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Nelson Cruz and other Hispanic MLB players visit Israel to promote Christian-Jewish relations
TEL AVIV (JTA) — On a recent Monday, the owner of a restaurant here captivated a group of 14 lunch patrons with stories of her life before and after moving to Israel from Ethiopia as a youngster. A family visiting from New York approached from another table, and the adult son asked if he could pose for pictures with some of the members of the big group.
After the group had left to walk to the shore nearby, the restaurant’s owner learned that she had just hosted a group of professional athletes and their entourage. She briefly considered running after them for a photo herself.
“I wish I’d known who they were,” she said.
The athletes — Nelson Cruz, Cesar Hernandez and Jeimer Candelario, all Major League Baseball players in the United States — were surprised by what they learned at lunch, too. For instance, they had not known of the existence of Black Jews, including the thousands of Ethiopians living in Israel.
The players and their significant others were brought to Israel for a week by the Philos Project, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that promotes Christian relations with Israel and other Middle Eastern countries. It was the organization’s first delegation to Israel involving Hispanic athletes, said Jesse Rojo, the Philos Project’s director of Hispanic affairs. The group toured Christian sites in Jerusalem and the Galilee and ran a baseball clinic for Jewish and non-Jewish youth in Raanana.
The visit also aimed to “proactively” combat antisemitism, Rojo said, “to show our baseball players that they can make a difference, not wait for someone to come out with an antisemitic tweet to do something.” The trip was organized well in advance of the recent antisemitism controversies involving American celebrities such as rapper Kanye West and NBA star Kyrie Irving.
But the players also expressed eagerness to learn about Israel and to impart their experiences upon returning to their homelands of the Dominican Republic and Venezuela — and to MLB clubhouses.
Cruz, from the Dominican Republic, is 39th on the MLB’s all-time home run list with 459. He hit only 10 homers this year and is 42 years old, but he said he’s hopeful a team will sign him to a contract for 2023. Hernandez, a second baseman who is also now a free agent, hails from Venezuela and is a former Gold Glove winner, earned for being named the best defender at his position in the American League. Candelario, born in New York but raised in the Dominican Republic, is also looking for a new team after playing six seasons at third base for the Detroit Tigers. Cruz and Hernandez played together on the Washington Nationals this past season.
On a minibus, before it set out for a day of touring, Cruz led a prayer of gratitude as everyone along for the ride bowed their heads. Members of the group uttered “amen” responses throughout. In Jaffa, Candelario expressed excitement at learning that the Bible’s Jonah had departed by ship from the ancient city’s port before being swallowed by a huge fish. At lunch, Candelario led the table in grace.
In separate interviews, each of the three visiting players said he had never heard anti-Jewish or anti-Israel views expressed by relatives, friends or acquaintances. Most of their compatriots, they said, think that Israel is constantly under enemy attack, a view they added was dispelled by their experience traveling around the country and feeling safe.
All attributed pro-Israel inclinations to their strong Christian beliefs, including regularly attending church services. They cited their mothers as devout women who raised them with Bible stories.
“We love God and the word of God. This is the land of our fathers,” said Candelario. “Whoever blesses Israel will be blessed,” he said, paraphrasing God’s promise to Abraham.
Rojo is organizing a charity softball game in the Dominican Republic between Dominican and Jewish-American MLB players in the coastal town of Susua — which was founded by refugees of Nazism who established still-operating dairy and sliced-meat factories. Funds raised through the event will pay to renovate both a baseball field and the town’s synagogue and to commemorate the Jewish immigrants’ roles in Susua’s history, Rojo said.
Cruz is trying to recruit fellow Dominican players to come on subsequent Israel trips and to play in next year’s Susua event. Superstar outfielder Juan Soto, Cruz’s former teammate on the Washington Nationals, considered participating in the recent delegation, but he reversed course after being traded mid-season to San Diego, Cruz said. Cruz also hopes to persuade the retired legends Albert Pujols and Manny Ramirez to come to Israel, too.
Back home, “we’ll share this experience, and definitely more players will be motivated to come,” Cruz said.
“Anyone who’s an opinion-maker from such countries helps us,” said Jonathan Peled, the Israeli foreign ministry’s deputy director general for Latin America. “They become ambassadors of good [will]. Whether a pastor, an athlete, a performer, a YouTuber – on every visit to Israel, there’s nothing like firsthand observation to see Israel in a more balanced, positive manner and less distorted.”
Jeimer Candelario, a third baseman for the Detroit Tigers, interacts with children at the Raanana field. (Nico Andre’ Duran)
Israel enjoys good relations throughout Latin America, with Venezuela an exception after it broke off diplomatic relations with the Jewish state in 2009, Peled said. “But we hope that [ties] will be renewed soon,” he said.
Venezuela, the Dominican Republic and Israel, coincidentally, will be competing (along with Puerto Rico and Nicaragua) in the same group at the upcoming World Baseball Classic, to be held in Miami in March. The teams will feature large contingents of major leaguers, with Israel’s roster consisting mainly of American Jews.
Baseball is not a top sport in Israel, but Team Israel’s periodic success on the world stage has helped promote the game. The Raanana site — dedicated in memory of Massachusetts native Ezra Schwartz, who was killed in a 2019 terrorist attack in Israel — is one of only a handful of baseball fields in the country. Other notable ones are at Kibbutz Gezer, in Tel Aviv’s Yarkon Park, and at the Baptist Village complex in Petach Tikvah.
At the group lunch, Hernandez said that he “would live here” in Israel in the off-season if he could obtain a visa. He was asked whether he meant it.
“Yeah, because it’s the Jesus country,” Hernandez said. “I asked my wife, and she said yes.”
Sitting beside him at the restaurant, Gabriela Hernandez nodded.
“Yes,” she said, “because of the significance it has for us.”
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The post Nelson Cruz and other Hispanic MLB players visit Israel to promote Christian-Jewish relations appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Jewish Georgetown Student Defeats $10 Million Lawsuit Filed by Fired Official Who Promoted Antisemitism
Anti-Israel demonstration on the campus of Georgetown University in Washington, DC in September 2024. Photo: Bryan Olin Dozier via Reuters Connect
A Jewish undergraduate student has defeated a $10 million lawsuit brought by a fired Georgetown University administrator who filed the claim because the student’s efforts to criticize the official’s sharing of antisemitic invective on social media contributed to the termination of their employment.
The student’s victory parries a barrage of accusations which the former administrator, Aneesa Johnson, lobbed at the student, Georgetown, and others. It also vindicates the free speech rights of Jewish students denouncing antisemitism at the highest levels of university governance, according to the student’s legal counsel, provided by The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and Gibson Dunn.
“This ruling is a victory for every student who has ever feared speaking out against antisemitism on campus,” Brandeis Center chairman Kenneth Marcus said in a statement. “A young woman raised her voice about hateful content posted by a university administrator — and was sued for it. Today, the court made clear that kind of retaliation has no place in our legal system. The Brandeis Center will always stand with those who refuse to stay silent.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Johnson’s appointment to Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service (SFS) in 2023 drew widespread criticism, as she had a history of writing hateful statements about Jews and Israel.
Those statements went back as far as 2015, according to an investigation of her social media activity that was led by Canary Mission. In July of that year, Johnson tweeted: “Ever since going to [Northwestern University] I have a deep seated [sic] hate for Zio [sic] b—ches. They bring out the worst in me.” Johnson also said, “You know why I call them Zio b—ches, because they’re dogs.”
“Zio” is an antisemitic slur brought into prominence by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. While the term, derived from “Zionist,” has generally been deployed by white supremacists and other far-right extremists, it has more recently been used as well by anti-Israel activists on the progressive far left to refer to Jews in a derogatory manner.
A week following the aforementioned posts, Johnson, a member of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), retweeted an unflattering picture of an Orthodox Jew and captioned it, “When the whole world hates you bc you a thief and you grow up looking like shaytan [the devil] #GrowingUpIsraeli.”
Six years later, in 2021, Johnson said on a podcast that US support for Israel is due to the influence of “the really powerful Zionist lobby that advocates for policies, statements, voting patterns that benefit the State of Israel.”
Having been hired to be the “primary point of contact” for master’s students on “everything academic” at the SFS, Jewish advocacy groups protested that any Jewish student should be forced to interact with Johnson. Georgetown University heeded their complaints and ultimately fired Johnson and in doing so set off the events which placed a Jewish undergraduate in the middle of a lawsuit seeking a windfall of damages.
The March 31 ruling dismissed the complaint as undermining the “marketplace of ideas,” freeing the student to move on with life.
“This retaliatory lawsuit … sought to punish her exercise of First Amendment rights and chill the expression of countless others,” Gibson Dunn partner Elizabeth Papez said in a statement. “We’re especially pleased that the court agreed our client’s First Amendment defense ‘packs a strong punch’ and compels dismissal with prejudice. The ruling sets a precedent that courts will not tolerate the use of the judicial system to punish those who speak out against antisemitism.”
The Brandeis Center’s legal advocacy has delivered a slew of victories for Jewish students and faculty in 2026.
In March, the organization negotiated a major agreement to settle a lawsuit it filed against the University of California, Berkeley in 2023 over its allegedly failing to address a series of incidents of campus antisemitism which culminated in anti-Zionist students establishing “Jewish-free zones” where pro-Israel advocates were barred from speaking.
The details of the settlement call for for Berkeley’s using the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism as a reference tool, stating a “reaffirmation” of antisemitism as a violation of the code of conduct, conducting an annual survey of the Jewish student body, and appointing an official to manage the school’s compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination at universities receiving taxpayer money to fund research and other operations. UC Berkeley will also pay the Brandeis Center $1 million as reimbursement for “outside attorneys’ fees and costs incurred” during litigation of the suit.
Joined by the StandWithUs Saidoff Law, the Brandeis Center announced on April 1 that City College of San Francisco (CCSF) upheld the findings of an investigation which found that a Jewish professor, Abigail Bornstein, experienced antisemitic discrimination during a series of explosive confrontations in which now-former CCSF employee Maria Salazar-Colon called her “colonizer,” “Dumb-stein,” and demanded that she “shut the f—k up.”
Those utterances, combined with other comments related to Israel, indicated Salazar-Colon’s awareness of Bornstein’s Jewishness and her willingness to degrade her over it, the Brandeis Center and StandWithUs said — noting that a trivial discussion on college “governance,” not politics or the Middle East conflict, set the staff member off. Salazar-Colon then continued targeting Bornstein through email, denouncing her again as a “colonizer” and making other crude statements. She ultimately drove Bornstein off campus, where she attempted to work remotely while filing formal complaints with the university and the local police department.
“The college did the right thing here. They brought in an independent investigator. They made clear that this was about discrimination based on Bornstein’s protected identity, that being Jewish — not union advocacy — and that’s important and a necessary distinction that we don’t often see being recognized,” Brandeis Center counsel Deena Margolies told The Algemeiner during an interview. “I’m seeing many more of these disciplinary matters in the employee context, and I notice that what often happens is that when a Jewish professor or staff member is targeted or files a complaint, there is often a cross complaint, a baseless complaint which is retaliatory. And yet, they always end up coming through.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Iran’s Internet Blackout Hits Record Length as Regime Tries to Crush Dissent in Digital Darkness
People attend the funeral of the security forces who were killed in the protests that erupted over the collapse of the currency’s value in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 14, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Iran’s internet blackout became the longest such nationwide shutdown ever recorded over the weekend, as the regime continued to face mounting military pressure, internal unrest, and growing isolation.
According to NetBlocks, an internet-monitoring watchdog that tracks global connectivity disruptions, Iran’s blackout entered its 37th consecutive day on Sunday, making it the longest nation-scale internet shutdown on record after authorities severed internet access as the war with the US and Israel broke out in late February.
The blackout continued on Monday, with the general public cut off from international networks for over 888 hours.
With the regime attempting to suppress internal opposition and silence domestic dissent, the blackout has effectively cut millions of Iranians off from independent reporting on the war and access to global news.
“We constantly find ourselves searching for ways to reconnect, just to be able to hear reliable news,” a 47-year-old woman in the central city of Isfahan told AFP on Saturday.
“Being without internet feels like being without oxygen to me. I feel trapped and suffocated,” a 53-year-old man in Tehran also said.
Iranian authorities have even warned that citizens suspected of accessing internet through virtual private networks (VPNs) — tools that bypass government censorship — could face arrest or imprisonment.
According to state media reports, Iranian security forces have arrested several citizens in recent weeks for using the Starlink satellite internet system, which allows users to bypass state-controlled terrestrial infrastructure.
Iran’s latest internet shutdown marks the second nationwide blackout in less than two months, after authorities previously imposed an 18-day outage in January during mass anti-government protests, which security forces violently crushed, leaving tens of thousands of demonstrators tortured or killed.
Human rights groups warn the regime has repeatedly used nationwide internet shutdowns as a tool to intensify its crackdown on opposition movements and conceal ongoing abuses from international scrutiny.
In recent years, Iranian authorities have accelerated efforts to sever the country’s reliance on the global web by advancing the regime-backed “National Internet” project aimed at consolidating state control over digital communications and information flows.
Meanwhile, the Islamist regime continues to face relentless pressure from US and Israeli strikes as the conflict escalates and prospects for negotiations become increasingly fragile.
In one of its latest attacks, Israel announced that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) intelligence chief Brig. Gen. Majid Khademi and Quds Force special operations commander Asghar Bagheri were both killed over the weekend.
This latest strike on leadership represents a “significant blow to Iran’s intelligence leadership at a time when the regime is already under sustained pressure,” an Israeli security official told Fox News.
According to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Khademi orchestrated overseas terrorist operations and oversaw surveillance targeting Iranian civilians during the regime’s brutal crackdown on protests.
Part of Iran’s elite military force, Bagheri coordinated the recruitment of terrorist operatives across the Middle East and directed deadly attacks against US and Israeli targets abroad.
On Monday, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced the IDF also struck Iran’s largest petrochemical facility in Asaluyeh, a blow that has effectively taken offline the two plants responsible for roughly 85 percent of the country’s petrochemical exports, crippling a key pillar of Iran’s economy and export capacity.
Katz described the strikes as “a severe economic blow to the Iranian regime, amounting to tens of billions of dollars.”
“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and I have instructed the IDF to continue to attack the national infrastructure of the Iranian terror regime with all its might,” the Israeli defense chief said.
“The Iranian terror regime will discover that the continued aggression against Israel and the cowardly and criminal fire at Israeli citizens will lead to the deepening of the economic and strategic damage it is paying and the collapse of its capabilities,” he continued.
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Pressure Mounts on UK Government to Ban Kanye West After Festival Backlash
Rapper Kanye West holds his first rally in support of his presidential bid in North Charleston, South Carolina, US, July 19, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Randall Hill
The British government was under growing pressure on Monday to bar US rapper Kanye West from entering the country after he was named as the headline act for the Wireless Festival of rap and hip-hop music set for July.
West, now known as Ye, has been criticized in the past for antisemitic remarks and celebration of Nazism, which have led on several occasions to his social media accounts, including X, being barred.
The decision to book Ye prompted several companies to pull their sponsorship of the festival, while the main opposition Conservative Party wrote to Home Secretary [interior minister] Shabana Mahmood urging her to ban him from coming to Britain.
Asked by Reuters for comment, a Home Office source said ministers were currently reviewing his permission to enter the country.
The Home Office does not usually comment on individual cases, but Mahmood has powers to personally request Ye to be excluded from the UK. In January, the department revoked the Electronic Travel Authorization of Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a Dutch far-right activist for spreading false information.
Festival organizers and Ye’s representative did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
The Jewish Leadership Council last week condemned the organizers for booking Ye after a rise in attacks on Jewish people and Jewish targets.
‘DEEPLY CONCERNING’
Prime Minister Keir Starmer also described as “deeply concerning” the decision to book Ye for the London festival.
“Antisemitism in any form is abhorrent and must be confronted firmly wherever it appears,” Starmer said in comments first reported by the Sun on Sunday.
“Everyone has a responsibility to ensure Britain is a place where Jewish people feel safe and secure.”
A spokesperson for London mayor Sadiq Khan said the rapper’s comments did not reflect the city’s values and that the decision had been made by festival organizers.
Australia cancelled the rapper’s visa last July after he released “Heil Hitler,” a song promoting Nazism. The ban came a few months after Ye advertised a swastika T-shirt for sale on his website.
Ye took a full-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal in January to apologize for his antisemitic remarks, attributing his behavior to an undiagnosed brain injury and an untreated bipolar disorder. He also apologized for his past expressions of admiration for Adolf Hitler and use of swastika imagery.
The 48-year-old has not performed in Britain since he headlined Glastonbury in 2015.
Drinks companies Diageo and Pepsi, a long-running sponsor, said they had withdrawn their support for the Wireless event over the decision to invite Ye. Pepsi-owner PepsiCo also confirmed its Rockstar Energy brand had pulled its sponsorship.
A spokesperson for PayPal told Reuters on Monday its branding would not appear in any future Wireless festival promotional materials.