The findings will be formally presented at the Senate in Palazzo Giustiniani on March 3.
According to the CDEC, anti-Israel animus was a key ideological driver of the surge in antisemitism.
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‘Where do I stand?’ Queer Modern Orthodox teens navigate a changing world
This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives.
(JTA) — Until recently, Jacob Feldon considered Yeshiva University a serious candidate for his college education. As a senior at a Utah high school who has embraced Modern Orthodoxy and harbors dreams of potentially becoming a rabbi, he said he was drawn to “the idea of going to school in an observant community where I can study Torah and Talmud with some of the smartest people doing such a thing today.”
But Feldon is also bisexual and serves as a Jewish youth ambassador for Beloved Arise, a national interfaith support organization for queer youth. So Feldon took notice when Yeshiva University declined to officially recognize a Pride Alliance group on campus, and then pressed its case to the U.S. Supreme Court when mandated to do so.
“As a queer man I can’t see going into that environment right now with everything happening,” Feldon told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I’m getting a pretty clear message that I won’t be welcomed, authentically welcome.”
Feldon is not the only high school student who identifies as Modern Orthodox to have complicated feelings about Yeshiva University at the moment. As the main Modern Orthodox university, the school blends secular and religious instruction and values. Its attempt to navigate a balance between being welcoming and inclusive and fighting for the right to control LGBTQ students’ official expression on campus has made national headlines — and caused some Modern Orthodox teens to question whether they would feel comfortable attending.
For LGBTQ teens, the lawsuit and other controversies around gender and sexuality in Modern Orthodoxy have created “a little hopelessness,” said Rachael Fried, executive director of the support nonprofit Jewish Queer Youth.
Fried described the mindset of Modern Orthodox LGBTQ adolescents as, “I’m trying to live an Orthodox life. I’m trying to build my future as a queer Orthodox person, and this is what the main, flagship institution of Modern Orthodoxy thinks about me. Then where is my future and what’s the hope for me and what are my dreams?”
For queer teens, the Y.U. saga is just one high-profile touchpoint in an ongoing grappling with their place within Modern Orthodoxy. Modern Orthodox communities range widely in many ways depending on their history, geography and leadership, meaning that some queer Orthodox teens say they have found acceptance and support while others say they’ve had more challenging experiences.
Rachael Fried is the executive director of the support nonprofit Jewish Queer Youth. (Courtesy JQY)
Often teens say they experience both. Like many of the queer teens interviewed for this article, Rivka Schafer and their parents first thought it best to keep their queer identity private due to the repercussions they feared with being LGBTQ in a Modern Orthodox community. When they did come out in middle school, Schafer said they received mixed reactions in their Jewish day school.
“The kids had a lot of stigma and the administration did too, but they tried to be really accepting and really supportive which was also really, really beautiful,” Schafer told JTA.
“Currently I identify as Modern Orthodox because Judaism is a really important part of my identity and I find Judaism to be really meaningful to me,” said Schafer, who is nonbinary, from their home in Teaneck, New Jersey. “So although I struggled a lot with the acceptance in the Jewish community, and stigma within the Orthodox community, I really ultimately believe it is and should be a strong part of who I am.”
But while Schafer has remained committed to their religious identity, Fried, of Jewish Queer Youth, said the Pride Alliance lawsuit and other LGBTQ-related controversies sometimes “pushes people away from Orthodoxy in a really unfortunate way.”
This is what happened to Mattie Schaffer. “I would describe it as [having] a religious identity crisis,” said Schaffer, a student at Lev Miriam Learning Studio in Passaic, New Jersey who uses he/they pronouns and identifies as queer. Schaffer, 16, said their neighborhood is a more right-wing Modern Orthodox community, colloquially called yeshivish, though his family is not.
“A part of all the alienation and isolation comes from a feeling of not having a place anywhere,” Schaffer said. “And as much as you try to conform, there just isn’t really a place for you to fit unless you want to be sticking out or be bending yourself in half.”
Modern Orthodox queer teens’ feeling “of not having a place” can be quite literal, particularly for those teens that are non-binary or transgender, said Schafer, the teen from Teaneck.
