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‘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.”
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The post ‘Hebrew in the huddle’: American football kicks off another season in Israel appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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New documentary captures the lively history of Yiddish theater in America
The new documentary Immigrant Songs: Yiddish Theater and the American Jewish Experience, produced by the Milken Archive of Jewish Music, is fast, entertaining and a good introduction to the topic.
Focusing mainly on the musical side of the story, but covering ‘straight plays’ as well, the film opens with a superb ‘warm-up act’: “Hu Tsa Tsa,” a stock Yiddish vaudeville number performed by the widely mourned Bruce Adler, who died in 2008 at age 63. Bursting with charm and talent, Adler, scion of a top Yiddish vaudeville family, demonstrates that Yiddish theater used to be pretty damned lively.
What follows is the oft-told story of the rise and decline of the American Yiddish theater, beginning with its prehistory in the Purimshpiels — the annual performances that for centuries served as the only secular entertainment in the Ashkenazic world. From there the film takes us to Yiddish theater’s 1876 birth in Romania, courtesy of Avrom Goldfadn, a.k.a. “The Father of Yiddish Theater.”
The film also describes Yiddish theater’s arrival in America, which, thanks to massive Jewish immigration, quickly became its capital. We learn of its influence on American theater’s styles of acting and set design. And the film describes the decline of its audience, due to assimilation and the immigration quotas of the 1920s.
There’s an excellent section on “The Big Four” Yiddish theater composers — Joseph Rumshinsky, Alexander Olshanetsky, Abe Ellstein, and Sholom Secunda. All in all, the documentary does a fine job of teaching the aleph-beyz, the ABCs, of the history of Yiddish theater to the uninitiated.
The most impressive aspect of Immigrant Songs is its well-crafted pace. Though there are a few snippets of vintage Yiddish cinema (Yiddish theater’s “kid brother”), most of the film consists of recent concert footage, some well-selected photographs and ephemera, and a lot of talking heads. Almost every prominent Yiddish theater historian was interviewed for it, along with several musicologists, an archivist, Yiddish actors, directors, producers, etc. (Full disclosure: I am one of them.) Director Jeff Janeczko cuts between the interviewees so smoothly — sometimes in mid-sentence — that it feels like they’re in the same room and feeding off each other’s energy. The movie just flies by.
There are a few errors. Marc Chagall is described as an important designer of Yiddish theater; actually he designed one minor production in Russia in 1921, and never did another. In a bizarre, and biblically illiterate, statement, one interviewee claims that Jews hadn’t developed a theater culture earlier because the Second Commandment’s prohibition of “graven images” forbade the construction of sets. (Actually it’s about idol worship.)
Another interviewee claims that the Yiddish play Der Yeshiva Bokher; oder, Der Yudisher Hamlet — The Yeshiva Student; or, The Jewish Hamlet (Yiddish plays then often had subtitles), is closely patterned on Shakespeare’s tragedy. In truth, the play — written by Isidore Zolotarevski, the prolific writer of shund (“trash”) melodramas — is not only awful, but is as close to Shakespeare as baked ham is to your grandmother’s kreplach.
The film’s biggest fault, however, is its short running time (45 minutes). This is a rich topic, and too much is left by the wayside in the interest of brevity. There’s nothing about what shund melodramas felt like, why they appealed to their audiences, and why they became the only thing a lot of people know about Yiddish theater.
There’s also nothing about the World War I-era wave of shtetl plays, which reflected immigrants’ homesickness without indulging in nostalgia, and provided some of Yiddish theater’s shining moments with plays like Green Fields, The Empty Inn and Tevye. And the most important play in the Yiddish canon, The Dybbuk, is never mentioned.
Perhaps most surprisingly, considering the film’s emphasis on music, there is no examination of Yiddish theater’s influence on Broadway’s music. (Cole Porter — ironically, the only gentile among the major composers of Broadway’s Golden Age — had a pronounced Jewish lilt in a number of his songs, and he actually attended Yiddish theater regularly.)
The film’s last section is about the renewed interest in Yiddish that began in the 1970s and ’80s with the klezmer revival. Much of it focuses on the 2018 Yiddish production of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, whose success was predetermined the moment the production was announced.
For the overwhelming majority of American Jews, from the Orthodox to the unaffiliated, Fiddler is all they know about the lives of their ancestors. And though it’s a world-class piece of musical theater, as a work of social history Fiddler is as phony as a glass eye. Nevertheless, for American Jews it’s a sacred text.
Fiddler was a huge hit, but it was a gimmick, a one-off, whose success does very little for the future of Yiddish theater. Worse, the Yiddish — not the text, but the lines spoken by most of the actors — was often mispronounced and had the wrong intonation. (One elderly gentleman of my acquaintance, a native Yiddish speaker from Czechoslovakia, told me he didn’t understand a word the actors said, and spent the whole evening reading the English supertitles.)
