Uncategorized
‘Hebrew in the huddle’: American football kicks off another season in Israel
(JTA) — The year was 1999, and Jonathan Hauser was working as a concierge at the famous King David Hotel in Jerusalem.
At the time, Hauser was playing for the Jerusalem Lions flag football team, a part of the American Football in Israel organization. The league was 10 years old at the time but lacked adequate playing fields. One day, he spotted a face he knew from TV in the hotel lobby: New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft.
Hauser told Kraft about American Football in Israel (AFI) — which Kraft, despite being a regular Israel visitor, did not know existed — and connected him with Steve Leibowitz, a veteran journalist who moved to Israel in 1974 and had been leading the development of the sport in Israel.
Just a year later, Kraft inaugurated the small Kraft Family Stadium in Jerusalem, with a field only 80 yards long (instead of the regulation 100-yard length in the NFL). The AFI — which started with touch football and later expanded to flag football and adult tackle football — had found a field.
On Saturday night, the AFI kicks off its season in Bet Shemesh with a matchup between the Bet Shemesh Rebels and the Jerusalem Lions, in front of a sold-out crowd of 400. Around 2,000 players, coaches and referees are now involved in the league throughout the country. The adult tackle league features eight teams from different cities who compete in an eight-game regular season, followed by playoffs that culminate in the Israel Bowl championship game in the spring. Other programs for men, women and children of all ages are offered in cities across Israel.
“The dream of building football in the country is due to the partnership and friendship and help of Robert Kraft, without any question, and his family,” said Leibowitz, a New York City native and longtime Giants fan.
Leibowitz had the dream since the 1980s, when he and a group of journalists put together a sports club to watch American football by pirating the signal from the Armed Forces Network. That inspired them to start the league.
In 2017, Kraft donated $6 million to open the Kraft Family Sports Campus in Jerusalem, which Leibowitz said is home to the only regulation-size American football field in the Middle East, plus facilities for soccer, basketball and more.
“My late, darling wife Myra always used to tell me that until I start building football in Israel, I would not win anything with [the] Patriots,” Kraft said at the 2017 dedication. “That happened in late 1999, and we won our first Super Bowl in 2001. Now we have five championships, and I can’t ignore the connection between our continuing to support development in Israel and our great accomplishments.”
New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft at the Kraft Family Sports Campus in Jerusalem. (Courtesy American Football in Israel)
Players from AFI have gone on to play college ball in the United States, most notably Yonatan Marmour, who in 2021 became the first Israeli to play Division I football. Bet Shemesh coach Charlie Cohen, a yeshiva teacher and salesman who moved to Israel from Massachusetts in 2000, added that some athletes play in Israel during a gap year before trying to make the jump to Division II.
In the early years of football in Israel, Leibowitz said the players were mostly American immigrants or children of immigrants. But now, he says there is mostly “Hebrew in the huddle”: Nearly every team outside Jerusalem is entirely Hebrew-speaking. Some cities have Arab players, plus immigrants from Ethiopia and Russia.
Leibowitz is proud of one notable AFI alum: American-born Ron Dermer, Israel’s new minister of strategic affairs and a former Israeli ambassador to the United States. Leibowitz called Dermer, who played flag football, a “celebrity” in Israel’s football community.
Leibowitz, who serves as president of AFI, acknowledged that the sport will never surpass the popularity of soccer or basketball in Israel. But the strides the league has made are undeniable, and the AFI hopes to build three more football stadiums, with plans in motion for regulation-size fields in Haifa, outside Tel Aviv and in Beersheva.
In another sign of development on the world stage, Israel also hosted the 2019 European Flag Football Championship and the 2021 Flag Football World Championship. In July, Leibowitz said, the AFI has been invited to bring a national team of top players to play in Fez, Morocco. He said it’s the first time an Israeli team will play a Moroccan team in Morocco, likely in any sport.
And with the 2028 Olympics in the not-too-distant future, Leibowitz said the AFI is working on a squad that could qualify for the soon-to-be-announced flag football competition.
Leibowitz added that the league honors the late Myra Kraft, who was also very involved in the sport’s development, by stitching her initials onto the Israeli players’ jerseys when they play abroad.
For coach Charlie Cohen, football is at the center of his Jewish practice — and helped inspire him to become a rabbi.
