A SENSE OF WHO YOU ARE: THE YESHIVA MACCABEES
Note to my non-sport fan readers:
This is not an article just about a basketball team—I promise you—even though it talks a lot about basketball at the top. Rather, it’s a story about the journey of a group of young people who happen to be together on a team, led by a remarkable leader and thinker.
It’s a story about creativity — amid a world full of destruction.
And it’s another snapshot of Israel today.
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For the past month, I have been following the Yeshiva University men’s basketball team, first spending three weeks with the Maccabees in New York, attending their daily 6 a.m. practices and a handful of their games, and then following them on a week-long, USO-style, goodwill journey throughout Israel.
Contrary to any well-worn jokes that may be flying around your head right now, the Yeshiva University basketball team is not actually the 47th Street Diamond District intramural squad, nor is it a collection of the best players from the local Jewish Community Center. The Yeshiva University Maccabees squad is a serious-as-a-heart-attack Division III college team.
Over the past five years, prior to this season, the Maccabees' record was 98-24; they’ve won their Skyline Conference championship three of those five years, and made it to the Division III NCAA playoffs three times. In 2020, with a record of 29-1, they advanced to the Sweet 16 and had a good chance to win it all, before COVID shut down the tournament.
Still not convinced?
Between November 10, 2019 and December 30, 2021 the Macs won 50 games in a row, the second longest winning streak in D3 history. During their streak, in the 2020 season, they defeated their opponents by an average of more than 29 points per game, and were the No. 1 ranked D3 team in the country. Their best player on that team, Ryan Turell, a 6-foot-7 point guard, led the nation in scoring his senior year, averaging more than 27 points per game, and became the first Orthodox Jew to play in the NBA’s G-League.
The Macs can flat-out ball.
Just as impressive as their won-loss record is Yeshiva’s style of play.
If you’re a basketball aesthete, it’s a joy to behold. If you're a casual fan, it’s a wonder. And if you're an opponent, it’s a bitch.
The Macs run a high-level version of the motion offense Bobby Knight employed to win three NCAA championships at Indiana and to lead the 1984 Olympic team to a gold medal. It’s an offense not based on diagrammed plays—in all the games I’ve watched, the Macs have only run one play. Instead, it’s based on principles of constant motion, spacing, screening, and “ball reversals”—quick passes that move the ball from one side of the court to the other—in order to force the defense to constantly react, to the point where they overreact, leaving a Yeshiva player open for a jump shot or a drive to the basket.
It’s a style of play closer to improvisational jazz than to standard basketball. A style similar to the beautiful offenses played most recently in the NBA by the Golden State Warriors and San Antonio Spurs.1
A MUSICAL GAME
The composer of Yeshiva basketball’s improvisational offense is the team’s head coach, Elliot Steinmetz, a full-time lawyer and father of three, who calmly functions on about four hours of sleep a night during the basketball season. Very much in the mold of Steve Kerr, the Warriors head coach, Elliot is a mixture of deep confidence and surprising humility. And like Kerr, Elliot’s style is casual with a purpose.
“I don’t let my players call me coach. Some of them do, out of habit, but I hate it—I hate being called coach, I hate it. I can't stand it. Because I look at it as coming from an old school perspective. Calling somebody ‘Coach’ is like calling somebody at work, ‘Sir.’ It implies that you work for them, as opposed to work with them.
“I don't want to look at my players that way. I don't think my players work for me, and I don't think they play for me. I think they’re working with me, and they're playing for themselves. My role is to try to assist them in any way I can to be better on the court.”
Elliot’s basketball IQ is off the charts. But it’s his EQ, his emotional quotient, that sets him apart. When he studies game films late at night, he’s looking at much more than just basketball execution. “I don't just watch the actual game. I also watch body language and stuff that's going on inside of the court.
“I have a great video,” he excitedly tells me during a late-night phone call, talking about a game clip of his two senior captains, both guards, Adi Markovich and Gav Landau. “I'm trying to find it as we're talking—one second—it’s Gav and Adi and—here it is! I found it. It’s awesome.”
The 10-second clip flies onto my phone.
“The two of them were both on the bench—Adi was hurt, Gav was just out of the game—and they're both standing up at a dead ball, talking to guys on the court, coaching them. You’ll see. This is great.”
