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How Israel built its most talented baseball roster ever for the 2023 World Baseball Classic
MIAMI (JTA) — As Team Israel celebrated its victory over Nicaragua Sunday afternoon in its opening game of the 2023 World Baseball Classic, there was proof up and down the lineup card of a months-long recruitment process that brought together a slew of major league talent.
There was manager Ian Kinsler, a 14-year MLB veteran and four-time All-Star. Big league pitchers Dean Kremer, who started the game, plus Richard Bleier and Zack Weiss. All-Star slugger Joc Pederson, and major league catcher Garrett Stubbs, who drove in the winning run.
For Kinsler, who played a central role in putting the roster together, the victory served as validation — even if he didn’t know what some of the players actually looked like until they arrived in Miami.
“Knowing the names, and then finally seeing all the faces and everybody coming together and playing a good game yesterday was very rewarding,” Kinsler said Monday. “It was a lot of fun.”
Pulling the team together took a combination of personal cajoling, a widely respected manager, Jewish geography and an effort to tap — and ignite — the sometimes embryonic Jewish identities of players who hadn’t given much thought to how their Jewish roots and baseball prowess might be combined.
“There’s quite a few guys who really want to help Israel and feel Jewish and buy into it,” Team Israel general manager Peter Kurz told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We evolve towards those players more — a player who says that he’s been to Israel, or that he’s connected to Israel. We definitely like to keep more than a player who was not connected at all, even though we try to go for the best athletes.”
The journey to assemble Team Israel, a 30-man roster composed largely of American Jewish ballplayers, half of whom have MLB experience, actually began back in 2021.
While playing for Israel’s 2020 Olympic team, Kinsler had conversations with Kurz and Israel Association of Baseball president Jordy Alter about managing the team in 2023.
“Once I developed the relationship with those two in the Olympics, it was a pretty easy decision,” Kinsler told JTA prior to the WBC. Kinsler had never managed a team before, at any level.
After he took the helm last June, Kinsler took a lead role in the team’s recruitment, working off a preliminary list of 50 players who were eligible to play for the team — meaning they were Jewish themselves, or the child or the grandchild of a Jew or married to one, and thus eligible for Israeli citizenship.
Kurz said Kinsler’s reputation around baseball was a key factor in offering him the job.
“There’s no doubt that Ian is one of the most respectable Jewish players that’s ever played the game before,” he said. “People respect him and they look up to him. Having experienced being in Israel twice, and playing for us in the Olympics, it just gives him that much more legitimization to talk to these players and ask them to come play for Team Israel.”
Kinsler is not the WBC’s only inexperienced manager who was chosen in part as a draw for players. Former players Mark DeRosa (United States), Mike Piazza (Italy) and Yadier Molina (Puerto Rico) are all managing, and Nelson Cruz is both a player on the Dominican Republic team and its general manager.
Ian Kinsler played for Team Israel at the Olympics in Tokyo after 14 MLB seasons. (Courtesy of JNF-USA)
As Kinsler began his recruitment, his first call was to Joc Pederson.
“It’s been an awesome experience,” Pederson told JTA. “I really enjoyed my time last time I played [in the 2012 WBC qualifier], and I wanted to do that again. Great group of guys.”
From there, Kurz said, he and Kinsler went down the list of Jewish major leaguers, calling each one to gauge their interest in representing Israel in the World Cup-style tournament. Given the timing of the WBC — just weeks before Major League Baseball’s Opening Day — it was largely a conversation about logistics.
“I think it wasn’t really necessarily the conversation about ‘Are you Jewish?’ Or ‘Are you eligible to play for Team Israel,’” Kinsler explained. “I think it was more of a conversation of ‘do you want to participate?’”
Pederson, who texted fellow big league players like Houston Astros star Alex Bregman and Milwaukee Brewers first baseman Rowdy Tellez (who is playing for Mexico), said health concerns and having enough time to get ready for the season were factors. New York Yankees players Harrison Bader and Scott Effross dropped out because of injuries.
And why did Pederson want to help recruit? It’s simple: “Because I like winning, and I want to win,” he said.
Israel hoped that having big-name players like Kinsler and Pederson lead the outreach efforts would pay off. While some of the game’s top Jewish stars ultimately did not join the team — namely Bregman and Atlanta Braves ace Max Fried — their work was far from fruitless, as this roster boasts the most major league experience Israel has ever had.
“I tried to get Peter to hold off as long as he could, so I could be the first one to get in touch with people,” Kinsler said. “Because I do think it helps hearing from a player.”
When making his calls, Kinsler said he shared his experience playing in the 2017 WBC with the U.S. team, plus “what kind of environment we’re trying to create for Israeli baseball.”
