Volume 15 Number 1June 2008

athletes, Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, electronic revolution, psychohistory, rage, sports psychology

By 1979, when The Culture of Narcissism was published, the world was well into the electronic revolution. An overabundance of images combined with the destruction of many social controls led Christopher Lasch and other social critics to predict that we were headed into the age of the narcissist. He wrote that we would begin to see more anger and a greater sense of emptiness in patients. He felt that many were on a desperate quest to find a new self. In his book about narcissism, Lasch devoted an entire chapter to the world of sports, realizing that the narcissist would be drawn to the adoring crowd where he could feed off of the cheering, fill his emptiness, and express his rage-all at the same time.

athletes, Barry Bonds, celebrity, Jack Molinas, legal transgressions, Marcus Moore, Mark Chmura, Michael Vick, Orenthal James Simpson, psychohistory, sports psychology

In this article, the author sets out a concern about how the legal system treats high-profile athletes charged with offenses, contending that some receive excessive leniency while others are prosecuted more vigorously than warranted. The author proposes four variables behind this range: the psychology of athletes who engage in risky off-field conduct, the makeup of particular judges, overzealous prosecutors, and the psychology of jurors. The author maintains that many athletes are conditioned from youth to expect protection from consequences, that very large contracts reinforce this expectation, and that it parallels a wider erosion of respect for authority in American culture. The author describes this in clinical terms and coins a profile of his own for it. The cases discussed are Barry Bonds’s child support ruling, Michael Vick’s dog-fighting sentence, the Duke lacrosse prosecution under Mike Nifong, Mark Chmura’s acquittal, the O.J. Simpson and Marcus Moore trials, and the Jack Molinas point-shaving conviction. The author is critical of the Bonds ruling and of Nifong, cites a poll of public expectations in the Vick case, and invokes celebrity worship syndrome to explain juror leniency. The author concludes that American culture appears to be moving toward a harsher standard for athletes’ transgressions.

athletes, head trauma, Michael Vick, National Football League (NFL), psychohistory, sports psychology

This article examines the 2007 case of Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick, who admitted taking part in a dog-fighting operation in Virginia in which dogs were killed, and who was sentenced to twenty-three months in prison. The author questions explanations based on gambling, Vick’s background, and loyalty to old friends, and compares his case with the November 2007 killing of Washington Redskins safety Sean Taylor. Drawing on New York Times and Washington Post reports, the author reviews evidence of long-term brain damage from repeated head trauma, team handling of concussions, and the condition of retired players such as Dave Pear. The author maintains that the National Football League’s ethic of playing through pain leaves players harmed by those in authority over them. Following a suggestion in Kenneth Jacobson’s letter to the Washington Post, the author applies Anna Freud’s concept of identification with the aggressor, as elaborated in Leonard Shengold’s Soul Murder, and proposes that Vick’s conduct emulated the treatment players receive from league officials. The author extends the same dynamic to the soldiers who abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The author concludes that the power such figures assume is illusory and ends in self-negation.

athletes, David Stern, dress code, National Basketball Association (NBA), Pacers-Pistons fight, psychohistory, self-perception, social psychology, sports injuries, sports psychology

This article considers the dress code that National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern introduced for the 2005–2006 season, requiring business attire when players enter or leave games, sit injured on the bench, or attend league events. The policy was first discussed after the November 2004 Pacers-Pistons fight at Auburn Hills, Michigan. The author identifies two assumptions behind it, that dress changes players’ behavior and that it improves fans’ view of players and the league. The author examines both through the psychology of social and self-perception and the concept of priming. The evidence is Frank and Gilovich’s 1988 study of black uniforms and penalties in the NHL and NFL, Wade and Stafford’s 2003 study of school uniforms and perceived gang behavior, and Zimbardo’s 1971 prison experiment. The author proposes that the code’s effect could be measured through personal fouls and off-court arrests. The author also questions whether the code suits a league whose appeal to younger viewers draws on hip-hop culture, citing the ESPN programs Streetball and City Slam and attendance at Dennis Rodman’s Dallas debut. The article closes by setting psychological conjecture aside for a commonsense view, citing Allen Iverson’s response that a suit does not change who a person is.

