Uncategorized
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.
—
The post How Arnold Horween, an unsung Jewish Harvard hero, changed American sports appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Hanukkah After Bondi Beach: We Must Not Retreat
Police officers stand guard following the attack on a Jewish holiday celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia, Dec. 15, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Flavio Brancaleone
The attack at Sydney’s Bondi Beach took place at a public Hanukkah celebration — an openly Jewish gathering marking a holiday meant to symbolize continuity, restraint, and survival. Candles were lit. Families had gathered. Jewish life was visible and unhidden. Violence arrived anyway. That fact matters. This was not random disorder that happened to occur near Jews. It was an assault on Jews gathered publicly as Jews.
For Jewish communities around the world, the message was immediate and chilling: a basic assumption — that peaceful religious celebration in a public space is protected — no longer feels secure.
Bondi Beach was not an aberration. It was a signal that even the most ordinary expressions of Jewish life now take place against a backdrop of heightened risk and weakened moral confidence.
Since October 7, 2023, Jewish communities have been forced to absorb a series of shocks that, taken together, reveal something deeper than a temporary spike in antisemitic incidents.
Jews have watched crowds chant “death to Jews” in major Western cities. We have seen synagogues, schools, and community centers require armed security as a baseline condition of existence. We have watched public officials hesitate, equivocate, or retreat into procedural language when confronted with explicit calls for Jewish death.
In that context, even violence that is not explicitly ideological is experienced differently. Bondi Beach occurred in a world where rage, intimidation, and public disorder have been steadily normalized — and where antisemitism is too often treated as a contextualized grievance rather than a moral emergency. It is no coincidence that Hanukkah celebrations across Europe, North America, and Australia this year are being guarded as potential targets rather than assumed civic fixtures.
For Jews, these are not abstract concerns. They shape daily life in quiet but consequential ways. This Hanukkah, many Jews will decide whether to light publicly or privately, whether to post photos or remain discreet, whether to wear a kippah or tuck it into a pocket, whether to gather openly or behind security checkpoints.
These are not acts of panic. They are acts of realism — born of a recognition that the social consensus protecting Jewish life is weaker than it once was. I have felt this calculation myself, not as fear but as prudence — an awareness that Jewish visibility now requires forethought in ways it did not a decade ago.
Hanukkah is often softened into a generic story about “light in dark times.” But that framing misses its harder truth.
Hanukkah commemorates a moment when Jews confronted a society that had lost its sense of limits — when desecration was tolerated, when power displaced law, and when public authority proved unwilling or unable to defend moral boundaries. The Maccabees did not revolt because they rejected pluralism. They revolted because pluralism had collapsed into coercion.
That distinction matters now.
Across Western democracies, restraint is increasingly treated with suspicion. Rampage violence is explained as inevitable. Public disorder is described as expressive. Antisemitic chants are reframed as political speech. Leaders and institutions speak fluently about process and context, but struggle to say plainly that some acts are beyond the pale.
The result is a dangerous permission structure. Not a conspiracy. Not a single ideology. But a cultural habit of hedging when clarity is required — of explaining rather than condemning, of balancing rather than drawing lines. Violence thrives in that space. So does antisemitism.
Sociologist Émile Durkheim warned that societies depend on shared moral frameworks to restrain individual impulses. When those frameworks weaken, violence becomes expressive rather than exceptional. Rampages become signals — not just of individual breakdown, but of collective uncertainty about what can and should be enforced.
Jews recognize this pattern because history has trained us to. Antisemitism rarely begins with laws or decrees. It begins with atmospheres. With what is tolerated. With what is explained away. With what authorities are reluctant to name because naming it might require action.
The Bondi Beach attack belongs to this broader moment. It targeted a Jewish holiday gathering, but it also reflected a wider failure to defend basic moral boundaries in public life. Violence does not emerge in a vacuum. It feeds on ambiguity — on the sense that enforcement is conditional and outrage selective.
Hanukkah offers a counterpoint to that ambiguity.
