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Wild pitch: How an Israeli kibbutznik became a Cincinnati Reds pitching coach
KIBBUTZ GEZER, Israel (JTA) — Bill James, the influential baseball writer, historian and statistician, once described the great Yankee first baseman Don Mattingly in only four words: “100% ballplayer, 0% bulls—.”
The same can be said of Alon Leichman, by all accounts the first athlete born and raised in Israel to make it to the major leagues, having just been named assistant pitching coach of the Cincinnati Reds.
Under manager David Bell, Leichman will help instruct the team’s pitchers — including Chase Anderson, Luis Cessa, Fernando Cruz, Alexis Díaz and Hunter Greene — on mechanics, pitch selection, preparation, concentration and execution.
His journey has been unlikely, verging on preposterous: How could someone from Israel, where baseball is barely an afterthought, step out of the wheat fields of a kibbutz to the highest level of baseball in the world?
The 33-year-old Leichman is the product of Kibbutz Gezer, the youngest child born to two idealists who grew up in Zionist youth groups and helped found this kibbutz in central Israel in the 1970s together with other Anglo — that is, English-speaking — Zionists.
But David, Alon’s father, couldn’t leave it all behind in Queens, New York. He was a baseball fan, a big baseball fan — “I always knew that if, God forbid, there’s a fire in my house, I know where my baseball glove is” — and one day, he and his fellow kibbutz residents had an idea: Why don’t we cut off a slice of the wheat crop and construct a regulation-sized field in the southwest corner of the kibbutz, where we can all go play when we get off work?
That was 1983, and there wasn’t a single baseball or softball field in all of Israel So David, who was in charge of construction on the kibbutz (Alon’s mother, Miri, is the kibbutz rabbi), built his field of dreams, just 450 yards from his front door and in the shadow of the 4,000-year-old archaeological site that gives Gezer its name.
And that’s where Alon Leichman grew up, first brought to the field by his father for the 1989 Maccabiah Games, five weeks after Alon was born on May 29.
“I never related to that field as the place my dad built,” Leichman said. “It was a field that was on the kibbutz. Growing up, everyone around me played — my older brother played, and all my friends, a little older than me, played.
David Leichman, left, stands behind the backstop at the baseball field he helped build at Kibbutz Gezer in Israel, where his son Alon, right, learned the game that has brought him to the major leagues. (Elli Wohlgelernter)
“I remember — I was 4, in gan [pre-kindergarten], and I would walk to the baseball field and practice. I vividly remember being in the gan and going to practice. But baseball on the kibbutz is just something that I grew into. Everyone did it; I was not special, just another kid who played. I happened to love it a lot.”
So he played and played and got better and better. By age 10, he was on the team representing Israel at a tournament in the Netherlands. But baseball in Israel back then was in its infancy, and there was not enough money to pay for the team to travel. So Leichman had to work extra hours to get the kibbutz to fly him over.
Not that he wasn’t used to working — like all kibbutz members, he was already contributing by third grade. But now he had to put in extra hours, picking olives or milking cows, to make the extra money.
“I liked milking cows,” he recalled. “Sometimes it’s hard work, but I got more of a kick out of it than hitting an olive tree” to shake loose the olives.
Leichman remembers well that tournament in Holland, the first time he wore the Israeli uniform representing his country abroad.
“It was really cool,” he recalled. “A sense of pride. That’s the first time I think I felt like: ‘You’re not just Alon, you’re not just representing the kibbutz anymore — you’re representing a whole country.’
“I knew back then that Israel was not on the best terms [with] the world. So it was something that I was aware of: that part of our job of playing baseball is also making sure that these guys get to know Israelis other than what they hear on the news and show them that, you know, we’re good people.”
The 5’-8” right-hander kept playing, kept improving and kept representing Israel at tournaments. He played in the one-season Israel Baseball League in 2007 as the second-youngest player, served in the Israeli army from 2007 to 2010, and then headed to the states to play college ball at two schools, Cypress College and the University of California, San Diego.
In his first appearance at Cypress, his elbow blew out, and he needed what’s known as “Tommy John surgery” to repair a torn ulnar ligament inside the elbow. Then he got hurt again and had a second Tommy John surgery. But when he got hurt a third time, and the doctor said he needed to go under the knife yet again, Leichman knew that his hopes for a professional playing career were over.
