Free How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization by Franklin Foer Page A

our reinforcements — at least they would know where to gather our bruised bodies. “Just tell them you’re an American. Nobody would touch you,” he counsels. By the time he has dialed the number, a sign for the motorway emerges. Three days of debauchery has deprived them of any sense of geography. Jimmy bangs on the Plexiglas separating the driver from us and gives him the thumbs up. Jimmy and Ralphie break into song, “We’re the top of the league, we’re the top of the league and you know.” As he sings, Jimmy lifts his arms above his head in triumph. t
    H o w S o c c e r E x p l a i n s
    t h e J e w i s h Q u e s t i o n
    “Do you want something to read?”
    “Yes, do you have something really light?”
    “How about this short leaflet: Famous Jewish Sports Legends.”
    —The movie Airplane!, 1980
    I.
    I had grown up thinking that great Jewish athletes come around about once in a decade, if the gene pool gets lucky. There was the Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax in the sixties; the swimmer Mark Spitz in the seventies; and then many fallow years. At home, my father and I would imagine that various athletes were quietly Jewish, like the Marrano survivors of the Spanish Inquisition. My father was especially adamant that Sid Bream, a lanky, energetic first baseman with the Atlanta Braves, was a person of the book. And, to be fair, the name, both first and last, made him a plausible member. But in retrospect, there were biographical details that probably should have negated our analysis.
    Sid Bream liked to talk about his love of hunting, and he drove a pickup truck. Yes, he wore a Mark Spitz moustache, but that was twenty years after its vogue within our community. The simple truth was that we were too apprehensive to go looking for Bream’s real ethnicity.
    Before Bream captured the imagination of our
    household, I had stumbled across the soccer club Hakoah of Vienna, winners of the 1925 Austrian championship. Hakoah’s great triumph came at a time when Austrian soccer represented the world’s gold standard of style and strategy. Although they had only a few scarce encounters with the other great teams of the era, Hakoah usually triumphed in these matches. Based on all the evidence we have, the Jewish all stars were, for a short spell, one of the best teams on the planet.
    Hakoah first came to my attention in a book that I found rummaging through my uncle’s old bedroom, in my grandparents’ house: Great Jewish Sports Legends. It had a frayed blue spine that could be lifted to reveal the naked binding. Sepia photos filled its pages. When this volume came into my possession at age eight, it quickly became a personal favorite. Because it had been written in the early 1950s, it wasn’t so far removed from the mid-century American renaissance of Jewish athletes, which consisted of giant figures such as the Chicago Bears’ quarterback Sid Luckman and the Detroit Tigers’
    first baseman Hank Greenberg. Like so much of Jewish life at that moment, the book was schizophrenic about its ethnic identity. As I remember the book, it was both

HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE JEWISH QUESTION
    a paean to Jewish achievement and to assimilation, but mostly to assimilation. There was no Star of David on the title page and no anecdotes about Greenberg skipping a crucial season-end game to attend Yom Kippur services. That’s why Hakoah sprung at me from the pages. There was nothing self-e¤acing about the Jewishness of the Hakoah players. The team had a Hebrew name and advertised its Judaism on its jersey.
    From the start, in other words, Hakoah had seemed chimerical to me. My search for the team made it even more so. I traveled to Vienna with promises of help from academics and community leaders. From them, I began to compile the names of Viennese Jews in their eighties and nineties who might have some memory of the championship season. Since 1940, Viennese Jewry has dwindled from approximately 200,000 to 7,000.
    Some of