Co-Captains, Gav Landau and Adi Markovich coaching from the bench.
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Getting his players to work with not for him, Elliot encourages them to coach one another from the bench during games, to speak their minds during timeouts and halftimes, and to co-run the team’s 6 AM practices, to a level that’s rare among college coaches.
“I call in my captains every year to meet with me, and I ask them, ‘Do you understand whose program this is? Do you know whose program it is?’
“And they look at each other, and they're like, “It’s your program, coach”—like they're trying to be respectful, like, “This is your program, coach. You built it. It’s your thing.”
“And I tell them, ‘Wrong. And if you play that way we're going nowhere. It’s not my program. I am just a tool that is here to help facilitate. This is your program. This is your locker room. This is your gym. I’m just here as a helper. My job is to allow you guys to find a way to excel and to build what you want to build over the next couple of years that you're here.” Elliot pauses and then says, “That's why I don't like the guys to call me coach.”
A perfect example of the “Coaching with” dynamic that Elliot has created for the YU Macs can be seen in the below video clip of a locker room scene from a recent game. Elliot and his assistant coaches always review the halftime stats and determine their strategy for the second half outside the locker room, while the team is inside, in part because Elliot wants to give his players time alone to talk through their own views of the first half of their game.
In this one-minute clip from a recent halftime, co-captain Adi Markovich breaks down for his teammates a few key adjustments he thinks they need to make before Elliot and his coaches enter the locker room:
Co-Captain Adi Markovich gives his halftime breakdown to the team, while Elliot and his assistant coaches huddle outside before coming into the locker room.
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In 2014 Elliot took over a Yeshiva hoops program that had gone 49-114 over the previous half dozen years. The turnaround was instant. But he could only take them so far. 14-11. 15-12. 15-10.
“My third year coaching, we had lost in the semi-finals of our conference tournament. We were running the same shit that everybody else does—screen and roll—and we would run into these athletic teams that could scout it, and that were quicker and more athletic—we'd hit our ceiling and we couldn't get over that hump.
“I called up a coaching mentor of mine, and he's like, ‘If you're ready to make a real change ... ’ and he sent me a book on the motion offense. I read the book. I started watching old Bobby Knight Indiana games. And then I read the book again. I really studied it, and I was like, ‘You know what, I'm all in.’ I stopped teaching anything else offensively. I started only running the motion, and you saw the success right away, just from the way we moved. You saw it grow on the guys. And once we started seeing success, it became a lot easier.”
The offense is far from easy, even for experienced ballers. The improvisational aspect of Elliot’s brand of motion offense can confound his own players almost as much as it confounds their opponents. To reach a comfort level playing in his system takes time. And because there’s so much unscripted motion and passing, it’s an offense that requires an extremely high level of trust in one's teammates—trust that they’ll make the right reads, the right screens, the right passes, and take the right shots. It’s a major adjustment for new players, all of whom have grown up being coached in systems full of scripted plays.
I mention to Elliot how watching his team practice and play games over a three-week period early in their season reminds me of watching the Beatles Get Back documentary. He hasn’t seen it, so I explain to him that when the Beatles were creating the songs they would eventually play in their fabled Rooftop Concert, because John, Paul, George, and Ringo couldn’t read or write music, they had to play their songs into shape over time. They had to jam the songs to life. As seen in Get Back, it was a process that demanded from each Beatle a blend of craftsmanship and art, unselfishness, and a desire to be consciously and subconsciously aware of what his bandmates were doing at all times. It also involved an enormous amount of nonverbal communication. Just like learning his motion offense.
“It's funny you say that thing with the music,” Elliot enthusiastically replies. “I’m fascinated by watching musicians, and singers as well. I actually play piano but I don't know how to play piano. It's a weird, born-with talent.
“I took lessons when I was seven for about six months. And I couldn't stand it, I hated it. And I quit. And I never wanted to do it again. Then when I was about 11 or 12, I was home from school sick for a couple of days, and I was really, really bored. And I went into the living room where my parents had a piano, and there was a song playing on the radio, I just started playing it. And my mom comes in, and she's like, ‘What the hell?’ And I was like, ‘I don't know! I just heard the song and I started playing it.’ And she’s like, ‘That’s not normal.’
