The greatest Jewish boxer of all was Benny Leonard, who was 5’ 5” and during his fighting days weighed between 130 and 153 pounds. Silver describes Leonard as a brilliant boxer with “the heart of a warrior,” who had a “devastating right-hand counterpunch,” and who left the sport unmarked after 219 bouts. He collapsed refereeing a bout at St. Nicholas Arena in 1947 and died soon thereafter of a heart attack at the age of 51.
Stars in the Ring ends on a doleful chapter on how boxing has become “a marginalized and debased fringe sport.” The reasons are several. They begin at the top, or rather with the fact that there is no top. Boxing is a sport without a commissioner, which has allowed various rival organizations and federations to flourish, each creating its own titles and new weight divisions. The immediate result is that no one knows who is the champion of any particular weight or class—titles are spread out all over the joint. As Mike Silver puts it, by way of analogy with baseball, imagine the luster the game would lose if every year there were four different World Series winners.
Boxing went into a slump during and shortly after World War II, when so many young and some established fighters went off to war, though it looked to be resuscitated in the 1950s by television. Television, though, wrought its own complications. While it brought boxing to an audience of millions, it also helped kill the boxing clubs and small arenas. Why pay to witness a bout in person when one can see it for nothing on television? This had the effect of depriving novice fighters of work and, more important, of the experience necessary to acquire consummate skill at their trade.
The reigning complaint among the contributors to The Arc of Boxing, a book Mike Silver published a few years ago, is that the fighters who came up after the early 1950s simply were nowhere near the caliber of those who came before them. To take one example, Floyd Mayweather, Jr., who is generally regarded as the best contemporary pure boxer, is described by one of the book’s contributors, Tony Arnold, as someone who uses his quickness “to overcome fighters with third-rate skills” but lacks real strategic intelligence and “ring guile.” The reason is, as Silver explains, a dearth of qualified teacher-trainers and the lack of experience on the part of fighters, who in an age of television haven’t fought enough to learn the manifold subtleties of their trade. “If you compare what boxing once was and what it has become,” a neuroscientist named Ted Lidsky, himself once an amateur boxer, is quoted in The Arc of Boxing as saying, “this is checkers in comparison to chess.”
As the skill among boxers diminished, the sport itself found new competitors for an audience in professional basketball and professional football. Mob interference, allowing only those fighters who were Mob-connected to get the best television bouts, didn’t help. Worse, according to Silver, have been the exploitative promoters Bob Arum and Don King, who, by arranging mismatches and scheduling over-hyped televised title fights, contributed heavily to making boxing the shabby sport it seems today. (The major cultural contribution of Don King may be limited to his name being the answer to the riddle that asks, “What does one get by combining Viagra and Rogaine?”)
Progress itself has worked against the future of boxing. With the long run of American prosperity that began after World War II, the old ethnic groups—Jews, Italians, Irish—ceased to need it to climb in status and prosperity. “The promise of America,” Silver puts it, “did not [any longer] have to come with a broken nose or cauliflower ear.” The vast majority of contemporary boxers are African Americans and Hispanics. With the current and quite legitimate alarm over head injuries in football, the future of the unforgiving sport of boxing, in which attacking the head of an opponent is usually a first priority, is further endangered.
The last major Jewish boxing champion was a man named Mike Rossman, a light-heavyweight and the first Jewish-American fighter to win a title in 40 years. (He won it in 1978 and lost it seven months later.) I confess to never having heard of Mike Rossman, and I wonder how many other similarly moderately obsessive sports fans like myself haven’t heard of him either. Nor had I heard of two recent Russian Jewish boxers, Yuri Foreman and Dmitriy Salita, both as it turns out Orthodox in their religious practice. But, then, as Silver laments, most of the young today are probably entirely unaware that Jews ever played an important role in a once immensely popular sport that “was important enough to give every ethnic group their first American heroes.” He adds that his reason for having written his book is that it is important to document the accomplishments of Jewish boxers,
so that future generations can acknowledge and appreciate how a people with no athletic tradition, and with so many doors closed to them, used their intelligence and drive to open another door to opportunity and eventually dominate, both as athletes and as entrepreneurs, what was for several decades the most popular sport in America.
