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Israel struck out at the World Baseball Classic, but the team’s Twitter account was a hit
(JTA) — Many fans were despairing as Team Israel trailed Puerto Rico 6-0 in the World Baseball Classic last week, but the team’s Twitter account had a different message.
“We will never give up,” the account tweeted. “After all, Moses was once a basket case.”
While the quip couldn’t stave off the team’s ultimate 10-0 loss, it came in the course of a win for Avi Miller, the 30-year-old marketing veteran who runs the @ILBaseball account. For Miller — who tweeted the tournament from 3,000 miles away — the World Baseball Classic was a breakout moment, nearly doubling Team Israel’s social media followers and exposing countless baseball fans to jokes straight out of Hebrew school.
Miller told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that his ambition was to do for Team Israel what the World Baseball Classic, an international Olympic-style baseball tournament, aims to do for baseball itself: deepen fans’ interest.
“Of course virality is nice, because it creates more of a following. But then once you have a following, what are you doing with it?” Miller said. “So for me, and it’s even continued through today, and it will tomorrow and so on, is to create engagement with people, create interest in it, help to create and raise the fundraising efforts, help to create awareness of these programs.”
Team Israel won its first game but dropped the next three to exit the competition early. Some of those games were brutal: Across 15 innings on March 13 and 14, Israel managed just one base runner against its opponents.
But on the team’s Twitter account, the hits kept coming. One breakout post, seen more than 100,000 times, showed a photo of a seemingly apoplectic Jakob Goldfarb (who was actually celebrating, despite what his expression suggests). Miller’s caption reflected contemporary meme culture: “When she says a latke is just a hash brown.”
when she says a latke is just a hash brown pic.twitter.com/K0jkVNHfeN
— Israel Baseball (@ILBaseball) March 12, 2023
In another popular post, the account outlined its “bubbie rankings,” using the Yiddish word for grandmother used in some Jewish families — and a homonym for the first name of one of the team’s pitchers. The list: “1) my bubbie 2) Bubby Rossman 3) other bubbies.”
From joking about storing a cooler of Manischewitz in the dugout to leaning into the “nice Jewish boy” vibe of the team, which was almost entirely composed of American Jewish ballplayers, the account’s sense of humor seemed to resonate.
Bill Shaikin, an award-winning baseball writer for the Los Angeles Times and a member of the Southern California Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, called Israel’s Twitter “the best social media account in the tournament.”
“I thought the account was a wonderful mix of baseball information and witty nods to what your Jewish mother might say,” Shaikin told JTA. “If you know, you know. But, if you didn’t know, it still worked.”
The USA doesn’t need the World Baseball Classic to popularize baseball within its country.
Other countries do. Here’s a thread from one (from the best social media account in the tournament): https://t.co/fyifV9H1lF
— Bill Shaikin (@BillShaikin) March 15, 2023
Miller was well positioned to tell Team Israel’s story. A marketing consultant living in San Diego, he worked in communications for sports teams and the NCAA before expanding his portfolio to include tech clients. He’s also been involved with the Israel Association of Baseball in different capacities for a few years, mostly helping with social media and video editing. The Baltimore native is a Jewish day school graduate and cofounded a Moishe House in San Francisco.
“I’ve had these two worlds collide,” Miller said. “I have a mentally strong relationship with baseball in my life, and then I have a bond to Judaism, from my entire upbringing. And for me as a passionate storyteller, my goal has been, both in years past and this World Baseball Classic, it’s been to help tell that story.”
That story, which included a late-game comeback win over Nicaragua and an impressive performance by Orthodox prospect Jacob Steinmetz, took place entirely in South Florida — a few thousand miles from Miller’s home in San Diego. Miller had been planning to be present at the tournament but was not able to — though no one would have been able to tell from the tweets.
Paging r/mademesmile – just watch Jacob’s face light up here in the dugout after his debut outing.
