Kushner in Alabama
Jewish high school basketball teams go to Auburn
Last week, the varsity basketball teams from the Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School in Livingston joined teams from Jewish high schools in New York, Pennsylvania, and Florida at the Eddie Jacobson Leadership Program, a sports-centered leadership conference in Auburn, Alabama.
The three-day program, coordinated by Athletes for Israel, included a basketball tournament among the participating schools, all-star games between top players in the tournament and Auburn-area high school students, community service activities in the Auburn area, and sessions on Israel advocacy. The students also went to an Auburn University men’s basketball game and had the opportunity to watch a practice and meet the team’s head coach, Bruce Pearl, and some of the college players.
Sports can facilitate connections with people outside of our ecosystem, Daniel Posner, AFI’s founder and chairman, said. He started the organization about five years ago; it grew out of his frustration with the negative way Israel often was portrayed in the media.
“The traditional methodology of educating people about Israel is just to go through the historical facts as we know them,” Mr. Posner said. “I found, especially with the younger generation, that that method simply wasn’t resonating.” He concluded that when Jews or Israelis talk about Israel, they tend to be seen as biased rather than objective. “And the truth of the matter is, to some extent we are,” he said.
But when non-Jews or people who have real platforms talk about Israel, “that’s very powerful.
“I’ve always had a love of sports, I’ve always had a love of Israel, and I’ve always been involved with pro-Israel activism,” Mr. Posner said. “Over the decades, colleagues at work would say, ‘Daniel, the next time you go to Israel, please take me with you,’ so I knew that there was a lot of interest. I knew that people wanted to go to Israel.
“My background is on Wall Street,” he continued. “I’ve been an investor for decades, focusing on markets, and I wanted to really make an investment in the Jewish people.”
So he started bringing professional athletes — people who play in the NBA, the NFL, and Major League Baseball — to Israel and letting them see the country for themselves. “These are people who have platforms where they speak to millions of people,” Mr. Posner said. The goal is to inspire these athletes to share their transformative experiences. “We could talk to 15 million Jews — but that really won’t make a dent, because there are eight billion people in the world, and there are 330 million people in the United States. We need to reach those people.”
After a number of trips, Ron Dermer, the American-born Israeli who was Israel’s ambassador to the United States until 2021, and became its minister of strategic affairs the next year, put Mr. Posner in touch with Coach Pearl.
“He is the head coach of a top 25 college basketball program — in fact, today Auburn is the best in the country in terms of the ranking of their basketball program — and he has always been highly pro-Israel,” Mr. Posner said. “He’s a Jewish coach in the middle of Alabama, and he said to me, ‘Daniel, I have this dream — I want to bring my team to Israel.’ I said, ‘Coach, Athletes for Israel wants to bring you and your entire team to Israel and to partner with you to bring the team on a trip that will be a once-in-a-lifetime trip. A trip that will enable your team to bond together, see the holy sites, see the historical sites, and at the same time see the culture of Israel.”
The trip took place during the summer of 2022. “We played three basketball games against high level Israeli opponents, including the national team, which we played to a sold-out arena in Tel Aviv,” Mr. Posner said. “The team got to float in the Dead Sea, they got to visit Jerusalem and all the holy sites, they got to see Tel Aviv and all the night life. Half the team members were baptized in the Jordan River. It was really an incredible experience.” ESPN covered the trip, and all the games were broadcast on television.
The following summer, AFI organized trips for the men’s basketball teams from the University of Arizona and Kansas State University. “In support of and to applaud the Abraham Accords, we brought those two teams to Israel for a week and to the United Arab Emirates for a few days,” Mr. Posner said. “They experienced an incredible week of culture, of history, of really exploring their roots, and of seeing the diversity and openness of Israel.” That trip also was broadcast globally. “It was really an infomercial for Israel to millions of people.”
Robert Robbins, a cardiac surgeon and the University of Arizona’s president at the time, was on that trip. The group visited a hospital that performs life-saving cardiac surgeries on children in conjunction with an Israeli organization called Save a Child’s Heart. “Bobbie saw the surgery and was incredibly impressed by the level of surgery and by what they were doing,” Mr. Posner said.
“He was even more impressed when he heard that the 11-year-old boy who had received the surgery lived in Gaza. And he was very surprised to learn that the family would be in danger if they told their friends or neighbors that they had been in Israel or that the boy had had an Israeli or Jewish doctor.