“I can't read music off the sheet, but I can hear a song a few times, and then for the most part, play it. I can’t concert-level play it, but I can actually make a song sound decent.”
OCTOBER 7: THE ATROCITIES
Elliot was praying in a synagogue in Jerusalem as the massacres and atrocities committed by Hamas were executed.
Praying as more than 1,139 innocent human beings, including 36 children, were being barbarically slaughtered and tortured—as babies were being cut out from the stomachs of their still alive and shrieking mothers, as the unborn and their siblings were mutilated in front of their parents, just before the parents’ lives were snuffed out—as some infants were being burned alive in their family’s ovens—as dozens of women were being raped—as more than two hundred human beings were being taken hostage and abducted into Gaza, where they were raped, tortured, starved and operated on by non-doctors and without anesthesia, and where more than 130 hostages still remain—as all of this carnage was being videotaped and much of it broadcast live to a worldwide audience, which now includes a sizable portion of our fellow human beings who somehow don’t believe it ever happened. Or, worse, that it was deserved.
Elliot and his wife and daughter were in Jerusalem visiting his middle son, Noah, who like many Orthodox Jews is taking a gap year between high school and college to study at a Yeshiva in Israel. (Elliot’s older son, Jacob, indefinitely delayed attending college to pursue his dream of becoming a Major League Baseball pitcher, after becoming the first Orthodox Jew to be drafted by an MLB team, the Arizona Diamondbacks, in 2021.)
After first seeking shelter in the synagogue’s stairwell, Elliot rushed back to the apartment where his family was staying and watched from the rooftop as over 3,000 rockets were fired into Israel by Hamas. Together with his daughter, Lea, he watched as missile after missile was intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome.
Other Yeshiva basketball players were also in Israel visiting their families.
The team’s student manager, Joel Weinstein, who is from Memphis, Tennessee, was in Jerusalem visiting friends. He would remain in Israel for three weeks after the massacres, driving supplies to soldiers on the front lines even before the area had been cleared of terrorists, while constantly reassuring his parents back home in Memphis that he was safely staying with his friends in Jerusalem.
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OCTOBER 18: “MOVING FORWARD”
It wasn’t until October 18 that Elliot was able to gather his team together in their gym.
Standing on the foul line near the team’s locker room, with his players surrounding him, he looked into their eyes, and then he told them, “I don't want to be here. I can't imagine any of you do either. Basketball is literally the furthest thing from my mind, right now. I have zero interest in starting a basketball season right now.
“But that said, we have to—I always say, ‘You don't move on, you move forward.’ You don't very often move on from traumatic things, you just find ways to kind of move forward. They're always there, and they're always kind of implanted in your mind, and still you have to move forward with life. But you can't bury your head in the sand, and you can't just sit in a room. What’s the point?”
Then, speaking to himself as much as to his team, Elliot said, “We have to find our way to start to slowly move forward. This is what we do. And this is what we're going to do. The only way I can find any value in it, is if we find a way to make it more important off the court than on the court.”
Reflecting on the moment, Elliot says, “I challenged them to basically come up with different ideas and different things that we could do. I had guys come in with different charity ideas, different things they wanted to try to raise money for. One guy wants to bring in a couple of youth teams and have them set up and play high school teams in charity games.
“It’s why we wore T-shirts with pictures of the hostages on them for the first number of games at home and even on the road. It's why I wear the shoes and shirts I wear at the games. It isn't to be a spectacle, it’s to make a point: This is on our mind, no matter what we're doing.”
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JANUARY: THE TOUR
As the Yeshiva Maccabees were coming up with ideas for how to bring meaning to their season, Daniel Posner, a class of 1990 Yeshiva graduate and hedge fund manager was coming up with an idea of his own.
Concerned about the rise in antisemitism, particularly among college students, in 2019 Posner had created Athletes for Israel (AFI), a foundation that brings teams and coaches from major Division I colleges, and also groups of professional athletes to Israel. Posner’s goal is to let them experience the country, in the hope that immersing them in Israel's racial, ethnic and cultural diversity will change any preconceptions they may have. Essentially, AFI is Birthright for non-Jewish jocks. The foundation has sponsored trips to Israel by varsity teams from the University of Tennessee, Kansas State, Arizona and Auburn, with the hope that their athletes who are influencers will have a positive effect on their cohort and those younger who look up to them.
