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Why your synagogue, and mine, needs a pickleball court
(JTA) — The weekday minyan at my synagogue has been moved from the sanctuary to its airy social hall. And whenever I attend I have the same lofty thought: This would make a great pickleball court.
Pickleball, the subject of countless breathless articles calling it the fastest growing sport in America, is essentially tennis for people with terrible knees. Players use hard paddles to knock a wiffle ball across a net, on a court about a third as big as a tennis court. It’s weirdly addictive, and because the usual game is doubles and the court is so small, it’s pleasantly social. I play on a local court (I won’t say where, because it’s hard enough to get playing time), where a nice little society has formed among the regulars.
“A nice little society among the regulars” is also how I might describe a synagogue. Or at least that’s the argument I fantasize making before my synagogue board, in a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”-style speech that will convince them to let me set up a net in the social hall so I can play in the dead of winter. I dream of doing for synagogues and pickleball what Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, did for shuls and pools: He popularized the notion of “synagogue-centers” that would include prayer services as well as adult ed, Hebrew schools, theater, athletics and, yes, swimming pools.
I might even quote David Kaufman, who wrote a history of the synagogue-center movement called “Shul With a Pool”: “Kaplan was the first to insist that the synagogue remain the hub from which other communal functions derive. Only then might the synagogue fulfill its true purpose: the fostering of Jewish community.”
Alas, the title “Mordecai Kaplan of Pickleball” may have to go to Rabbi Alex Lazarus-Klein of Congregation Shir Shalom, a combined Reform and Reconstructionist synagogue near Buffalo, New York — which knows from winter. Last week he sent me a charming essay saying that his synagogue has begun twice-weekly pickleball nights in its social hall. About 40 members showed up on its first night in November, and it’s been steady ever since.
“When my synagogue president presented the idea during High Holy Day services, many of our members rolled their eyes,” Lazarus-Klein, 49, wrote. But the rabbi counters by citing Kaplan and paraphrasing one of his forebears, Rabbi Henry Berkowitz, a 19th-century Reform rabbi who encouraged synagogues in the 1880s “to create programming related to physical training, education, culture, and entertainment to help better compete with social clubs. Over the years, synagogues have experimented with all types of sports activities including bowling, basketball, and, more recently, Gaga. Why not pickleball as well?”
Lazarus-Klein also told me in an interview that his synagogue doesn’t do catering, so the “social hall just sits empty except for High Holidays or bigger events.”
“Our buildings were built for just a few times a year. It’s a shame,” he said. “We have tried as a congregation to get our building more use. We rent to a preschool, we have canasta groups, we have adult education. But for large swaths [of time], especially the social hall is just completely empty.”
Lazarus-Klein wrote that the pickleball sessions have attracted regular synagogue-goers, as well as “many others who had never been to any other synagogue event outside of High Holy Days.”
The players also cross generations, including the rabbi’s 9- and 12-year- old sons and congregants as old as 70. “With a little ingenuity and a few hundred dollars, our empty social hall is suddenly filled several nights a week.”
I offered the rabbi two other arguments for in-shul pickling. First, hosting pickleball honors the spirit of any synagogue that has “Shalom” in its name: By bringing the court under its roof, the synagogue avoids the turf battles between tennis players and picklers that are playing out, sometimes violently, in places across the country.
And I shared with Lazarus-Klein my obsession with the synagogue as a “third place” — sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s idea of public places “that host the regular, voluntary, informal and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.”
“That’s a great way of thinking of it,” said Lazarus-Klein. “I think our membership does kind of use it that way. It’s another base, not where they’re working and not where their home is, where they can feel at home.”
The “shul with a pool” has long been derided by traditionalists who say the extracurriculars detract from the religious function of synagogues. Kaufman quotes Israel Goldstein, the rabbi of B’nai Jeshurun in New York, who in 1928 complained that “whereas the hope of the Synagogue Center was to Synagogize the tone of the secular activities of the family, the effect has been the secularization of the place of the Synagogue…. [I]t has been at the expense of the sacred.”
Lazarus-Klein, who was ordained by the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. argues that there is sacred in the secular, and vice versa.
“I think a synagogue is a community,” he told me. “A community is a place that supports each other and it’s certainly not just about Jewish ritual, right? It’s about being together in all different ways. And the pickleball just really expands what we’re able to offer and who we’re able to reach.”
Kaplan, I think, deserves the last word: The synagogue, he wrote in 1915, “should become a social centre where the Jews of the neighborhood may find every possible opportunity to give expression to their social and play instincts. It must become the Jew’s second home. It must become [their] club, [their] theatre and [their] forum.”
It must become, I know he would agree, a place for pickleball.
