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Yeshiva University fans gear up for Sweet Sixteen run — and a Shabbat in Atlanta
(JTA) — Yeshiva University’s men’s basketball team is set to play in the Sweet Sixteen round of March Madness on Friday, for the first time in the program’s history.
If that sentence sounds familiar, that’s because the YU Maccabees have qualified for the Division III tournament’s Sweet Sixteen once before, in 2020. But that tournament was cut short due to the COVID-19 outbreak, and they never got a chance to play the game.
“It’s always like, ‘What could have been,’ and now here they are — they’re back and they have a shot,” said Simmy Cohen, a YU superfan.
The Maccabees, who are 22-8, advanced past the first two rounds with a 71-69 win over Bates College, followed by a 92-69 win against the University of Maine-Farmington.
To advance to the Elite Eight, the Maccabees will need to defeat Emory University, the second-ranked team in DIII. As the higher seed, Emory gets to host the game at their home gym in Atlanta. But while the Maccabees are entering the game as underdogs, they have one possible advantage on their side: fans flooding in from near and far.
“I don’t think any other Division III basketball team has any national fanbase,” said Rabbi Adam Starr, a YU alum who leads Congregation Ohr HaTorah, a modern Orthodox synagogue in Atlanta.
“Other places have alumni, that’s one thing, but here it’s much more than alumni,” he said. “Certainly within the Orthodox Jewish world, but even beyond it’s something they’re rallying behind, whether they went to Yeshiva University or not. It’s just a Jewish pride story.”
Starr said Atlanta’s Jewish community will be out in full force to support YU, the private Jewish university in New York City. Some Atlantans are taking the day off work to catch the 1 p.m. tip-off, Starr said. Students from the local Jewish day school between seventh and 12th grade will be bussed to Emory’s Woodruff PE Center.
The game is also expected to draw Jewish fans from around the country, including Cohen’s sister-in-law, who will be driving from the New York metropolitan area.
“The interesting thing here is that Emory is on spring break, so most of their students are not around,” Starr said. “So I wouldn’t be surprised if it actually feels more like a YU home game than an Emory home game.”
There’s an added wrinkle for visiting fans: Because the game falls on a Friday afternoon, fans who observe Shabbat according to Jewish law will be doing so in Atlanta.
To help those observant supporters, a Google Form that pairs visitors with host families has circulated, titled “YU Mac Fans Shabbat Hospitality in Toco Hills Atlanta,” referring to the heavily Orthodox Jewish Toco Hills neighborhood.
“We’re known for our Southern Jewish hospitality,” Starr said.
The team itself, Starr added, is staying at a hotel, but will be “having meals in the community at one of the shuls.”
On Saturday afternoon, following kiddush, Starr will host a “Meet the Macs” panel discussion at Ohr HaTorah with head coach Elliot Steinmetz; assistant coach and Orthodox Union chief of staff Yoni Cohen; team captains Zevi Samet and Max Zakheim; and senior Tom Beza, who “previously served in a combat role” in the IDF, according to a flier for the event.
The team’s tournament run has taken place over the backdrop of war breaking out between the U.S. and Israel and Iran, which has hit close to home for YU, whose roster includes seven Israeli-born players.
“While we have your attention,” Steinmetz tweeted on Sunday, the day after their Round of 32 victory, “I’d like to point out that while we are here preparing for a stupid basketball game, our friends and family in Israel are going back and forth to bomb shelters multiple times a day as Iran and Hezbollah fire rockets indiscriminately at civilian populations. Take a minute out of your day and pray for their safety and victory.”
Starr said he views the Maccabees’ tournament run as “something good and positive” that Jewish people can “gather around.”
“And I’ve heard from people in Israel, this is a very welcome distraction for them,” Starr said. He remarked that his brother had to pull over on the way home from a wedding in Israel last week and lie flat on the ground due to a siren going off. “But he was listening to the game while this was going on,” Starr said.
Last week, Israeli guard Yoav Oselka led the way with 27 points in YU’s win against Maine-Farmington; Samet, the team’s leading scorer, put up 27 in their narrow 71-69 win over Bates in the Round of 64.
Emory, as one of the top DIII basketball programs, is the favorite to win Friday’s game. But Cohen said the energy from YU fans may help the Maccabees in their push for an upset.
“I think it’s going to be an electric atmosphere,” he said.
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UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage
A campus event featuring freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov drew the condemnation of UCLA’s student government on Tuesday. In an open letter, the UCLA Students Associated Council said that bringing Tov to speak to students “served to legitimize and normalize” atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Shem Tov, 23, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza until his release in a prisoner exchange in February 2025. UCLA hosted him on April 14 for a Yom HaShoah event.
“While we affirm the humanity of all people impacted by violence, we reject the selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence,” the student government letter wrote in the letter, which was addressed to the UCLA administration and UCLA Hillel among others. “Israel is currently continuing to carry out what has been widely identified by human rights advocates as a genocide in Gaza, while also expanding its illegal military campaign into Lebanon.
