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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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Feds investigating antisemitism allegations at American Psychological Association
(JTA) — The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is opening an antisemitism investigation into the American Psychological Association, the largest professional organization for mental health professionals, the agency announced Wednesday.
The investigation stems from several complaints by Jewish and Israeli psychologists alleging that the association has promoted or failed to discipline anti-Israel activism among some of its affinity groups. The complaints also allege that the APA has encouraged “decolonizing therapy” methods that attack Zionism.
These allegations are part of a sweeping complaint filed in August by the legal group Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which has frequently filed similar antisemitism complaints against educational institutions that it says are in violation of federal anti-discrimination rules. This is the center’s first complaint against a healthcare organization to result in a federal investigation.
“We want to see the APA brought into compliance with federal civil rights laws,” Rebecca Harris, litigation staff attorney at the Brandeis Center, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We want the APA to stop promoting discriminatory and harmful psychology practices.”
In its August letter to HHS, the Brandeis Center accuses the APA of being “one of the worst purveyors of anti-Semitism and extremist ideology in healthcare.” It adds, “HHS should not fund groups that use taxpayer dollars to engage in anti-Semitic and discriminatory behavior.”
A representative for the APA did not immediately return a request for comment. In response to recent Congressional inquiries, from both Republicans and Democrats, into similar allegations of antisemitism at the organization, the APA has stated, “Some of our Jewish members and community organizations have voiced concerns about antisemitism within the broader psychology field and within APA’s divisions. We have taken and continue to take those concerns seriously.”
Jewish mental health professionals have been raising concerns about antisemitism and growing anti-Israel sentiment within the profession since Oct. 7, 2023, including in a letter signed by more than 3,500 mental health professionals last year. That letter, referenced in the Brandeis Center complaint, criticizes the APA for failing to discipline a former division president, Lara Sheehi, for various incendiary comments about Zionism.
In another prominent incident, the psychiatrist and bestselling author Bessel van der Kolk faced discipline and apologized for comments that Jewish attendees at a seminar of his deemed antisemitic. In June 2025, Democratic New York Rep. Ritchie Torres urged the APA to address antisemitism in its ranks, prompting the organization to commit to new listening sessions and “strengthening discourse standards.”
Under the Trump administration, HHS has also mounted several antisemitism investigations at medical schools, pulling millions of dollars in federal funding for medical research over the issue.
The APA’s alleged encouragement of “decolonizing therapy,” Harris said, is harmful to Jews and Israelis. “It’s essentially a pathologizing of Zionism and Jewish identity,” she said. (A past president of the organization has advocated for decolonial psychology, and the organization has offered webinars and other training modules based around decolonizing trauma healing.)
The center also alleges that the APA has put up roadblocks to allowing an official Jewish affinity group to form, while excusing inflammatory language about Zionism from an Arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern and North African affinity group.
The news of the APA’s federal antisemitism investigation came as the Trump administration announced it would be moving the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which handles antisemitism complaints, to the Department of Justice.
The move, being done as part of a larger effort to dismantle the education department, drew praise from Brandeis Center chair Kenneth Marcus, himself a former OCR official under the first Trump administration. It also drew criticism from the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and other Jewish groups that said the move to the justice department would make it harder for students alleging discrimination to file complaints.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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In Britain, a Jewish Culture Month aims to move the conversation beyond Oct. 7
(JTA) — In the almost three years since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of Israel, Great Britain has seen “a relentless focus on everything to do with the Jewish community in the public domain, and it’s about antisemitism or Israel,” said Adam Ma’anit, the communications manager for the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
Over the past four weeks, a flurry of performances, lectures and art exhibits has been an opportunity to move past that.
The Board of Deputies, which represents a community of diverse and often competing views under its umbrella, created Jewish Culture Month, a first-of-its-kind series held under the banner of “Less Oy, More Joy.” The month was designed to bolster Jewish communal confidence and to introduce wider audiences to aspects of Jewish life that rarely make headlines.
The month, which wrapped up Tuesday, sought to make clear that British Jewish identity is, and always has been, about far more than conflict. “We’re not defined as a community by pain,” Ma’anit told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’ve got great architects, writers, and musicians as well.”
Those artists were featured in more than 150 events over four weeks across the country at major museums and galleries , including London’s British Museum, Oxford’s Bodlein Library, Bath’s Little Theatre Cinema, Nottinghamshire’s National Holocaust Museum and local synagogues and private homes nationwide.
Among them was The Klezmer Village Band, which introduced Jewish culture to primary schools in Plymouth. “We wanted to bring Jewish culture back into the community,” Plymouth Jewish Community Director Louise Clements said. “This is the first time in many years that something like this has happened here.”
One of the band’s musicians, Ilana Cravitz, also noted after the event that “music is a wordless language. People respond from inside — they stop thinking, they feel. And we really saw that today.”
Notables featured throughout the celebrations included British broadcaster and television personality Vanessa Feltz, who spoke at the opening at London’s Freud Museum; comedian Bennett Arron, who performed stand-up routines in Hampstead, London; and acclaimed British artist and vocal Israel critic Anish Kapoor, whose exhibit opening on Tuesday closed out the month.
“Part of Jewish Culture Month is about us celebrating our own culture and being proud, British Jews, and asserting ourselves in an environment where it has been the most challenging to be that very British Jew,” said Ma’anit.
The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust noted another aspect of the festival soon after it kicked off on May 16. “At a time when division and prejudice continue to affect communities across the country, initiatives like Jewish Culture Month can help build understanding and strengthen social cohesion,” it posted social media.
However, some thought it difficult to focus on social cohesion when discussing contemporary British Jewish identity without discussing how that identity dovetails with British Jews’ relationship with Israel.
It’s something that Jewish Renaissance, the online magazine of Jewish culture, raised ahead of the opening. Freelance writer and former Jewish Quarterly editor Matthew Reisz wrote that while there was definitely diversity in the program, “We seem unlikely to hear much about the deep divisions within the community, not least in relation to Israel/Palestine, or the crucial, though often tense dialogue with other minority communities on both shared and contentious issues.”
Ma’anit insisted that the choice was a deliberate one. “It’s not a rejection of Zionism or distancing ourselves from Israel,” he said. “Quite the opposite. The board’s leadership remains openly supportive of Israel and many of the figures involved in the project have deep personal and family ties to the country.”
Israeli-born Ma’anit is one of those figures. He is the cousin of the Idan family of Nachal Oz, a kibbutz close by the border with Gaza. Eighteen-year-old Maayan Idan was shot and killed by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7 while trying to help her father, Tsachi, hold their safe room door closed. The entire event was livestreamed by the terrorists. Tsachi was abducted into Gaza, where it was believed he was still alive as the war on Gaza raged. It was discovered only later that he had been murdered, with his body finally returned in the hostage deal in February 2025.
Ma’anit, who spent those years lobbying for the hostages’ return, appearing on news programs and organizing hostage vigils in his hometown of Brighton, has been forced to meld the personal with the professional when it comes to the post-Oct. 7 era.
It’s why, he said, Jewish Culture Month is about creating space for aspects of Jewish identity that have been overshadowed post Oct. 7. “The argument is not that Israel is unimportant,” he said, “it’s that Jewish life cannot be reduced to Israel alone.”
Yet even without a focus on Israel and Zionism, the month did not pass without the conflict in the Middle East affecting the program. In May, a culture month lecture titled “Ancient Israel and Judah” at the British Museum had to be postponed, the museum said, because of “security concerns” over potential “disruptions” by protesters who had obtained tickets. The rescheduled event, held June 11, was the best-attended of the entire series, with around 4,000 people joining in person and online.
Ma’anit called the incident “overblown. It was just procedural,” he said. “People fill in the blanks and then it gets out of control.”
However, the speed with which the controversy escalated and elicited angry reactions from many in the community only served to highlight how questions about Jewish visibility and any event with “Israel” in the name — even a reference to thousands of years ago — have become highly charged in the last three years.
“It just shows how on edge the community is,” Ma’anit said.
That has intensified the need for something like Jewish Culture Month in the eyes of many British Jews. Steph Thwaites, head of a group dedicated to helping Jewish publishing professionals navigate an increasingly hostile publishing industry, said after a Jewish Culture Month event on the topic that the professionals felt “a sense of community and a source of comfort,” as well as a space to “combat anti-Jewish racism in publishing and to support Jewish creatives.”
Ultimately, as UK Communities Secretary Steve Reed put it in his speech at the launch of the festivities, Jewish Culture Month “is a time to celebrate Britain’s Jewish community and its contribution to our shared story. It’s a time for coming together. It’s a time for friendship. Jewish experience cannot just be about defending against fear; it also has to be an expression of hope and joy and freedom.”
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This Jewish activist was arrested and deported for her book ‘Lesbian Love.’ 100 years later, will NYC apologize?
In 1926, New York City police arrested Eve Adams, a Polish-Jewish immigrant who ran a lesbian bar in Greenwich Village, for the crime of being gay.
The formal charges were more euphemistic. Officially, Adams was charged with disorderly conduct — that is, flirting with an undercover police officer who had entrapped her, and obscenity, for writing and possessing the book Lesbian Love.
