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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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Most American Jews believe Zohran Mamdani will make NYC Jews less safe, Israeli poll finds
(JTA) — More than two-thirds of American Jews believe that New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will make the city’s Jews less safe, according to a new survey by a nonpartisan Israeli research institute.
The finding came in the Jewish People Policy Institute’s latest Voice of the Jewish People Index, which surveyed 745 American Jews about a range of topics last month, just 10 days after Mamdani was elected. It offers the latest insight into Jewish sentiments about Mamdani, whose staunch criticism of Israel has drawn attention, and at times allegations of antisemitism, from Jews around the world.
The survey found that 67% of respondents believed Mamdani’s election would make New York City’s Jews less safe, while 6% believed they would be more safe and 18% believed he would make them neither more or less safe.
Among Jews identifying as politically conservative, 93% said they believed Mamdani would make New York City Jews less safe. Concerns were lower among liberal-leaning Jews, but still one third of respondents who identified as “strongly liberal” said they believed Mamdani would make Jews less safe.
Over half of respondents said they felt “worried” about the election of Mamdani, while 11% said they were “afraid.” Another 13% said they were “hopeful.”
A different poll in August found that 58% of Jewish New Yorkers believed the city would be less safe for Jews under Mamdani.
The Jewish People Policy Institute conducts regular surveys of Jewish sentiment, drawing on a pool of Jews who have agreed to be part of a survey pool. The institute notes that as a result, “the survey tends to reflect the attitudes of ‘connected’ American Jews, that is, those with a relatively strong attachment to the Jewish community and/or Israel and/or Jewish identity.”
It found that 70% of respondents identified as Zionist, while 12% identified as “not a Zionist, but a supporter of Zionism.” Additionally, 7% identified as “neither a supporter nor an opponent of Zionism,” 5% identified as a post-Zionist and 3% identified as an anti-Zionist.
Among strong liberal respondents, 52% identified as Zionists, while 79% of strong conservatives identified as Zionists.
Asked whether they believed that Zionism is racism, a charge frequently leveled by Israel’s critics, 59% of respondents said they believed that Zionism is “not at all racism.” Among strong liberal respondents, the proportion was 28%, compared to 86% of strong conservatives.
The survey also asked respondents about their perception of antisemitism coming from the political left and right in the United States. In recent months, calls to condemn right-wing antisemitism among Jewish conservatives have revealed growing rifts within the party.
Among the survey’s respondents, 62% said they were worried about antisemitism from both the left and the right, while 20% said they were more worried about antisemitism on the left and 17% were more worried about it on the right. Among strong liberals, just 5% were worried about antisemitism on the left while just 1% of conservatives were worried about antisemitism on the right.
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Palestinian restaurant opening near Columbia names its location to honor girl killed in Gaza, campus protesters
(JTA) — A Palestinian restaurant in New York City has named its new location “Hinds Hall” after the moniker pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University gave to a campus building they occupied last spring.
In a post on Instagram on Thursday, the restaurant, Ayat NYC, which has eight locations, announced that its new storefront in Morningside Heights would be renamed in solidarity with the protesters at Columbia.
“It stands right next to Columbia University where students stood up for Gaza and renamed Hamilton Hall, a campus building to Hinds Hall and we choose to stand with them and carry that name forward,” the post read.
Critics of Columbia’s pro-Palestinian protests at the time accused its participants of antisemitism and calling for violence against Jews. In June, a report by the Columbia University Task Force on Antisemitism found that over half of its Jewish student body had experienced discrimination and exclusion after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
The new location for the restaurant, which is owned by restaurateur Abdul Elenani and his wife, Ayat Masoud, faced criticism from some of the neighborhood’s Jewish residents, who say they have been overwhelmed by pro-Palestinian symbols and sentiment since Columbia became an epicenter of the encampment movement last year.
Ayat wove pro-Palestinian advocacy into its practices throughout the war in Gaza. In January 2024, one of its locations drew a public outcry after its menu featured the phrase “From the River to the Sea,” a phrase frequently used by pro-Palestinian activists that Jewish watchdogs view as a call for Israel’s destruction. Afterwards, the location hosted a free Shabbat dinner for over 1,300 people that drew anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian Jews and others.
“Our restaurants will not only ever serve food. It will serve memory, truth, and responsibility,” the new post from Ayat NYC continued. “The least we can do is carry her name in our hearts and on our storefront so that everyone who walks by knows that Hind mattered and every single child matters.”
The location’s name, which was also adopted in a song by rapper Macklemore, pays homage to Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed in Gaza in January 2024. (The Israeli military denied responsibility for her death, but a Washington Post investigation found that Israeli armored vehicles were present in the area.)
Her heavily publicized death, and the phone call she made to paramedics with the Palestine Red Crescent Society while stranded in a vehicle, also inspired the docudrama “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” which won a top prize at the Venice Film Festival in September.
