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ESPN’s Jeff Passan opens up on his Hebrew school upbringing, interviewing Sandy Koufax and Jewish baseball history
(JTA) — For tuned-in baseball fans, Jeff Passan is everywhere. As ESPN’s senior MLB insider, he frequently breaks some of the sport’s biggest news and appears on several of the global sports network’s television, radio and podcast programs.
After two decades of reporting, can anything make him nervous? There is one athlete who does: Jewish legend Sandy Koufax.
“Generally speaking, when I’m talking to people, I’ll call them by their first name. He was Mr. Koufax,” Passan told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the pitcher he once wrote a paper about for Hebrew school.
While a columnist for Yahoo! Sports, Passan spent about four years reporting his 2016 New York Times best-selling book “The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports,” a deep-dive into pitching and the epidemic of what’s known in the sport as Tommy John surgery, or ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction.
Koufax, known for his on-the-field dominance and his refusal to pitch on Yom Kippur during the 1965 World Series, walked away from baseball at only 30 years old because of injury. So as Passan began work on his book, he knew he needed to talk to Koufax.
Koufax is famously private, and securing a rare interview wasn’t easy — Passan enlisted fellow Jewish writer Jane Leavy, Koufax’s biographer, who put in a good word for him. When the time came to talk, Passan said it was the most nervous he’s ever been for an interview.
“I was in awe the whole time,” Passan said in a phone interview from Arizona, where he’s covering spring training.
Koufax’s pitching prowess aside, Passan praised the principled stance the former Dodger took all those years ago.
“The way that he represented himself, the way he honored Judaism, and, when it was an incredibly difficult thing, stuck by what mattered to him, I think that’s applicable across religions, across cultures, across backgrounds,” Passan said. “If you feel passionate about who you are, and something is important to you, even when it’s uncomfortable, you should stand by it. That’s exactly what he did. I have an undying amount of respect for him for both doing that and just for the way that he has and continues to carry himself.”
A Cleveland native, Passan fell in love with both baseball and writing at a young age. His father, Rich, worked at the Plain Dealer for 42 years, and Passan said he got his first byline at 14 years old. He would go on to cover sports at Syracuse University, the Fresno Bee, the Kansas City Star, Yahoo! Sports and, since 2019, at ESPN.
Passan, 42, grew up in a Conservative Jewish household, attending Hebrew school three times a week. He said he considers himself a “cultural Jew” — noting that his wife is Catholic and they are raising their kids without religion.
“I look at religion now as being a really important thing for lots of people, but the sort of thing that for me and my family, we’d like for our children to be a little more worldly until, or if, they decide to choose to go the religious route,” he said.
Jeff Passan at his bar mitzvah, Oct. 9, 1993. (Courtesy of Passan)
Passan said he and his family celebrate Hanukkah — he’s a big fan of latkes — and he fasts on Yom Kippur. And then there’s Jewish geography.
“When I run into someone who’s Jewish, even though I’m not particularly religious, and he or she may not be particularly religious, there’s still a connection there because of how we were raised and the things that you learn growing up a Jew,” he said. “If there’s one thing that I look at with regret that my kids don’t have, because we’re not raising them Jewish, it’s that.”
That instant connection is present in the press box, too.
“We know who we are,” Passan said. “There was one World Series where I think there were like seven or eight Jewish writers sitting in a row. And we said all we need is a few more and we got a minyan here.”
Passan said he also feels that camaraderie with Jewish players — especially those who play for Team Israel during the World Baseball Classic, which is coming up next month.
“It’s different than Team USA or the Dominican Republic or Venezuela,” he said. “It’s a cultural team. It’s a team that’s often based around your religion or the religion in your family, and I think that makes it a unique group of players who may not have that same connection or that same feel to Israel, but they have that shared experience of being Jewish and knowing what that entails.”
The presence of Jewish talent in Major League Baseball — and on Team Israel, which features more big leaguers this year than ever before — is noticeably greater than it has been in years. The 2021 World Series, which featured four Jewish players, is a prime example.
