// boroughing //
Fall 2016
No Ordinary Game:
Israel Comes Home to the Diaspora
Aaron Fisher
Over the summer, I learned that not only would Israel have a team in the preliminary round of the World Baseball Classic, but also, the games would be held in Coney Island, in Brooklyn, in September. I immediately went online and bought a ticket, relatively sure that I was one of the only people to do so.
Having served as an unofficial destination for Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the early 20th century, Coney Island felt like the perfect place for Team Israel to have opened its stint in the 2017 World Baseball Classic—a relatively new baseball tradition in which teams from around the world compete in a tournament every four years.
The poetry of the tournament being in Brooklyn was not lost on the players. “All through the [New York Mets] system, it was Ike [Davis] and I. We were the Jews on the team. In New York especially, it was kind of special. This is a very Jewish city,” former Met Josh Satin said in an interview with the New York Post. Satin and Davis are on Team Israel’s roster this year. While both Satin and Davis are Americans born in the United States, they, along with their Jewish-American teammates, wore the blue and white uniforms of another country, Israel.
It took more than an hour to get from Columbia to Coney Island, and once we arrived, my friend and I decided to forgo the first couple of innings of the game to eat a Jewish, yet distinctly non-kosher, meal at the original Nathan’s Famous hot dog stand near the boardwalk. Founded by Polish Jewish immigrant Nathan Handwerker on Coney Island in 1916, Nathan’s Famous, like Team Israel itself, is a product of Jewish immigration to America: as far as I can tell, only one member of the Israel national baseball team, Shlomo Lipetz, was born in Israel. But the Law of Return works in favor of Team Israel—anyone who is Jewish or has a Jewish parent, grandparent, or spouse is eligible to play for the national team.
Anyone who knows me would be stunned that I intentionally skipped the first couple of innings of a baseball game. But this game, as a concept, was nearly nonsensical to me: it was a contest between Great Britain and Israel, two countries known more for their complicated relationship in the first half of the 20th Century than for their baseball skills. The intricacies of the game were not the driving force behind my being there; instead, I was at the game for the cultural experience.
After we finished our treif, we walked over to the stadium. Israel and Great Britain were facing off at the regular home of the Brooklyn Cyclones, a minor league affiliate of the New York Mets. Because it was the top seed in its bracket, Team Israel was the “home team,” which immediately made sense considering the fans in attendance. In our section, I counted one man with a red sweatshirt that said “England” on it; it seemed to represent an English soccer team. The rest of the section—and the entire park—was filled with blue and white.
The fans consisted of a mix of young Brooklyn Jews with multiple ear piercings, elderly men with Eastern European accents, Israelis, middle age Mets fans wearing jerseys of Jewish major leaguers who last played half a decade ago, yarmulke-clad yeshiva boys, and seminary girls in black skirts, standing together and waving their Israeli flags to a rendition of “Cotton-Eyed Joe.” When the PA announcer offered some facts about Great Britain and Israel on the video board in the fourth inning, and announced that “the capital of Israel is Jerusalem,” the crowd erupted, its loudest cheers of the night except for washed-up former Mets slugger Ike Davis when he hit a pinch-hit, bases loaded single in the seventh inning. American Jews cheered for fellow Americans while waving Israeli flags, a stirring sign of unity between the two countries with the largest Jewish populations in the world.
Over the course of the game, we got to know the other fans in our section. A tattooed and earring-clad man, holding a baseball scorebook and an Israeli flag, sat next to us. Two elderly men in the row behind us discussed the intricacies of some of their favorite baseball trades—all of which took place before the 1950s. One favorite involved the Philadelphia Athletics, a team that has not been in Philadelphia since 1953.
The crowd activities and promotions at MCU Park were typical of a minor league baseball stadium. There was a contest between fans squirting water at each other, but at this game, the fans were named Shira and Tzipporah.
In the sixth inning, I left my seat to go to the bathroom. I passed three NYPD counterterrorism officers and a kosher food stand—which replaced the Nathan’s Famous hot dog stand from the Cyclones’ regular season games. This time, I got a knish.
Even in the bathroom, the crowd was buzzing. Two little Orthodox boys, each about six years old, one wearing a Dodgers hat and one an Athletics hat, were in the middle of a conversation about the baseball tournament that quickly turned into a sophisticated meditation on geopolitics and religious strife.
“But Pakistan is in their bracket,” one of the boys told the other. “Do you think they’ll refuse to play us?”
“Maybe,” the other boy replied. “It’s because of the anti-Semitism.”
As far as the playing went, Great Britain took the lead in the top of the seventh, but Israel came back strong with a big inning, scoring four runs in the bottom of the same inning off a beleaguered and unimpressive British bullpen. An Australian chap named Vaughan Harris took the loss; clearly, Israel was not the only team on the field with liberal eligibility rules.
“Baseball doesn’t really make sense, as a game, for the British,” my new 65-year-old friend told me. We all agreed the British are too polite for a sport that encourages spitting sunflower seeds and chewing tobacco onto the ground.
After their win, Team Israel went on to win its next two games, and will compete in the main tournament in March in Seoul, South Korea.
In The Big Lebowski, The Dude questions Walter’s Judaism. “Three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax,” Walter explains, telling The Dude why he didn’t convert back to Catholicism when his Jewish wife left him. There’s no doubt Walter would agree: in Coney Island, Jewish baseball lives on.
Team Israel came to Brooklyn, and the Jewish diaspora followed. In the most American of places—a minor league baseball park on Coney Island—we ate knishes instead of hot dogs, and watched Craig Breslow, major league baseball pitcher, Yale alumnus, biochemistry major, and proud Jew, take the win.