What a memory for @JacobSteinmetz6. pic.twitter.com/rCRJCk781Y
— Israel Baseball (@ILBaseball) March 14, 2023
“I think it’s similar to what a great YouTuber or videographer would tell you, is that to make the best video you don’t need the best camera ever made,” Miller said. “What I needed was the passion and the storytelling ideas behind it. Between that and then having contact with almost every single guy on the team and people on the ground, it gave me plenty of ideas to work with when it came to telling that story in a fun way.”
Miller said the feedback was overwhelmingly positive — and came from all levels of baseball fandom, from those who know little about Israel baseball, or even baseball, to die-hard fans.
“That to me is the best response to it, making it something that was approachable for all, but then still getting the signs of respect from the deep baseball people,” Miller said.
He also said there were, predictably, some negative responses. Miller said he made a conscious effort to shy away from politics, including keeping his own personal opinions out of the mix. Not everyone followed that tack.
“Could I have engaged with every single person that wrote in on any platform and was sending us messages about ‘Free Palestine,’ and [said], ‘Oh, you respect our boundaries now, because you don’t like the strike zone,’ all these different things?” Miller said. “Sure, I could have been sassy and responded within those spaces, one hundred percent. I could easily talk smack with anyone any day. But at the end of the day, that wasn’t the goal.”
Part of that restraint, Miller said, had to do with channeling the voice and priorities of the team itself.
“If you talked to Ryan Lavarnway, you talk to Josh Zeid, any of those guys about their views on Israel baseball, I can’t imagine the Palestinian conflict comes up as part of it because it’s simply not,” he said, referring to a Team Israel player and coach, respectively. “It doesn’t make that not an important thing to talk about, but in this case, the story was aside from that.”
In general, Miller said he worked to build relationships with the players and other members of the Israel baseball organization, to help craft an authentic presence of the team’s social media accounts — from the underdog mentality to the emphasis on team camaraderie.
And in that vein, it was tweets showcasing players’ talents that Miller said made him most proud. Not only did the players’ families appreciate the content, but some of their agents did, too — with one pitcher even asking Miller for video highlights he could send to teams considering bringing him on. Miller declined to share who it was, but at least one Team Israel pitcher landed an MLB contract after the tournament, Rossman with the Mets.
“The most meaningful to me are ones where I can put out content that showcases an individual or multiple individuals and then knowing that that impacts that guy in some way,” Miller said.
—
The post Israel struck out at the World Baseball Classic, but the team’s Twitter account was a hit appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Anti-Israel, Antisemitic Views of US Republicans Concentrated Among ‘New Entrants’ to Party, New Poll Finds
People gather for the UTEP chapter of Turning Point USA’s event featuring Border Czar Tom Homan on Dec. 4, 2025, at the UGLC on the UTEP campus in El Paso, Texas. Photo: USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
A strong majority of Republicans in the US support Israel and reject antisemitism, but “new,” more liberal entrants to the party are more likely to hold an animus toward the Jewish state and tolerate antisemitic hatred, according to a major new survey.
The Manhattan Institute, a prominent US-based think tank, has released a new poll examining the evolving makeup of the Republican Party (GOP) and its current attitudes toward Israel and Jewish Americans.
The results show a GOP that still contains a strong, reliable core of pro-Israel voters, yet one that is increasingly fractured, with a growing minority expressing skepticism toward Israel or even openly hostile antisemitic views.
According to the poll, the majority of Republicans, defined as registered GOP voters or those who, regardless of party affiliation, voted for Donald Trump in 2024, remain consistently conservative on foreign policy and firmly supportive of Israel. The Manhattan Institute divided this group into two groups: “Core Republicans,” defined as “longstanding GOP voters who have consistently backed Republican presidential nominees since 2016 or earlier,” and “New Entrant Republicans,” defined as “recent first-time GOP presidential voters, including those who supported Democrats in 2016 or 2020 or were too young to vote in cycles before 2020.” The two blocs comprise about two-thirds and one-third of the GOP coalition, respectively.
Among the nearly 3,000 total respondents, 55 percent said that Israel is an “important and effective” US ally, while 23 percent said that Israel is “a country like any other” whose interests sometimes align with the US. An additional 12 percent agreed with a description of Israel as a “settler-colonial state” and a liability, indicating a heavy disdain for the Jewish state.
