#18 Harry Mizler’s shorts 1934
ON DISPLAY at the Jewish Museum London are a pair of boxing shorts owned by the Olympic boxer Harry Mizler and generously loaned to the Museum by his family. Mizler, who competed almost exactly 90 years ago at the 1932 games in Los Angeles, was born in London’s East End to Jewish Polish parents. Thanks to his success in amateur boxing he eventually turned professional, representing Britain on the international stage firstly at the 1930 Empire Games, known today as the Commonwealth Games, and two years later at the Olympics.
Harry Mizler’s boxing shorts, emblazoned with both the Union Jack and the Star of David are a wonderful surviving documentation of a Jewish history that whilst not always pretty, was incredibly vibrant and flourishing. A history that defies expectations, narratives, images and stereotypes of what Jewish life looks like: the history of the London Jewish boxing world of the interwar period.
The history of Jewish boxers in England goes back to the 18th and 19th century when boxers such as Daniel Mendoza, ‘Dutch’ Sam Elias and Barney Aaron were renowned fighters. From the late 1890s to its peak in the 1930s, Jewish involvement in boxing was at an all-time high, not simply in the ring but in a wider professional sense with many boxing halls being established in London’s Jewish areas by Jews, such as Wonderland, the Judeans Athletic and Social Club and Paragon Hall. This section of London Jewry comprised of mainly Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants who differed from their middle-class contemporaries because their cultural identity, whilst still firmly Jewish, was none-the-less inseparable from their working-class identity . Boxing offered enormous opportunities for East-End Jewish youth, not simply financially, but also socially, as their involvement reflected their desire to distance themselves from their parents’ immigrant identities and integrate into wider British society. Boxing changed both the way they viewed themselves and the way they were viewed by the wider community and non-Jewish society. They became not just Jewish figures but local heroes, and in Harry Mizler’s case national stars, proudly representing their country.
Their involvement was of course not without issue, as boxing could be associated with immoral types and criminal activity, and many saw Jewish boxers as standing in direct opposition to Jewish values. Whilst there is no denying the precarious and unorthodox nature of their profession, the cultural importance
and relevance of Jewish boxers is not to be overlooked. The widespread stereotype often applied to Jewish men is that they are successful in business and finance, but not in physical endeavours. Jewish boxers defy these assumptions through the physical reality of their profession. Boxers such as Harry Mizler, wearing their faith, ethnicity and country visibly on their boxing shorts whilst competing on a world stage emphatically defied antisemitic tropes at a time when they were rife.
Indeed, the Olympic Games that followed were the 1936 Nazi Olympics, an event which was deeply connected to the disappearance of Jewish boxers, and more widely Jewish athletes, as their very right to existence was violently threatened. This precarious, complex and rarefied nature of British Jewish boxers, both in the 1930s and today, only serves to make this pair of shorts, worn when Mizler won the British lightweight title in 1934, all the more interesting.