But not before proving to himself that he had what it takes.
“I know I was good in Israel. I knew that. But I had no idea how I would fare coming to the States. I thought I could fare [well] there, but I really never knew because I had never faced those types of hitters. And then, in my first game, I did really well for two and a third innings, four strikeouts. No one got on. It was 1-2-3, 1-2-3, and then I got the first guy out in the ninth. And on a one-two fastball, my elbow popped. So it was like, ‘Okay, I can do this here.’”
His love for the game never left him, and Leichman grew into an insightful and intuitive coach. His expertise and aptitude were self-evident.
Various jerseys from Alon Leichman’s baseball career are displayed on the wall of his family’s home at Kibbutz Gezer, Israel. (Elli Wohlgelernter)
“Alon will be a big-league coach one day,” pitcher and teammate Alex Katz said three years ago. “It’s hard to get a coaching job in affiliate ball without professional experience, let alone non-affiliated experience. But he’s just one of the most intelligent baseball minds I’ve ever been around. And he’s young.”
Leichman said his strength is “helping guys get better. Communicating with them. Being able to relate to them. Getting on their level. Simplifying it for them. And being creative and finding ways to throw more strikes.”
Despite the surgeries, Leichman could still pitch, if he did it sparingly. He joined Israel’s World Baseball Classic teams of 2012, 2016 and 2017 as a player or coach; pitched for the European Baseball Championship team in 2019; threw in the Olympic qualifying tournaments in 2019; and hurled one perfect inning against Team USA at the Olympics in 2021 in Tokyo. Along the way, he also earned a black belt in jujitsu.
But coaching was his future, and after being given a chance in 2017 to instruct in the Seattle Mariners farm system, Leichman kept moving up, from Single A to Double AA to Triple AAA, before being grabbed by the Reds to join their major league staff this season.
His father is overwhelmed. “It’s unbelievable,” David Leichman said. “I’m still shaking and crying to myself about how wonderful this has been. It’s really amazing.”
Alon is no less shell-shocked, having agreed to sign a contract with the Reds on the same day the New York Mets asked to interview him about a potential job.
“It’s not really sinking in yet, to be honest,” he said while in Israel recently to visit his family on Gezer. “But it’s definitely a dream come true, something I’ve been dreaming about since I’m a little kid. Obviously, I wanted to be there as a player, but once I got hurt and realized that playing was not an option anymore, I started pursuing coaching. I wanted to do it at the highest level. The dream remained; it just took a different route. But it’s still as exciting.”
Leichman is still undecided on whether to join Team Israel’s coaching staff in Florida for the WBC in March before heading back to Goodyear, Arizona, to rejoin the Reds in spring training. But this product of the wheat fields of Gezer won’t ever forget from where he’s come: His uniform numeral, 29, is a constant reminder. It’s his laundry tag number at the kibbutz.
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Trump nominee for Kuwait ambassador, grilled at confirmation hearing, loses support over Israel views
(JTA) — After Amer Ghalib became the most prominent Muslim politician in the country to endorse Donald Trump for president last year, he did so on pro-Palestinian grounds. And he was rewarded with a plum position: the administration’s ambassadorship to Kuwait.
But the mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan, had to get through Senate approval first. And at Thursday’s confirmation hearing before the foreign relations committee, multiple Republicans broke rank and took Ghalib to task for his past social media posts and actions about Jews and Israel.
“It appears you have a deep-felt and passionate view about the Middle East,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told Ghalib. “But it is a view that is in direct conflict with the policy positions of President Trump and this administration.”
Cruz grilled the Yemen-born mayor on Hamtramck becoming the first American city to adopt a boycott, divestment and sanctions policy against Israel; on his previous “liking” of Facebook posts comparing Jews to monkeys; and on his past stances opposing the Abraham Accords.
He wasn’t the only Republican to take issue with Ghalib. Sens. David McCormick of Pennsylvania and Pete Ricketts of Nebraska also harshly questioned the mayor on his views on Jews and Israel.
