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2 S A N D Y K O U F A X Super Jew Sandy Koufax! The closest thing to a Jewish messiah since Jesus! There isn’t a young Jewish male out there that wasn’t regaled to the tales of the great Koufax. Unhittable as a pitcher. Unimpeachable as a Jew (he didn’t play on Yom Kippur, donchaknow). Does there even need to be a discussion? jew or not jew website At 4:27 p.m. on May 27, 2010, the president of the United States strode to the podium of the East Room to welcome a select group of Jewish notables to the White House. In his opening remarks, President Obama singled out one guest in particular: the president: (Applause.) Thank you so much. It is wonderful to see all of you, and I am proud to welcome you to the first ever event held at the White House to honor Jewish American Heritage Month. (Applause.) This is a pretty, pretty fancy group here, pretty distinguished group. We’ve got senators and representatives. We’ve got Supreme Court justices and successful entrepreneurs, rabbinical scholars , Olympic athletes—and Sandy Koufax.1 It was a terrific line, garnering both laughter and applause—as did the joke the president then added: “Sandy and I actually have something in common—we are both lefties. He can’t pitch on Yom Kippur; I can’t pitch.”2 Without doubt, all assembled understood the reference to Koufax ’s main claim to Jewish fame; as journalist Debra Rubin noted, the former baseball star was “a hero to many in the Jewish community for his refusal to pitch on Yom Kippur [during the World Series of 1965].” In her article “Koufax Wows White House Reception,” Rubin observes 49 50 J E w H O O I N G T H E S I X T I E S how Koufax’s celebrity outshone even Obama’s: “Forget the president. Baseball great Sandy Koufax was the draw at Thursday afternoon’s White House reception in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month. Those attending swarmed Koufax . . . and he was the only guest President Barack Obama singled out in his remarks.”3 The White House also gave Koufax an honored place in the assembly, seating him immediately next to the president in a front row including First Lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, Senator Arlen Specter (who had co-authored the bill instituting Jewish American Heritage Month), and Theodore Bikel. All in all, it was a remarkable display of favoritism, highlighting the unique celebrity of Sandy Koufax. The president ’s privileging of the pitcher anticipated the reaction that many of the invited guests would have toward Koufax. Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, for example, writes of his White House experience: As far as Sandy Koufax goes, I can tell you what I said to him when we finally got a chance to chat at the end of program. I asked him what it felt like to be both a Hall-of-Famer and one of the most important rabbis of the 20th century. He looked at me a little funny and said, “Believe me, I’m no rabbi.” I explained that there was probably no person who empowered a certain generation of Jews, especially young men and boys, to claim their Jewishness with pride, confidence and joy, and if that isn’t being a great rabbi, I didn’t know what was. His eyes welled up with tears and he said, “Thank you rabbi for putting me in your club.”4 Hirschfield’s anecdote reveals something of the extraordinary celebrity American Jews have bestowed on Koufax, a phenomenon that has become all the more evident in recent years. Yet the same anecdote also points to some internal contradiction in the Koufax myth. Although elevated in the eyes of many Jews to the level of religious icon, Koufax in reality was never terribly religious—as he honestly put it, “Believe me, I’m no rabbi”—nor was his choice to miss a game on Yom Kippur the heroically pious act it has been puffed up to be. Koufax was a great baseball player, certainly; but he has entered the realm of collective memory as a great Jew. As this chapter will further explore, this is but one of the many anomalies contained in the American Jewish celebrity of Sandy Koufax. Any consideration of Koufax’s celebrity has to begin with...

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