Jackie Robinson, Jewish Icon

The story of Jackie Robinson’s integration of baseball in 1947 provided Jews with a myth representative of their experience of assimilation into American society in the era following World War II. Popular Jewish accounts of this story, found in children’s literature and adult fiction, essay and memoir, reveal three themes: identification with Robinson as a victim of oppression, idealization of Robinson as a heroic figure whose success announced the possibility of an end to all bigotry, and glorification of the role Jews played in bringing about Robinson’s triumph. The ways in which Jewish writers tell this story reveal how the Jewish ideal of a special relationship between Blacks and Jews derived from drawing connections, based primarily in the Jewish imagination, between Jewish and Black experiences of integration and assimilation.