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Basketball
Contributed by Mitch Gevelber

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The South Philadelphia Hebrew Association SPHAs (pronounced "spas") dominated basketball in the 1920s and '30s.  The team's flashy shooter was set-shot expert Inky Lautman and the Biblical David was the six-pointed star on the early SPHA's jerseys. The "Hebrews," as they were called, eventually morphed into the NBA's first champion, the 1946-47 Philadelphia Warriors.

"The reason, I suspect, that basketball appeals to the Hebrew with his Oriental background," wrote Paul Gallico, sports editor of the New York Daily News in the 1930s, "is that the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind, flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smart aleckness."

Writers opined that Jews had an advantage in basketball because short men have better balance and more foot speed. They were also thought to have sharper eyes, which of course cut against the stereotype that Jewish men were myopic and had to wear glasses. But who says stereotypes have to be consistent?

Basketball has always been a game of the inner city. At the turn of the century, European Jews flooded off immigrant ships into the ghettos of the booming Eastern metropolises. New York and Philadelphia were the epicenters of the basketball world, with the dominant team, the Hebrews, ensconced in South Philly.

"Basketball is a city game," notes Sonny Hill, an executive adviser with the Philadelphia 76ers. "If you trace basketball back to the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, that's when the Jewish people were very dominant in the inner city. And they dominated basketball."

"It was absolutely a way out of the ghetto," said Dave Dabrow, a guard with the original Hebrews. "It was where the young Jewish boy would never have been able to go to college if it wasn't for the amount of basketball playing and for the scholarship."

Although New York turned out, in pure numbers, more stars that were Jewish, the Philadelphia SPHAs were basketball's best known and most successful all-Jewish team. From 1918 onward, the "Hebrews" barnstormed across the East and Midwest, playing in a variety of semi-pro leagues that were precursors to the NBA. In an incredible 22-season stretch, they played in 18 championship series, winning 13.

Playing 80 or more games a year and with no home court to call their own, they were sometimes called "The Wandering Jews." Then, with the emergence of National Socialism in Germany and an escalation of anti-Semitism in the U.S., the Jewish players faced incessant racial slurs and biased officials in the small towns in which they played.

"Half the fans would come to see the Jews get killed, and the other half were Jews coming to see our boys win," said Gottlieb. "...Whenever something would happen down on the court that those Brooklyn fans didn't like, they'd send [beer] bottles down at us."

The Jewish heyday lasted until the late 1940s, when dominion over the urban basketball courts passed to blacks, the fastest-growing group of urban dwellers who were migrating north from dying Southern farms in search of opportunity. The new generation of Jews began moving on to other pursuits -- into teaching, off to dental school, and out to the suburbs.
haggadah Section: Yachatz
Source: aish.com

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