Nice piece, LP.
Really well written post. I really enjoyed it.
I'm also of the faith, with a father who was at Battle of the Bulge. He grew up in a Mexican community in St.Paul, MN. He was a gang member in a Mexican gang in the 1930s.
Organized crime in Minneapolis meant Kid Cann Rosenfeld, Red Rudinsky etc.
Interesting linking Jewish apathy toward boxing, to Hellenic culture.
A really good post, that deserves wider circulation. I'd like to reprint it on my blog, with a plug for your blog.
Great post - thanks for that.
Thanks for this, I really enjoyed it - Barney is a distant cousin of mine (I'm in Dublin but the Rastofskies that didn't go to America came to Belfast and then some moved on to Dublin.
Loved your bio on B. Ross. My aunt, an avid fan of boxing,left me a signed autograph of Mr. Ross. Any interest, please advise.
Plenty of tough Jews in the old labor movement. The Fur and Leather Workers story of their successful battle with the gangsters is well told in Foner's history of the union. Something changes when the Jews become 'white' though. Nothing tough about being 'white'. i think of toughness as admirable in the oppressed or as an individual's irrepressible spirit. Nothing tough about the man who beats his wife though. Toughness' aimed at oppressing others and defending the perks and privileges of an oppressing race/class/sex, changes into bullying and brutality. Shanker in the 1968 teachers strike comes to mind not as tough but as a bullying opportunist. Meyer Kehane and the rest of the Brooklyn facists who terrorized Palestinians also come to mind, not as toughs, but as lowlife thugs. The tough jew today is the one who is not cowed or silenced by the establishment, not motivated by hatred or fear or self enrichment. Bloomberg is not tough. Norman Finkelstein, Uri Avnery, the Gush Shalom activists, these are the tough Jews of today. And what about the women. There were lots of tough jewish women organizers on the lower east side when I grew up in the 60's. Some old lefties who never gave up, some working class bohemian types who painted, danced and did their thing, with barely a pot to piss in. Some women left to raise kids on their own. They were tough when it came to standing up for their kids in indifferent schools, when it came to haranging a stingy landlord over the lack of heat. Tough enough to work all day and come home and cook real food for a hungry brood and still sing them all to sleep. I know one well, my mother, in her fashion, a tough jew who married an Irishman and was left to raise three little lepracohens on her own. Gotta love those tough jews.
plenty of tough jews around, they just don't run in your circles. my dad, ww2 vet, boxer and steel-worker was a big influence on me. more honest, decent, and intuitive than the machers we knew. i've lived by my wits [no degree] and have done pretty darn well. i've passed this ethos down to my sons. tell me, how does a guy actually believe in this communist bullshit after all these years?
I was doing some research on the great Barney Ross, a long time favorite of mine, and came upon this quite by accident. It's some of the best material I've ever read on the man and his life. There's lots of ironies here. I spent part of my youth in the Albany Park neighborhood of Chicago. In fact, when I graduated from elementary school we lived in that neighborhood, which was still heavily Jewish. We didn't eat by our corned beef at S&L, but rather at Ada's which was practically next door to the Catholic Church we attended. Lots of my classmates were sons and daughters of "tough Jews" who moved to Albany Park from the West Side, like the legendary 24th Ward in North Lawndale. To me, Jews were just part of the ethnic mix (albeit white) of my Chicago youth. I never thought of Jews as effete or sissified. Some used to knock me around pretty good on the playgrounds and in the streets and alleys. Roosevelt and Von Steuben high schools were perenially strong in basketball and I used to like to walk down the street to the playground at Roosevelt to watch the big guys on the Rough Riders football team practice. A couple of guys on the team, both Jews, were kind of legends in the neighborhood. Years later I was befriended by a much older archetypal "tough Jew" who would have been an older contemporary to the Barney Ross generation. He liked to regale me with stories of fellow "tough Jews" who made their marks on the streets of Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century. In my young adulthood I fell in league with some tough Jews who were Marxists in the tradition of Leon Trotsky. They made such an impression on me that I eventually rejected any and all left wing parties. Today I am more of a liberterian than anything. I always appreciate a good read however, and I'm sure I'll read this story again some time.
Good story about Barney Ross but disgusting comments about Israel and the Israeli army.Barney Ross who tried to volunteer to the Israeli army and was a Zionist would have spit on your coward face.
and by the way I despise all the liberal American "Jews" who brought Nigger one to power.
Eric from Israel.
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