“Where did you grow up?” Barry Weinberg asks me.
“Here,” I reply.
“See, that explains it,” he says.
Weinberg is a former Major League Baseball trainer who spent over 30 years in the big leagues. He worked for the Yankees, the Athletics and spent 24 years alongside Cardinals manager Tony La Russa. Weinberg has three World Series Rings (one with the Oakland Athletics and two with the Cardinals) and four League Champion Rings.
I’m talking to Weinberg at Jewish Baseball Heritage Night at Shirley Povich Field in Bethesda, Maryland. I’m working on a book about Jewish contributions to American culture. Weinberg grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, not far from Potomac, the town I’m from. He tells me that he didn’t run into antisemitism growing up here, and he’s not surprised that someone like me, who loves Jewish people and culture (despite being Catholic), grew up here also. Maybe it’s that the Mid-Atlantic region, “the land of pleasant living,” is too far north for Southern racism and too far South for Spike Lee conflagrations. Maybe we’re just more chill here. Or maybe Jews have such a long history here that people like me consider them part of the family.
“Growing up in this area,” Weinberg says, “I think everybody had a lot of Jewish friends and neighbors. I didn’t feel an antisemitism. Everybody got along where I grew up in Silver Spring.”
Weinberg adds that “in the world of sports, nobody cares about any of that. They only care if you know how to play. Sports has been a way to eliminate some of it. It’s the world around us that’s the problem. Players don’t care if the guy pitching against them is Jewish of black or whatever.”
In our talk Weinberg often touches on that same point—that it’s the world that has changed, not us. While he didn’t experience prejudice growing up in Maryland, he did last year in Amsterdam. He was there for an exhibition game with Israeli Baseball and they needed Israeli guards.
Shirley Povich Field is named after the legendary Jewish Washington Post sports writer. Povich wrote a column for the Post for 70 years. He was also a huge fan of my grandfather, who played first base for the Washington Nationals from 1915-1932. Povich called Joe Judge “poetry in motion” at first base.
Weinberg fell in love with baseball as a kid in the 1960s when Senators slugger Frank Howard moved in across the street. Howard took Weinberg to RFK to see batting practice. Another of Weinberg’s inspirations was Bill Zeigler, the athletic trainer for the Senators. When he was a kid Weinberg wrote Zeigler a letter about leaving school and joining his Senators staff. Zeigler responded with encouragement, but recommended Weinberg stay in school. Five years later they were on opposing benches, Weinberg with the Yankees and Zeigler with the Rangers. The two have remained friends.
Weinberg has great insight into the game as well as stories from his career, from working with Tony La Russa to getting fired by George Steinbrenner—“I guess he just needed someone to blame,” he says.
At that point I notice that “Hava Nagilia” is playing in between batters. And sitting next to me is Washington, DC-based filmmaker Aviva Kempner. Kempner has made award-winning documentaries about under-known Jewish heroes for over 40 years. Her films include The Spy Behind Home Plate, about baseball player and OSS spy Moe Berg Rosenwald, a documentary on how philanthropist Julius Rosenwald partnered with Booker T. Washington in establishing over 5000 schools with African-Americans, Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, about Gertrude Berg, who created the first television sitcom, and my favorite, the Peabody-awarded The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, about the Hall Fame slugger who faced antisemitism during the 1930s.
I talked to Kempner about the new antisemitism roiling America. I told her our conversation would be off the record and I would be contacting her to request a formal interview for my book.
At one point, when the game was about to start, a group of Cub Scouts shuffled behind home plate to present the colors for “The National Anthem.” Like most everyone else here they’re Jews, just more cute and fidgety than the rest. Seeing their innocent faces I felt overcome with sadness. The future for them didn’t look bright. They deserved the America that Barry Weinberg and I grew up in.