Book review: Sport and British Jewry: integration, ethnicity and anti-Semitism 1890-1970

Mike Huggins, University of Cumbria, reviews the book 'Sport and British Jewry: integration, ethnicity and anti-Semitism 1890-1970' by David Dee (Manchester University Press, 2013).

The history of Jewish communities of the Diaspora has been an important area of scholarly study for many years, as the substantial number of journals, books, and articles devoted to the topic continue to demonstrate. In America, substantial works by, inter alia, Levine and Riess have provided a solid basis of research on Jewish involvement with sport. In Britain, by contrast, there has been a popular misconception that Jews were disinterested in physical pursuits and what Dee calls “a paucity of research” (p. 5) to set the record straight. A few studies in recent years have begun to explore the history of Jewish involvement in sports such as boxing or horseracing, but Dee’s subtle, scholarly, and nuanced work is the first book-length treatment of the role that Anglo-Jewry played in British sport over the last century or so before 1970, and the way sport affected their life experiences and individual, community, and cultural identities.