Reel Hub: Holyland Hardball at the BJFF

Holyland Hardball
November 11 @ 7 PM
November 12 @ 2 PM
Coolidge Corner Theater
more information

The excitement of documentary filmmaking is that you never know exactly where the story will take you. The makers of startup.com probably never set out to make a morality tale about the outsize egos of late NASDAQ-bubble-era start-ups, or "the rise and fall of the American dream" as the tagline eventually proclaimed; nor does one imagine that the filmmakers of Holyland Hardball intended to make a movie about cultural separation and the rise and fall of American dreamers. But the end result is a thoroughly entertaining documentary about misplaced altruism, about the desire to do something for someone else, without ever stopping to think about whether or not the "good deed" is wanted at all.

Holyland Hardball documents the rise (well, not that much of a rise) and fall of the Israel Baseball and the lives of those involved: the Brookline based impresario Larry Baras, IBL (and former Red Sox) GM Dan Duquette, and players trying to make the league, if only to someday say that they were professional ballplayers.

For everyone involved, the league is their one chance to fulfill life-long goals. Jewish literature features all kinds of dreamers, and it's easy to offer a crude distinction between those who, in the words of Sholom Aleichem, don't realize that "dumplings in a dream are a dream and not dumplings," and those who struggle to fulfill Herzl's motto that "if you will it, it is no dream." But the dreamers of Holyland Hardball problematize our crude distinction: what happens when you realize your dreams and they fade away anyway? What happens when a site of dreaming doesn't want to fulfill that role anymore?

As the movie documents, the growing chasm between Israeli and American Jewish culture is a large part of the league's failure. The Americans marketing the league think in terms of a kitchy, shlocky Judaism ("Baseball in Israel? Vy not?") and not in terms of a living state with a way of life and way of experiencing Judaism very other to their own. The problem isn't that Baseball is too American to succeed in Israeli (as Tom Segev pointed out, Elvis did indeed come to Jerusalem), but that the American Jewish businessmen expected to find an Israeli populace more like them than not, that they didn't expect to find that the Jewish experience is so multicultural.

It's worth mentioning that as a result of the league's ultimate failure, Major League Baseball narrowly avoided the dangerous situation of having to answer "the Jewish Question" once and for all. The first World Baseball Classic included the odd quirk that players could choose to play for either their country of residence or their ancestral country. The result was a Mike Piazza anchored Italy and much-ado-about what country A-Rod would represent when the US should have been focused on building a bullpen. It also led the organizers of the Israeli Baseball League to dream about an Israeli team centered around Kevin Youkilis, Ian Kinsler, and the rest of the Hebrew school all-stars. None of these players hail from Israel; they are simply Jewish, and Major League Baseball and the World Baseball Classic, by accepting them as members of the team, would have implicitly affirmed the Zionist principle that Israel is the homeland of all Jews and not just a modern nation state with its own citizenship structure and immigration policies. Who knows what that would have meant.

Perhaps, in the end, it's better for global diplomacy that the Israel Baseball League didn't succeed.