Head coach Bruce Pearl of the Auburn Tigers celebrates by cutting down the nets after their 77-71 win over the Kentucky Wildcats in the 2019 NCAA Basketball Tournament Midwest Regional at Sprint Center on March 31, 2019 in Kansas City, Missouri.

In March, Auburn University men’s head basketball coach Bruce Pearl was asked during a press conference if he and his team would be joining the pledge started by Stanford University women’s head basketball coach Tara VanDerveer to donate $10 to Ukraine for every three-pointer sunk during March Madness. His answer, which was ultimately a “yes,” was given by way of a semi-long-winded explanation of the Purim story. In a nutshell: Queen Esther saved her people despite being safe herself in the castle, so he too would give help to Ukraine, despite not facing the same threats at home.

The connection between Purim, Ukraine and sports may not have seemed abundantly clear at first, but for Pearl, Judaism and basketball have long gone hand-in-hand. A strong supporter of Israel, the Boston native has visited the country on several occasions — often as part of Jewish-Christian interfaith missions, but most recently with his team from Auburn, where they both toured the country earlier this month and faced off against Israel’s national teams, Pearl recalled during an interview with Jewish Insider’s “Limited Liability Podcast.”

Bringing the Bible to life: “It very much brought their Bible alive. And if it wasn’t their Bible, it was their mom’s Bible or their grandmother’s Bible, somebody in their family is a churchgoer, and they got to see and feel [that] themselves,” Pearl said, referring to how the trip touched his players. “And then the next day, it was the Western Wall, and it was the City of David, and it was Yad Vashem. And we focused on some of these Jewish, historical, religious sites, and they got that.”

A passion for Israel: Seeing his players in Israel was important to Pearl not only as their coach, but also as someone with deep love for the country. Pearl told podcast co-host Rich Goldberg that one of his passions is gaining allies for the Jewish people and for Israel.

Teaching positivity: “I’m not trying to change the hearts and souls and minds of the people that hate us, because they hate us. They’ve been taught to hate us and it’s really hard to change those minds. But there are a lot of people that don’t know, that haven’t been affected yet, that may be on the fence or that someday are going to face and see some real antisemitism, or experience some Israel hate. And now these kids are going to be in a position to handle it a little differently,” he said.

‘Let them experience it’: “Honestly, you don’t need to do much persuading. Just let the kids, let people see it, let them experience [it]. Let them see how much the people there love the land, love their history, love their country,” he added.

Read more and listen to the podcast here.

Sydney Levin-Epstein

Growing up in Western Massachusetts, Sydney Levin-Epstein had a unique weekend routine. Each Saturday morning, she went to Shabbat services in Springfield, a nod to her father’s religion. When the service ended, she would wait with her rabbi for her parents to pick her up and take her to Irish dance classes — a hobby inherited from her mother’s culture. Now, after several years away in Washington, D.C., the 27-year-old Levin-Epstein is back in her hometown of Longmeadow, Mass., mounting a bid for the Massachusetts state Senate. 

Relentless approach: “Being raised in a Jewish household with Irish practices gave me this brutal and relentless attitude to life. I really can handle anything,” she told Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch over coffee in Boston, the city where Levin-Epstein hopes to work — and to disrupt — as a politician from the oft-forgotten western part of the state. Central to Levin-Epstein’s campaign is a strongly held belief that Western Massachusetts is too often forgotten by the state’s power brokers on Beacon Hill, leaving much of the state isolated from the economic and cultural power in Boston.

In his shoes: Levin-Epstein, a Democrat, hopes to follow in the footsteps of Eric Lesser, her longtime neighbor and the district’s current state senator, who bowed out of his seat to run for lieutenant governor in the Bay State’s Sept. 6 primaries. Lesser, who also grew up heavily steeped in the Jewish community around Springfield, was first elected at age 29. 

It’s personal: For Levin-Epstein and her family, the economic issues she hopes to fight are personal. Her family owned a sporting goods store that shuttered when she was in high school due to the opening of big-box stores such as Walmart and Dick’s Sporting Goods. Her father closed the store when the family could no longer afford health insurance. He got a job as a TSA agent at the nearby Bradley International Airport in Connecticut. She wanted to go to school out of state, but needed to save money first. She spent a year at a community college in Springfield while working odd jobs that included babysitting and even a stint in a Tweety Bird costume at Six Flags New England in Springfield. She then transferred to The George Washington University.

Jewish roots: Levin-Epstein quickly got involved in Jewish life at GW, and in particular pro-Israel advocacy on campus. Her father had made aliyah and served in the Israel Defense Forces after he graduated from college, but “I didn’t have an appreciation of this until I started to just deepen my understanding of what it means to be a Zionist, and to be a Jewish woman in the political space,” she said. “I found my voice by advocating for the U.S.-Israel relationship as an undergrad, and it helped me understand the political landscape through different trainings that were available to college students,” she said, noting that she spent time with the campus chapters of both AIPAC and J Street, and on the student board of GW Hillel. 

Read the full story here.

The Zionist Congress was established in 1897 by Theodor Herzl as the supreme organ of the Zionist Organization (ZO). (Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

More than 1,200 philanthropists, leaders, politicians and entrepreneurs from 38 countries will gather in Basel, Switzerland, on Sunday and Monday to celebrate 125 years since Theodore Herzl convened the first World Zionist Congress there and set in motion a movement that would result in the modern-day State of Israel, Lev Gringauz reports for eJewishPhilanthropy. 

Past, present, future: “Words cannot describe the excitement and emotion,” Yaakov Hagoel, chairman of the World Zionist Organization, which is hosting the conference, told eJewishPhilanthropy. “We’re not only going to be dealing with the historical facts, but we are going to be looking into the future…of the Zionist movement.” Hagoel sees Jewish unity as a defining issue for this year’s conference, alongside concerns about antisemitism; encouraging Jews worldwide to learn more Hebrew and move to Israel; and countering what he sees as Jewish assimilation and loss of identity.

Back to the beginning: The gala for this year’s conference will be held at the Stadtcasino Concert Hall, where the original World Zionist Congress met. The rest of the conference features a variety of panels and speakers, ranging from Yossi Cohen, former director of the Mossad and current head of Israel investment for the Japanese firm Softbank, to Judge Ruchie Freier in Brooklyn, dubbed the “hasidic superwoman of night court” by The New York Times.

Still relevant: Another speaker, professor Yedidia Stern, president of the Jewish People Policy Institute, will explore the lessons that Jews should take away from Herzl’s original congress: namely, how to address widespread divisions in Israel and the broader Jewish world over matters of Jewish identity, Zionism and politics. Herzl managed, “despite all the disputes, to reenergize the idea…that Jews can act together to achieve their goals,” Stern said. ‘The main lesson is commitment to democracy, commitment to rules of the game in an era of disputes.”