(JTA) — Dylan Geller has taken great pride in his work as a student manager of Duke University’s men’s basketball team since landing the gig as a freshman in 2019. But things felt different this season, and not just because the Blue Devils had a new head coach, Jon Scheyer, after 42 years under the legendary Mike Krzyzewski.
“Coach Scheyer is such a role model to me, being a young Jewish man myself with aspiring hopes and dreams in basketball,” said Geller, a senior from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “Seeing him do it so successfully, he’s definitely been a big inspiration.”
Starting Thursday night, Scheyer, 35, will lead the Blue Devils through the head-spinning Division I tournament known as March Madness, which raked in an average 10.7 million TV viewers per game last year. Ranked No. 5 in its division, Duke will face off against the Golden Eagles of Oral Roberts University, an evangelical Christian school in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
If the Blue Devils go all the way in this year’s Division I tournament — as the team has done five times in the past, most recently in 2015 — Scheyer would be the first Jewish coach to do so in more than seven decades. (Nat Holman led the City College of New York to an NCAA championship in 1950, when only eight teams competed.) He would also be only the sixth Jewish men’s basketball coach ever to reach the Final Four.
Scheyer is ending his first season as Duke’s head coach with a 26-8 record, becoming the most successful first-year coach in the school’s history.
Duke students are famous for their fandom, earning the moniker “Cameron Crazies” from their antics in the stands of their school’s Cameron Indoor Stadium. But for Duke’s substantial population of Jewish students, faculty and graduates, the intensity is heightened by knowing that the most influential figure on the Durham, North Carolina, campus is a fellow Jew.
“At Duke, these people are celebrities,” said Sophie Barry, a former president of the Jewish Student Union who graduated last May. “It’s a national stage, people are watching them on ESPN all over the place, and they’re just walking around on our campus. It’s such a big deal. And as Jewish people, we can’t help getting all excited when a celebrity is Jewish.”
So devoted to basketball that he made the sport his bar mitzvah theme, Scheyer earned the nickname “Jewish Jordan” when he was growing up in the Chicago suburb of Northbrook, Illinois. (Michael Jordan played for the Chicago Cubs during Scheyer’s childhood there, after winning a national title for Duke’s rivals, the University of North Carolina Tar Heels.) He led his high school team — with an all-Jewish starting lineup — to a state championship in 2005.
Scheyer then played for the Blue Devils from 2007 to 2010, helping the team win two ACC championships and one NCAA title. A history major, he also volunteered in a literacy program and starred in an improv group’s video in which he bikes to the campus Hillel, wears a tallit and spins a dreidel. After a devastating eye injury thwarted Scheyer’s ambitions in the NBA, he obtained Israeli citizenship and played one ultimately disappointing season for Maccabi Tel Aviv.
“I felt proud to be Jewish living in Israel, and you realize there’s not a lot of Jews in the world, and that only strengthened my beliefs,” Scheyer said during a conversation with Jewish students in 2015, shortly after he returned to Duke as a member of the coaching staff.
The Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team after winning the Israeli Basketball Super League championship, Feb. 16, 2012. Jon Scheyer played on the team that season. (Flash 90)
Scheyer was picked for the top coaching spot last year, taking on the daunting job of succeeding Krzyzewski, known as “Coach K,” who built a dynasty in the world of college basketball. Along with guiding the Blue Devils to five national championships, Krzyzewski amassed a total of 1,202 head coaching victories in his 47-year career — 42 of those at Duke — achieving a record in NCAA history.
Scheyer has already made his own mark, bringing the team into March Madness with a nine-game winning streak and celebrating a coveted title in his debut season. On Saturday, he led Duke to a 59-49 victory over Virginia in the ACC tournament championship, becoming the third first-year coach to win the title and the first ever to claim it as both a player and a coach.
He appears to be optimistic about his team’s chances. Scheyer’s assistant declined an interview request, saying this week, “We are leaving for Orlando and hopefully will be gone for the next few weeks at the NCAA Tournament. We can circle back after the season.” Scheyer had previously not responded to multiple requests for interviews.
Of the 363 Division I men’s basketball programs, 10 currently have Jewish head coaches, according to the Coaches Database.