athletes, emotional attachment, Norbert Elias, psychohistory, sports psychology

This article presents Norbert Elias’s account of sport as set out in The Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process, co-authored with Eric Dunning. The author begins from the observation that passion for sport is non-utilitarian in most people’s lives, and organizes the discussion around Elias’s two questions: what human need sport satisfies, and how modern sport developed. The author explains the civilizing process as Elias’s extension of Freud’s view of the movement from primitive to civilized. In this view, human psychology is shaped by society over long periods, and violence is curbed by a state monopoly of legitimate force and by internalized norms, at the cost of inner tension and a degree of tedium. Sport, Elias contends, supplies controlled excitement through rules and referees. The author reviews his historical examples: the Greek pankration, Roman gladiatorial games, and unregulated medieval English football. The author also reports his view that modern sports arose in England, first among aristocratic pursuits and later in team games, alongside the peaceful alternation of power among English political factions. Elias treats the two developments as parts of one process, not as cause and effect. The author concludes with Elias’s position that modern sport is a partial solution to the gap between human craving for excitement and pacified societies, and notes that the civilizing process can reverse.

athletes, competitive sports, group dynamics, physical skill, psychohistory, sports psychology, strategy

This article considers three sources of success in competitive games (physical skill, strategy, and chance), drawing on the author’s own research and on psychoanalytic ideas about infancy and birth order. It reports a cross-cultural sample in which thirty-nine societies had games of physical skill only and thirty-nine also had games of chance. In the latter group, he reports, infants’ bodily movement was severely restricted and contact with caretakers was infrequent. He proposes that games of chance express adult dependency acquired in infancy and an infantile fantasy of magical omnipotence, and he cites Guys and Dolls as an illustration. The article maintains that competition induces excitement and aggression, that strenuous activity relieves them, and that chess trains children in rational and empathic behavior. It contends that first-borns, inhibited against physical violence, tend toward tennis, golf, or chess, while later-borns predominate in professional football. It reports a questionnaire, conducted with Arpad Elo, finding weekend chess tournament players predominantly first-born.

analytic training, athletes, competitive sports, Olympics, psychoanalysis, psychohistory, sports psychology

In this article, the author, trained in medicine and psychoanalysis, recounts some twenty-five years of consulting with professional and serious amateur athletes and performing artists. He begins with his own turn to distance running after serious illness in his thirties, and the depression that followed a broken foot before his first Boston Marathon. He reports that sports medicine colleagues were puzzled by injured athletes who return to activity too soon. He describes teaching orthopedists, coaches, and trainers to consider what a sport means to the individual. He contends that injury threatens an athlete’s sense of self and omnipotence and can lead to narcissistic regression. He then describes about ten years in the Major League Baseball Rookie Development Program, sponsored jointly by team owners and the Players Association. In it, improvised scenarios prepared with the Second City comedy group lead into small discussion groups run by a retired veteran player and a psychotherapist. He reports that performance and relationships are the recurring concerns. He maintains that early wealth and limited discipline make internal discipline a central topic, and proposes that visualization techniques have a psychoanalytic underpinning. He also relates a media interview in which he attributed the rivalry of two home run competitors to a sibling relationship, easier to sustain than competition with Babe Ruth as a paternal figure. He concludes that sports consultation presents psychoanalysis as a current, living practice. The article is based on a 2008 presentation to the European Psychoanalytical Federation in Barcelona.

