No Jews in Mudville?

[technojce]

I'm writing this post with the World Series (Go Tigers!) on in the background. At the moment, there is no sound, because Wes, my roommate, has turned the sound off on the TV and iTunes up on his Mac. Currently one of the new Bob Dylan songs is playing....

Anyway, as I was watching the game earlier, something I heard in the "stadium music" struck me

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[belugadogzebra]

I know we've been discussing this for two days...but, I changed my search parameters slightly on Google Scholar and found out some interesting things about Jewish identity in the US and baseball.
There are some fabulous books out there on identity, race and religion in sports too.

It seems Jewishness was portrayed increasingly as a religion in the U.S. throughout the 1930s when radio and baseball were really gaining momentum. This was a fairly comfortable fit for most Americans (although I saw some references to ugly media coverage of famous Jewish business men and baseball players--which contradicts the idea that the fit was entirely comfortable). But really, it seems people tended to believe that race was evidenced by skin color, so in that mindset Jewishness wasn't really a situation of a different race, just a different belief system. This was a spin on Jewishness that religion-loving, race-fearing Americans could accept.

So keeping that in mind, and even though it is utterly contradicted by some of the anti-semitic press coverage (worrying about scandals in baseball with Jews controlling money etc.) Americans were increasingly comfortable with Jewishness from the 1930s on, which made room for Jews to become sports stars. Again, this didn't go smoothly. Many Jewish baseball players made tough decisions about how faithful to Jewish customs they would be. There were scheduling conflicts between Jewish holidays and scheduled game days....and there was a lot of pressure on Jewish players not to let the team down. Although there is one case where it actually goes over fairly well when a player doesn't play for religious reasons....again, it seems the acceptance is rather tenuous and conflicted.

What is clear is that Jewishness was not stamped out in baseball at all, but there were significant pressures from the design of the sports game of baseball itself to not be a dogmatic Jew.

I would guess too that the public was more accepting of "less Jewish" behavior even if there was some kind of growing tolerance of a Jewish religion. The message on all minority counts has been pretty clear throughout my lifetime anyway, and I would bet all my money that we inherited that climate from way back.

Here are some long-standing messages running loose in our melting pot culture: Be gay but not flamboyant...be black but don't sound like a nigger...be Jewish but don't make me see it, be from another country at home but speak English in public...homogenize, homogenize,...(oh, but add some vitamin D back into the homogenized mix cuz' we all need some excitement and local "color").