“I think it’s just another way to illustrate that we can be everything,” Passan said. “If you are growing up and you want to be a rabbi, that’s wonderful. If you’re growing up and you want to get into media, that avenue is there for you. And if you’re growing up and want to be a baseball player, there are no limitations. The history of Jewish baseball players, while not extensive, is nevertheless rich.”
And what is it, exactly, about baseball that has endeared the sport to American Jews for so long? Passan has some theories.
First, he noted the historical significance New York has held in both baseball and American Judaism. For a period in the early-to-mid 20th century, New York was home to three MLB teams — the Yankees, Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants.
“As Jews, we really gravitate toward things that have history and substance,” Passan said. “Baseball being so big in the emergence of sporting culture in the United States, there’s a gravitas to that, there’s an import to that, that I think Jews really are attracted to.”
The other aspect that has bonded Jews and baseball, Passan said, is its shared culture of family tradition.
“It’s something that can be passed on from fathers and mothers to sons and daughters,” he said. “Family is such a vital part of being Jewish. Just as we pass down customs and traditions, sports are among those customs and traditions and baseball is a generational sport.”
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The post ESPN’s Jeff Passan opens up on his Hebrew school upbringing, interviewing Sandy Koufax and Jewish baseball history appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Ladino-speaking pirates, genies and grumpy demon cats: PJ Library expands bookshelves with Sephardic stories
In 1940s Baghdad, a little girl named Na’ima tries desperately to stay awake all night for Shavuot. In wartime Libya, a young boy embarks on a supernatural quest to find a lost city. In 19th-century Morocco, a father’s frustration with his son’s teacher leads him to a rabbinical court.
Until recently, none of those stories would have been likely candidates for mainstream American Jewish children’s books. Now, they are among the first titles slated for publication through PJ Library’s Sephardic Stories Initiative, a fellowship launched in 2024 to support authors writing tales that reflect Sephardic, Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jewish traditions.
For more than two decades, PJ Library has mailed free Jewish children’s books to families around the world. Today, it distributes roughly 670,000 books monthly in more than 40 countries. According to Alisa Koyrakh, the organization’s director of books, those stories have historically reflected a familiar slice of Jewish life.
“There are just a lot of Ashkenormative stories out there—a lot of stories about Yiddish, the Lower East Side and immigration from Eastern Europe,” Koyrakh said. “Those are all really important stories. But we saw gaps. It was kind of obvious.”
The Sephardic Stories Initiative intends to fill those gaps, bringing together Sephardic and Mizrahi writers for a year of workshops, editorial mentorship and critique from their peers.
Arnon Z. Shorr, whose first foray into children’s literature was a fiction book about Ladino-speaking Jewish pirates (yes, those were actually a thing), described his forthcoming graphic novel, Pedahzur and the Quest for the Hidden City, as a supernatural adventure set in Libya in the mid-1940s.
Knowing 1940s Libya is more often associated with Fascist persecution of Jews in North Africa—not talking cats and magical quests – Shorr laughed.
“I just got a kick out of it because it’s so not what anybody ever expects,” he said.
For Shorr, it was important to write a story connected to his family’s Libyan heritage. He spent hours digging into North African Jewish folklore to draw inspiration.
“There are historians and academics who do fantastic work looking into these things,” he said. “But their work doesn’t necessarily get read by 10-year-olds. I try to channel some of that into a fun genre—a desert adventure with genies and grumpy demon cats.”
Israeli author Rinat Hadad Siegel also found inspiration in an unlikely place: the Farhud, the violent pogrom that erupted in Baghdad during Shavuot in 1941, killing scores of Jews.
Her book, Na’ima’s Shavuot Eve, follows a little girl determined to stay awake all night alongside the adults celebrating the holiday that marks when God gave the Torah to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai.
For Siegel, writing about a place she has never been to —and cannot visit—posed a challenge. Once home to one of the world’s oldest and largest Jewish communities, Iraq today is believed to have only a handful of Jews remaining, and travel there by Israelis like Siegel is effectively impossible.
