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Jewish star guard Abby Meyers leads University of Maryland into top-10 spot in the NCAA tournament
(JTA) — Last July, Abby Meyers helped lead Team USA to a gold medal in women’s basketball at the Maccabiah Games, or the “Jewish Olympics,” in Israel. Starting next week, she hopes to embark on a run towards another championship: a Division I NCAA tournament title.
Meyers, a graduate transfer at the University of Maryland, is the starting shooting guard for a Terrapins team ranked sixth in the nation going into this Sunday, when the March Madness bracket seedings will be revealed. She averaged 14.5 points and 5.4 rebounds per game this season and was named to the All-Big Ten Second Team, an honor that singles her out as one of the best players in the powerhouse conference.
Last week, Maryland lost to Iowa in the Big 10 tournament semifinals. Last March, they lost in the Sweet 16 round to Stanford.
“I think it just gives us more motivation going into the NCAA tournament,” Meyers said. “Especially if you’re a competitor, no one likes losing. But that’s part of the game, right? You live, you learn. And we’re lucky to have another opportunity.”
One particular group could help motivate her during what she hopes will be a deep tournament run: her Jewish fans.
“There’s an amazing following of Jewish students who come to my games, who support me and love the fact that I’m Jewish,” she said. Her school has one of the largest populations of Jewish students in the country, at around 6,000.
Growing up in Maryland’s Montgomery County, she attended synagogue at the Reform Washington Hebrew Congregation in Washington, D.C. and was surrounded by Jewish friends in the DMV area — the colloquial acronym for the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia region. She didn’t begin playing basketball competitively until high school.
She played with her two sisters, Emily and Olivia, in high school, then went first to Princeton. There she played with two Jewish teammates, Kira Emsbo and Maddie Plank, who also played with Meyers at the Maccabiah Games last summer.
“I see myself as a female Jewish athlete, and I think it really came to fruition this past summer when I went to the Maccabiah Games in Israel and was able to play alongside so many amazing, talented Jewish athletes from all over the world,” Meyers said. “That was different for me, because I’ve never been around so many Jewish athletes before.”
Meyers had tried out and made the Maccabi USA women’s basketball team in 2017, but decided not to play because she was about to enter college — a decision she now calls naive. The Maccabiah Games is a quadrennial sports competition that convenes thousands of Jewish athletes from around the world for an Olympics-style tournament in Israel.
So when the 21st Maccabiah Games were set to return in 2022, Meyers didn’t want to miss out again. She found out that Plank, who now plays at Davidson College in North Carolina, would be trying out, and that her assistant coach at Princeton, Lauren Battista, was a Maccabiah alum. Maccabi USA women’s basketball coach Sherry Levin also reached out to Meyers, and chose the 6-foot guard as team captain early on.
“I can’t speak more highly of a player that I’ve coached than Abby Meyers. And I’ve coached a lot,” Levin said. She hailed Meyers’ basketball IQ, her selflessness on the court and her leadership. “She checks every box.”
Meyers, who had never been to Israel, said the experience was “by far the most fun I’ve ever had.”
“It’s way more than just basketball. It’s really learning about your history, your ancestry and just appreciating all things Jewish,” Meyers said.
In addition to winning the gold medal, Meyers said her visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem stood out to her.
“To be there, in Jerusalem in that moment, it was really just a reflective moment,” Meyers said. “It made me just appreciate the opportunity I had to represent my country being a Jewish athlete, and to also have that opportunity to be there, in person, to be safe, to be healthy, and to just appreciate those who came before me.”
Plank echoed Levin’s praise for her teammate.
“Abby is probably the most basketball-loving, passionate, driven character that I’ve ever been around in my life,” Plank said. “She just leads by example. It’s such a pleasure being on the court with her.”
Plank said she and Meyers keep in touch now that they’ve both left Princeton (they played against each other this season — Maryland beat Davidson 70-52). She said she hopes to see Meyers in the WNBA one day.
If that WNBA dream doesn’t come to fruition for Meyers, she said that she is open to the possibility of playing professionally in Israel.
Meyers joined her close-to-hometown school as a graduate transfer last year after three seasons at Princeton, where she was unanimously named the Ivy League Player of the Year and earned First Team All-Ivy honors in her final year. She made the move in part to be closer to her family, including her grandmother, who she said has not been able to see many of her games.
Back at Maryland, Meyers isn’t surrounded by many Jewish players on the court. But she does appreciate the opportunity to explain concepts such as synagogue, Hebrew school and the Holocaust to non-Jewish teammates.
“I’m always happy and proud to be able to not educate, but to inform them on what it’s like to be Jewish,” she said. “There’s plenty of Jewish stereotypes out there, whether it’s looks, or that we’re just hardworking go-getters, which I love, because we are. But it’s special to have that kind of interaction with them where they’re open and willing listeners and learners.”
On campus at both Princeton and now Maryland, Meyers said she has engaged with chapters of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement — which performs outreach and holds programming for a wide range of Jewish students on campuses across the country — and other centers of Jewish life.
“I was able to meet so many cool Jewish students who knew me and knew that I play basketball and have been to my games,” Meyers said. “It was just great to tap into that community, because automatically you feel like they’re your immediate friends.”
