In 1898, at the Second Zionist Congress in Basel, Max Nordau coined a term that became a sort of slogan for Jewish athletic movements emerging throughout Europe, including both Morgnshtern and its competitors. Their program was stringently anti-Zionist, a fact that incited bitter hostility from Hapoel along with many other contemporary Jewish movements, both in the political and athletic arena. Morgnshtern was the athletic arm of the Polish Bund, a Jewish, socialist labor movement that is distinguished by its core tenet of doykait, or “hereness,” the principle that Jews are responsible for developing viable living conditions in their current environments-in this case, Poland and the former Russian Empire. The offended party, Morgnshtern (Yiddish for “morning star”), was the offshoot of a political movement whose history spans from fin-de-siècle Russia to an abrupt vanishing point brought about by the Second World War. The prewar chapter of muscular Judaism’s narrative lies somewhere in history’s blind spot, and with it, the issue at stake in this unplayed ping-pong game of ’38. The friction between these sports clubs captures two opposing strains of the developing rhetoric of Muskeljudentum-muscular Judaism, at a decisive crossroads. Although the year of 1938 is charged with historical cataclysms that somewhat overshadow the event of a thwarted game of table tennis, the insult articulated here points to a schism in the maturation of a young movement.

The Warsaw-based team representing Hapoel, a Zionist-socialist sports organization, stood up their opponents in a complex maneuver to bar their rivals, another Jewish athletic club called Morgnshtern, from the second-place title. On Valentine’s Day of 1938, a critical game in a ping-pong tournament held in Poland was called off after an embarrassing show of poor sportsmanship.

Poster for a soccer match between Orkan and Makabi Warsaw, 1927

Eliza rose