athletes, baseball, Jacques Barzun, psychohistory, sports psychology

In this article, the author asks why baseball became the American national pastime, taking as a starting assumption French historian Jacques Barzun’s view that the game reflects the American heart and mind. Using the game’s history from the first newspaper accounts in 1845 through the Cincinnati Red Stockings in 1869 and attendance growth from 1.8 million in 1900 to 6.6 million in 1909, the author attributes its standing to industrialization, urbanization, immigration, improved transport, and promotion by sportswriters whose incomes depended on readership. The author contends that two myths served middle-class Americans of the period: an integrative myth, in which playing or watching baseball taught American values, and an agrarian myth placing the game’s origins in rural America, which the author characterizes as historically inaccurate. The author notes that the integrative creed coexisted with the exclusion of Black players until Jackie Robinson in 1947. The author also proposes that continuity of players under the 1903 National Agreement and the reserve clause, and continuity of place under territoriality among owners between 1903 and 1953, strengthened fan attachment. Framing the story as social psychology, the author draws on Solomon Asch, Herbert Kelman, and the territorial imperative. The author argues that established Americans used baseball to acculturate immigrants and protect their own social position, and that immigrants, seeking security and stability, moved through compliance, identification, and internalization. The author concludes that these influences established baseball in the American psyche.

athletes, baseball, child abuse, George Steinbrenner, Joe Torre, psychohistory, sports psychology

This article considers the relationship between Joe Torre, manager of the New York Yankees from 1996 to 2007, and the club’s principal owner since 1973, George Steinbrenner, and asks how Torre survived so long under him. The author reviews Steinbrenner’s ownership, including his repeated dismissal of managers, his conviction for illegal contributions to the 1972 Nixon re-election campaign, and his suspension from baseball after paying a gambler to discredit a player who was suing him. The author is sharply critical of his interference in the team and cites unfavorable judgments by commissioners Bart Giamatti and Fay Vincent. Drawing on Torre’s autobiography Chasing the Dream, Don Zimmer’s memoir Zim: A Baseball Life, newspaper reports, and a broadcast interview, the author recounts Torre’s childhood as the youngest child in a Brooklyn household dominated, in Torre’s account, by a controlling and abusive father. The article also covers Torre’s playing career and his founding of the Safe At Home Foundation in 2003. The author contends that Steinbrenner took on the role of Torre’s father, that Torre’s early experience helped him endure it, and that it shaped his attention to players’ confidence, safety, and health. The author attributes the team’s declining postseason success, including the 2004 collapse against the Red Sox, to the strain of working under Steinbrenner. The author concludes that Torre left after 2007, worn down, following a contract offer the author regards as insulting.

athletes, gender in sports, male sports heroes, psychohistory, psychology, Sports Heroes, Fallen Idols, sports psychology,Stanley Teitelbaum, tennis, Venus Williams, women players

This article takes as its starting point Stanley Teitelbaum’s study of male athletes, Sports Heroes, Fallen Idols (2005), and asks how women’s professional tennis compares. The author draws on published books and journalism, including work by L. Jon Wertheim, Michael Mewshaw, and Paul Fein, Monica Seles’s memoir, and a New York Times interview, to sample the careers of players from Suzanne Lenglen in the 1920s to Jennifer Capriati, Martina Hingis, Lindsey Davenport, Martina Navratilova, and Venus and Serena Williams. The author contends that, unlike the male athletes Teitelbaum describes, many girls in tennis are driven by their fathers’ ambitions and often turn professional and peak early. The author reports accounts of abuse and control by parents and coaches, and cites Hingis and Davenport among the exceptions. The author also observes that some players praise parents whose conduct was publicly criticized. Using object-relations theory, separation-individuation, and Erikson’s identity concepts, the author proposes that identity themes unify these varied experiences, with separation-individuation the most significant. The author suggests that father-coached players hit harder but suffer faster physical wear, and raises identity diffusion as a possible reading of Serena Williams’s career. The author concludes that working through these psychological ordeals may make the players more whole but has only marginal and unpredictable effects on performance. A 2008 update reviews several players’ comebacks, injuries, and results.

athletes, female body image, female identity, gender differences, gymnastics, psychohistory, sports psychology, women players

