Sport, Politics and Society in the Land of Israel by Yair Galily Amir Ben-Porat

Author:Yair Galily, Amir Ben-Porat [Yair Galily, Amir Ben-Porat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Sports, Reference
ISBN: 9781317967903
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-10-31T04:00:00+00:00

To examine the way that sport reports mirror the general state of mind of that time.

To examine those characteristics that the Mandatory sports press handed down to the sports press in the State of Israel.

To make key information about sports reporting in the early twentieth century accessible to readers of our time.

For the purposes of this pioneering research all the sport reports appearing during the 1920s and early 1930s have been scanned. This included the scanning of the established press: the daily press—Davar, Ha’aretz, and Doar Hayom, and the weekly Hatzafon in Haifa which was published for two years (1926–1927). Also scanned were the organs of the sports associations, Uzenu of the Hapoel and Maccabi of Maccabi.

The article addresses various aspects of this journalism from news items to specific sports reporting to ideological articles and opinion pieces to readers’ letters. Each section in the article deals with one of these. The intention is not to analyze the historical data emerging from the various reports but to set out the framework in which this data appears. Thus recording and describing sports reporting by the Hebrew press is the objective of this article.

The Nature of Sports News

The Location of the Sports News Items and their Scope

Prior to the appearance of sports sections, sports news items were released randomly. They were very short, appeared usually on the margins of the news and were printed in small letters across the paper. In Davar, sports news items could be found typically within the scope of the sections containing news about different places (‘in Haifa’, ‘in Tel Aviv’, etc.). Ha’aretz released, from time to time, sports news items under the heading ‘In the Sport’. However, this was not a regular section. News items were not released systematically. At times, many days would pass without any reporting of sports events; even when items were eventually released, it would be a few days after the event itself, without the signature of the writer. Sports news items were not illustrated, due to the marginal space they captured compared to other fields, and also because the press, in general, in those days, was hardly ever illustrated.

The Content of the News Items

Reports of football scores: Most of the sports news items included reports about the scores of football matches. The British occupation and its influence on sport in Eretz Israel and the visits of the Hacoach Vienna football team in the years 1924–1925 resulted in a sharp rise in the popularity of football, to the extent that in 1928 a football association was established in Eretz Israel.

In the 1920s, no regular national league or cup existed. On the other hand, league matches were held locally—for example, the Haifa League (Ha’aretz, 3 March 1925), the Jerusalem Municipality Cup (Davar, 27 April 1929), the Tel-Aviv Regional Cup (Davar, 14 February 1929). Apart from the teams formed by Maccabi and Hapoel, there were local active youth teams (Hagibo, Allenby, Balfour, Hatzvi), which merged subsequently into the big associations. For example, Allenby merged into Hapoel Tel Aviv (Davar, 30 March 1927) and Hagibor into Maccabi Haifa (Ha’aretz, 16 December 1925).

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