Bethlehem Says

It’s puzzling, though, that Drake’s “re-dedication” to the faith, a trope that sounds a lot like what jewelry stores might devise for marriage vow renewals, is more about a redefinition of his place in it. He’s had his bar mitzvah at the appropriate time. In the most unexceptional way possible, he was a Jewish boy who passed on into manhood. There’s simply no need to recreate, much less repeat, a ceremony from 13 years ago unless the aim is more of a reboot than a “re-dedication.” That seems to be what “HYFR” is getting at. The person Drake is now has reclaimed the ritual from, well, the ritual itself. The transformation is not of the person, but of the cultural framework surrounding him.

Read the rest of my Awl piece on Drake and heavy bar mitzvah theorizing.

Rebecca T. Alpert, Professor of Religion and Women’s Studies at Temple University, started out trying to get to the bottom of the Jewish affinity for baseball. But, reared on the 1950’s Brooklyn Dodgers, she found it impossible to not also bring race into the picture, at one point arguing for Jackie Robinson as a great Jewish sports hero. She ended up writing Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball (Oxford University Press). I interviewed Dr. Alpert over the summer for a piece that didn’t end up happening. I thought this stuff was a good read, though, so here it is. 

SHOALS: How did you find your way to this topic?

ALPERT: I discovered that in Negro League stories there were often questions about “Well, who were these sort of smarmy Jews who owned Negro League teams, and what were they about?” I wanted to see if there really was anti-Semitism, and it lead me to trying to use baseball to peer at some of these questions that are really about this hypothetical connection between Jews and blacks.

SHOALS: A figure in the book like Abe Saperstein is incredibly hard to make sense of by today’s standards. He wasn’t white, but was more white than the blacks he dealt with professionally. This had its avantages, for him and his black peers (and even the players), but also made him an easy target. There’s a real connection there, but it’s remarkably ambivalent.

ALPERT: With any historical myth, it’s important to see what’s underneath it. But it’s also important to remember the Jews who created that myth saw themselves immediately after the Holocaust. They weren’t talking about the Holocaust, but I do believe they used the changes in American society and use championing the changes in American society as a way to deal with anti-Semitism as much as it was to do with anti-black racism.

SHOALS: That was one of the more striking, I think, single themes in the book. Because that almost really does turn it into what makes it seem self-serving. It could have been anyone. Robinson is, in a way, the missing link between the struggle of Hank Greenberg and Koufax’s great moment of acceptance by mainstream America. What makes it tricky is that he’s at once subject and object.

ALPERT: You can’t separate Koufax from the whole Six Day War phenomenon, as well. When you talk about the power of the civil rights movement, Jews, I think, at that time, translated the civil rights stuff in relation to the Six Day War. And in 1967 was Koufax and the Six Day War and it was all “Jew is beautiful.” I lived through it, and that is how I experienced it. And I think it’s borne out by a lot of the literature. That’s really what was going on.

SHOALS: Also, that’s right on the verge of the late 60s split between Jews and blacks in the movement. It’s interesting timing there that the most Zionist pressure point is also the one where the “special relationship” starts to fray.

ALPERT: Absolutely. I sort of feel like blacks are saying to us, “You’ve stolen enough. You’ve taken enough. Now you’re taking our ‘black is beautiful’ thing. No, you can’t have it. No, you can’t claim to have done anything that has contributed to our well-being.”

SHOALS: I wonder if there also isn’t a different between business interest versus activist interest. When you’re talking about business situations, there’s almost inherently strife, because there’s money involved.. Whereas activism, the people are working together because they have common ideological goals or at least overlapping ones. The Negro Leagues are bound to make Jews look less sympathetic because they’re trying to make money. It was a business. You get the same problem in the record business. Jews helped promote music, but they also exploited artists at times.

ALPERT: Part of the problem with sport, and entertainment as well, is that people don’t want to think of it as a business. They want to think there’s something holier or purer about it, which is, again, how Jews concoct their connection to baseball a lot of the time. But you’re absolutely right when business interests get involved. You read a lot of criticism also of the black Negro League owners. It wasn’t like they were good guys and these Jews were bad guys. I tried to bring that out in the book as well. I wanted to love [owners like] Cumberland Posey and Effa Manley, but they, too, were business people.

