Yonkers Girl’s High School Basketball Coach Fired After Players Used Anti-Semitic Slurs Against Jewish Team

A Yonkers High School girl's basketball coach was fired after an incident where players hurled anti-semitic slurs against players from the private Jewish school, the Leffell School, on Thursday, according to The New York Post. A player has also reportedly been dismissed from the team.

The Yonkers interim superintendent Dr. Luis Rodriquez and city Mayor Mike Spano issued a joint statement on Sunday addressing the incident.

"After a thorough review of videos taken at the game and interviews with those who witnessed the incident, the Yonkers Public Schools dismissed the coach and one player from the Roosevelt basketball team,” the joint statement said.

Neither the coach nor the player was identified in the statement. The statement also condemned anti-semitism as a whole.

“The Yonkers Public Schools, along with the City of Yonkers, sincerely apologize to the students and community of The Leffell School for the painful and offensive comments made to their women’s basketball team during a recent game with Roosevelt High School,” the statement said. “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.”

The Leffell School is a K–12 private, co-educational, Jewish day school in Hartsdale, New York with a tuition rate of about $45,000 per year. Roosevelt High School is a public high school in Yonkers, New York.

Leffell player Robin Bosworth claimed that Roosevelt players chanted "free Palestine" at her team, she wrote in her high school newspaper about the experience of the game in an op-ed in her high school's newspaper, The Lion's Roar.

"At the end of the quarter, players on the opposing team started shouting, 'Free Palestine' and other antisemitic slurs and curses at us," Bosworth wrote. "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."