Embodying the Revolution: The Hebrew Experience and the Globalization of Modern Sports in Interwar Palestine

by Ofer Idels

Overview

This original and thought-provoking study offers a fresh perspective on Zionism by exploring Hebrew culture’s ambivalent attitude toward modern sports. Drawing on extensive archival sources and contemporary literary theories, it focuses on Zionism’s surprising anxiety toward sports during the interwar heyday of “muscular Judaism,” revealing an unusual society in which athletes failed to attain national pride and distinction. Addressing themes such as the body, language, space, immigration, internationalism, amateurism, gender, and militarization, Embodying the Revolution presents an innovative reading of Jewish life in Mandate Palestine, linking the marginalization of sports to the meaning and experience of the Zionist Revolution. Idels' compelling interpretation of the appeal of sports, selfhood, and the compromises inherent in radical aspirations—narrated from the periphery of the interwar global rise of sports—challenges contemporary assumptions that dismiss ideology as an elitist myth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781978844476
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	10/14/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	156
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

OFER IDELS is the Jenny Belzberg Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Calgary, Canada. He is the author of Zionism: Emotions, Language and Experience.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Introduction 1

1 Teaching Nordau to Play Football: Gymnastics and Sports before and After World War I 11

2 Competing in Hebrew: Revolutionary Language and the Sporting Presence 25

3 “Keep away from the Prima Donnas”: Hebrew Purpose and the Athletic Body 43

4 “The Whole World Will Know Our Answer”: Sports, Internationalism, and the Jewish Return to History 61

5 “We Have to Learn to Sacrifice Everything”: Militarism and the Zionist Desire for a Useful Experience 77

Epilogue 93

Acknowledgments 101

Notes 103

Bibliography 127

Index 000

Editorial Reviews

"Ofer Idels offers the first historically grounded and philosophically argued answer to the question about the specific—and indeed exceptional marginal—position of sports in contemporary Israeli culture. His book marks an incisive threshold both for readers with a scholarly agenda and with a broader typological interest."— Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Albert Guérard Professor in Literature emeritus at Stanford University

"This absorbing book situates Zionist debates about sports in Interwar Palestine within their global context to reveal the varied ways in which prevalent perceptions of an individualistic, self-aggrandizing athlete faced a counter-discourse of the righteous, pioneering one, whose physical cultivation proclaimed a larger collective purpose."— Erik N. Jensen, author of Body by Weimar: Athletes, Gender, and German Modernity

"With forceful originality, Embodying the Revolution challenges us to rethink the connections between physical experience and ideology, Zionist history and the world. Idels's passion for the historian's craft makes the book an excellent read."— Hannah Pollin-Galay, author of Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish

From the Publisher