A high school basketball game was canceled last week after players from a New York public school hurled antisemitic insults at the players of a private Jewish school.
On Monday’s show, Megyn was joined by Liora Rez, executive director of Stop Antisemitism, to discuss the incident and why antisemitism needs to be exposed.
A Flagrant Foul
Last Thursday, the girls’ varsity basketball teams from the Leffell School, a private Jewish school in Hartsdale, and Roosevelt High School, a public school in Yonkers, faced off in the non-league game.
The competition was reportedly forced to end early, however, due to Roosevelt’s rhetoric and physicality. According to an op-ed written for the school newspaper by Leffell player Robin Bosworth, the opposing team shouted “antisemitic slurs and curses at us” and her teammates were injured due to “the other team’s physical style of play.”
“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,” Bosworth wrote. “If a team shows blatant disrespect towards my team and our school community’s values, it should not be tolerated or forgotten immediately following the game.”
A Roosevelt player, who has not been named, reportedly yelled “I support Hamas, you f–king Jew” at a Leffell player. Additionally, chats of “Free Palestine” could allegedly be heard. The game was suspended at the end of the third quarter.
Exposing Antisemitism
On Monday, a statement from the school system and the mayor of Yonkers confirmed the Roosevelt basketball coach and one of the team’s players have been dismissed. Neither has been identified. “The coach doesn’t deserve the anonymity,” Rez said. “I don’t understand why his identity is being hidden.”
In her view, this was likely not an isolated incident. “I think there is probably antisemitic and bigoted language in the locker room, during practice times, things like that,” Rez noted. “The fact that it came to this fiasco of a situation leads me to believe that this coach should have been let go a while ago.”
Rez explained that her group exists for situations like this one. “They have First Amendment rights to spew their speech, to support Hamas verbally, and we have our First Amendment rights to expose them,” she shared. “Stop Antisemitism exists to expose who these antisemites are, who’s allowing this hatred.”
Some three months after the terrorist attacks of October 7, Rez said the rhetoric has gotten out of control. “This isn’t just ‘Israel is bad. Palestine is good,’” she noted. “If you are saying Hamas terrorists are resistance fighters and they did nothing wrong, this is insane.”
Megyn agreed. “You’re either very, very dumb and uninformed or you are very, very hateful,” she concluded, “to justify anything that happened on 10/7.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Rez by tuning in to episode 697 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.