They may have been a despised and outcast race, but the 18th-century British Jews — descendants of those who had been readmitted to England by Oliver Cromwell after four long centuries of exile — finally found a champion. Before Barney Ross and Benny Leonard, Daniel Mendoza was a Jewish boxer who both outwitted and outpunched the anti-Semites, enabling Jews to stand tall and be proud of their heritage. In Randy Cohen’s new play, “The Punishing Blow: An Illustrated Lecture by Order of the Orange County Court,” to be performed for one night only at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Mendoza reclaims his rightful place as one of the first Jewish celebrities of the modern age.
“The Punishing Blow” is told in the form of
a lecture by a non-Jewish professor, Leslie (Seth Duerr) who seems both awe-struck and repelled by his fascinating subject, about whom he has been ordered to speak as a way of doing community service for an anti-Semitic outburst. As the lecture progresses, the professor’s highly suspect motivations for choosing his subject become clear. The play thus leads the audience to reflect on a number of vexing moral questions. Cohen is an expert on such issues, given that he writes “The Ethicist” column in the The New York Times Magazine, along with similar duties at National Public Radio and Slate. Before writing about ethics, he was an Emmy Award-winning writer for “Late Night with David Letterman” and the “Rosie O’Donnell Show.”
He was reading Boswell’s biography of Samuel Johnson when he realized that he knew little about Jewish life in England during the same period. His curiosity soon led him to discover Mendoza, who immediately struck him as a larger-than-life figure, despite the fact that he measured only 5 feet 7 inches and weighed only 160 pounds. He realized that Mendoza had been unjustly neglected in Jewish history. “Mendoza brought thought to the sport,” Cohen told The Jewish Week. “Before Mendoza, the bigger man just bashed the smaller one, but Mendoza introduced a Jewish-style of boxing: a wily, analytical, almost Talmudic style.” In this new, “scientific” type of boxing, Mendoza’s quick movements, emphasis on defense, and precisely aimed blows enabled the Jewish underdog to triumph over much bigger opponents. As a result, Cohen said, the openly Jewish Mendoza changed the way that manly British virtues were defined, making room for Jews to be accepted as equals in British society. Cohen calls him the “Muhammad Ali of the 18th century,” whose fame transcended the world of boxing. Indeed, Mendoza was reputed to be the first Jew to have a conversation with the monarch, King George III. Incredibly, the London press reported one of his victories before they mentioned the storming of the Bastille.
Writing about Mendoza has led Cohen to reflect upon his own Jewish identity. Born in Charleston, S.C., Cohen said that he was never sure what separated Southern customs from Jewish ones, given that Southern Jews ate both kreplach and gumbo. His approach to ethics, he says, is “resolutely secular,” given that he has only occasionally been in a synagogue since his bar mitzvah in Reading, Pa., where his family relocated when he was a boy. But Cohen acknowledges that “the way that I phrase moral questions is completely informed by my Jewish upbringing. I hear my parents and even my rabbi’s voice in my head.” n
“A Punishing Blow” runs for one night only, Wednesday, March 25 at 7 p.m. at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park. For tickets, $15, call the box office at (646) 437-4202 or visit www.mjhnyc.org.
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