Another year, another painful season for Chicago Cubs fans.
This erev Rosh Hashanah marks the last game of the season for the team that hasn’t won a World Series since 1908 and hasn’t advanced to the World Series since 1945. Jewcy Editor in Chief Jason Diamond knows this all too well.
[[READMORE]]
"My mother’s side of the family, they were old American Jews," Diamond told a crowd of forty during "A Night of Baseball Stories" held at WORD, an independently-owned book store in Brooklyn. "The first thing they got into, I mean before anything American, was the Chicago Cubs. I don’t know why, but I am the great-grandson of a Chicago Cubs fan," he said. "And that’s (pause) a horrible thing."
Despite lacking the answer to this enigma, Diamond stepped up to the mound to deliver a short story that night. In the semi-autobiographical tale, he offered a ballpark explanation as to how his ancestor, Julius Ginsberg, settled on the Cubs as his team — and how he may have inadvertently cursed them by shaving his beard.
While sprinkled with iconoclasm, Diamond’s story struck a sermonic chord. "You know, if you stay a Cubs fan, you’re gonna make a great Jew," Diamond’s dad once opined on the ride home from another Cubbies loss. "Because being a Jew and being Cubs fan is all about waiting. You wait, and you wait, and you never get what you want. You’ll wander in the desert dry-mouthed and miserable, but you will never get what you want."
Archive Notes: Volunteer organization "Impact for Hunger" set a record for the largest canned food collection ever during a 1983 game between the New York Mets and the Chicago Cubs (The Cubs lost the game 5-2) … While playing for the Cubs in 2008, Jason Marquis became the first Jewish pitcher to hit a grand slam since 1950. This season, while playing for the Washington Nationals, Marquis became the fifth Jewish pitcher to register 100 wins … Well before becoming Major League Baseball commissioner, Ford Frick said in a 1934 broadcast, "Probably the greatest Jewish player ever in the leagues was Johnny Kling, catcher and ‘Brains’ of the famous old Chicago Cubs of the Frank Chance era" … Check out Jeremy Fine’s attempt to identify the best Jewish Chicago baseball players of all time
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
