The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (50 page)

Even as a young boy in the city’s sandlot leagues, he was a legend. His fastball as a teenager was clocked in the nineties but he had next to no control. Until Koufax was in his mid-twenties, a batter’s hard helmet and swiftness in ducking were little protection for those balls whizzing past like bullets.

Sandy had tremendous control, however, on the Lafayette High School and University of Cincinnati basketball squads. He was an outstanding six-foot-two forward with an accurate one-handed jump shot and an average ten points per game. Also, Koufax secured a place on the freshman baseball team roster as an incredibly precocious cannon baller. The college student struck out fifty-one batters in thirty-two innings, thirty-four of those strikeouts in consecutive games.

The next summer, he tried out for the New York Giants, was passed over, but then sought out by the Pirates and the Braves. The Dodgers organization beat out Pittsburgh and Milwaukee by appealing to his family’s Kings County loyalty and offering a larger signing bonus.

Koufax joined the Brooklyn Dodger team during the spring training of 1955, the year “dose bums” would finally grab their World Series rings. He was still unable to throw precisely, had limited experience, was literally all over the lot, and to compensate for his nervousness, he threw faster and still more wildly. Due to the rule mandating that a “bonus baby” should not be sent for seasoning in the minors, but slowly ripen or rot on the bench in the big leagues, Koufax observed Don Newcombe, Johnny Podres, Sal Maglie, and Clem Labine mow down the National League, and then, blessedly, beat those “damn” New York Yankees for Brooklyn’s first (and last) world championship.

Finally, in 1959, after four years of bench warming, Koufax became what field manager Walter Alston had so patiently expected—a great pitcher. In just 153 innings, Koufax struck out 173 (eighteen in one game to set a record—after thirteen in the previous outing for another record of thirty-one strikeouts in two straight), helping to propel the now Los Angeles Dodgers to a pennant and World Series championship over Chicago’s White Sox.

He was nearly traded to the Yankees during the off-season, but the Dodgers kept the faith and him. A disastrous 1960 season followed, his 1959 won-lost record of 8—6 plummeting to 8—13 due to an unnatural rush in his pitching gait and a “silent temper” (in general manager Buzzie Bavasi’s words).

When the Jewish second-string catcher Norm Sherry advised Koufax to “just try to get the ball over,” he began to throw more easily, naturally. And woe to National League hitters, for Koufax began to juxtapose his brutal fastball with a winding curve more accurate than a Cruise missile. Koufax kind of gave away his curveball with a unique twist of his elbow when he threw, but batters were lost when it fell off the table crossing the plate.

Sandy Koufax pitching in the 1963 World Series.

No-hitters followed in each of years 1962 through 1965, including a perfect, no-runners-on-base game thrown against the Chicago Cubs. In a first inning of what would be nine innings of wondrous no-hit perfection against the New York Mets, three batters struck out on nine straight pitches. Star hitter Richie Ashburn, a skilled man with the bat, was said to have stood amazed, laughing as the strikes flew irresistibly by.

A very private man, Koufax was called by the press “The Man with the Golden Arm,” and for five seasons that is what he was. Not since Lefty Grove had there been such a southpaw. Before Koufax retired after the 1966 season due to an arthritic elbow, he had led the league in earned run average for five consecutive seasons, complete games for two, most strikeouts and innings pitched for four out of six, and virtuosic twenty-six- and twenty-seven-win seasons back to back to conclude.

Perhaps his most famous outing to the mound, surely his most influential, was the day on Yom Kippur, 1965 when Koufax refused to pitch in the first game of the World Series against the Minnesota Twins. Preferring to attend synagogue with his parents rather than disobey religious proscription against work on the holiest of Jewish holidays, Koufax became a world figure. (His beloved comrade, ace Don Drysdale, substituted, was shelled by Minnesota after two and a half innings, and when yanked in the third inning quipped to manager Alston, “Bet you wish I was Jewish, too!”) When Koufax returned after the holiday to pitch shutouts in the fifth and seventh games, clinching the series for the Dodgers, a divine inspiration for his miraculous skills was commonly implied.

For post-Holocaust Jewry and to millions of non-Jews glued to their television sets, Sandy Koufax’s genius pitching (even more than the exploits of trailblazers slugger Hank Greenberg, basketball’s Nat Holman, and quarterback Sid Luckman before the war) confirmed that great Jewish athletes could compete and triumph in America’s sports with exemplary talent, integrity, and fierce pride. Before Koufax, Jews had excelled in nearly every field but never had there been a Jewish athlete quite like him. Koufax was the greatest southpaw in modern baseball history (sorry, Lefty Grove fans!), quite simply the best, the dominant pitcher of his era, and forever a hero to Jewish kids who cannot get enough of baseball.