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UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage
A campus event featuring freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov drew the condemnation of UCLA’s student government on Tuesday. In an open letter, the UCLA Students Associated Council said that bringing Tov to speak to students “served to legitimize and normalize” atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Shem Tov, 23, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza until his release in a prisoner exchange in February 2025. UCLA hosted him on April 14 for a Yom HaShoah event.
“While we affirm the humanity of all people impacted by violence, we reject the selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence,” the student government letter wrote in the letter, which was addressed to the UCLA administration and UCLA Hillel among others. “Israel is currently continuing to carry out what has been widely identified by human rights advocates as a genocide in Gaza, while also expanding its illegal military campaign into Lebanon.
“In this context, elevating a single narrative, absent of critical political and humanitarian framing, serves to legitimize and normalize these ongoing atrocities.”
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel’s director emeritus, called the statement “completely ridiculous.”
“You can’t present the narrative of your experience without it being called ‘one sided,’” Seidler-Feller said. “There has to be a counter-story to persecution. Is there a counter-story to killing people?”
UCLA Hillel executive director Daniel Gold dismissed the criticism in Tuesday’s letter as antisemitic.
“Hillel at UCLA and Students Supporting Israel UCLA would like to apologize…for absolutely nothing,” he wrote in a statement. “Members of UCLA student government have once again shown they are anti-dialogue, anti-learning, anti-truth, anti-student and antisemitic.”
The USAC did not respond to a request for comment.
As college campuses across the country became a hotspot for pro-Palestinian activism following the Oct. 7 attack, UCLA, with an activist history and a large Jewish population, stood out as a major flashpoint. Its student encampment was the site of a riot in April 2024 and eventually cleared by police in riot gear.
The USAC has sided with pro-Palestinian protesters throughout. In a Feb. 2025 letter titled “We Are All SJP,” the USAC, which is democratically elected by the roughly 30,000-member UCLA student body, condemned Chancellor Julio Frenk’s suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine. The letter referred to Israel only as “the Zionist state” or put the country’s name inside quotation marks.
The University of California has since been sued by the Department of Justice, which said that UCLA created a hostile work environment against Jewish and Israeli faculty in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
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Trump extends ceasefire with Iran, even after Iran balks at new round of negotiations
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he would unilaterally extend the U.S.-Israeli ceasefire with Iran, even though Iran had not agreed to his conditions or even to return to the negotiating table.
Trump announced the decision on Truth Social just hours before the two-week-old deal was set to expire. Citing Iran’s “fractured” leadership, Trump wrote that he had been asked by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to “hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”
Vice President JD Vance’s planned trip to Islamabad, where talks were set to take place, was postponed indefinitely after Iran failed to confirm its participation in negotiations.
Trump added that the United States would maintain its naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, despite Iran’s repeated calls for the restrictions to be lifted.
The announcement marked a sharp departure from the president’s statements earlier in the day, telling CNBC that, if a deal was not made before the deadline, “I expect to be bombing.”
In a statement Tuesday, Sharif thanked Trump for his “gracious acceptance” of Pakistan’s request to extend the ceasefire, adding that the country would “continue its earnest efforts for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.”
The announcement adds to uncertain about the war’s future, including for Israelis who lived through six weeks of Iranian bombing, and renews questions about Trump’s commitment to achieving his war goals, which have varied and included blunting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, achieving regime change, and destroying Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles. He said earlier this week that he was asking Iran to limit its nuclear program for 20 years, five years longer than was required by the deal struck by Barack Obama in 2015. Trump exited that deal in 2018.
Last week, Trump announced a different ceasefire, between Israel and Lebanon, on Truth Social, contradicting Israel’s claim that the Iran ceasefire would not apply to its fighting with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed proxy in Lebanon.
Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire extension came during the night in Israel, after Israelis began their celebration of Independence Day. It drew criticism from one of his staunchest pro-Israel supporters, the Zionist Organization of America, whose national president Morton Klein said in a statement that “interminable delay is the standard Islamic Iranian regime negotiating tactic” and that acceding to it represented a victory for Iran. The statement did not mention Trump.
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Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’
(JTA) — Alan Dershowitz, the prominent pro-Israel attorney whose clients have included Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, announced on Monday that he was leaving the Democratic party and registering as a Republican.
Describing himself as a “lifelong Democrat,” Dershowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had decided to “bite the bullet and register as a Republican,” citing Democratic support for an arms embargo on Israel last week and the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric.
“There is no denying that the hard left, anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party has moved from the fringe to the mainstream,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that “Republicans have their own antisemitic fringe, but for now it remains a fringe.”
The announcement formalized a political evolution for Dershowitz, who defended Trump during his first impeachment and has increasingly broken with Democrats over Israel in recent years.
In 2021, Dershowitz nominated Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Avi Berkowitz, Trump’s top Middle Eastern envoy during his first administration, for the Nobel Peace Prize over their hand in shaping the Abraham Accords.
Dershowitz — who has recently faced scrutiny over his ties to Epstein, and previously denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by one of Epstein’s accusers — panned the Democratic Party as the “most anti-Israel party in U.S. history” in the op-ed.
“I believe that the Democratic Party’s hostility to Israel represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the center and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that he intended to “work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate.”
Dershowitz’s comments are in line with Trump’s statements about Jews and the Democratic Party. He has repeatedly expressed amazement at how any Jews could vote for the Democrats considering his own record when it comes to Israel.
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