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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.
—
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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Netanyahu’s Torah exemption pledge highlights election stakes
Sometimes a statement can contain multitudes, or at least provide a crystallizing moment in an election campaign. So it was when Benjamin Netanyahu, while criticizing the detention of about 40 Haredi draft evaders by military police at Ben-Gurion Airport this week, declared in a radio interview: “We need to protect the world of the Torah … But whoever doesn’t study must serve in the military.”
Netanyahu was effectively saying that yeshiva study should continue to be, as it has been under an informal arrangement, a free pass out of military service – and he went on to repeat a pledge to turn this into law. It is a position opposed by the overwhelming majority of Israelis.
The statement came amid such a calamitous two-week stretch for Netanyahu’s campaign leading up to the Oct. 27 election that it has some people joking that agents of the opposition might have infiltrated Likud headquarters and taken charge.
In a tragicomic episode, one of Netanyahu’s chief propagandists called leading opposition candidate Gadi Eisenkot – a former military chief who is of Moroccan Jewish background – a “monkey” who is under the control of Ashkenazi elites.
Yinon Magal, who has described himself as a vessel for Netanyahu’s messaging, made the comments on Channel 14, the pro-Netanyahu propaganda TV channel where he is the leading host. He later filmed himself explaining that the simian reference, in Israel’s mafia parlance, merely refers to a junior criminal who is a puppet of more heavyweight mafiosi. His clarification did little to stem the tide of criticism.
As Netanyahu awkwardly tried to distance himself, he also charged that opposition figures had used racist slurs, referring to a recent podcast interview with businesswoman Galia Albin in which she said his supporters are Mizrahis who plan to vote for him mindlessly.
Then came leaked comments (made last year) by Haredi Rabbi Dov Lando, leading spiritual leader of the Netanyahu-allied United Torah Judaism party – proclaiming that Zionism had brought disasters upon the Jewish people, that life under Arab rule would have been preferable and that religious Zionist soldiers were being killed because their rabbis taught them “distorted Torah.” Once again, outrage boiled over, and received mostly silence from the Likud.
Donald Trump’s enthusiastic endorsement of Netanyahu might have qualified as good news – but the U.S. president seemed to connect a Bibi reelection to a renewed assault against Iran. That rests on the dubious assumption that Israelis are eager for another few weeks (or more) in bomb shelters.
A punctuation mark arrived a few days later with reports, albeit unverified, that Netanyahu actually had planned to attack Iran earlier this month but was blocked by Trump. Many expected that scenario, which would have been interpreted as a gambit to delay, by dint of national emergency, an election in which he’s badly trailing in credible polls.
Polling is not available on every such twist and turn of the campaign, but decades of studying Israel and a nose to the ground tell me none of this is popular. And there is no question that most Israelis want to end the draft evasion by Haredim. Recent polls put support for that at 85 percent, which essentially means all non-Haredim.
The issue, as I have said before, is easily the most effective axe for the opposition to grind – because the current situation with the Haredim is utterly untenable.
Tens of thousands of Haredi men of military age remain outside the draft system, while soldiers and reservists from other communities carry an increasingly intolerable burden that has ,in many cases, reached hundreds of days a year.
Whether all those registered as yeshiva students genuinely study – a central question for some people – should be beside the point. Why should Torah study confer a privilege unavailable to Israelis studying physics, medicine, engineering or law? Why should one form of education exempt citizens from defending the country while every other form does not?
The consequences of the Haredi parties’ extortion extend far beyond the army. Israel has created an incentive system in which prolonged religious study preserves military exemptions, public subsidies and a way of life often characterized by economic dependence. Many Haredi educational institutions reject the core curriculum essential for participation in a modern workforce, even as the state helps finance them.
This is an extraordinary arrangement for a country whose security depends on its economic strength, and whose economic strength depends on scientific education, technological innovation and a highly skilled workforce.
Demography makes the issue existential. Haredim already account for roughly one-sixth of Israel’s population, and their exceptionally high birth rates – almost seven children per family on average – mean their share will continue to skyrocket. Unless patterns of education, employment and military participation change dramatically, Israel faces the prospect of an ever-smaller proportion of its citizens supporting and defending an ever-larger population.
The danger is compounded by the mobility of the people on whom Israel’s prosperity depends. Engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs and physicians have opportunities elsewhere. If enough conclude that the country’s trajectory has become irreversible, the resulting brain drain could be catastrophic.
Earlier this year, my friend Rabbi Hershel Grossman arranged for me to meet senior rabbis associated with the Mir and Hebron yeshivot. They were gracious and pleasant, but strikingly candid about their opposition to compulsory core education, military service and ordinary employment whenever these conflicted with Torah study. More troubling was their confidence that demographic change would eventually give their community decisive political power.