“I feel like he’s someone that a lot of kids like me — even outside of Duke — who love sports can really look up to. Because there’s not a lot of Jewish representation, in terms of coaches like that,” said Geller.
The National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame honored Scheyer as Jewish athlete of the year once while he was in high school and again in college. But Scheyer has indicated that he is ambivalent about being a Jewish sports icon.
“I always wanted to be recognized as a great basketball player. I always wanted a kid to look up to me because of who I was as a person and then my basketball skills, not because I was Jewish,” he said at the Jewish life event in 2015. “But I figured … if it was a cool thing that I was Jewish on top of respecting my game and the way I played and who I was, then I was all for that.”
Asked whether he would play a game that fell on Yom Kippur — an unlikely event given when the basketball season falls — Scheyer’s answer came quickly.
“I would never turn down a game,” he said. “I know that’s not a good thing to say but it’s the truth.”
Duke has about 15,000 students, and about 1,700 of them this year are Jewish, according to student newspaper The Chronicle. The school is home to multiple Jewish centers, including the Freeman Center for Jewish Life that is home to the campus Hillel; the Center for Jewish Studies academic department, and a thriving Chabad that last year inaugurated a new, 24,000-square-foot building.
Duke has about 15,000 students, of whom about 1,700 of them this year are Jewish. (Wikimedia Commons)
At the school’s Chabad, some basketball fans call themselves the “Chabad Crazies,” according to Chabad Rabbi Nossen Fellig. “They’re all crazy about their basketball,” he said.
Throughout the weeks — yes, weeks — leading up to Duke’s games against major rivals, hundreds of students sleep in tents outside the Cameron Indoor Stadium on a patch of grass known as Krzyzewskiville, or K-Ville, in hopes of snagging tickets.
Barry was among those who endured dozens of frigid winter nights for a Duke-UNC game last season. (The teams split their outings during the regular season, then met again in the Final Four, when the Tar Heels ended Krzyzewski’s coaching career to go on to the final game.)
“It was six whole weeks,” Barry said. “You have to take two different tests about your Duke basketball knowledge — one on the current team and one on Duke basketball history — to determine whether or not you get a tent and what order you will sit in when you get into the stadium.”
Students with Duke University’s Jewish Student Union wait to get into a men’s basketball team on campus. (Courtesy Sophie Barry)
While saying that Coach K was “the GOAT,” Barry was thrilled when Scheyer took his place. Before he was named the successor, Barry met the new coach during Hanukkah of 2020, when Scheyer appeared at a virtual menorah lighting for students secluded at home in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Coach Scheyer got on and did this whole Q&A — from questions about how he celebrated Hanukkah growing up and celebrating it now with his two kids, to questions about whether he preferred sour cream or applesauce. It was a really cute event to lift the spirits during such a hard time,” Barry recalled. (Scheyer and his wife Marcelle, a nurse, have since added James to big siblings Noa and Jett.)
Joyce Gordon, director of Jewish life at Duke, said she has heard giddiness at the campus Hillel about the coach’s identity.
“Many Jewish students definitely have a sense of pride that Coach Scheyer is ‘one of us,’” said Gordon.
Fellig described Scheyer as a “mensch” and “dear friend to the Jewish community.” One summer before the pandemic, the coach requested Fellig’s help arranging kosher meals for a group of players that he was training in Israel. And at a recent Jewish event on campus, he brought a surprise.
“He surprised the students by giving them tickets to the game the next day, which was a pretty big game,” said Fellig. “He saved everyone the line — they would have had to wait for many hours.”
Geller, who hopes to clinch a job in an NBA front office after graduation, was high-spirited about his team’s March Madness prospects under Scheyer’s lead.
“The team has great momentum,” he said. “But the most exciting part is in the locker room [after the ACC tournament], they were all talking about [how] we’ve got to forget about this win tomorrow, because we don’t want to fall in the trap of being too excited. So I think they have a great mindset and great leadership.”
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The post For Jewish fans, Duke’s new basketball coach inspires a different version of March Madness appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
In parts of the Orthodox world, racist rhetoric has been normalized.