In this article, the author describes two styles of Finnish women’s free-group gymnastics and the body image and identity each fostered among participants. The author reports that the sport has been very popular in the Nordic countries since the early twentieth century, with mass festivals in Finland, and contends that mass performance worked as an institution that created and maintained norms about movement, habits, and gender difference. The earlier style, in use from the 1900s, is presented as following the Swedish gymnastics of Per Henrik Ling and Hjalmar Ling, who held that men and women move alike to different degrees. The author characterizes women in this style as moving as male gymnasts did, abandoning corsets, and taking up an Amazon body ideal, and as emancipated for their time and linked to women’s efforts at equality and to careers in teaching and government office. The author reports strong opposition from Finnish male gymnastics leaders and wider society, including a 1909 view that identical training for the sexes was unnatural, and proposes that men feared merging with the female or motherly side. The later style, in use from the 1920s to the present, is described as favoring slenderness, flexibility, grace, and dance influences over strength and speed, with upper-body apparatus removed from girls’ schools. The author reports that German influence in the 1930s reinforced the expectation that women move as women, and maintains that this revised body perception did not encourage women to adopt an identity that competed with men.

athletes, Joe Illick, psychobiography, psychohistory, sports psychology, swimming

In this article, the author, a 73-year-old man, recounts his lifelong athletic career, centered on swimming and tennis, and his present routine of daily swimming in San Francisco Bay. He swims a mile or more in water as cold as the high forties and competes in club races and in a winter mileage contest for the title of Polar Bear. He recalls a childhood on a rural Pennsylvania farm, running games at elementary school, swimming and tennis learned at a country club from age eleven, high school swimming, varsity swimming at Princeton, a lapse during graduate study at the University of Pennsylvania, running in the 1970s, and a return to the water through masters swimming in the mid-1980s. He describes finding the Bay in the mid-1990s and attributes its appeal to a country boy’s wish to escape urban restraints. He reports that club mates called his daily swimming compulsive, which he rejects, pointing to its health benefits and its use against depression during his divorce. He considers whether a hidden reason lies behind his pleasure in beating men of his own age and answers that it is atavistic rather than personal. He maintains that athletic endeavor is an enjoyable and healthy but unremarkable part of ordinary existence. He closes by noting that he spent over a decade in therapy without mentioning his sporting life.

aggression, athletes, death, hunter-gatherer, life cycle, predator and prey, psychohistory, sports psychology

In this article, the author reflects from his own experience on why some people pursue fishing with an obsession that costs them heavily in money and effort. He recounts a boyhood in the bush country of Northern Ontario, where fishing became an obsession from about age eight, and a recurring dream of rowing beneath forested mountains that he now sees himself living on the British Columbia coast. He describes the predator and prey he watches outside his window and mentions the fishing habits of acquaintances, among them a Washington banker and a Parisian fishing writer who travels from Uruguay to fish a single British Columbia river. He also cites a remark attributed to the sculptor Henry Moore about devoting a life to a task one cannot fully accomplish. He proposes that anglers see the world differently from non-anglers and that fishing must not be wholly easy to satisfy. He maintains that the angler passes through stages, from catching a fish one knows is there, to catching as many as possible, to seeking harder species by harder methods such as fly fishing for steelhead. He contends that angling returns people to the hunter-gatherer cycle, that releasing fish sustains the experience, and that tournament fishing diminishes it. He concludes that such truths become clear only after passing through the stages.

Al-Qaeda, American politics, George Bush, Iraq, politics, Sadam Hussein, traumatic reliving, unconscious, Vietnam

This article applies the author’s theory of traumatic reliving to the American defeat in the Vietnam War, the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the Iraq War begun in March 2003. Working from the historical record of the three episodes and from statements by Henry Kissinger, John Kerry, and George W. Bush, the author proposes that a nation can relive a mass trauma unconsciously, following rules of unconscious equivalence in which roles reverse and one enemy stands in for another. He argues that the Iraq War first replayed 9/11, with Iraq and Saddam Hussein substituted for al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, and then became a reliving of Vietnam. He is sharply critical of the administration’s conduct of the war and lists parallels: war powers resolutions in 1964 and 2002, the framing of each war as a crusade against a worldwide network, guerrilla resistance, torture and atrocities, support for unpopular local governments, falling domestic support, and blame of neighboring countries. Because many Americans openly recognize the parallel, the author distinguishes seeing the resemblance from seeing the reliving behind it. He contends that opposition to the war is itself part of the reliving, citing the antiwar party’s decisions after the 2006 elections to keep funding the war and not to pursue impeachment. He concludes that governments, even democratic ones, appear more representative of a public’s traumas than of its opinions, and he presents this as a qualification of classic defenses of representative government.

