Saratoga Jewish Community Arts, with a generous grant from the Jewish Federation of Northeastern New York and
sponsored by Temple Sinai of Saratoga Springs, will present a panel discussion of the film The Catcher was a
Spy, based on the true story of baseball player Moe Berg, on Zoom on October 13 at 7 pm.

On December 18, 1944, a 42-year-old man masquerading as a Swiss physics student settled his 6-foot 1inch frame
into a chair in a Zurich lecture hall. Instead of simply listening to the brilliant insights offered by the physicist at the podium, he was trying to understand enough of the scientist’s German to identify key words – words that could change, or perhaps even destroy the world.

The attendee wasn’t a student, he was a retired baseball player named Morris (Moe) Berg. The American government wanted him to assassinate Werner Heisenberg, director of the Nazi nuclear program, dubbed “the most dangerous possible German inthe field” of physics. 

Born on March 2, 1902, in Harlem, NY, Berg was the youngest child of Bernard Berg, a Jewish Ukrainian immigrant and his wife Rose. While all their children attended college and went on to professional careers, Berg was the most intellectually gifted of the three. He studied modern language at Princeton where he was one of the few Jewish
students in the class of 1923. He earned a law degree from Columbia, took graduatelevel courses at the Sorbonne in Paris and even worked at a New York law firm. He claimed varying degrees of proficiency in at least six languages, but his true passion was baseball.

Berg played 16 seasons for five professional teams and posted a respectable batting average of .243 over 1813 at-bats. Casey Stengel described him as “the strangest man ever to play baseball.” And John Keeran, a former sports columnist for the New York Times called him, “the most scholarly athlete I ever knew.” Phyllis Wang, Coordinator
of SJCA says, “for the United States, Berg was an unexceptional baseball player but a most exceptional spy.”

Berg’s crucial contribution to the war, it was suggested, even beyond intelligence gathering, was his ability to successfully persuade numerous scientists to emigrate to the United States.

SJCA’s panel discussion of The Catcher Was a Spy is Sunday, October 13 at 7 pm. The film may be viewed free by Netflix subscribers and also on Kanopy and Roku; it may be purchased from Amazon and Apple TV.

Advance registration is required. To register or for information on future SJCA programs, go to the SJCA Home Page.

A playbill and Zoom link will be sent to registrants a few days before the program.