The story of the oil is not a story about optimism. It is a story about responsibility. Someone chose to protect what was sacred when it would have been easier to surrender it. Someone insisted that desecration was not normal, that collapse did not deserve accommodation, and that continuity required effort.
That insistence feels increasingly countercultural.
In recent years, Western elites have grown uncomfortable making firm moral judgments. Everything must be contextualized. Everything must be balanced. Everything must be filtered through the language of grievance. But pluralism does not survive without boundaries. And minorities suffer first when those boundaries dissolve.
For Jews, the post-October 7 world has made something painfully clear: condemnation of antisemitism has become conditional. Calls for Jewish death are weighed against political narratives. Jewish fear is treated as inconvenient. Jewish safety is discussed as a variable rather than a nonnegotiable.
Hanukkah rejects that logic entirely.
The holiday is not only about light. It is about continuity — the refusal to disappear quietly when the world becomes less hospitable. It is about maintaining Jewish presence, practice, and confidence even when public space feels uncertain.
Lighting the menorah is not an act of provocation. It is an assertion that Jewish life does not require permission to endure.
Bondi Beach will be remembered as one more moment when Jews understood something before others were ready to say it plainly: a society unwilling to enforce moral limits cannot protect its most vulnerable members. Rampage violence and chants of “death to Jews” are not separate phenomena. They are different expressions of the same failure.
A society that cannot say, without hesitation, that calling for Jewish death is beyond the pale is not morally neutral. It has already chosen sides.
The menorah burns not because darkness recedes on its own, but because someone insists — again and again — that darkness does not get the final word.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Uncategorized
Australia’s ‘Hanukkah Massacre’ Is Worse Than You Think
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaks during a press conference at the Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, June 17, 2024. Photo: Lukas Coch/Pool via REUTERS
Chabad’s “Hanukkah by the Sea” event near Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, turned into a bloody massacre on Sunday: 15 murdered and dozens more injured, as of the latest update.
Far from being an isolated incident, this nightmarish display of terror is only the latest symptom of a dangerous and systematic attack by the Australian government against its own Jewish population.
According to news sources, the terrorists were Sajid and Naveed Akram: a father and son of Pakistani origin who had pledged allegiance to ISIS shortly before carrying out their antisemitic bloodbath.
In one rare bright spot, Ahmed Al Ahmed, an immigrant from Syria, heroically risked his life to disarm one of the terrorists, likely saving many innocent lives in the process. Al Ahmed survived several gunshots and is recovering in hospital.
In the aftermath of this modern day pogrom, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese issued a statement in which he made no mention whatsoever of Jews, antisemitism, Hanukkah, Islamic extremism,terrorism, or ISIS.
Albanese referred to the massacre merely as “shocking” and “distressing,” and said that his thoughts were with “every person affected.”
Within hours, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu utterly excoriated Albanese, accusing him of “pouring fuel on this antisemitic fire,” and noting that he had sent Albanese a letter last August, warning of the very conditions that had brought about this attack, a warning that had gone unheeded.
In tandem with the Israeli Prime Minister’s vigorous public scolding, Albanese held a press conference, in which he finally condemned the Bondi attack as antisemitic.
However, Albanese continued to avoid any mention of Islamic extremism, despite Australian law enforcement having already publicly confirmed that the terrorists had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State terror organization (ISIS), and that they were carrying an ISIS flag in their vehicle.
According to reports, the Mossad had been warning Australia regularly for months about terror plots against the local Jewish community. Local police deny there were specific warnings about this particular attack, but Israeli leaders from all sides of the political spectrum countered that Australia had ignored “countless warning signs.”
Australia’s national failures are reminiscent of the Dutch pogrom of November 2024, in which local Muslim attackers violently hunted Israeli soccer fans through the streets of Amsterdam — after Dutch police ignored urgent warnings from Israeli intelligence.
The conditions for a similar massacre are currently shaping up in New York City, where the incoming mayor responded to a highly threatening antisemitic protest by accusing the local Jewish community of “violations of international law.” (I previously addressed both topics in depth at The Algemeiner).
