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For Jewish fans, Duke’s new basketball coach inspires a different version of March Madness
(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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UK Police Investigate Security Incident Near London’s Israeli Embassy
A Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) car. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
British police said on Friday they were investigating a security incident near the Israeli embassy in London after a group reported online that it had targeted the premises with drones carrying “dangerous substances.”
Matt Jukes, the head of counterterrorism at London police, said there were no signs the embassy had been attacked, but officers in protective clothing were assessing “discarded items” found near the building.
The embassy said in a statement all its staff were safe.
COUNTERTERRORISM POLICE INVESTIGATE
“Counter Terrorism Policing London are aware of a video shared online overnight in which a group claim to have targeted the nearby embassy of Israel with drones carrying dangerous substances,” Jukes said in a televised statement.
“And whilst we can confirm that the embassy has not been attacked, we’re carrying out urgent inquiries to determine the authenticity of the video and to identify any potential link between it and the items discarded in Kensington Gardens.”
The pro-Iranian group Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiyya, or Movement of the Companions of the Right Hand of Islam, had posted a video which included footage of drones along with two figures dressed in protective clothing and a message that the Israeli embassy was being targeted.
The group has claimed responsibility for a spate of attacks across Europe on US, Israeli, and Jewish targets, including an arson attack which destroyed several ambulances belonging to the Jewish volunteer emergency service Hatzola which were parked near a synagogue in the Golders Green area of north London.
Jukes said the police presence had been stepped up and cordons had been put in place, meaning there was no public access to Kensington Gardens and the surrounding area.
“We do not believe there to be any increased public safety risk at this time, and we would urge people, nonetheless, to avoid the area while officers carry out their work,” Jukes said.
The Israeli embassy said in a statement that a suspected security incident was being investigated in an adjacent park.
“We wish to clarify that all embassy staff are safe and that the embassy was not attacked,” it said. “As always we remain in close and continuous contact with the local authorities.”
It was the latest in a number of incidents involving the embassy and Jewish sites in the British capital since the ambulances were torched last month.
Earlier this week, two suspects were arrested over an attempted arson attack on a synagogue in north London.
In March, two men were charged with being tasked by Iran to carry out hostile surveillance on the Israeli embassy and other Jewish targets, while earlier this week a man from Kuwait went on trial accused of planning a terrorist attack on the embassy.
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Kanye West Concert in Poland Will Be Canceled, Venue Says
Kanye West walking on the red carpet during the 67th Grammy Awards held at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, CA on Feb. 2, 2025. Photo: Elyse Jankowski/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
A Polish stadium said on Friday that it will cancel a concert by US rapper Kanye West days after he postponed a show in France amid a furor over his past antisemitic comments and celebration of Nazism.
“We would like to inform you that the Ye [Kanye West] concert planned for 19 June 2026 at the … Slaski stadium will not take place due to formal and legal reasons,” stadium director Adam Strzyzewski said in a statement posted on Facebook.
The decision by the Slaski stadium in the western city of Chorzow, first reported by Wyborcza newspaper on its website, comes just over a week after Britain blocked the 48-year-old from traveling there to headline a festival.
There was no immediate comment from the rapper, now known as Ye, who in January apologized for his behavior, which he attributed to untreated bipolar disorder, and renounced past expressions of admiration for Adolf Hitler.
Authorities in Poland had already signaled they would seek to ban the planned June 19 concert.
“In a country scarred by the history of the Holocaust, we cannot pretend that this is just entertainment,” Polish Culture Minister Marta Cienkowska said on Thursday.
More than 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, were murdered at the Auschwitz death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. Nazi Germany killed more than 3 million of Poland‘s 3.2 million Jewish population.
Ye was barred from Australia last year after releasing a song promoting Nazism and advertising swastika T-shirts on his website.
He has performed in the United States and Mexico City this year, with further concerts planned in Europe and Asia.
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Iran Says Hormuz Strait Open After Lebanon Truce, Trump Expects Iran Deal ‘Soon’
An Iranian flag lies amidst the rubble of a building of the Sharif University of Technology, which was damaged in a strike, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, April 7, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said the Strait of Hormuz was open following a ceasefire agreement in Lebanon, while US President Donald Trump said talks could take place this weekend and he believed a deal to end the Iran war would come “soon.”
Araqchi said in a post on X the Strait was open for all commercial vessels for the remainder of the US-brokered 10-day truce agreed on Thursday between Israel and Lebanon to halt fighting between Israeli forces and Iran-backed Hezbollah.
Trump told Reuters on Friday that the US will work with Iran to recover its enriched uranium and bring it back to the United States as part of any deal.
US-Israeli strikes on Iran began on Feb. 28, triggering Iranian attacks on Gulf neighbors and reigniting the Israel-Hezbollah conflict in Lebanon.
Thousands have been killed and the conflict effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz – through which a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas usually transits – threatening the worst oil shock in history.
OIL PRICES TUMBLE, STOCKS JUMP
Oil prices fell more than 10%, extending earlier losses after Araqchi’s post. Global stocks, already trading near record highs, jumped further on the news.
Major shipping companies reacted more cautiously, signaling it may take more time for traffic through the chokepoint to return to normal levels – about 130 ships a day before the war.
Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd said it would refrain from passing through the strait while it assessed the announcement. The Norwegian Shipowners’ Association said several issues needed clarification, including the possible presence of sea mines.
The US Navy warned in an advisory to seafarers that the mine threat in parts of the waterway was not fully understood and avoidance of the area should be considered.
A senior Iranian official said ships could pass through the Strait only under coordination with Iran‘s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
After a video conference on Friday, more than a dozen countries said they were willing to join an international mission to protect shipping in the Strait when conditions permit, Britain said.
US BLOCKADE REMAINS IN PLACE
Shortly after Araqchi’s statement, Trump posted on Truth Social: “IRAN HAS JUST ANNOUNCED THAT THE STRAIT OF IRAN IS FULLY OPEN AND READY FOR PASSAGE.”
However, he said the US military blockade of ships sailing through the Strait to Iranian ports – announced after talks with Iran last weekend in Islamabad ended without agreement – would remain until “our transaction with Iran is 100% complete.”
An Iranian official later told Fars news agency Tehran would consider the Strait‘s continued blockade by US forces a violation of the ceasefire and would again close the waterway.
Trump told Reuters on Friday there could probably be more talks this weekend. Some diplomats said that was looking unlikely given the logistics of assembling officials in the Pakistani capital, where the talks are expected to take place.
DIPLOMACY PROGRESS
A Pakistani source involved in mediating between the US and Iran said there was progress in backdoor diplomacy and that an upcoming meeting could result in the signing of a memorandum of understanding, followed by a comprehensive deal within 60 days.
“Both sides are agreeing in principle. And technical bits come later,” the source said on condition of anonymity.
A senior Iranian official told Reuters there had been an agreement on unfreezing billions of dollars in Iranian assets, as part of the accord to reopen the Strait, without giving a timeline.
One key sticking point has been Tehran’s nuclear program. At last weekend’s talks, the US proposed a 20-year suspension of all Iranian nuclear activity, while Iran suggested a halt of three to five years, according to people familiar with the proposals.
Iran has demanded the lifting of international sanctions, while Washington has pressed for any highly enriched uranium to be removed from Iran. Two Iranian sources have said there were signs of a compromise on the HEU stockpile, with Tehran considering shipping part of it out of the country.
Trump told Reuters the US would bring Iran‘s enriched uranium back to the United States. “We’re going to go in with Iran, at a nice leisurely pace, and go down and start excavating with big machinery … We’ll bring it back to the United States,” he said during a phone interview.
He mentioned “nuclear dust,” a reference to what he believes remains after the United States and Israel bombed Iran‘s nuclear installations in June last year.
Despite Trump‘s optimism, Iranian sources told Reuters on Friday that “gaps remained to be resolved” before reaching a preliminary deal, while senior clerics struck a defiant tone during Friday prayers.
In Tehran, cleric Ahmad Khatami said: “Our people do not negotiate while being humiliated,” while in Isfahan, the imam said: “We did not accept the terms proposed by the other party.”
In Islamabad, troops were deployed along routes into the capital on Friday, though roads remained open and the government had not ordered business closures, as it did ahead of the previous meeting.
LEBANON CEASEFIRE GOES INTO EFFECT
The US-backed ceasefire agreed between Israel and Lebanon to end fighting between Israel and Hezbollah appeared to be largely holding on Friday, despite Lebanese Army reports of some Israeli violations. Paramedics said an Israeli drone strike killed one person in southern Lebanon.
The conflict was reignited on March 2 when Hezbollah opened fire on Israel in support of Tehran, prompting an Israeli offensive.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military on the reported ceasefire violations on Friday.