Rabbis speaking from the bimah refer to Palestinians as Amalek. Calls to block humanitarian aid are incorporated into divrei torah. One might hear that “Smotrich, Ben-Gvir and their parties speak for the great majority of the religious Zionist community” — a terrifying normalization of religious extremists — or even that the Palestinian people do not exist.
We know where this kind of rhetoric leads. After undercover Israeli border police killed four members of the Bani Odeh family as they drove home from a shopping trip in Nablus in mid-March, one of the two surviving sons recounted being pulled from the car and beaten by a soldier who told a friend, “we killed the dogs.” That boy is only 11 years old; he will live the rest of his life with the memory of seeing his parents and two of his siblings killed in front of him.
The scale of Palestinian suffering in Gaza and the West Bank cannot be justified or ignored. However, in much of the American Orthodox and observant Jewish community — of which both of us are proud members — this pain is barely acknowledged, let alone condemned.
We know that these are deeply painful times for Israelis, who have endured two years of terror, fear and loss. But we believe our community has a moral imperative to empathize with Israelis and Palestinians alike — not one at the exclusion of the other.
The silence we see in our communities is neither incidental nor neutral. It is structural and communal, reinforced by political and institutional pressures.
Our tradition teaches “shetikah ke-hoda’ah” — that silence is tantamount to approval. We have seen this truth manifest in our modern world, through political upheavals like the #MeToo movement and the continuing Jeffrey Epstein scandal. These moments have proven that silence in the face of known misdeeds is not neutral.
Yet even with this clarity, too many forces in our community currently push for silence when it comes to the suffering of Palestinians. Among them are demands by funders who see supporting Israel as inconsistent with holding empathy for Palestinians, and cultural norms that suggest unquestioning support for Israel is a central principle of contemporary Orthodox life.
This communal silence allows us to ignore scathing reports of Israeli human rights and international law violations, including many issued by Israeli nonprofits such as B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, Yesh Din and Peace Now.
What fills that vacuum should alarm anyone committed to principles of humanity and basic decency.
As Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller warned at a recent conference organized by Smol Emuni, the Orthodox left group we co-founded, if we cannot speak against Israeli war crimes or settler violence “it appears as if Judaism supports the massacre of innocents, the stealing of land and sheep, the burning of homes, the uprooting of olive trees, and the murder of children.”
Our tradition has been distorted by those, like Ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who speak the language of revenge and supremacy.
Now, more than 900 days after the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, it is time for the Orthodox community to refocus on the heart of our tradition. We must answer the biblical question: What does God demand of us right now?
How do we, as religious Jews, respond to horrific violence perpetrated by Jews? How do we face this historical moment in which Jewish people have killed more civilians than ever in modern history?
The horror inflicted on the Bani Odeh family is not an isolated incident. It is part of a sharp escalation of Israeli military and settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. In March to date, seven Palestinians have been killed by Jewish extremists. That’s on top of the more than 68,000 people killed in Gaza during the war, including at least 20,000 children. (The total estimated death toll in Gaza includes both combatants and civilians.)
Where are the public reckoning with Jewish-led violence, and the demand for moral accountability? The sermons, communal statements, the school assemblies? Why aren’t rabbis invoking the most basic commandments: “thou shalt not kill,” “thou shalt not steal”?
Where is the Torah that teaches that every human being is created in the image of God? The Torah that commands us to “do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly before God”?
In many Jewish spaces, we acknowledge Jewish suffering, condemning Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah and antisemitism. But a moral and religious life demands that we ask not only what has been done to us, but what wrongs we have done to others.
We must create more communal spaces for pain to be heard and questions to be raised, a reprieve from the isolation many of Orthodox Jews horrified by Israel’s abuse of Palestinians experience in our communities. We must elevate voices within our tradition that reflect a different set of values, values centered on humility and compassion and a commitment to share the land with all those living on it. For every rabbinc teaching that celebrates force, we must quote others sources that demand kindness. When we hear “He who is kind to the cruel will become cruel to the kind,” we must answer “Walk in God’s ways — just as God is merciful, so too you must be merciful.”
And we must learn to listen to the voices of people on all sides of this conflict, even those that are unsettling. Because without hearing from others we cannot learn to live with them.
