Uncategorized
ESPN’s Jeff Passan opens up on his Hebrew school upbringing, interviewing Sandy Koufax and Jewish baseball history
(JTA) — For tuned-in baseball fans, Jeff Passan is everywhere. As ESPN’s senior MLB insider, he frequently breaks some of the sport’s biggest news and appears on several of the global sports network’s television, radio and podcast programs.
After two decades of reporting, can anything make him nervous? There is one athlete who does: Jewish legend Sandy Koufax.
“Generally speaking, when I’m talking to people, I’ll call them by their first name. He was Mr. Koufax,” Passan told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the pitcher he once wrote a paper about for Hebrew school.
While a columnist for Yahoo! Sports, Passan spent about four years reporting his 2016 New York Times best-selling book “The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports,” a deep-dive into pitching and the epidemic of what’s known in the sport as Tommy John surgery, or ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction.
Koufax, known for his on-the-field dominance and his refusal to pitch on Yom Kippur during the 1965 World Series, walked away from baseball at only 30 years old because of injury. So as Passan began work on his book, he knew he needed to talk to Koufax.
Koufax is famously private, and securing a rare interview wasn’t easy — Passan enlisted fellow Jewish writer Jane Leavy, Koufax’s biographer, who put in a good word for him. When the time came to talk, Passan said it was the most nervous he’s ever been for an interview.
“I was in awe the whole time,” Passan said in a phone interview from Arizona, where he’s covering spring training.
Koufax’s pitching prowess aside, Passan praised the principled stance the former Dodger took all those years ago.
“The way that he represented himself, the way he honored Judaism, and, when it was an incredibly difficult thing, stuck by what mattered to him, I think that’s applicable across religions, across cultures, across backgrounds,” Passan said. “If you feel passionate about who you are, and something is important to you, even when it’s uncomfortable, you should stand by it. That’s exactly what he did. I have an undying amount of respect for him for both doing that and just for the way that he has and continues to carry himself.”
A Cleveland native, Passan fell in love with both baseball and writing at a young age. His father, Rich, worked at the Plain Dealer for 42 years, and Passan said he got his first byline at 14 years old. He would go on to cover sports at Syracuse University, the Fresno Bee, the Kansas City Star, Yahoo! Sports and, since 2019, at ESPN.
Passan, 42, grew up in a Conservative Jewish household, attending Hebrew school three times a week. He said he considers himself a “cultural Jew” — noting that his wife is Catholic and they are raising their kids without religion.
“I look at religion now as being a really important thing for lots of people, but the sort of thing that for me and my family, we’d like for our children to be a little more worldly until, or if, they decide to choose to go the religious route,” he said.
Jeff Passan at his bar mitzvah, Oct. 9, 1993. (Courtesy of Passan)
Passan said he and his family celebrate Hanukkah — he’s a big fan of latkes — and he fasts on Yom Kippur. And then there’s Jewish geography.
“When I run into someone who’s Jewish, even though I’m not particularly religious, and he or she may not be particularly religious, there’s still a connection there because of how we were raised and the things that you learn growing up a Jew,” he said. “If there’s one thing that I look at with regret that my kids don’t have, because we’re not raising them Jewish, it’s that.”
That instant connection is present in the press box, too.
“We know who we are,” Passan said. “There was one World Series where I think there were like seven or eight Jewish writers sitting in a row. And we said all we need is a few more and we got a minyan here.”
Passan said he also feels that camaraderie with Jewish players — especially those who play for Team Israel during the World Baseball Classic, which is coming up next month.
“It’s different than Team USA or the Dominican Republic or Venezuela,” he said. “It’s a cultural team. It’s a team that’s often based around your religion or the religion in your family, and I think that makes it a unique group of players who may not have that same connection or that same feel to Israel, but they have that shared experience of being Jewish and knowing what that entails.”
The presence of Jewish talent in Major League Baseball — and on Team Israel, which features more big leaguers this year than ever before — is noticeably greater than it has been in years. The 2021 World Series, which featured four Jewish players, is a prime example.
“I think it’s just another way to illustrate that we can be everything,” Passan said. “If you are growing up and you want to be a rabbi, that’s wonderful. If you’re growing up and you want to get into media, that avenue is there for you. And if you’re growing up and want to be a baseball player, there are no limitations. The history of Jewish baseball players, while not extensive, is nevertheless rich.”
And what is it, exactly, about baseball that has endeared the sport to American Jews for so long? Passan has some theories.
