Saturday, November 10, 2018
The Jewish Boxer Who Helped the Allies Turn the Tide of World War I
Opening his newspaper on May 5, 1921, cigar salesman Ben Kaufman was in for a shock. The U.S. government released a list of slackers, or men who had dodged the draft in the First World War. There it was, midway down this ignominious roll call: Benjamin Kaufman, Brooklyn, New York. Bounties of up to $50 awaited the capture of each slacker—about $300 in today’s money. These payouts were intended for law-enforcement officials but others thought they were eligible to collect.
In the previous “slacker raids” of 1918, tens of thousands of suspected draft dodgers were arrested both by officials and vigilantes affiliated with the reactionary American Protective League (APL). The victims of the raids were often kept in miserable conditions, and denied legal rights. The APL had also been notoriously anti-Semitic and sought to expel the “Bolshevik Jew” from American society. By 1921, even though the APL no longer existed, there were fresh calls for its revival to ferret out “un-Americans.” No surprise that some men who saw their names in the newspapers in the spring of 1921 skipped town.
Not Kaufman. The amateur bounty hunters would regret trying to mess with him. And he had some show-and-tell to lug to the military office—his Congressional Medal of Honor, one of the first in the war to have been received by a Jewish soldier. With his medal came a remarkable story of heroism that sounded almost too outlandish to be true.
Born March 10, 1894, Kaufman spent his earliest years on a farm upstate before the family settled in Brooklyn. Between his foreign heritage (his parents came from Russia) and being Jewish—not to mention his eight older siblings—he had to learn to defend himself. “Unless you could fight in East New York in Brooklyn at that time, you just didn’t have a chance,” he later recalled. “When you came home with a bloodied nose and black eyes… our mother, instead of scolding us, would fix us up with First Aid.”
Though he wasn't tall, he was sturdy and packed a punch. He got kicked out of Erasmus Hall high school for breaking the football captain's nose, then did well enough at his next school, Newton High in Elmhurst, New York, to walk out with a scholarship to Syracuse University. While studying engineering there, fighting landed him in trouble again, so he dropped out to pursue professional baseball, one of several sports he'd excelled at in high school and at Syracuse.
By 1917, when the United States declared war on Germany and became a full participant in the First World War, Kaufman was selling shoes in Trenton, New Jersey. The 23-year-old applied to an aviation school so he could enter the military as a pilot, but he was among the first lists of names called in the draft before he had the chance to begin training.
Kaufman, who had steel grey eyes with a don’t-I-know-you face, was assigned to Company K of the 308th Regiment’s 77th Division. Their uniforms boasted a patch of the Statue of Liberty, a shout-out to the region from which the soldiers hailed and to the division’s diverse blend of heritages—it was said to have the most languages spoken within it of any military division in modern history. The 77th also had the largest number of Jewish soldiers in the American Expeditionary Forces, or AEF, a term for U.S. troops in the First World War.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-jewish-boxer-who-helped-the-allies-turn-the-tide-of-world-war-i
In the previous “slacker raids” of 1918, tens of thousands of suspected draft dodgers were arrested both by officials and vigilantes affiliated with the reactionary American Protective League (APL). The victims of the raids were often kept in miserable conditions, and denied legal rights. The APL had also been notoriously anti-Semitic and sought to expel the “Bolshevik Jew” from American society. By 1921, even though the APL no longer existed, there were fresh calls for its revival to ferret out “un-Americans.” No surprise that some men who saw their names in the newspapers in the spring of 1921 skipped town.
Not Kaufman. The amateur bounty hunters would regret trying to mess with him. And he had some show-and-tell to lug to the military office—his Congressional Medal of Honor, one of the first in the war to have been received by a Jewish soldier. With his medal came a remarkable story of heroism that sounded almost too outlandish to be true.
Born March 10, 1894, Kaufman spent his earliest years on a farm upstate before the family settled in Brooklyn. Between his foreign heritage (his parents came from Russia) and being Jewish—not to mention his eight older siblings—he had to learn to defend himself. “Unless you could fight in East New York in Brooklyn at that time, you just didn’t have a chance,” he later recalled. “When you came home with a bloodied nose and black eyes… our mother, instead of scolding us, would fix us up with First Aid.”
Though he wasn't tall, he was sturdy and packed a punch. He got kicked out of Erasmus Hall high school for breaking the football captain's nose, then did well enough at his next school, Newton High in Elmhurst, New York, to walk out with a scholarship to Syracuse University. While studying engineering there, fighting landed him in trouble again, so he dropped out to pursue professional baseball, one of several sports he'd excelled at in high school and at Syracuse.
By 1917, when the United States declared war on Germany and became a full participant in the First World War, Kaufman was selling shoes in Trenton, New Jersey. The 23-year-old applied to an aviation school so he could enter the military as a pilot, but he was among the first lists of names called in the draft before he had the chance to begin training.
Kaufman, who had steel grey eyes with a don’t-I-know-you face, was assigned to Company K of the 308th Regiment’s 77th Division. Their uniforms boasted a patch of the Statue of Liberty, a shout-out to the region from which the soldiers hailed and to the division’s diverse blend of heritages—it was said to have the most languages spoken within it of any military division in modern history. The 77th also had the largest number of Jewish soldiers in the American Expeditionary Forces, or AEF, a term for U.S. troops in the First World War.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-jewish-boxer-who-helped-the-allies-turn-the-tide-of-world-war-i
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