Baseball and Me

March, 2018 Vol. 47 No. 2 Jewish Peace Letter Published by the Jewish Peace Fellowship CONTENTS Madelyn Hoffman Pg. 5 Branch Rickey, right, known for helping break baseball's color line by signing Jackie Robinson, left, to play for the Dodgers Murray Polner Baseball Pg. 3 and me Stefan Merken We’re The Magnes Moving ZionistPg.2 Some Sugges- Pg. 2 tions for Liberal Zi- onists and Murray Polner for Progressive Jews Who Rabbi Memory and Arik Ascherson Pg.3 Morality Pg. 5 Aliza Becker Pg.Henry 4 Siegman The Implications of President Trump’s Pg. 6 Jerusalem Ploy Philip J. Bentley Compassionate Pg. 9 listening with- out judgement Gene Knudsen Hoffman 2 • March, 2018 jewishpeacefellowship.org From Where I Sit We’re Moving Stefan fter more than fifty years of being housed Merken in the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s building (Shadowcliff) in Nyack, NY, on the banks of the Hudson River, the JPF is moving because the FOR, which owns the old and beautiful house, has decided to sell. AWhere we’re moving remains a question. But for now, boxes are being packed, furni- ture and furnishings offered for sale. JPF will The JPF will, however, continue receiv- ing mail at our email address jpf@forusa. continue to org and our P.O. Box 271, Nyack, NY, 10960, be the voice or through the FOR. And our office staff will continue handling the work of the JPF. for peace in But what does this mean for the peace movement in 2018 and beyond? Like most the American similar groups, we’ve lost many of our active members in recent years. Men and women Jewish who found meaning in battling war and community. social injustice are disappearing as age and death take their toll and not enough younger people have replaced them, often concentrating on other causes and issues rather than seventeen years of war and constant threats of more wars and injustice. Today, everything is done online. Who needs an office (even a department store?) when the com- puter in a bedroom at home or a smart phone car- ried in one’s pocket has all the information we think we may need? Why stand in the street when you can sign a petition online or send a few bucks to exist- ing peace groups asking for donations online? What we all need to recognize is that life is chang- ing. And that includes the new (and old too) ways we have to resist war lovers and the carnage they create. Where STEFAN it’s going is anyone’s guess. But this I know: The Jewish MERKEN is Peace Fellowship, its current members and those who will chair of the surely follow us will continue to be the voice for peace Jewish Peace in the American Jewish community for years to come. Fellowship. Thank you for your continued support. Y Yes! Here is my tax-deductible contribution to the Jewish Peace Fellowship! $25 / $30 / $50 / $100 / $250 $500 / $1000 / Other $ ____ Enclosed is my check, payable to “Jewish Peace Fellowship” Phone: ______________________________________________ E-mail address: _____________________________________________ (Please provide your name and address below so that we may properly credit your contribution.) Name _____________________________________ Address ___________________________________ City / State / Zip ___________________________ Mail this slip and your contribution to: Jewish Peace Fellowship Y Box 271 Y Nyack, NY 10960-0271 Below, please clearly print the names and addresses, including e-mail, of friends you think might be interested in supporting the aims of the Jewish Peace Fellowship. 3 • March, 2018 jewishpeacefellowship.org Branch Rickey, right, known for helping break baseball's color line by signing Jackie Robinson, left, to play for the Dodgers Community Baseball, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and Me Murray Polner urely God must have been with me when I picked Jackie,” Branch Rickey said after he looked back at his unprecedented signing of Jackie Robinson to a baseball contract in 1947. When Robinson died in 1972 of diabe- tes and hypertension, some white sports columnists wroteS that his coming was no big thing and would have happened sooner or later. Others, more cyni- cal, described Rickey’s motive as greed. But the fact is that before Rickey no one had done it or even se- riously proposed doing it. That’s his legacy. And I guess it’s mine too since when I received a publisher’s contract to write a biography of Rickey (Branch Rickey: A Biography*). I knew I had to find out why so believing and trusting a Christian conserva- tive and Republican supporter of Cold War policies would dare to change the game he revered forever. Very quickly I understood the central role his religious faith played. And for most of his post-Jackie life he peppered his speeches with references to the absence of