What follows the Fiddler section in Immigrant Songs is mostly bromides. But the best current Yiddish theater reflects the kind of fresh thinking that keeps the form alive.
An occasional well-presented museum piece, like the Folksbiene’s 2016 revival of Rumshinsky’s operetta The Golden Bride, is a very worthwhile project (though it, too, suffered from poorly spoken Yiddish). But the most dynamic contemporary Yiddish theater is, in Jeffrey Shandler’s apt phrase, “post vernacular” — i .e., the use of Yiddish is self-conscious, a deliberate choice rather than something that’s done automatically, as it would have been a century ago when there were a lot more Yiddish speakers in the world.
An example of this is the 2017 neo-realist film Menashe, which could far more easily and conventionally have been made in English. Or a well-known piece done in Yiddish translation, like Shane Baker’s stunning Yiddish translation of Waiting for Godot, can become something much more valuable than a mere stunt. The Yiddish version, under Moshe Yassur’s straightforward direction, humanized the play, stripping it of the encrusted pretentiousness that had hidden its soul. (When it was presented in the International Samuel Beckett Festival in Ireland, multiple audience members approached the cast afterwards with the same reaction: “I don’t speak a word of Yiddish. But I’ve seen Godot five or six times, and this is the first time I understood it.”)
There’s a lot to be learned from Immigrant Songs. If you find yourself hungry for more, you couldn’t do better than to seek out YIVO’s online Yiddish theater course “Oh, Mama, I’m in Love!” But by all means, start with Immigrant Songs. It’s a very entertaining and informative appetizer.
The post New documentary captures the lively history of Yiddish theater in America appeared first on The Forward.
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UK PM Starmer Says There Could Be New Powers to Ban Pro-Palestinian Marches
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer gives a media statement at Downing Street in London, Britain, April 30, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jack Taylor/File photo
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the government could ban pro-Palestinian marches in some circumstances because of the “cumulative effect” the demonstrations had on the Jewish community after two Jewish men were stabbed in London on Wednesday.
Starmer told the BBC that he would always defend freedom of expression and peaceful protest, but chants like “Globalize the Intifada” during demonstrations were “completely off limits” and those voicing them should be prosecuted.
Pro-Palestinian marches have become a regular feature in London since the October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel that triggered the Gaza war. Critics say the demonstrations have generated hostility and become a focus for antisemitism.
Protesters have argued they are exercising their democratic right to spotlight ongoing human rights and political issues related to the situation in Gaza.
Starmer said he was not denying there were “very strong legitimate views about the Middle East, about Gaza,” but many people in the Jewish community had told him they were concerned about the repeat nature of the marches.
Asked if the tougher response should focus on chants and banners, or whether the protests should be stopped altogether, Starmer said: “I think certainly the first, and I think there are instances for the latter.”
“I think it’s time to look across the board at protests and the cumulative effect,” he said, adding that the government needed to look at what further powers it could take.
Britain raised its terrorism threat level to “severe” on Thursday amid mounting security concerns that foreign states were helping fuel violence, including against the Jewish community.
“We are seeing an elevated threat to Jewish and Israeli individuals and institutions in the UK,” the head of counter-terrorism policing, Laurence Taylor, said in a statement, adding that police were also working “against an unpredictable global situation that has consequences closer to home, including physical threats by state-linked actors.”
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War Likely to Resume After Trump’s Rejection of Latest Proposal, Says IRGC General
Iranians carry a model of a missile during a celebration following an IRGC attack on Israel, in Tehran, Iran, April 15, 2024. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
i24 News – A senior Iranian military figure said that fighting with the US was “likely” to resume after President Donald Trump stated he was dissatisfied with Tehran’s latest proposal, regime media reported on Saturday.
The comments of General Mohammad Jafar Asadi, one of the top Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders, were relayed by the Fars news agency, considered as a mouthpiece of the the powerful paramilitary body.
“Evidence has shown that the Americans do not not adhere to any commitments,” Asadi was quoted as saying.
He further added that Washington’s decision-making was “primarily media-driven aimed first at preventing a drop in oil prices and second at extricating themselves from the mess they have created.”
Iranian armed forces are ready “for any new adventures or foolishness from the Americans,” he said, going to assert that the Iran war would prove for the US a tragedy comparable with what was for Israel the October 7 massacre.
“Just as our martyred Leader said that the Zionist regime will never be the same as before the Al‑Aqsa Storm operation [the name chosen by Hamas leadership for the October 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel], the United States will also never return to what it was before its attack on Iran,” he said. “The world has understood the true nature of America, and no matter how much malice it shows now, it is no longer the America that many once feared.”