What do you think?
Rate this book
Fútbol, Jews, and the Making of Argentina
If you attend a soccer match in Buenos Aires of the local Atlanta Athletic Club, you will likely hear the rival teams chanting anti-Semitic slogans. This is because the neighborhood of Villa Crespo has long been considered a Jewish district, and its soccer team, Club Atlético Atlanta , has served as an avenue of integration into Argentine culture. Through the lens of this neighborhood institution, Raanan Rein offers an absorbing social history of Jews in Latin America. Since the Second World War, there has been a conspicuous Jewish presence among the fans, administrators and presidents of the Atlanta soccer club. For the first immigrant generation, belonging to this club was a way of becoming Argentines. For the next generation, it was a way of maintaining ethnic Jewish identity. Now, it is nothing less than family tradition for third generation Jewish Argentines to support Atlanta . The soccer club has also constituted one of the few spaces where both Jews and non-Jews, affiliated Jews and non-affiliated Jews, Zionists and non-Zionists, have interacted. The result has been an active shaping of the local culture by Jewish Latin Americans to their own purposes. Offering a rare window into the rich culture of everyday life in the city of Buenos Aires created by Jewish immigrants and their descendants, Fútbol, Jews, and the Making of Argentina represents a pioneering study of the intersection between soccer, ethnicity, and identity in Latin America and makes a major contribution to Jewish History, Latin American History, and Sports History.
- GenresHistory
240 pages, Paperback
First published October 9, 2014
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 30, 2026
In 1904, in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Monserrat, eight young men who lacked enough chairs for their founding meeting moved to a plaza and passed a hat to buy one leather football, pooling eleven pesos between them. That club, Club Atlético Atlanta, named after an American warship that docked in the Buenos Aires harbor, would spend its first two decades wandering between neighborhoods, pitches, and landlords, earning the nickname "los bohemios", the gypsies.
The eventual destination was Villa Crespo, a working-class Buenos Aires quarter that Jewish immigrants from Poland, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire had settled into block by block, filling its streets with tailors, textile workers, bookshop owners, and Yiddish-speaking café philosophers who had swapped their shtetls for tango and fútbol.
The book traces how a club with zero Jews among its founders became, by the 1940s and 1950s, the one professional football club in all of Argentina that rival fans pelted with soap bars and serenaded with Hitler chants. Its "Jewish identity" was assigned entirely from the outside, exactly as Ajax in Amsterdam and Tottenham in London received theirs.
The mind behind Atlanta's golden age was León Kolbowski, a Polish-born Communist with an Orthodox father's prayer habits, a fearsome mustache, and a philosophy summarized as "create problems in order to resolve them." He took the presidency in 1959 and proceeded to build a stadium for thirty-four thousand people while the club had no money to build one for ten, selling off every homegrown star.
Artime, Griguol, Errea, Gatti were sold to River Plate and Boca the moment they became valuable enough to liquidate. Kolbowski hired the Jewish Argentine trainer Adolfo Mogilevsky, who imported Inter Milan's defensive tactics into a neighborhood ground in Villa Crespo, and in three separate stints Atlanta finished fifth or better every time.
The club sent Atlanta to play in Tel Aviv in 1963, the first Argentine football team to do so. The Communist leadership raised zero objections. The Jewish community of Villa Crespo celebrated with the fervor of a people who had been told that sport was for everyone except them. Kolbowski's reward for twelve years of this kind of visionary overreach was electoral defeat in 1969 by a few dozen votes of disputed authenticity.
The deepest subject of this book is what happens when a football club becomes a secular synagogue for people whose grandmothers prayed in Yiddish on Yom Kippur and then walked to the stadium before returning to synagogue for the closing service, weighing up the relative urgency of atonement and a crucial relegation six-pointer.
Fans recall Yiddish insults flying from the cheap seats; children memorized Atlanta's entire squad before the civil registry recorded their births; at least one Jewish Chacarita supporter confessed to chanting anti-Semitic songs in games against Atlanta, his club loyalty outweighing his ethnic identity the moment the whistle blew.
The book covers the full arc from Eastern European immigration to Argentine Peronism to military dictatorship to the club's 1991 bankruptcy, during which Atlanta became the first professional football club in the country to declare insolvency, closed its doors, and reopened within two months.
For those who wonder what glues together an immigrant community across three generations of assimilation, Rein's answer is unsentimental: a yellow-and-blue jersey, a cramped stadium on Humboldt Street, and the collective pleasure of beating River Plate.
Raanan Rein, Tel Aviv University professor, Iberian and Latin American studies chair, has written a book with a thesis so elegant it practically scores itself. The football pitch is where immigrant identity gets its most honest workout, away from the synagogue's decorum and the community organization's agenda. Belonging to a place is a full-contact sport.