Having served as an unofficial destination for Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the early 20th century, Coney Island felt like the perfect place for Team Israel to have opened its stint in the 2017 World Baseball Classic—a relatively new baseball tradition in which teams from around the world compete in a tournament every four years.
The poetry of the tournament being in Brooklyn was not lost on the players. “All through the [New York Mets] system, it was Ike [Davis] and I. We were the Jews on the team. In New York especially, it was kind of special. This is a very Jewish city,” former Met Josh Satin said in an interview with the New York Post. Satin and Davis are on Team Israel’s roster this year. While both Satin and Davis are Americans born in the United States, they, along with their Jewish-American teammates, wore the blue and white uniforms of another country, Israel.
It took more than an hour to get from Columbia to Coney Island, and once we arrived, my friend and I decided to forgo the first couple of innings of the game to eat a Jewish, yet distinctly non-kosher, meal at the original Nathan’s Famous hot dog stand near the boardwalk. Founded by Polish Jewish immigrant Nathan Handwerker on Coney Island in 1916, Nathan’s Famous, like Team Israel itself, is a product of Jewish immigration to America: as far as I can tell, only one member of the Israel national baseball team, Shlomo Lipetz, was born in Israel. But the Law of Return works in favor of Team Israel—anyone who is Jewish or has a Jewish parent, grandparent, or spouse is eligible to play for the national team.
Anyone who knows me would be stunned that I intentionally skipped the first couple of innings of a baseball game. But this game, as a concept, was nearly nonsensical to me: it was a contest between Great Britain and Israel, two countries known more for their complicated relationship in the first half of the 20th Century than for their baseball skills. The intricacies of the game were not the driving force behind my being there; instead, I was at the game for the cultural experience.
After we finished our treif, we walked over to the stadium. Israel and Great Britain were facing off at the regular home of the Brooklyn Cyclones, a minor league affiliate of the New York Mets. Because it was the top seed in its bracket, Team Israel was the “home team,” which immediately made sense considering the fans in attendance. In our section, I counted one man with a red sweatshirt that said “England” on it; it seemed to represent an English soccer team. The rest of the section—and the entire park—was filled with blue and white.
The fans consisted of a mix of young Brooklyn Jews with multiple ear piercings, elderly men with Eastern European accents, Israelis, middle age Mets fans wearing jerseys of Jewish major leaguers who last played half a decade ago, yarmulke-clad yeshiva boys, and seminary girls in black skirts, standing together and waving their Israeli flags to a rendition of “Cotton-Eyed Joe.” When the PA announcer offered some facts about Great Britain and Israel on the video board in the fourth inning, and announced that “the capital of Israel is Jerusalem,” the crowd erupted, its loudest cheers of the night except for washed-up former Mets slugger Ike Davis when he hit a pinch-hit, bases loaded single in the seventh inning. American Jews cheered for fellow Americans while waving Israeli flags, a stirring sign of unity between the two countries with the largest Jewish populations in the world.
Over the course of the game, we got to know the other fans in our section. A tattooed and earring-clad man, holding a baseball scorebook and an Israeli flag, sat next to us. Two elderly men in the row behind us discussed the intricacies of some of their favorite baseball trades—all of which took place before the 1950s. One favorite involved the Philadelphia Athletics, a team that has not been in Philadelphia since 1953.
The crowd activities and promotions at MCU Park were typical of a minor league baseball stadium. There was a contest between fans squirting water at each other, but at this game, the fans were named Shira and Tzipporah.
In the sixth inning, I left my seat to go to the bathroom. I passed three NYPD counterterrorism officers and a kosher food stand—which replaced the Nathan’s Famous hot dog stand from the Cyclones’ regular season games. This time, I got a knish.
Even in the bathroom, the crowd was buzzing. Two little Orthodox boys, each about six years old, one wearing a Dodgers hat and one an Athletics hat, were in the middle of a conversation about the baseball tournament that quickly turned into a sophisticated meditation on geopolitics and religious strife.
“But Pakistan is in their bracket,” one of the boys told the other. “Do you think they’ll refuse to play us?”
“Maybe,” the other boy replied. “It’s because of the anti-Semitism.”
As far as the playing went, Great Britain took the lead in the top of the seventh, but Israel came back strong with a big inning, scoring four runs in the bottom of the same inning off a beleaguered and unimpressive British bullpen. An Australian chap named Vaughan Harris took the loss; clearly, Israel was not the only team on the field with liberal eligibility rules.
“Baseball doesn’t really make sense, as a game, for the British,” my new 65-year-old friend told me. We all agreed the British are too polite for a sport that encourages spitting sunflower seeds and chewing tobacco onto the ground.
After their win, Team Israel went on to win its next two games, and will compete in the main tournament in March in Seoul, South Korea.
In The Big Lebowski, The Dude questions Walter’s Judaism. “Three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax,” Walter explains, telling The Dude why he didn’t convert back to Catholicism when his Jewish wife left him. There’s no doubt Walter would agree: in Coney Island, Jewish baseball lives on.
Team Israel came to Brooklyn, and the Jewish diaspora followed. In the most American of places—a minor league baseball park on Coney Island—we ate knishes instead of hot dogs, and watched Craig Breslow, major league baseball pitcher, Yale alumnus, biochemistry major, and proud Jew, take the win.
\\AARON FISHER is a junior in Columbia College. He can be reached at af2803@columbia.edu. Photo courtesy of the Israel Association of Baseball.