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
250 years of American Jewish life is a miracle. Don’t take it for granted.
When I moved from Belgium to the United States for graduate school in the early 2000s, international-student orientation warned me about three areas in which I would experience culture shock: doctors, dating, and food. They were right: I am still looking for good chocolate. But what nobody mentioned was that culture shock can also work in the other direction: you can encounter something so different in a good way that it, too, takes time to understand. For me, that was American Jewish life.
The Judaism I had grown up with in Belgium was timid and a little subdued; it felt to me as though it did not quite dare to put down roots or imagine itself as fully Belgian. American Judaism bewildered me at first by its sheer pluralism: so many denominations, and within them so many people experimenting with what it meant to be and do Jewish in this country and in this world.
Even more surprising was its creativity — the music, the intellectual life, the social activism, the constant invention of new institutions, rituals and communities. It was also loud and argumentative. American Jews tangled about Judaism, politics, Zionism and one another. The old story about two Jews having three opinions was not a joke here but a reality.
I loved it. Not because I agreed with all of it — I certainly did not — but because even the arguing seemed to me evidence that American Jews did not feel they had to hide or be discreet, not even about their disagreements.
Of course, Jewish success in the United States did not mean that America offered the same possibilities to everyone. Jewish integration took place in a country whose deepest structures of exclusion targeted Black Americans. That inequality is part of the American Jewish story and complicates any account of its success.Nor was the American Jewish experience free of prejudice: American Jews encountered social ostracism, quotas in higher education, exclusion from neighborhoods and country clubs, and violence.
And yet, over 250 years, Jews in the United States became deeply woven into the political, cultural and civic life of the country. How the encounter between Jewish traditions brought from many parts of the world and the particular freedoms, tensions and possibilities of American life produced a distinctively American form of Judaism is a question that has stayed with me ever since, and America’s 250th anniversary seems like a good moment to return to it.
I think part of the answer lies in the American idea of hyphenated identities. In a country of immigrants from many parts of the world, the hyphen suggested a social architecture, albeit imperfect, that allowed for multiple communities to coexist within a larger whole. By contrast the Europe in which I grew up remained more attached to myths of national homogeneity that made Jewish belonging harder.
But today, across the political spectrum, people are asking what America as an idea and a national community stands for. Historically, such moments have often made Jews a test case for the limits of inclusion. To those who imagine the nation as a homogenous family, Jews are strangers; to those who imagine it as a universal community, Jews often seem too particularistic.
Amid rising antisemitism, the aftermath of Oct. 7, turmoil on university campuses and intense political polarization, it is not surprising then that many American Jews are feeling anxious about the future. The pessimists believe something fundamental is broken and wonder whether it is time to keep a packed suitcase ready. The optimists insist that America remains different, even exceptional, and that American institutions and laws are strong. This too shall pass, they say.
As a historian, I am skeptical of both positions. The past is full of moments that look inevitable in retrospect because, once we know what happened, it becomes harder to imagine other outcomes. But in the moment, multiple futures are always possible. History cannot tell us which one will become ours, but it can broaden the range of possibilities we are able to see.
That is one reason I created a new public course at Brandeis this fall, America and Its Jews at 250. I wanted to see what becomes visible when the questions troubling American Jews today are placed against that much longer historical horizon. Over the course of the semester, 28 scholars and public thinkers will examine the relationship between Jews and America from the colonial period to the present. At a moment when so much attention is understandably focused on Israel, I also wanted us to look more closely at the American Jewish experience and what Jews built here.
Doing this at Brandeis is especially meaningful. Many of America’s oldest and most influential universities grew out of Christian religious communities. Brandeis represented something different: the possibility that a university could be rooted in American Jewish life while being as intellectually ambitious and universal as any of them. A course about America and its Jews belongs in that tradition because these are not two histories that happened in parallel; they are intertwined.