After October 7, like every other Jew connected to Israel, Posner could see and feel how traumatized the country was. So, he decided to flip his foundation’s mission and create a USO-styled goodwill tour to raise the morale of Israelis. Israel is a country that loves basketball—Israelis love the NBA and they love their own leagues—and while American college basketball isn’t big here, the Yeshiva Maccabees enjoy a following in Israel, especially among the modern-Orthodox.
Posner’s foundation and Yeshiva put together a week-long tour, that included, among other activities:
Visiting hospitals to meet and talk with wounded soldiers and recovering hostages
Holding clinics at organizations for economically disadvantaged youths, and at the Shalva National Center for individuals with mental disabilities
Picking crops at a farm—badly needed due of the shortage of workers because of the war
Visiting with IDF members near and on the Gaza border
Playing an exhibition game against an Israeli pro team, Hapoel Tel Aviv
Witnessing the remains of the carnage and the makeshift memorials at the Nova Music Festival and the Kibbutz Be'eri massacre sites
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THE KIBBUTZ
More than the endless images of the detritus of wanton destruction and brutality, it’s the sounds the ceramic shards from the fallen roof tiles made whenever we walked on them that I can’t get out of my head. Almost musical. Each crack sounds like a lost note from a wind chime echoing destruction and death.
Walking on the endless debris is like walking on thin ice. You hear a crack and you instinctively pause. We all did.
You pause because you don't want to cause any more destruction. You don’t want to add to the erasure of what was once a community of Jews, hundreds of whom were tortured and killed in the most primitive—and the most modern—ways imaginable. Massacred in ways that once were unimaginable, and now are unforgettable. Unless, of course, you’ve fallen down a rabbit hole into a left-wing or right-wing political cult whose social media feeds compel you to deny that it even happened.
It feels like you are walking on sacred ground. Even if you’re an atheist.
As we stood in the scorched rubble of what had once been the home of a family who was slaughtered, and worse, someone said, “You can still smell the death.”
Someday soon most of what remains of Kibbutz Be'eri will be put in large metal dumpsters and carted away. New lawns will be planted. And new houses will be built. But some of the shards will remain, as proof of what happened here.
Some of the burnt out houses will be preserved as historical evidence, and as shrines. And survivors will remain for eight or nine more decades, perhaps, and they will tell and retell their stories about how their parents or siblings or children were murdered or raped or abducted. About how they themselves were taken from their homes and held hostage by barbarians intent on first exterminating a people, and then violently establishing a global caliphate—erasing the very concept of freedom and ultimately destroying any memory of Western culture.
The only time I saw Elliot hesitant to make a decision was two weeks before the team embarked on the tour. Their schedule hadn’t been set—and it would stay in flux—but it was weighing on his mind: Should the team go down south to the massacre sites? And if it did, how best to assure the players that their going would be optional, and that there was no shame in saying that it would be too traumatizing for them.
Six of his players are Israeli. A number of them had friends who had been slaughtered. One player was good friends with an 18-year-old Israeli boy who had been held hostage in Gaza for the first 54 days of the war. Three had served in the IDF before coming to Yeshiva to play with Elliot, and had close friends still in the IDF who were risking their lives every day. In a phrase now repeated almost as often as the Shema: everybody knew somebody who knew somebody. How best to make it clear to the players that it was okay not to go?
Elliot was hesitant. None of his players were. Everybody felt they had to go. For themselves. For their fallen friends. For their family members and friends now in arms. For their people.
We are guided through what remains of Kibbutz Be’eri by two of the survivors of the October 7 pogroms. One, Chen Kraunik, is a 23-year-old professional basketball player in Israel. His father, Arik Kraunik, is believed to be the first civilian killed in the Be’eri massacre. He was the kibbutz’s chief security officer. Reportedly, he killed seven terrorists while calling for backup before his life was ended, saving hundreds of innocent lives.
