A psalm of David: Blessed be the Lord, my Rock, Who teaches my hands to battle and my fingers to fight.
—PSALM 144
In my scheme of things, Slapsie Maxie was a more miraculous Jewish phenomenon by far than Dr. Albert Einstein.
—PHILIP ROTH, THE FACTS: A NOVELIST'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
In the 1920s the most famous Jew in America was not a scientist, entertainer, author, or Supreme Court justice. The most famous Jewish person in America during “The Roaring Twenties” was a world champion boxer named Benny Leonard.1
Not only was Benny Leonard one of the greatest boxers who ever lived, but he was also the first Jewish sports superstar of the mass media age, and the first Jewish-American pop culture icon. He was written about and photographed more than any other Jewish entertainer or artist of his day. But ask a person today if he or she has ever heard of Benny Leonard, and more than likely you will be met with a blank stare.
In the first half of the twentieth century, boxing was an integral part of American culture, rivaling baseball in popularity. Champions and contenders, most of whom came from ethnic minorities, were elevated to hero status in poor urban communities. They were a source of inspiration, pride, and hope to a population struggling to break free of the cycle of poverty and enter the social and economic mainstream. The first four decades of the last century were a Golden Age for the sport of boxing in terms of status, the quantity and quality of talent, media coverage, and attendance figures. It was no less a Golden Age for Jewish boxers.
Over 100 years ago an unprecedented confluence of social and historic events converged to create one of the most unique and colorful chapters of the Jewish immigrant experience in America. Yet, except for a few names, the elite athletes who made it possible are all but forgotten today. This book is intended to remedy that by shining a spotlight on 166 outstanding Jewish boxers of the Golden Age. Who were they? What did they accomplish? What happened to them after they hung up their gloves?
Embedded in each mini-biography is a historical nugget that, when dusted off and polished, reveals a story of ethnic pride, resilience, tragedy, and triumph. When viewed collectively, it is the story of an immigrant people striving to overcome adversity.
No other sport lends itself so perfectly to metaphor. Getting knocked down and picking yourself up to continue the battle can be seen as a metaphor for life’s ups and downs. Despite the hardships they encountered, the tough Jewish boxers of the Golden Age were individuals who kept on punching, never quit, and refused to be counted out.
For nearly half a century many working-class Americans admired qualities they perceived as inherent in the makeup of the professional boxer. A sport that required courage, physical strength, and athletic prowess was seen as a proving ground of sorts, as a test of one’s character. At a time when boxing mattered to society far more than it does today, when it was the most popular sport in America, Jewish people were earning the attention and respect of their fellow citizens in the prize ring. They didn’t need to be doctors, lawyers, accountants, or Nobel Prize winners. Back then being a boxer was more than enough.
In those days there weren’t many choices for a young man seeking fame and fortune as a professional athlete. There were only three major professional sports of any note in America: baseball, boxing, and horse racing. While basketball was a very popular inner-city sport (in which Jewish players excelled), there was no money to be made shooting hoops for a living. Even the best professional players had to supplement their basketball incomes with full-time jobs. There was money in baseball, but it was limited to only 400 major league players (16 teams comprised of 25 players each). From 1900 to 1940, only 52 Jewish athletes played major league baseball.2 Less than half that number played professional football.
The limited participation by Jewish athletes in baseball and football was influenced by the fact that neither was an inner-city sport. They required an outdoor field to practice and money to spend on uniforms and equipment. Both were in short supply in Jewish immigrant neighborhoods. While some city high schools had football teams and a field to practice on, Jewish boys often dropped out of high school to look for work.
On the other hand, boxing gyms required little space and a limited amount of equipment. They could be found in every inner-city neighborhood. Professional boxing was open to anyone who could pass a rudimentary physical examination—and sometimes even that was unnecessary. The opportunity to make quick money drew thousands of young men to the prize ring. As a result, boxing was the first professional sport in which many Jewish Americans participated.