She worked to piece together the Baghdad her family inhabited by interviewing relatives —including an aunt who survived the Farhud—and digging through Iraqi Jewish archives.
“I would go to different libraries and find books about it, and you can see the amount of dust,” she said. “Nobody has touched them for years.”
Although the book doesn’t mention the Farhud directly, it contains subtle nods to the tragedy, including an illustration of a memorial for family members who perished and decorative amulets that Iraqi Jewish children typically wore on Shavuot.
Siegel hopes children will connect with the story’s universal moments—wanting to stay up all night with the grown-ups—as well as its distinctly Iraqi Jewish setting, from sleeping on rooftops overlooking the Tigris River on warm nights to eating kahi, a flaky Iraqi pastry traditionally served on Shavuot.
But expanding the offerings of Jewish children’s literature beyond Ashkenazi narratives is not merely a creative endeavor. It’s also a way to broaden the public conception of Jewish identity at a challenging time, Shorr said.
According to an analysis of the Publishers Marketplace database, there was a 76% decrease in fictional book deal announcements that mentioned Jews, Judaism or Israel between 2023 and 2024. By 2026, there was an 82% decline.
A July report by PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for free expression and writers’ rights, found that many Jewish authors have faced challenges publishing openly Jewish work since Oct. 7. Many of the authors interviewed for that report cited publishers’ fears of boycotts of Jewish or Israeli stories, which made getting their work published challenging.
“The narrow view that we get of who Jews are and what Judaism is about through Hollywood, mass entertainment—whatever—leaves too much room for people to invent more of the story for themselves,” Shorr said. “I think that becomes very dangerous for us.”
Koyrakh said getting Jewish children’s books with unfamiliar settings and storylines published by major publishing houses has long been a challenge.
“It’s much easier to get a Hanukkah book published by a major publishing house because that’s an easy story for publishers to know how to sell, put in the market and recognize. But we know there’s so much more to Jewish life than Hanukkah.”
The four inaugural books of the Sephardic Stories Initiative will be published by PJ Library and distributed to the Jewish families it serves. They include Na’ima’s Shavuot Eve, Pedahzur and the Quest for the Hidden City, Shai’s Lesson, set in 19th-century Morocco, and Signs of Magic, which takes place in mid-19th-century Tiberias.
Shorr hopes their publication will inspire the next generation of Jewish storytellers.
“I didn’t want to commit my career to backing myself into somebody else’s tale,” he said. “Because I hadn’t ever seen a story about anybody like me, I couldn’t imagine it.” Looking back, he said, “The lack of mirrors meant it took much longer for me to start creating mirrors of my own.”
The post Ladino-speaking pirates, genies and grumpy demon cats: PJ Library expands bookshelves with Sephardic stories appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu and Lapid vie for a critical title: Who is Israel’s most adept U.S. whisperer?
(JTA) — WASHINGTON – Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and Yair Lapid, the leader of his opposition, are in Washington, ostensibly to attend the funeral of one of the staunchest pro-Israel American politicians, Lindsey Graham.
They are also, as Lapid made clear in an appearance Monday at the influential Atlantic Council think tank, launching a bruising election campaign and are intensely seeking the favor of a constituent who does not vote in Israel on Oct. 27: President Donald Trump.
Or more broadly, the favor of Americans.
Israeli-born Netanyahu, who was raised in Philadelphia, has made a career of defining himself as his country’s best, even inevitable, envoy to its most important ally. He met with Trump on Tuesday. Lapid in his speech sought to portray Netanyahu’s public diplomacy – the defining characteristic of his political career – as busted and harmful.
“The first step is obvious” to restoring Israel’s reputation, Lapid said. “Send into retirement Benjamin Netanyahu and his group of extremists who are tearing us apart at home and abroad.”
Lapid, who speaks in fluent but accented English, says he wants to be the foreign minister in the next government, one led by Naftali Bennett, a security hawk, as prime minister. He, too, claims an intimacy with the American psyche, evident in an essay he just published in The Atlantic about the cross-country road trips he takes every several years.
