In an oft-cited scene in the movie Airplane!, a request for “light” reading is met with a flimsy pamphlet titled “Famous Jewish Sports Legends.” But the truth is that Jews were once heavily represented in certain athletic endeavors, especially boxing in 19th-century England and early 20th-century America. Jewish participation in Major League baseball peaked in the 1930s and then steadily declined—except for a spike in the 1970s. Yet that trend has reversed again, as Elli Wohlgelernter writes:
We are living in the Golden Age of Jewish baseball, and the evidence—as with almost every proof in sports—is in the numbers: sixteen Jews appeared in Major League games last year. And that is the record for one season. . . . [T]he eight Major League seasons with the highest number of Jewish players have occurred since 2009, and the top fifteen since 2006. Irrefutable evidence that the last two decades—fifteen of the past seventeen seasons—have been the most fertile years for Jewish ballplayers.
Jewish fascination with America’s Pastime goes back to the beginning, including keeping tabs on which players were one of ours, [and] continued throughout the 20th century, especially when two Hall of Famers burst on the scene: Hank Greenberg in the years leading up to the Shoah; and Sandy Koufax, who blossomed in the 1960s. Their stories of sitting out Yom Kippur—Greenberg in 1934, Koufax in 1965—is the stuff of legend, quoted over and over and over by Jews and non-Jews alike.
Baseball has also been of service to American Jews. At the turn of the 20th century, new immigrants used the sport to help assimilate into their new homeland. Ironically, the game’s utilitarian purpose then flipped a century later: whereas the immigrant Jew—who mainly came from a religiously knowledgeable home—was using baseball to become American, today’s Americans who play for Team Israel—who come mainly from assimilated homes—are using the game to become more Jewish.
Read more on Times of Israel: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/jews-playing-in-major-league-baseball-we-just-set-the-record/