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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.”
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Hanukkah After Bondi Beach: We Must Not Retreat
Police officers stand guard following the attack on a Jewish holiday celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia, Dec. 15, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Flavio Brancaleone
The attack at Sydney’s Bondi Beach took place at a public Hanukkah celebration — an openly Jewish gathering marking a holiday meant to symbolize continuity, restraint, and survival. Candles were lit. Families had gathered. Jewish life was visible and unhidden. Violence arrived anyway. That fact matters. This was not random disorder that happened to occur near Jews. It was an assault on Jews gathered publicly as Jews.
For Jewish communities around the world, the message was immediate and chilling: a basic assumption — that peaceful religious celebration in a public space is protected — no longer feels secure.
Bondi Beach was not an aberration. It was a signal that even the most ordinary expressions of Jewish life now take place against a backdrop of heightened risk and weakened moral confidence.
Since October 7, 2023, Jewish communities have been forced to absorb a series of shocks that, taken together, reveal something deeper than a temporary spike in antisemitic incidents.
Jews have watched crowds chant “death to Jews” in major Western cities. We have seen synagogues, schools, and community centers require armed security as a baseline condition of existence. We have watched public officials hesitate, equivocate, or retreat into procedural language when confronted with explicit calls for Jewish death.
In that context, even violence that is not explicitly ideological is experienced differently. Bondi Beach occurred in a world where rage, intimidation, and public disorder have been steadily normalized — and where antisemitism is too often treated as a contextualized grievance rather than a moral emergency. It is no coincidence that Hanukkah celebrations across Europe, North America, and Australia this year are being guarded as potential targets rather than assumed civic fixtures.
For Jews, these are not abstract concerns. They shape daily life in quiet but consequential ways. This Hanukkah, many Jews will decide whether to light publicly or privately, whether to post photos or remain discreet, whether to wear a kippah or tuck it into a pocket, whether to gather openly or behind security checkpoints.
These are not acts of panic. They are acts of realism — born of a recognition that the social consensus protecting Jewish life is weaker than it once was. I have felt this calculation myself, not as fear but as prudence — an awareness that Jewish visibility now requires forethought in ways it did not a decade ago.
Hanukkah is often softened into a generic story about “light in dark times.” But that framing misses its harder truth.
Hanukkah commemorates a moment when Jews confronted a society that had lost its sense of limits — when desecration was tolerated, when power displaced law, and when public authority proved unwilling or unable to defend moral boundaries. The Maccabees did not revolt because they rejected pluralism. They revolted because pluralism had collapsed into coercion.
That distinction matters now.
Across Western democracies, restraint is increasingly treated with suspicion. Rampage violence is explained as inevitable. Public disorder is described as expressive. Antisemitic chants are reframed as political speech. Leaders and institutions speak fluently about process and context, but struggle to say plainly that some acts are beyond the pale.
The result is a dangerous permission structure. Not a conspiracy. Not a single ideology. But a cultural habit of hedging when clarity is required — of explaining rather than condemning, of balancing rather than drawing lines. Violence thrives in that space. So does antisemitism.
Sociologist Émile Durkheim warned that societies depend on shared moral frameworks to restrain individual impulses. When those frameworks weaken, violence becomes expressive rather than exceptional. Rampages become signals — not just of individual breakdown, but of collective uncertainty about what can and should be enforced.
Jews recognize this pattern because history has trained us to. Antisemitism rarely begins with laws or decrees. It begins with atmospheres. With what is tolerated. With what is explained away. With what authorities are reluctant to name because naming it might require action.
The Bondi Beach attack belongs to this broader moment. It targeted a Jewish holiday gathering, but it also reflected a wider failure to defend basic moral boundaries in public life. Violence does not emerge in a vacuum. It feeds on ambiguity — on the sense that enforcement is conditional and outrage selective.
Hanukkah offers a counterpoint to that ambiguity.
