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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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New Report Exposes Docters Without Borders for Pursuing Anti-Israel Activism
A Palestinian woman helps a burn victim, Maria Abu Aawad, at a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hospital in Zawaida, in the central Gaza Strip, Jan. 26, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa
A new report is raising questions about whether one of the world’s most prominent humanitarian organizations has crossed the line from medical advocacy into political campaigning in its approach to Israel and the war in Gaza.
The analysis — published by NGO Monitor, an independent Jerusalem-based watchdog group that monitors nongovernmental organizations — scrutinizes the statements and activities of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders, following the Palestinian terrorist group’s Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza.
“Despite the slaughter of over 1,200 people, the injuries to thousands, and the kidnapping of over 250 hostages into Gaza [during Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities], MSF’s public communications and almost daily updates immediately pivoted to a singular focus on condemning Israel’s response,” the report says.
NGO Monitor also points to a December 2023 finding by former MSF Secretary General Alain Destexhe, who found that many MSF employees celebrated Hamas’s brutal incursion into Israel, contending that “over 40 percent of statements by staff, including senior figures, praised Hamas and the attacks.”
Destexhe warned last year that “MSF is no longer neutral; its humanitarian language now serves a political cause.”
According to NGO Monitor’s report, MSF, which purports to be a neutral provider of emergency medical care, has increasingly adopted language and positions that align with political advocacy, including accusations that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza. NGO Monitor argues that such claims are not supported by verified evidence and risk distorting the realities of a complex and ongoing conflict.
The report contends that MSF’s public messaging has relied on incomplete or unverified information while omitting key context, including the role of Hamas in embedding military infrastructure within civilian areas such as hospitals and residential neighborhoods. Israel has repeatedly cited these conditions as a central challenge in its efforts to target terrorist networks while minimizing civilian harm.
Further, the report accuses the MSF of “systematically omitting essential details and context” such as “the basic military requirements faced by Israel for neutralizing a terror organization with a massive underground tunnel network embedded in civilian infrastructure, and in which hostages were hidden.”
Critics highlighted in the report say that by failing to acknowledge these dynamics, MSF presents a one-sided narrative that could mislead policymakers, media organizations, and international institutions. The watchdog group further argues that statements from globally recognized NGOs carry significant weight and can influence legal proceedings and diplomatic pressure against Israel.
The report criticizes the MSF for asserting that Israel’s military tactics are tantamount to “death sentences,” claiming that the humanitarian organization “sought to leverage its influence” on world leaders” to pressure them to curtail supposed “indiscriminate violence unleashed on a helpless people.”
NGO Monitor also raises concerns about accountability within large humanitarian organizations, calling for greater transparency in how public claims are verified and communicated. It suggests that NGOs operating in conflict zones must maintain strict standards of neutrality to preserve credibility and avoid contributing to misinformation.
MSF has repeatedly defended its work in Gaza, emphasizing the dire humanitarian conditions and the urgency of medical needs on the ground. The organization maintains that its statements are based on firsthand observations by its staff and reflect the severity of the crisis facing civilians.
The report came out two months after Doctors Without Borders publicly acknowledged that armed individuals — many of them masked — were present inside the large compound of Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, citing intimidation of patients, arbitrary arrests, and suspected weapons movement as reasons for halting some of its work there.
The admission, buried in a rarely referenced FAQ page on the group’s website, lends factual support to claims long asserted by Israeli authorities about the use of medical facilities by Hamas and allied terrorists during the conflict in Gaza.
Last year, NGO Monitor obtained documents revealing that Hamas has long run a coordinated effort to penetrate and influence NGOs in the war-torn enclave — contradicting years of denials from major humanitarian organizations.
The study showed how Hamas has for years systematically weaponized humanitarian aid in Gaza, tightening its grip over foreign NGOs operating in the territory and exposing patterns of complicity and collaboration that contradict the groups’ persistent denials.
According to the documents, Hamas officials designated specific points of contact with “highly respected” international NGOs, including Doctors Without Borders and several others.
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Trump Admin Investigates New York City for Antisemitism Following Nonprofit’s Exposure of ‘Palestine Teach-Ins’
A general view of the US Department of Education in Washington, DC, on Dec. 1, 2020. Photo: Graeme Sloan via Reuters Connect
The Trump administration is investigating the New York City Department of Education (DOE) for allegedly violating federal civil rights laws by failing to stop K-12 teachers from procuring students for membership in anti-Zionist study groups, an enterprise which the government says will flood public school classrooms with antisemitism.
