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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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Contributor to Drop Site News Says Israelis Should ‘Be Removed From Our Planet’
Abubaker Abed reporting from Gaza. Photo: Screenshot
Abubaker Abed, a self-described Palestinian journalist and contributor to the far-left news outlet Drop Site News, has come under intense scrutiny following the circulation of social media posts in which he called for the “wiping out” of Israel and said that Israelis “mustn’t feel safe.”
The remarks, which quickly spread across multiple online platforms, have prompted widespread condemnation and renewed skepticism over the credibility and coverage of Drop Site News, a controversial publication fiercely critical of Israel and US foreign policy in the Middle East.
“Wiping out Israel off the planet is not enough revenge. Israelis mustn’t feel safe anymore. Haunt them and go after them where they go. These terrorist parasites must be removed from our planet,” Abed posted on an Instagram story.
Drop Site co-founder Ryan Grim responded to the incident by clarifying that Abed’s comments do not reflect the editorial position or institutional stance of his publication. Grim, a far-left investigative reporter who has repeatedly accused Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza, did not condemn the statements by Abed.
“We also are never going to police the language of anyone who survived a genocide,” Grim posted on X.
Abed, a social media influencer from Gaza who evacuated to Ireland during the Israel-Hamas war, has previously suggested that attacks on Jewish institutions might be justified if they signal support for Israel.
Following the recent attack on the Temple Beth Israel Synagogue in Michigan, Abed resurfaced a photo from the synagogue featuring an Israel soldier. Abed wrote that the attempted mass casualty event was justified because the assailant defended himself.
“A person is not criminally responsible if they act reasonably to defend themselves against an imminent and unlawful use of force,” Abed wrote in a since-deleted post on X. “Israel murdered his relatives and is illegally bombing and invading his country.”
The FBI said last week that the attack on the largest Jewish temple in Michigan was an “act of terrorism” inspired by Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist group committed to Israel’s destruction.
Drop Site, a new media organization which debuted in July 2024, has found itself under immense criticism over its coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the broader Middle East. The outlet has consistently characterized Israel as a “genocidal” aggressor stoking chaos and violence throughout the region.
Meanwhile, Drop Site depicts internationally recognized terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis in a far more favorable light. Drop Site lead reporter Jeremy Scahill routinely refers to Hamas as “the resistance” and has given softball interviews to Hamas leaders.
Drop Site has also defended the Iranian regime from accusations of terrorism, asserting that Tehran’s goals “center on national sovereignty.” The site contends that Iran has “sought to project influence regionally through allied governments and forces (Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthi, Iraqi Militants, etc.) what’s often called the ‘Axis of Resistance.’”
Some observers have raised alarm bells over the outlet’s growing popularity among establishment mainstream liberals. Ben Rhodes, a former Obama administration official and co-host of the popular “Pod Save America” podcast, has praised the outlet on his social media profile and confirmed he is a subscriber.
Drop Site’s expanding influence does not seem to be confined to left-wing or liberal ideological circles. Right-wing media personality Mike Cernovich contended on X that young conservatives are increasingly reading Drop Site “for Israel news.” Joe Kent, the former director of the US National Counterterrorism Center, over the weekend reposted a Drop Site article pushing Iranian regime propaganda falsely claiming the US was actually trying to kill a downed American airman — just hours before he was dramatically rescued.
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Frankfurt cinema declines to participate in Jewish film festival, spurring backlash
(JTA) — A Frankfurt cinema’s decision not to participate in the local Jewish film festival is spurring allegations of antisemitism, even as its manager says the move was financial.
The Jewish Community of Frankfurt announced last week that the Astor Film Lounge did not wish to host movies during Jewish Film Days this year. The cinema, it said, had cited its workers’ reluctance to staff movies that are part of the biennial festival, as well as concerns about the security required to host Jewish events.
“The decision unequivocally signifies that Jewish life, Jewish people, and a Jewish media presence are no longer welcome at the Astor Film Lounge,” the community said in a statement.
“This line of reasoning is not only disappointing, but sends a devastating societal signal: If Jewish life and Jewish presence are suppressed out of fear of potential reactions, then this effectively amounts to a capitulation to antisemitic pressure,” the statement continued. “The fact that Jewish life can only take place under police protection is already shameful. That this necessity for police protection is now being used as a pretext to completely prevent Jewish events is a scandal.”
But the cinema’s managing director, Tom Flebbe, contested the Jewish Community of Frankfurt’s interpretation of events. In a statement cited in a leading local newspaper, he said the theater had withdrawn this year for economic reasons, as only 40 to 50 guests had come to screenings last year.
Flebbe said a lower-level manager had made unauthorized and inaccurate remarks about security concerns.
“Economic viability is a legitimate and necessary basis for business decisions — regardless of the thematic context of an event,” Flebbe said, adding that other joint projects with the Jewish community will continue as planned.
“The ASTOR Film Lounge MyZeil views Jewish life as a natural and welcome part of this society,” the statement concluded. “The decision against participating in the 2026 Jewish Film Days is not against Jewish people, Jewish culture, or Jewish presence. It is the result of a careful consideration of economic factors. We regret that our reasoning has been interpreted in this way and stand by our decision.”
During the 2024 festival, a half-dozen venues hosted screenings as part of Jewish Film Days. The Astor Film Lounge hosted one screening, of the film “March ’68,” a love story set during the Polish government’s antisemitic campaign following Israel’s Six-Day War.
Film festivals have emerged as a frontier for tensions over Israel and antisemitism. Germany’s largest film festival, the Berlinale, was roiled by tensions this year as its jury head fended off calls to criticize Israel. A major Toronto film festival, meanwhile, ruffled feathers last year by first canceling and then screening a documentary about the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. And a Jewish film festival was canceled in Malmo, Sweden, last year because too few cinemas would agree to show movies for it.
Flebbe’s explanation for why Astor Film Lounge would not participate in this year’s Jewish Film Days did not satisfy everyone who heard it. The Berlin-based German-Jewish Values Initiative, a non-partisan think tank, in an open letter called the economic justification a “mere pretext.”
“To the best of our knowledge, the Jewish Community of Frankfurt was prepared to guarantee a minimum revenue” for the film festival, the letter said. By apparently giving in to “threats and antisemitic pressure,” it added, the cinema has capitulated “to the very forces seeking to drive Jews out of the public sphere.”
The post Frankfurt cinema declines to participate in Jewish film festival, spurring backlash appeared first on The Forward.
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Israeli, Serbian leaders denounce antisemitic statements at Belgrade protest
(JTA) — Israeli and Serbian officials are denouncing antisemitic comments made by demonstrators during a clash between Serbian students and police at a protest last week.
“Death to Vučić and all the Jews around him,” one protester said in a televised interview, referring to Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić. “Long live Serbia.”
The protest last Tuesday marked the latest flashpoint in a series of anti-government protests that have erupted across the country over the past year after 16 people died in an accident at a railway station in November 2024. Hundreds of students participated in the protest, which came as Serbian police searched the offices of the University of Belgrade as part of an investigation into the death of a female student. The school’s leadership claimed that the investigation was an “attack on the university” for its support for the student-led protest movement.
Serbia and Israel first established diplomatic relations in 1948, and Vučić told the Jerusalem Post last year that the country “will always appreciate, respect, and like the Jewish people and Israel.”
Nemanja Starović, the Serbian minister of European integration and the chair of Serbia’s delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, called on the protest leaders to “unambiguously condemn these antisemitic incidents and to immediately remove all antisemitic messages and slogans from university premises.”
“On multiple occasions over the past months, we have warned about the widespread antisemitic ideology within the so-called blockade movement at universities in Serbia,” Starović wrote in a post on X. “Ignoring this dangerous threat has allowed it to escalate into open calls for murder, which now appear as a logical and inevitable outcome.”
The Israeli Foreign Ministry condemned the demonstrator’s comments in a post on X.
“Israel strongly condemns the reprehensible antisemitic calls made yesterday in Belgrade,” the post read. “Israel appreciates the Serbian government’s immediate condemnation of these calls and its firm and consistent stance in the fight against antisemitism.”
Efraim Zuroff, the director of the Israel Office and Eastern European Affairs for the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, also condemned the antisemitic rhetoric in a Times of Israel op-ed.
“One gets the impression that this is a politically motivated to harm President Aleksandar Vučić, who has close ties with the State of Israel, key Jewish organizations such as AIPAC and the Serbian Jewish community,” Zuroff wrote. “That is completely unacceptable! If these things are not stopped, they will end up in dangerous violence, and therefore cannot be ignored.”
The controversy over the protest comes as antisemitism has surged in Europe in recent years. Last September, Serbia arrested 11 individuals accused of perpetrating hate-motivated acts in France and Germany, including throwing green paint on the Holocaust Museum, several synagogues and a Jewish restaurant in Paris.
The post Israeli, Serbian leaders denounce antisemitic statements at Belgrade protest appeared first on The Forward.