First, he noted the historical significance New York has held in both baseball and American Judaism. For a period in the early-to-mid 20th century, New York was home to three MLB teams — the Yankees, Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants.
“As Jews, we really gravitate toward things that have history and substance,” Passan said. “Baseball being so big in the emergence of sporting culture in the United States, there’s a gravitas to that, there’s an import to that, that I think Jews really are attracted to.”
The other aspect that has bonded Jews and baseball, Passan said, is its shared culture of family tradition.
“It’s something that can be passed on from fathers and mothers to sons and daughters,” he said. “Family is such a vital part of being Jewish. Just as we pass down customs and traditions, sports are among those customs and traditions and baseball is a generational sport.”
—
The post ESPN’s Jeff Passan opens up on his Hebrew school upbringing, interviewing Sandy Koufax and Jewish baseball history appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Selective Outrage and the Silence Over Iran’s Dead
Iranian demonstrators gather in a street during anti-regime protests in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 8, 2026. Photo: Stringer/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
In recent weeks, thousands of Iranian citizens have been killed amid widespread internal unrest. Some casualty reports even reach into the tens of thousands.
Iranian men and women took to the streets to protest economic collapse, systemic repression, and a theocratic regime that has ruled through fear for more than four decades. They were met with bullets, mass arrests, torture, and executions. Yet beyond fleeting mentions and buried headlines, much of the international media has chosen to look away.
At the same time, global attention remains overwhelmingly fixated on Israel and the Palestinians. News panels, campus demonstrations, activist campaigns, and social media feeds are saturated with outrage directed almost exclusively at the Jewish State. This contrast is not accidental. It reflects a deeper moral and structural failure in modern journalism and activism.
The most common explanation offered for the lack of coverage is access. Iran is a closed dictatorship. Foreign journalists are monitored, restricted, expelled, or imprisoned. The regime routinely shuts down the Internet, blocks social media platforms, and intimidates the families of victims. Casualty figures are deliberately obscured, and firsthand reporting is dangerous.
But access alone does not explain the silence.
History shows that journalists have reported from some of the most inaccessible and hostile environments on earth. Syria, North Korea, Sudan, and Afghanistan have all received sustained attention despite severe limitations. When there is genuine interest, creative reporting follows.
In the case of Iran, the problem is not merely a lack of footage. It is a lack of will.
Israel presents the opposite reality. It is one of the most scrutinized countries in the world. It allows foreign media full access, maintains a free press, hosts outspoken human rights organizations, and operates under an independent judiciary and parliamentary oversight. Journalists can move freely, challenge officials, and broadcast live from conflict zones.
When Israel defends itself after a massacre multiple times worse than the 9/11 attacks, every action is framed as a potential crime. When Iran kills its own citizens, it is described in sanitized language as unrest, crackdowns, or internal affairs.
This is not moral consistency. It is moral evasion.
Much of the international focus on the Palestinian cause relies on a simplistic and emotionally comfortable narrative. It divides the world into oppressor and oppressed, strong and weak, villain and victim. It requires little historical context and no serious engagement with internal problems, extremist violence, or rejectionism. It also offers a familiar and ideologically convenient antagonist: the Jewish State.
Iranian protesters disrupt this narrative. Their existence exposes an inconvenient truth that many commentators prefer to ignore — that the greatest source of suffering in the Middle East is not Israel, but authoritarian Islamist regimes that brutalize their own populations. The Iranian protestors undermine the claim that Israel is the region’s central moral problem, and they challenge the ideological frameworks upon which entire activist ecosystems are built.
That is precisely why they are ignored.
There is also a strategic dimension to this silence. The Iranian regime has spent decades exporting violence while redirecting global attention outward. Through proxy terror groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, and through relentless anti-Israel propaganda, Tehran ensures that outrage is focused anywhere but inward. Every international campaign condemning Israel serves as a distraction from executions, torture chambers, mass arrests, and the killing of dissenters.
Western protest culture plays an enabling role. Modern activism often favors symbolism over substance and slogans over substance. It gravitates towards causes that fit fashionable ideological molds. Iranian dissidents who oppose Islamist extremism, reject antisemitism, and openly criticize Western hypocrisy do not fit neatly into those frameworks. As a result, they are ignored.
Perhaps the most uncomfortable truth is that Jewish suffering is endlessly contextualized, while Jewish self defense is reflexively condemned. That is why Israel is treated differently than the Iranian protest movement.