Across Europe, fans still chant Holocaust slogans at clubs associated with Jewish neighborhoods while the clubs' actual Jewish populations have long since suburbanized away. The fantasy of the "Jewish club" outlives the Jews. Rein calls this correctly, and it applies as much to Amsterdam and London as to Villa Crespo.
The book sometimes channels the minutes of Atlanta's board of directors with the reverence normally reserved for the Dead Sea Scrolls. The academic apparatus did challenge my patience. But with the upcoming World Cup, and in the current climate of migration anxiety, violent attacks against Jewish fans, antisemitic attempts to ban Israel from sports across the Western world, and general racism in soccer, the book is urgently topical. The bohemios, it turns out, were ahead of their era.
❤️ 🇮🇱
The eventual destination was Villa Crespo, a working-class Buenos Aires quarter that Jewish immigrants from Poland, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire had settled into block by block, filling its streets with tailors, textile workers, bookshop owners, and Yiddish-speaking café philosophers who had swapped their shtetls for tango and fútbol.
The book traces how a club with zero Jews among its founders became, by the 1940s and 1950s, the one professional football club in all of Argentina that rival fans pelted with soap bars and serenaded with Hitler chants. Its "Jewish identity" was assigned entirely from the outside, exactly as Ajax in Amsterdam and Tottenham in London received theirs.
The mind behind Atlanta's golden age was León Kolbowski, a Polish-born Communist with an Orthodox father's prayer habits, a fearsome mustache, and a philosophy summarized as "create problems in order to resolve them." He took the presidency in 1959 and proceeded to build a stadium for thirty-four thousand people while the club had no money to build one for ten, selling off every homegrown star.
Artime, Griguol, Errea, Gatti were sold to River Plate and Boca the moment they became valuable enough to liquidate. Kolbowski hired the Jewish Argentine trainer Adolfo Mogilevsky, who imported Inter Milan's defensive tactics into a neighborhood ground in Villa Crespo, and in three separate stints Atlanta finished fifth or better every time.
The club sent Atlanta to play in Tel Aviv in 1963, the first Argentine football team to do so. The Communist leadership raised zero objections. The Jewish community of Villa Crespo celebrated with the fervor of a people who had been told that sport was for everyone except them. Kolbowski's reward for twelve years of this kind of visionary overreach was electoral defeat in 1969 by a few dozen votes of disputed authenticity.
The deepest subject of this book is what happens when a football club becomes a secular synagogue for people whose grandmothers prayed in Yiddish on Yom Kippur and then walked to the stadium before returning to synagogue for the closing service, weighing up the relative urgency of atonement and a crucial relegation six-pointer.
Fans recall Yiddish insults flying from the cheap seats; children memorized Atlanta's entire squad before the civil registry recorded their births; at least one Jewish Chacarita supporter confessed to chanting anti-Semitic songs in games against Atlanta, his club loyalty outweighing his ethnic identity the moment the whistle blew.
The book covers the full arc from Eastern European immigration to Argentine Peronism to military dictatorship to the club's 1991 bankruptcy, during which Atlanta became the first professional football club in the country to declare insolvency, closed its doors, and reopened within two months.
For those who wonder what glues together an immigrant community across three generations of assimilation, Rein's answer is unsentimental: a yellow-and-blue jersey, a cramped stadium on Humboldt Street, and the collective pleasure of beating River Plate.
Raanan Rein, Tel Aviv University professor, Iberian and Latin American studies chair, has written a book with a thesis so elegant it practically scores itself. The football pitch is where immigrant identity gets its most honest workout, away from the synagogue's decorum and the community organization's agenda. Belonging to a place is a full-contact sport.
Across Europe, fans still chant Holocaust slogans at clubs associated with Jewish neighborhoods while the clubs' actual Jewish populations have long since suburbanized away. The fantasy of the "Jewish club" outlives the Jews. Rein calls this correctly, and it applies as much to Amsterdam and London as to Villa Crespo.
The book sometimes channels the minutes of Atlanta's board of directors with the reverence normally reserved for the Dead Sea Scrolls. The academic apparatus did challenge my patience. But with the upcoming World Cup, and in the current climate of migration anxiety, violent attacks against Jewish fans, antisemitic attempts to ban Israel from sports across the Western world, and general racism in soccer, the book is urgently topical. The bohemios, it turns out, were ahead of their era.
❤️ 🇮🇱
April 9, 2021
This book is a great history of a very particular aspect of Argentina, but also the history of soccer and the Jewish diaspora as well. The last chapter is fantastic, tying together so many points about racism, antisemitism, and the role of soccer in crafting transnational and national identities. A must read for anyone curious about the relationship between soccer and politics, the two have never been separated.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews