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NBA player Meyers Leonard opens up on his antisemitism scandal to Jewish ESPN reporter
(JTA) — Nearly two years after NBA player Meyers Leonard was caught using an antisemitic slur on a video game platform, the former first-round pick opened up about the incident and his subsequent journey toward forgiveness in an interview with Jewish ESPN reporter Jeremy Schaap.
“I know that I made a huge, huge mistake,” Leonard told Schaap, an 11-time Emmy winner who has produced other Jewish-themed content for ESPN. “And like, how in the world did this ever happen? I couldn’t harm a fly.”
Leonard, then a member of the Miami Heat, used the word “kike” while livestreaming a “Call of Duty” video game on the Twitch streaming platform in March 2021. The backlash was swift: Leonard was suspended by the Heat and fined by the league. He was then traded and released.
Leonard apologized the following day, writing, “I am deeply sorry for using an anti-Semitic slur during a livestream yesterday. While I didn’t know what the word meant at the time, my ignorance about its history and how offensive it is to the Jewish community is absolutely not an excuse and I was just wrong.”
The 7-footer was also injured at the time of the incident, and hasn’t played in the NBA since. But now he is healthy and attempting a comeback, having recently worked out for the Los Angeles Lakers.
Schaap spoke to Leonard for the ESPN Daily podcast, relaying the experience to host Pablo Torre.
Leonard, who said he has not yet forgiven himself, told Schaap about the toll the mistake took on him, which included needing 24-hour security because of threats made against him and his family. He even thought about ending his life.
“I felt like I had just destroyed my life and everything that I had worked for, to be honest,” Leonard said.
Torre framed the Leonard episode in the context of Kyrie Irving’s recent antisemitism scandal, saying Irving “became the new face of the foremost antisemitism scandal, in not just NBA history, but modern sports history.”
Schaap alluded to the recent rise in antisemitism across the United States, including the deadly 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. “This has been, the last several years, a time at which the Jewish community has felt more under attack than it has in a long time,” Schaap said.
Schaap said he began his interview by asking if Leonard knew what he was saying when he used the slur.
“Absolutely not,” Leonard said. “Again, there are absolutely no excuses for what happened that day, and ignorance, sadly, is a very real thing. And that’s what I was.”
Leonard added that he likely learned the word from being active in online gaming, which is often a hotbed for antisemitism and other forms of hate.
Schaap and Torre provided a brief history and explanation of the slur, and Schaap said he was inclined to believe Leonard when he said he did not know its meaning.
“I talked to younger Jewish people from metropolitan areas who said they had never heard the word, and that was shocking to me,” said Schaap. “Now Meyers Leonard, of course, had heard the word, because he used it, which is different. But it does seem highly plausible to me, knowing all these younger Jewish people who don’t know what the word means, that he didn’t know what it means.”
Schaap and Leonard also retraced the timeline of the controversy, from the moment he uttered the word online to his engagement with the local Jewish community in South Florida. Just days after the incident, Leonard met with Pinny Andrusier, a rabbi affiliated with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in nearby Broward County.
“You’re a good man with a good soul,” Leonard recalled Andrusier telling him. “This happened for you, not to you. You’ll understand eventually.”
From there, Leonard met others in the local community, including Holocaust survivors, and also met with representatives from the Anti-Defamation League and the Greater Miami Jewish Federation.
Schaap asked Leonard if he had absorbed anything from Jewish culture or tradition into his own life. His answer: love.
“Walk outside your door, love people,” Leonard said. “Be kind. Forgive. Through a big mistake of mine, I met a loving community. I met people who had been through extremely difficult times, yet they loved me. And they wanted me to love myself.”
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The post NBA player Meyers Leonard opens up on his antisemitism scandal to Jewish ESPN reporter appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Trump Says ‘Clock Is Ticking’ for Iran
US President Donald Trump speaks about research into mental health treatments in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, April 18, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Nathan Howard
US President Donald Trump on Sunday threatened consequences for Iran if its leaders do not act quickly.
“For Iran, the Clock is Ticking, and they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!,” he wrote in a Truth Social post.
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Netanyahu Warns Israel Prepared for ‘Any Scenario’ with Iran, Vows to Defeat Drone Threat in Lebanon
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a press conference at the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem, Aug. 10, 2025. Photo: ABIR SULTAN/Pool via REUTERS
i24 News – Speaking at a special government meeting marking Jerusalem Day at the Knesset Museum, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israeli forces in Lebanon are holding and clearing territory while confronting a growing threat from fiber-optic FPV drones. He said he convened a special team with the defense minister and civilian and military experts, telling them they have “no budget limit” to find a solution. “Whatever it costs, it costs,” Netanyahu said, adding that he has “no doubt that Israel will be the first country to deliver a complete solution to this problem.”
Netanyahu also said he would speak with President Donald Trump to hear his impressions from his trip to China and discuss Iran and various regional scenarios. “There are certainly many possibilities; we are prepared for any scenario,” he said, adding that Israeli authorities remain vigilant regarding Iran.
Over the weekend, Israel eliminated Izz ad-Din al-Haddad, whom Netanyahu described as “number one in Hamas’s military wing” and a “master murderer,” responsible for the killing, injury, and kidnapping of thousands of Israeli civilians and IDF soldiers.
Netanyahu said Israel now controls 60 percent of the Gaza Strip and reiterated that the operation’s objective is to ensure Gaza will “never again pose a threat to Israel.” He added that Israel has fulfilled its promise to return all hostages, including “the hero of Israel, the late Ran Gvili.”
“Every single architect of the massacre and the hostage-taking will be eliminated down to the last one, and we are very close to completing this mission,” he said.
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Pacific Palisades Jews, displaced by fire, reopen their synagogue as part of returning home
(JTA) — Sixteen months after the fires that devastated the Pacific Palisades and uprooted hundreds of Jewish families, congregants of Kehillat Israel are returning to their synagogue.
On Friday, hundreds of congregants are carrying their Torah scrolls back into the building that became a symbol of the Los Angeles neighborhood that was devastated by fire in January 2025.
While the synagogue suffered significant smoke damage from the fires, the building, constructed in 1950, remained standing, providing desperately needed continuity for the roughly 250 congregants who lost their homes and 250 others who were temporarily displaced.
All three of the synagogue’s clergy members, including Rabbi Daniel Sher, lost their homes in the fires, a tragedy that Sher said imbued Friday’s reopening ceremony with mixed emotions.
“It’s a mixed blessing. I’m going to move back into my place of work before I break ground on my home,” Sher told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But Judaism knows how to survive hardship, and so our job is to take this tradition and take 1000s of years of understanding that and put it into action.”
The reopening of the synagogue after months of repairs and renovations will also carry added weight as it coincides with a celebration honoring Cantor Chayim Frenkel and his wife, Marsi, for 40 years of service to the congregation.
“I feel very honored and proud,” Frenkel told JTA. “They’re dedicating the new ark to me and my wife, so that’ll be something in perpetuity that I’m honored to — if I’m blessed with grandchildren — to have them go in there and say, my daddy and my grandfather participated in working with others to create a very meaningful and a very loving and a very heimish shul filled with Yiddishkeit, a Zionistic, just a beautiful community.”
In the months after the fires, Kehillat Israel became what Frenkel jokingly called a “wandering” congregation, holding services in the Santa Monica mall while its religious school borrowed space from a Los Angeles public school. Clergy also held b’nai mitzvah services in neighboring synagogues, homes, hotels and even a restaurant.
“I can’t help but feel like it was this strangely entrepreneurial, energetic space in which this initial point of grief and loss very quickly manifested into a communal excitement and connection and has changed the way we will forever operate as a community, even once we’re back in our own sacred space,” Sher said.
Frenkel said that many of his congregants had told him that the “one of the main reasons they’re coming back to the Palisades to rebuild is because the synagogue did not burn.”
“That was a huge component for them to go through the rebuilding process, because they knew they had their synagogue,” Frenkel said.
As some congregants prepare to move back to the area, Sher said he had received hundreds of donated mezuzahs that clergy plan to distribute to families returning to rebuilt homes, helping them rededicate their spaces after months of displacement.
“For the families, the home is a mikdash me’at, it’s a small sanctuary, and I always tell our kids that there is an invisible bridge that leads from the synagogue directly to their home,” Frenkel said. “And now that their homes have burned or are being rebuilt, those bridges are being rebuilt, and that mezuzah is helping create that.”
But even as some of the congregation remains displaced around Los Angeles, Sher said the reopening ceremony was about much more than restoring a building. Instead, he said, it serves as a declaration that the community was “still here,” and that they had “never actually left.”
“For us as people who work there, but for congregants who have put a piece of their emotional connection into that building, they get something to still remain as home,” Sher said. “So our reopening isn’t just that statement, it’s saying, if you want home to be there still, it is.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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