Jordan Shusterman and Jake Mintz

As high school seniors, Jake Mintz and Jordan Shusterman saw a funny video on the Internet — Yoenis Cespedes, then an outfielder for the Oakland Athletics, roasting a pig over a spit — and made a Twitter account parodying it, like so many others in their generation. @CespedesBBQ was born in Mintz’s parents’ living room, and soon became a hub for out-of-left-field takes on Major League Baseball’s most eccentric and interesting players. The Twitter account turned into a viral sensation in the baseball world (124,600 followers and counting) and led to full-time careers covering the sport. Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch caught up with Mintz, who is with Shusterman in Houston reporting on the World Series between the Atlanta Braves and Houston Astros.

Day school roots: Their story begins years before they launched the account in December 2012 — as kids who grew up going to Ohr Kodesh Congregation in Chevy Chase, Md. “We didn’t particularly like each other,” Mintz told JI. The pair attended middle school at Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville. They began to bond over a shared love of baseball, when most of the kids they knew preferred basketball or football. “We would post on Facebook about random baseball things,” Mintz recalled. “I was like, ‘Well, I could talk to him.’ It’s not like we actively hated each other or anything. It was just a middle school dislike.”

Finding a niche: The intent behind the account was both parody and serious baseball commentary — until they realized plenty of that already existed. “No one’s ever gonna care what two 17-year-olds think,” Mintz acknowledged. “So we just made jokes. We pivoted and just started tweeting things that we thought were entertaining. For a long time, no one really cared.”

Jewish humor: Jewish tweets are peppered throughout the account’s content; in 2017, an excited Mintz tweeted that he made the Jewish Division III All-American baseball team as an athlete at Washington University in St. Louis. “THIS IS THE HAPPIEST DAY OF MY LIFE,” he wrote. A 2017 tweet about Jewish players at that year’s World Series included the hashtag “#MOTsRepresent” — a reference to ”members of the tribe.”

Baseball BBQ: MLB reached out while they were in college, offering the pair an internship, which turned into a job offer. In 2017 they joined full-time, marking a new phase for the once-scrappy @CespedesBBQ account. “I never thought that would be my life,” Mintz said. At the start of this year’s baseball season, he and Shusterman moved to Fox Sports, where they write analysis and create digital videos. They also have a podcast,“Baseball BBQ,” with the sports media company The Ringer.

Passionate proselytizers: “We are obsessed [with baseball]. It is our lives. Any closer that I can bring anybody to me is a worthwhile experience,” Mintz said. “We are not a proselytizing people. Jews do not recruit well. I don’t think we’re preachy about it, necessarily. But it’s more just bringing energy and passion to the thing we love and hoping that people catch on to that.”

Read the full story here.

Bonus: Tonight, left-handed pitcher Max Fried starts on the mound for the Atlanta Braves in Game Two of the World Series. Fried will become the first Jewish pitcher to start a World Series game since Jason Marquis in 2004. With a win, the 27-year-old would become the first Jewish pitcher since Ken Holtzman in 1974 to win a World Series game.

A picture taken on October 18, 2018 shows the entrance to the US Consulate in Jerusalem.

Thirty-five Republican senators introduced a bill on Tuesday aiming to block the Biden administration’s plans to reopen the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem that served the Palestinians, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports. The legislation, led by Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN), would make it U.S. policy not to open or reopen any diplomatic facility in Jerusalem other than the U.S. Embassy, and would prohibit U.S. funds from being used to open any such facility.

Quotable: “President Biden continues to push forward his inflammatory plan to establish a second mission in Israel’s capital city of Jerusalem — one for the Israelis and a second one for the Palestinians,” Hagerty said in a statement. “It is regrettable that the Biden Administration insists on making moves that divide the United States and Israel… The Trump Administration kept its promise to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, the eternal and indivisible capital of the Jewish State, and Congress must do everything in our power to strengthen our posture.”

Inside the bill: The bill, titled the “Upholding the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Law Act of 2021,” is framed as protecting the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, which directed the president to relocate the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Successive presidents waived the timetable set out in that law, until former President Donald Trump executed the move in 2019. Hagerty argued that the Biden administration’s plan “violates” the 1995 law. While the 1995 law sets U.S. policy that “Jerusalem should remain an undivided city” and that “Jerusalem should be recognized as the capital of the State of Israel,” it contains no specific provision barring the operation of any other diplomatic facility in Jerusalem.

Long shot: There has been no public opposition from Democratic senators to a potential reopening, seemingly dooming the legislation. Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, suggested it was “a stretch” to argue that reopening the consulate violates the 1995 law. Miller said “there may be a handful” of Democrats who ultimately support the legislation, but predicted most would not because, “This is clearly an effort to embarrass the administration.”

Read more here.

(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

For more than two decades, former Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) was among the most moderate of U.S. senators. This centrist streak brought him to the brink of the White House as the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2000, but he angered the party by running as an Independent in 2006 and later endorsing Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008. Still, Lieberman stands by his centrist political decisions. Now, he wants to encourage more politicians to do the same. His latest book, The Centrist Solution: How We Made Government Work and Can Make It Work Again, serves as a call to action for politicians to seek a more collegial middle path towards governance. “I always try to distinguish between centrism as not the same as moderation,” Lieberman explained in an interview with Jewish Insider’s Sam Zieve Cohen. “Centrism is a strategy, moderation is an ideology.”

