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Why are there so many Jewish sports halls of fame?
(JTA) — On one wall of the dining hall at the Indiana University Hillel sit 36 framed photographs of Jewish alumni who have made an impact in the sports industry, from athletes to executives. It’s the IU Jewish Sports Wall of Fame.
One of those pictures is of Josh Rawitch, who has had a long career as an executive in baseball. At first, Rawitch told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, he questioned whether he was truly worthy of being honored alongside fellow Hoosiers like Mark Cuban, the billionaire businessman and owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, and Ted Kluszewski, a four-time All-Star with the MLB’s Cincinnati Reds in the 1950s.
But then Rawitch thought about the location of the wall, and who it might impact.
“You’re going to have young people, 18, 19 years old, walking in there looking at the wall, seeing all these people who are up there who have gone on to do significant things in the industry,” Rawitch said. “That’s actually pretty cool. That actually inspires them. If I was 18 and I’d have walked in and that wall had been there when I was a freshman, I would have thought, ‘that’s really cool.’ I would love to be like one of those people someday.”
Rawitch knows a thing or two about halls of fame: He’s the president of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York. He said institutions like the one he leads are important “repositories for history.”
“I think having a hall of fame of any kind in any city essentially does two things — it honors people who are really good at what they do, and it documents the history of what’s gone on in that industry,” he said.
The Indiana University Jewish Sports Wall of Fame, located in the dining hall at Indiana University Hillel. (Courtesy)
The display that honors Rawitch in Bloomington is just one of many halls, walls and exhibits across the United States and the world — many of them small — that honor Jewish greatness in sports. From Southern California to Philadelphia, St. Louis to Washington, D.C., similar organizations and institutions recognize Jewish athletes, coaches, executives, media members and beyond.
Why so many?
“We want to call attention to that because of the antisemitic trope that Jews are not good soldiers, farmers or athletes. We need to overcome that,” said Jed Margolis, who runs the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in Israel, which has honored over 400 athletes since 1981 and is housed in Netanya after being founded in the United States. “It’s simply not true. And telling the stories out there will help inspire people and lay to rest some of those falsehoods which I think are important to overcome.”
In the fight against antisemitism, Steve Rosenberg, who chairs the Philadelphia Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, said “the best defense is a good offense.” The Philadelphia hall, which inducted its first class in 1997 and has moved locations multiple times, has 183 total inductees, including former NFL tight end Brent Novoselsky and longtime 76ers broadcaster Marc Zumoff.
“We shine the light on the great accomplishments of Jews in sports. And we need to do more of that in the world,” Rosenberg said.
Rosenberg added that he thinks there should be even more halls of fame, for Jewish actors, architects, poets and so on, “so that we can celebrate our accomplishments, not in the way that we pat ourselves on the back, but that we can talk about all the great things that we do as a people.”
For Craig Neuman, the chief programming officer at the St. Louis Jewish Community Center, a key feature of Jewish culture is the sense of connection Jews feel when they discover that a celebrity is Jewish. That sense of pride is clear in the work Neuman does with the St. Louis Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, which has its own hallway at the JCC.
“I can’t imagine any other place in the world where you would say, ‘I feel connected to this other country, or these other people, by sheer virtue of our religion,’” Neuman said. “There’s some pride that’s involved with that.”
Like the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame seeks to recognize the most elite athletes — Jewish world record holders, Olympians and the like. Or, as Margolis put it: “We’re looking for the best of the best: the Hank Greenbergs, the Mark Spitzes, people like that.”
Jed Margolis, left, with former Israeli basketball star Mickey Berkowitz, back center, and his family, at the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in Netanya, Israel. (Courtesy of the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame)
At the local halls of fame, the criteria are different. Rawitch likened it to the dynamic between national versus state and local politics.
“As the National Baseball Hall of Fame, I think it’s pretty clear that we are honoring the absolute greatest who ever played or worked within the game of baseball nationally,” Rawitch said. “Clearly, that should be harder to get into than, say, the California Baseball Hall of Fame or the New York Baseball Hall of Fame. But I don’t think it should diminish if you’re a recipient of that. It should be an honor for anybody who’s named to any sort of hall or wall of fame.”
Inclusivity is central to the local halls of fame.
“I think we want to, on some level, send a message that says, ‘hey, just because you’re not in Cooperstown doesn’t mean that you didn’t have an impact in the world, on your sport, in your community,’” said Neuman.