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FIFA COO Says World Cup ‘Too Big’ to Be Postponed by Israel-Iran War
Soccer Football – FIFA Club World Cup – Group D – Esperance de Tunis v Chelsea – Lincoln Financial Field, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US – June 24, 2025, General view of the FIFA logo before the match. Photo: REUTERS/Lee Smith
FIFA Chief Operating Officer Heimo Schirgi said the 2026 World Cup is “too big” to postpone and will proceed as planned despite the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
Schirgi made the comments while speaking on Monday outside construction of the International Broadcast Center, which is located inside the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center and will serve as a hub for international coverage of the World Cup. Schirgi was asked about Iran as it remains unclear if the country will participate in World Cup, after the US and Israel launched joint airstrikes against the Islamic Republic that led to the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several other high-ranking Iranian officials. Iran has retaliated with strikes against Israel and civilian areas across the Middle East.
“At some stage, we will have a resolution, and the World Cup will go on, obviously,” Schirgi replied, according to NBC 5 in Dallas. “The World Cup is too big, and we hope that everyone can participate that has qualified.”
FIFA Secretary General Mattias Grafstrom previously said the organization is closely monitoring the situation in the Middle East ahead of the World Cup in June. Schirgi added that FIFA has been in contact with Iran’s soccer federation, but did not provide details about what was discussed, according to Reuters.
The FIFA World Cup will take place across cities in the US, Mexico, and Canada from June 11 to July 19. Iran qualified for the tournament through its participation in the Asian Football Conference. It is set to compete in Group G at the World Cup and is scheduled to face New Zealand on June 15 and Belgium on June 21, both in Los Angeles, before going head-to-head against Egypt on June 26 in Seattle. Soccer fans from Iran are already barred from entering the United States for the World Cup as part of a travel ban that the Trump administration announced in June.
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Heaviest Day of Strikes Yet on Iran Despite Market Bets That War Will End Soon
Smoke rises following an explosion, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 7, 2026. Picture taken with a mobile phone. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
The United States and Israel pounded Iran on Tuesday with what the Pentagon and Iranians on the ground said were the most intense airstrikes of the war, despite global markets betting that President Donald Trump will seek to end the conflict soon.
Raising the stakes for the global economy, Iran‘s Revolutionary Guards said they would block oil shipments from the Gulf unless US and Israeli attacks cease.
“Today will be yet again, our most intense day of strikes inside Iran: the most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes, intelligence more refined and better than ever,” US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told a Pentagon briefing.
Yet with Trump having described the war on Monday as “very complete, pretty much,” investors appeared convinced he would end it soon – before the disruption to global energy supplies worsened the global economy.
An historic surge in crude oil prices on Monday was mostly reversed within a day. Asian and European share prices staged a partial recovery from earlier precipitous falls, and Wall Street bounced to around its levels of late February, before the war.
A source familiar with Israel’s war plans told Reuters the Israeli military wanted to inflict as much damage as possible before the window for further strikes closes, under the assumption Trump could end the war at any time.
Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Saar, said his country was not planning for an endless war and was consulting with Washington about when to stop it.
Iran has refused to bow to Trump’s demand that it let the United States choose its new leadership, naming hardliner Mojtaba Khamenei as supreme leader to replace his father, who was killed on the war‘s first day.
But occasionally contradictory remarks from Trump at a Monday press conference appeared to reassure markets he would stop his war before provoking an economic crisis like those that followed the Middle East oil shocks of the 1970s. He said the US had already inflicted serious damage and predicted the conflict would end before the four weeks he initially set out.
Trump has not defined what victory would look like, but on Monday did not repeat declarations that Iran must let him choose its leader.
Several congressional aides have said they expect the White House to soon request as much as $50 billion in additional funding for the war.
The US used $5.6 billion in munitions in the first two days of strikes against Iran, a source familiar with the information said on Tuesday.
“There is a big question mark over how long people can put up with the costs of this conflict,” said Clionadh Raleigh, CEO of US crisis-monitoring group Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, or ACLED.
Several senior Iranian officials voiced defiance on Tuesday.
“Certainly, we are not seeking a ceasefire; we believe the aggressor must be struck in the mouth so that they learn a lesson and never again think of attacking dear Iran,” Iran‘s parliament speaker, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, posted on X.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi told PBS that Tehran was unlikely to resume negotiations with the US.
The war has effectively halted shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, where a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas normally passes along Iran‘s coast. Some of the world’s biggest producers have run out of storage and cut back output.
After Iran chose its hardline new leader, oil prices briefly surged to nearly $120 a barrel on Monday. But by 1500 GMT on Tuesday, Brent crude had settled back down below $90.
Trump said on Monday that if Iran blocks oil through the strait, “we will hit them so hard that it will not be possible for them or anybody else helping them to ever recover that section of the world,” he said.
But a spokesperson for the Revolutionary Guards said Tehran would not allow “one liter” of Middle Eastern oil to reach the US or its allies while US and Israeli attacks continue.
“We are the ones who will determine the end of the war,” the spokesperson said.
Iran is fighting back but is not tougher than the US military expected before the war, the top US general told reporters on Tuesday, at the same briefing where Hegseth promised the Pentagon’s most intense day of strikes in the 10-day-old conflict.