Netanyahu is on a mission to secure support for continuing and winning the war he and Trump launched against Iran. In remarks in Hebrew he recorded just prior to leaving Israel on Monday, he leaned into his friendship with Trump.
“I am on my way to Washington to a meeting with our friend the president of the United States, Donald Trump,” he said, standing with his wife, Sara, outside the airplane. “This is my eighth meeting with him since he was elected for his second term, more than any other world leader. It is a great privilege, and also a great responsibility.”
Both Lapid and Netanyahu claimed a closeness to Graham, the South Carolina Republican senator who helped Netanyahu cajole Trump into the war with Iran. Graham, Netanyahu said, was “a true friend of mine and the state of Israel.” Lapid inserted Graham into his argument that the long term goal for Israel and the United States should be the collapse of the Iranian regime. “The last conversation I had with the late Lindsey Graham was about this,” he said Monday.
Lapid at the outset of his remarks sought to erode Netanyahu’s reputation as an America whisperer, saying the coming election would “be the most dramatic, the most crucial, the most intense the country has ever seen.”
“Here is the not to-do list for the Israeli government if you don’t want to witness the complete collapse of the country’s international status.”
Lapid accused Netanyahu of isolating Israel by caving to extremists in his government and alienating allies. Instead, he laid out a formula for how the next prime minister would govern.
“If a minister in your government says a nuclear bomb should be dropped on Gaza, fire him. If a minister in your government says there are circumstances in which it is acceptable to starve the civilian population, fire him. If a minister stands over a large group of handcuffed activists lying on the floor of a detention facility, waving a flag and mocking them, fire him,” Lapid said.
He was referring, respectively, to controversial statements and actions by Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, some of which have been used to fuel the claim that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the war Hamas launched on Oct. 7, 2023 with deadly raids inside Israel.
Netanyahu’s mission comes at a perilous juncture in the U.S.-Israel relationship, and his own reputation. Trump’s approval ratings are at a low as the war appears to have generated victories for Iran, which now controls the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway critical to the passage of a fifth of the world’s petroleum. Inflation has skyrocketed, US allies are furious, and Americans in large majorities oppose the war, just as Trump is facing his own electoral test less than 100 days before the midterm elections.
Netanyahu is unpopular in the United States, and for the first time, Americans are more likely to favor Palestinians than Israelis. An Economist poll published Tuesday showed half of Americans supported Netanyahu’s arrest. Trump wants Israel to stay out of the war, crippling Israel’s ability to influence the outcome of the conflict that continues to loom on its border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy, hopes to regain its strength.
Lapid’s audience here is mostly left of center: His host at the event was Daniel Shapiro, the Obama administration’s ambassador to Israel. A spokesman for Lapid said that other than his attendance at Graham’s funeral, his only public appearance on his trip to the United States this week would be with a group of Democratic senators.
The Atlantic Council is bipartisan, but its Republican component is made up mostly of the old-school believers in alliances that Trump has all but ousted from the party. Seated in the front row was Stephen Hadley, the national security advisor to former President George W. Bush, who is a board member of the Atlantic Council.
Lapid said reconciling with Democrats would be a priority in the next government, should his dream team emerge victorious: Bennett as prime minister, Lapid as foreign minister and Gadi Eisenkot as defense minister. Eisenkot, who has in recent polls surpassed Bennet and Netanyahu, obviously might have different ideas about who gets which job.
“Elizabeth Warren, John Ossoff and Tim Kaine are not the enemy,” he said, referring to Democratic senators from Massachusetts, Georgia and Virginia who have been critical of Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war, and who have voted to suspend defense assistance to Israel. “The Democratic Party is not the enemy.“
Bennett and then Lapid were rotating prime ministers during the last government’s eighteen months of tenure in 2021 and 2022, interrupting Netanyahu’s 12 year run launched in 2009. Netanyahu by then was already persona non grata among Democrats for his all-out campaign against President Barack Obama’s Iran policies.