Schafer finds their nonbinary identity sometimes at odds with even the most basic rules of the Hebrew language, which assigns a gender to nearly all words, and of their synagogue. “Where do I stand? On the mechitza?” they asked, referring to the divider separating men and women in Orthodox synagogues.
The question of LGBTQ individuals in gender-separated prayer spaces recently reared up at Y.U., when one of its leading rabbis decreed that a transgender woman could not pray in either the women’s or men’s section of her university-affiliated synagogue.
But while recent months have been abundant in controversy, the last decade has shown tremendous progress for LGBTQ Modern Orthodox teens, according to multiple people in and around the community.
Rabbi Steve Greenberg, who was ordained by Yeshiva University before coming out as gay in 1999, heads the Orthodox queer advocacy group Eshel. His organization surveyed approximately 240 Orthodox synagogues and rabbis and found that 74% of interviewees were “high welcoming,” meaning that “inclusion is explicit, principled and broadly acknowledged” and queer families’ life cycle events other than marriage are celebrated. Another 22% offered “moderate welcome,” while 4% were “low welcoming/inattentive.”
Nadiv Schorer, right, married Ariel Meiri in 2020 with Orthodox rabbi Avram Mlotek officiating. (David Perlman Photography)
Approximately 10 rabbis said they were willing to perform same-sex marriages, according to Eshel’s research.
“They do their best to make it possible for LGBTQ folks to belong to Orthodox environments,” said Greenberg. “And it’s grown.”
The head of school at North Shore Hebrew Academy on Long Island, Rabbi Jeffery Kobrin, said he believed that growing conversations about LGBTQ issues in Orthodox communities has had benefits.
“I think it’s easier to be a queer teen now than it was in 2012, just because it’s more out there,” Kobrin said. “People talk about it more, people try to be more accepting of it, and people, community-wise, seem to less feel this contradiction between Orthodoxy and alternative lifestyles.”
Some teens say they have witnessed change in just the last couple of years. Benjamin Small, a gay teen who graduated from SAR High School last year and now attends Yeshivat Ma’ale Gilboa in Israel, said his rabbi, Chaim Poupko, of Congregation Avahath Torah in Englewood, New Jersey, has advocated for queer members of the Orthodox community in his synagogue.
“That would be unheard of two or three years ago,” Small said.
Few Modern Orthodox schools in the New York area have an LGBTQ support club. But Fried, JQY’s executive director, said students are learning how to organize and build community independently, in the absence of recognition from their schools and synagogues.
“That comes with people choosing themselves, feeling empowered to build their own communities and to step-up and create the groups that others are not creating for them,” she said.
Before the Y.U. court case, “the messaging that I heard from the Modern Orthodox community was ‘your identity is not wrong, and we want to support our queer members of the community,’” said Fried, whose organization gave grants to student groups affected by the Y.U. case.
But now, she said, the message that queer Modern Orthodox teens are hearing has shifted.
“Actually, your queer identity is what is problematic. It’s not just the sentence in the Torah that is about behavior, but actually your identity,” she characterized Modern Orthodox institutions as saying. “You want to gather and build community that is based around identity and that, in and of itself, is problematic, and it’s inherently a threat.”
For its part, Yeshiva University has tried to thread a narrow needle.
A person walks by the Wilf Campus of Yeshiva University in New York City, Aug. 30, 2022. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
“We love all of our students including those who identify as LGBTQ,” Y.U. said in a FAQ after it launched a school-sanctioned LGBTQ club. “Through our deep personal relationships and conversations with them, we have felt their struggles to fit into an orthodox world that could appear to them as not having a place for them.” (The YU Pride Alliance called the new club “a feeble attempt” at compromise and said they were not involved in its formation.)
There was no consensus among teens who spoke to JTA about how much the Y.U. saga would affect inclusion in other spaces. It’s also unclear the degree to which queer Modern Orthodox teens and their allies are incorporating the situation in their decision-making about college.
Y.U. declined to share student enrollment and admissions data, saying that the university does not generally release that information. But according to a recent Y.U. advertisement, last fall the school had “the largest incoming undergraduate class in over 20 years.”