“Without sports, there is no Jewish identity for me,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Cohen, 53, said he was kicked out of Hebrew school as a child and had all but walked away from his Judaism when he was coaching Pop Warner football in Sharon, Massachusetts. His winless team squared off against a powerhouse squad from nearby North Attleboro and won, 13-12.
“That was a really watershed moment for me,” Cohen said. “I took that to heart, as a person, and as a Jew.”
He explained: “Here it is, you’re a football coach, and you’re demanding that your team has character. Your team shows up for each other. If you have a loss, come fight for your guys, don’t quit… I said to myself, if I were to demand my little peewee football team turns it around, well, I’m going to turn it around, too.”
He reengaged with Judaism and ultimately immigrated to Israel, where he became a rabbi.
Cohen began as Bet Shemesh’s offensive line coach, then became head coach last season, leading the Rebels to the semifinals, where they lost by four points.
And no, Cohen is not over the loss: “We had the ball with two minutes to go. Should’ve called a timeout and calmed them down. You live and you learn.”
A Tel Aviv Pioneer player hurdles an opponent in an American Football in Israel game. (Doron Dotan)
One of Cohen’s players is 22-year-old yeshiva student Aviad Ohayon, who said he tried football for the first time in high school in Kfar Saba, at the behest of a friend. He didn’t know what football was at the time.
“The information that I had about football was like a bunch of guys with helmets fighting with a strange ball, in the shape of an egg,” Ohayon told JTA, not inaccurately. “He really wanted me to come, so I was like, okay, why not? I came to one practice and you can say I fell in love with the sport.”
Ohayon — who plays running back, linebacker and kicker — said he has played basketball, soccer and karate in the past, but football was special.
“I really loved sports, but something with football, the training and all the practices, was very different to me,” he said. “The spirit, the brotherhood, everything was way more unique than I saw in the other sports.”
Leibowitz, now 71, calls himself the “grandfather” of the sport in Israel.
“The craziness was sticking with it all these years, for over 30 years, and making it into a life ambition to establish the sport in Israel, because I think it’s a good sport. I think it has a place in this country,” he said. “I think we’ve proven that. And together with that we’ve created a community. So at this point, I can’t even leave if I wanted to.”
—
The post ‘Hebrew in the huddle’: American football kicks off another season in Israel appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
In the face of conflict over assimilation, appropriation, colonialism and hegemony, a plea for human dignity through dance
Some movies cut so close to home that they make it impossible to have an objective response. When I was watching Tatyana Tenenbaum’s debut feature documentary Everything You Have Is Yours, the moment of truth hit about halfway through.
The film’s protagonist, dancer and choreographer Hadar Ahuvia, is rehearsing in an empty studio, talking about doing her homework at the Jewish Community Center in Hawaii as a child, while her mother taught Israeli folk dance classes in another room. She’d only stop when she heard a favorite song.
“I’d rush out,” Ahuvia says in voiceover “to join a dance or two with women my mother’s age, tucking into their palms for ‘Mah Navu.”
I leaped up because I suddenly remembered dancing with my own Israeli mother, at a New Jersey JCC in the 80s, my small hand tucked into her palm, as we moved softly in a circle with American Jews, to the opening notes of “Mah Navu.” My middle-aged legs were convinced that they still knew what to do. They didn’t, and I slammed into the coffee table, leaving angry bruises on both shins that still refuse to heal.
It’s a little on-the-nose, but so is life:
Like Ahuvia, I’m the daughter of kibbutzniks who moved to the U.S. and raised me here, and I loved the old dances. Like Ahuvia, I knew very little then about the history of how they’d come into being. I only knew they belonged to us, just as Israel belonged to us. And like Ahuvia, I come from a family full of conflict over the war. We throw words at each other: genocide, terrorists, resistance, safety, peace, justice. We wield facts and figures as weapons, we challenge each other’s sources. We demand empathy while offering none; we yell, we sulk, we storm out of group chats, and then collapse into that most un-Jewish of compromises: silences that sometimes last weeks. And this is just with my parents. Don’t even get me started on the uncles.
Despite all our best and worst efforts, we never change each other’s minds.