“New Entrant Republicans” perceive Israel in a far harsher light than the general GOP base, according to the data. Among this cohort, 24 percent see Israel as a “liability” while just 39 percent still consider Israel an important ally of the US.
Notably, old guard and newer members of the Republican Party have split perspectives on Qatar, with 41 percent of new entrants viewing the Middle Eastern country favorably compared to 23 percent of “core” Republicans.
The survey also delivers a stark warning about a troubling minority within the GOP and across the broader electorate that holds openly antisemitic views. According to the results, 17 percent of current Republicans can be categorized as “anti-Jewish,” defined as those who “self-identify as both racist and antisemitic and express Holocaust denial or describe Israel as a colonial state” or “do not self-identify that way but nevertheless hold both of those extreme positions.”
The Manhattan Institute found that newer entrants are more likely to be anti-Jewish.
“Anti-Jewish Republicans are typically younger, disproportionately male, more likely to be college-educated, and significantly more likely to be New Entrant Republicans,” the survey states. “They are also more racially diverse. Consistent church attendance is one of the strongest predictors of rejecting these attitudes; infrequent church attendance is, all else equal, one of the strongest predictors of falling into this segment.”
This group is also in general more politically liberal, according to the survey: “Given that many of these voters are younger and former Democrats, more progressive policy tendencies are unsurprising.”
Notably, the Manhattan Institute found slightly higher levels of anti-Jewish sentiment (20 percent) among Democrats.
Among newer Republicans, 38 percent believe that Jews are more loyal to a foreign country than the US, compared to 24 percent of more traditional Republicans.
The “new entrant bloc is more likely to express tolerance for racist or antisemitic speech, more likely to support political violence, more conspiratorial, and — on core policy questions — considerably more liberal than the party’s traditional base,” the Manhattan Institute writes. “These voters are drawn to Trump but are not reliably attached to the Republican Party.”
A key factor in the data is age, with the survey showing a major generational divide in which older GOP voters are much more supportive of Israel and less likely to express antisemitic views than their younger cohorts.
According to the data, 25 percent of GOP voters under 50 openly express antisemitic views as opposed to just 4 percent over the age of 50.
Startlingly, a substantial amount, 37 percent, of GOP voters indicate belief in Holocaust denialism. These figures are more pronounced among young men under 50, with a majority, 54 percent, agreeing that the Holocaust “was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe.” Among men over 50, 41 percent agree with the sentiment. There are also substantial divisions among racial lines. Whopping amounts of black and Latino GOP voters, 66 percent and 77 percent, respectively, believe in Holocaust denialism. Thirty percent of white GOP voters deny or minimize the Holocaust, according to the Manhattan Institute.
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Neo-Nazis Deploy AI Apps as New Creative Weapons Against Jews, Watchdog Groups Reveal
Screenshots taken on Oct. 23, 2025, of three Sora videos created by user “Pablo Deskobar.”
Large language model (LLM) programs marketed as “artificial intelligence” have become common tools in the kits of online extremists advocating a genocide of the Jewish people, according to new research from longtime watchdogs of antisemitic hate groups and terrorist movements.
On Tuesday, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released its report, “The Safety Divide: Open-Source AI Models Fall Short on Guardrails for Antisemitic, Dangerous Content,” which presented the results of testing 17 LLM models — including Google’s Gemma-3, Microsoft’s Phi-4, and Meta’s Llama 3 — which are available for anyone to download and customize to their preferences.
“The ability to easily manipulate open-source AI models to generate antisemitic content exposes a critical vulnerability in the AI ecosystem,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL. “The lack of robust safety guardrails makes AI models susceptible to exploitation by bad actors, and we need industry leaders and policymakers to work together to ensure these tools cannot be misused to spread antisemitism and hate.”
In addition to the “open source” models, the group’s researchers analyzed OpenAI’s “closed source” GPT-4o and GPT-5 as a comparison and reported a surprising finding.