fairness and justice for Black people and other minorities. “Why is there an epidemic of racism in the world today?,” he began a talk on one steamy summer day in the I was born late fifties in Buf- in Brooklyn. falo to stomping, cheering NAACP When I entered delegates. When visited by Rutgers my early University phi- losophy professor teenage years Houston Peterson little mattered in his suburban Pittsburgh home, but baseball, he called out “Let’s go to church.” They the Brooklyn then drove to a black church and Dodgers, and when the 76-year- Ebbets Field. old Rickey entered, cane in hand, con- gregants stood and shouted, “God Bless you, Mr. Rickey,” while Peterson told me the minister shouted “Amen.” I was born in Brooklyn. When I entered my early teenage years little mattered but baseball, the Brook- lyn Dodgers, and Ebbets Field, which opened in 1913 and drew scores of unique and unusual fans like Hilda Chester ringing her cowbell (immortalized in SABR by Rob Edelman’s first-rate portrait of her), a harebrained and annoying fan constantly yelling “Cooookie” for third baseman Lavagetto, and the atonal, amateurish Dodger Symphony, which paraded around the lower stands between innings. A few priests occasionally blessed the team, even though their prayers went unheeded for years and the Catholic Church pressured baseball in 1947 to ban Hilda Chester became the Brooklyn Fred Frankhouse and Babe Ruth Dodgers most famous fan. Durocher for a year for his supposed immoral behavior. Actually, we lived a myth, namely that Brooklyn was an ethnic paradise of mutually tolerant Irish, Jews, Italians, Scandinavians, and Blacks. In reality, we lived separate lives but still it was a community of Dodger- obsessed fans who happily accepted Robinson’s arrival if not their sons’ infatuation with baseball. In Peter Levine’s Ellis Island to Ebbets Field (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), he quotes Abraham Cahan, a Jewish im- migrant from Russia and editor of the Yiddish language Jewish Daily Forward newspaper, answering a question from a father complaining about his son playing ball. “I want my boy to grow up to be a mensch, not a wild American runner,” the father wrote. To Baseball, and the which Cahan, an assimilationist and dedicated American patriot, replied: “Let city-loyalties it us not raise the children that they should grow up foreigners in their own place.” fostered, symbolized Until then, Ebbets Field was my cathedral and passion for the Dodgers continuity in a my faith. One thing about Rickey was world fractured that he understood the extraordinary hold the team had on its fans. When he by irreparable was forced out by Walter O’Malley—he who kidnapped the team and fled to disruption and high LA (Old joke: An armed Brooklyn man enters a bar and sees Hitler, Stalin and crimes O’Malley: Who does he shoot?)—he wrote about his years in Brooklyn. “They were wonderful years. A community of over three million people, proud, hurt, jealous, seeking geo- graphical, social, emotional status as a city apart and alone and sufficient. One could not live for eight years in Brook- lyn and not catch its spirit of devotion to its baseball club, such as no other city equaled. Call it loyalty and it was.” He was referring to a tradition where speed and technology could never quite supplant his ingrained nineteenth-century deep-seated belief that baseball, and the profound city-loyalties it fostered, symbolized continuity in a world fractured by irreparable disruption and unforgivable high crimes. How, he once asked in a speech, can anyone explain the murders of one and a half million Jewish children by the Nazis and their allies? In 1936, I saw my first Brooklyn Dodger game with my Hebrew school class, shepherded by our rabbi’s brother, sadly a Yankee fan. Bucky Walters, a Philly Continued next page 4 • March, 2018 jewishpeacefellowship.org Continued from page 3 third baseman converted into a pitcher with a windmill motion, faced my favorite, Fred Frankhouse, the idol of Port Royal, Pennsylvania. After the game I broke loose from my classmates and planted myself near the door to the Dodger clubhouse and cornered Frankhouse for his autograph. He signed my scorecard and told me I was a nice boy. In 1989, when I read he had died I sent his family a sympathy card and audaciously signed it, “a loyal Brooklyn and Frankhouse fan since 1936.” By the next year or so, with money I had earned as a delivery boy for a delicatessen and a Garment Center company, and regularly fortified with a sandwich and banana provided by my mother who had somehow begun to understand what baseball meant to me, I took the subway to Ebbets Field and sat alone in the bleachers.

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