Also published athttps://www.counterpunch.org
UNLIKE MOST EVERYWHERE ELSE, real estate speculators in New York City run the Democratic Party. They care just as little as speculators elsewhere for preserving the City’s history. The D train — the same West End line above which dad slugged that Clincher softball of lore six decades ago — creaks high above that asphalt Bensonhurst ballfield triangle, now bulldozed and “improved”.
Across Benson Avenue, Lafayette High School students painted magnificent murals in tribute to their fellow students who’d died. They updated them every year, utilizing the handball court walls as their canvasses. Shockingly — like Diego Rivera’s famous painting in Rockefeller Center of V.I. Lenin addressing Russia’s revolutionary workers — the school has covered the beautiful artistic tributes to dead friends with gray paint, gray after gray after gray.
Teachers and school administrators stake their claims to the area next to the handball courts by parking their cars on the large cement softball yard that had been the scene of so many great games 50 years ago. No one can play there today, it’s filled with cars. The school has also re-fenced the openings we’d cut to enable us to sneak through late at night and hang out with friends on the high school’s steps. A new sign says they’ve extended the lone grassy baseball diamond in right field to 389 feet from home plate, 94 feet deeper than the infamous short-porch down the right field line in the old Yankee Stadium, That, too, would be quite the impressive shot.
When in 1932 a reporter commented on Babe Ruth’s demand for an $80,000/year contract — same as he received the previous two years — the reporter chortled: $8o,ooo a year! In these times! Don’t be silly, Babe. Why, that’s more than Hoover gets for being president of the United States.“ The Babe was quick to swing back: “What the hell has Hoover got to do with this? Anyway, I had a better year than he did.”
From throughout Gravesend and Bensonhurst, neighborhood youth would meet on the stone stairways by the heavy metal doors at Lafayette. Summer nights were hot and sticky; parents couldn’t afford private air-conditioning, so the teens would explode out of their apartments, gathering, listening to music, singing Doo Wop and “making out“ until after midnight. When the new air-conditioned 24-hour Pathmark supermarket appeared nearby on Cropsey Avenue, its ice cream aisle became the favored and chilled gathering spot.
Math teacher Jack Shalom subbed at Lafayette a few years ago and explored the unfamiliar high school. He discovered behind a tied door a metal plaque — of whom? Jack squeezed behind the obstruction and closely examined the plaque, which honored baseball pitching great Sandy Koufax, the school’s most famous alumnus! (And what of the great musician Howie Cohen? radical Red Balloon Collective troublemaker Doug Appel? former NY Mets owner Fred Wilpon? and notorious billionaire scuzz-ball Jeffrey Epstein? All attended Lafayette H.S. Wilpon was Koufax’s friend long before purchasing the NY Mets; the others high-schooled there a decade later.)
Koufax, as every self-respecting Brooklynite in the late 50s knew, was our hometown hero — and was then whisked off with the Dodgers to Los Angeles where he blossomed into one of the all-time great pitchers, after adjusting his mechanics in 1961 — the year owned by Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle for the New York Yankees. Over the next few years Koufax threw 4 no-hitters, one of them a rare “perfect game“. The Black players on the Dodgers — Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe — protected the young Jewish Koufax from the permicious antisemitism of their white Christian teammates and management, as Newcombe reported years later.
Jack Shalom dusted off the hidden Koufax plaque and rubbed it, expecting the genie to pop out. “Who’s that,“? the security guard asked as he stumbled over Koufax’s name. Jack was too shook up to say, “Koufax — the greatest pitcher in baseball for six years running.“ And he also didn’t say that Koufax was most famous, strangely, for the one game he refused to pitch in October 1965 during the World Series against Minnesota, because the game fell on the first day of Yom Kippur.
“Koufax’s decision to observe Yom Kippur in 1965 didn’t attract particular attention in the media at first,“ writes Steve Lipman in a 2014 article for NY Jewish Telegraph Agency. The New York Times and New York Post reported matter-of-factly that he would miss the start because that day was “the holiest Jewish holiday.“
“… But, through word of mouth in Jewish circles, everyone knew. Over time, that game assumed mythic proportions. … Brandeis University historian Jonathan Sarna tells The Jewish Week. ‘In an era when lots of Jews thought it was best to keep their Judaism quiet,’ Koufax’s act ‘gave some Jews courage to be outwardly Jewish in other ways — by wearing a Jewish symbol, demonstrating for Soviet Jews, or the like.’“
Steven Schnur, an author and college instructor, says that by that one game not played, Koufax became “the universal symbol of a Jew who made a choice that we as a community admired. It has nothing to do with an Orthodox lifestyle, or with a commitment to observance of halacha,“ says Schnur.
Judaism today is unfortunately and wrongly equated with Zionism and the state of Israel. Students protesting Israel’s bombardment and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank are blasted as “antisemites“ — even though many of those protesting Israel’s genocidal acts are themselves Jewish, as were many progressive Jews in the 1940s who opposed the creation of the Jewish state of Israel. New York University has just announced that those who condemn zionism == the political policies and actions entered into by the state of Isrrael — would be taken as having committed a hate crime against individual Jews! They’d risk losing their scholarships and being suspended from school. Lipman doesn’t discuss the great pitcher’s views on today’s historical events. But he observes: “Koufax … was (and remains, as far as is known) devoutly secular, with little formal Jewish education and (according to all accounts) no bar mitzvah. He intermarried twice and divorced twice; he has no children.“
“A secular, non-practicing Jew,“ Jane Leavy describes him in her book Sandy Koufax: A Lefty‘s Legacy. A secular Jew who became a symbol for the entire Jewish community.
“When Sandy Koufax stated that he would not pitch on Yom Kippur, many Jews in America stood a little taller and had a better sense of self-worth and Jewish pride,“ even though Hank Greenberg, playing for the Detroit Tigers 30 years earlier, had also refused to play on Yom Kippur. Rabbi Berel Wein, an Orthodox scholar and historian who now lives in Jerusalem, wrote that Hammering Hank’s “refusal to pitch on Yom Kippur influenced that generation of American Jews to become more publicly assertive and to be less ashamed of their Jewishness. The decision of Koufax to do the Jewish thing so publicly and in such a quintessential American setting as the World Series pumped a new confidence into that generation of American Jews.“
During Koufax’s heyday, Pope John XXIII changed the liturgy. Sunday sermons would no longer pound into Christian church-goers’ heads the calumny “The Jews killed Jesus.“ But Vatican II didn’t prevent the Italian Catholic Corraggio twins who lived in the next building in the Marlboro projects, from punching me. “You killed Jesus“ they’d yell as they chased me through the Projects. I never thought to shout back, “What about Vatican II?“ Instead, I proudly accepted their accusation. “Let’s own it!,“ I thought. There’s power among the powerless in having killed their God, if that’s what they want to believe.
“The Jews killed Jesus“ meme ever really ended; it just receded and is now re-emerging due to Israel’s subjugation and mass-murder of the Palestinian people, in the name of Jews everywhere. So for that reason, as though the commission of genocide is not enough, Jews are obliged to speak up and shout from the rooftops: “Stop! Not in my name!“ Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now When? are so important today.
Koufax is still alive, and now lives in Florida. Through my Bensonhurst neighborhood a black Nissan with “Koufax“ plates slips unnoticed, parking near Lafayette H.S. Is it Sandy? I sometimes wait to see who gets out of the car, but my stakeouts have been too frayed to find out.
