Elliot Willensky, in the aptly titled When Brooklyn Was the World: 1920-1957, points out that “327,000 men and women from Brooklyn had fought in [World War II]; 7,000 of them had died in it.” No county in the United States sent more its sons and daughters off to World War II than Kings County (Brooklyn).
A good estimate is that more than 100,000 Jewish Brooklynites – out of a population of approximately 900,000 Jews living in Brooklyn at the time – served our country during the war.
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In the Madison HS senior yearbook for January 1932, my father is listed as Barney Schulewitz, but when he was drafted into the army in 1942 he Americanized the name. Many New York City neighborhoods during the first half of the 20th century had a Schulte cigar store.
The most famous cigar-smoking Jewish Brooklynite was probably the late Red Auerbach, out of Williamsburg and Eastern District HS, who led the Boston Celtics – as coach, general manager, and president – to an unprecedented 16 National Basketball Association titles. Between 1957 and 1966 he coached them to nine NBA titles in ten seasons (including eight straight), and Red would triumphantly light up a cigar in the closing minutes or seconds of a game when victory was assured.
A high school buddy of Auerbach’s was the late Victor Hershkowitz, who between the early 1940s and the 1960s won 23 national amateur handball championships. Both Auerbach and Hershkowitz were World War II veterans, and Hershkowitz also worked as a New York City firefighter.
Another Jewish Hall of Fame coach from Brooklyn is the late Red Holzman, out of Brownsville, Franklin K. Lane HS, and CCNY, who coached the perennially second-rate New York Knicks to the team’s only NBA championships (in 1970 and 1973).
Vermont’s socialist senator didn’t play basketball for Madison HS, but Bernie Sanders was a miler and cross-country runner. However, the school’s most famous track star was Marty Glickman, who was supposed to run one of the four legs of the 400-meter relay for the U.S. track team in the 1936 Berlin Olympics final. But Glickman and another Jewish sprinter, Sam Stoller, were removed from the team for the medal round by Avery Brundage, head of the U.S. Olympic Committee and an outright anti-Semite. Just before Glickman died in 2001, the U.S. Olympic Committee apologized to him and to the family of Sam Stoller, who had passed away in 1992.
Glickman was also a star halfback on Madison HS’s football team and at Syracuse University. In 1994 the football field of Erasmus, Madison’s neighborhood arch-rival, was named for Sid Luckman, the Hall of Fame quarterback for the Chicago Bears and Columbia University. Luckman told The New York Times he had “chased [Glickman] all over the field and couldn’t catch” him in the 1934 Public Schools Athletic League (PSAL) championship game.
Neither the great Luckman nor Times sportswriter Ira Berkow mentioned that the only Americans who were faster than Glickman in the mid-1930s were Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympic Games, and Ralph Metcalfe, the silver medalist in the 100-meter dash at the 1932 and 1936 Games. The two African-American sprinters replaced Glickman and Stoller on the victorious relay team for the final round, despite Owens’s protestations to “let Marty and Sam run.”
Additionally, the silver medalist in the 200-meter dash in the 1936 Olympics was Mack Robinson, the older brother of the legendary Jackie Robinson, who shattered Major League Baseball’s apartheid policy with the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field in 1947. Willensky’s When Brooklyn Was the World ends in 1957, when the Dodgers deserted the borough and relocated to Los Angeles.