The story of the oil is not a story about optimism. It is a story about responsibility. Someone chose to protect what was sacred when it would have been easier to surrender it. Someone insisted that desecration was not normal, that collapse did not deserve accommodation, and that continuity required effort.
That insistence feels increasingly countercultural.
In recent years, Western elites have grown uncomfortable making firm moral judgments. Everything must be contextualized. Everything must be balanced. Everything must be filtered through the language of grievance. But pluralism does not survive without boundaries. And minorities suffer first when those boundaries dissolve.
For Jews, the post-October 7 world has made something painfully clear: condemnation of antisemitism has become conditional. Calls for Jewish death are weighed against political narratives. Jewish fear is treated as inconvenient. Jewish safety is discussed as a variable rather than a nonnegotiable.
Hanukkah rejects that logic entirely.
The holiday is not only about light. It is about continuity — the refusal to disappear quietly when the world becomes less hospitable. It is about maintaining Jewish presence, practice, and confidence even when public space feels uncertain.
Lighting the menorah is not an act of provocation. It is an assertion that Jewish life does not require permission to endure.
Bondi Beach will be remembered as one more moment when Jews understood something before others were ready to say it plainly: a society unwilling to enforce moral limits cannot protect its most vulnerable members. Rampage violence and chants of “death to Jews” are not separate phenomena. They are different expressions of the same failure.
A society that cannot say, without hesitation, that calling for Jewish death is beyond the pale is not morally neutral. It has already chosen sides.
The menorah burns not because darkness recedes on its own, but because someone insists — again and again — that darkness does not get the final word.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Australia’s ‘Hanukkah Massacre’ Is Worse Than You Think
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaks during a press conference at the Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, June 17, 2024. Photo: Lukas Coch/Pool via REUTERS
Chabad’s “Hanukkah by the Sea” event near Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, turned into a bloody massacre on Sunday: 15 murdered and dozens more injured, as of the latest update.
Far from being an isolated incident, this nightmarish display of terror is only the latest symptom of a dangerous and systematic attack by the Australian government against its own Jewish population.
According to news sources, the terrorists were Sajid and Naveed Akram: a father and son of Pakistani origin who had pledged allegiance to ISIS shortly before carrying out their antisemitic bloodbath.
In one rare bright spot, Ahmed Al Ahmed, an immigrant from Syria, heroically risked his life to disarm one of the terrorists, likely saving many innocent lives in the process. Al Ahmed survived several gunshots and is recovering in hospital.
In the aftermath of this modern day pogrom, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese issued a statement in which he made no mention whatsoever of Jews, antisemitism, Hanukkah, Islamic extremism,terrorism, or ISIS.
Albanese referred to the massacre merely as “shocking” and “distressing,” and said that his thoughts were with “every person affected.”
Within hours, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu utterly excoriated Albanese, accusing him of “pouring fuel on this antisemitic fire,” and noting that he had sent Albanese a letter last August, warning of the very conditions that had brought about this attack, a warning that had gone unheeded.
In tandem with the Israeli Prime Minister’s vigorous public scolding, Albanese held a press conference, in which he finally condemned the Bondi attack as antisemitic.
However, Albanese continued to avoid any mention of Islamic extremism, despite Australian law enforcement having already publicly confirmed that the terrorists had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State terror organization (ISIS), and that they were carrying an ISIS flag in their vehicle.
According to reports, the Mossad had been warning Australia regularly for months about terror plots against the local Jewish community. Local police deny there were specific warnings about this particular attack, but Israeli leaders from all sides of the political spectrum countered that Australia had ignored “countless warning signs.”
Australia’s national failures are reminiscent of the Dutch pogrom of November 2024, in which local Muslim attackers violently hunted Israeli soccer fans through the streets of Amsterdam — after Dutch police ignored urgent warnings from Israeli intelligence.
The conditions for a similar massacre are currently shaping up in New York City, where the incoming mayor responded to a highly threatening antisemitic protest by accusing the local Jewish community of “violations of international law.” (I previously addressed both topics in depth at The Algemeiner).
