Depicting Hakoah: Images of a Zionist Sports Club in Interwar Vienna

Abstract

The SC Hakoah was not only Vienna’s most prominent "Jewish" (Zionist) sports club of the Interwar years, but also part of the Viennese popular sports culture. The media constantly covered the club and its members. A closer look at the sports reporting reveals that different genres of the media (texts, photographs, and caricatures) produced different meanings. In this way the depiction of the Hakoah Sports Club was part of a complex culture producing "Jewish difference" between the poles of Antisemitism and "Jewish Vienna." The analysis clearly demonstrates that the different "genres," i.e. texts, pictures, and caricatures, produced diverse messages to Viennese Jews: Their inclusion should be based on "assimilation," although it had to be clear that they always remained identifiable.