Asked if Iran was a stronger adversary than he expected when the US military drew up its war plans, General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters the fight was not harder than expected.
“I think they’re fighting, and I respect that, but I don’t think they are more formidable than what we thought,” Caine told the Pentagon briefing.
Ending the war quickly would appear to preclude toppling Iran‘s leadership, which held large-scale rallies on Monday in support of the new supreme leader.
Many Iranians want change and some openly celebrated the death of the elder Khamenei, weeks after his security forces killed thousands of people to put down anti-government protests. But there has been little sign of protest during the war.
At least 1,270 people have been killed since the US and Israeli airstrikes began on Feb. 28, according to Iranian state media reports.
Scores have also been killed in Israeli attacks on Lebanon to root out the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, which has fired into Israel in solidarity with Iran. Iran said four of its diplomats were killed in a strike on a hotel in Lebanon on Sunday.
Iranian strikes on Israel have killed 12 people. Iran has struck US military bases and diplomatic missions in Arab Gulf states but also hit hotels, closed airports and damaged oil infrastructure.
Australia will deploy a military surveillance aircraft to the Middle East and send missiles to the United Arab Emirates but will not put troops on the ground in Iran, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Tuesday.
Australia‘s military support would help the Gulf countries defend themselves against unprovoked attacks from Iran, Albanese said, stressing Australia was “not a protagonist.”
“Our involvement is purely defensive,” Albanese told reporters. “And it’s in defense of Australians who are in the region as well as in defense of our friends in the United Arab Emirates.”
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New Poll Shows Complex, Nuanced Views Among Democratic Voters on Israel
Pro-Israel rally in Times Square, New York City, US, Oct. 8, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Jeenah Moon
A new survey analysis of Democratic voters suggests that despite increasingly vocal criticism of Israel in some activist circles, especially among the party’s youth, the broader Democratic electorate remains largely supportive of the US–Israel relationship.
The data, released by the Manhattan Institute, examines the ideological positioning of the Democratic Party and its views on a range of cultural and political issues, including attitudes toward Israel. Its findings suggest that while the party is experiencing a generational shift in how voters discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the center of the Democratic electorate continues to support Israel’s security and the longstanding alliance between Washington and Jerusalem.
According to the findings, relatively small shares of Democratic voters occupy the most firmly pro-Israel or anti-Israel positions. Only 13 percent of respondents say Israel is fundamentally a “colonial apartheid state” that should be dismantled and bears responsibility for violence tied to the conflict since its founding. At the other end of the spectrum, just 16 percent describe Israel as a legitimate nation confronting serious security threats and view its actions as largely defensive, even if imperfect.
One of the report’s central conclusions is that the largest bloc of Democratic voters identifies as politically moderate. According to the analysis, moderates outnumber both progressive liberals and a smaller activist faction often associated with the party’s most ideological rhetoric. When asked about the direction of the Democratic Party, 38 percent of respondents said the party should move toward the political center, compared with 22 percent who said it should move further left and 26 percent who said it is already in the right place.
The results suggest that the median Democratic voter holds a more pragmatic political outlook than the tone of many internal party debates might indicate. The largest portion of Democratic voters falls somewhere between those two poles. Nearly half of respondents, 49 percent, say Israel has a right to exist but believe the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians, both historically and during the current war, deserves strong criticism. Another 23 percent say they are uncertain about how to characterize the conflict.
The analysis also highlights a sharp generational divide. Younger Democrats are substantially more likely than older voters to adopt strongly critical views of Israel. Among Democrats between the ages of 18 and 29, 26 percent say that Israel should be dismantled as a colonial apartheid state and that it “bears responsibility for any and all violence since its founding.” That is four times more than Democrats over the age of 65 and three times more than those between the ages of 50 and 64.
Meanwhile, only 9 percent of Democrats in the youngest cohort say Israel is a legitimate country confronting serious security threats and acting largely in self-defense.
These new findings carry implications for the party’s debate over Israel. The survey analysis suggests that most Democratic voters still view Israel as an important US ally and support its right to defend itself, even as many also express concerns about the humanitarian consequences of conflict in Gaza and the broader Israeli-Palestinian dispute. In other words, the report suggests that the typical Democratic voter has a position that combines support for Israel’s security with calls for diplomacy and humanitarian restraint.
Despite those internal disagreements, the analysis concludes that the most strident anti-Israel rhetoric in American political discourse originates from a relatively small but highly visible activist faction within the Democratic coalition. This group, which often plays a prominent role in campus activism and social media campaigns, is more likely to support measures such as boycotts or sanctions targeting Israel and to frame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in stark ideological terms. According to the report, however, this faction represents a minority of Democratic voters and does not reflect the views of the party’s broader electorate.
Taken together, the findings point to a Democratic electorate that is more supportive of Israel than some political narratives suggest. While younger activists and progressive voices have become increasingly prominent in shaping the party’s internal debate, the survey analysis indicates that moderates, many of whom maintain traditional views of the US–Israel relationship, still make up the largest segment of Democratic voters.