But that doesn’t mean the standards for entry aren’t high. In fact, in St. Louis, candidates for induction must possess more than just athletic accomplishments — there’s also the “mensch factor.”
“When you are in a position where people might look up to you because of some accomplishments, and whether it’s because you’re an athlete, or you’re a politician, or a lawyer or whatever the profession that puts you in the public’s eye, there’s a certain responsibility that comes along with that,” said Neuman. “It’s a great example to set that, yeah, this guy was a great baseball player, but he was also a great human being as well.”
The St. Louis Jewish Sports Hall of Fame has 84 members inducted across eight classes dating back to 1992 — including Chicago Cubs ace Ken Holtzman and basketball legend Nancy Lieberman. The last group was enshrined in 2018.
Many of those inductees represent more than the typical professional sports — baseball, basketball, football, soccer and hockey. There are racquetball and handball players, even a hot air balloonist. (Whether that counted as a sport was a topic of debate for the selection committee.)
In Philadelphia, a similar conversation was held around whether poker should qualify — in that case, poker was allowed, but it turned out the candidate in question wasn’t actually Jewish.
For Rosenberg, recognizing people from a diverse range of sports is an important part of the work, especially as he works to engage younger members of the community.
“I want the young people, particularly the young Jews, to know that there’s a place for you, no matter if you’re a golfer, a swimmer, a gymnast, a baseball player, whatever you want to do, that you can go on to achieve greatness and that greatness will be recognized,” Rosenberg said.
He added that very few people stop by the hall of fame.
“The reality is, if I stood at the hall of fame on any given day, people that are coming in just to see the hall of fame, we couldn’t get a minyan,” Rosenberg said, referencing Judaism’s 10-person prayer quorum. “Maybe over the course of a year. But we do get the sort of incidental traffic, people that are going to the JCC for other activities.”
The Philadelphia Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. (Courtesy)
The Philadelphia hall’s journey to the JCC was not a simple one. The collection used to have a permanent space at a local YMHA, featuring typical sports artifacts like bats and jerseys. Then it moved into the Jewish federation building — until September 2021, when Hurricane Ida caused severe flooding that destroyed much of the hall of fame’s memorabilia. The current exhibit at the JCC is more two-dimensional, Rosenberg said.
One of the Philadelphia inductees is Arn Tellem, the vice chairman of the NBA’s Detroit Pistons and a longtime agent who represented A-list athletes like Kobe Bryant. Throughout the 2000s, Tellem was regularly ranked among the top agents in all of sports, and he is a member of the Southern California, Michigan and Philadelphia Jewish Sports Halls of Fame.
By the time Tellem got the call from the Philadelphia hall in 2015, he had received his fair share of recognition. But that didn’t make this honor count any less for the Philadelphia native. Rosenberg said Tellem “couldn’t wait to come” to the ceremony, bringing three tables worth of supporters with him.
“Arn Tellem isn’t doing this for recognition, or for money, or for fame,” Rosenberg said. “He has that. It means something to him.”
That sentiment seems to be shared by honorees from across the halls. Rosenberg added that he has seen some inductees moved to tears by the news. When Chris Berman, the ESPN broadcaster who has anchored the network’s flagship program “SportsCenter” since a month after it launched in 1979, was honored by the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, he was “very touched,” said Margolis.
Lauren Becker Rubin, a former star lacrosse and field hockey player at Brown University, was inducted into the Philadelphia Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 2018.
“It was a big honor for both me and my family,” Becker Rubin told JTA. “I think the connection of celebrating both the athletic achievement and the community makes it meaningful on another level.”
Becker Rubin, who is now a mental performance coach, is also a member of Brown’s athletic Hall of Fame for setting numerous school records in both sports during her college career. But being recognized by her local Jewish community was a particularly special honor, she said.
After her induction, Becker Rubin joined the hall’s board. “Celebrating positive achievements and putting out positive messages about Jewish athletes is a good counter to the negative rhetoric that is out there,” she said.
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The post Why are there so many Jewish sports halls of fame? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Indiana synagogue that shaped Reform movement is sold — and will become a coffee shop, event space
The 1867 synagogue in Lafayette, Indiana — once a laboratory of the Reform movement — has been sold, after a grassroots effort to bring it back into Jewish hands fell short.
