http://www.jidaily.com/878ef?utm_source=Jewish+Ideas+Daily+Insider&utm_campaign=ddeca110c0-Insider&utm_medium=email
Sidney Franklin, born Sidney Frumpkin, left his Orthodox-Jewish family in Brooklyn at the age of 18 after a violent quarrel with his father. Heading south, he crossed the border into Mexico, where he was captivated by one of the world’s cruelest and most dangerous sports: bullfighting.
A year later, in 1923, the thin Jewish Yankee from New York became the first American and the first Jewish bullfighter in the world. He attained world fame thanks to his friendship with Ernest Hemingway; the novelist was fascinated by the Jewish matador, who had won the heart of the Spanish people. Hemingway writes in “Death in the Afternoon” (1932 ) that Franklin “is a better, more scientific, more intelligent and more finished matador than all but six of the full matadors in Spain today. The bullfighters know it and have the utmost respect for him. … You will find no Spaniard who ever saw him fight who will deny his artistry with a cape.”
Franklin is one of 19 Jewish athletic champions from between the 18th century and the founding of Israel, in 1948, whose stories are told in an exhibition that opened last Sunday at Beit Hatfutsot: the Museum of the Jewish People. Entitled “The Game of Their Lives,” the exhibition is a unique attempt to paint a comprehensive picture of outstanding Jewish athletes throughout the world, one that crosses geographic and national boundaries and presents a wide range of sports. It opens at the start of a year that will see the XXX Olympic Summer Games in London, and that marks the 40th anniversary of the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich.
“It is no coincidence that very little has been heard up to now about the amazing story of the Jewish bullfighter who captured the Spanish people’s heart,” says the exhibition’s curator, sports journalist Adi Rubinstein. “He just did not fit in with the commonly accepted image of the weak, puny Jew from the ghetto who always gets beaten up by the gentiles.”