The Barney Ross story is rescued from oblivion
By Rabbi Jack Riemer

<I>"Barney Ross," by Douglas Century. Schocken Books and Nextbooks, N.Y. N.Y. 2006, 216 pages, &#036;19.95

Seventy five years ago, when German Jewry was in turmoil, Schocken Books of Germany produced a whole series of small books that enabled the Jews of Germany to get some self-understanding and some pride in their Jewish heritage.       Those books were of inestimable value to a bewildered generation.
Now the American Schocken is undertaking a similar series of small but significant books for American Jewry. What they are doing is matching up some of the brightest minds of our time with figures from the Jewish past and present. So Robert Pinsky, the former poet laureate of the United States, encounters David, the poet of the Bible.
Sherwin Nuland, the distinguished medical authority encounters Maimonides, the pre-eminent doctor of the Middle Ages. And in this volume, Barney Ross, the nearly forgotten former welterweight champion is brought back from obscurity by Douglas Century.
Barney Ross's life unfolded in three stages. In the first stage, he was Beryl Rasofsky, the son of immigrant parents, who grew up on the streets of Chicago. His father wsas killed in a botched hold-up, his mother had a breakdown, and his three younger siblings were sent off to orphanages-all before he reached the age of 14. In order to try to make enough money to care for his family, Ross became a petty thief, a gambler, an errand boy for the Capone gang, and eventually a prize fighter.
In stage two, Ross turned professional at 19 and won the lightweight, the junior welterweight and the welterweight championships over the course of a ten-year career. It is hard to believe it now, but Ross fought in an era when Jews were the managers, the fans, and sometimes the fighters, who dominated the sport, and so he was a Jewish hero.
During World War II, Ross served on Guadalcanal, and he came back with the Silver Star for bravery. He also came back with an addiction to morphine, which effectively ended his boxing career. He eventually kicked his habit with great effort, and, instead of keeping his illness secret, he campaigned across the country to educate young people about the danger of drugs, and in the futile effort to persuade the American people to treat addiction as an illness instead of a crime. 
In his last years, he devoted much of his energy to the effort to create a Jewish State. He leaned on his former friends in the underworld to donate money with which to buy guns and for help in smuggling them out of the country. And he tried to create a corps of American Jewish war veterans who would go to Palestine to fight. Unfortunately, the State Department blocked those efforts.
Now there is a new generation to whom Barney Ross is utterly unknown, and to whom the idea of a Jewish prize fighter seems like an anomaly. And so it is good that Schocken and Nextbooks have worked together to rescue his story from oblivion.
If the biographies of King David, Maimonides, and Barney Ross are representative of the quality of this series, we look forward eagerly to seeing the ones that are on the way.

Rabbi Jack Riemer writes from Boca Raton, Fla.