Thousands of dead Iranians should shake the conscience of the world. The fact that it does not should alarm anyone who still believes in universal human rights. Outrage cannot be selective. Journalism cannot be ideological. And moral concern cannot depend on whether a tragedy serves a preferred narrative.
Iranian lives matter, not when they are useful as political tools, but always. Until the media internalizes that truth, its credibility will continue to erode, one ignored grave at a time
Sabine Sterk is CEO of Time To Stand Up For Israel.
Uncategorized
Syria’s Internal Unrest Is Spurred by Turkish Ambitions
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan attends a press conference with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz at the Presidential Palace in Ankara, Turkey, Oct. 30, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Umit Bektas
“The Syrian Democratic Forces’ [SDF] insistence on protecting what it has at all costs is the biggest obstacle to achieving peace and stability in Syria.”
That’s what Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said in early January, blaming Syria’s Kurdish-led SDF for some of the bloodiest fighting that Aleppo has seen since Bashar al-Assad’s fall.
But before Washington accepts Ankara’s indictment, it should ask a simpler question: why would Syrian Kurds compromise their political future when Turkey itself refuses to compromise with its Kurdish population at home?
Foreign Minister Fidan made Turkey’s position explicit in a recent television interview: Kurdish groups “only change [their] position when [they] face force. They either have to see force or face the threat of force,” he said. But this isn’t frustrated rhetoric — it’s Turkish doctrine. And recent fighting shows what that doctrine produces.
Beginning on January 6, 2025, Syrian government forces — backed by Turkish-aligned factions — established a template in Aleppo: evacuation orders, artillery strikes, and forced displacement. Over 140,000 civilians subsequently fled Aleppo. The “ceasefire” offered no protections — only withdrawal.
Damascus then replicated the model across northeast Syria. Within two weeks, Syrian forces took Deir Hafer, Tabqa, Raqqa, and Deir al-Zor, as SDF units retreated and Arab tribal allies defected. By January 21, the SDF had lost nearly half its territory and accepted a ceasefire that amounts to capitulation: individual integration into Syrian forces with none of the autonomy protections it had sought.
In other words: disarm first, trust later, rights never.
This is precisely the model Turkey has applied at home. In February 2025, PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan — whose group is a US-designated terrorist organization — called for the group’s disbandment after four decades of conflict. By July, PKK fighters symbolically burned weapons in what they called “a step of goodwill.” Turkish military operations continued throughout — because for Ankara, negotiated settlement is insufficient. Only total victory will do.
Syrian Kurds have watched this closely. They have also watched Turkey’s record in Syria itself. In 2018, Operation Olive Branch displaced at least 150,000 people from Afrin; in 2019, Operation Peace Spring killed hundreds of civilians and drew credible accusations of ethnic cleansing and summary executions. When Turkish President Erdoğan threatened military action in 2019, Washington urged restraint. Turkey invaded anyway.
Now Fidan issues the same threats — and expects different results. He accuses the SDF of “maximalist attitudes” and “deceptive moves,” while demanding immediate, unconditional surrender. He warns that Kurdish resistance will push Turkey to use force. He has already delivered: Turkish drones have hit SDF positions on multiple occasions during the recent fighting, signaling Ankara’s willingness to back up threats with force.
This is not just a Kurdish problem. It threatens core US interests.
Washington’s Syria policy rests on preventing a jihadist resurgence, blocking Iranian expansion, and safeguarding Israel’s security. Each is threatened by Turkey’s coercive approach to Kurdish integration. Marginalized communities without legal protections become fertile ground for extremist recruitment. The collapse of Kurdish autonomy also weakens one of the last effective counter-ISIS buffers in the country. And assaults on minority communities — including the Druze — increase domestic pressure on Israel to intervene, raising the risk of escalation the United States has worked to prevent.
Turkey, meanwhile, gains leverage at America’s expense. By casting itself as the architect of Syria’s “reunification,” Ankara elevates its regional standing while embedding its proxies inside the Syrian security apparatus. Washington, by contrast, is reduced to issuing ceasefire calls while Syria’s post-war order is being written without it.
There is still time to change course — but only if the United States stops outsourcing Syria’s political settlement to Ankara.
Washington retains leverage through its military presence, sanctions relief, reconstruction assistance, and diplomatic recognition. It should use that leverage to establish transparent, enforceable frameworks for minority integration — with international monitoring and public guarantees, not closed-door capitulation pushed for by Turkey.
First, the United States should demand formal negotiations between Damascus and Syria’s minority representatives, under international auspices — with public terms and third-party monitoring.
