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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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Mamdani Hedges in Response to Mob Targeting New York City Synagogue
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani holds a press conference at the New York City Office of Emergency Management, as a major winter storm spreads across a large swath of the United States, in Brooklyn, New York City, US, Jan. 25, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Bing Guan
Protests targeting an Israeli real estate event at a New York City synagogue have put Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s leadership under renewed scrutiny after demonstrators returned to the Upper East Side location on Tuesday night.
The demonstration prompted a significant police response and raised concerns about rising antisemitic rhetoric in the city home to the world’s largest Jewish population outside of Israel.
Protesters gathered outside Park East Synagogue in Manhattan during a showcase called “The Great Israeli Real Estate Event 2026,” which included the marketing of properties in Israel proper as well as West Bank settlements. At the demonstration, activists held signs and chanted slogans that went beyond criticism of Israel, seemingly calling for the death and expulsion of Jews and, in some cases, support for US-designated terrorist groups.
“Death, death to the IDF [Israel Defense Forces],” “Rapists,” and “Settlers, settlers go back home, Palestine is ours alone” were among the insults screamed by the protesters, some of whom also waved flags belonging to the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah.
The scene marked a return to the same synagogue that was the site of a contentious protest in November, which drew widespread condemnation and sparked debate over the boundaries between political expression and hate speech. At that gathering, demonstrators chanted “We don’t want no Zionists here” and “Resistance, you make us proud, take another settler out,” among others. One speaker claimed, “It is our duty to make them think twice before holding these events! We need to make them scared.”
Both protests were organized by the anti-Zionist activist organization Pal-Awda.
This time, however, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) appeared better prepared. Officers established barricades and maintained distance between demonstrators and synagogue attendees, preventing the kind of close confrontations seen in the earlier protest. While tensions remained high, authorities largely kept the situation contained, avoiding major physical clashes.
Still, video circulating on social media appeared to show hordes of protesters storming and attempting to penetrate the barricades erected by the NYPD to separate the synagogue from the demonstrations. According to multiple reports, police had to deploy pepper-spray and at least one officer was hospitalized during the chaos.
Ronen Levy, a Queens-based pro-Israel counterprotester, repudiated the demonstrations as a threat to the local Jewish community.
“You want to protest? You want to assemble on the street, you want to assemble in a park, you want to assemble in a center or Columbus Circle? You’re more than welcome,” Levy told AMNY. “But to protest in a shul or a mosque or a church, that’s unethical, that’s un-American.”
“It came to where they do it in the shul, because it’s a lot easier to get Jewish people to come down, because it’s a Jewish congregation,” Levy continued. “Most people in synagogues, they want to go live in Israel.”
The incident came amid an ongoing surge in antisemitic hate crimes in New York City. According to police data, Jews this year have been targeted in the majority of all hate crimes committed in the city, continuing a troubling trend of rising antisemitism following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. Mamdani took office on Jan. 1.
Jewish community leaders have increasingly voiced concern about demonstrations occurring near religious institutions, warning that such actions blur the line between protest and intimidation.
Mamdani, who faced criticism over his response to the November protest outside the same Manhattan synagogue, on Wednesday expressed support for the police’s response but also condemned the Israeli real estate event.
“I think that I’ve made it clear time and time again that we in this city believe in the sacrosanct nature of the right to protest, and also are committed to ensuring that any New Yorker can safely enter or exit from a house of worship, and that access never be in question, while we also protect the First Amendment,” Mamdani said during a press conference. “And I do believe that the police ensured that yesterday evening.”
However, the mayor went on to defend the protesters’ cause.
“There is no tolerance for hatred of Jewish New Yorkers,” he said. “I’ve also been clear to New Yorkers, my honest opinions about the fact that when we have a real estate expo that is promoting the sale of land, which includes the sale of land in occupied West Bank in settlements that are a violation of international law, that that is something that I firmly disagree with.”
“I also believe that many New Yorkers firmly disagree with it, because it has been at the heart of an ongoing effort to displace Palestinians from their homes,” Mamdani added.
Mamdani’s office issued a similar statement on Tuesday in the hours leading up to the protest.