Still, the school’s lawsuit and rhetoric has been a turnoff for 19-year-old Penny Laser, a queer student at a secular college who had envisioned possibly pursuing graduate studies in Talmud at Y.U. and grew up in a non-Orthodox household. (Laser asked to be identified using a pseudonym because she is seeking a giyur lechumra, a conversion for Jewish individuals to remove any doubt of their Orthodox Jewish legal status, and feared the Rabbinical Council of America would not grant her one if she was quoted in this article.)
“I’m not sure how I can trust or engage with Y.U. in the future,” said Laser. “A. I don’t know if it’s going to be a safe place for me, and B. I don’t want to align myself with an institution that has values like this.”
Schafer, from Teaneck, and Schaffer, from Passaic, are both not considering Y.U.
And the consequences of the Y.U. litigation goes beyond influencing the decisions of individual students, according to Fried.
“What the Y.U. situation is doing right now is forcing this conversation into the spotlight,” she said. “So different institutions and leaders are forced into having this conversation, or even thinking about where they stand. People are asking them to communicate where they stand.”
Feldon, from Utah, has hope. He thinks that the Modern Orthodox world needs queer rabbis to lead the conversation on inclusion from a halachic perspective — and he thinks that can still happen, despite the push by Modern Orthodoxy’s flagship university to block the Pride Alliance.
“I choose to believe,” said Feldon, “that we’ll get there. My dream life is where I can bring my boyfriend to minyan [prayer services] three times a day. And I choose to believe that we are on that path.”
—
The post ‘Where do I stand?’ Queer Modern Orthodox teens navigate a changing world appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Trump administration files lawsuit against UCLA, saying it failed to protect Jewish and Israeli employees
(JTA) — The Department of Justice filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday accusing the leadership of UCLA of allowing an antisemitic work environment on campus, intensifying the Trump administration’s long-running scrutiny of the Los Angeles campus.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Central District of California, alleges UCLA failed to protect Jewish and Israeli faculty and staff from harassment following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and the protests that spread across American universities afterward.
The complaint was filed the same day President Donald Trump is scheduled to deliver the first State of the Union address of his second term, in which he is expected to cite the administration’s broader confrontations with higher education institutions as evidence of its successes. It also comes roughly three months after nine Justice Department attorneys resigned from the government’s University of California antisemitism investigation, telling the Los Angeles Times they believed the probe had become politicized.
The lawsuit says that antisemitic conduct at UCLA became widespread after Oct. 7 and persisted through the 2023-24 academic year. According to the lawsuit, Jewish and Israeli employees were subjected to threats, classroom disruptions, antisemitic graffiti and, at times, were blocked from parts of campus during protests.
The government places particular emphasis on the spring 2024 Royce Quad encampment, when pro-Palestinian demonstrators established a tent protest in the center of campus. The Justice Department alleges UCLA failed to enforce its own campus rules, allowing protests that disrupted university operations and contributed to what it describes as a hostile workplace.
“Based on our investigation, UCLA administrators allegedly allowed virulent anti-Semitism to flourish on campus,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a DOJ press release announcing the lawsuit. Harmeet K. Dhillon, who leads the department’s Civil Rights Division, described the alleged incidents as “a mark of shame” if proven true.
UCLA officials rejected the government’s characterization, pointing instead to changes made under Chancellor Julio Frenk.
“As Chancellor Frenk has made clear: Antisemitism is abhorrent and has no place at UCLA or anywhere,” vice chancellor of strategic communications Mary Osako said in a statement. She cited investments in campus safety, the launch of UCLA’s Initiative to Combat Antisemitism, the reorganization of the university’s civil rights office, the hiring of a dedicated Title VI and Title VII officer and strengthened protest policies.
“We stand firmly by the decisive actions we have taken to combat antisemitism in all its forms, and we will vigorously defend our efforts and our unwavering commitment to providing a safe, inclusive environment for all members of our community,” Osako said.
Frenk, who is Jewish, has spoken publicly about antisemitism in higher education. In an essay published by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last year, he invoked the history of German universities under Nazism, warning that those institutions “never recovered after driving Jews out” and urging American colleges to confront antisemitism while preserving academic freedom and open debate.
The new lawsuit follows earlier legal battles over campus protests at UCLA. In July 2025, the university agreed to pay $6.13 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Jewish students and a Jewish professor who said demonstrators had blocked access to parts of campus. Under that agreement, UCLA said it would ensure protesters could not restrict movement or access to university spaces.
