The Assistant Professor of Football: Soccer, Culture, History.
The academic treatment for English-speakers who get that soccer is more than gamedays, stars and goals. Who wonder about the histories, subcultures and politics that make the game so different from many American sports cultures; and who care about a critical take on soccer as a global capitalist machine. A European-guided journey, with one expert "visiting professor" each episode.
The Assistant Professor of Football: Soccer, Culture, History.
Emancipation and Migration: Hakoah Vienna, Austria's Jewish Champion 1925
In a bit of a parallel episode to Episode 24 ("The Footballer who Defied the Nazis? The Myth of Matthias Sindelar"), this is the story of Hakoach Vienna. A child of central European Jewish emancipation movements and of the "muscular religion" fashionable at the time, the Jewish club became Austria's first professional champion in 1925, subsequently lost its important players to North American clubs, was home to Bela Guttman in Austria, and was shut down 3 days after the Anschluss of Austria to Germany. It lives on in at least 3 clubs, on 3 continents, one of them a re-formed Hakoah, in Vienna itself.
Marcus Patka is here to tell this story. A historian and curator at the Jewish Museum of Vienna, he created and curates the Hakoah collection from the interwar years at the Museum.
HELPFUL LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:
William D. Bowman, "Hakoah Vienna and the International Nature of Interwar Austrian Sports," Central European History 44 (2011), 642–668.
"West Ham 0-5 Hakoah: How an All-Jewish Team Defeated the English at their own Game, Conquered Austrian Soccer and Defied the Nazis," An Interview with Michael Lower (University of Minnesota)
"How a 1926 soccer match divided the St. Louis Jewish Community," STL Jewish Light, August 3 2023
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Artwork for The Assistant Professor of Football is by Saige Lind
Instrumental music for this podcast, including the introduction track, is by the artist Ketsa and used under a Creative Commons license through Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ketsa/