“As suggested by previous research and data, OpenAI’s closed-source GPT-4o beat every open-source model (save gpt-oss-20b) in nearly every benchmark, compared to the next highest, the open-source Phi-4 with a score of .84,” the ADL researchers wrote. “GPT-5, in contrast, despite being a newer model than GPT-4o, had a lower guardrail score (.75 compared to .94), fewer refusals (69% compared to 82%), more harmful content (26% compared to 0%) and a higher evasion rate (6% compared to 1%).”
The analysts considered varying explanations for their findings including the possibility “that GPT-5 is designed for ‘safe completions’ (partial or high-level answers), leading to significantly fewer refusals than GPT-4o (e.g., 0% vs. 40% in one prompt). This also resulted in a change of tone. In Prompt 3, for example, GPT-4o started with a preamble about the sensitive nature of the topic, while GPT-5 usually omitted the warning, choosing instead to address and illustrate problematic tropes within the answer itself.”
The complexity of analyzing the LLM models and ambiguity of the results led the ADL to adopt a cautious tone and assess that “we cannot claim a strict linear boost in overall capability.”
“The decentralized nature of open-source AI presents both opportunities and risks,” said Daniel Kelley, director of the ADL’s Center for Technology and Society. “While these models increasingly drive innovation and provide cost-effective solutions, we must ensure they cannot be weaponized to spread antisemitism, hate, and misinformation that puts Jewish communities and others at risk.”
In its list of recommendations in response to the research findings, the ADL urged governments to “establish strict controls on open-source deployment in government settings, mandate safety audits and require collaboration with civil society experts, [and] require clear disclaimers for AI-generated content on sensitive topics.”
The ADL report came out a few days after the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) published a new analysis of how online neo-Nazi advocates have started to use AI models. The group described the discovery of custom AIs with names like “Fuhrer AI” and “Deep AI Adolf Hitler Chat” programmed to speak in the style of the Nazi leader and to promote his genocidal ideology.
“We are also witnessing the rise of a new digital infrastructure for hate. And it’s not just fringe actors,” Steven Stalinsky, executive director of MEMRI, and Simon Purdue, director of MEMRI’s Violent Extremism Threat Monitor project, wrote in their analysis. “State-aligned networks from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea amplify this content using bots and fake accounts, sewing division, disinformation, and fear — all powered by AI. This is psychological warfare. And we are unprepared.”
Stalinsky and Purdue warned that “the threat isn’t hypothetical. We’ve been studying how extremists began experimenting with generative AI as early as 2022. Since then, the volume, coordination, and sophistication have grown dramatically.”
Analyzing the many dimensions of the threat posed by AI has recently drawn significant research attention from both the ADL and MEMRI, with the two groups findings’ complementing one another.
Last month, The Algemeiner reported on MEMRI’s in-depth analysis, “Artificial Intelligence and the New Era of Terrorism: An Assessment of How Jihadis Are Using AI to Expand Their Propaganda, Recruitment, and Operations and the Implications for National Security.” In October, the ADL released its report, “”Innovative AI Video Generators Produce Antisemitic, Hateful, and Violent Outputs.”
Meanwhile, Israel has begun moving quickly to integrate AI into its war plans.
Last week, the Israel Defense Forces announced its “Bina” initiative, named after the Hebrew word for “intelligence.” This restructuring and consolidating of Israeli military efforts in artificial intelligence-fueled warfare specifically aims to counter aggression from Iran, China, and Russia.
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Can Jewish tradition help you stay sane when all your bosses are ‘idiots’?
Dear Bintel,
My work colleagues and I need your help. Does Jewish tradition have anything to say about how not to lose your mind when all your bosses are idiots?
Signed,
Losing It
Dear Losing It,
Proverbs 29:2 sums up the impact of bad leadership on morale better than I can: “When a wicked man rules, the people groan.” Believe me, I can hear you and your colleagues groaning in response to every ridiculous email and edict from your inept employers.