Campus tensions over speech and security have continued more recently. Bari Weiss, the journalist and founder of The Free Press, withdrew this month from a scheduled appearance at UCLA as part of the Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture series. Weiss had been invited to speak on “The Future of Journalism” but canceled the event, citing security concerns ahead of the lecture.
The post Trump administration files lawsuit against UCLA, saying it failed to protect Jewish and Israeli employees appeared first on The Forward.
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Antisemitism Spikes to Record Levels in Italy, New Data Shows
A protester uses a pole to break a window at Milano Centrale railway station, during a demonstration that is part of a nationwide “Let’s Block Everything” protest in solidarity with Gaza, with activists also calling for a halt to arms shipments to Israel, in Milan, Italy, Sept. 22, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Claudia Greco
Antisemitism in Italy surged to record levels last year, according to newly published figures, as Jews and Israelis across Europe continued to face a relentlessly hostile environment including harassment, vandalism, and targeted attacks.
In Italy, the Milan-based CDEC Foundation (Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation) confirmed that antisemitic incidents in the country almost reached four digits for the first time last year.
Of 1,492 reports submitted through official monitoring channels, the CDEC formally classified a record high 963 cases as antisemitic, according to the European Jewish Congress and Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI), the main representative body of Jews in Italy.
By comparison, there were 877 recorded incidents in 2024, preceded by 453 such outrages in 2023 and just 241 in 2022. The data fits with several reports showing antisemitism surged across the Western world, especially the US and Europe, following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
“The main ideological matrix that has fueled hatred against Jews is anti-Semitism linked to Israel – i.e., the transfer of anti-Jewish myths, such as blood libel, racism by election, and hatred of mankind,” the organization stated.
In May, for example, a restaurant in Naples ejected an Israeli family, telling them “Zionists are not welcome here.” Months earlier, demonstrators at a January protest in Bologna vandalized a synagogue, painting “Justice for a free Gaza.”
Most of the incidents, 643, occurred online on digital platforms, while 320 involved physical acts such as graffiti, vandalism, and desecration of synagogues in addition to discrimination, threats, and assaults.
The surge in antisemitism came amid multiple surveys showing pervasive antisemitic attitudes among the Italian public.
Around 15 percent of Italians consider physical attacks on Jewish people “entirely or fairly justifiable,” according to one survey published in September.
The survey, conducted on Sept. 24-26 by the pollster SWG among a national sample of 800 adults, found that 18 percent of those interviewed also believe antisemitic graffiti on walls and other public spaces is legitimate.
About one-fifth of respondents said it was reasonable to attack professors who expressed pro-Israeli positions or for businesses to reject Israeli customers.
Months earlier, in June, the Italian research institute Eurispes, in partnership with Pasquale Angelosanto, the national coordinator for the fight against antisemitism, polled a representative sample of the country’s population and found that 37.9 percent of Italians believe that Jews “only think about accumulating money” while 58.2 percent see Jews as “a closed community.”
About 40 percent either did not know or did not believe that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, and the majority of respondents — 54 percent — regarded antisemitic crimes as isolated incidents and not part of any broader trend.
The report also showed elevated levels of anti-Israel belief among younger Italians, with 50.85 percent of those 18-24 thinking that “Jews in Palestine took others’ territories.”
The Institute for Jewish Policy Research estimates the number of Jews in Italy as ranging from 26,800 to 48,910 depending on which standards of observance one selects. Eurispes places the number at 30,000.
In January, the Anti-Defamation League released the newest results of its Global 100 survey which found that 26 percent of Italians — 13.1 million adults — embrace six or more antisemitic stereotypes.
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Israeli bobsled captain on Olympics exit: ‘Holy endeavor’ slammed into rigid rule
The man who piloted the Israeli bobsled team to its first-ever Olympic Games defended the athlete-swapping scheme that led to the team’s removal from competition, saying in an interview with the Forward that the Israeli sporting authority blew the incident out of proportion.
The Olympic Committee of Israel said it pulled the team after learning that a member had faked an illness in order to allow the substitution of a teammate in his place.
