Louis Theroux after interview with ‘Death to the IDF’ artist Bob Vylan
(JTA) — British Airways has dropped its sponsorship of documentarian Louis Theroux’s podcast following an interview with British punk musician Bobby Vylan where the artist defended his chants of “death, death to the IDF” at the Glastonbury music festival.
Following the band’s Glastonbury performance in June, the two members of Bob Vylan had their U.S. visas revoked by the State Department ahead of a planned tour this month. The BBC also said the livestream of the performance broke its guidelines because Bob Vylan’s chants could “fairly be characterised as antisemitic.”
Bob Vylan’s frontman, whose real name is Pascal Robinson-Foster, Theroux that he did not regret the chants during the interview.
“If I was to go on Glastonbury again tomorrow? Yeah, I would do it again. I’m not regretful of it,” said Vylan. “I’d do it again tomorrow, twice on Sundays. I’m not regretful of it at all. Like, the subsequent backlash that I’ve faced is minimal. It’s minimal compared to what people in Palestine are going through.”
Robinson-Foster also criticized a report by the Community Security Trust, British Jewry’s antisemitism watchdog, that found antisemitic incidents had spiked the day after Bob Vylan’s set, telling Theroux that it was unclear what the group was “counting as antisemitic.”
“I don’t think I have created an unsafe atmosphere for the Jewish community,” said Robinson-Foster. “If there were large numbers of people being like, going out and ‘Bob Vylan made me do this,’ then maybe I might go, woof, I’ve had a negative impact here. Again, in that report, what definition are they going by? We don’t know that.”
During the interview, Robinson-Foster also said that the “focus” should not have been placed on the “death to the IDF” chant, but rather “on the conditions that allow for that chant to exist.”
“Ultimately, the fight is against white supremacy, right?,” said Robinson-Foster. “That is what the fight is against. And I think white supremacy is displayed so vividly in Zionists.”
In response, Theroux replied, “They say we’re not white, we’re Jewish, right?”
Later, Theroux appeared to agree with Robinson-Foster’s assertion that the “Zionist movement and the war crimes being committed by Israel” should be viewed through the “lens of white supremacy.”
“I think I’d add to that, there’s an even more macro lens which you can put on it, which is that Jewish identity in the Jewish community, as expressed in Israel, has become almost like an acceptable quote, unquote, way of understanding ethno-nationalism,” said Theroux, later adding that “this sense of post-Holocaust Jewish exceptionalism or Zionist exceptionalism, has become a role model on the national stage for what these white identitarians would like to do in their own countries.”
Following the interview, Theroux drew criticism for failing to challenge Robinson-Foster’s defense of his chants during the interview.
“Louis Theroux has every right to interview whoever he wants, but with that right comes responsibility,” Jewish film producer Leo Pearlman told the British outlet Jewish News. “When you give a microphone to someone who proudly repeats a genocidal chant that played a part in inspiring attacks on Jews across Britain, you’re not probing hate, you’re amplifying it.”
Dave Rich, the head of policy at the Community Service Trust, wrote in a blog post that he had been distressed that Theroux did not note that Robinson-Foster had publicly undercut the idea that his chant of “death to the IDF” was not meant as a call to voice when he commented at another concert, “We are for an armed resistance. We wanna make that explicitly f–king clear.” Rich also criticized the decision to release the interview even after the attack on a Manchester, England, synagogue in which two people were killed on Yom Kippur.
“Theroux’s podcast was recorded before the Manchester attack, which he acknowledges in the introduction,” Rich wrote. “But they still went ahead and published it anyway, as if the death of two Jews due to an Israel-hating jihadist doesn’t change the context of an interview with someone who became famous for calling for death for Israelis.”
After the interview aired on Spotify last Friday, British Airways issued a statement to announce it had dropped its sponsorship of Theroux’s show.
“Our sponsorship of the series has now been paused and the advert has been removed,” the airline wrote in a statement shared with the British outlet Jewish News. “We’re grateful that this was brought to our attention, as the content clearly breaches our sponsorship policy in relation to politically sensitive or controversial subject matters.”
The episode follows the release, in April, of a documentary by Theroux titled “The Settlers” that served a searing portrayal of the far-right Israeli settler movement in the West Bank.
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