Jewish Major Leaguers in Their Own Words: Oral Histories of 23 Players by Peter Ephross with Martin Abramowitz (review)

Jewish Major Leaguers in Their Own Words contains twenty-three interviews, conducted by a dozen different interviewers, spanning three decades, but with one clear message. Being a Jewish major leaguer has long meant making choices, often defying expectations of family and community.

For some, a career in professional baseball meant eschewing the careers that nice Jewish boys were supposed to pursue. In 1938, for example, Sam Nahem chose to put a law career on hold to play baseball, to his mother’s initial chagrin.

For most, a career in baseball necessitated making compromises on expressing their Jewish identification, frequently disappointing their parents—with the exception of Marv Rotblatt’s father, who was glad when his son chose baseball over an expensive bar mitzvah.

Being a Jewish professional baseball player has meant reconciling seemingly incompatible identities and contradictory expectations. It is painful to read how many players felt lonely and guarded around teammates, afraid to react to supposedly harmless but nevertheless latently anti-Semitic remarks for fear of violating clubhouse norms. It is especially heartbreaking to read Saul Rogovin’s description of his own conflicted feelings when Al Rosen challenged Rogovin’s anti-Semitic teammate: feeling proud of Rosen (a fellow Jew), feeling disloyal for being proud of Rosen (an opposing player), feeling forced to choose between his two identities, and feeling ashamed for being unable to choose.

The archetypal choice, of course, is the choice: whether or not to play on the High Holidays. Players felt pressured by Hank Greenberg’s and then Sandy Koufax’s iconic choices to sit out important games on Yom Kippur. Jesse Levis, for example, was sitting on the Brewers’ bench on Yom Kippur, fasting, when an unknowing manager inserted him as a pinch hitter. Levis failed to get a hit—not only then, but for the rest of the season—a fate he attributed to divine punishment but more likely his internalizing pressures to try to reconcile a career in baseball with Jewish identity expression.

Jewish players were also aware of Jewish fans’ pride in and expectations of their heroes’ choices to honor Jewish tradition, and this, too, was often stressful. Many players internalized a responsibility to increase the numbers of Jews in baseball by inspiring young Jews to take up the game—“If Hank Greenberg can become a ballplayer, so can you” (39). Many also felt the burden of showing that Jews can stand up to anti-Semites; the best example given in the book involved a classic anti-Semitic epithet, a baseball bat, and the punchline, “Yes, and I’ll kill you, too” (27).

Being a Jewish baseball player, then, meant constantly searching for ways to avoid having to choose between baseball and Jewish identity expression. Often relations with family and community brought redemption. Lou Limmer’s greatest moment in baseball was the day he hit a pinch-hit home run, because afterwards his mother said to him, “You know, from you I got nachas [pride]” (130). Future Jewish major leaguers sought out other Jews in small, minor-league towns. Reconnecting with a Jewish community produced charming results: a Jewish family in Mobile delivering Passover dinner to a bed-ridden Cal Abrams, a Jewish car dealer in Omaha offering Lou Limmer the use of a Corvette (a family man, Limmer opted for a station wagon instead), the Jewish community in Birmingham adopting Mickey Rutner and begging him to stay.

The greatest contribution of this ambitious book is the opportunity to read players’ perspectives on Jewish identification and to understand the choices they made. After all, other books—such as the Boxermans’ two-volume Jews and Baseball, also published by McFarland—have already chronicled the professional careers and on-field accomplishments of Jewish major leaguers. In this respect, however, reading Jewish Major Leaguers can be frustrating. Whether because of how the interviews were conducted or how they were...