Event

Dyed in Crimson with Author Zev Eleff

Tuesday, March 26, 2024
6:30 pm - 7:30 pm
Business and Community Center

Author Zev Eleff returns to Skokie to share how two outsiders changed one of America’s most important universities.

In 1926, Harvard athletic director Bill Bingham chose former Crimson All-American Arnold Horween as coach of the university’s football team. The pair attempted to shift the team's culture to something based on merit rather than social status, emphasizing honor and courage over mere winning. Their success challenged entrenched ideas about who belonged at Harvard and, by extension, who deserved to lay claim to the American dream.

As a player, the Chicago-born Horween had led Harvard to its 1920 Rose Bowl victory. As a coach, he faced intractable opposition from powerful East Coast alumni because of his values and midwestern, Jewish background.

In Dyed in Crimson: Football, Faith, and Remaking Harvard’s America, Eleff traces these two immigrants’ sons' careers as student-athletes, and then leaders--their approach shaped by a vision of an America that rewarded any person of virtue. He also examines how Horween undermined stereotypes of Jewish masculinity and dealt with the resurgent antisemitism of the 1920s.

Currently the president of Gratz College, Eleff was previously chief academic officer of Hebrew Theological College and vice provost of Touro College in Skokie. Before moving to the Philadelphia area, he was a prominent and wide-reaching voice within Chicago’s Jewish community, an invited speaker in dozens of synagogues and agencies, and a recipient of the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago’s “36 Under 36” award.

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