But perhaps that’s the trouble. And part of what makes Everything You Have is Yours such a necessary offering. Tatyana Tenenbaum and Hadar Ahuvia, both of them dance artists, are interested in the body, not the mind. Over the course of seven years, Tenenbaum films Ahuvia’s trips from New York to Poland to Palestine and to her mother’s kibbutz in Israel — everywhere that Ahuvia can, in her own words, “exercise my freedom of movement,” in pursuit of her troubled, troubling lineage.
Tenenbaum’s camera dances with Ahuvia as she wrestles with the folk traditions on which she was raised. The film’s title is taken from one of Ahuvia’s own works in which she and her collaborators demonstrate and re-enact the ways in which early Israeli folk dances appropriated, assimilated, and finally claimed ownership of Palestinian and Jewish Arab traditions.
Everything You Have Is Yours is not a screed or polemic but rather a gorgeous, engrossing portrait of committed dancers — Israeli, Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, American and Palestinian — as they, like Ahuvia, claim their own “freedom of movement” within the shackles that bind past and present. And while Ahuvia’s performances draw from her specific identity and heritage — as her collaborators draw from theirs — her questions are universal: How does history live in our bones? What do we lose, and what do we gain, when we challenge the myths of our childhood? How do we carry the violence inflicted on us and the violence we inflict on others? And where do we go from here?
Ahuvia and Tenenbaum talked to me over Zoom about the film’s long journey to the screen, the impact of the past two years on their relationships and work, and why such a critically well-received project has yet to find a distributor.
I told them I’d connected with the film. I didn’t tell them it was the first movie I’ve seen about Israel that I could imagine watching with my own mother, across our differences, my palm tucked once more in hers.
When I first reached out to you for this interview, Tatyana, you expressed a very strong conviction that you and Hadar needed to be in the conversation together.
Tatyana Tenenbaum: Hadar and I are both dance artists, and that’s how we met, so the movie grew out of a horizontal friendship. Before I proposed to Hadar that we document her process, we had already worked together as performers.
Also, the themes we’ve explored are related: I’m not Israeli, but I do have Ashkenazi Jewish lineage, so for me this project was also a reflection of what it means as an American to have assimilated into a national project and into empire.
You shot and edited over seven years. What kinds of conversations did you need to have as you were working out accountability over the long haul, both to each other and to the other dancers on camera?
TT: So many! I’m a process-based artist and I had never made a film before, and at first I thought it would just be a 10-minute short. And then 15, and then 20, and it kept evolving. Hadar and I had a lot of catch-up work to do around consent. This is personal work and her relationships with her family are very tender. Ultimately the process mattered, not only because of the political ideas Hadar is grappling with and her beautiful artistry, but also her vulnerability.
Was it a shared editing process?
Hadar Ahuvia: No, I am really glad this is Tatyana’s film. I don’t think it would be an interesting thing to see a documentary that I made about myself.
The film has been very well received by audiences and critics, but there has been some struggle getting distribution and getting it shown, particularly by Jewish festivals. What do you think is happening there?
TT: Our struggles with distribution aren’t unique. Films that are critical of Zionism are not films that distributors want to take a risk on. There are exceptions: The Jewish Film Institute, for example, presented the movie in San Francisco for Winterfest, and they made a beautiful panel as the centerpiece of the weekend about it, which was lovely.
Because we were on their roster, all the Jewish festivals then solicited the film. But none of them programmed it. I think it’s worth saying, and worth naming that. It’s a missed opportunity.
HA: And we invite them to reconsider.
While the film has a point of view, it also features Israeli and American dancers rehearsing and performing together while navigating political disagreement. That diversity of thought feels both satisfying and precarious. How have the past two years of fracture, both between and amongst Israeli and American Jews, impacted these dancers and your relationships with them?
TT: It’s been hard. But we’re still in relationship with everyone in the film.
HA: We knew right from the start that we didn’t all sit in the same place politically. Even if we disagree about the exact makeup of what political futures should look like, we believe in the humanity and dignity of all people. And I think that continues to be true for everybody who participated, which enables us to continue to be in relationship.
On the other hand, while the Palestinian-Americans in Freedom Dabka Group are featured prominently, they only appear in parallel. There’s never an intersection, or a moment of seeing the two sets of dancers come together.
HA: It would have been superficial to try to invite Palestinians into my work. That wouldn’t change the power dynamics of it still being my work, and my authorship. Also, the politics in the real world are such that this kind of collaboration in my work about Israeli dance didn’t feel possible. It would have been superficial for me to rush to solutions.
