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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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Quotation Marks That Silence Iran
Traces of an Iranian missile attack in Tehran’s sky, amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, April 3, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
There are times when journalism errs not in what it states — but in how it chooses to frame the issue. Quotation marks, the ultimate symbol of fidelity to another’s words, can also become instruments of distortion when stripped of the conditions in which those voices exist: fear, coercion, and imposed silence.
Recently, the British newspaper The Guardian — one of the most influential media outlets in the world — published the following statement from a man in Tehran: “Nothing good can come of this, since obviously the US and Israel don’t give a damn about the Iranian people.”
Presented in quotation marks, the phrase acquires an air of legitimacy. But what is not in quotation marks is precisely what matters most: who can speak freely within Iran.
The statement appeared in an article whose title was, in itself, a warning: “Iran calls on young people to form human chains around power plants as Trump deadline looms.”
The article described an official call for young people to surround power plants as a deadline set by the United States approached, under threat of attack. This was not a marginal detail, but the very core of the report: civilians being summoned to physically occupy potential targets — a practice that, by deliberately exposing the population to risk, violates not only international law, but any basic notion of humanity.
The coverage noted that attacks on civilian infrastructure can constitute war crimes, a correct — but incomplete — statement. It omitted the fact that the use of civilians as human shields, or the deliberate placement of populations in the line of fire, is equally a grave violation of international humanitarian law. This is not an isolated practice: the Iranian regime and its proxies have repeatedly relied on the exposure — and, ultimately, the sacrifice — of civilians as a method of warfare, both in defense and in attack. In its most literal sense, this is terrorism.
The question, then, is not only what this man said, but under what conditions he could have said anything different.
The reality is unequivocal. Estimates from independent organizations indicate that the death toll from the 2026 protests in Iran may have reached as high as 43,000 — people killed for daring to challenge the regime. This is part of a systematic policy of repression.
The executions of young protesters continue, often under charges such as “war against God” — a vague formulation that, in practice, turns dissent into a capital crime. In Iran, disagreement is not merely dangerous. It is, daily, a death sentence.
This pattern is neither new nor incidental. For years, the Iranian regime has exercised strict controls over information, suppressing dissent not only through force, but through fear that shapes what can be said — and what must remain unsaid.
Journalists operate under severe restrictions, and ordinary citizens face imprisonment or worse for statements deemed disloyal. In such an environment, even seemingly spontaneous public opinion becomes inseparable from the boundaries imposed by the state. What is presented to the outside world as a civilian voice may, in reality, be a reflection of survival.
This dynamic is further compounded by the regime’s broader strategy, often mirrored by its regional proxies, of embedding military objectives within civilian spaces. The result is a systematic blurring of lines between combatant and non-combatant — one that not only endangers lives, but also distorts how those lives are represented in global narratives. In Iran, what is said cannot be taken at face value—nor should it be presented as such.
So is it legitimate to treat a statement gathered under a system that punishes dissent with death as an authentic expression of public opinion? Or are we, however unintentionally, amplifying the narrative of a regime that controls words?
When the international press publishes quotes without acknowledging the climate of coercion in which they are spoken, it risks becoming a vehicle for propaganda.
Quotation marks are not neutral. They carry the weight of what can be said — and of everything that has been silenced.
In authoritarian regimes, the question is not only whether we are listening — but what, exactly, we are being allowed to hear. By ignoring context, are we helping create the conditions for Iranians to one day speak freely — or are we helping silence them for good?
Nira Broner Worcman is a Brazilian journalist, CEO of Art Presse Communications, and author of A Sisyphean Task (translated from the Brazilian edition, Enxugando Gelo), on media coverage of the war between Israel and terrorist groups. She was a Knight Science Fellow at MIT and earned her master’s degree at NYU’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program.
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The Pakistan Gambit: Why Islamabad’s Mediation Should Worry Israel
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif meet in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Sept. 17, 2025. Photo: Saudi Press Agency/Handout via REUTERS
The two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran has been widely celebrated as a triumph of Pakistani diplomacy. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has received effusive international praise, and Islamabad has positioned itself as the indispensable broker of a deal that pulled the region back from the edge of catastrophic escalation.
The congratulations, however, are premature. For Israel and for American policymakers thinking seriously about long-term regional security, the architecture of this ceasefire and the identity of its architect should raise as many questions as the ceasefire itself.
Let’s start with what Pakistan actually is in this equation.
Islamabad is not a neutral party in the conventional sense. It shares a long border, and deep cultural and religious ties with Iran. It represents Iranian diplomatic interests in Washington, where Tehran maintains no embassy. It is home to the world’s second-largest Shia Muslim population. It has simultaneously cultivated a strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia and maintains a close alliance with China, which is Iran’s largest trading partner — and which, according to reporting, helped bring Tehran to the negotiating table.