The Bible is also full of stories about individuals saddled with work they neither want nor enjoy. Jeremiah is a reluctant prophet ordered to deliver messages nobody wants to hear. Jonah also pointed out the futility of his assignment, saying, essentially, “Why should I tell everyone they’re evil when they won’t listen?” Meanwhile, Moses tries to talk God out of giving him the task of leading the Jews out of Egypt.
And what does the Talmud have to say about all this? The sages portray pushback not as insubordination, but as part of the fundamental relationship between Jews and God: We have a responsibility to demand justice and challenge authority.
But how do you do it without getting fired? Speaking truth to power is an art. Nathan the prophet did it with panache: He got King David to see the error of his ways by relating a parable. When David noticed that the man in Nathan’s tale had transgressed, Nathan said to David, “You are the man!”
Now, I’m not saying your work life will improve if you tell your terrible bosses a story in which the villains are thinly veiled versions of themselves. Nor am I suggesting that you must endure 20 years of servitude, like Jacob did, in order to get some sheep and the woman of your dreams, or that you should argue about every single thing you’re asked to do, as did Moses.
But here’s an oft-quoted Talmudic saying that expresses one of Judaism’s guiding principles, and I think it’s relevant to your work-life quandary: “It is not up to you to complete the task, but neither are you free to avoid it.”
In other words, you aren’t responsible for fixing everything that’s wrong with your job. But you are required to make an effort.
What might that look like? How about cheerfully encouraging adherence to best practices by offering evidence-based recommendations? Or matter-of-factly questioning a pointless policy — without pointing fingers — by simply showing that it’s hurting the bottom line or creating delays?
Now I wouldn’t want you to get on the bosses’ bad side or put yourself in the firing line in the course of offering criticism veiled as new ideas. To help your cause, enlist trusted colleagues to backread that email before you send it, or ask others to jointly request a meeting to propose a new approach to something you’re aching to improve.
What if your suggestions and complaints go unheeded? The Talmud tells of a rabbi who predicts that those on the receiving end of his protests “will not accept the rebuke from me.”
Do it anyway, is the response: “Even though they will not accept it, the Master should rebuke them.”
Consider, too, this beautiful precept from the great philosopher Maimonides: “Each of us should see ourselves as if our next act could change the fate of the world.” Meaning that every small choice you make as you carry out your duties — rendering a compliment to an overwhelmed work friend, making a correction without judgment, sharing a shortcut with the team or listening to a colleague’s frustration — matters.
I truly believe that part of how we maintain our sanity in the face of incompetence or evil is by standing up for our own values, even when it seems pointless. If you subscribe to the notion that every righteous act we perform, no matter how small, contributes to repairing our broken world, and if you can truly believe in the power of individual good deeds, it will go a long way toward restoring your peace of mind.
Peace of mind can also come from the time-honored Jewish tradition of kibbitzing. If you don’t already have an online group on WhatsApp or Discord where you and your coworkers can kvetch as well as support each other away from the bosses’ gaze, start one. If your work is in-person, in the office, rather than remote, invite a couple of colleagues out for a beer or coffee or a meetup in the park.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t also serve up this oft-quoted Talmudic nugget: “A person should love work and not hate it.” The ancient rabbis believed work not only supports one’s material needs, but also provides dignity and self-worth — or so it should. If it’s impossible for you to love your work given your current situation; if you can’t bear the thought of sticking it out the way Jacob did; and if you don’t feel motivated enough to push back one small act at a time, as Maimonides advised, well then, you could always go all out and confront those idiotic bosses head on.
Of course, if you do that, they might hand you your walking papers. Then again, maybe being forced to look for a new job isn’t the worst thing that could happen given your disdain for your situation. Maybe you’re thinking of quitting anyway — and maybe that’s not a bad idea. As a more contemporary Jewish sage, Bob Dylan, once said, “All you can do is do what you must.”
Signed,
Bintel
What do you think? Send your comments to bintel@forward.com or send in a question of your own.
This is Beth Harpaz’s final column for Bintel Brief. She managed and wrote for the column from 2022 to 2025.
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