The necessary alternative is a comprehensive overhaul of the incentives governing Haredi education, military service and employment. Every child should receive a core curriculum. Young adults should perform military or meaningful national service, with appropriate accommodations for religious observance. Public funding should encourage economic participation rather than prolonged dependence.
Opposition parties promise various versions of such plans. None of this will be easy, and it will not be accomplished by dialogue alone. But the alternative is a version of national suicide. There is no question that – alongside accountability for Oct. 7 and the demand for an independent state commission of inquiry – the future of Haredi military service, education and economic participation belongs at the center of this election.
So why would Netanyahu effectively say that studying Torah should entitle an able-bodied young man to exemption from military service?
There are several possible explanations for this – and the rest of the parade of seeming political misjudgments.
One might be a calculated strategy of mobilizing the base through fear and resentment rather than persuading the center. This might be useful in various scenarios involving a messy outcome of the election.
The others might be overpowering hubris, a toxic contempt for the public or the myriad other pathologies that often accompany too long a time in power.
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Tidbits: A publishing firm for Jewish writers excluded by mainstream publishers
Tidbits is a Forverts feature of easy news briefs in Yiddish that you can listen to or read, or both! If you read the article and don’t know a word, just click on it and the translation appears. Listen to the report here:
אין ניו־יאָרק איז די וואָך געגרינדט געוואָרן אַ פֿאַרלאַג פֿאַר ייִדישע און ישׂראלדיקע שרײַבער וואָס זאָרגן זיך, אַז זייער אָפּשטאַם אָדער מיינונגען קאָנען שטערן צום פּובליקירן זייערע ביכער.
לויט אַ סטאַטיסטיק פֿונעם מחבר מעג קין, איז בײַ די הויפּט־פֿאַרלאַגן, צווישן 2023 און 2024, געפֿאַלן מיט 76% די צאָל בעלעטריסטישע ביכער, וואָס דערמאָנען ייִדן, ייִדישקייט אָדער ישׂראל.
„הײַלײַן פּאָבלישינג סטודיאָ“, וואָס האָט דעביוטיִרט אין ענגלאַנד מיט אַ חודש צוריק, האָט געעפֿנט אַן אַמעריקאַנער צווײַג אין מאַנהעטן בײַ „פּאָרט סאַיִד“, דעם רעסטאָראַן פֿונעם וועלטבאַרימטן קוכער איל שני (עיאַל שאַני).
„הײַלײַן“ איז לאַנצירט געוואָרן דורך ניל בלער, דעם לאַנגיאָריקן ליטעראַרישן אַגענט פֿון דזשיי קיי ראָלינגס — דער שרײַבערין פֿון די האַרי־פּאָטער ביכער.
„איך האָב שוין פֿון לאַנג באַמערקט, אַז אַ צאָל שרײַבער קענען נישט געפֿינען קיין פֿאַרלאַג,“ האָט בלער געזאָגט. „נישט צוליב דער קוואַליטעט פֿון זייער שרײַבן אָדער אַ דוחק פֿון אָריגינעלע געדאַנקען, נאָר ווײַל זייער וועלטבאַנעם שטימט נישט מיטן קוקווינקל פֿון די פֿאַרלאַגן — אָדער אפֿשר ווײַל זייער משפּחה־נאָמען איז אַ ייִדישער אָדער ישׂראלדיקער.“
די פּראָבלעם, זאָגט ער, איז געוואָרן נאָך ערגער נאָך די טעראָריסטישע אַטאַקן פֿונעם זיבעטן אָקטאָבער, האָט בלער געזאָגט. ער האָט למשל דערמאָנט די שוועריקייטן בײַם געפֿינען אַ הויפּטשטראָמיקן בריטישן פֿאַרלאַג פֿאַר אַ בוך פֿון אלי שרבי (עלי שאַראַבי) וועגן זײַנע איבערלעבונגען ווי אַן ערובֿניק אין עזה — נישט געקוקט אויף דעם וואָס אין אַמעריקע האָט מען שוין געהאַט פֿאַרקויפֿט הונדערטער טויזנטער עקזעמפּלאַרן דערפֿון. צום סוף האָט זײַן בוך אַרויסגעגעבן אַ קליינער בריטישער פֿאַרלאַג, „סוויפֿט בוקס“.
„הײַלײַן“ וועט באַשטיין פֿון צוויי אימפּרעזומס: „אָדעסאַ עדישאָנס“ און „אַנטידאָט בוקס“. „אָדעסאַ עדישאָנס“, אָנגעפֿירט פֿונעם רעדאַקטאָר דזשעקי קלײַן, וועט דרוקן ייִדישע און ישׂראלדיקע בעלעטריסטיק און פֿאַקטפּראָזע אויף טעמעס פֿאַרבונדן מיט דער ייִדישער געשיכטע, אַנטיסעמיטיזם, פֿילאָסאָפֿיע, עסן און קולטור.