Pakistan’s Foreign Minister coordinated with counterparts from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt before flying to Beijing for further consultations. This is not the profile of a disinterested mediator. It is the profile of a state managing an extraordinarily complex set of overlapping interests, some of which are structurally misaligned with the security requirements of the United States and Israel.
Field Marshal Asim Munir’s personal rapport with Donald Trump is real, and it clearly mattered in the final hours before the deadline. But personal rapport is not a substitute for strategic alignment. The same Pakistani military establishment that built this relationship with the Trump White House has also spent decades maintaining ties with actors whose interests are fundamentally hostile to the American-led regional order.
Pakistan does not formally recognize Israel. It has never been part of the Abraham Accords architecture. It has no stake in ensuring that any final agreement with Iran leaves the Jewish State with an enhanced (or acceptable) security environment. Its interest is in ending a war that was disrupting its oil imports, threatening regional stability on its doorstep, and straining an economy already under severe stress. Those are legitimate national interests, but they are Pakistan’s interests, not Israel’s or America’s.
The contradiction at the heart of this ceasefire emerged almost immediately. Sharif declared publicly that the truce covered the conflict everywhere, explicitly including Lebanon. Netanyahu’s office issued a correction within hours, stating clearly that the ceasefire does not extend to Lebanon, where Israel continues operations against Iranian-backed Hezbollah. That is not a minor discrepancy in diplomatic language. It reflects a fundamental divergence in what the parties believe they agreed to.
Iran and Pakistan have an interest in framing the ceasefire as broadly as possible, foreclosing Israeli military options across every front simultaneously. Israel has an interest in preserving its freedom of action in Lebanon, which remains a live theater of operations with direct implications for its northern security. The fact that the broker of this deal publicly endorsed the Iranian and Pakistani interpretation, rather than the Israeli one, tells you something important about where Islamabad’s equities actually lie.
Then there is the deeper problem of what Iran brought to the table. The framework Tehran submitted includes demands for the lifting of all sanctions, release of frozen assets, American military withdrawal from regional bases, war reparations, and explicit recognition of Iran’s right to nuclear enrichment. This is not the negotiating position of a country that has been strategically defeated. It is a maximalist agenda that, if accepted in whole or in part, would leave Iran in a stronger regional position than it occupied before the war began.
The Iranian leadership has been explicit internally that it views the ceasefire as a validation of its wartime objectives. That self-assessment should be taken seriously. Regimes that believe they have won tend to negotiate accordingly.
The Islamabad talks will be shaped by this opening dynamic. The United States enters those negotiations having accepted Iran’s 10-point proposal as a workable basis for discussion, under time pressure, brokered by a state with deep ties to Tehran and no relationship with Israel. The agenda will be set by the parties who designed the framework. Iran’s nuclear file, its ballistic missile program, and its proxy network across the Levant will all be subject to negotiation in an environment that is structurally tilted toward Iranian preferences.
Israel’s task in the coming two weeks is to ensure that Washington understands the distinction between ending a war and ending a threat. A ceasefire that reopens the Strait of Hormuz while leaving Iran’s centrifuges operational is not a security achievement. It is a commercial arrangement with an existential footnote. A final agreement that includes American military retrenchment from the region under Iranian pressure is not stability. It is the precondition for the next conflict, fought under worse conditions.
Pakistan may have earned its diplomatic moment. But the morning and days after a ceasefire is when the real negotiation begins, and Israel cannot afford to let Islamabad write the terms.
Amine Ayoub, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is a policy analyst and writer based in Morocco. Follow him on X: @amineayoubx
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How South Africa Embraced Iran — and Isolated Its Own People
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in Chatsworth, South Africa, May 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Rogan Ward
It’s sometimes tough to be a proud South African. Not because of the place or her people, but because the African National Congress (ANC), the political party that leads our current “government of national unity” and which was once the party of Nelson Mandela, has become an abject embarrassment — and destroyed the ideals it was founded on.
On the domestic front, they have led the country into ruin, as massive levels of governmental incompetence and corruption have led to literally crumbling infrastructure, ruinous public institutions, massive wealth inequality, and one of the highest violent crime rates in the world.
And yet, however disgraceful the ANC has been in local matters, they’re even worse in foreign policy, where the government has aligned itself with the absolute worst, most despotic regimes on the planet. But more than cozying up to Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China, it’s the ANC’s close relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran (and its proxies) that is the darkest stain on its increasingly tarnished reputation.