Here’s Donald Duck as a Nazi, culled from WW2-era propaganda. Click on this link to see a ladies’ hockey team decked out in swastikas, when the symbol stood for Native American Sanskrit healing. Now that I’ve properly insulated myself with some humor, let’s talk Nazis. I can’t speak for all Jews, and certainly, as someone whose family was scarcely affected by the Holocaust, I’m in a privileged, if attenuated, position when it comes to El Reich. This stuff is only ever so real to me.

That said, Nazi imagery and iconography was an integral part of Jewish collective memory well before Schindler’s List, and Bill Clinton’s “Year of the Holocaust” pronouncement. I don’t care if you think collective memory is a crock. Jews make use of it the best we can, even when, as I said, some people don’t need to resort to linguistic mumbo-jumbo to find their place in it. Part of that is growing up with Nazis on the brain. As mass-slaughter, the Holocaust is unfathomable. But it wasn’t just that. Somehow, one of the worst human undertakings of the modern era was attached to an ideology, and extended fan club, that was chock full of silliness and outright aestheticism. The significance of Germany, or the Germanic ideal, was buried long ago; what remains, as both a magnet for present-day racists in search of a look, and an object of fascination for those who can’t help but confront them as historical fact. Arch-fiends, through their actions, suggest a kind of purity. Beyond that, we also all know about their banality. Yet the irony that continues to serve as the hook, and the lure, is that Nazis also set high watermarks for kookiness, eschatological blather, camp, and fright-as-art.

None of these are good things, but with the shoah internalized and absorbed, they do start to peal away and take on lives of their own. I have had Holocaust flight dreams as far back as I can remember (thanks, EC!). Nazis, on the other hand, are a curiosity, albeit one that must be handled carefully—a boundless source of material that, if anything, is the unapologetic plunder of every Jew. The least we could have is a good laugh, or hard look at, the organization that tried to wipe us off the face of the Earth.

So yes, I was a little surprised to find this passage in Chuck Klosterman’s eulogy for Al Davis:

What is one to make of a Jewish person who is fascinated by Adolf Hitler? How do we comprehend a man who goes out of his way to study the most hated thing he can imagine? In 99.9 percent of all possible scenarios, such paradoxical absorption would be dark and meaningful. It would be twisted and bizarre, and it would be perceived as the ultimate manifestation of self-loathing. Unless, of course, the Jewish person is question was Al Davis. Then it makes perfect sense. Of course Al Davis was interested in the Nazis. Of course he was. Somehow, it would have been more surprising if he hadn’t been. 

I am sorry if anyone, in any office, takes this as a hit piece. It’s just unfathomable to me that a Jew, especially one fascinated by power and image, would not fixate on the Nazis. While I’m sure it galls white supremacists, that history, the legacy, is ours now. It’s why The Producers or the season finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm exist. And though comparing folks to Hitler is like bringing a corpse to a knife-fight, the Nazis as a whole left behind plenty of material to work with. You just have to be Jewish for it to not come off as a hate crime.

Stop me before I destroy the Jewish race! Or so sayeth the comments on my Tablet piece on Jeff Van Gundy and Jewish identity. Calm down. All I wanted to say was that:

Almost all Jewish basketball fans (and plenty of non-Jewish ones) have, at one time or another, sought to confirm their intuitions about Van Gundy, who is diminutive and bald; talks too much and always sounds slightly annoyed at himself for doing so; and, of course, has that vague yet unmistakably European surname. The strong prima facie case for Van Gundy’s Jewishness is only enhanced by his connection to the Knicks, a franchise with strong Jewish overtones. Both Jews and Knicks fans tend to be eager for anything resembling a Jewish presence in Madison Square Garden

For that, I am accused of 19th-century anti-Semitism, and told to “visit a college campus, to see how Jews are represented?” Someone sent his kids to the wrong school! I kind of like what Eric Freeman and I concluded last night. He said it would be “too much, too obvious” for JVG to be Jewish. I responded: “You’re right. He almost doesn’t need to be.”

Rest easy, everyone, I will not stay deconstructing, or subversively reinforcing, stereotypes forever. Nor am I about to turn this into an argument about 21st-century assimilation; I’m glad you grew up strong and able to play sports, if you were. And, sadly, my Paul Newman costume is at the cleaners. Maybe that explains it all.