“He further inflamed tensions on an already volatile situation,” the Anti-Defamation League’s New York/New Jersey branch said of Mamdani’s comments. “The mayor had a responsibility to de-escalate. He did the opposite.”
Mamadani faced intense criticism from Jewish leaders and pro-Israel advocates after issuing a similar statement in November that appeared to legitimize the gathering of demonstrators who called for violence against Jews outside Park East Synagogue.
Julie Menin, the speaker of City Council, defended the protesters’ first Amendment Rights while admonishing efforts to intimidate synagogue attendees.
“The right to peaceful protest must be protected, and so must the ability of individuals to safely access a house of worship without fear or intimidation,” Menin said.
Mamdani has come under immense scrutiny over his record of anti-Israel statements, repeatedly accusing Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza and claiming that Israel does not grant “equal rights” to all of its inhabitants. Given his track record of anti-Israel sentiment, which according to critics has fueled hostility toward Jews, Mamdani’s handling of antisemitism has come under the spotlight.
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AI-Generated ‘Rabbis’ on TikTok Push Antisemitism, Generate Over 10 Million Likes, Report Reveals
TikTok app logo is seen in this illustration taken, Aug. 22, 2022. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic
The Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) released a report on Tuesday exposing 49 TikTok accounts which have amassed large followings pushing bigoted stereotypes with phony rabbi videos created using generative artificial intelligence programs.
Analysts at CAM’s Antisemitism Research Center found that the accounts — which use handles such as @rabbirothstein @rabingoldmaan @rabbistirberg, and @rabbi_silverstein — had collected 950,000 users and provoked over 10 million likes.
Across accounts, researchers found similar narratives and linguistic patterns in service of a common modus operandi: recasting conventional antisemitic stereotypes by having rabbis promote them as obvious truths.
The first “rabbi” introduced in the report is “RabbiSilverman.” One video features the rabbi figure holding a bottle of Coca-Cola with the caption “$4 at the airport and $7 on a flight.” Another shows the rabbi sitting inside of a limo while he holds a gold bar and a stack of $100 bills alongside the description “when the dollar and gold go up together.” Three more images show the rabbi sitting and studying the Torah at a table while a red sports car sits in a showroom behind him.
The rabbi in one video sports a giant nose and says, “As Jews, never sign a contract without reading every single line.”
Another fake “rabbi” presented is “Rabbi StirBerg.” Sitting in front of a bookshelf in what resembles a synagogue’s office, videos include such instructions as “never give your kids an allowance” and “Jews are wealthy because we don’t feel guilty for wanting more money.” Another taunts, “by 8 our kids know why yours stay poor.”
Examples of AI-generated rabbi videos pushing antisemitism on TikTok. Photo: Screenshot
CAM noted that the antisemitism on TikTok would especially impact youth.
“The danger is clear. By masquerading as authentic Jewish voices, these ‘rabbis’ erode trust, normalize hatred, and incite real-world violence targeting Jews,” CAM said. “By amplifying this content to young, impressionable audiences, TikTok is complicit in accelerating radicalization in an era when AI is making disinformation increasingly difficult to detect.”
CAM called on TikTok to “immediately invest in AI detection tools specifically trained to identify synthetic religious impersonation, implement guidelines to ensure traffic is not actively directed to such accounts, and launch a public awareness campaign highlighting how to spot AI-generated propaganda.”
Jewish creators on TikTok have long objected to antisemitism on the platform. In November 2023, a group of more than 40 content creators and public figures raised the alarm about the antisemitism they had experienced on the platform, calling for more robust safety features and content moderation. TikTok responded at the time saying, “We’ve taken important steps to protect our community and prevent the spread of hate, and we appreciate ongoing, honest dialogue, and feedback as we continually work to strengthen these protections.”
The research into TikTok follows similar findings from CAM in a March report that revealed a proliferation of fake AI rabbis on Meta’s Instagram platform. One “Rabbi Goldman” account identified in the report had reached 1.4 million followers. Combined with 11 other imposters, the following reached 2.1 million. CAM noted how the variety of rabbis each presented with different voices and persona, but all promoted the same money-obsessed stereotypes.