Lapid, like others running against Netanyahu, appeared cowed by Netanyahu’s attempts to tar their past association with Mansour Abbas, the leader of the United Arab List. Bennet and Lapid made history by including the party in the governing coalition. That would not happen again, Lapid said, although garnering enough seats to govern is more daunting without the inclusion of Arab parties.
“I have a lot of conversations about this with Mansour Abbas, who seems to understand this better than some of my Jewish friends, the fact that maybe it’s time for a coalition that will be made of only of Zionist parties,” he said.
Lapid’s greater affinity to Democrats notwithstanding, he took shots at Netanyahu’s relationship with Trump – arguing that he was the better friend to the president’s Middle East agenda. He noted that last year he brought Trump’s 20-point plan for bringing peace to Gaza to a Knesset vote – and that Netanyahu and his coalition partners absented themselves from the Knesset rather than vote for it.
“I passed the 20-point plan, I did it just to bend Netanyahu’s arm into it,” he said. Netanyahu could not afford to back the plan because its provisions anticipating Palestinian self-governance might have cost him his right-wing coalition partners. ”So I got all the compliments from the American administration,” Lapid said. “It was fun.”
The post Netanyahu and Lapid vie for a critical title: Who is Israel’s most adept U.S. whisperer? appeared first on The Forward.
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2 Jewish-owned Toronto bagel shops hit with gunfire, vandalism
(JTA) — Locals lined up outside a Toronto bagel shop on Monday in a show of support after attacks on two outposts of the Jewish-owned chain, adding to a string of incidents facing Jewish businesses in the city.
Two locations of Kiva’s Bagel Bar, a fixture for Toronto Jews since it opened in 1979, were targeted late Saturday and early Sunday. Gunfire hit the windows of one storefront just an hour after another storefront was vandalized and its front glass shattered, according to the Toronto Police Service.
Police said their Hate Crime Unit was investigating, and they believed the same SUV may have been involved at both scenes. The bakeries were closed at the time and no injuries were reported.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said he was “appalled” by the attacks. “Jewish Canadians should be able to live, work, and worship free from fear, intimidation, and hate,” he said on X on Monday. “Canada’s government is absolute in our commitment to combatting the scourge of antisemitism.”
Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow added on X that the incidents were “vile and unacceptable” and said she “will always stand with Toronto’s Jewish community against antisemitism.”
Residents flocked to Kiva’s and sold out their bagels by 10:30 a.m. on Monday, according to the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, an advocacy arm of the Jewish Federations of Canada. Resident Adrian Rocca, the founder of a local real estate company, posted a photo on LinkedIn of his employees lined up outside.
CIJA said the Canadians rallying around Kiva’s sent a message that “there are a lot of good people ready to take a stand against hate, intimidation, and violence.” The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reached out to Kiva’s for comment.
As police searched for suspects in the bagel shop attacks, a gunman opened fire on the U.S. Consulate in Toronto early Monday morning, setting off a high-speed chase and a manhunt. Police have not confirmed any connection between the gunfire at the consulate and at Kiva’s.
The shooting at the consulate marked the second in four months. Toronto police have arrested three people connected with the previous consulate attack, as well as several others accused of shooting at Jewish targets in the city in recent months. At a press conference last month, Police Chief Myron Demkiw identified a “broader pattern” between the shots fired at the consulate and at Toronto-area synagogues and Jewish schools over the past year.
“What we are dealing with in this case and in other unrelated incidences, including shootings at synagogues and Jewish schools, is a recurring and similar modus operandi — and that is criminals for hire,” said Demkiw. “Through encrypted messaging apps, young people are hired to carry out attacks against various targets, and in order to get paid, they’re required to film their attacks.”
Carney pledged in June to fight antisemitism through a new Ministerial Advisory Council on Rights, Equality, and Inclusion. In his speech at Toronto’s Holy Blossom Synagogue, he said that the country was “failing Jewish Canadians.” Two-thirds of Canada’s religion-motivated hate crimes last year were directed at Jewish Canadians, who make up only 1% of the population, Carney said.
The post 2 Jewish-owned Toronto bagel shops hit with gunfire, vandalism appeared first on The Forward.
