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Article: Baseball's Jewish accent. (works about baseball by Jewish writers)
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- January 8, 1994
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1994 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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BESIDES their love of baseball, many of the finest writers about the sport have something else in common. Enough of them to field their own team are Jewish: Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Chaim Potok, Mordecai Richler, Roger Kahn, Eliot Asinof, Eric R. Greenberg, Mark Harris and Joseph Hell-er. Many more have covered the sport as newspaper reporters.
It was, and is, a somewhat odd fixation--baseball was nurtured in American cornfields, a world away from the shtetls of Eastern Europe. Less than 1% of Major League baseball players have been Jewish. Of these, few have played more than a dozen Major League games, and only two--Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax--have been ...