Second, continued American sanctions relief and reconstruction funds must be tied to measurable benchmarks: minority protections enshrined in law, parliamentary oversight of integration, and independent accountability mechanisms.
Third, Washington must make clear that Turkish military intervention — direct or through proxies — will trigger consequences under existing authorities, including Executive Order 13894, which targets actions threatening Syria’s territorial integrity.
Most critically, the United States must reject the premise that Kurdish communities can be bombed into accepting promises their neighbors have already broken. Fidan says Kurdish groups only understand force. But history suggests Turkey only understands leverage. Washington still has it — and should use it now, while integration is still being implemented, before Fidan’s doctrine of force becomes Syria’s permanent reality.
Jonah Brody is a policy analyst at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA).
Uncategorized
The Digital War Against the Jewish Community Is Raging, Perhaps Worse Than Ever
The TikTok logo is pictured outside the company’s US head office in Culver City, California, US, Sep. 15, 2020. Photo: REUTERS
On Monday, the remains of Ran Gvili — a young Israeli police officer killed during the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks — were finally recovered from a cemetery in northern Gaza. With his return, the hostage crisis effectively came to an end. There are no more Israeli hostages in Gaza.
This final milestone received far less international media coverage than the release of the last living hostages in October 2025, an event that had a noticeable impact on the digital landscape. As we found in a student-driven project at the Social Media & Hate Research Lab at Indiana University’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, antisemitism dipped on X and TikTok the day those living hostages were released. But the respite was short-lived.
Social media has become a toxic environment for Jews. The sheer volume of hateful commentary on anything Jewish — from current events to the Holocaust — is staggering. But to view these platforms as merely “loud” is to miss the more dangerous reality: social media is today’s primary tool for disseminating antisemitism and, increasingly, for mobilizing it.
Our research shows that social media is being used to politicize antisemitism and coordinate action across ideological boundaries. What often appears as a spontaneous burst of passion — such as student activism on campus — is frequently the result of a highly networked digital infrastructure.
In our lab’s study on the “Rhetoric of Resistance,” we tracked the online networking of anti-Israel campus groups across the United States. The findings are a wake-up call for university administrators and policymakers: these groups are not operating in isolation. They have built a wide network of off-campus organizations and individuals, allowing them to synchronize messaging and amplify radicalized narratives at an unprecedented scale.
We are seeing a shift toward language that mirrors the rhetoric of designated terrorist organizations. Slogans that deny a people’s right to exist or that justify violence are no longer fringe; they have been moved into the mainstream of campus discourse through coordinated digital amplification, often expressed in snippets, coded phrases such as talk about “Jewish power,” “Zionist evilness,” or even slogans such as “Free Palestine,” which has become a battle cry.
One of the most troubling patterns our student coders identified is how specific types of political commentary function as “gateways.” While many users believe they are simply criticizing a government’s policy, our data shows that totalizing, categorical condemnations — framing an entire nation as “genocidal” or a “terrorist state” — are most strongly associated with antisemitism. In contrast, humanitarian-focused themes, such as the suffering of individual Palestinians, showed a much less consistent association with anti-Jewish hate speech.
Our central finding is nuanced and confirms other studies: negative views of Israel and antisemitism are strongly correlated. Approximately half of the posts we analyzed that expressed negative views of Israel were antisemitic, while posts with positive views showed zero antisemitism. The students’ diligent coding work allows us to demonstrate empirically how criticism can create a permissive environment for antisemitism without every post necessarily crossing the line into hate speech.
However, in the vast majority of the most vitriolic posts, the content was not just “anti-Israel”; it was fundamentally anti-Jewish, utilizing collective blame and dehumanizing language. This creates a “permissive environment” where hate speech is sanitized as political advocacy, making it difficult for platforms — and even trained human moderators — to draw the line.
The one-day dip in antisemitism we observed during the 2025 hostage release proves that the digital climate is sensitive to reality and human empathy. However, the immediate “snap-back” to hostility suggests that the underlying machinery of mobilization is always running.
If we are to protect the integrity of our campuses and our public discourse, we must confront the reality that some digital activism is designed not to persuade, but to ostracize and radicalize. We must support the right to vigorous political debate while refusing to tolerate the coordinated degradation of Jewish identity. The hostage crisis has ended, but the digital war against Jewish life continues. Recognizing the tools of this mobilization is the first step toward stopping it.
The author is the Director of the Borns Jewish Studies Program and Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University.