In recent months, a small group of local Jews tried to crowdfund roughly $300,000 to buy the building, hoping to turn it into a cultural and educational center preserving the city’s Jewish history. But the campaign ran out of time.
“Including pledges, we had about $60,000,” said Robyn Soloveitchik, one of the organizers. They needed nearly five times that amount. Now, the donations will be returned.
The sale of the building closed May 1 to a new owner, Ed Bahler, a local businessman whose family has worked in construction for decades.
“We hope to make it a super vibey, cool, historic coffee shop and place to have events,” Bahler said. He plans to preserve the exterior, which has landmark status and is topped by a large Star of David, but said it requires repairs to brickwork, gutters and landscaping.
The former sanctuary, with its high ceilings and stained glass windows, will remain a focal point.
Bahler said the project is partly about giving back. “We’re invested in the community,” he said, noting that seven of his children attended Purdue University in neighboring West Lafayette.
Soloveitchik said her group knew from the outset the purchase effort faced long odds. “Of course, it’s not what we wished for,” she said, “but we did know it was going to be an uphill battle.”
The nonprofit she and others formed to purchase the building plans to continue operating, shifting its focus to other preservation efforts in the state. “Hopefully we can find a way to stick around and just do a little bit of good for our community, even if this project didn’t work out,” she said.
Michael Brown, executive director of the Indiana Jewish Historical Society, called the outcome disappointing. “I’m sad that they weren’t able to acquire the building,” he said.
He hopes Bahler will mount a plaque or display photos documenting the building’s history as a pioneering synagogue.
A changing landscape
What happened in Lafayette is part of a broader pattern across Indiana.
In April in Terre Haute, the state’s oldest continuously operating Jewish congregation sold its synagogue building after more than a century. The 1910 structure, known for its sweeping stained glass windows, is expected to become a wedding venue.
“We had to sell in order to continue operating,” said Scott Skillman, president of the United Hebrew Congregation. They now plan to meet at a smaller location, or to rent space from a church.
Like many small towns, Terre Haute has seen its Jewish population shrink for decades. “There’s no amount of programming that’s going to change that,” Skillman said.
Other Indiana synagogues have found more unusual second lives that would have been unimaginable to the people who built them.
When a new baseball stadium was built in 2012 in South Bend, the team owner had to figure out what to do with a 1901 Romanesque Revival–style synagogue on the property that was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The team spent $1 million restoring the building, where the team gift shop now operates. A mural on the wall of what’s now known as the Ballpark Synagogue riffs on the Sistine Chapel, depicting God passing a baseball to Adam along with the words “Play Ball.”
Wendy Soltz, a history professor at Ball State University who led the federally funded Indiana Synagogue Mapping Project, has documented 66 purpose-built synagogues across the state dating back to the 19th century. Of those, 24 have already been demolished.
The Lafayette building, she said, had “statewide and national significance.”
A legacy reshaped
The Lafayette synagogue was founded in 1849 as Ahavas Achim.
The congregation was among the early adopters of Reform Judaism in America and is believed to have hosted one of the first egalitarian minyanim in the country. The building it moved into in 1867 stood as a marker of that ambition — a place where a small Midwestern Jewish community helped shape a national religious movement.
Rabbi Julian Morgenstern served the shul, and later rose to lead Hebrew Union College. He helped secure visas for several Jewish scholars fleeing Nazi persecution, including Abraham Joshua Heschel. Several other future luminaries passed through Lafayette’s pulpit.
The congregation moved to a new Lafayette location in 1969. Since then, the old building has housed churches, the Red Cross and other nonprofits.
Lafayette today has two synagogues, one Reform and one Conservative. It also has a Chabad and Hillel connected to Purdue University. The school has roughly 1,500 Jewish students, according to Hillel.
For more than a century, Ahavas Achim’s building anchored Jewish life in the city. Now, it is entering a new chapter, one shaped by a different vision of community.
Bahler said he hopes to open the coffee shop and event space by the third quarter of this year, pending rezoning and renovations.
“We saw a historic building that had a very interesting spirit to it,” he said. “Something that could be brought alive into a place that draws people — a place of connection.”
The post Indiana synagogue that shaped Reform movement is sold — and will become a coffee shop, event space appeared first on The Forward.
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Liberal Zionists are under attack. A new book proves their work has never been more important
As much as American Jews may care about what happens in Israel, we’re in the bleachers, watching what Israelis are up to on the field.