Following the Instagram report, CAM reported that Meta had removed more than 60 Instagram accounts, including those in other languages like French, Italian, German, and Spanish. The watchdog group praised the technology company founded and led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, saying that “Meta has been highly responsive in working with CAM to better understand this activity and identify ways to reduce its reach and minimize its exposure to users.”
CAM vowed to remain vigilant to the threat, warning that “these identities are easily recreated and quickly reappear. CAM will continue to cooperate with Meta to address this expanding network … without sustained monitoring and rapid response, these false identities will continue to shape online discourse, reinforcing hostility toward Jewish communities that translates into real-world violence.”
In March, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced his decision to shut down the AI video-generating app Sora, a platform which hosted videos showing Jews chasing after coins, cheating poor people out of money, and being run over by a car. Research released by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in October found that in at least 40 percent of cases, programs would still generate responses when given antisemitic, extremists, or other hateful prompts.
CAM warned of the real-world consequences from the TikTok videos.
The report stated that antisemitic tropes “have historically instigated violence — from pogroms to the Holocaust to contemporary attacks on Jews. In the digital age, this content contributes to a documented global rise in antisemitic incidents by providing ‘evidence’ that justifies hostility. The visual caricatures (large noses, ostentatious wealth) further dehumanize Jews, erasing a psychological barrier to violence.”
In February, police in the Netherlands arrested 15 people, charging them with using TikTok to promote propaganda for the Islamic State. Some videos reached as high as 100,000 views. They urged views to join the terrorist group and glorified the “martyrs” who had died in service of the group’s mission of creating a global caliphate empowered to impose strict, Salafi-interpretations of Shariah law across the entire planet.
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Artists, Cultural Workers Plan Strike for Venice Biennale in Protest of Israel’s Participation
Signage for the 61st Venice Biennale running from May 9 to November 22. Photo: IMAGO/Frank Ossenbrink via Reuters Connect
An anti-Israel collective announced a 24-hour strike for artists and cultural workers on Friday, the day before the 61st Venice Biennale opens to the public, in protest of Israel’s inclusion in the event.
The Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA) is organizing the strike on the city’s Viale Garibaldi, and a number of groups, unions, and art spaces have already vowed to participate including Biennaleocene, a coalition of cultural workers in Venice that formed in 2023. The strike was announced right before ANGA hosted a massive protest at the Biennale.
The international art exhibition opened for previews on Wednesday and ANGA disrupted the opening, assembling a protest outside of Israel’s temporary pavilion in the Biennale’s Arsenal complex. ANGA said “hundreds” participated in the protest and claimed the decision to include Israel in this year’s Biennale “constitutes active institutional support for a state committing genocide in Gaza against the Palestinian people.”
“Protestors marched through the Arsenale with large banners, Palestinian flags, placards, and distributed flyers calling for the shut down [sic] of the Genocide Pavilion,” ANGA wrote in an Instagram post that featured pictures from the protest. “ISRAEL YOU CAN’T HIDE, WE CHARGE YOU WITH GENOCIDE! The demand is clear: Boycott the Israeli pavilion and SHUT IT DOWN.”
ANGA previously published an open letter, signed by hundreds of event participants, that called for Israel to be boycotted from this year’s Venice Biennale. Last week, the jury for the 2026 Venice Biennale resigned mere days after saying it would not consider awarding the event’s top prizes to countries whose leaders are facing charges of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court, meaning Israel and Russia.
After the jury’s resignation, organizers of the Biennale announced new “Visitor’s Lion” awards. The public will vote for the winners, and Russia and Israel are both eligible to take home those awards. The award ceremony for the 2026 Venice Biennale has also been pushed from May 9 to Nov. 22, which is the last day of the show.
Romanian artist Belu-Simion Fainaru is representing Israel in this year’s event with his installation “Rose of Nothingness,” which will highlight Jewish mysticism, memory, and poetry.
At the 2024 Venice Biennale, artist Ruth Patir closed Israel’s official pavilion to the public until a ceasefire and hostage release agreement could be agreed upon. That same year ANGA supporters protested outside of the American and Israeli pavilions during previews for the Biennale, in condemnation of US support for Israel. The group of anti-Israel activists also protested outside the French, British, and German pavilions, because of each country’s relations with Israel.