Jew,” a massively respectful cheer relative to the rest. As Edmund Schechter, an American diplomat, recounted in a memoir of his Viennese youth, “Each Hakoah victory become another proof that the period of Jewish inferiority in physical activities had come to an end.”
Just as they built their squad using the methods of modern management, Hakoah exploited their successes with a marketing plan that could have been scripted by a Wharton MBA. In the o¤ season, Hakoah toured the world, the same way that Manchester United now builds its brand with jaunts to the Far East and America. Instead of selling jerseys, however, Hakoah sold Zionism. Preparing for visits, Hakoah would send ahead promoters to generate buzz for Muskeljudentum and distribute tickets to companies stocked with Jewish employees. They lured overwhelming crowds to watch this curiosity. In New York, Hakoah pulled 46,000 fans into the Polo Grounds.
Lithuanian Jews bicycled through the night to see the club. Such audiences lifted Hakoah’s game to levels far above its natural talent. Against the London outfit West Ham United, the Jews ran up a 5–1 victory. Naysayers rightly point to the West Ham lineup on that day. And it’s true, the Hammers didn’t take the traveling Jews very seriously, playing a mostly reserve squad. Nevertheless, the achievement stands: Before Hakoah, no continental team had beaten an English club on English soil, the same soil on which the game had been created. HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE JEWISH QUESTION
There was, however, an unintended consequence of this success. On the team’s 1925 trip, Hakoah players caught a glimpse of New York City, a metropolis seemingly uninfected by European anti-Semitism. It replaced Jerusalem as their Zion, and, over the next year, they immigrated there en masse. Deprived of nine of its best players, Hakoah attempted resurrection but only achieved mediocrity. For the rest of its brief life, it struggled to hold down a place in the top division of Austrian football, occasionally plummeting out of it.
And then, its players struggled against death. With the 1938 Anschluss and German rule of the nation, the Austrian league shut down Hakoah, nullified the results of any games played against Hakoah, and it handed over the club’s stadium to the Nazis.
When I returned to Washington from Vienna, I went to the library of the national Holocaust Museum. A scholar had pointed me in the direction of a documentary that contained footage of Hakoah players. Der Führer Schenkt den Juden Eine Stadt, The Fuhrer Gives a City to the Jews, depicts life in the Czech concentration camp of Theresienstadt. The Nazis had created Theresienstadt as a Potemkin village that they would show to the Red Cross, Danes, and other humanitarians. Here, the Jews attended lectures and performed symphonies. How could there be genocide?
So pleased with their ability to pull the wool over the humanitarian eyes, the Nazis intended to stage Theresienstadt for a far wider audience. They would transpose the images to celluloid and distribute them widely. In the summer of 1944, the Nazis commis-
sioned the burly Jewish comic actor and director Kurt Gerron to make the picture. Gerron had become a big name in the Weimar film renaissance, a colleague of Marlene Dietrich. But now, he wasn’t just shooting for his reputation; he believed that he could make a film that could please the SS enough to save his life.
The Nazis had given Gerron an impossible task.
They had asked him to make a film without giving him any control over the script or editing. In fact, he died in Auschwitz without having viewed any of the 17,000
feet of film that he shot. More than that, the residents of Theresienstadt didn’t lend themselves to propaganda. Not even modern special e¤ects could have compensated for the sad faces playing chess or the grim urgency with which children grab pieces of but-tered bread o¤ a plate.
To please the Nazis, Gerron embraced the Nazi
style—especially their cult of the body. Women perform aerobics in short shorts. A shirtless worker brings down his hammer on an anvil holding piping steel. A group of men play soccer. It is the perverse Nazi inversion of Muskeljudentum.
narrator: Use of free time is left to individuals.
Often workers flock to soccer games, Theresienstadt’s major sports event.
The courtyard of the camp’s old military barracks is used as a field. Men and little boys cram the porticos overlooking the dirt pitch. The camera pans to teams dashing into barracks. Like Hakoah, one team wears Jewish stars on its white jerseys. The other wears dark shirts. HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE JEWISH QUESTION
narrator: The teams each have only seven men,
due to limited space.
Players shake hands with the referee.
narrator: Nevertheless, enthusiastic fans watch a spirited game from beginning to end.
Play begins. Some of the players in dark jerseys must have played professionally. Despite the cramped quarters, they execute sly give-and-gos and skillfully deflect a corner kick into the goal. With each goal, the crowd jumps ecstatically from their seats.
For two minutes, the action unfolds without narra-tion. The scene then abruptly switches to the bathing facilities, a tribute to the compound’s impeccable hygiene. A line of naked men marches into the showers.
III.
It’s not exactly breaking news that, sixty years after Hakoah, anti-Semitism persists in Europe. There are even signs—the flourishing of ultra-right politicians in France and Austria; a rise in physical violence directed at French Jewry; political cartoons redolent of classic hook-nose stereotypes—that it may be increasing. As scary as all that is, intellectual honesty demands a distinction between anti-Semitism then and now.
Anti-Semitism now is something strange and
new—not