That’s what makes Ariel Beery’s new book, Being Israeli After the Destruction of Gaza, so timely and necessary. “I wanted to explain to the English-speaking world what we liberal democrats in Israel are experiencing,” Beery wrote me in an email, “and give voice to liberal democratic Israelis that may help them speak to their global friends about the present moment.”
The book is based on long interviews that Beery — a 46-year-old American-born tech and social entrepreneur who has lived in Israel since he was 19 — conducted with 11 thoughtful, articulate Israeli Jews. All of them, like him, struggle with the terror and carnage of Oct. 7, Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and the ongoing challenges to Israel’s democracy — but still maintain that Israel must be a secure home for Jews and a democracy for all its citizens.
The book is a lesson in what liberal Zionism looks like within Israel, illustrating pragmatic approaches to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at a time when, in the United States, the loudest pro- and anti-Israel voices tend to drown out those that are most rational.
Beery’s book is a lifeline, because it proves American Jewish liberal Zionists are not alone — and neither are our Israeli counterparts.
The politically homeless liberal Zionist
American Jews are deep into a post-Gaza War reckoning.
Liberal Zionists like myself are politically homeless. The left writes us off as apologists for what they call a genocidal ethnostate, and the right is either embracing full-bore Candace Owens-style antisemitism or treating Palestinian suffering as a non-issue.
Mainstream American Jewish organizations, which were once the standard-bearers of liberal Zionism, have largely remained mum about Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assault on democracy and the pogroms that West Bank Jews carry out against their Palestinian neighbors.
That sense of homelessness can make us feel more disconnected from Israel. Even many Israelis who share the traditional liberal Zionist vision of coexistence have, post-Oct. 7, rejected compromise with Palestinians.
But we are not alone. We share, like so many of the people Beery spoke with, a post-Oct. 7 shattered faith in Israel’s government and its military.
“It felt like the murder-suicide of your parents,” Alina Shkolnikov, the former head of the Russian desk at the IDF spokesperson unit, told Beery. “You found out that the two entities you trusted most all of your life, and gave service to — that they were nothing.”
Nor are we alone in the sense that the war that came after was both just, and criminal.
“Gaza is our Dresden,” the journalist Bernard Avishai told Beery. “World War II was a just war, but the firebombing of Dresden was still a war crime. The fact that the war was just doesn’t mean that everything done in the prosecution of the war was just. Those are two different questions. And we have to be able to hold them both.”
By mid-2024, Avishai and others in the book point out, Hamas was militarily crippled and Hezbollah neutered. Where was the justification to continue? “The surgery was done. What we needed was immunotherapy. And instead of immunotherapy, the government kept cutting.”
‘I’m the Free French’
As in the U.S., Israeli liberal Zionists are in despair over the country’s lack of political leadership.
“What does it mean, at the level of consciousness, for a state that says I don’t fix things, I just live from crisis to crisis?” said Yau Levy, a tech entrepreneur. “No Palestinian state, no concessions, no political process, no day-after plan.”
And yet none of the interviewees have given up.
“The mindset I have is: I’m the Free French,” said Aliza Inbal, a former diplomat who served as a speechwriter for the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. “The battle for an enlightened Israel, whatever Israel may look like in the future, is not something that’s going to be won in a year or two. But we have to fight the fight.”
That sentiment encapsulates the big difference between the handwringing here in the U.S. — where Jews either live within a static fantasy of their preferred Israel, or are free to wash their hands of it for good — and there. It’s apt that Beery’s title wryly echoes that of Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish After the Devastation of Gaza, which became a lightning rod for asserting that Zionism itself is the problem, reflecting the growing American anti-Zionist movement. American Jews have the privilege of engaging in theoretical conversations; Israelis have no choice but to believe in a better future, and work to make it happen.
The possibility of a better future sounds pie-in-the-sky given the facts on the ground. Hamas is still a major force in Palestinian life. Younger Israelis, according to the most recent poll, have shifted right. The massacre of Oct. 7 convinced many Israelis once open to compromise with the Palestinians that coexistence is for suckers.
But there are 14 million people between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, and nobody is going anywhere. There is no military solution. There is only finding a way to live together fairly, or apart.
