Behind every great sports story is an equally fascinating human interest story. In Out of Left F
ield, Rebecca Alpert follows the trail of intertwined histories that link the African-American and Jewish-American cultures across the one field that unites all Americans—the baseball field. What she found was a story that confounds expectations and turns racial and ethnic preconceptions on their heads. “Jewish” businessmen who weren’t in fact Jewish, black players who were practicing Jews, and a profound solidarity between two ethnicities whose common history of oppression and diaspora put them on the “same team.”