Our other guide is Ofir Engle, the 18-year-old friend of one of the Yeshiva players, Tom Beza. Ofir was abducted from Kibbutz Be’eri while visiting his girlfriend, and held hostage in Gaza for 54 days. He and her family were hiding in a safe room when the terrorists broke in. They shot the family’s dog, and then dragged Offir and his girlfriend’s father into Gaza. His girlfriend’s father, Yossi Sharaabi, was killed in captivity, and his body remains in Gaza.
Chen and Ofir calmly bear witness to what they personally lived through, describing the nightmare of October 7 and all that they have lost. Over 130 lives snuffed out. Dozens sadistically tortured. And 32 hostages abducted into Gaza by both Hamas terrorists and Palestinian civilians.
Neither Ofir nor Chen ask for an ounce of sympathy.
They only ask that we share their stories and tell the world what we have seen.
Many of us shake our head in sadness, because we know that the world is not listening.
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THE NOVA MUSIC FESTIVAL SITE
After Kibbutz Be'eri we go to the site of another massacre: The Nova Music Festival.
The Nova site provides a clear contrast between Israel’s culture of life and Hamas’s culture of death. On the morning of October 7, it was the scene of so much life, youth, love, and music. A scene of entertainment, of escape, and happiness, not unlike a basketball game. Until it suddenly wasn’t.
Close to 400 civilians at the music festival were massacred that morning by Hamas, many more were wounded, and over 40 were taken hostage and abducted into Gaza.
At the Nova site, the players light Yahrzeit candles, and then silently walk through the profound memorial that has been planted on the grounds of the music festival turned pogrom:
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DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION
One of the most surprising things about the Yeshiva basketball team is its diversity.
Yes, they’re all Jewish, but differences in religiosity within cultures can be as fractious as differences of political opinion—they certainly are here in Israel, where they were tearing the country apart before October 7. And Elliot’s team is strikingly diverse.
Ironically, it is the players from Israel who are the most secular. Some are even atheists, though they are still spiritual.
Co-Captain Adi Markovitch was raised by secular parents. As was Tom Beza, a free-spirited, flower-child sophomore from Savyon, a short drive east from Tel Aviv. A marketing major who hopes to play professionally overseas, Tom sometimes wears his hair in braids, has tattoos, plays the drums, and loves The Who and Led Zeppelin.
When I ask Tom about attending Yeshiva despite being secular, his response is kind but clear:
“For me, the thing that can be the most Jewish is to serve in the military [which Tom did before YU] and being Israeli. For others it’s learning Torah, which is totally fine. We learn about each other and different customs, different opinions, and have different observations about a lot of things.
“I respect the fact that Zevi [the one ultra Orthodox player on the team] is very conservative, and he's really sticking through a lot of stuff that his Judaism asks him to do. That’s great—this is what keeps him happy. This is what he thinks is best for him, and so he should do it. For me, I was raised a little bit different. And Zevi knows it. We talk about it, it comes up in many conversations—with everyone, not just me. That's the good part here. That's what this team is about.
Zevi Samet, the team’s lone Black Hat, is the most naturally talented player on the team. Last year he led all Division III players in 3-point shots made per game, was named his conference’s rookie of the year, and made First Team All-Conference. In one game he scored 40 points while shooting 11-for-16 three pointers.
Zevi’s shooting touch is almost magical—his release is eye-blink quick, and even when he shoots from long distance, the ball floats on its way to the net as if it’s moving in slow motion. I’ve been watching basketball since 1968 and have covered dozens of NBA games, and I’ve never seen a softer shot.
When Zevi shoots from distance, the bench chants “Boom!” and his teammates are always somewhat surprised when the ball fails to fall through the net.
During a recent game, after Zevi made an effortless move to break free and then hit yet another shot, Elliot turned to his assistant coach, Joe Schwartz, and matter of factly said, “He’s gonna be a pro. He’s fucking good.”
Co-Captain Adi simply says, “It’s now Zevi’s team.”
While Adi is the player-coach-leader of the Maccabees, Zevi is the spiritual leader of the team. When I ask Zevi if he has any plans for after college he replies, “I want to inspire people. I learned working at basketball camps and being with kids that I have the ability to inspire people, so I want to do something that lets me do that. But I’m not sure what it is, yet.”
