Jews and Baseball: a love story that could have been so much more

Hank Greenberg hits a home run in a 1938 game between the Detroit Tigers and the Chicago White Sox.

Apparently, Babe Ruth was not Jewish. Nor is Barry Bonds, for which, as my Yiddish-speaking grandmother would have said, "Gott zu danken." But Hank Greenberg was Jewish. And so is Sandy Koufax. And that's the problem with Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story. Too much of them, not enough of other things.

Once Peter Miller's documentary (he snagged Dustin Hoffman as narrator) has established that American Jews love baseball because it has allowed them to feel American, to play American, to be American, where else can it go? You might say the same for Italian-Americans or Irish-Americans. Jews, though, were the outsider's outsiders on account of the peculiarities of their religion and their funny hats.

But let's allow that there was some unique symbiosis between Jews and baseball that eased assimilation into American life. Where does that leave us?

Well, it leaves us with a 91-minute documentary in which archival footage and a full roster of talking heads ring small variations on that theme, blended with homages to Greenberg, Koufax and almost every Jew who has played major league ball, from Lipman "Lip" Pike in the 1870s, through Moe Berg (a catcher, a spy, and a scholar who spoke seven languages; it was said he couldn't hit in any of them), to contemporaries such as former Blue Jay Sean Green and Boston's Kevin Youkilis, who looks more like a biker than a bocher.

And, nice as it is to see the surprisingly long roster of Hebraic ballplayers, their display feels a lot like an inescapable bar mitzvah gift of the past, From Moses to Einstein: They All Are Jews, a book designed to remind boys not to waver in their commitment to their seriously accomplished tribe.

But back to Greenberg and Koufax. The two greatest Jewish players dominate the doc. Much is made, and rightly so, of Greenberg's meaning to American Jews, especially during the 1930s, with the rise of Hitler, and his decision not to play on Yom Kippur during the heat of the 1934 pennant race, which endeared him to Jews everywhere and is his great, and really only, link - superb skills aside - to Koufax, an elegant and reclusive left-hander who excused himself from pitching the first game of the 1965 World Series for the same reason.

But there's already a very good documentary about Greenberg, Aviva Kempner's 1998 film The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg. And with Koufax, until we get to Yom Kippur, we have a portrait of a great pitcher who might have been Spanish or Lithuanian.

What does not get explored is what makes a Jewish player Jewish or how the relationship of player to community has changed over time: Greenberg's Detroit of the 1930s, with its casual racism and anti-Semitic provocateurs Father Coughlin and Henry Ford, is far from Koufax's L.A. of the 1960s, or Youkilis's Boston today.

Miller and producer William Hechter have assembled an admirable lineup, including baseball commissioner Bud Selig, Larry King (this reviewer once watched part of a game with him in L.A.), Ron Howard and Marvin Miller, who abolished the reserve clause that bound players to their teams and allowed them to become millionaires (Let my people go, indeed!). Miller's enemies could fix him with a double Jewish stereotype, greedy capitalist and socialist rabble-rouser.

But the relationship between Jews and baseball goes well beyond the playing field. Jews have been baseball writers and team owners. And Jewish novelists Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Mark Harris, Paul Auster and Michael Chabon have explored baseball as a great American theme. Where are their voices?

That's not to suggest that Jews and Baseball isn't enjoyable: the organization, the writing by Ira Berkow, the footage, the research, all excellent. But it could have been so much more.

Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story