The US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) said last week that reports regarding the activities of a group which calls itself “NYC Educators for Palestine” prompted its inquiry. First publicized by the North American Values Institute (NAVI), they range from teaching extracurricular courses on “Palestinian resistance” to holding “Palestine teach-ins” on federal holidays.
NAVI has noted that public sector union leaders enrolled in the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) are some of the group’s most eager participants and endorsers. The problem, according to critics, is that their affiliation implies the approval of a city government that the Trump administration says should be ending the practice.
NYC Educators for Palestine targets children as young as five, the US Education Department alleged in a press release announcing the action, describing long sessions in which teachers drill into them the notions that Israelis are “genocidal white supremacists” and that Hamas terrorists are “martyrs.”
The group also targets high school students preparing to transition to college and the workplace as well. In January, it held a “teach in” on the Martin Luther King holiday, casting a wide net for children “ages 6-18.”
The inexorable outcome of the group’s indoctrination is the radicalization of students who will point to disinformation confected by anti-Zionist activists as cause to abuse their Jewish classmates, the Education Department said.
“No child should be taught by his or her teachers to hate their peers. Neither should Jewish children be taught that being Jewish somehow makes them inherently guilty or proponents of hate and violence,” Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey said in a statement. “Discrimination has no place in our schools, and, unlike the previous administration, the Trump administration will not turn a blind eye to antisemitic harassment. [The Office for Civil Rights] will investigate these appalling allegations to ensure the equal treatment of all students.”
According to NAVI, the leading supplier of money and support for the NYC Educators for Palestine’s initiatives is a little-known nonprofit titled “Rethinking Schools,” which describes its mission as “strengthening public education through social justice teaching and education activism.”
Rethinking Schools in turn is a beneficiary of the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers union in the country, and the Lannan Foundation — a benefactor of Mohammed El-Kurd, an anti-Zionist activist who has trafficked in antisemitic tropes, demonized Zionism, and falsely accused Israelis of eating Palestinians’ organs. The Schwab Charitable Fund, founded by investment banker Charles Schwab in 1999, has also donated some $78,000 to Rethinking Schools, according to NAVI.
In an exclusive interview with The Algemeiner, NAVI chief strategy officer Josh Weiner said that NYC Educators for Palestine’s activities clearly violate civil rights laws even as they transgress professional ethics.
“First off, they’re actively advertising and speaking at these events and sharing their status as New York City public school teachers to attract attendance, which is misleading for suggesting that they are sponsored by the Department of Education or New York City,” he explained, noting that the group will hold at least six more events before the end of the academic year. “Essentially what they’re doing is training students to be hostile toward fellow students based on their identity as Jews as Israelis. That likely creates a hostile environment at school and limits their access to an equal education.”
The federal government’s intervention in the matter is “long overdue,” Yael Lerman, executive director of StandWithUs Saidoff Law, a legal advocacy group based in California, told The Algemeiner in a statement.
“Jewish and Israeli students are afforded the same protections as every other child under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act,” Lerman said. “Schools are not free for qll political activism — especially when that activism creates a hostile environment for students based on their identity. When educators blur the line between instruction and indoctrination, and when repeated warnings from parents and advocacy groups go unaddressed, federal intervention becomes necessary. This case matters not just for New York City but for school systems across the country.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Social Justice Academy in California Tormented Jewish Student After Oct. 7 Attack, New Lawsuit Says
Illustrative: High school students participating in anti-Israel demonstration on Jan 26. 2024: Photo: Michael Ho Wai Lee / SOPA Images via Reuters Connect
Another California public school district has been accused of allowing antisemitic discrimination and harassment in a disturbing new civil lawsuit filed by The Deborah Project, a legal advocacy group that has contested a slew of similar cases across the state.
The victim in the case is Eden Horowitz, a female Jewish student from Alameda County who says the San Leandro Unified School District (SLUSD) stood down while students and instructors at the Social Justice Academy of San Leandro High School tormented her for nearly three years.
“This case exemplifies a disturbing trend: schools that champion social justice while turning a blind eye to antisemitism,” Jerome Marcus of The Deborah Project said in a statement announcing the action. “We are holding these institutions accountable to their own shared values.”
