Then, in the second half, she wrote, things escalated. The Roosevelt players started shouting, “Free Palestine” as well as “antisemitic slurs and curses at us.”
Four days later, Yonkers Public Schools announced it had fired Roosevelt’s coach and dismissed one of its players from the team for what it called “painful and offensive comments.” The incident occurred nearly three months after Hamas’s attack on Israel killed at least 1,200 people, sparked a war in which more than 23,000 have been killed in Gaza and led to an increase in antisemitism and anti-Muslim incidents in the United States.
“This cannot be who we are as New Yorkers,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, in response to the basketball game. “No one should ever be subjected to antisemitism or any kind of hate.”
The Lion’s Roar did not immediately respond Monday to a request from The Washington Post to interview Bosworth.
Antisemitic incidents spiked in the United States in the two months after Hamas attacked Israel, according to the Anti-Defamation League. The number of attacks, vandalism and harassment more than quadrupled in that time when compared with the same two-month span in 2022. Federal officials have said they have also responded to a rise in reports of hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims since the start of the war.
Anti-Defamation League chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt called the number of attacks against Jews “relentless” and said they showed “no signs of diminishing.”
“The lid to the sewers is off, and Jewish communities all across the country are being inundated with hate,” Greenblatt said in a statement last month. “Public officials and college leaders must turn down the temperature and take clear action to show this behavior is unacceptable to prevent more violence.”
On Monday morning, Yonkers Public Schools interim superintendent Luis Rodriquez and Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano (D) apologized to Bosworth, her teammates and the Leffell School “for the painful and offensive comments made to their women’s basketball team.”
“Collectively, we do not and will not tolerate hate speech of any kind from our students and community. The antisemitic rhetoric reportedly made against the student athletes of The Leffell School are abhorrent, inappropriate and not in line with the values we set forth for our young people,” they wrote in a statement.
When Yonkers school administrators learned of the incident, they launched an investigation that included referees, coaches, students and school officials from Leffell. After reviewing videos of the game and interviewing witnesses, the school district fired the coach and dismissed a player, neither of whom has been publicly named.
In her op-ed, Bosworth said that because of the Israel-Gaza war, the slurs felt “extremely personal” to her and her teammates. Nevertheless, they honored the custom of shaking hands with every opponent after the game. But doing so while telling them “good game” didn’t sit right with her.
“If a team shows blatant disrespect towards my team and our school community’s values,” she wrote, “it should not be tolerated or forgotten.”