“In this context, elevating a single narrative, absent of critical political and humanitarian framing, serves to legitimize and normalize these ongoing atrocities.”
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel’s director emeritus, called the statement “completely ridiculous.”
“You can’t present the narrative of your experience without it being called ‘one sided,’” Seidler-Feller said. “There has to be a counter-story to persecution. Is there a counter-story to killing people?”
UCLA Hillel executive director Daniel Gold dismissed the criticism in Tuesday’s letter as antisemitic.
“Hillel at UCLA and Students Supporting Israel UCLA would like to apologize…for absolutely nothing,” he wrote in a statement. “Members of UCLA student government have once again shown they are anti-dialogue, anti-learning, anti-truth, anti-student and antisemitic.”
The USAC did not respond to a request for comment.
As college campuses across the country became a hotspot for pro-Palestinian activism following the Oct. 7 attack, UCLA, with an activist history and a large Jewish population, stood out as a major flashpoint. Its student encampment was the site of a riot in April 2024 and eventually cleared by police in riot gear.
The USAC has sided with pro-Palestinian protesters throughout. In a Feb. 2025 letter titled “We Are All SJP,” the USAC, which is democratically elected by the roughly 30,000-member UCLA student body, condemned Chancellor Julio Frenk’s suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine. The letter referred to Israel only as “the Zionist state” or put the country’s name inside quotation marks.
The University of California has since been sued by the Department of Justice, which said that UCLA created a hostile work environment against Jewish and Israeli faculty in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
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Trump extends ceasefire with Iran, even after Iran balks at new round of negotiations
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he would unilaterally extend the U.S.-Israeli ceasefire with Iran, even though Iran had not agreed to his conditions or even to return to the negotiating table.
Trump announced the decision on Truth Social just hours before the two-week-old deal was set to expire. Citing Iran’s “fractured” leadership, Trump wrote that he had been asked by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to “hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”
Vice President JD Vance’s planned trip to Islamabad, where talks were set to take place, was postponed indefinitely after Iran failed to confirm its participation in negotiations.
Trump added that the United States would maintain its naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, despite Iran’s repeated calls for the restrictions to be lifted.
The announcement marked a sharp departure from the president’s statements earlier in the day, telling CNBC that, if a deal was not made before the deadline, “I expect to be bombing.”
In a statement Tuesday, Sharif thanked Trump for his “gracious acceptance” of Pakistan’s request to extend the ceasefire, adding that the country would “continue its earnest efforts for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.”
The announcement adds to uncertain about the war’s future, including for Israelis who lived through six weeks of Iranian bombing, and renews questions about Trump’s commitment to achieving his war goals, which have varied and included blunting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, achieving regime change, and destroying Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles. He said earlier this week that he was asking Iran to limit its nuclear program for 20 years, five years longer than was required by the deal struck by Barack Obama in 2015. Trump exited that deal in 2018.
Last week, Trump announced a different ceasefire, between Israel and Lebanon, on Truth Social, contradicting Israel’s claim that the Iran ceasefire would not apply to its fighting with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed proxy in Lebanon.
Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire extension came during the night in Israel, after Israelis began their celebration of Independence Day. It drew criticism from one of his staunchest pro-Israel supporters, the Zionist Organization of America, whose national president Morton Klein said in a statement that “interminable delay is the standard Islamic Iranian regime negotiating tactic” and that acceding to it represented a victory for Iran. The statement did not mention Trump.
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Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’
(JTA) — Alan Dershowitz, the prominent pro-Israel attorney whose clients have included Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, announced on Monday that he was leaving the Democratic party and registering as a Republican.
Describing himself as a “lifelong Democrat,” Dershowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had decided to “bite the bullet and register as a Republican,” citing Democratic support for an arms embargo on Israel last week and the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric.
“There is no denying that the hard left, anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party has moved from the fringe to the mainstream,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that “Republicans have their own antisemitic fringe, but for now it remains a fringe.”
The announcement formalized a political evolution for Dershowitz, who defended Trump during his first impeachment and has increasingly broken with Democrats over Israel in recent years.
In 2021, Dershowitz nominated Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Avi Berkowitz, Trump’s top Middle Eastern envoy during his first administration, for the Nobel Peace Prize over their hand in shaping the Abraham Accords.
Dershowitz — who has recently faced scrutiny over his ties to Epstein, and previously denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by one of Epstein’s accusers — panned the Democratic Party as the “most anti-Israel party in U.S. history” in the op-ed.
“I believe that the Democratic Party’s hostility to Israel represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the center and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that he intended to “work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate.”
Dershowitz’s comments are in line with Trump’s statements about Jews and the Democratic Party. He has repeatedly expressed amazement at how any Jews could vote for the Democrats considering his own record when it comes to Israel.
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