While navigating spring training schedules and injuries is certainly part of it, Kurz said there were many players who were excited for the opportunity to wear Israel across their jersey.
One of those players is Baltimore Orioles pitcher Dean Kremer, who was the first Israeli to be drafted into the MLB. Kremer, whose parents are Israeli, was born and raised in California, but has spent time living in Israel.
Dean Kremer pitches against Nicaragua in Israel’s first game of the 2023 World Baseball Classic, March 12, 2023, in Miami. (Courtesy Team Israel)
“Playing for Team Israel, anytime I get to put on that uniform is special for me,” Kremer said after pitching in Israel’s victory over Nicaragua. “It’s like another home. So every time I get to represent it’s one of the better feelings.”
Pederson added that the whole team “feels extremely proud.”
Ryan Lavarnway, a veteran catcher who has also played for Israel since 2017 and is seen as one of its leaders, has been vocal about how much it means to him to suit up for Israel.
“Playing for this team is super meaningful to me,” Lavarnway said after Israel’s exhibition game against the Miami Marlins. “It’s been really life changing. And I hope that this next generation of players that are new to this team takes the baton, and it means as much to them as it’s meant to us.”
One of those younger players is Toronto Blue Jays prospect Spencer Horwitz.
“Coming into this, I didn’t know what to really expect, this being my first time playing for Team Israel,” Horwitz said. “It’s living up to everything that people are saying. That environment we were just in was definitely electric.”
With reports of antisemitism on the rise in the United States, Kurz said players are more inclined to publicly identify as Jewish.
“I think a lot of these players feel, even more so, that they have to identify as being Jewish. Nobody’s trying to hide that at all,” he said.
Kurz added that Israel had an easier time recruiting top talent for the 2023 roster than in previous years, for a few reasons.
First, he said, both Team Israel and the WBC itself have gained in prominence over the past decade. For Israel, a surprising run in the 2017 WBC helped put Israeli baseball on the map, garnering excitement among both fans and potential players. And the WBC itself has grown more popular in the United States and around the world, with superstar players such as Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout suiting up for their ancestral countries, and MLB devoting more resources to marketing the tournament.
Geography also played a role. With most of the games being played in Miami, that allowed MLB players to more easily participate, as half the league has spring training in Florida.
When trying to discover Jewish players, there’s a certain element of word-of-mouth Jewish geography that comes into play, too. No player encapsulates that better than Ty Kelly.
“It’s easy to get the Cohens and the Levys. It’s more difficult to get the Ty Kellys,” Kurz said.
Ty Kelly bats during Israel’s exhibition game against the Miami Marlins, March 8, 2023 in Jupiter, Florida. (Emma Sharon/MLB)
Kurz recalled that about seven years ago, he heard from someone on Long Island who had taken his kids to a minor league game. Kelly was signing autographs and spotted the kids’ kippahs and told them he was Jewish. They told their father, who in turn told Kurz.
“And the rest was history,” Kurz said. Kelly, who has played for Israel since the 2017 WBC, has become another one of the team’s leaders. After this WBC, he will begin his coaching career in the Seattle Mariners organization.
The WBC’s eligibility rules also allowed Israel some flexibility in recruiting. Outfielder Alex Dickerson, for example, is not Jewish, but his wife is.
“This is about creating the best team possible within the rules,” Kinsler said.
Creating the best team also meant creating a strong coaching staff.
Kinsler recruited former Israel manager Brad Ausmus, who was Kinsler’s manager in the big leagues, and former All-Star and fan favorite Kevin Youkilis, the former Boston Red Sox first baseman.
“It was easy,” Youkilis said of his decision to join the team. “Being part of this is part of my heritage, part of growing up Jewish and being bar mitzvahed and all that. It was an easy yes.”
Youkilis, who retired in 2014, said coaching full-time isn’t in the cards for him, but he’s enjoying the experience right now.
“It’s remarkable how good a talent we have, a collective Jewish group of ballplayers that when I was growing up probably wasn’t that strong,” he said. “It’s good to see the next generation of ballplayers, and to be a coach, and to witness it and be around and help guys.”
While this team, and its coaches, is largely a group of American Jews, the uniform says Israel. Even with the fraught political climate in Israel, which is experiencing an uptick in violence and widespread protests over the country’s far-right government and its controversial judicial proposals, both Kurz and Kinlser said politics were not a factor for any player.
“I don’t think in general athletes are too scared of those types of things,” Kinsler said.
Kurz added that leading up to the WBC, numerous players reached out to ask questions and gain a better understanding of the current situation in Israel. But nobody expressed hesitation about identifying with the country. (There have not been protests or anti-Israel demonstrations, as there have been at times in the past when Team Israel plays in the United States and abroad.)