For the past two years since the October 7 massacre, not only has Australia seen a massive rise in violent antisemitic attacks, but local Jewish leaders have consistently objected to the government’s permissive atmosphere toward attacking Jews, such as failing to apply appropriate penalties and needed protections.
Examples include frequent and enormous marches calling to “Globalize the Intifada” (a phrase that the United States Congress officially recognizes as a call for violence against the Jewish people), public calls to “gas the Jews,” as well as Australia’s recognition of a Palestinian state last September, a move widely regarded in the Arab world as a reward for the October 7 massacre.
Like most countries with free speech protections, Australia also has numerous federal and local laws against incitement, which authorities have routinely failed and refused to enforce in protection of Australia’s Jewish communities.
Prime Minister Albanese has promised to respond to the massacre by tightening Australia’s gun laws. Ironically, Australia already has among the strictest gun control regimes in the entire world. Apparently, gun laws are not enough when a country permits and ignores massive hatred, incitement, antisemitism, ongoing violence, and affiliations with international terror organizations.
Who knew?
Given Australia’s ongoing commitment to a failing “strategy,” its continued protection of Islamist extremists, and its continuing systematic neglect of Jewish safety, it is safe to assume that this is only the beginning of more attacks to come.
Daniel Pomerantz is the CEO of RealityCheck, an organization dedicated to deepening public conversation through robust research studies and public speaking.
Uncategorized
Are We at a Tipping Point? Will Larger Numbers of Jewish Americans Make Aliyah?
New immigrants arrive in Israel in 2019, many coming alone to serve in the nation’s military. Photo: courtesy of Nefesh B’Nefesh.
In The Arc of a Covenant (2022), a comprehensive book about the history of the relationship between the US and Israel, Walter Russell Mead points out that, if not for the persecution and expulsion of Jews from Arab lands to Israel after the 1948 war, Israel might not exist.
At best, it would be a smaller, demographically weaker country, with about one-half the Jewish population that it has today.
Recent attacks and hate marches across the world (from chanting “gas the Jews” in Sydney, which led directly to Bondi, and so many other incidents) have had me wondering if history was going to repeat itself. Will these events result in a new wave of immigration of Jews to the Jewish State, particularly from the US, where the largest number of Jews outside of Israel live?
One particularly notable event was an anti-Israel protest at a New York City synagogue (the Park East Synagogue), which included violent antisemitic threats, like “we need to make them scared.” That the protesters targeted an event by Nefesh B’Nefesh, a non-profit organization that has helped thousands of North American Jews immigrate to Israel, makes it clear that demographics are crucial in the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians.
Statistics indicate that 3.5 million Jews have made Aliyah since 1948, when the Jewish State was established. The vast majority were Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and Soviet pogroms, and those from the Arab/Muslim world, as previously mentioned. Yet, despite the large number of Jews in the US, the number that have immigrated to Israel is quite small — approximately 135,000, less than four percent of the total.
The question is: will the unsettling events targeting Jews across the world be enough to reach a critical threshold, so that large numbers of American Jews decide that enough is enough?
American Jews have done very well in all respects, perhaps better than any other diaspora in the history of the Jewish people. Yet, when it comes to personal safety for Jews, it seems that even America is not an exception.
The new mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, was disappointingly equivocal in his comments about the protests that took place at the Park East Synagogue, saying a house of worship should not promote Nefesh B’Nefesh events. Clearly, he has his own ideas about where Jews should and should not live.
This is not new. In the 1930s, the German antisemitic board game Juden Raus! told Jews to go to Palestine. Today, they are told to go back to Europe.
Israel is the ancestral home of the Jewish people, a home they never abandoned, spiritually or physically. Those Jews who reside in Israel are there by right, not on sufferance. Many made Aliyah for various reasons: religious, ideological, and economic. But the single most important driving force has been antisemitism. Those who seek Israel’s destruction should reflect on the fact that their own hatred has been the catalyst for Israel’s remarkable rebirth.
Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.