AJ Edelman, the team’s captain, did not contest that account. He said that the substitution was unanimously agreed to by the group, calling it “essentially a normal maneuver” at the Olympics given what he called a “somewhat arbitrary” rule that allows alternates to compete only when an athlete is medically unable to continue.
The reason it didn’t work, he said, was that the teammate chosen to fake sick tipped off the Israeli committee, which needed to approve the substitution.
“We’re not the only team to have made that sort of substitution in the competition,” Edelman, 34, said in a phone interview with the Forward from Prague, shortly after midnight local time Tuesday. “We are the only team for which the person then was just upset that he was the one doing it and made a scene about it.”
The swap would have made Ward Fawarsy, who was traveling with the squad as an alternate, the first Druze Israeli to appear in Olympic competition. Instead, the committee pulled the team before its third race, cutting short Israel’s run with two heats remaining.
The Israeli committee said in a statement that it had reported the matter to the International Olympic Committee and would conduct an investigation after the Games.
The exit — which Edelman characterized as a voluntary withdrawal — blighted a budding underdog success story. The team, nicknamed “Shul Runnings” (a play on the title of a popular movie about the 1988 Jamaican team), had scrapped its way into the Olympics without financial support from Israel — largely thanks to the perseverance of Edelman, its indefatigable spearhead, who told the Forward he saw the team as a “holy endeavor.”
Without a national sports program behind him, Edelman, a former MIT hockey goaltender, had recruited Israeli athletes from other sports to the project — Zisman was a former pole vaulter, Fawarsy played rugby — and crowdfunded relentlessly to pay for their training. He said this year was the first he broke even, with the team’s costs totaling to around $300,000.
After narrowly missing qualification in 2022 and 2026, Israel broke through in January, receiving an invitation after the United Kingdom decided to send only one team instead of two.
But at the end of a whirlwind month in which the team was burglarized at its pre-Olympic lodgings, booed at the opening ceremony and drawn into controversy involving multiple foreign broadcasters, Israel’s withdrawal left it below teams that crashed in the final results for 4-man bobsled, marked “Did Not Start” on the scoresheet.
Israel also finished last out of 26 teams in 2-man sled.
Taking the plunge
The fake illness plan was set in motion after the second of four heats in the 4-man competition, with Israel in 24th place out of 27 and medaling out of reach.
Olympic rules generally do not allow alternates to compete unless a team member has to withdraw due to injury or illness. The idea to fake an injury, according to Edelman, had been Zisman’s earlier in the year, when it appeared that he, not Fawarsy, would be the alternate. Edelman said he nixed the proposal at the time.
But in Italy, with Fawarsy the alternate due to a pre-Olympics injury, Edelman went for the switch.
“Ward’s inclusion was important because of his years of service to the team, because of who he was and because of who he represented,” Edelman said. “I was quite proud that a group of young Israelis took a look at their brother, their teammate, and said, ‘This is important for you. This is important for us.’”
After the group agreed to the plan, the question became which team member would drop out.
According to Edelman, Zisman thought it should be Menachem Chen, because he had raced with Edelman in the 2-man. But Zisman, Edelman said, “was the weakest performer. And given that Ward’s position was his position in the sled, they were somewhat interchangeable.”
Zisman appeared to begrudgingly go along with the arrangement at first, undergoing a medical exam and signing an affidavit to support the substitution request, according to Israeli officials. But Edelman said that during that process, Zisman volunteered that “another athlete should do it instead, and at that point Israel made it what it became.”
Edelman said his team’s alternate substitution ploy was not uncommon at the Olympics.
The Olympic Committee of Israel said in a statement that Zisman had admitted to the head of the delegation that he had acted improperly, forcing the committee to withdraw the request and disqualify the move.
“The Olympic Committee of Israel views any deviation from the Olympic values as unacceptable and cannot accept inappropriate behavior,” the OCI statement added. “It should be emphasized that, up to this point, the participation of the bobsleigh delegation has taken place in the spirit of sport and without any violations by the athletes.”
The Israel committee did not respond to questions sent by the Forward, and Zisman did not respond to a request for comment.
Edelman flatly disagreed with the committee’s decision.
“We felt that it was completely fine, given that it was essentially a normal maneuver,” Edelman said. “It was really blown into something that we hadn’t expected. Israel insisted on sort of making an example of the situation.”
