Filled with facts, trivia, photographs, and statistics, an updated reference furnishes concise portraits of more than 150 important Jewish athletes, including Sandy Koufax, Kerry Strug, Daniel Mendoza, Esther Roth, and many others.

A collection of essays by today's preeminent writers on significant Jewish figures in sports, told with humor, heart, and an eye toward the ever elusive question of Jewish identity. Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame is a timeless collection of biographical musings, sociological riffs about assimilation, first-person reflections, and, above all, great writing on some of the most influential and unexpected pioneers in the world of sports. Featuring work by today's preeminent writers, these essays explore significant Jewish athletes, coaches, broadcasters, trainers, and even team owners (in the finite universe of Jewish Jocks, they count!). Contributors include some of today's most celebrated writers covering a vast assortment of topics, including David Remnick on the biggest mouth in sports, Howard Cosell; Jonathan Safran Foer on the prodigious and pugnacious Bobby Fischer; Man Booker Prize-winner Howard Jacobson writing elegantly on Marty Reisman, America's greatest ping-pong player and the sport's ultimate showman. Deborah Lipstadt examines the continuing legacy of the Munich Massacre, the fortieth anniversary of which coincided with the 2012 London Olympics. Jane Leavy reveals why Sandy Koufax agreed to attend her daughter's bat mitzvah. And we learn how Don Lerman single-handedly thrust competitive eating into the public eye with three pounds of butter and 120 jalapeño peppers. These essays are supplemented by a cover design and illustrations throughout by Mark Ulriksen. From settlement houses to stadiums and everywhere in between, Jewish Jock features men and women who do not always fit the standard athletic mold. Rather, they utilized talents long prized by a people of the book (and a people of commerce) to game these games to their advantage, in turn forcing the rest of the world to either copy their methods -- or be left in their dust.

Here is the first full account of Jewish contributions to international sports. Rich in personal anecdotes, historical background (including explanation of the barriers excluding Jewish athletes from otherwise successful careers) and packed with 150 rare, historical, black-and-white photographs. Foreword by Mark Spitz.

The Ultimate Jewish Sports History and Trivia Book.

Discusses the history of Jewish participation in America's pastime, including players, team owners, and sportswriters.

The 100 Greatest Jews in Sports takes the greatest Jewish athletes in all major sports from the past eleven decades and ranks them against each other, using a limited scope and quantitative criteria. Each decade has seen someone new emerge as the greatest Jewish athlete, from boxer Abe Attell to baseballs' Sandy Koufax and Ken Holtzman, to golf's Amy Alcott, to footballs' Harris Barton. Sports profiled include baseball, basketball, hockey, tennis, golf, auto racing, boxing, soccer, football, swimming, and many others. Silverman takes a scholarly approach to ensure reliability and validity of the statistics given. The author identified the most common categories of statistics in which the highest paid athletes in all sports had excelled, and he assigned numeric values to reflect the performance categories. That provided a proportional representation of the most important individual accomplishments in sports. By applying those numbers to the records of selected athletes, each was ranked against the other. Additionally, the author asked selected experts of each sport to perform the same ranking with no specific criteria, and the results were the same. Filled with historic photographs of the athletes profiled, and interspersed with interesting tidbits of each athlete's personal life and career, this book is certain to be of interest to the casual to serious sports enthusiast alike.

In the 2015–16 NBA season, the Jewish presence in the league was largely confined to Adam Silver, the commissioner; David Blatt, the coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers; and Omri Casspi, a player for the Sacramento Kings. Basketball, however, was once referred to as a Jewish sport. Shortly after the game was invented at the end of the nineteenth century, it spread throughout the country and became particularly popular among Jewish immigrant children in northeastern cities because it could easily be played in an urban setting. Many of basketball’s early stars were Jewish, including Shikey Gotthoffer, Sonny Hertzberg, Nat Holman, Red Klotz, Dolph Schayes, Moe Spahn, and Max Zaslofsky. In this oral history collection, Douglas Stark chronicles Jewish basketball throughout the twentieth century, focusing on 1900 to 1960. As told by the prominent voices of twenty people who played, coached, and refereed it, these conversations shed light on what it means to be a Jew and on how the game evolved from its humble origins to the sport enjoyed worldwide by billions of fans today. The game’s development, changes in style, rise in popularity, and national emergence after World War II are narrated by men reliving their youth, when basketball was a game they played for the love of it. When Basketball Was Jewish reveals, as no previous book has, the evolving role of Jews in basketball and illuminates their contributions to American Jewish history as well as basketball history.

The author reports on the many young Jewish fighters who began boxing for the money. In the 1920s and 1930s, "Jews were represented in almost every aspect of the sport, from manufacturing equipment to management."--Jacket.

Books written to address the myth that Jews are no good at sport all have a common flaw - discussing a list of great Jewish athletes does not allow us to gauge the overall success (or failure) of Jews as a group at sport. This book provides such a gauge by comparing the successes of Jewish athletes with those of Australian athletes at the Summer Olympics. The book is, however, more than a comparison of two groups of athletes. Intriguing personal stories, snippets of history and the intertwining of bigotry and irony will engage the reader. Who would think it possible that five Jewish athletes could survive incarceration by the Nazis to subsequently compete at the Olympics with one of them winning a gold medal while three of them would also set world records? Or that the most successful Olympians in countries who have treated their Jewish citizens most harshly are two Jewish women-Irena Kirszenstein-Szewinska in Poland and Agnes Keleti in Hungary? Is there a more fitting irony than the 1938 Nazi propaganda movie, Olympia, inadvertently showcasing a Jewish Olympian as its hero? Perhaps truth really is stranger than fiction. It's certainly more interesting.

For some, the connection between Jews and athletics might seem far-fetched. But in fact, as is highlighted by the fourteen chapters in this collection, Jews have been participating in-and thinking about-sports for more than two thousand years. The articles in this volume scan a wide chronological range: from the Hellenistic period (first century BCE) to the most recent basketball season. The range of athletes covered is equally broad: from participants in Roman-style games to wrestlers, boxers, fencers, baseball players, and basketball stars. The authors of these essays, many of whom actively participate in athletics themselves, raise a number of intriguing questions, such as: What differing attitudes toward sports have Jews exhibited across periods and cultures? Is it possible to be a "good Jew" and a "great athlete"? In what sports have Jews excelled, and why? How have Jews overcome prejudices on the part of the general populace against a Jewish presence on the field or in the ring? In what ways has Jewish participation in sports aided, or failed to aid, the perception of Jews as "good Germans," "good Hungarians," "good Americans," and so forth? This volume, which features a number of illustrations (many of them quite rare), is not only accessible to the general reader, but also contains much information of interest to the scholar in Jewish studies, American studies, and sports history.