“Her name carries the weight of all the children whose voices were silenced and whose blood was treated like it meant nothing,” the post by Ayat NYC continued.
An opening date has not yet been set for the Upper West Side location. A new location opened in late October in Astoria, the Queens neighborhood that is home to Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and home to a thriving pro-Palestinian activist community.
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NC activists claimed ‘victory’ in their Israel-divestment push. The state treasury says they’re wrong.
(JTA) — Earlier this week, several pro-Palestinian groups in North Carolina touted the state pension fund’s sale of $6.7 million in Israeli government bonds as a “victory.”
But despite the groups’ claims, the North Carolina Department of State Treasurer said that the sale had nothing to do with “divestment” but was simply a part of a routine portfolio rebalance.
“The sale of two Israel Government International bonds was not related to a divestment exercise,” the North Carolina Department of State Treasurer said in a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “The previously held bonds were sold in October during a larger fixed income portfolio rebalancing exercise that sold bonds with shorter remaining maturity than the portfolio typically holds.”
The activists had hailed the sale as a win for the boycott Israel movement.
“VICTORY: NC DIVESTS FROM ISRAEL!! Genocide and apartheid are a bad investment,” wrote the Jewish Voice for Peace chapter of Triangle North Carolina in a post on Instagram, adding that the sale was a result of a “powerful campaign” supported by over 40 local organizations.
The JVP chapter had joined with several other groups, including Muslims for Social Justice and Jewish Voice for Peace Charlotte, to form Break the Bonds North Carolina Coalition, a campaign advocating for divestment. Similar campaigns have long lobbied treasury officials in other places.
But the likelihood that officials in North Carolina would pass BDS measures appeared unlikely. In 2017, the state’s governor signed into law a bill that banned state agencies from doing business with companies that boycott Israel. The elected state treasurer, Brad Briner, is a Republican, as is the majority of the legislature. The governor, meanwhile, is a moderate Jewish Democrat who has never made Israel a centerpiece of his politics.
Still, anti-Israel sentiment that has surged among Democrats have made an impact on the state. In June, the North Carolina Democratic Party passed a resolution calling for the United States to implement an immediate arms embargo on Israel. And in August, the Democratic Rep. Valerie Foushee announced that she “will not accept” donations for the 2026 elections from the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC.
Last month, on Oct. 29, Break the Bonds gathered outside the State Treasurer’s Office to deliver a petition with 4,600 signatories and called on the state to divest the Israeli bonds held in its pension fund.
“The people of North Carolina do not want a retirement fund invested in genocide, occupation, and apartheid,” the petition read. “We demand that our savings be used to make our communities stronger and healthier, not to fund crimes against humanity abroad.”
But while a press release from JVP cited the petition as part of its efforts to pressure the state to divest, the treasury said that its “rebalancing exercise took place before Break the Bonds NC Coalition presented its petition to our department.”
The treasurer also added that as of the end of October, it still held some Israeli bonds within its broader investments.
The discrepancy between the group’s celebratory tone and the treasury’s explanation was not the first time that a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions effort elicited a conflicting response.
In April 2024, anti-Zionist activists at Pitzer College in California, including the local JVP chapter, claimed victory after the school announced it would no longer pre-approve students to study abroad at Haifa University. The school later said the decision had come from waning student interest, not a principled objection.
A similar episode also occurred this month in Minnesota, where pro-Palestinian advocates claimed they had successfully pressured the State Board of Investment to divest from Israeli bonds.
Despite the statements from the groups, which included MN BDS Community and the Anti-War Committee, the state board told TCJewfolk that the sale of some Israeli bonds was a fiscal choice.
“Contrary to statements from the organization referenced in your inquiry, the Minnesota State Board of Investment (SBI) has not changed its investment policy regarding permitted investments,” the SBI told TCJewfolk. “The SBI hires professional, third-party institutional investment managers to make investment decisions at the individual security level. These holdings are not static.”
The status of Israel bonds in New York City offers another glimpse at the complicated politics of the contested holdings. This year, Comptroller Brad Lander, a progressive, declined to reinvest Israel bonds that matured, giving anti-Israel activists a sense of the victory. But the city remains invested in Israeli assets, and activists there are continuing to push for divestment — which the mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, favors and the comptroller-elect, Mark Levine, says he does not plan to do.
In a press release Tuesday, JVP said that the sale in North Carolina came shortly after “Minnesota and Michigan announced their decisions not to re-invest.
Reached for comment by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Ari Rosenberg, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace Triangle and the Break the Bonds NC Coalition, said the state’s decision “represents the power of people’s voices from across the state — including public sector workers — who had been calling attention to these problematic investments for nearly a year.”
“For months, we met with the Treasurer’s office, gathered 5,000 signatures from concerned citizens, and rallied with state pension fund recipients and community members to deliver our petition and our message,” Rosenberg said in an emailed statement. “The Treasurer’s decision makes it clear that our voices were heard.”
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