Not too often we get to write about baseball around these parts, but it’s the dog days and the recent revelation that the famous (or infamous, see above) Brooklyn Dodger pitcher Ralph Branca is actually Jewish has sent reverberations through the Jewish and baseball blogsphere. Although the lifelong Roman Catholic has just found out at 85 that his mother was Jewish, some Jewish writers are chomping at the bit to stake a Jewish claim on baseball history. Writing in Tablet, Marc Tracy takes the predictable tribalist route claiming the news further confirms “Jews’ sneaky centrality to American mass culture and the all-powerful branch of it called sports,” while Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin writes “Jewish or Not, the Pitcher Was a Mensch.” Roberto Baly (at the Dodger blog Vin Scully is My Homeboy) has a more interesting take:
From a family historical perspective, it’s great to know your roots. I get it. I understand. What I dislike is when religious groups claim one of their own. Jewish leaders get all happy when Ryan Braun of the Milwaukee Brewers hits a dinger and he’s not even Jewish. Or like his mom says, “where were they before?”. The “Hebrew Hammer” is not that Hebrew.
My dad is Jewish. His parents are from Turkey. From Turkey they went to Cuba. From Cuba, they came to the U.S.A. My mom is from Mexico and is Catholic. At the end of the day, we’re all human beings and should love each other.
Baly points to a 2007 Nate Bloom article in the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix that looks at the phenomenon of Jews celebrating Jewish athletes, even when they’re only vaguely Jewish. This certainly resonates with me. I was raised on stories of Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax (probably the closest thing to a Jewish saint in my house for refusing to play on Yom Kippur), and there were often debates over whether certain athletes were Jewish. As a kid, Jewish athletes were presented to me as a great oddity and perhaps our greatest accomplishment. While in retrospect the astonishment over Jewish athleticism seems to reflect an internalized anti-Semitic assumption of Jewish wimpyness, the stories I was raised with always mixed a certain ‘David & Goliath’ spirit of beating “them” at their own game with a dose of Jewish moral exceptionalism (“If Sandy Koufax could miss the World Series to go to synagogue what excuse do you have?”). Bloom says it well:
The existence of top-flight Jewish athletes is a counterpoint to the stereotype that Diaspora Jews have concentrated on the life of the mind to the exclusion of physical excellence. An athlete is a far cry from the stereotypical bookworm “ghetto Jew” getting by on his wits rather than taking on the world of anti-Semites with his fists.
But none of this excuses the lengths to which many Jewish sports fans and Jewish media will go to prop up the religious and ethnic bona fides of an athlete with a trace of Jewish ancestry.
Well Baly and Bloom might not have to worry, not all Jews seem excited about welcoming Branca into the community. Maybe it’s because he was on the losing end of the most famous play in baseball history, but according to an article in today’s New York Times the Dersh doesn’t want anything to do with him:
“Ralph Branca is not a Jew,” said Alan Dershowitz, a Brooklyn-born Dodgers fan, lawyer and Harvard professor. “Whatever the definition, it doesn’t include someone who willingly accepted a different religion. He didn’t stay home on Yom Kippur like Koufax.” (Koufax, of course, knew he was a Jew.)
Dershowitz, in fact, theorized that Branca, to his eyes as a boy, did not pitch “Jewishly.”
Jewishly?
“Koufax altered strength and guile and knew that you pitch for six days and you rest on the seventh,” he said. “Branca was straight-on; you could see there was nothing Jewish about Ralph Branca.”
Looks like the exceptionalism lives on.
