The New Jersey Devils star center, who had scored twice in Team USA’s semifinal win, sent the puck between the legs of Canadian goaltender Jordan Binnington 1:41 into overtime to give the American team a 2-1 win.

 “This is all about our country right now. I love the USA,” Hughes told NBC. “I love my teammates.”

 The win broke a 46-year Olympic drought for Team USA, which had not taken gold since the famous “Miracle on Ice” team that upset the Soviet Union on its way to gold in 1980. The United States also won in 1960.

 “He’s a freaking gamer,” Quinn Hughes, Jack’s older brother and U.S. teammate said, according to The Athletic. “He’s always been a gamer. Just mentally tough, been through a lot, loves the game. American hero.”

 Quinn Hughes is a defender for the Minnesota Wild and a former captain of the Vancouver Canucks who won the NHL’s top defenseman award in 2024. He was also named the best defender in the Olympic tournament by the International Ice Hockey Federation after scoring an overtime goal to send the U.S. team to the semifinals.

 The third Jewish member of the U.S. team, Boston Bruins goaltender Jeremy Swayman, won the one game he played, a Feb. 14 preliminary-round victory over Denmark.

 The Hughes family — rounded out by youngest brother Luke, who also plays for the Devils — has long been lauded as a Jewish hockey dynasty. They are the first American family to have three siblings picked in the first round of the NHL draft, and Jack was the first Jewish player to go No. 1 overall. They are also the first trio of Jewish brothers to play in the same NHL game and the first brothers to earn cover honors for EA Sports’ popular hockey video game.

 Jack, who had a bar mitzvah, has said his family celebrated Passover when he was growing up. Their mother, Ellen Weinberg-Hughes, who is Jewish, represented the U.S. women’s hockey team at the 1992 Women’s World Championships and was on the coaching staff of the gold-
medal-winning women’s team in Milan. Weinberg-Hughes is also a member of the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.

 Hughes’ golden goal ushered in a burst of Jewish pride on social media, with one user calling it “the greatest Jewish sports moment of all time.” The Hockey News tweeted that Hughes was “the first player in hockey history to have a Bar Mitzvah and a Golden Goal! Pretty cool!”

 Jewish groups and leaders also jumped on the praise train. “Special shout out to @jhugh86 on scoring the game-winning goal!” tweeted Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League. “Beyond his incredible skill on the ice, Jack makes history as a proud representative of the American Jewish community, reminding us that the Jewish people are interwoven into America in her 250th year! Mazel Tov, Jack!”

 Avdija was named an All-Star reserve for the Western Conference on Sunday, Feb. 1, an expected but deserved nod after the northern Israel native finished seventh in All-Star voting with more than 2.2 million votes, ahead of NBA legends LeBron James and Kevin Durant. Avdija’s breakout performance this season has earned him repeated praise from James and others across the league.

 Avdija’s star turn began last year in his first season with Portland, when he further captured the adoration of Jewish fans across Israel and the U.S. But he took another step forward this season, averaging 25.8 points, 6.8 assists, and 7.2 rebounds per game. His points and assists clips are by far the best of his career, and rank 13th and 12th in the NBA, respectively. He’s considered a front-runner for the league’s Most Improved Player award.

 For close observers of Israeli basketball, Avdija’s All-Star selection is the culmination of a promising career that began as a teenage star with Maccabi Tel Aviv and made him the first Israeli chosen in the top 10 in an NBA draft.

 “Deni Avdija being named an NBA All-Star reserve is an unbelievable achievement in the mind of every Israeli basketball fan,” Moshe Halickman, who covers basketball for the popular Sports Rabbi website, wrote in an essay for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “This is a dream come true for many — a dream that became realistic and even a must-happen during his breakout season — but something that in his first five seasons in the NBA never came across as something that was going to be real.”

 Halickman, who has covered Avdija in Washington, D.C., and in Israel, wrote that Avdija is not only considered the greatest Israeli hooper of all time, but perhaps the best athlete to come out of Israel, period.

 Oded Shalom, who coached Avdija on Maccabi Tel Aviv’s Under-15 and Under-16 teams, echoed that sentiment in a recent profile of Avdija in The Athletic. 

 “Even though he is only 25, I think he is Israel’s most successful athlete in history,’’ Shalom said. “We’ve had some great gymnasts — and I hope everyone forgives me for saying it, because we’ve had some great athletes — but I think Deni has become the greatest.”

 Avdija’s ascension has also come against the backdrop of the Gaza war and a reported global rise in antisemitism, which he has said affects him personally.

 “I’m an athlete. I don’t really get into politics, because it’s not my job,” Avdija told The Athletic. “I obviously stand for my country, because that’s where I’m from. It’s frustrating to see all the hate. Like, I have a good game or get All-Star votes, and all the comments are people connecting me to politics. Like, why can’t I just be a good basketball player? Why does it matter if I’m from Israel, or wherever in the world, or what my race is? Just respect me as a basketball player.”

 Now, Avdija’s talents will be on display at the NBA All-Star Game, on Sunday, Feb. 15, in Los Angeles.

(JTA) — As the American Israeli poet Marty Herskovitz thought about the upcoming Passover holiday, the prospect of singing Dayenu at the first seder since his country was attacked didn’t sit right with him.

The classic Passover song, whose title means “It would have been enough,” expresses gratitude about how much God has done for the Jewish people. But Herskovitz, the son of a Holocaust survivor who has lived in Israel since 1986, thought the words would ring hollow at a time when so many Jews are at risk.