„אַנטידאָט בוקס“ וועט דרוקן פֿאַקטפּראָזע מיט אַ שייכות צו טעכנאָלאָגיע, עטיק, דעמאָקראַטיע, אידענטיטעט און מאַכט.
קלײַן האָט געזאָגט, אַז מע וועט אויך באַטראַכטן מאַנוסקריפּטן פֿון אַראַביש־ישׂראלדיקע און נישט־ייִדישע שרײַבער, וואָס זייער אַרבעט פֿאַרנעמט זיך מיט דער ייִדישער קולטור, געשיכטע אָדער געדאַנקען.
צו לייענען וועגן דעם אויף ענגליש גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
To read about this in English click here.
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In ‘Fatherland,’ Thomas Mann finds a Germany divided
Speaking at the Library of Congress, just before the end of World War II, Thomas Mann insisted “that there are not two Germanies, a bad and a good one, but only one whose best qualities were perverted by devilish cunning into evil.”
Two years later, in 1947, he would publish Doctor Faustus, a meditation on his homeland’s slide into fascism in the idiom of Germanic legend. Two years after that, accepting the prize named for Goethe, the Faust legend’s greatest chronicler, he would return to Germany, which, by then, had split in two.
Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, is about the 1949 trip Mann took with his daughter Erika from American-administered Frankfurt to East German Weimar, then in the grips of Soviet control. They glide through bombed-out streetscapes in a black, all-American Buick. During the tour, dignitaries try to win Mann over to one of two ideologies vying to replace the fascist model: that of the free market, or that of Communism.
By the time the film takes place, Mann was an American citizen who had lived outside of Germany for over a decade. He railed against the Nazis and appealed to the conscience of his countrymen in radio broadcasts from exile in California. He had married into a Jewish family, and his anti-Nazi credentials were beyond reproach. But at a press conference in Frankfurt, when an AP reporter asks “where is home,” he responds in English with a German word that English can only approximate.
“I am an American citizen,” Mann, played by Hanns Zischler, answers. “I am also a German writer. Where my heimat is, where I belong, is a much more difficult question.”
His country no longer exists.
Pawlikowski, a Polish director whose silken, black-and-white films excel in painting the surreality of the Iron Curtain, plucked this compelling episode from Colm Tóibín novel of Mann’s life, The Magician. Zeroing in on the 1949 tour, he’s crafted an intimate story of a father and daughter navigating a new political order where one’s allegiance, as summed up by Mann’s son Klaus, is either to “Stalin or Mickey Mouse.”
When Klaus (August Diehl) dies by suicide while Erika and Mann are in the middle of the excursion, and Mann insists on sticking to the itinerary, the Great Man’s faults are blown open: He believes his lecture tour, and the power of words, can improve conditions for a nation, but he had long ago declared his son a lost cause.
Zischler’s performance is at once understated and monumental. His response to Richard Wagner’s glad-handing grandchildren, who want him to put in a good word for reviving his festival in Bayreuth, is a punchy quotable: “The opera should be razed to the ground and your mother should be put on trial.” His mystified look when a Soviet colonel asks him to discuss “Mephistophelian dialectics,” is better than any bon mot.
Hüller is dependably excellent, glowering at the supposedly de-Nazified guests at a banquet and musing to a former war correspondent comrade about “what they were up four years ago.”
Mann’s controversial visit to Weimar is marked by a perfunctory pilgrimage to Goethe’s final home for a photo op. Among the effects are Goethe’s death mask, a blunt-force metaphor following Mann’s speeches, to East and West Germans, extolling how the great poet “rejected the German Romantic death cult.”
When Goethe’s dead, can the winner of his eponymous prize make the rejection last?
History has a verdict. While Mann rejects his own Faustian bargains — the invitation to put in a good word for Wagner or take a job as president of the Arts Academy in East Germany — his fate is teased when Erika sees a catalogue of “Fifth Columnists,” which has his headshot near Einstein and Arthur Miller.
Mann was a victim of McCarthyism, and left his adopted country in 1952 to settle — and die — in the neutral environs of Switzerland.
The film has enough restraint to spare us this epilogue. It ends with a father, a daughter and a sublime expression of grief and untainted German art. (Fitting for Pawlikowski, whose films so often center music, it is a Bach composition that delivers the final beat.)
Mann never did make his homecoming permanent, but on this score, he had a properly self-aggrandizing, if apt credo: “Where I am, there is Germany.”
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