The complaint that says that, on paper, Horowitz should have fit in at the Social Justice Academy, which says that its mission is to uplift minority students by teaching them to oppose “power oppression, capitalism, white supremacy, imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia … and transphobia.” In addition to being Jewish, she is a multiracial American of Brazilian, African American, Native American, and Eastern European heritage — an archetype of the kind of student sought by progressive institutions across the US.
However, the complaint alleges that Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel caused students and faculty to cancel out everything that once merited Horowitz’s being embraced by the SJA community. Overnight, her “intersectional” racial identity became second to the fact that she is Jewish, and her lawyers say that attending the Social Justice Academy became a daily tribulation.
One teacher, Erica Viray Santos, led the movement against her, the complaint charges. In class, Santos made a show of accusing Israel of “genocide” and proclaimed that she would not teach key units on the Holocaust. Allegedly, Santos also publicly paraded her contempt for Horowitz, denouncing her in arguments with the school’s principal that she initiated within earshot of the class. Meanwhile, her classmates began calling her a “Zionist” and a “racist,” according to the lawsuit.
The profusion of anti-Jewish sentiment fused with near manic obsession over the Middle East conflict to inspire criminality, the complaint continues. As the SJA community fulminated over Horowitz’s refusal to accept their views, someone allegedly graffitied antisemitic messages alluding to the Holocaust and other classic antisemitic tropes in a school bathroom. Having already refused to acknowledge the situation’s rising severity despite receiving a stack of complaints related to it, SLUSD officials responded to the hate crime with more indifference, according to the suit. District officials saw to the graffiti’s erasure, delayed condemning it, and later dropped its search for the culprit.
Ultimately, the district allegedly found cause to punish the Jewish victim. While her bullies walked free, the Social Justice Academy “expelled” her from every initiative she had joined to foster the better world envisioned in the school’s mission statement. It then, according to the complaint, refused to perform services related to disability accommodations for the student to sabotage her academic performance and “isolated” her from everyone else. Topping off what her lawyers describe as “retaliation,” SJA placed her in a probationary program under the threat that she would be expelled from the school if she did not fulfill its cumbersome requirements.
By that point, a doctor had clinically diagnosed Horowitz with depressive and anxiety orders, and she was suffering panic attacks. Her parents’ last recourse for remedying the situation, filing a lawsuit, ultimately prompted SJA to act on its threat to expel her, which it did after an attorney notified a district official of the coming action.
SJA staff allegedly announced the news to the student body as a way of “further humiliating” Horowitz, who then received failing grades in every course.
On Friday, SLUSD declined to comment on the troubling allegations, telling The Algemeiner it “is aware of the lawsuit, and because it is an active legal matter, cannot comment at this time.”
In the meantime, Horowitz’s attorneys say that SLUSD has to be held accountable for “state-sponsored exclusion” and for corrupting progressive values to use them as instruments of racial hatred.
“Faculty didn’t just ignore the antisemitic abuse — they fueled it,” said Ryan Weinstein, counsel for The Deborah Project’s partner in the case, Ropes & Gray LLC. “When confronted with the truth, the district didn’t investigate it; it retaliated. We are seeking systemic change to ensure that ‘social justice’ is never again used as a shield for discrimination against a Jewish student — or any student.”
All of California is under scrutiny over K-12 antisemitism, as The Algemeiner has previously reported.
In February, a consortium of Jewish advocacy groups — the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and StandWithUs — sued the state, alleging that Jews have been called “k—kes,” threatened with gang assaults, and subjected to chants proclaiming “F—k the Jews” at anti-Israel demonstrations promoted by faculty.
In one highly disturbing incident described in the legal complaint, fifth graders from the Oakland Unified School District were filmed telling their teacher, “Another major thing that I’ve learned is that the Jews, the people who took over, basically just stole the Palestinians’ land” and “one thing that’s really surprising to me, and that appeals to me is that the US is helping the Jews.” In another incident, the Oakland Education Association created a curriculum in which the intifada — two prolonged periods of terrorism in which Palestinians murdered Israeli civilians — was taught to third graders as a nursery rhyme.
“Jews consistently are being targeted with hostility because of who they are, including in California and particularly in K-12 public schools. This lawsuit seeks to remedy that,” StandWithUs chief executive officer Roz Rothstein said in February. “It is imperative that California K-12 schools not be co-opted by those seeking to indoctrinate students into antisemitic hate. However, Jewish students and parents indicate that this is precisely what is happening in California. Shockingly, those tasked with enforcing non-discrimination laws in our schools have failed to intervene effectively to put a stop to this growing problem.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.