The Center for Jewish Studies is proud to Present Dr. Andrei Markovits as its seventh Gold Foundation Distinguished Lecturer of the 2007-2008 academic Year. Dr. Markovits will delivere a lecture entitled “Sports Culture and Jewish Identity in Europe and the U.S.”
Jews have rarely, if ever, been associated with sports of any kind. And yet, modern sports have played a key role in the lives of Jewish men in particular since the proliferation of mass sports as culture in the late nineteenth century. By using his own biography as an inveterate sports fan on both sides of the Atlantic since his childhood in Romania, Professor Andrei Markovits will analyze how sports--which he has elsewhere called "hegemonic" in that they exist in our daily lives well beyond their loci of production on the courts, fields and stadia--have interacted with Jews. The lecture will discuss some of the so-called "Jewish" soccer teams in Europe and how anti-Semitism has re-emerged at virtually all levels of contemporary European soccer (football).
Professor Markovits will also contrast the Jewish sports experiences in Europe and the United States, placing them in the larger context of the Jewish experience on both sides of the Atlantic. In particular, he will conclude with the decisive role of Jews in basketball, the so- called "liberal's game." (The lecture will immediately precede the NCAA championship game in men's Division I college basketball!)
Andrei Markovits is currently the Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author and editor of many books on topics as varied as German and Austrian politics, anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, social democracy, social movements, the European right and the European left. Markovits has also worked extensively on comparative sports culture in Europe and North America. He has widely written on global soccer with special emphasis on Germany, Austria and the United States. His latest book, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America, has just been published by Princeton University Press.
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