Between 1901 and 1939 there were 29 Jewish world-champion boxers—about 16 percent of the total number of champions. During those years fighters of Irish, Jewish, and Italian descent were the dominant groups within the sport. Irish Americans dominated the sport in the latter half of the 19th century. In the 1890s, 50 percent of the champions and most of the leading contenders were Irish. But over the next two decades a flood of new immigrants inundated the sport, and the number of Irish champions shrank back to 25 percent. The decline was due to both competition from other ethnic groups and improving opportunities for Irish youth. As noted by historian Steven A. Riess, “The ethnic succession in the ring reflected the changing racial and ethnic complexion of the inner city as older ethnic groups who were doing better economically moved out and were replaced by the new urban poor.”3
In the 1920s, 14 of the 66 world champions were Jewish, placing them second behind Italians, who had 19 world champions, but ahead of the Irish, who had 11.4 Back then, winning a title was a rare and venerated accomplishment. Until the rise of numerous quasi-official “sanctioning organizations” in the 1970s, there were never more than 10 weight divisions, and generally only one champion per division. Today there are over 100 world champions spread across 17 weight divisions.
By 1928 Jewish boxers comprised the single largest ethnic group among title contenders in the 10 weight divisions. The majority were ranked in the six lighter-weight classes, from flyweight (112-pound limit) to junior welterweight (140- pound limit). This was no small achievement in an era when competition was brutal and only a fraction of the thousands of professional boxers made it to contender status. To be a contender a fighter had to be ranked among the top 10 challengers in his particular weight division.
Jewish boxers were most numerous from the first decade of the twentieth century until the end of the Great Depression, with the largest percentage active during the 1920s. By the time I became interested in the sport as a child in 1959, they had all but disappeared. But where had they gone? Most of the boxers I saw on the Wednesday and Friday night televised broadcasts had names like Ortiz, Jones, Fernandez, or Griffith. Not a Goldstein, Schwartz, Kaplan, or Cohen among them.
The answer is that social and economic success put an end to the Golden Age of the Jewish boxer. When Jewish people could afford to leave Delancey Street for “Main Street,” they didn’t look back. The sons and grandsons of Jewish boxers became accountants and entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and dentists—anything but boxers. That is called progress. But if they had been born just 50 years earlier, many of them would have been nursing a broken nose and cauliflower ear after battling through a tough preliminary bout.
Upwards of 3,000 Jewish professional boxers were active during the Golden Age, or about 7 to 10 percent of the total number of professionals. Many times that number fought as amateurs but never entered the “punch for pay” professional ranks. Some historians consider the numbers to be much higher, but record-keeping prior to the 1920s was inconsistent, and exact figures are difficult to ascertain. Not counted are many boxers who never went beyond the four- or six-round preliminary stage, or quit after a few pro bouts. Their names seldom made it into the record books.
Currently there are fewer than two dozen Jewish professional boxers (who compete in at least one bout per year) throughout the world.5 Compare that to 1930, when 16 men named Cohen had one or more professional fights in American rings!6 Is it any wonder that boxing has produced more world-class Jewish athletes than any other professional sport?
Another startling fact: From 1900 to 1950 New York’s Madison Square Garden (the sport’s premier arena) presented 866 boxing shows. Two hundred and forty (28 percent) of those shows featured a Jewish boxer in the main event. (See complete list in appendix.) What made this possible was the large number of outstanding Jewish boxers (especially in New York City) and their popularity with Jewish fans who paid to see them fight.
While many individual Jews excelled in science, education, merchandising, public service, the judiciary, and in literature, it was in show business and sports that accomplishments were most visible to the general public. Jewish success in any field of endeavor was cause for celebration, but nowhere was the surge of pride expressed more tangibly—and loudly—than in the arenas and stadiums where the sight of a victorious Hebrew gladiator wearing the six-pointed Star of David on his boxing trunks elicited the cheers of thousands.
In America the “Golden Age” of boxing existed in tandem with the Golden Ages of Hollywood, vaudeville, radio, musical theater, music publishing, comic books, and the garment industry. All were linked by a common thread, in that first- and second-generation American Jews were instrumental in their birth, development, and growth. There was virtually no anti-Semitism in any of these industries because Jews made up the majority of owners and employees. The collective creative genius that built these industries flourished because America was one of the few places that allowed Jewish people the unencumbered freedom and opportunity to open new doors when others were closed to them.
Those with entrepreneurial talent used their skills to take boxing to unprecedented levels of popularity. Outside the ring Jewish promoters, managers, trainers, corner men, gym owners, equipment manufacturers, and magazine publishers quickly ascended to leadership roles within the sport. Jews were involved in every aspect of boxing and were largely responsible for turning it into a profitable and respectable multi-million-dollar business. At the same time, Jewish athletes were showing the world how successful they could be as competitors in the toughest of all sports.
For many immigrant parents the idea of their sons earning a living in a boxing ring was unacceptable, and cause for great distress. But young Jews who came of age in the tough inner-city neighborhoods of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Boston, Cleveland, and Detroit were different in thought and behavior than their ancestors, the poor and oppressed Eastern European shtetl Jews victimized by the Russian Czar’s anti-Semitic policies and the drunken Christian peasants who added to their misery in that pogrom-scarred land. This is not to say that Jewish boxers in early-twentieth-century America were not profoundly connected to their Jewish origins. Many were, but they also proudly embraced their newfound American identities.
Although the need to economically improve their lot through hard work and education was of paramount importance to Jewish immigrants and their children, this new environment demanded something extra from them, and perhaps, at the time, even more important. As Teddy Atlas, the renowned trainer and ringside analyst for ESPN Sports, commented in a recent interview:
The Jewish fighters did not just box for themselves. They were representing a race of people and the reputation of that race. . . . Jewish immigrants and their children lived in a rough and tumble environment. Within this domain it was very important for some Jews to be able to go into the ring and be as tough as the next guy, or even tougher to a greater extent, because of where they were coming from and the way they were perceived . . . and some of the bullying that would go along with that.
Yes, the Jew could be smart, yes, the Jew could find a way out and be prosperous, but at a time when boxing was the biggest sport in this country the Jew also had to prove that he could be as tough as anybody and could also be as proud as anybody.7
As representatives of their people, Jewish boxers, whether they realized it or not, carried a heavy burden. The result of their efforts not only changed the way other Americans perceived the Jewish people, but it also changed the way Jewish people viewed themselves. Journalist Pete Hamill, the son of Irish immigrants, recalls that as a teenager he used the word “kike” to describe Jews at the family dinner table; his father promptly admonished him: “Benny Leonard is a Jew.”
As a young man growing up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, author Ron Ross remembers the esteem accorded to boxers who lived in his neighborhood. When Morris Reif, the last of Brownsville’s Golden Age Jewish boxers, passed away at the age of 90 in 2013, Ross eulogized him with words that are descriptive of an entire generation of Jewish boxers:
He was the last of a breed that at one time was both commonplace and conversely, unique; feared by some, admired by others but never underrated or ignored. Fighting was their business and they were a rough-and-tumble lot, respected and acknowledged among the rulers of their domain, and all who knew them. . . . Maybe it was because they were the children of a generation of passive resistors, the sons of stoic, but non-combative fathers, tough, thick-skinned peddlers, farmers and merchants who tolerated their indignities with an almost incomprehensible resoluteness and strength of purpose that made fighting the natural evolution of their species. . . . Chins jutting, fists flying, they came to fight. It was their business, it was their lives. They were a new breed and they shocked a world that couldn’t conceive of Jewish battlers.8
Many persons outside of the ring were important contributors to the Golden Age of the Jewish boxer, but they are not the central characters in this epic saga. That distinction belongs to the boxers without whom there would be no sport. This book is divided into six chapters, each representing a significant era in the sport’s evolution. Within each chapter dozens of notable Jewish boxers are identified. My regret is that space limitations prevented me from adding the names and bios of hundreds of additional Jewish contenders, journeymen, and main-event club fighters, all of whom contributed their own special luster to boxing’s rich, historic tapestry. They too deserve to be remembered. It is the intention of this book to be a fitting tribute to all of them.
I now invite the reader to enter the arena with me and take a seat as I climb the steps into the ring of history and introduce you to these extraordinary athletes and the legacy they have left for all of us.
“Ding, ding, ding! Ladies and gentlemen, in this corner . . .”