Jewish Insider: You credit your Judaism and your study of the Talmud as guiding your political beliefs. You write, “the Talmudic ethic is an ideal precondition for centrism and problem solving politics.” How important is religion in developing a centrist worldview?

Joe Lieberman: As I look back at my own personal history, about the various forces and ideas that were at work on me over my life, it did seem to me that my Jewish upbringing, and particularly the Talmud, was really an important part of how I became a centrist. I don’t think I felt that as I was getting into politics. I always say that my religious upbringing, the whole ethic of tikkun olam, or kiddush hashem, was part of what moved me into public service. But when I looked back at the whole development of Jewish law, of the Talmud, [it] resulted from spirited, respectful discussion and argument. And then, more often than not, agreement on a course to go forward, and rarely ended up in the kind of personal animosity.

JI: In your book, you argue that the majority of Americans still remain moderate in their tastes and in their political interests. Yet, clearly, there’s been a rise in the election of partisan politicians over the last decade. Why is that? If the voters want centrist problem-solvers, why are these partisan politicians winning instead?

JL: The reason is that the centrists, the independents, the moderates, are not as intensely involved in the selection of nominees for Democratic and Republican parties for Congress and other offices. And that allows the further left and further right of the two major parties to have disproportionate influence on who’s chosen.

JI: You write that in 2008, neither then-Senators Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama asked for your endorsement, whereas Sen. McCain, who you endorsed, obviously did. Had they asked, would you have considered giving your support?

JL: Yeah, I definitely would have. There was such a prevailing consensus in the Democratic Party, particularly among voters who voted in primaries, that the war was a terrible mistake. The fact that I had been unwilling to give up on it until I felt we had stabilized the country — which, in fact, by 2008 we had — made me persona non grata among a lot of Democratic primary voters. I assume that’s why Hillary and Barack didn’t ask for my support. But it would have been natural. It would have been a hard decision between them because, as I said, I had close relations with both of them. But it would have been more natural for me to support Clinton or Obama than for me to support McCain. But by the time John asked me, around November of 2007, it was clear to me that Obama and Clinton were not going to ask for my support. And also, I loved John, I believed in John, I trusted John. And I knew he was ready to be president of the United States on day one. So I also felt that I was making a statement about bipartisanship.

JI: Regarding President Biden, you write in the book, “the only way we will solve some of our serious national problems and seize some of our great national opportunities… will require Republican members of Congress to break away from Trump, and it will require Biden and Democratic members of Congress to declare their independence from far-left Democrats who won’t compromise.” Centrist Democrats have reportedly grown annoyed by President Biden’s refusal to take a hardline stance in negotiating with progressives on the infrastructure bill. How do you assess President Biden’s strategy?

JL: I mean, there has to be room and there is room in the Democratic Party for what I would call center-left Democrats like Joe Biden. That center-left group is probably the majority in the Democratic Party. I would never say to exclude the further-left Democrats who don’t want to compromise, but they can’t be allowed to think that they can control the party, or the president of the party. They don’t have the numbers to justify that. There have been times, I will say, in the months since President Biden was elected that I felt that the “Squad,” the so-called “Progressive Caucus” in the House, has had more influence in the party and in the Biden administration than they’re entitled to. Again, I would never exclude them, but they have to come to the center also and begin to negotiate.

Read the full interview here.

Marc Stanley testifies via video in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

Marc Stanley, the Biden administration’s nominee to be U.S. ambassador to Argentina, said “there should be a demand” that the Argentinian government and judiciary fully investigate and prosecute the 1994 terrorist bombing of the Associación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, reports Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod. The attack, which was carried out by a Hezbollah-linked Lebanese suicide bomber and which investigators believe was directly organized by senior Iranian government officials, is still officially unsolved in Argentina.

Taking a stand: Stanley, speaking at his Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing on Tuesday, described the bombing as “a huge issue” and called on the Argentinian government to properly address the attack. “This is not a Jewish issue. This an affront on Argentina,” Stanley said. “Eighty-five people died and they weren’t all Jews… I think all Argentines should be upset about it, and I think there should be a demand of this government, the judiciary [to] prosecute and find out who’s responsible and get justice.”

Right direction: He praised Argentina for recent steps addressing some of the individuals and groups linked to the attack, including “finally” designating Hezbollah as a terrorist organization in 2019, and said he was “pleased” that President Alberto Fernández was “outraged” that an official linked to the bombing was appointed to a leadership role in the new Iranian government.

Jewish values: “Throughout my life, public service, the pursuit of justice, the desire to give back and repair the world — what in Judaism we call tikkun olam — have always been a central part of my identity: as a young intern and staffer on Capitol Hill, as a lawyer, as a volunteer, as an activist in everything from the fight to rescue Soviet Jewry to the cause of a safer State of Israel to leadership roles in local and national nonprofits and serving in state and federal government,” Stanley said. “Now, if confirmed, I have the chance to continue forging that path on behalf of our nation.”

Read more here.