“October 7 was just two months later, and Bobbie wrote one of the most pro-Israel statements of any major university president in the country, really calling out Hamas as a terrorist organization.”
“The Eddie Jacobson Leadership Program is held in Auburn because the community there has been incredibly behind sending its team to Israel and they’ve been incredibly supportive of pro-Israel activism,” Mr. Posner said. “And we want to thank the university for its support and for sending its team to Israel and enabling us to host them and showcase Israel to millions of people. It’s an incredible platform, and we wanted to thank them for that.”
AFI ran the leadership program once before, about a year and a half ago, and the plan is to hold it annually going forward.
Eddie Jacobson was a close friend of President Harry Truman, Mr. Posner said; the two men met in Kansas City, renewed their friendship when they found themselves together in the army during World War I, and maintained both a business relationship and close friendship until Mr. Jacobson died. Mr. Jacobson had strongly advocated for both the Jewish people and the State of Israel, and his old friend paid attention to him. In March 1948, President Truman wasn’t sure if he was going to support the establishment of Israel. Mr. Jacobson went to the White House and asked the president to meet with Chaim Weizmann. The president agreed to the meeting, and Mr. Weizmann, who became the new state’s first president, convinced him to support its establishment.
“Through relationships, through people that you know, we really can connect to people outside of our bubble,” Mr. Posner said. “So often when we talk about Israel advocacy, we’re either talking to the people who are generally already convinced or we’re trying to convince people who will never be convinced.”
But “there’s a huge population in the middle. And those are people that we can connect with through sports. Some of that connection is just sharing the same beliefs and sharing the same values. So much of advocating for Israel is just letting people know how similar it is to America in many ways. That it is a democracy — the only democracy in the Middle East — and that, like the United States, it has freedom of religion and incredible diversity. You can strike up a conversation with a person sitting next to you at a sports game because you’re both Yankees fans or Rangers fans or Knicks fans. Similarly, sharing similar democratic values provides an opportunity to be a pro-Israel activist and talk about Israel in a positive way.
“One of the goals of the program is to give the visiting high school students an opportunity to connect with the local students over basketball games and share our common values.”
The program’s Israel advocacy component focused on “what is going on in Israel today and how Israel is impacting the world in a positive way,” Mr. Posner added. “We love to showcase different ways that Israel helps people beyond its borders.”
Another focus was on how to connect with people and share that information.
The group heard from someone who read newspapers regularly but had not heard about the Abraham Accords before she met Mr. Posner. She told him that there were millions of people like her, who don’t know that Israel has made peace with five Arab countries. “That’s a fact that we need to let people know about,” Mr. Posner said. “Most people in the Jewish community are aware of it and understand it, but we need to make sure that it’s more broadly known and understood in terms of the amount of economic impact that it’s had and the positivity it’s had with all those countries. It shows that there can be peace between Israel and her Arab neighbors.”
Richard Kirsch, Kushner’s athletic director, feels that the trip “really opened up” his students’ minds. “We tend to be kind of clustered in our own area,” he said. “You can generally only hear about or read about what’s going on in other parts of the country, but when you actually see firsthand that people really care about Israel and the Jewish people, that makes a big difference.” And he thought the students benefitted from learning about Israel advocacy from Mr. Posner and from meeting Coach Pearl “in terms of his inspiration and wisdom and how much of an influence he’s had in that area of the country when it comes to pro-Israel advocacy.”
Sophie Baum of Hillside is a senior at Kushner and a point guard on its girls’ varsity team. She participated in the inaugural Eddie Jacobson program as a sophomore and was extremely excited to be able to go back to Auburn last week. The tournament games were a lot of fun, she said, but she really appreciated the opportunity to meet Coach Pearl and hear him talk about “the importance of standing up for what you believe in, even when it’s hard.”
Ben Leeds, a Kushner senior who lives in Livingston and is a member of its boys’ varsity team, appreciated the chance to learn ways to effectively share information about the openness and diversity of Israeli society with people who may not know a lot about it. And he was grateful for the opportunity to learn from Mr. Posner, whom he described as “a great role model.” Mr. Posner talked about some of the players who wanted to be baptized while they were in Israel, Mr. Leeds said, and he emphasized that “people don’t have to be the same as you, or relate to Israel in the same way” in order to support it.
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