Introduction Making an Adjustment

Introduction Making an Adjustment David M.K. Sheinin and Raanan Rein The Jewish American comedian Lenny Bruce famously reflected, “Who can be glad they’re Jewish? You can say…I’ve made a good adjustment, but that’s all.”1 In his 2013 documentary, “When Jews were Funny,” director Alan Zweig is pre- occupied with and anxious about what has changed in recent decades regard- ing Jewish comedy and Jewish comedians in the United States. More specifically, he asks, is there still “Jewish” comedy? No comedians interviewed have the same answer, but Gilbert Gottfried may have come closest to explaining a shift that has occurred over time. While yiddishkeit, Yiddish in-jokes, the Borscht Belt, and the other categorical “Jewish” markers of a comedian’s identity may have slipped away, Jewish comedy continues to function through comedic devices that identify protagonists as Jewish in conjunction with other, overlap- ping identities. Reflecting an ever more complicated set of ethnic and other identities in the Americas, the shift is away from the rigid, and toward a set of constantly reconfiguring identity borders. So according to Gottfried, on the popular television comedy Seinfeld, “every character in it was a Jew, even though they changed their name…. George Costanza and his family were all Jews, but they have an Italian name.”2 Jews have been adjusting their identities for centuries. Sport tells those adjustment stories in the twentieth century where Jewish sport narratives have both reflected and pushed a growing fluidity and complexity of ethnic identity and its boundaries. Jewish sports narratives have tended away from rigid markers toward more complex, multifaceted identity narratives. In Comerica Park, home of baseball’s Detroit Tigers, sixty-seven years after he retired from the game, fans can still see Hank Greenberg towering over Left Field, a split second after swatting the ball one last time. Sandwiched between Ty Cobb sliding home spikes first, and Charlie Gehringer turning two from second, Greenberg has as rigid an identity as possible, frozen in time as one of Detroit’s greats. At the base of his life-size statue is engraved a list of distinctions – his 1956 Hall of 1 Mordechai Richler, “The Street,” in Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fiction, eds. Linda Hutcheon and Marion Richmond (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); and in Canadian and European Cultural Perspectives, eds. Peter Easingwood, Konrad Gross, and Lynette Hunter (New York: Rodopi, 1996), 81. 2 Alan Zweig, “When Jews Were Funny” [documentary]. (Toronto: Sudden Storm Productions, 2013). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004284494_002 <UN> 2 Sheinin and Rein Fame induction, his 1937 record of 183 runs-batted-in, his 1941 induction into the u.s. Armed Forces, and more. Greenberg registered dozens of remarkable accomplishments, and a memorial plaque under a statue can only show so much. At the same time, can we unbundle what the sculptors/planners left out, what they put in, and what they intended? Is unrecorded information “left out” part of a memory-making process? When the statue was unveiled in 2000 at the opening of Detroit’s brand new stadium, how many in attendance knew much about Greenberg? How many at the ballpark on a spring evening today – many who came there to see the best hitter in baseball, Venezuelan Miguel Cabrera – even know who Greenberg was? A long-time fan might remember that in 1947, after he was traded to Pittsburgh, in a not so subtle nod to Greenberg’s tendency to pull his hits, the Pirates slyly moved the Left Field wall in by 30 feet. Sure enough, the statue shows Greenberg’s trademark swing, with the ball depicted in motion, pulling hard to the left. Despite this meticulous remembrance, other details do not appear. Aside from his last name (which is a far less sharp ethnic identifier to Americans today than it might have been 70 years ago), there is not the slight- est evidence in the memorial that this ball player – the first Jewish sports superstar in the Americas and an athlete who explicitly tied a Jewish identity to his American and baseball identities – was Jewish. In 2014 Detroit, he is “Hammerin’ Hank” not “the Hebrew Hammer.” He grew up in “New York, New York,” but a young fan passing by would learn nothing of his immigrant parents, his birth name (“Hyman”), or the family cloth-shrinking business in the garment district. There’s no word to convey the moment that made him nationally famous when, in 1934, he refused to play an important game on Yom Kippur. Greenberg is remembered today cleansed of his “Jewish-American” identity.3 Perhaps in 2014, Greenberg is no George Costanza precisely because his identity was so carefully and severely constructed in the 1930s that when cast in bronze, there was little of that long ago Jewish identity narrative that might resonate today as heroic, as it once had. Even so when Greenberg climbed onto a national stage, his story was at odds with more typical narratives of Jews in sports. Told by Ashkenazi Jews, there was a time in the Americas when Jewish sports stories tended in two directions. They could be both a source of fun and a device to reaffirm Jewish distinctiveness in the trope of Jews as un-athletic and the related strangeness of sporting cultures. In his 1969 work The Street, the writer Mordecai Richler reviews life on Montreal’s The Main, “a poor man’s 3 Burton A. Boxerman and Benita W. Boxerman, Jews and Baseball, vol. 1 (Jefferson: McFarland, 2007), 177–183. <UN>.

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