Iced out of Italy
The incident capped a Winter Olympics in which Israel appeared in more headlines due to controversy than competition. The country did not medal at Milan Cortina — it has never medaled at a Winter Games — and most of its athletes ended competition in the bottom half of contestants.
The first Israeli delegation to compete at the Winter Olympics since the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, was also a frequent target at the Games. Much of the ire from foreign press and other athletes targeted Edelman, who has been a vocal defender of Israel’s war in Gaza on social media.
As Israel was racing in the 2-man event, a commentator for a Swiss TV broadcast listed Edelman’s comments and actions related to the war, which it said were “in support of the genocide in Gaza.” The network later apologized.
An Italian commentator also landed in hot water after he told someone off camera but on live air to avoid the Israeli team.
Edelman said the hostility extended to his fellow bobsled athletes, and claimed that one had called the team “baby killers.” He declined to name the athlete or say what country he represented.
“I take a look at a guy like that, who has made the Olympics a couple of times, and I go, ‘What a loser,’” Edelman said. “He spends his time worrying about Israelis or Jews? What a total loser. So I just don’t put too much stock in it.”
Edelman did not want to highlight the role Fawarsy’s ethnic background played in the team’s decision to break the rules, saying doing so “minimizes him as an athlete and it minimizes him as a person, into something demographic.” At the same time, he appeared to allude to Fawarsy serving in the IDF as a reason for his inclusion.
On Oct. 12, 2023, Edelman posted a picture of Fawarsy to Instagram, writing in the caption that his teammate was “serving on the front lines right now.” (He edited the caption earlier this month to, “Love Ward. Send him a message with your support!”)
“He served Israel with distinction and a level of heroism that all of us aspire to have in our lives,” Edelman told the Forward, adding, “Ward earned it and deserved it as much, if not more, than any of the other guys.”
Fawarsy did not respond to an inquiry.
Frozen fallout
Few in the public sphere have found inspiration in the team’s intentional rule-breaking, even done in service of a Druze athlete’s achievement. Israel’s i24 news broadcast called it a “dramatic and disappointing development.” The Times of Israel said the team’s “legacy was tainted.”
And David Greaves, the president of the Israeli Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation, told Times of Israel that he was “deeply disappointed in the actions of the team.”
Edelman maintained that the public reaction reflected a lack of context about how the sport tends to operate.
He compared the move to a football player seeking medical treatment to stop the clock or buy time for fatigued teammates. But that ploy, he noted, conferred a competitive advantage his team’s swap had not.
The rule that alternates could not compete was arbitrary in Edelman’s view because it was mostly designed to limit the census of the Olympic Village. He said that other teams had similarly broken the rule with none the wiser.
“When you take a look at the sport from the outside and don’t understand how the sport works, what the usual behavior is in the sport and why things are the way they are,” he said, “the decision seems like a very heavy risk to have taken on. The move is not unusual. It is not uncommon whatsoever.”
It did not appear that any other men’s bobsled teams made substitutions at the 2026 Games. It was unclear how many alternates ultimately competed at Milan Cortina.
At least one alternate was substituted in in another sport: Rich Ruohonen, an athlete on the U.S. curling team, entered competition late in a match with his team facing a near-insurmountable deficit. His throws made Ruohonen the oldest-ever U.S. Winter Olympian. It was unclear how he was able to substitute, and U.S. broadcasters embraced the moment. (Ruohonen could not be reached for comment.)
In a statement to X following news of the team’s withdrawal, Edelman took accountability for the decision and said he believed he had been “putting the country first.” And while he believed Israel was held to a higher standard than other countries, he was not sure that should have influenced his team’s choices.
“A lot of people have asked, ‘Would you do it again?’” Edelman told the Forward. “I think it would have been very hard in the future for all of us to take a look back on it and go, ‘You know, every other team does this sort of thing — we were just not going to get Ward in there because we’re looked at extra harshly if something goes wrong.’
“Again, it’s tough to explain to outsiders who don’t know the sport,” he continued. “So I feel very comfortable and confident in the decision that the team unanimously took.”
The post Israeli bobsled captain on Olympics exit: ‘Holy endeavor’ slammed into rigid rule appeared first on The Forward.