Jewish Major Leaguers in Their Own Words: Oral Histories of 23 Players
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Peter Ephross with Martin Abramowitz. Jewish Major Leaguers in Their Own Words: Oral Histories of 23 Players. Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2012. 227 pp. Paper, $35.00. Jewish Major Leaguers in Their Own Words contains twenty-three interviews, conducted by a dozen different interviewers, spanning three decades, but with one clear message. Being a Jewish major leaguer has long meant making choices, often defying expectations of family and community. For some, a career in professional baseball meant eschewing the careers that nice Jewish boys were supposed to pursue. In 1938, for example, Sam Nahem chose to put a law career on hold to play baseball, to his mother's initial chagrin. For most, a career in baseball necessitated making compromises on expressing their Jewish identification, frequently disappointing their parents--with the exception of Mary Rotblatt's father, who was glad when his son chose baseball over an expensive bar mitzvah. Being a Jewish professional baseball player has meant reconciling seemingly incompatible identities and contradictory expectations. It is painful to read how many players felt lonely and guarded around teammates, afraid to react to supposedly harmless but nevertheless latently anti-Semitic remarks for fear of violating clubhouse norms. It is especially heartbreaking to read Saul Rogovin's description of his own conflicted feelings when A1 Rosen challenged Rogovin's anti-Semitic teammate: feeling proud of Rosen (a fellow Jew), feeling disloyal for being proud of Rosen (an opposing player), feeling forced to choose between his two identities, and feeling ashamed for being unable to choose. The archetypal choice, of course, is the choice: whether or not to play on the High Holidays. Players felt pressured by Hank Greenberg's and then Sandy Koufax's iconic choices to sit out important games on Yom Kippur. Jesse Levis, for example, was sitting on the Brewers' bench on Yom Kippur, fasting, when an unknowing manager inserted him as a pinch hitter. Levis failed to get a hit--not only then, but for the rest of the season--a fate he attributed to divine punishment but more likely his internalizing pressures to try to reconcile a career in baseball with Jewish identity expression. Jewish players were also aware of Jewish fans' pride in and expectations of their heroes' choices to honor Jewish tradition, and this, too, was often stressful. Many players internalized a responsibility to increase the numbers of Jews in baseball by inspiring young Jews to take up the game--If Hank Greenberg can become a ballplayer, so can you (39). …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".