Mike Silver does not strike the autobiographical note until near the close of Stars in the Ring, when he mentions that on his fifth birthday his father bought him a pair of junior-size boxing gloves. When I was six years old, my father did the same for me. He also taught me the rudiments of the sport: jab, hook, right-cross, left-cross, uppercut, footwork, how to block blows. As for my own boxing career, my last fight, at age 10 outside Eugene Field Grammar School, was against a boy named Barry Pearlman. Stopped at the end of the first round by the school principal, it was pronounced a draw, and I retired soon after undefeated.
Harry Golden
(2015)
Famous journalists, like fireworks, pop, flare, ascend, and disappear. James Reston, Murray Kempton, Harrison Salisbury, Tim Russert and many lesser lights, after blazing vigorously in their day, soon after their deaths are extinguished, known only to fellow journalists, if even to them. Consider Harry Golden. Is there anyone around today under 60 who will remember that once famous name or what it stood for? Seems unlikely.
In his heyday—the 1950s and early ’60s—Harry Golden had two books simultaneously on the New York Times best-seller list, was on the outer rim of the inner John F. Kennedy circle, and was mentioned in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” Golden was invited to speak at universities, performed at the Concord Hotel in the Catskills, and was offered a reserved seat at Robert Kennedy’s funeral. He appeared on the television talk shows of Dave Garroway, Steve Allen, Jack Paar and Johnny Carson; also on Edward R. Murrow. In 1961, Life magazine sent him to Jerusalem to cover the Adolf Eichmann trial. He was a celebrity in journalist’s clothes.
Not that Harry Golden was a standard journalist. He never set out in life to write. He was a salesman, a self-starter, a main-chancer, an operator whose overestimation of his slickness landed him in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in 1929 for running a bucket-shop stock operation, improperly investing—or failing to invest—clients’ funds and keeping the profits for himself.
The son of Jewish immigrants, Golden had a fairly typical Lower East Side New York boyhood. Born Chaim Goldhirsch in 1903 in Galicia, he had a luftmensch father, a maven on all subjects but that of making a good living; an older and a younger brother; and two older sisters. As so often in Jewish immigrant families, the mother was the family’s ballast and anchor, keeping the ship afloat. She died of cancer of the spine at 57 in 1924.
Harry Golden grew up holding the usual jobs: newspaper boy, delivery boy for a furrier with intellectual pretensions, desk clerk in a hotel owned by his brother Jake. He married an Irish Catholic woman, and, owing to the disgrace entailed, no member of his own family attended the wedding. He and his wife had four children and lived apart for decades. One of the children, Richard Goldhurst, would later serve as his father’s unnamed collaborator and ghostwriter.
A small man, pudgy—“short of inseam and wide of waist,” his biographer Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett notes in her biography Carolina Israelite—a cigar stuck in his mouth, bespectacled, with a chosen nose, Harry Golden bore a passing resemblance to a Der Stürmer caricature of a Jew. In his case, this wasn’t a problem.
He would later become an unwanted spokesman for his people, a man whose ingratiating style and schmaltziness were taken, mistakenly, for quintessentially Jewish.
After serving nearly four years in prison for his stock-market fraud, Golden moved, without his family, to Charlotte, North Carolina, a place where his disgrace was unknown. He was a drinking man, not a drunk but one requiring regular injections of booze early and refills through the day. Women found him attractive, and he did not avoid temptation in this line. If at this point in his life he had an occupation, it would be general hustler. His first job in the South was selling advertising space for local and regional newspapers; he later tried to get a mineral-water business under way. He was sloppy about money: He was frequently in trouble with the IRS; he bounced checks in Alabama. In a letter to a friend, Virginia Foster Durr, an early Southern white civil-rights advocate of great courage, called Golden “a phony, a sincere phony.”
