{"id":958,"date":"2011-02-17T08:53:18","date_gmt":"2011-02-17T15:53:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/?p=958"},"modified":"2011-02-17T14:05:30","modified_gmt":"2011-02-17T21:05:30","slug":"review-jews-and-basesball-an-american-love-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/?p=958","title":{"rendered":"Review: JEWS AND BASEBALL: AN AMERICAN LOVE STORY"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>Who knew that Hank Greenberg might be the most significant Jew in American history? Or that his interaction with Jackie Robinson helped pave the way for integration of the sport? The meaty and all-encompassing documentary feature \u201cJews and Baseball: An American Love Story\u201d makes a convincing argument for both those propositions. The film is an informative history lesson with archived interviews with Greenberg and a rare interview with pitching great Sandy Koufax. It\u2019s a must for baseball fans\u2014Jewish or otherwise.<\/p>\n

There are so many stories told in \u201cJews and Baseball\u201d begging for their own movie. Greenberg\u2019s story alone is worthy of big budget treatment. The tale of his encounter with Robinson after a collision on the field that may have injured Robinson could be a fantastic conclusion. But the ambitious anthology that is \u201cJews and Baseball\u201d isn\u2019t content focusing on highlights and digs deep into the history of Jewish Americans and the sport. And let\u2019s face it, if you are a baseball fan, you\u2019ll want to see the film to hear from Sandy Koufax. The Koufax interviews are revealing and make the documentary a significant footnote in baseball history.<\/p>\n

Narrated in a dry, matter of fact manner by two-time Oscar winner Dustin Hoffman, the movie is more informative than really entertaining. Still, the style of objective filmmaking employed here in the evolving Michael Moore era is a little refreshing and reminiscent of Ken Burns work. No doubt the film will find its way to public television that would do well to court it. The movie does have a number of recognizable personalities lending their thoughts on the subject. Interviews with fans Larry King, Ron Howard, and others are combined with interviews with baseball greats Bob Feller, Yogi Berra, Al Rosen, Kevin Youkilis and many others. The archived interviews, which include the one with the late Greenberg, have been restored and displayed extremely well here. The quality of this production is top notch\u2014old photos and images from the game\u2019s past are excellently restored and utilized. As a documentary filmmaker myself, I can tell you that the artistry involved to produce such a clean and fluid product is no easy task and had to have taken hundreds and hundreds of work hours to complete.<\/p>\n

\u201cJews and Baseball\u201d was the opening night film for this year\u2019s Atlanta Jewish Film Festival, which is on-going through the end of the month. For more information about the growing and popular AJFF visit the festival website: http:\/\/www.ajff.org\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jonathan admires the work to produce the AJFF opening night film.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":959,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","has-thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=958"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/958\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":965,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/958\/revisions\/965"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}