P
aid lavish sums by American and English collectors to locate and then authenticate important works of art, Berenson was his own greatest creation, the ultimate civilized man. With his business partner, the British art dealer Joseph Duveen, Berenson made huge sums certifying the validity of artworks to interested but untutored buyers.

Berenson’s saga began in a small town outside Vilna in Lithuania. Butrimonys was an Eastern European
Shtetl
much like countless other villages in the Pale of Settlement. Young boys took their Hebrew lessons, reveling in the intricacies of the Talmud, largely oblivious of the outside world. In 1875, Berenson emigrated to Boston with his family. Out of a humble background, he rose in a few years, largely self-taught from long hours of study in the public library, to Boston Latin School, Boston University, and then scholastic fame at Harvard.

Liberal wealthy Bostonians were charmed by Berenson’s brilliance and spirituality. Sent to Europe on a traveling fellowship funded by the patron Isabella Stewart Gardner, he came under the influence of Giovanni Morelli, a Florentine who preached a new canon of art criticism based on scientific methods. Berenson visited every church and museum he could find in Italy, systematically noting in his encyclopedic mind the works of the great and lesser
maestri.

His choice of a mate, a married woman named Mary Costelloe, also changed his life. Overwhelmed by Berenson’s wit and intellect, Mary left her husband, a lawyer and the father of her two children. Berenson educated her about art, and she reciprocated by organizing their family unit into the most sought-after art specialists in Europe. Berenson’s old benefactor, Gardner, called upon their services in building up a wondrous private collection of Renaissance paintings.

The Berensons also began to work for others of similar wealth and lavish spending habits, intent on owning that most highly regarded of all possessions of the time, the private art collection. Cheated by deceitful art dealers not constrained by ethical concerns, wealthy collectors and institutions came to view the Berensons as their only reliable source of expert advice. Although he was repulsed all his life by the commercial art world (his biographer Ernest Samuels recalls Berenson calling it the “pig trade”), enormous profits were made from fees collected in the service of confused patrons. Through his association with the art dealer Duveen, Berenson assembled many of the great private collections that later found their way into the major American art museums.

With their newfound wealth, the Berensons purchased a villa outside Florence named I Tatti. The formal house became the center of international art commerce. Berenson, an avid collector of books, devoted great energy to amassing a library of tens of thousands of volumes. The library was bequeathed to Harvard University and became the cornerstone of I Tatti Institute, known also as The Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.

Berenson lived in I Tatti like a Renaissance prince. His palatial home became a center of European culture, attracting disciples (such as future great art historians Kenneth Clark and Meyer Schapiro), literary greats (Somerset Maugham, John Steinbeck, Mary McCarthy, and Edith Wharton), and public figures (Harry Truman, Walter Lippmann, Judge Learned Hand) to his influence. Surrounded by fascist and then deadly Nazi persecution, he remained in Italy for the duration of the war, somehow surviving the Holocaust (unlike the fictional character Aaron Jastrow, whom Herman Wouk in his
The Winds of War
and
War and Remembrance
loosely based on Berenson and had murdered in the flames of Auschwitz). Berenson lived for another fourteen years after the war, a true esthete, resplendent in the glory of his intellect and culture, his scholarly methods the prime model for generations of art historians.

I
n 1933, nineteen-year-olds Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two childhood friends living twelve blocks apart in Cleveland, Ohio, created a fictional character who would become more famous than Sherlock Holmes or Tarzan and the force behind the launching of a new industry based on a new literary genre—the comic book. Their character was a man “more powerful than a locomotive, faster than a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!”

Superman was the first and the most American (although literally out of this world) of all the superheroes. Modeled after Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars, intellectual, muscle-bound Doc Savage, and the Saturday matinee serial spaceman Flash Gordon, his tale adapted from the science-fiction novel
When Worlds Collide,
Superman was conceived during the darkest days of the Depression and European fascism. Born Kal-El (a curiously Hebraic-sounding alien) on the immense planet Krypton, “whose inhabitants had evolved, after millions of years, to physical perfection” (from early DC Comics’ explanations of his amazing strength), the first
Action Comics
featuring Superman (1938) was a spectacular hit, 200,000 copies selling out in days.