Here is an eye-opening look at one of baseball's most intriguing
and little known stories: the many-faceted relationship between Jews
and black baseball in Jim Crow America.
In Out of Left Field, Rebecca Alpert explores how Jewish sports
entrepreneurs, political radicals, and a team of black Jews from
Belleville, Virginia called the Belleville Grays--the only Jewish
team in the history of black baseball--made their mark on the
segregated world of the Negro Leagues. Through in-depth research,
Alpert tells the stories of the Jewish businessmen who owned and
promoted teams as they both acted out and fell victim to pervasive
stereotypes of Jews as greedy middlemen and hucksters. Some Jewish
owners produced a kind of comedy baseball, akin to basketball's
Harlem Globetrotters--indeed, Globetrotters owner Abe Saperstein was
very active in black baseball--that reaped financial benefits for
both owners and players but also played upon the worst stereotypes of
African Americans and prevented these black "showmen" from
being taken seriously by the major leagues. But Alpert also shows how
Jewish entrepreneurs, motivated in part by the traditional Jewish
commitment to social justice, helped grow the business of black
baseball in the face of the oppressive Jim Crow restrictions, and how
radical journalists writing for the Communist Daily Worker argued
passionately for an end to baseball's segregation. In fact, the
campaign to convince manager Branch Rickey to integrate the Brooklyn
Dodgers was initiated by Daily Worker sports writer Bill Mardo, in an
open letter in the paper.
Deftly written and
meticulously researched, Out of Left Field offers a unique
perspective on the economic and social negotiations between blacks
and Jews in the first half of the 20th century, shedding new light on
the intersection of race, religion, and sports in America.