For the past two years since the October 7 massacre, not only has Australia seen a massive rise in violent antisemitic attacks, but local Jewish leaders have consistently objected to the government’s permissive atmosphere toward attacking Jews, such as failing to apply appropriate penalties and needed protections.
Examples include frequent and enormous marches calling to “Globalize the Intifada” (a phrase that the United States Congress officially recognizes as a call for violence against the Jewish people), public calls to “gas the Jews,” as well as Australia’s recognition of a Palestinian state last September, a move widely regarded in the Arab world as a reward for the October 7 massacre.
Like most countries with free speech protections, Australia also has numerous federal and local laws against incitement, which authorities have routinely failed and refused to enforce in protection of Australia’s Jewish communities.
Prime Minister Albanese has promised to respond to the massacre by tightening Australia’s gun laws. Ironically, Australia already has among the strictest gun control regimes in the entire world. Apparently, gun laws are not enough when a country permits and ignores massive hatred, incitement, antisemitism, ongoing violence, and affiliations with international terror organizations.
Who knew?
Given Australia’s ongoing commitment to a failing “strategy,” its continued protection of Islamist extremists, and its continuing systematic neglect of Jewish safety, it is safe to assume that this is only the beginning of more attacks to come.
Daniel Pomerantz is the CEO of RealityCheck, an organization dedicated to deepening public conversation through robust research studies and public speaking.
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Are We at a Tipping Point? Will Larger Numbers of Jewish Americans Make Aliyah?
New immigrants arrive in Israel in 2019, many coming alone to serve in the nation’s military. Photo: courtesy of Nefesh B’Nefesh.
In The Arc of a Covenant (2022), a comprehensive book about the history of the relationship between the US and Israel, Walter Russell Mead points out that, if not for the persecution and expulsion of Jews from Arab lands to Israel after the 1948 war, Israel might not exist.
At best, it would be a smaller, demographically weaker country, with about one-half the Jewish population that it has today.
Recent attacks and hate marches across the world (from chanting “gas the Jews” in Sydney, which led directly to Bondi, and so many other incidents) have had me wondering if history was going to repeat itself. Will these events result in a new wave of immigration of Jews to the Jewish State, particularly from the US, where the largest number of Jews outside of Israel live?
One particularly notable event was an anti-Israel protest at a New York City synagogue (the Park East Synagogue), which included violent antisemitic threats, like “we need to make them scared.” That the protesters targeted an event by Nefesh B’Nefesh, a non-profit organization that has helped thousands of North American Jews immigrate to Israel, makes it clear that demographics are crucial in the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians.
Statistics indicate that 3.5 million Jews have made Aliyah since 1948, when the Jewish State was established. The vast majority were Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and Soviet pogroms, and those from the Arab/Muslim world, as previously mentioned. Yet, despite the large number of Jews in the US, the number that have immigrated to Israel is quite small — approximately 135,000, less than four percent of the total.
The question is: will the unsettling events targeting Jews across the world be enough to reach a critical threshold, so that large numbers of American Jews decide that enough is enough?
American Jews have done very well in all respects, perhaps better than any other diaspora in the history of the Jewish people. Yet, when it comes to personal safety for Jews, it seems that even America is not an exception.
The new mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, was disappointingly equivocal in his comments about the protests that took place at the Park East Synagogue, saying a house of worship should not promote Nefesh B’Nefesh events. Clearly, he has his own ideas about where Jews should and should not live.
This is not new. In the 1930s, the German antisemitic board game Juden Raus! told Jews to go to Palestine. Today, they are told to go back to Europe.
Israel is the ancestral home of the Jewish people, a home they never abandoned, spiritually or physically. Those Jews who reside in Israel are there by right, not on sufferance. Many made Aliyah for various reasons: religious, ideological, and economic. But the single most important driving force has been antisemitism. Those who seek Israel’s destruction should reflect on the fact that their own hatred has been the catalyst for Israel’s remarkable rebirth.
Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.