Ghalib did not disavow any of his past stances or posts. The BDS resolution, he said, had been drafted by the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace and approved unanimously by the city council. “It wasn’t my idea,” he said. “We don’t have any companies that deal with Israel in our city.” He said he had no power to remove a city council official who had said the Holocaust was advance punishment for Israel.
He “liked” the Facebook post about monkeys, he said, because he used to “like” every post on his feed before becoming mayor. “The person who wrote it is mentally challenged in our community,” he said of the post, later adding, “It’s definitely antisemitism, but clicking on it doesn’t mean I endorse that.”
“Actually, ‘like’ means exactly that,” Cruz retorted.
In response to a question from McCormick about whether he would “accept President Trump’s view that Israel is and should be the national home of the Jewish people,” Ghalib dodged. “I think we can coexist in the region and that’s the answer, that everybody has the right to exist now,” he said. “I trust the president’s policies and I will support his policies.”
At the end of the hearing, Cruz said he would vote no on confirming Ghalib, putting the mayor’s appointment on shaky ground.
Ghalib had endorsed Trump after previously siding with the “Uncommitted” movement that had targeted President Joe Biden’s support for Israel. In a meeting with Trump prior to his endorsement, the mayor said the two had discussed the possibility of a ceasefire in Gaza. Michigan, which has a large Arab population, wound up swinging to Trump.
A separate nominee at the same hearing, South Africa ambassador hopeful Leo Bozell, pledged to push the country to end its genocide charge against Israel in front of the International Court of Justice.
The post Trump nominee for Kuwait ambassador, grilled at confirmation hearing, loses support over Israel views appeared first on The Forward.
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The best Shabbat I ever kept, or how to dodge the biggest World Series spoiler ever
This time a year ago, with Sukkot ending and the World Series upon us, I and many other Shabbat-observant Jews were coming apart at the spiritual seams.
Naturally, I wrote about it: The New York Yankees and the Los Angeles (formerly Brooklyn) Dodgers were facing off in the Fall Classic for the 12th time in their storied rivalry and the first time in 43 years. But because the first two games overlapped with Shabbat — falling on Friday and Saturday evenings — thousands of diehards in the two biggest Jewish communities in the U.S. couldn’t watch.
Or could we?
When I asked those fans about the quandary, a few of them told me they’d found ways to watch: A friend’s apartment, the in-laws downstairs, little loopholes with which I was well-versed. (When I was a kid, the dry cleaner’s flatscreen usually sufficed.) Others who couldn’t or wouldn’t watch planned to learn the outcome through the grapevine the next day.
No one I spoke to, however, planned to record the game and watch it after Shabbat ended. Sure, starting a replay of Game 1 on Saturday night meant you couldn’t join Game 2 in progress. But the bigger reason was also kind of funny: In a community that insists on unplugging for 25 hours, finding out a sports score — even inadvertently — was generally seen as inevitable. The only person who believed it was possible to avoid World Series spoilers and watch the whole thing, start-to-finish, 24 hours after the fact, was me.
I also just wanted my precious Shabbat left alone. On the job, I am regularly contending with a firehose of information — much of it discouraging — and the intensity hardly lessens when I’m off the clock. When people ask me whether it’s hard to turn off my phone on Friday afternoon, my answer is that it’s really not. The challenge — the imperative — is protecting the feeling of rest that comes with it. So: No sports fandom, either.
Now, the problem of spoilers is close to my heart. I once wrote an article for this publication about a Harry Potter spoiler that became the most devastating Camp Ramah prank of all time. I now believe that Jewish law actually regards ruining an ending without consent as an act of theft — one called g’neivat da’at (literally, “theft of knowledge”). Of course, the harder a person works to avoid spoilers, the more easily something is spoiled; friends know not to text me asking if I watched the game because that means it ended!!!
Staying out of the loop would be difficult, but I’d spent half a lifetime watching Saturday games on tape delay. In case you weren’t aware, streaming apps are all apparently hell-bent on revealing the outcome of a game that’s just happened before you watch it, by, to take one infuriating example, making the thumbnail image a picture of one of the teams celebrating. In the face of this adversity, I’ve developed the specific muscle of keeping my eyes just focused enough to find the game I want and put it on. These ocular reps would surely prepare me for the World Series.