Fred Irwin Greenstein, interview, journalism, political psychology, psychohistory, social sciences

This interview with Fred I. Greenstein, Emeritus Professor of Politics at Princeton University, conducted over the Internet by editor Paul H. Elovitz, follows a career summary covering Antioch, Yale under Harold Lasswell, and posts at Yale, Wesleyan, and Princeton. Greenstein attributes his turn to political psychology to puzzlement over the Nuremberg defendants and the McCarthy era, calls himself self-educated in the field, and names Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, The Authoritarian Personality, and Lasswell as influences. He reports leaving the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in the early 1960s over perceived dogma, while valuing his three years in analysis. He calls Personality and Politics his most original book, summarizes the finding of Children and Politics that adult political behavior has roots in early political leanings, and describes his forthcoming study of the first seven presidents. He recalls childhood memories of Franklin Roosevelt, his turn to the modern presidency during Watergate, and encounters with presidents from Truman to Clinton. He reports that declassified records led him to revise his view of Eisenhower as politically unsophisticated, and discusses student reactions to the Kennedy assassination, the toll of office on Johnson and Nixon, and Ford’s account of managing presidential pressures. He maintains that political memories differ from political fact yet shape perceptions of presidents, and stresses a president’s capacity for restraint in crisis. He closes by voicing concern about McCain’s capacity to withstand the presidency’s pressures, but not Clinton’s or Obama’s.

antisemitism, Catholic, Christian, film review, Mel Gibson, The Passion of Christ, psychohistory, religious propaganda, Romans

This film review of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ compares it with Oliver Stone’s JFK as two films that drew attention for their content rather than their form. The reviewers report that Gibson’s film was embraced by evangelical Protestants and conservative Roman Catholics, criticized by other Christians for its interpretation of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and condemned by many Jews concerned about anti-Semitism. They contend that disputes over historical accuracy are beside the point for both films, which they describe as reflecting the worldviews of their makers. They characterize the mythology surrounding Jesus as broader in its influence than that surrounding John F. Kennedy. They fault Stone for implying that Lyndon Johnson conspired in the assassination, and they read JFK as reflecting 1960s counterculture suspicion of political elites. They place Gibson’s film in the tradition of the passion play and Roman Catholic martyrdom iconography, note his ties to traditionalist currents opposed to the reforms of Vatican II, and report that he financed the film himself. They also observe that he followed the gospel narratives and added material from a nineteenth-century mystic’s visions, and they credit his casting of Mediterranean-looking actors. They fault Gibson for declining to refute statements about the Holocaust and for his own remarks about Jews. They close with a speculative psychological reading of his identification with the film’s subject.

book review, George Makari, pseudoscience, psychoanalysis, psychohistory, Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud

This review of George Makari’s Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (Harper, 2008) describes the book’s history of the field through World War II in three phases: Freud’s formulation of a theory of mind, the creation of a movement marked by schisms, and a pluralistic community after World War I. The reviewer reports that Makari rejects the picture of Freud as an isolated genius and places his theories in nineteenth-century science and philosophy. The review covers Makari’s accounts of the 1910 Nuremberg Congress, the breaks with Adler and Jung, the New York Psychoanalytic Society’s 1941 demotion of Karen Horney, and the wartime divisions among British followers of Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and the Independents. The reviewer contends that Makari’s text holds two positions in tension: that psychoanalysis offers the richest systematic description of inner experience, and that its knowledge claims are tenuous and its schools irreconcilable. He asks which psychoanalysis Makari means. Citing Martin Bergmann, R. C. Lewontin, Ernst Mayr, Evelyn Fox Keller, and C. James Goodwin, he observes that biology and psychology also divide over ideology and criteria of evidence, but maintains that this does not lessen the problem for psychoanalysis. He judges that Makari’s history points to the need for psychoanalysis to keep its theoretical fluidity, integrate research from other fields, and establish rigorous ways of adjudicating between rival schools.