Time has cured most of my culture shock, but I have not forgotten the surprise I felt 26 years ago at the vibrancy and pluralism of American Jewish life. Much of our discussions, in this anniversary year, focus on the country’s uneven path toward more justice and equality, and rightly so. But that should not obscure the immense creativity that this messy and contested American experiment made possible. American Jews embraced its possibilities with a vitality that produced forms of Judaism few of their forebears would have recognized, yet that remain deeply connected to what came before. That dynamism also produced disagreements and fragmentation, and anxiety about what still holds Jews together.
Culture and creativity depend on the soil in which they develop. Protecting American jewish life therefore means not only to fight for Jews and Judaism, but also for the pluralistic republic that allowed them to flourish. Perhaps one day historians will give this entanglement of Judaism and America a name. But for now it remains unnamed because it is still being made, and because its future, I hope, is still in our hands.
The post 250 years of American Jewish life is a miracle. Don’t take it for granted. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
El-Sayed defends opposing Israel aid as he woos Jewish voters
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed made opposition to U.S. military aid to Israel a defining issue of his campaign in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. On Sunday, as the party’s nominee, El-Sayed explained why he supported sending American military aid to Ukraine in its war against Russia but opposes sending aid to Israel as it fights Hamas and other armed groups in the region.
“In Ukraine, you’re talking about attacks from a leader of a neighboring sovereign country, who clearly violated international law in attempting to breach the sovereignty of the Ukrainian public,” El-Sayed said in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press. “That is conditional on that circumstance.”
As for Israel, he argued, the United States has “been offering unconditional foreign military aid to Israel independent of the circumstances for years and years and years.”
The distinction comes as El-Sayed tries to draw a clearer line around his position on Israel aid as he moves into the general election, following a narrow victory over Rep. Haley Stevens, who was backed by AIPAC and other pro-Israel Jewish groups.
Since his primary win, El-Sayed said in media appearances that his opposition to unconditional military aid — including funding to the Iron Dome defense system — goes beyond Israel. He pointed to Egypt, where his parents were born, as well as to Saudi Arabia and Jordan, saying those U.S. allies should not receive unconditional American military support either.
“It’s not just Israel,” El-Sayed said, adding, “It’s about the conditions.”
When pressed on whether there was any scenario in which he would support military aid to Israel, El-Sayed said he could consider supporting it if Israelis and Palestinians reached an agreement that guaranteed, as he described it, the “Palestinian people and Jewish Israeli people” equal rights to “peace, dignity, and self-determination.” During the primary, El-Sayed stopped short of explicitly backing a two-state solution.
The Jewish voter test
El-Sayed’s position on Israel is becoming a test of whether he can unite Democrats for the general election in one of the nation’s most important swing states. Many Jewish Democrats remain uneasy with his rhetoric on Israel — including his calling Israel “bloodthirsty” — even as the party needs their support to defeat Republican Mike Rogers and improve its chances of winning back the Senate.
The Jewish Democratic Council of America, which backed Stevens and said its volunteers made nearly 100,000 calls on her behalf, said that the “razor-thin margin” in El-Sayed’s victory is evidence that pro-Israel Democrats remain an important electorate within the party.
Halie Soifer, JDCA’s chief executive and a Michigan native, said in a Substack post Friday that Jewish Democrats are standing “on a political fault line” after El-Sayed’s victory. “Jewish voters’ concern with El-Sayed and other far-left candidates is rooted in concern for our safety and security given rising antisemitism and antisemitic violence, including when Jews are blamed for the actions of Israel,” she wrote.
Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in Michigan, but they could still prove decisive in a close race. Michigan has been decided by narrow margins in recent elections: Donald Trump won the state in 2016, Joe Biden flipped it in 2020, and Sen. Elissa Slotkin narrowly won her Senate race in 2024 even as Trump carried the state in the presidential race.
AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, which spent more than $30 million in the primary, is reportedly weighing additional spending in the general election to boost Rogers. It would likely be joined by other groups, including the centrist Democratic groups Third Way and Welcome PAC, as well as the Republican Jewish Coalition.
Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the liberal pro-Israel group J Street — a progressive alternative to AIPAC — urged El-Sayed to take a different approach to the Jewish voters who opposed him. Ben-Ami wrote in a Substack post that El-Sayed should spend significant time listening to Jewish Michiganders and their concerns about vulnerability and antisemitism, while making clear “in words and in actions” that Jews who care deeply about Israel have a place in his coalition.
‘I love and revere Judaism’
In the Sunday interview, El-Sayed sought to reassure Jewish voters who remain skeptical of him.
Asked to respond to President Donald Trump’s comments that El-Sayed “hates” Israel and Jewish people “with a passion that burns in his heart,” El-Sayed said, “I love and revere Judaism and the Jewish people. I believe they’re a light unto the world.”
El-Sayed recalled growing up in Bloomfield Hills, a metro Detroit community with a large Jewish population, and being invited to Passover Seders, synagogues and bar and bat mitzvahs. “I’m really honored for what I learned and got to share with my Jewish sisters and brothers,” he said. “But they are not the same as AIPAC and Israel.”
The candidate also disavowed some remarks by Hasan Piker, the popular pundit and streamer who has been accused of antisemitic rhetoric and who appeared with El-Sayed on the campaign trail. El-Sayed said Piker’s statement that “America deserved 9/11” was “dumb,” though he did not commit to ending campaign appearances with him.
The test in the coming months is whether El-Sayed can win over skeptical Jewish and moderate Democrats without moderating his views on Israel or losing the progressive and pro-Palestinian voters who propelled him to victory.
The post El-Sayed defends opposing Israel aid as he woos Jewish voters appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
The Nakba exhibit and the importance of historical context
By NOAH STRAUSS When I went to the Nakba Exhibit, I was shocked, not by the contents of the exhibit but by its size. The exhibit was tiny in my eyes, and I thought the amount of outcry was excessive for an exhibit that is less than 500 words. It felt like every other day the National Post had an article about the exhibit, criticizing different aspects of it. But then I had a realization: the exhibit was never criticized because it was “too” big, but because of the contents of it. When I was toured by the curator, I actually asked her, “Where is the rest of it?” I was confused because I had been misled by the media to believe the size of the exhibit was massive.
I believe that every human being should be able to live a free life. No human should be bullied for who they are. That is not okay, and to some credit, the Nakba exhibit does cover this. But where my problem now comes into play is the fact that the museum fails to portray the full history surrounding the Nakba.
The museum is publicly funded; our taxpayers’ dollars go there. It is supposed to represent our nation and our beliefs, not take a side on history. The Museum did exactly that. It took a side, and guess what? It caused chaos.
Whenever asked why it does not show the other side of history, the museum would always say something along the lines of: our space is limited, the focus of the exhibit is solely the Nakba, etc. But to me, these are excuses, and I will call that out.
For context, the Nakba was an event that occurred around 1948 after the 1947 UN Partition Plan. The Nakba continued until about 1949. During this time, approximately 750,000 Palestinians were either forced out or left what is now Israel.
The Museum is contributing to concerns surrounding the rise of antisemitism. The Museum has failed to mention that during the same era as the Nakba, hundreds of thousands of Jewish people were displaced from Middle Eastern and North African countries, with many forced to leave because of their religion.
Context matters. Yes, 750,000 Palestinians were displaced, but what happened during the same era also left hundreds of thousands of Jewish people without homes. When a visitor with no historical context walks in to see what the “Jewish” people did to the Palestinians, of course they’re going to blame the Jews. Because it makes me, a Jewish person, look terrible.
In my view, the exhibit contributes to concerns about growing antisemitism by presenting an incomplete historical narrative.
But then, as Jewish people, we need to know when it’s time to move forward. We need to focus on how we can positively portray the Jewish community and show the world who we are, rather than allowing others to define us through a one-sided historical narrative.
Noah Strauss is a 15-year-old Gray Academy student
