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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.
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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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What Jackson, Mississippi’s only synagogue means to its city — in the wake of arson, and beyond
When Beth Israel Congregation was dedicated in Jackson, Mississippi, in the summer of 1875, the occasion was marked with a procession that began in front of City Hall.
A local paper reported that the synagogue was so crowded that many were unable to gain admission. Visitors had come from all over the South: Vicksburg, Canton, New Orleans, Memphis, and beyond. Christians were present and explicitly welcomed. The service concluded with an elegant supper and a ball at Angelo’s Hall on Capitol Street, a venue that could comfortably accommodate 400 people. Much of the crowd remained out celebrating until dawn.
This was a city witnessing Jewish life in public and welcoming it, even though the congregation numbered only about 80 souls. And it was also a city reckoning with the aftermath of hate: The ceremony marked the opening of a rebuilt synagogue, after an earlier Beth Israel building had been destroyed by “an incendiary” the year before.
This history matters now. Jackson has long known a double inheritance: the reality of antisemitism, and the presence of neighbors who showed up to support the Jewish community.
After an antisemitic arson attack on Saturday severely damaged Beth Israel — which was rebuilt after being bombed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1967 — national coverage moved quickly to frame the event as confirmation of a familiar story about Mississippi. One outlet led with the phrase “Mississippi Goddam,” invoking the title of Nina Simone’s civil rights protest anthem as a shorthand for moral condemnation.
Outrage in the face of antisemitic violence is justified. But framing Jackson primarily as a home to deeply rooted hatreds obscures the local reality: a synagogue that has long benefited from relationships with churches and civic partners, and a city where Jewish life has persisted through cooperation, not isolation. When that context disappears, so do the stories of neighbors who still live there, and who will be working to rebuild long after the headlines fade.
Months before the fire, I wrote for a local Jackson publication about Beth Israel’s history as a civic and interfaith institution in the city. My reporting traced how the synagogue’s 19th-century dedication unfolded as a public event, with Christian leaders in attendance and the building treated as a point of local pride.
And it showed me how significant a source of pride Beth Israel has been to its hometown — one of the truths lost, after the arson, in a rush to define Mississippi as a one-dimensional home of bigotry.
The 1875 reports on the synagogue’s opening lingered on details that newspapers of the time reserved for buildings that were points of civic pride, dwelling on the height of the sanctuary, the carved woodwork of the altar, the light from arched windows, and the number of people the pews could seat. One paper ventured that no small congregation “in the entire South, if indeed the whole country,” possessed as fine a place of worship as Beth Israel in Jackson.
That pride is still evident today, particularly in the swell of interfaith support that followed Sunday’s fire.
As the president of Beth Israel Congregation told the Forward, multiple churches reached out in the days following the arson, offering their sanctuaries as temporary worship space for the congregation while repairs are underway.
Rebuilding, he noted, could take up to a year. In the meantime, Jewish life in Jackson would continue.
That gesture may have been quiet, but it is not small. It means Christian congregations opening their doors not just for a one-night vigil or brief program, but for the long, ordinary work of sustaining religious life: making space for Shabbat services, holidays, study and gathering.
This history is not new. After the 1874 arson, local papers reported that a subscription had been started to rebuild the synagogue and predicted that the call would be “generously responded to.” A year later, the congregation, described as “Spartan-like,” rebuilt, assisted by friends in the wider Jackson community.
When Beth Israel dedicated a new synagogue in 1942, amid World War II, the ceremony again unfolded as a civic occasion. The governor of Mississippi sent greetings, the mayor spoke on behalf of the city, and representatives of Catholic and Protestant churches were present.
In his dedication sermon, Rabbi Julian Feibelman urged that the synagogue be consecrated “to everything that is true and that is blessed in the teachings of our faith,” and called it a house meant for “intercommunication and society — the ethical in life.”
When we treat a place as defined by inevitable hatred, we suggest that the people who actually live there are incapable of building a stronger and more welcoming communal life — people like Feibelman, who, in that 1942 sermon, said the synagogue aimed to be “a perpetual lamp” within the community. We treat antisemitism as something to fear from a distance, rather than something neighbors can confront together.
That kind of framing leaves out the work that follows violence. Jewish life in Jackson is not something to be guarded from afar. It is sustained locally, as an integral part of the city it has helped shape.
The post What Jackson, Mississippi’s only synagogue means to its city — in the wake of arson, and beyond appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel Strikes Hezbollah Targets in Several Areas in Lebanon
Illustrative: Smoke rises after Israeli strikes following Israeli military’s evacuation orders, in Tayr Debba, southern Lebanon, Nov. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ali Hankir
The Israeli military said it was striking Hezbollah targets in several areas in Lebanon on Thursday, adding that the strikes were in response to Hezbollah‘s “repeated violations of the ceasefire.”
An Israeli military spokesperson had earlier issued a warning to residents of certain buildings in the Lebanese village of Sohmor.
Israel and Lebanon agreed to a US-brokered ceasefire in 2024, ending more than a year of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah that had culminated in Israeli strikes that severely weakened the Iran-backed terrorist group. Since then, the sides have traded accusations over violations.
Lebanon has faced growing pressure from the US and Israel to disarm Hezbollah, and its leaders fear that Israel could dramatically escalate strikes across the battered country to push Lebanon‘s leaders to confiscate Hezbollah‘s arsenal more quickly.
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Pakistan-Saudi-Turkey Defense Deal in Pipeline, Pakistani Minister Says
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif meet in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Sept. 17, 2025. Photo: Saudi Press Agency/Handout via REUTERS
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey have prepared a draft defense agreement after nearly a year of talks, Pakistan‘s Minister for Defense Production said, a signal they could be seeking a bulwark against a flare-up of regional violence in the last two years.
Raza Hayat Harraj told Reuters on Wednesday the potential deal between the three regional powers was separate from a bilateral Saudi–Pakistani accord announced last year. A final consensus between the three states is needed to complete the deal, he said.
“The Pakistan–Saudi Arabia-Turkey trilateral agreement is something that is already in pipeline,” Harraj said in an interview.
“The draft agreement is already available with us. The draft agreement is already with Saudi Arabia. The draft agreement is already available with Turkey. And all three countries are deliberating. And this agreement has been there for the last 10 months.”
Asked at a press conference in Istanbul on Thursday about media reports on negotiations between the three sides, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said talks had been held but that no agreement had been signed.
Fidan pointed to a need for broader regional cooperation and trust to overcome distrust that creates “cracks and problems” that led to the emergence of external hegemonies, or wars and instability stemming from terrorism, in the region.
“At the end of all of these, we have a proposal like this: all regional nations must come together to create a cooperation platform on the issue of security,” Fidan said. Regional issues could be resolved if relevant countries would “be sure of each other,” he added.
“At the moment, there are meetings, talks, but we have not signed any agreement. Our President [Tayyip Erdogan]’s vision is for an inclusive platform that creates wider, bigger cooperation and stability,” Fidan said, without naming Pakistan or Saudi Arabia directly.