cancer, David Rieff, death, experimental medical treatments, mother-son relationship, psychobiography, psychohistory, Susan Sontag, Swimming in a Sea of Death, A Son’s Memoir

This review of David Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir (Simon & Schuster, 2008) treats the book as an account of the death of his mother, Susan Sontag, from myelodysplastic syndrome in December 2004, after earlier breast and uterine cancers. The reviewer reports that Sontag sought the most extreme treatments, including a bone marrow transplant paid for privately after Medicare declined coverage, and held to survival as her goal until the end. The reviewer contends that without her financial resources she would have had no treatment, and that the memoir raises questions about terminal illness, the cost of experimental care, and a dying person’s denial of death, citing Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. The reviewer reads Rieff’s passages on survivor’s guilt, on his rejection of the idea of closure, and on burying his mother in Paris as showing continuing bereavement. The review sets against Sontag’s course the reviewer’s own recollection of a parent’s death, which involved no aggressive treatment and a calmer acceptance. The reviewer regrets that Sontag died in rage and left her son anger and fear rather than acceptance. The review closes with the hope that readers can learn to live in sorrow and still keep their spirit.

aging, Clio’s Psyche, creativity, death, letter to the editor, psychohistory, psychology of aging

In this letter to the editor, the author responds to the journal’s March special issue on the art, creativity, and psychology of aging with a personal reflection written at age eighty-four. The author proposes that age is largely a state of mind and lists what he sees as its components: greater candor, a sense that what is history to others has been lived experience for him, a heightened awareness that every day counts, a growing sense of the futility of physical possessions, and occasional thought about how he wants to be remembered. He recalls time spent with his grandparents, his own growing attention to obituaries, and the increased awareness of mortality that follows from reading of the deaths of acquaintances and contemporaries. He describes wanting to use remaining time productively, fearing mental or physical decline and the loss of independence, and feeling tension between rest and unfinished tasks. He also describes an urge to write down accumulated experience so that it is passed on. He notes a generational gap in shared historical reference, illustrated by a classroom exchange about World War II. Citing the Antioch College motto attributed to Horace Mann, he says he is not ashamed to die, but that any victories he can claim are shared and that gains must be defended repeatedly. He concludes by urging readers to stay active in mind and body.

aging, childhood fantasies, Clio’s Psyche, creativity, death, denial, letter to the editor, positive perspective, psychohistory

In this letter to the editor, written in response to the March special issue of Clio’s Psyche on art, creativity, and the psychology of aging, the author says he agrees with the contributors’ view that advanced age can bring wisdom and a positive outlook on life. He then recounts experiences that complicate that view. He describes an impulsive gesture at the bedside of a comatose friend and a childhood game with his older brother, both of which he interprets as expressing an unconscious wish to bring the dying back to life. He reports on a visit to Taiwan, where elders are served first at meals but customarily pay the bill, and where he reacted with anger to being offered a train seat. He compares this with an account by Sander Breiner in “A Psychoanalyst/Psychohistorian Looks at Aging.” He cites Freud’s failure to recognize his own reflection as an old man as an instance of aging and denial coexisting. Citing Michael Isaacs in “A Relocated Psychoanalyst Reflects on Aging,” he notes that death is often taboo in psychoanalysis. He lists twelve euphemisms for death and offers jokes attributed to George Burns and Woody Allen, along with an anecdote about Ed Koch’s burial plot, as examples of humor as an outlet. He concludes that aging is confusing and that denial often accompanies it.

aging, chronological age, Clio’s Psyche, death, generativity, George Vaillant, letter to the editor, Nora O’Brien, psychohistory, psychological age, psychology, physical age

In this letter to the editor, the author responds to the March 2008 special issue of Clio’s Psyche on aging, commenting on its treatment of psychological life. The author proposes defining a young person of any age as one who looks to the future and plans for it, and an old person of any age as one who looks to the past and has difficulty seeing a future for the self. The letter distinguishes three age categories: chronological age, physical age (appearance, way of living, and how others see a person), and psychological age. For psychological age, it poses questions about identity, intimacy, career consolidation, generativity, passing on meaning, and integrity at thirty, fifty, and sixty, and refers to contributions by George Vaillant and Nora O’Brien in that issue. The author extends this scheme to death and dying, contending that many deaths are linked to these components, including social support and the availability of help from this or the next generation. The author maintains that physical and psychological death are related to chronological age.