We co-founded Smol Emuni U.S. as a grassroots movement for those who share a deep commitment to and love for the land and people of Israel, and who believe in the essential Jewish principle that all humans are created in the image of God. We see the pursuit of justice and equality as an essential expression of Judaism. As Rabbi Mikhael Manekin, founder of HaSmol HaEmuni in Israel, often says “we are ‘smol’” — Hebrew for “left” — “not despite our faith, but because of it.”
Decades of occupation, ongoing war, and the erosion of Israeli democracy have not only strained Israeli society but strained Judaism itself. We need, in response, to invest in an Orthodox Judaism that is brave enough to be humble, and faithful enough to be self critical. We need a Judaism for those seeking an authentic Torah vision that insists that justice, equality and human dignity are not departures from our tradition, but its very core.
We need to pursue justice and teshuva returning to God’s call to “swerve from evil, to do good, and to pursue peace.”
The post The Orthodox world has abandoned its values by abandoning Palestinians appeared first on The Forward.
Dueling pro-Israel and anti-Israel demonstrations at McGill University in Montreal, Canada; May 2, 2024. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
McGill University’s law school in Montreal, Canada lost the chair of its advisory board on Sunday, when he resigned from the position over what he described in a letter notifying the administration of his decision as an “escalating pattern of hostility toward Jewish students, faculty, and alumni.”
The immediate cause, wrote Jonathan Amiel, was the Law Students Association’s passing an academic boycott of Israel through a student referendum held on Saturday. If adopted as university policy, the measure would shutter partnerships with Israeli institutions, bar individual Israelis or known Zionists from holding teaching positions, and allow professors to refuse writing letters of recommendation for students applying to study abroad in Israel.
A majority, 57 percent, of students who participated in the referendum voted to approve it, with 67 percent of the student body casting ballots, indicating high turnout. It accused Israel of being an “apartheid” state and of perpetrating a “genocide” against the Palestinians, despite that the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics reports that the Palestinian population has “doubled about ten times since” Israel’s founding in 1948.
While a Jewish student is challenging the vote in court, as reported by the Montreal Gazette, its approval by the student body has, according to activists, left an impression on the Jewish community there while achieving a reverberant political victory for the student anti-Zionist movement.
“We are deeply concerned by the ongoing developments within student governance at McGill University Faculty of Law,” the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), a Canadian Jewish advocacy group, said in a statement.
According to Amiel, last week’s endorsement of a boycott of the world’s lone Jewish state was part of a broader, troubling trend.
“The referendum is not an isolated event,” Amiel wrote in his resignation letter, which he since made available for public viewing. “An institution once defined by intellectual rigor and principled debate has, in too many instances, become an environment where being Jewish, identifying as a Zionist, or maintaining any association with the State of Israel carries professional and personal risk.”
He added, “This includes the normalization and, at times, glorification, of events marking acts of mass violence, the obstruction of students’ access to classrooms and university facilities, and the use of academic platforms to legitimize or advance extremist ideologies.”
Amiel also charged that the institution failed to discipline “conduct involving harassment or intimidation.”
McGill University was one of hundreds of schools where anti-Zionists organized to celebrate Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, in which the terrorist group’s fighters slaughtered, kidnapped, and raped Israeli civilians during their invasion of the Jewish state.
Their activities culminated in an anti-Israel encampment which spanned across four months and did not disband until long after the end of the 2023-2024 academic year. While McGill officials took steps to limit the freedom of action of the group which staged the demonstration, such as bringing the issue before a court and denouncing the “obvious antisemitism” of its members, Amiel’s letter suggests that the university has not done nearly enough to combat anti-Jewish harassment and discrimination on campus.
“The defining feature of this period has been an absence of decisive leadership at moments when clarity and resolve were required,” Amiel continued. “In that absence, direction has effectively been ceded to actors whose objectives are fundamentally misaligned with the university’s core academic mission.”
McGill University has denounced the outcome of the referendum, with president Deep Saini saying, “The effects here are antisemitic, and that plain fact must guide McGill’s response.”
Amiel’s resignation comes amid an ongoing crisis of pervasive antisemitism on campuses across the Western world.