He is contemplating playing professionally, but Zevi’s worried that even an Israeli team might not be willing to accommodate his strict religious lifestyle, which at times will require him to travel separately from the rest of the team. However, considering that no Black Hat has ever come close to performing on the court as well as Zevi, and considering the fanfare that his pro career would inevitably generate within the ultra-Orthodox community, it’s a good bet that an Israeli team will want him and his potential fan base.
Zevi is a Black Hat unicorn. Unlike Elliot’s son, Jacob, and Ryan Turell, Zevi comes from an ultra-Orthodox community that rejects many aspects of modernity and does not embrace sports, certainly not as a career. At least, not until Zevi came along. But it hasn’t been easy.
“I had a lot of people saying that what I'm doing is wrong. Don’t spend three hours a day playing basketball, you're wasting precious time. You're not taking a basketball with you to the next world. Why are you spending so much time playing basketball?
“But for me the best part about Judaism is that you can turn the physical into the spiritual.
“So, I said to God:
"’God, I'm gonna go and play basketball right now, so that people watch my game, and maybe I can inspire them. I'm gonna go play ball right now to build relationships. I'm gonna go play and work on leadership.’
“And now, every second I'm on the court, I'm getting rewarded for it.
“So, yeah, people—a lot of them—came over to me and said, ‘What are you doing? You're naive, blah-blah-blah.’ And if I didn't play basketball, maybe I would sleep two more hours a night. And I went against a lot of people. But I stuck with my gut. I trusted what I believed in. And I believe this is what brings me closest to God. And it helps me do the Jewish subjects more. I didn't want to give it up. That's why I kept doing it.”
Just as Elliot encourages Adi and Gav to co-coach his team from the inside, he embraces Zevi’s basketball piety—his belief in the spirituality of basketball—and Zevi’s sense of who he is—as can be seen in this pre-game, locker room clip that shows the interplay between Elliot, Adi and Zevi before their exhibition game in Tel Aviv—which for their Israeli fans was the highlight of their tour.
As this short video makes clear, all of the other Maccabees, no matter their level of religiosity, look forward to being inspired by Zevi’s pregame homilies:
Elliot, Co-Captain Adi, and Zevi address the team in the locker room before their game.
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In the locker room after the game, Elliot confesses to his team, “For me, having this game was the least important part of our trip. It wasn't really something I wanted to do. I wanted to do all the other things we’ve been doing.
“But seeing you play, and seeing the crowd, and seeing the amount of people that were here. And seeing the Achdut [the Hebrew word for unity], that’s what tonight was about. This was an opportunity to have camaraderie, unity, solidarity. It was so much bigger than the actual game and basketball that I don’t even care to talk about the game itself.
“I’m proud of you guys. I’m proud of everything you guys have done up until now. And I’m in advance proud of everything we’re going to do in the next few days.”
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A COLD AND VERY BROKEN “HALLELUJAH”
After the game there’s a team dinner at one of the player’s homes, just north of Tel Aviv, and a short drive from the Mediterranean sea. As we walk in, an acoustic guitarist is playing, and music fills the night.
After dinner, while most of the team is outside enjoying the evening, Elliot quietly sits down at the piano and plays a song he sounded out long ago that captures the mood of his team’s journey.
As Leonard Cohen wrote:
Maybe there's a God above
But all I've ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
And it's not a cry that you hear at night
It's not somebody who's seen the light
It's a cold and it's a very broken Hallelujah
And with that Elliot and the Maccabees return to Jerusalem to continue their journey as a team.
Each with a deeper sense of who they are.
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If you’re a basketball nerd, this deep dive into the Maccabees’ version of the motion offense on YouTube’s “Slapping Glass” channel is a must-view. If you like the game but are not a full-out nerd, it’s worth a quick glance to understand how something that looks so natural on the court is actually based on very specific principles of spacing, player movement, and ball movement, and demands constant reads and reactions by the offensive players.
Amazing. Thank you for sharing this story. I don't follow basketball, but if this team can open the eyes of anyone to the truth of what Israel has, and is, enduring, they will have done a great thing. I am not Jewish, but I pray for the people of Israel every day. One thing I pray for is an end to hatred for the Jewish people, and it is wonderful to see these whose lives may aid that.
Bravo Douglas. Just fabulous.