“They’re definitely interested, they want to know what’s going on,” Kurz said. “They want to know who they’re playing for.”
Kelly, who was part of those types of discussions in the clubhouse with the Olympic team, said the players are keeping an eye on the news, but they haven’t had many conversations about it yet.
“I think it’s sort of the nature of the team, having a lot of new guys and people not really knowing what their roles are supposed to be, as far as talking about that stuff, or what their opinions are supposed to be,” Kelly said. “I think that happens as guys get to know each other more.”
Building camaraderie was also a priority for the team. Prior to the tournament, Israel held a private screening of the new documentary “Israel Swings for Gold,” which followed the team’s Olympic experience in Tokyo.
Kinsler said that while the event was not mandatory, he encouraged players to attend.
“I think that’ll be a great bonding experience for us, and something that other teams don’t really have the luxury of using as motivation or bringing togetherness,” Kinsler said beforehand. “That could be an advantage for us.”
And with a tough draw in Pool D, which pits Israel against top teams including the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Puerto Rico, Israel will need any advantage it can get.
But Israel is no stranger to being the underdog. In fact, the team relishes it.
“We’re certainly the David against the Goliath of the baseball world. But you know, we love it,” Kurz said.
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The post How Israel built its most talented baseball roster ever for the 2023 World Baseball Classic appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Nearly half of young Americans view US relationship with Israel as a burden, survey finds
(JTA) — Nearly half of young Americans, 46%, believe that the United States’ relationship with Israel is mostly a burden to the United States, according to a new survey from the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School.
The Harvard Youth Poll, which polled 2,018 Americans aged 18 to 29, found that just 16% of those surveyed described the U.S. relationship with Israel as mostly a benefit.
Respondents were asked about their view of other U.S. alliances, including Canada, which 53% saw as beneficial, and Ukraine, which 21% saw as beneficial. Israel received the lowest perceived benefit of any country tested.
The survey also found that 55% of young Americans believe the U.S. military action in Iran is not in the best interest of the American people.
It comes as attitudes about Israel among young Americans in recent years have grown sharply negative. Earlier this month, a Pew Research Center survey found that 70% of Americans aged 18 to 49 held a somewhat or very negative opinion of Israel. That view was split among partisan lines, with 84% of Democrats in that demographic holding a negative view of Israel, compared to 57% of Republicans.
The Harvard survey was conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs between March 26 and April 3 and had a margin of error of 2.74 percentage points.
The post Nearly half of young Americans view US relationship with Israel as a burden, survey finds appeared first on The Forward.
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Long Island father and teen son arrested after investigation into swastika drawn in school bathroom
(JTA) — A father and his teenage son were arrested Wednesday after an investigation into swastika graffiti at the teen’s school led police to search their home, where authorities said they found chemicals used to make explosives.
The arrests stemmed from an investigation into swastika graffiti found in a boys’ bathroom at Syosset High School on Long Island. After police determined that a 15-year-old student had drawn the swastika, the Nassau County Police Department sent officers to his home.
There, the teen told the officers about the explosive materials, according to prosecutors. He said his father had purchased the chemicals for him to build rockets.
During the subsequent search of the home, police found “highly unstable” materials that had been combined to make explosives, including nitroglycerin, multiple acids, oxidizers and fuels. They began to evacuate people in adjacent homes, fearing an explosion.
The teen was not identified by police due to his age. Francisco Sanles, 48, who was arrested at the scene, has pleaded not guilty to seven criminal counts, including criminal possession of a weapon and endangering the welfare of a child. His son was charged with five counts, including criminal possession of a weapon, criminal mischief, aggravated harassment and making graffiti.
Swastika graffiti is relatively commonplace in schools, with the Anti-Defamation League reporting over 400 incidents in 2024: Syosset High School itself was hit by a spate of antisemitic graffiti, including swastikas, in 2017. But it is relatively rare that incidents result in arrests.
In an email to the school district Wednesday night, the Syosset School District — which enrolls a large number of Jewish students — said its investigation had identified the student for the police, and he would face “serious consequences pursuant to the District’s Code of Conduct.”
“Antisemitism and hate speech have no place in our communities or in our schools,” the district said. “Syosset has long been proud of being a welcoming, empathetic, and inclusive community and those values remain firm. We protect those values and this community by confronting and holding accountable those who traffic in any form of hate.”
In January, New York City Police arrested and charged two 15-year-old boys suspected of spraying dozens of swastikas on a playground in a heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood with aggravated harassment and criminal mischief as a hate crime.
The post Long Island father and teen son arrested after investigation into swastika drawn in school bathroom appeared first on The Forward.
