Standing on the podium last week in Paris’ Grand Palais, a gold medal hanging around her neck, fencer Jackie Dubrovich was also walking in the footsteps of many successful US Jewish athletes.
A native of New Jersey, she is the daughter of émigrés.
Her parents came to the US in the late 1980s from Belarus, part of a wave of Jewish immigration from the dying Soviet Union that was undergoing a period of political liberalization.
Dubrovich, 30, a graduate of Columbia University, where she was an All-American fencer, follows generations of Jewish men and women, who came to the US from overseas, or whose parents did, and earned notoriety in a variety of sports.
Dubrovich’s fencing specialty is foil; she was part of a four-woman team (including Maia Weintraub, whose father is Jewish) that defeated the top-ranked Italian squad 45-39 in the championship round during the Summer Games in the French capital.
Her accomplishment is an indicator of the continuity of athletic success in the émigré community, and a reminder of the controversy, especially in earlier generations, which sometimes accompanied it.
Since Jews began migrating to this country — mostly from Eastern Europe, then from countries threatened by Nazi Germany, then from the USSR — in large numbers in the late 19th century, many of them, and their children, used sports as a means to get ahead in a new land. Many — witness Dubrovich — found success as professional athletes, and, like Dubrovich, in the Olympics.
Other examples: boxers Benny Leonard, Abe Attell and Barney Ross (née Rosofsky); basketball players Dolph Schayes, Ernie Grunfeld and Ossie Schectman; football players Marshall Goldberg and Sid Luckman; baseball superstar Hank Greenberg; and Olympic sprinter-turned broadcaster Marty Glickman. And such past Olympians as Myer Prinstein, Irving Jaffee, Simon Shnapir, Lillian Copeland, Lenny Krayzelburg, Isaac Berger and Sasha Cohen.
The prominence of members of second-generation families “brought into high relief long-standing ambivalences about athletics and physicality among those who had come from the Old World,” historian Jeffrey Gurock writes in Marty Glickman: The Life of an American Jewish Sports Legend (Washington Mews Books, 2023).
“It was a source of tension in many Jewish households.”
Many of the Jews had come here from overseas and were from “a cultural and social environment where sports participation was often unknown and certainly not hallowed.” This was especially true in Orthodox families who saw their children’s avid participation in athletics a threat to traditional Shabbat-keeping and kosher-keeping values.
“Jewish athletes were sometimes pressured — and other times they simply preferred — to embrace the demands and values of sports at the expense of Jewish allegiances and observances,” Gurock writes in Judaism’s Encounter with American Sports (Indiana University Press, 2005).
Many of the athletic clubs that served as training centers for elite athletes would not admit Jews. And some universities, especially Ivy League schools, which were early venues for taking part in sports, imposed quotas on the number of Jews they would admit.
Outside of some haredi Orthodox parents, this Jewish opposition to sports is rare; and a growing number of collegiate athletic programs, and professional leagues (particularly at the minor league, entry level) have demonstrated a willingness to accommodate the religious requirements of observant athletes.
Prestigious athletic clubs have opened their doors to Jewish competitors. Official quotas in colleges have disappeared.
While the economic conditions of much of the US Jewish community have changed since the early 20th century, and young Jews from families who have been here for generations, gravitate towards careers in in professions like law or medicine, sports remain a way for disadvantaged minorities and new immigrants from many ethnic backgrounds to make a reputation — and a living — in the US.
Once, it was boxing. Then, basketball, the epitomal city game. Now, the Olympics.
A century ago, screenwriter-novelist Budd Schulberg writes in the introduction to When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport (Praeger, 1997), “ambitious young Jews were struggling to break out of the cycle of poverty in which so many saw their parents hopelessly trapped.”
Once, it was controversial in many parts of the émigré Jewish community for Jews to excel in sports, especially in a sport as violent as boxing. Some up-and-coming Jewish boxers changed their names to spare their families public embarrassment. Now, athletic success is largely a matter of communal pride.
While boxing is no longer dominated by Jews, a few Orthodox boxers have excelled in recent decades. Now, gentler sports like tennis and figure-skating — and fencing — have become fertile grounds for Jewish athletes.
For some émigré Jews, sports is path to “mobility . . . one of the ways of advancing themselves,” says Gurock, a history professor at Yeshiva University.
Sports, says Gurock, offers members of emigres groups paths to financial and career accomplishments that often are not open in other areas. And, he says, newcomers from émigré families, like Dubrovich, are typically driven and highly motivated, with stronger work ethics than people born in this country display.
Jewish success in sports largely parallels the disproportionate accomplishments of émigré success in such areas as business entrepreneurship and Nobel Prize winning.
Jewish success in sports, says Gurock, is a source “of ethnic pride” for most members of US Jewry.
Dubrovich, a Russian language major in college who has worked as a senior account strategist for an advertising company, began fencing at eight because it suited her “awkwardly lanky self.” She said she plans to retire from fencing after this year’s Olympics.
The arc of her athletic career reflects the change in Jewish emigres’ attitude about sports. She was “not immediately in love” with fencing, she once said. She viewed the sport “more as an obligation” than as a pleasant avocation. She stuck with it, she said, because “my parents kept pushing me.”
