By STEVE PFARRER
Staff Writer
It’s more or less an axiom, says Eddy Portnoy: Jews and sports or physical toughness don’t go together. He points to the line from the 1980 comedic movie “Airplane” in which a passenger asks a stewardess for some light reading.
“How about this leaflet, ‘Famous Jewish Sports Legends?’ ” the flight attendant suggests.
But there was a time, Portnoy says, when tough Jewish street kids, the sons of immigrants, made up a significant percentage of American boxers, and when Jewish wrestlers and boxers in Poland were widely popular. He’s chronicled some of that history in “Yiddish Fight Club,” an engaging exhibit at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst.
In putting together the show, which runs through Oct. 17, Portnoy, a senior researcher and exhibit curator for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City, has melded three elements of his historical digging. Along with stories and larger-than-life photos of Jewish-American boxers circa 1915-1940, and fighters from pre-World War II Poland, he’s included a wealth of Yiddish fighting terms he discovered a few years ago in a 1926 linguistic anthology.
When it comes to expressions like “dos lempl” (little lamp), which means to squeeze an opponent’s nose until it turns red, “You don’t expect Yiddish to have those kinds of phrases,” Portnoy said during a recent phone interview.
“It shows not all Jewish history is in books, it’s not all intellectual history,” he added. “Those terms were taken down by a linguist who interviewed street gangs in Warsaw and Vilna, guys who knew how to fight. … It’s amazing that this stuff was preserved.”
Aside from being entertaining in its own right, the exhibit also turns a common stereotype on its head, Portnoy notes. Though many Jews in post-war America moved into the middle class and became more associated with white-collar fields such as law, medicine and academia, one-third of America’s professional boxers in the 1930s were Jewish, and they had many avid fans.
“This is the period when the children of working-class immigrant parents are growing up, and [parents and children] really admire physical toughness, that sense of ‘up from the streets,’ ” he said. “That goes against this image we have that Jews aren’t associated with violence or sports.”
Indeed, boxers like Sid Terris, born on New York’s Lower East Side in 1904, generally got an early start on their fisticuffs. Terris was boxing by 13 and would go on to win his first 50 fights as both an amateur and professional lightweight, earning the nickname “The Galloping Ghost of the Ghetto.”
Then there’s Barney Ross, who could have been a character in E.L. Doctorow’s 1989 novel, “Billy Bathgate.” Born Dov-ber Rasofsky in 1909 to immigrant parents in New York — the family later moved to a poor neighborhood in Chicago — Ross initially wanted to be a Talmudic scholar, like his father, and a rabbi.
As a young teen, though, he became disillusioned with religion after his father was shot to death in his grocery store during a robbery; his younger siblings were parceled off to different homes and an orphanage when his mother had a nervous breakdown. Ross drifted into the life of a small-time gangster and numbers runner and at one point was reputed to have worked for Al Capone.
But then he turned his street toughness to boxing, winning titles in the lightweight and welterweight divisions in the late 1920s and 1930s. Known for his stamina and grit, Ross compiled a record of 72 wins, four losses, three draws and two no-decisions before retiring in the late 1930s.
Another vivid figure in the exhibit is Martin “Blimp” Levy (1906-1961), the Boston-born son of Russian-Jewish immigrants; he allegedly weighed 200 pounds at his bar mitzvah. Levy would later work as a circus “Fat Man” on New York’s Coney Island before becoming a successful wrestler in the 1930s and early 1940s, known for being surprisingly nimble despite his 600-pound bulk.
Portnoy, formerly a professor of Jewish studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey, says his initial entrée into this world of Jewish fighters came years ago when, doing research for his dissertation, he came across cartoons in Yiddish newspapers from 1920s Poland — then home to Europe’s biggest Jewish population — that used wrestling as a metaphor.
“There would be an article about two cantors vying for a position, and a cartoon would show them in a wrestling ring,” he said. “I kept seeing things like that and wondering what it was all about.”
Further exploration led him to figures like Zelig Pashov, a champion wrestler who would enter the ring in a sash with the color scheme of the Zionist movement. Another hugely popular fighter was Shepsl Rotholtz (1913-1982), a boxer who became the first Jewish champion in Europe (in the flyweight division).
And Rafael Halperin (1924-2011), born in Austria but raised mostly in British Mandatory Palestine (a region that includes historical and modern-day Israel), became a bodybuilder and then a successful wrestler; he often wrestled in the U.S., where his meets became staples for Jewish men and children who watched them on TV in the 1950s. In his later years, Halperin became a rabbi in Israel.
One of the exhibit’s highlights is the inclusion of a wealth of Yiddish terms and phrases for fighting, both in boxing and all-out brawling, a colorful vernacular that’s presented in both English and Hebrew.
There’s “unterkletzel,” for instance, which means kneeing your opponent in the rear end. A “shtikhe,” meanwhile, is not another kind of Asian medicinal mushroom but rather a punch in the ribs with the knuckles of the first two fingers extended.
Pulling a “der gubernator” is jabbing someone in the ribs with a thumb, while “mashkante” means to hold a person down and beat him — literally, to take out a mortgage on someone.
A more conventional boxing term is “shtaysl” (an uppercut), while “klung” is a nice example of onomatopoeia: It’s a punch in the teeth that’s so hard the recipient hears bells ring.
Portnoy said he’s gotten fascinating feedback on the exhibit, many from Jews who had ancestors who were boxers or wrestlers and wanted to tell him their stories. He also heard a riveting account from an elderly woman who asked to speak with him after seeing the exhibit when it opened last year at the YIVO Institute.
“She pointed at the picture of Shepsl Rotholtz and explained that he’d saved her life,” he said.
Rotholtz, it turns out, had been interned at one point in the Warsaw ghetto during WWII, and he had plucked this woman — then a young girl of 5 or 6 — from a crowd of Jews that the Nazis had rounded up for transportation, likely to a death camp.
“To hear a story like that was just incredible,” Portnoy said. “Makes me even happier I put [the exhibit] together.”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.
“Yiddish Fight Club” will be on view through Oct. 17 at the Yiddish Book Center, 1021 West St., Amherst. For information, visit www.yiddishbookcenter.org.