Globalizing the intifada has now trickled down to (checks notes) … high-school girls’ basketball in Westchester.
Let’s go to the lowlight reel.
A Jan. 4 match-up between Roosevelt High School in Yonkers and Leffell, a private Jewish school in Hartsdale, was called off during the third quarter after Roosevelt players repeatedly hurled antisemitic comments at their opponents.
“I support Hamas, you f–king Jew,” one player from Roosevelt allegedly said.
In an op-ed for her student paper, Leffell hooper Robin Bosworth wrote that the game was filed with hostility and with “substantially more jabs and comments thrown at the players on our team than what have experienced in the past.”
Bosworth added that her Leffell team was getting unnecessarily banged up by Roosevelt, whose players shouted “free Palestine.” After the coaches and refs deliberated, Leffell decided to end the game. To ensure their safety, the team was escorted out by security.
It’s tough to imagine taking the court and your opponent hacking you in the name of terrorism.
But that’s where we’ve found ourselves since the dam broke on October 7 — normalizing antisemitism and allowing it to permeate nearly every facet of our lives, right down to school athletics.
It would be naive to say racial or class differences never played out in high-school sports, be it student-section chants or on-court trash talk. When I was growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, sticks-and-stones mentality ruled and students sections weren’t afraid to go for the jugular over some point of local contention.
It was mutual, juvenile warfare, though no one harped on the mean cheers. They only cared who got the win.
But that all feels like tame behavior compared to a group of teen girls brazenly, and very comfortably, employing naked hatred of Jewish people as a core game strategy — turning a New York gym into a proxy war for a conflict being fought more than 5,600 miles away.
The sheer lunacy.
It’s particularly flagrant behavior given that, over the last 15 years or so, we’ve moved to a kindler, gentler place in sports. We’re contantly reminded that the field and the court are the great equalizers. Sportsmanship from coaches, players and parents are paramount; a zero-tolerance approach to hate permeates every league at every level.
In some cases youth officials have been sent for antiracism training. In pro sports, endzones and baselines are painted with useless platitudes and slogans, like “Stop hate” or “End racism.”
But what happens when kids have been fed by Tiktok and in many cases, their own schools, a steady, illiberal diet of antisemitism — a notion that Hamas terrorists are heroes of the resistance and all Jewish people, by extension, are the enemy in this poisonous intersectional paradigm.
We saw it at Queen’s Hillcrest High School, where hundreds of students were allowed to rampage because a teacher expressed support for Israel.
“I have played a sport every athletic season throughout my high school career, and I have never experienced this kind of hatred directed at one of my teams before,” wrote Lefell player Bosworth.
In addition to the kumbayah undercurrent in athletics, most of these kids have also grown up with pro sports spoiled by political and activist overreach by athletes and the media. For a time — and I’d argue that this trend is slowly receding — obsessive stories about who was standing and who was kneeling for the National Anthem drowned out actual game coverage, and we knew more about players’ social justice initiatives than their stats.
Sports were no longer about escapism but about being confronted with the feelings and political leanings of people in the industry, from athletes to coaches and writers.
(Of course you have to support the correct activism to be in favor — just ask Enes Kanter Freedom, who says he was blackballed by the NBA after criticizing China).
No wonder a high school kid today might think it’s appropriate to bring their political grievances — no matter how poisonous — to the court and expect praise for their “righteous” actions.
Thankfully, the red-faced Yonkers school district didn’t think so. Once it was clear that the Roosevelt team was truly out of bounds, they apologized, booted a player from the team and fired a coach.
Instead of applause, it was swift justice.