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.

Last I posted this photo of Roy Hibbert, tricked by Google image search (and urgency) into thinking it was Paul George. No, it wasn’t a case of “they all look the same”—”they” being the Pacers—but wishful thinking on my part. I also put up a video of a very attractive, quiet African-American lady explaining that George only dates white girls, but felt like it wasn’t my place to fall into that discussion and took that down, too. There are certain side-splitting tweets that I won’t RT; I refuse to have an opinion about someone calling someone else an Uncle Tom. Good things to remember when you write about the NBA as a white person—one who bothers to acknowledge race, at least.

Anyway, I am now fine with this being Hibbert, as I’ve realized that this series is moderate boom-time for all signs of personality among the Pacers. I wrote about it on GQ.com. You can send me a caption if you want, but it kind of has to involve giraffes or ears hanging low.

There’s a new Beastie Boys single out, and all of sudden, I’ve realized that I owe these guys a big, fat apology. I’ve never said anything bad about them, much less in any public forum, and I’ve never denied that Licensed to Ill was the first tape I saved up for and bought with my own money. One day I was slicing up some steak for a sandwich—must have been around third grade—and it made me uncomfortable to hear about asses while doing so. The first time I saw the video for “Fight For Your Right”, I felt intense pity for the dorks whose apartment it was. It upset me way more than Friday the 13th, Part 2, my first slasher flick, around the same time. Predictably, I also found Check Your Head unbearably hype, and in time acknowledged Paul’s Boutique as neglected brilliance. There was one track on their Reuben Wilson-inspired instrumental live album that I liked as much as any Roots groove (ah, 1996).

However, whenever I talk about the Beasties, I’m quick to add that almost immediately, I made sure that I got Raising Hell as a Chanukah present, and that while I stayed loyal to the Beasties, I was also discovering the rest of the rap universe. I can’t be the only person who shares in this story, but while some stepping stones are disposable; others probably deserve a modicum of credit—even if, ultimately, that depends more on what’s made of them than what they themselves actually make. Going from the Beastie Boys to other rap, easy. But since I’m pretty sure hip-hop is what got me invested in critical thinking about race; made my interest in jazz almost adorably tinged with racial angst, like this was 1957; and more likely, has led me to approach sports the way I do. So congratulations, Beastie Boys. You changed my life, even if it’s been over a decade since I listened to anything—new or old—that you’ve recorded. When I saw your ABA-inspired shirt in a thrift store recently, my wife convinced me that it was not a good look. Still, I made sure to mention it in The Undisputed Guide as a key moment in ABA revivalism. That about sums it up, I think.