The sincerity was to be found in Golden’s politics. As a boy in New York, he hung out at the Henry Street Settlement House, a great incubator of future socialists. He listened to his father schmooze away about Marxism. He read the little blue books put out by Haldeman-Julius, the Kansas City publisher. He had been 8 years old when the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of 1911 caused the deaths of 123 women and 23 men in the greatest industrial disaster of its time, and this left him a permanent labor sympathizer. Living in the South during the days of darkest segregation, he found a natural cause and subject in integration.
The debut issue of the Carolina Israelite, Harry Golden’s essentially one-man paper—it came out, with great irregularity, monthly—appeared in February 1944. He was able to publish only with the financial help of local Jewish businessmen in Charlotte. The paper’s motto, printed in large letters on its front page, was “To Break Down the Walls of Misunderstanding—and To Build Bridges of Good Will.” A subscription cost $2; two years along, in 1946, it had a partly bogus subscription list of 3,481 subscribers. At the height of its editor’s popularity in 1961, the paper reached its maximum circulation of 55,000. Golden closed it down in 1968, that annus horribilis, the year of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.
Golden had arrived and then asserted himself in the South just in time to take a hand in the last pure moral campaign this country has known: the struggle to remove from the books those segregationist laws—in health, education, accommodation, transportation and more—that locked in the secondary status of American blacks. His advantage over many other white journalists who covered the civil-rights campaigns of those years was that he actually lived in the South, though he might have been thought, by Southerners, a bit of a carpetbagger. In fact, he rather encouraged the notion of his being so. The title of his paper might be translated: “A Jew, or Stranger, in the South.”
Golden used a broad-strokes humor that in its day worked in getting him much attention. He proposed, for example, a Vertical Negro Plan to eliminate segregation, which called for moving all the chairs out of Southern classrooms, since whites and blacks in the South seemed to get along fine until it came to sitting down together. His solution to anti-Semitism was to have Jews threaten to convert to Christianity.
Many of the things Golden wrote in those years were touched with what passed for Jewish sensibility. His timing here, too, could scarcely have been improved, for from the 1950s on Jewish culture—from “Fiddler on the Roof” to the novels of Malamud, Bellow, and Roth—was getting a good press. Golden’s contribution to this brief renaissance was a nearly endless flow of nostalgia pieces in the Carolina Israelite on Eastern European Jews in the New World, with comedy added. His book titles—Only in America, For 2¢ Plain, Enjoy! Enjoy!—partook of this. Golden was called “The Jewish Will Rogers.” In 1961 the literary critic Ted Solotaroff, in Commentary magazine, attacked Golden’s falsely romantic vision of the Lower East Side ghetto life and his self-chosen role as village explainer—explaining blacks to whites, whites to blacks, Jews to Gentiles, Gentiles to Jews, everyone to anyone who would listen. The long assault ended by suggesting that his next book be called “Enough Already!”
The attack never laid a glove on Golden. His readers continued to adore him. Reviewers lined up to laud what they took to be his warmth and honesty. In 1958 Only in America, his first collection of essays from the Carolina Israelite, sold more than a million copies (in hardcover and paperback) and was on the New York Times best-seller list for 66 weeks.
The story is told of the conductor Herbert von Karajan getting into a cab, and when the driver asks where he wishes to go, answering: “It doesn’t matter. They want me everywhere.” So, too, with Harry Golden. The speaking engagements poured in. Adlai Stevenson was pleased to have him draft speeches for him in his presidential campaigns. John Steinbeck and Henry Miller—a strange combination—were among his admirers. A friendship earlier made with Carl Sandburg, who also lived in North Carolina, deepened. The two men one day sat down, Ms. Hartnett notes, to compile a list of great phonies of the day, on which appeared the names Norman Vincent Peale, Bernard Baruch, Cardinal Francis Spellman, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, and Cecil B. DeMille. Not a bad selection. The only names prominently missing, of course, were those of Carl Sandburg and Harry Golden.
Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett’s biography, Carolina Israelite, provides a mini-history of the civil-rights movement. Jackie Robinson, Rosa Parks, Brown v. Board of Education, the lunch-counter sit-ins, the Freedom Riders, Martin Luther King Jr., the Civil Rights Act of 1964, all come into play in her pages. Through these years and events, when moral clarity was easily established and, with courage on the part of peaceful black protesters, acted upon, Golden flourished.
When the civil-rights movement fell apart, so, soon after, did Harry Golden’s high standing as an important figure not only in journalism but in American life. The movement began to collapse, precisely, when in 1966 Stokely Carmichael, then the head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, declared for Black Power, which meant that white participation in the movement was no longer wanted. Under a squalid character named H. Rap Brown (currently serving a life sentence for murder), the SNCC would turn anti-Semitic. Enter the Black Panthers—exit the moral cachet that nonviolence gave to the black cause. James Baldwin and a delegation of black artists and intellectuals earlier met with Robert Kennedy, when he was attorney general, and after the meeting Baldwin announced: “Let us not be so pious now as to say that President Kennedy was a great civil-rights fighter.”
This remark especially wounded Harry Golden, who had bet all his chips on the Kennedys as great moral leaders. Ms. Hartnett reports that he wrote a book—high on my list of books never to read—called “Mr. Kennedy and the Negroes.” Golden wanted President Kennedy to compose an update of “The Emancipation Proclamation.” He likened him—sound familiar?—to Lincoln. “He remains the civil rights president,” he wrote, when a better case could be made that Kennedy was halting and faltering in his aid to Southern blacks, fearful of moving too quickly lest it cost him politically. Not long after Kennedy’s assassination, Golden wrote that Kennedy “was an idea to the people of the United States. More than the man he was, and the office he held, was an idea of what we could become; what we could achieve.” Amen—and pass the Kool-Aid.
Later Golden would write that Lyndon Johnson was “Kennedy’s finest achievement,” by which he meant—which is not true—that Kennedy was the spur behind President Johnson’s genuinely impressive accomplishments in the realm of civil rights. Golden was out of touch with the militants in the civil-rights movement. His backing of Lyndon Johnson’s actions in Vietnam next lost him the young. “The real Iron Curtain,” he wrote, “is between adults and kids.” He continued to turn out books, but, Ms. Hartnett reports, his son Richard was the chief writer of these, including his autobiography. Wasn’t it Charles Barkley, who, when a reporter mentioned a controversial item in his autobiography, replied, “I was misquoted”?
; Magazines began rejecting Golden’s work. Speaking engagements became fewer. No publisher, Ms. Hartnett writes, was interested in his proposal for a book called “America, I Love You.” After he closed down the Carolina Israelite in 1968, his occasional writings ran in the Nation, that rest home for old socialists. He was asked, and agreed, to serve as a judge for a Miss Nude America contest. Harry Golden died, his fame much muted, in 1981.
Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett’s biography of Harry Golden is, at 266 pages of text, the right length. She does not scant any of her subject’s faults and brings out his virtues. Like her subject, she is too greatly enamored of the Kennedys. The name of the odious Joseph Kennedy, the founding father, never appears in her book. Her prose is fluent, if sometimes marred by the clichés of the day, among them “reach out,” “icons,” “shift focus” and “charismatic style.” The last phrase she awards to Lyndon Johnson, who may be said to have had the reverse of such a style.
Ms. Hartnett closes Carolina Israelite by setting out her subject’s contradictions, which were manifold. She tries to revivify him, to bring him into the contemporary age, by suggesting that he was a blogger avant la lettre. She claims that he would have loved the Occupy Wall Street movement and thought of himself as “comrade” to all victims. She is doubtless right. Harry Golden was one of those men who never tired of saying how much he loved the people, and like most such men, somewhere along the way he turned a nice profit.
Gershom Scholem
The Ideal of Culture Page 46