Irish Eddie versus Benny Leonard

A story of old Jewish boxers. Pebble to Small Beer blog.

Boxing was also the first sport to give Jews an equal chance to compete (if not dominate): between 1910 and 1940, there were 26 Jewish world boxing champions. Some of these fighters fought under non-Jewish names, often Irish. This was partly because Irish boxers were very popular with the public, and partly because their families disapproved of their career choice. (It was said that, "They fear no man in the ring, but they're scared of their mothers.") An oft-told story concerned Benny Leonard (real name: Benjamin Leiner), one great Jewish fighter who never masked his heritage. Leonard was touring, and in a grimy Pennsylvania mill/mining town was matched up against the local pride and joy, one Irish Eddie Finnegan. The crowd was out for blood, and even before the fight started was chanting, "Kill the Jew. Kill the Jew." This so infuriated Leonard that he let out all the stops and pounded his opponent mercilessly. He might actually have killed him, except at one point "Irish Eddie" was able to engage Leonard in a clinch and gasp, in Yiddish, that his name was really Seymour Rosenbaum.