This book explores the many-faceted relationship between Jews and black baseball in Jim Crow America. Jewish sports entrepreneurs, political radicals, and a team of black Jews 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. The book 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 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 radical journalists writing for the communist Daily Worker argued passionately for an end to baseball’s segregation. This book offers a unique perspective on the economic and social negotiations between blacks and Jews in the first half of the twentieth century, shedding new light on the intersection of race, religion, and sports in America.
