To be clear, I didn’t mean that this particular thread was motivated by racism, or was going to go in racist directions. I was simply observing that that’s often the direction that discussions like this one go in.
I highly doubt if this is true (for a meaningful number of “people”). There was never a time when Jews were “so dominant in sports, especially in brutal sports like boxing”, so it’s unlikely that many people would have wondered why that was so.
Learn some math. Even assuming those numbers are true, one in seven is not remotely close to dominating the sport.
[FWIW, I doubt if the numbers are accurate altogether. There’s a tendency in books of that sort to stretch the definition of Jewish. For example, Max Baer was not Jewish by any reasonable definition, but he tends to get counted, e.g. here.]
At the time we’re discussing, Jews were about 4% of the US, and heavily concentrated in urban areas which probably produced much more than their fair share of boxers. And again, I’m skeptical of the one in seven number for reasons given.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Jews had more than their fair share of boxers for the same reason they had more than their fair share of mobsters at that time. They were concentrated in poverty-stricken urban ghettoes, which tend to produce those types.
But disproportionate representation is not nearly the same thing as dominance. Black representation in boxing from the 60s to the 80s (especially at the heavier divisions) was dominance. Jewish in that earlier time was probably somewhat disproportionate.
I think there is a bit of truth here. To non boxing people (like myself) the heavyweight champion tends to get a lot more headlines, and in my memory on it does seem to have been dominated by people such as Sonny Liston, through Muhammeed Ali to Mike Tyson. After that interest was not there- or less there.
Guess I’m saying is the bigger headlines get the most attention unless you closely follow the sport.