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Tucker Carlson calls campaign to shame a country club for barring a Jewish toddler ‘repulsive’
(JTA) — Catherine Rampell, the economist and pundit, likes telling the story about how her father once launched a public campaign against a Palm Beach country club when it banned his 4-year-old son from attending a birthday party because he is Jewish.
Now, Tucker Carlson has turned the anecdote into a sinister and “repulsive” tale of a crusade against folks who just want to hang out together.
Carlson substantially misrepresented Rampell’s anecdote, turning it into what Rampell on Wednesday said was “a coded story in defense of antisemitic and racist country clubs.”
Carlson, the far-right firebrand who sits at the center of the Republican Party’s schism over antisemitism, on Tuesday interviewed his brother Buckley on his streaming show about their shared disaffection for President Donald Trump over launching the Iran war. Tucker Carlson was until recently close to Trump, and Buckley Carlson was a speechwriter for the president.
The brothers in the podcast discussed Trump’s purported distaste for WASPs, shorthand for White Anglo Saxon Protestants who are descended from immigrants who arrived in the Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries. Trump’s grandfather was German-born, and his mother was Scottish.
“He’s very fixated on the WASP thing, and does talk about it a lot,” Tucker Carlson said.
“There’s another group in America that’s kind of fixated on the WASPs too,” his brother responded.
“I’ve noticed that,” Tucker said. And his brother continued: “With equal fervor and hostility.”
That led into a discussion of “status anxiety” driving social change, which Tucker Carlson says “everyone lies about.” That’s when Carlson recalled meeting Rampell at Fox News about a decade ago, when he was a host at the network and she was a guest commentator.
Referring to Rampell, who graduated with honors from Princeton University and who was then about 30, as a “girl” and a “liberal neocon person” who was “not smart,” he recalled asking her about her upbringing. She told him she grew up in Palm Beach, the wealthy Florida enclave where Carlson has also spent a lot of time.
“And she’s like, ‘Yeah, we moved there, and my dad sued the Bath and Tennis club for discrimination because they wouldn’t let him in,’” Tucker Carlson recounted.
“Like, that’s repulsive to me,” he continued. “A club should have, you should have the right to hang out with whoever you want to hang out, on whatever basis you want to make that decision. She was, like, bragging about it, and I was like, the hatred behind that, the desire to destroy something is so evident. This girl’s a hater.”
Rampell, who scould only vaguely recall the encounter, set the record straight on Wednesday on the Bulwark podcast. Rampell works for the Bulwark, a centrist political outlet, as well as for the liberal cable news channel MSNOW.
“My father didn’t sue country clubs,” she said. “Tucker is actually right that freedom of association is allowed under the law.”
Instead, Rampell’s father, Richard, a CPA, was moved in 1990 to launch a publicity campaign against clubs in the area that excluded on the basis of race, religion or gender, after his toddler son was told he would not be invited to a preschool classmate’s birthday party.
“We learned this, or my family learned this, because my brother was in preschool at the time, and he was not invited to a birthday party, and was subsequently found out that the reason he was not invited is that the country club that Tucker is referring to, the Bath and Tennis club, did not allow Jews in its doors, even 4-year-old Jews, as it turns out,” Rampell said.
“When your own child becomes a victim, it awakens emotions you never knew you had,” Richard Rampell told the Palm Beach Daily News on May 16, 1993.
Carlson did not say “Jews” when he discussed the topic on his livestream. But Rampell said she detected plenty of codes, including his exchange with his brother about a group “fixated” on WASPs, and the ostensible oxymoron he uses to describe Rampell a “liberal neocon.”
“You’ll understand what that’s a euphemism for,” Rampell said.
“Neoconservative” or “neocon” are sometimes used as anti-Jewish pejoratives, on the left and the right. Rampell’s writing and commentary do not reflect the views of actual neoconservatives, who champion shrinking the welfare state as well as a robustly interventionist foreign policy.
Rampell noted that Carlson is no stranger to euphemisms for Jews, recalling that in his eulogy for the slain conservative leader Charlie Kirk last year, Tucker referred to the killers of Jesus as “a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus.”
Trump in 1993 sought assistance in turning the Palm Beach estate he had purchased, Mar-a-Lago, into a country club. One lawyer he consulted with advised Trump to emphasize that the new club would be open to all comers – it would not restrict Jews or Blacks or others.
“You’ve got an island with a lot of Jewish residents who have no club to go to,” said the lawyer, Paul Rampell — Catherine’s uncle, and her father’s partner in campaigning against country club bigotry.
Trump agreed and hired the lawyer, who helped him secure permission to launch the club.
The post Tucker Carlson calls campaign to shame a country club for barring a Jewish toddler ‘repulsive’ appeared first on The Forward.