election, gender, letter to the editor, media, oppression, politics, psychohistory, race, racism, sexism

In this letter to the editor, the author replies to an e-mail discussion with the editor about gender in the primary season, agreeing that the media shows little interest in the question of gender. She objects to debates over whether people of color or women are more oppressed and criticizes a remark that sexism has never killed anyone while racism has. She cites the heckling of Hillary Clinton with a demand to iron a shirt, and John McCain’s amused response to a question about how to beat Clinton. She contends that comparable remarks aimed at Barack Obama would have drawn outrage, and she maintains that the United States is more willing to discuss racism than sexism. In a second part, responding to an exchange between the editor and another correspondent, she disputes the argument that the side spending most wins California initiatives and referendums. She cites her essay with Marie Bolton on environmental propositions in La Californie: Périphérie ou laboratoire?, “The Case for Cautious Optimism: California Environmental Propositions in the Late Twentieth Century,” in which oil interests outspent environmental groups.

America, antisemitism, baseball, Jewish ballplayers, Jewish Major Leaguers Baseball Cards, Martin Abramowitz, psychohistory, Sandy Koufax

In this letter to the editor, the author writes about Jews in baseball, prompted by Martin Abramowitz’s 2003 set of cards, Jewish Major Leaguers Baseball Cards. The letter gathers examples and secondary sources in support of its position and applies no stated framework. It opens with figures, as reported by Abramowitz and a Boston Globe reporter, on Jewish players’ share of major leaguers and their batting and pitching records. It relays literary critic Eric Solomon’s reasons for Jewish attraction to the game: acculturation, intellectual appeal, literature, urban life, and cultural sensibility. It cites Abraham Cahan’s Forward and his novel Yekel on baseball and Americanization. The author lists Jewish novelists, sportswriters, broadcasters, and songwriters, and describes early Jewish team owners. He also describes settlement-house athletics, promoted by an anxious German-American Jewish elite to counter perceptions of Eastern European immigrants. He then profiles three figures. Hank Greenberg, he maintains, countered anti-Semitic stereotypes in the 1930s and 1940s and encouraged Jackie Robinson in 1947. Sandy Koufax, drawing on Jane Leavy’s Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy, is discussed for his refusal to pitch on Yom Kippur in 1965, the Koufax-Drysdale holdout, and the unsettled question of the prejudice he met. Marvin Miller, head of the Major League Baseball Players Association from 1966, is credited with transforming players’ rights and safety, and the author notes his exclusion from the Hall of Fame. The letter concludes that Jews, historically wanderers, have found a home in America, and that baseball has helped them find it.

Columbus Centre for Studies of Persecution and Genocide, Fellow of the British Academy, group fantasy, memorial, Norman Cohn, psychohistory, Pursuit of the Millennium, scholarship, University of Sussex, Warrant for Genocide

In this memorial tribute, the author, writing after the death of Norman Cohn (1915–2007), sketches the historian’s career and writings and is admiring of him as a scholar and as a personal intellectual influence. The tribute recounts Cohn’s training as a linguist at Oxford, his Second World War intelligence work interrogating SS members and refugees from Russia, and his later appointment at the University of Sussex, where he directed the Columbus Centre for Studies of Persecution and Genocide. It surveys five books. The Pursuit of the Millennium is credited by the author with creating the field of millennial studies. Warrant for Genocide is described as arguing that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion intensified anti-Jewish prejudice. Europe’s Inner Demons is said to identify the fantasies behind the scapegoating of Jews and witches. Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come traces apocalyptic belief to Zoroaster, and Noah’s Flood follows the changing story of the flood. The author recounts discovering The Pursuit of the Millennium as an undergraduate, says it led him to see emotion and fantasy at work in history, and faults Cohn’s de-emphasis of religious emotion in the 1970 edition. He concludes that psychohistorians should credit Cohn as an early explorer of group fantasy.