(JTA) — How do you follow a coaching legend? Jon Scheyer, a one-time Jewish basketball star at Duke University who went on to play for the Israeli powerhouse Maccabi Tel Aviv, will find out soon enough. Scheyer, 33, is the pick to succeed Mike Krzyzewski, the winningest coach in Division 1 college basketball history, who…
Georgia Tech’s Josh Pastner became the first Jewish head coach to lead a college basketball team to win an Atlantic Coast Conference championship, topping a division that includes titans Duke and North Carolina and becoming another example of the renaissance for Jews in American sports. Pastner, 43, a native of West Virginia, had already won…
You’re reading DENI DIARY, the weekly dispatch from Deni Avdija’s rookie season by Louis Keene. Want these posts in your inbox? Click here. So, after starting the season with five straight losses, the Washington Wizards strung together a pair of wins against Minnesota and Brooklyn last weekend. But Deni Avdija has seen his minutes decline…
This is the second installment of Deni Diary, a new weekly report about the rookie season of Deni Avdija, the Israeli basketball phenom who plays for the NBA’s Washington Wizards. Want these updates in your inbox? Click here to subscribe. December 25, 2020: The cedar of Lebanon The Washington Wizards have seven foreign-born players —…
This story was updated to reflect breaking news. Deni Avdija, a 6’9” forward for Maccabi Tel Aviv, was selected ninth overall by the Washington Wizards at NBA Draft 2020, becoming the highest-drafted Israeli player ever and just the second Israeli player to be drafted in the first round of the NBA Draft. Avdija told a…
Nobody else was calling out former NBA star Stephen Jackson for publicly spewing anti-Semitic comments, so Mark Shepard, a 19-year-old college student, stepped up. “I said, ‘Dude you’re an anti-Semite’ to get his attention,” Shepard recalled Thursday in a phone interview. Jackson made his comments on Instagram Live after his friend DeSean Jackson, a star…
On July 8, former NBA player Stephen Jackson, who has become an admirable leader in the Black community during the George Floyd protests, went on Instagram and turned on the camera. After he had already doubled down on NFL player DeSean Jackson’s misinformed Instagram post about a Jewish conspiracy theory, for which DeSean has since…
Stephen Jackson speaks with Rabbi David Wolpe about antisemitism