The ANC and the Islamic Republic: Brothers in Arms
The ANC and the Islamic Republic have over the years built a relationship that is almost romantic in its intensity and faithfulness. Never has the ANC had a bad word to say about the regime, and never has the regime failed to correspond in kind. Though, of course, the ANC’s loyalty is not entirely freely given reports that it clearly enjoys some financial support from the Islamic Republic.
Either way, whether out of misplaced loyalty to their “fellow revolutionaries” or mercenary self-interest, the ANC has stood by the Islamic Republic through thick and thin; through its nuclear ambitions, its persecution of religious minorities, and its mass murder of tens of thousands of innocent protesters.
The South African government was one of the few around the world to mourn the death of Ali Khamenei — and even as it has effectively cut diplomatic ties with Israel, even refusing the offer of Israeli NGOs to help solve the country’s water problems and to help fix our decrepit national health services, it proudly hosts all sorts of senior Iranian regime officials and maintains ever close ties to the Iranian embassy here.
Unsurprisingly, the ANC’s years-long relationship with the Islamic Republic intensified almost exponentially in the immediate aftermath of October 7, 2023. South Africa and the ANC immediately shifted the focus from the Israeli victims, to Palestinians who it said were experiencing “genocide,” “war crimes,” and “apartheid” before Israel’s defensive war even started.
Aside from taking Israel to international court, the ANC supported all of the attacks taken by Iran and its proxies against Israel. And then came the current war between Iran and the combined forces of the United States and Israel, and things took a bit of a turn once again.
Of Moral Bankruptcy and Terrible Alliances
To those of us paying attention, it’s been all but impossible to miss how different the ANC’s role has been in this war. The Islamic Republic clearly hasn’t used the ANC to constantly legitimize its cause or to propagate its propaganda in the way it did during the Gaza war. It doesn’t need to.
The ANC has already played its role perfectly in turning Israel into the ultimate aggressor on the world stage, and with President Trump’s historically low popularity both at home and abroad, the Islamic Republic may have already won what may be the most crucial battle for its survival: the war over public opinion.
And yet, even as the ANC tries to walk a fine line in not alienating Washington completely and has tried to present itself as a neutral party in the war — even offering to mediate talks between the Islamic Republic and the US — its allegiances remain as clear as ever.
Though it’s hardly the first liberal-democratic government to chafe with the Trump administration, the ANC-captured Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) has seemingly done everything in its power to antagonize Trump. Don’t get me wrong, Trump being Trump, a lot of this is his fault, especially with his insistence on there being a “white genocide” happening in South Africa and being decidedly undiplomatic in his thoughts on the ANC. But he’s also right about certain things. There really is no “white genocide” — as President Ramaphosa pointed out correctly, it’s not a question of race but of a high crime rate that targets everyone equally (this is somehow good news?) — but Trump is hardly imagining the ANC’s incompetence or its troubling tight relationships with the enemies of the free world.
The simple, inescapable truth is that the ANC is far more tolerant of tyrants and Islamist theocracies than it is of its fellow liberal-democracies.
Regardless of what you think of the current war in Iran, the ANC’s behavior towards the Islamic Republic since it massacred its own citizens by the tens of thousands over just a couple of days, has been nothing less than disgraceful.
It has also created an environment in South Africa where institutions fall directly in line with its terrible foreign policy. The University of Pretoria, for example, has stoked all kinds of controversy for its decision to “platform” the Islamic Republic’s ambassador to South Africa, while the University of Cape Town has decided to bestow an honorary doctorate on Imtiaz Sooliman, the “philanthropist” and founder of Gift of the Givers, known for his antisemitic statements — and especially his concerning ties to various radical Islamist groups.
A Million Wrongs Make a Right?
There is, however, a silver lining or two in all of this. The ANC is such an unmitigated train wreck at this point that it might be good that it is currently standing so fully on the wrong side of history. It has shown itself to be so wildly incompetent, corrupt, and morally twisted that it would almost be worse if it stood with America and Israel in all of this.
More hopefully, South Africa itself may benefit most from the ANC’s dreadful alliances, ironically. Ten years ago, the thought of the ANC losing power in the country was all but unthinkable — but given what’s happened over the past decade, that might be changing.
What is truly miraculous about all this, though, is that despite everything, South Africa genuinely remains a great place to be a Jew. Yes, there is still some antisemitism and like all Diaspora communities we still need armed security at our shuls, schools, and communal events, but despite the ANC’s best efforts to ingratiate itself to our very worst enemies, there is far less antisemitism here than in most countries and, at least within broadly Jewish and/or cosmopolitan areas, seldom any real need to hide our Jewishness.
And it is of the greatest of all possible ironies that we largely have the ANC to thank for this. At least the version of it that was around in 1994 — that crafted such an inclusive constitution and did its very best to engender a society where bigotry of any sort is entirely unacceptable. Except, of course, to sing “Kill the Boer.”