I even thought about putting videos of Palestinians in different pieces, and that didn’t feel right either, because it wouldn’t give them the agency of representing themselves. And so what I decided to do instead was to “notice the absence.” The absence of relationship with Palestinians comes from the way that apartheid in the State is actualized in my body.
There’s a particularly arresting scene featuring Hadar’s on-stage breakdown of how early Israeli folk dances altered and absorbed Yemeni Jewish steps, and how this represents a “de-Arabization” of the form. Then there is a similar process through which Palestinian dabka becomes Israeli debka. When asked about it on camera, Amer Abdelrasoul of the Freedom Dabka Group says “I don’t know about Israeli Debka, and I don’t wanna see it. Because I’m gonna get pissed.”
TT: Amer didn’t explicitly know about those Israeli dances. At the same time, he wasn’t surprised about them, because they reminded him of other cultural appropriations. That moment creates a visceral response in audiences, but I thought it was a great answer: direct, clear and honest.
I can imagine a critique from the left that within the context of what Palestinians are currently experiencing in Gaza, the occupied territories and elsewhere, art that focuses on Israeli perspectives — even critically — might be problematic. How would you respond to that?
HA: I think it’s important for us to do this work, so that Palestinians don’t have to. As Jews, it’s our responsibility to speak to our people.
How would you respond to the other side, to those who might feel that the critiques embedded in this film harm Jewish safety, and delegitimize Israeli experience?
HA: We really center Israelis. We humanize Israelis and show our diversity. And that itself could actually be critiqued from the Left. But from the Right, what I’ve heard most is, well, cultural exchange is good, isn’t it? Even some of the dancers you see in the movies disagree with my critique of the cultural appropriation in these dances.
I think that cultural exchange is great too. But, again, this is about power dynamics. For example when I see Christian Zionists appropriating Jewish culture — as we see them do with my mother’s dancing in the film’s archival footage — it makes the dangers really clear to me.
TT: The largest Zionist voting bloc in the U.S. are evangelical Christian Zionists. It’s a fact that is often obscured politically, and I actually learned it from Hadar. We hope that the film also gives audiences a tangible experience with the way that, under Christian hegemony, there are people claiming to support us but who do not actually care about Jews.
When you ask the dancer and choreographer Ze’eva Cohen about her identity, she says that the answer to the question of where you come from lies not in your citizenship but in your heritage. What heritages do you invoke in this film?
TT: I am going to say… Somatic abolitionism.
HA: And especially the work of Resmaa Menakem.
I was expecting the answer to be Poland, or Eastern Europe.
TT: Hadar and I share an education in postmodern dance, and we share the idea of being with the body on the level of sensation and function and integration. This is where Menakem has been so important for our dance field. The need for reintegration only emerges because of colonialism. Without colonialism, we wouldn’t need to reintegrate: Our bodies would just be there.
This brings us back to Ze’eva Cohen saying that in Yemeni Jewish culture “if you didn’t dance, if you didn’t sing…you didn’t believe in God, unless it was embodied.”
HA: Dance continues to be a way that I process grief and anger. I’ve been researching Ashkenazi culture, and especially Ashkenazi vernacular and cantorial music, reclaiming this long chain of transmission.
As I’ve been dancing, I’ve been active with Rabbis for Ceasefire, and I’m also in rabbinical school. So, davening and prayer has been another way that I feel I stay connected to being Jewish — to being deeply rooted, while also holding what’s happening in the world, and ultimately being able to envision what else is possible.
Mor Mandel, an Israeli collaborator and dancer featured in the film, says of leaving Israel: “I left the ship sinking, but I still dream in Hebrew.” Hadar, are you still able to dance in Hebrew?
HA: In my research around Yiddish dance, I’ve discovered that there exists a beautiful sense of pride in each dance. I’ve reconnected to Jewish strength through that posture rather than through Zionism. So no, I no longer dance Israeli folk dance for fun.
Except that it felt meaningful to me at my wedding to do “El Ginat Egoz,” a dance by Sarah Levi Tanai, with my mom. It felt like a gesture that acknowledges our shared language. Context matters, right? So I don’t do these dances on the fields of the kibbutz, but it felt right to me to do them at my wedding, with my mom. It felt good to acknowledge this particular dance that…
TT: …that she loves.