Earlier this month, the Union of Jewish Students (UJS) released survey results showing that Jewish campus life in Great Britain is rapidly deteriorating. The group found that 47 percent of Jewish students report having heard their classmates justify the Oct. 7 massacre in which Hamas slaughtered civilians and committed mass rape; 23 percent have witnessed Jewish students persecuted over their identity; as many as 36 percent have either lost friends in this new milieu or know someone who has; and a shocking 40 percent report “having changed their journey through campus” to avoid anti-Zionist protests occurring every week at some universities.
Some of the report’s most concerning findings focused on anti-Jewish sentiments expressed by non-Jewish students. Twenty percent said they prefer not be roommates with a Jewish person, while a quarter of students surveyed believe that arguing that “Zionists control the media/government” does not constitute antisemitism. Responding to a separate question, 16 percent expressed approval of saying outright that “Jews control the media/government.”
“This report demonstrates that antisemitism on campus is not isolated but normalized,” Union of Jewish Students president Louis Danker said in a statement. “No Jewish student should have to face social ostracism, abusive language, or physical violence — there is a right to protest but not harass. If we are serious about combating extremism in Britain, we have to start on campus, where half of students have seen glorification of Hamas or Hezbollah. Concerned sentiments and piecemeal progress are not enough.”
The issue is no less severe in the US.
In February, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and Hillel International reported that a striking 42 percent of Jewish students reported experiencing antisemitism during their time on campus. Of that group, 55 percent said they felt that being Jewish at a campus event threatened their safety. Meanwhile, 34 percent of Jewish students avoid being detected as Jews, hiding their Jewish identity due to fear of antisemitism.
According to the data, 38 percent of Jewish students said they decline to utter pro-Israel viewpoints on campus, including in class, for fear of being targeted by anti-Zionists. The rate of self-censorship is significantly higher for Jewish students who have already been subjected to antisemitism, registering at 68 percent.
“No Jewish student should have to hide their identity out of fear of antisemitism, yet that’s the reality for too many students today,” Hillel International chief executive officer Adam Lehman said in a statement released with the survey results. “Our work on the ground every day is focused on changing that reality by creating environments where all Jewish students can find welcoming communities and can fully and proudly express their Jewish identities without fear or concern.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
Eden Golan, Israel’s representative at the Eurovision Song Contest, reacts during a press conference following the official unveiling of Israel’s song submission, in Tel Aviv, Israel, March 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins
Eden Golan, who represented Israel in the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest, talked in a new interview about still experiencing anxiety, fear, and nightmares of threats against her life two years after the competition ended.
“I’m always afraid. I look in every direction like a security guard,” the 22-year-old Israeli singer said in an interview published on Friday in the “7 Nights” supplement of Yedioth Ahronoth. “I’ve had recurring anxiety since Eurovision: I walk into a place, a restaurant, or a show, and someone shoots me from behind. I have recurring nightmares of people chasing me and killing me. But I’m learning to live with it. No one will silence me anymore.”
Golan told Yedioth Ahronoth that she also still faces antisemitism almost everywhere she goes.
“Quite a few of my performances abroad had protests,” she explained. “In Switzerland they threw red paint at the entrance to the venue, supposedly to say the blood is on our hands. There was one protest with signs against [Israeli Prime Minister] Bibi [Netanyahu] and against me. After all the threats I received, there’s definitely fear for my life, but what could be worse than what I went through at Eurovision?”
Golan participated in the 2024 Eurovision in Malmo, Sweden, with the song “Hurricane” and finished in fifth place. The song was originally titled “October Rain,” but the name and its original lyrics were disqualified by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which organizes the Eurovision competition, for being too political since it referenced the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack in southern Israel.
Golan made it to the top five of the competition even after being booed on stage by anti-Israel audience members, facing death threats, and having a Eurovision jury member refuse to give her points because of his personal feelings against Israel’s military actions during its war against Hamas in Gaza.
Golan has also said she had to conceal her identity outside her hotel room in Malmo during the Eurovision contest because of the threats she received from anti-Israel activists, who were angry about the Jewish state’s participation in the international competition. At the time, the deputy director general of the EBU condemned the harassment that participating singers had experienced.
Noam Bettan is Israel’s representative in the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest, which will take place in Vienna, Austria, in May. He is competing with a trilingual song titled “Michelle.”