The following year, the U.S. government deported Adams to Poland, in what was effectively a death sentence: 16 years later, Adams would be murdered at Auschwitz.
Now, a century after Adam’s arrest, Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal — the first openly gay person to hold the elected position — is urging New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to formally recognize the city’s role in Adams’ persecution.
He sent a letter to Mamdani requesting that the city issue a formal declaration acknowledging Adams’ conviction in 1926 “was unjust and rooted in discriminatory law enforcement and affirming that New York City failed her as a pioneer of LGBTQ+ life, as an immigrant, and as a Jewish woman who was ultimately deported to her death.”
“Adams’s story is among the most unjust in our city’s history,” the letter reads. “One hundred years after her arrest, we have the obligation and the opportunity to say plainly that she deserved better.”
In a statement to the Forward, the Mayor’s office said they are reviewing the request.
“The Mamdani Administration is deeply committed to uplifting the stories of New Yorkers that have gone unheard throughout history,” deputy press secretary Sam Raskin said.
A pioneer
Born with the name Chawa Zloczower in Poland in 1891, Adams immigrated to the United States through Ellis Island at age 20.
In America, she adopted the name Eve Adams — a playful nod to her androgyny, invoking the biblical Adam and Eve — and wore men’s clothing.
“She was a vibrant activist, who was daring. She had an androgynous appearance, which immediately identified her as a lesbian,” said Jonathan Ned Katz, author of The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams. “Wearing pants for women was just unthinkable in the time period.”
Adams soon immersed herself in New York’s anarchist circles, befriending prominent Jewish anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. She worked as a traveling saleswoman for leftist publications including Mother Earth, activities that landed her on the Bureau of Investigation’s watch list during the First Red Scare.
In 1923, Adams published Lesbian Love, a collection of essays about the romantic lives of dozens of women in Greenwich Village. Katz described the book as far ahead of its time.
“The word “lesbian” was not used much. It was like a dirty word at the time, so you didn’t say it out loud,” Katz said. “Here she was, putting it on a book jacket.”
Two years later, Adams opened Eve’s Hangout in Greenwich Village. The underground tearoom became a rare refuge where lesbian women could socialize openly.
But the haven proved short-lived. In 1926, an undercover detective named Margaret Leonard visited Eve’s Hangout, where she met Adams. The following day, the two attended a play in Times Square together. Adams gave Leonard a copy of Lesbian Love — evidence of “obscenity” that prosecutors later used against her — and Leonard alleged Adams made sexual advances toward her during the taxi ride to the theater.
Adams was convicted and spent 18 months in jail before the United States deported her to Poland.
She settled in Paris, where she began a relationship with Jewish cabaret singer Hella Olstein Soldner. In 1943, the two women were arrested and sent to the Drancy internment camp. From there, they were deported to Auschwitz, where both were murdered.
Adams’ legacy
Over the years, Adams has come to be recognized as a Jewish LGBTQ icon. Her life inspired the play The Great Lesbian Love of Eve Adams, and she was the subject of a New York Times obituary published as part of the newspaper’s “Overlooked” series, which chronicles the lives of notable people throughout history whose deaths went unreported.
Hoylman-Sigal said he was inspired to commemorate Adams by the NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project, a nonprofit that documents local queer history, which asked him to send the letter to Mamdani. The Sites Project also offers historic walking tours of the city featuring Adams’ story.
“Their jaws drop when we tell them these stories, standing in front of the building where her tea room was,” said Ken Lustbader, co-founder of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project.
On Wednesday, the centennial of Adams arrest, the Sites Project is hosting a performance and vigil in Adams’ honor at the former site of Eve’s Hangout — today, home to La Lanterna, an Italian cafe and pizzeria.
The site of Eve’s Hangout has also been recognized by the National Park Service as part of a roundup of Greenwich Village landmarks significant to LGBTQ history.
New York City, however, has never formally acknowledged the injustice of Adams’ arrest, conviction and deportation.
A posthumous apology would be unusual, though not without precedent: In 2019, the NYPD formally apologized for its 1969 raid on the Stonewall Inn, describing the department’s actions as “discriminatory and oppressive.”
“I would love to see the mayor do it, but we could have one from the police department — an apology for sort of framing her,” Katz said. “They sent in a plainclothes policewoman to entrap her, and so that was really beyond a democratic process.”
The NYPD did not respond to the Forward‘s request for comment.
Whether or not the city issues an official acknowledgement, Hoylman-Sigal said he hopes the campaign will help keep Adams’ story alive.
“It’s an extremely poignant story, sorrowful, outrageous, sad — and one that most people don’t know about,” he said. “So I thought bringing attention to it was a righteous cause.”
Jacob Kornbluh contributed reporting.
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