HA: Yes, exactly. That she loves.
Everything You Have Is Yours screens on March 5 and 8 at the Laemmle Theater in Los Angeles. Information on further screenings is available on the film’s website.
The post In the face of conflict over assimilation, appropriation, colonialism and hegemony, a plea for human dignity through dance appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Britain Sends Destroyer and Helicopters With Counter-Drone Tech to Cyprus
Entrance to the RAF Akrotiri, a British sovereign base in Cyprus, which was hit by an unmanned drone overnight, causing limited damage, after sirens sounded, in Cyprus, March 2, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Yiannis Kourtoglou
Britain is deploying HMS Dragon, an air defense destroyer, to Cyprus after the runway of its Akrotiri base there was hit by an Iranian-made drone.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Tuesday he was sending the naval vessel along with helicopters with counter–drone capabilities to the region, as the conflict in the Middle East intensifies.
France and Greece said they would also send anti-missile and anti-drone systems after the British base on the island was hit on Monday.
“The UK is fully committed to the security of Cyprus and British military personnel based there,” Starmer said in a post on X, adding that he had spoken with Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides about the move.
“We’re continuing our defensive operations and I’ve just spoken with the President of Cyprus to let him know that we are sending helicopters with counter drone capabilities and HMS Dragon is to be deployed to the region,” the British prime minister said.
HMS Dragon is a Type 45 air-defense destroyer equipped with the Sea Viper missile system and advanced radar designed to track and neutralize airborne threats, according to the Royal Navy’s website.
Uncategorized
Trump Awards Medal of Honor to ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ World War II Soldier With ‘Unsurpassed Courage’
US President Donald Trump speaks during a visit at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, US, Feb. 13, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
President Donald Trump bestowed the Medal of Honor to three former US Army soldiers on Monday at a White House ceremony and they included a World War II veteran who was recognized by Yad Vashem as “Righteous Among the Nations.”
Trump posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor to Master Sgt. Roderick (Roddie) W. Edmonds, who refused to single out the Jewish servicemen he fought alongside when he was held by Germans in a prisoner-of-war (POW) camp during World War II. The president said the three US soldiers receiving the Medal of Honor — only one of whom is still living – demonstrated “unsurpassed courage.”
In 1941, Edmonds enlisted in the US Army and soon became one of the youngest master sergeants in the military, Trump said. The native of South Knoxville, Tennessee, led a unit that fought in Europe during World War II and they were captured by German forces on Dec. 19, 1944. Edmonds was held with other American POWS, including Jews, at Stalag IX-B in Bad Orb, Germany. Germans tried to separate Jewish POWs and many of them were sent to Nazi extermination camps or killed. Edmonds was in charge of the American barracks in Stalag IXA, according to the US Army, but refused to help single out Jewish POWs.
“On July 26, 1945, a Nazi SS officer issued an order over the camp loudspeaker, loud and strong, he said that only American Jews were to show up to roll call. Following this morning, he added ‘all who disobey this order will be shot immediately,’” Trump explained at the Medal of Honor ceremony. “There were more than 200 Jewish American soldiers in the camp, and Roddie knew their separation from the group would mean certain death. So that night he summoned his team and devised a plan. The next morning, all 1,200 American men fell in line together, shoulder to shoulder.”
“Enraged, the Nazi commandant rushed forward, drew his Luger pistol, and pressed the barrel between Sgt. Edmond’s eyes,” the president added. “He barked at Roddie, ‘They cannot all be Jews!’ He screamed loud and again and again. And, staring straight back into the raging face of evil, Sgt. Edmonds replied fearlessly, ‘We are all Jews here.’ The Nazi officer lowered his weapon and the soldiers erupted in cheers.”
The president noted that “with total disregard for his own life, Roddie had saved over 200 of his fellow service members.” Stalag IXA was liberated two months later.
Edmonds died on Aug. 8, 1985, in Knoxville. His son, Chris, accepted his Medal of Honor on Monday at the White House ceremony. Trump also posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor to Staff Sgt. Michael H. Ollis and Command Sergeant Major Terry P. Richardson.
Yad Vashem recognized Edmonds as Righteous Among the Nations in 2015. A year later, a ceremony was held at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, and the Righteous medal and certificate of honor was presented to Edmond’s son.