The Saturday morning after Game 1, I walked to shul with my sister. Well, I was headed to shul; she was headed first to the shul security guard, that singular oracle of contemporary American Orthodox Judaism, who would have the scoop. I escaped that spoiler by skipping ahead as we approached, but my plan faced some resistance in the pews. Everyone else knew what had happened and wanted to discuss it. And I’ll never forget the look of sheer annoyance one in-the-know friend had when I explained my choice. “You’re just gonna go the whole day not knowing?” Sir, that was the whole point.
Several hours later, I was pacing in front of the television in my apartment. There were two outs, bases loaded, bottom of the 10th inning, Dodgers down one. All of it had already happened, and yet none of it had, when I watched Freddie Freeman limp to the plate. You don’t need me to tell you what happened next.
A walk-off grand slam. Reader, I was screaming. I started a replay of Game 2 a few minutes later.
Now, I titled this column “the best Shabbat I ever kept,” but the truth is I don’t really remember too much about that Shabbat. I probably spent it like most others — whiling away a few hours in shul, seeing family and friends, nodding off on the couch. I’m sure only that it wasn’t spoiled. Dodgers history awaited me after Havdalah.
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Are you a Good Witch or a Bad Witch? Or a Jewitch?
When I was a little girl, I played Witch all the time. I was The Grande Madame — the Queen of all the Witches. I even wrote spooky musicals for the neighborhood kids. We set up lawn chairs in my friend Susie’s backyard in Queens, and made our parents watch. If I had been more business minded, I would have sold tickets.
Now I teach music and something must have stayed with me, because October is my favorite month — Witchy Music Month. This week, I put on my pointy hat, plugged in my spooky orange lights, and played some scenes from The Wizard of Oz and Snow White for the kiddos.
Then I noticed something.
Both witches had big, hooked noses. What they used to call “Jewish Noses.” The noses that kept New York surgeons busy when we hit 18. Many of us got nose jobs. It wasn’t a secret. It was expected.
My mother said no, so I couldn’t get one, but it didn’t stop me from kvetching. (I also asked to be sent to a Swiss Finishing School — again, no.)
I looked it up. A big study in 1914 debunked the theory that Jews actually had big noses — 14% aquiline, compared with 10% of the regular population. Considering that Jews are a people sometimes “bottlenecked from geographic diversity” in a more modern study in 2022, meaning that we weren’t allowed to live anywhere we wanted, and definitely meaning that we inbred, it doesn’t sound like we owned Big Nose.
Tell everybody.
Still, the “hook-nosed” Jewish stereotype remains. Hard to get rid of stereotypes, and harder to get rid of what most people find conventionally attractive. Especially when Disney adds to the Big Hooked Nose in Snow White’s witch — with some well-placed warts.
The most famous Jewish Witch story was when King Saul wanted to go to battle with the Philistines and consulted the Witch of Endor. She summoned Prophet Samuel’s Spirit for the King. Alas Samuel prophesied Doom, and King Saul and his son Jonathan were killed the next day.
The irony was that King Saul had banned all witches, until he needed one himself.
And do you remember what TV writer Sol Sacks named Samantha’s mother in the TV series, Bewitched? Yes, Endora. I bet Sacks’ Hebrew School teacher was proud.
My son, Aaron, is most like me, and I guess most susceptible to my witchiness. He really believed when he was little, and I remember once picking him up from his second grade class. As I bent down to tie Aaron’s shoe, I felt 100 little eyes on me. When I straightened up, I was surrounded by a solemn crowd. A little girl pointed and said, “Aaron, she doesn’t look like a witch.”
I have to admit, I was a little insulted.
I also have to admit that I did use my powers on Aaron and I am a little ashamed. When he was six, he hated Shabbos because of its restrictions. No TV, no piano, no trips in the car to the 7-Eleven for Slurpees; and endless synagogue.
But this happened on a Wednesday night. He was in a mood and was smashing all her plastic swords and yelling, and I was on the phone trying to accept a music gig with a bride and groom. I told the couple I’d call them right back.
“Aaron,” I looked at him. “If you don’t stop right now — I’m gonna make it SHABBOS!”
He dropped his swords in petrified horror. “C-c-can you really DO that?”
And then I did something I’m even more ashamed of. I smiled.
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