“We have to take the text and find a way to make it relevant and not just say the words that seem so impossible to say,” Herskovitz says. “‘Dayenu, it’s enough.’ It’s clearly not enough. As long as people are trapped in Gaza, that’s not enough. As long as our soldiers are still risking their lives, it’s not enough. We can’t say ‘Dayenu.’ It can’t be, you know, ‘Praise God for this situation.’ So we have to find new texts.”

It’s a mission that has long animated Herskovitz, who used the financial reward from a legal settlement after his then teenaged son was injured in a terrorist attack in 2001 to create a fund to support education initiatives in Israel. The fund has backed his own Creating Memory initiative at Bar-Ilan University, which focuses on Holocaust remembrance through art, and Israel’s Conservative Schechter Rabbinical Seminary.

At Herskovitz’s urging, Schechter convened dozens of rabbis and Jewish community leaders from across Israel earlier this year to reimagine the haggadah, the core text of the Passover seder. The result of their work will be a supplement for Israeli families to use during their seders at the beginning the first major holiday since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7 — an assault that itself pierced the observance of a Jewish holiday, Simchat Torah. (The Oct. 7 attack reportedly had originally been planned for the first night of Passover last year.)

Many seder tables will have empty seats representing Oct. 7 victims, hostages, and soldiers who are unable to return home for the holiday. But the seminary sought to provide rabbis and their communities with other ways to adapt the ancient tradition to the current moment.

“The Passover holiday is really one in which families celebrate on their own,” says Rabbi Arie Hasit, Schechter’s associate dean. Passover is going to happen in the home. So, our job right now, which is so significant, is to help people navigate how to prepare.”

Among the supplement’s passages is an addition to the seminal “Four Questions” recited during the seder, which ask, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The added text aims to reflect the feelings of seder attendees this year.
“On all other nights, we think that we have answers. Tonight, we all just stay silent,” says the passage, which is in Hebrew. “On all other nights, we remember, sing, and cry. … On this night, we only cry.”

The initiative is one of several underway to adapt the Passover holiday for a different crisis in the Jewish story.
Rabbi Menachem Creditor, the scholar-in-residence at UJA-Federation of New York, is working on a haggadah supplement with the Academy of Jewish Religion, a pluralistic rabbinic school in Yonkers, New York.

“To talk about liberation when our family is not yet whole again is very hard, and our own tears will mix with the maror,” Creditor says, using the Hebrew word for the seder plate’s bitter herbs. “We won’t need the haggadah’s usual explanation of what bitterness feels like.”

Creditor says AJR’s CEO and academic dean Ora Horn Prouser approached him with the idea of creating a Passover supplement about the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. They put out a call for submissions — prayers, essays, artwork, and other reflections — and received dozens of responses that will be edited into a resource AJR will self-publish and sell on Amazon. Parts of the final product will also be available for free on the seminary’s website.

In addition to Dayenu, Creditor and Horn Prouser point to one particular piece of the Passover text with new resonance this year: “Vehi Sheamda,” the prayer that warns that in every generation, a new enemy will attempt to defeat the Jewish people. This year’s crisis conjures new ideas about both the enemy and how to vanquish it, Creditor says.

“The language in the seder, in the haggadah, is that God will save us,” Creditor says. “But Zionism represents a very different religious posture, which is: We will save us.

“Unfortunately, the first part of the paragraph remains true and was amplified horribly on Oct. 7,” Creditor continues. “The second half of it must be true through the connection that we have, as a Jewish people throughout the world, strengthening our homeland.”

The Passover initiatives in both Israel and the United States add to a long tradition of haggadah iterations and supplements that layer present-day issues onto the ancient text, from those centered around Soviet Jewry to more recent examples, like additions about the Ukraine war and the pandemic. Last year, some families left an empty seat at their seder table in honor of Evan Gershkovich, the Jewish Wall Street Journal reporter who remains jailed in Russia.

“The haggadah is something that developed, and as modern Jews who are dealing with issues of the same themes that have come up again and again in our history, we need to figure out how to make those themes accessible, relevant, real and useful,” says Rabbi Sara Cohen, a Schechter alumna who helped plan the seminary’s conference in Israel.

“We don’t necessarily think of holidays as a time for processing trauma, but because Passover is the first major holiday since [Oct. 7] and because it’s a holiday that the story of which talks about national trauma and redemption, one of the questions is, ‘What is redemption in our day, and are we feeling redeemed, are we feeling free?’’’ Cohen says. “We have to pay attention to the desire to process the trauma and the framework that our tradition gives us for processing it.”
Cohen wrote the additions to the Four Questions that are included in the Schechter supplement. Other supplement passages invoke more explicit war imagery and the sense of bereavement felt by many across Israel.

Hasit acknowledges that beginning the project in early February was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it provided Schechter with plenty of time to collect responses and work with Herskovitz to put together a Passover resource ahead of the holiday.

On the other hand, the war is evolving daily, and nobody knows what the status of the conflict, or the hostages, will be by late April. But Hasit says no matter what happens, the trauma of Oct. 7 will need to be addressed at the seder table.
“We know that [Passover’s] coming, and we know that it’s going to be different,” he says. “We know that it’s going to include processing everything that has happened since Oct. 7. And no matter what happens tomorrow, and the day after that, none of that is going to change.”

Herskovitz says he views the Passover effort as a cognate of his Holocaust remembrance work, in which he emphasizes the importance of creating fresh, personal materials that people can connect with.

“I think the same exact thing is what has to be done in Pesach this year,” he says, using the Hebrew word for Passover. “You cannot use the same text and the same ideas that you used for years and years because this year is so radically different. And to go back to the old text, the old ideas, is basically making it irrelevant.”