“I don’t expect the Palestinians I work with to be anything other than Muslims who, at the end of the day, might want us to leave,” Meredith Mishkin Rothbart, who works on Arab-Jewish civil society initiatives, told Beery. “But the people who work with me, as much as they would like me to leave and get out of their face and even if they believe we should never have come here to begin with, they’re choosing peaceful means to try to fix it and come to a new reality. Just like I am.”
The question Israel’s leadership refuses to answer, Yau Levy said, is “Not what we oppose, but what do we actually want? What are we building toward? What is the positive vision that justifies the sacrifice?”
American Jews don’t really have to answer that question. They can drift away from thinking about Israel when it gets too ugly, or cheerlead as Israel’s most retrograde politicians destroy it from within. But Israelis cannot opt out, not out of the country where they live, nor out of its demographic realities. Their hopes for their future, and their children’s future, are bound to striving for a better outcome.
The asymmetry should give us humility — and spine. If Israel’s liberal Zionists haven’t given up, neither should we.
The post Liberal Zionists are under attack. A new book proves their work has never been more important appeared first on The Forward.
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US, Israel Said to Plan New Iran Strikes as Tehran Pounds UAE
People walk past a billboard with a graphic design about the Strait of Hormuz on a building, amid a ceasefire between US and Iran, in Tehran, Iran, April 27, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Israel and the US are coordinating plans for another round of strikes on Iranian targets, CNN reported Tuesday, as Iran kept up its attacks on the United Arab Emirates for a second straight day and amid reports that the Gulf state’s defense increasingly appeared to be drawing on Israeli support.
CNN cited an Israeli source as saying that the plans, largely drawn up before the ceasefire with Iran began in April, include strikes on Iran’s energy infrastructure and targeted killings of senior officials.
“The intention would be to carry out a short campaign aimed at pressuring Iran into further concessions in negotiations,” the source said, adding that any decision to resume the war would be made by US President Donald Trump.
CNN also reported that an Israeli-operated Iron Dome battery intercepted an Iranian missile over the UAE on Monday, the first known use of the system to defend a Gulf state. The system had been secretly deployed there at the start of the war, according to the report, along with Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers sent to operate the system.
The system has so far intercepted dozens of Iranian missiles in the UAE, according to Israeli officials cited in a separate report by Axios.
The UAE said Iran fired 12 ballistic missiles, three cruise missiles, and four drones at the country on Monday. And then, according to Emirati officials, Iran launched additional missiles and drones on Tuesday. The UAE’s Foreign Ministry called the attacks a “serious escalation” and a “direct threat” to national security, adding that the UAE reserves its “full and legitimate right” to respond.
Another report by the London-based Iran International said that Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian was furious over the escalation and warned military commanders of the regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) that the “completely irresponsible” attacks risked dragging Iran back into full-scale war.
He also described the IRGC’s handling of tensions with regional states as “madness,” the report said, citing sources close to the matter, and warned that the consequences could be irreversible.
The New York Times reported last week that senior IRGC commanders were increasingly driving decision-making in Tehran, with Iran’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, unable to command the system with the authority once wielded by his father. The report added to mounting rumors over Khamenei’s health and capacity, and to growing confusion over who is ultimately directing Iran’s military and political response.
Iranian state media, citing an unnamed military official, said that the strikes on the UAE were unintentional and “the result of the US military’s adventurism to create passage for illegal ship transit” through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman through which about one-fifth of the world’s trade in oil and liquefied natural gas flows.
Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of US Central Command, on Monday said American forces had cleared a mine-free route through the strait, which Iran shut in response to the US-Israeli strikes, and were escorting civilian vessels when Tehran launched cruise missiles, drones, and small boats at ships under US protection.
US military helicopters destroyed six of the boats, Cooper told reporters, saying “each and every” threat had been defeated.
Beyond mounting escorted transits for commercial vessels, the US has countered Iran’s shutdown of the waterway by blockading Iranian ports, a move that has further crippled the country’s already ailing economy and pushed it to the brink of collapse.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards issued a new warning Tuesday, saying any vessel that does not use the route approved by Tehran through the Strait of Hormuz would face retaliation.
“We warn all vessels planning to transit the Strait of Hormuz that the only safe passage is the corridor previously announced by Iran. Any diversion of ships to other routes is dangerous and will result in a firm response from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards navy,” the Guards said in a statement carried by state television.
IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir on Tuesday said the military was “closely monitoring developments in the Gulf” and is “prepared to respond with force against any attempt to harm Israel.”