{"id":85874,"date":"2025-08-21T21:10:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-21T21:10:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/85874\/"},"modified":"2025-08-21T21:10:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-21T21:10:10","slug":"israeli-flags-in-workout-video-give-holmgren-social-media-headache-the-forward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/85874\/","title":{"rendered":"Israeli flags in workout video give Holmgren social media headache \u2013 The Forward"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"When<\/p>\n

When you read the comments section. Photo by Sam Hodde\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\"Louis<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\tBy Louis Keene<\/a>
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tAugust 21, 2025\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

It all started innocently enough: a video of NBA star Chet Holmgren practicing jump shots in an open gym.<\/p>\n

Holmgren doesn\u2019t speak in the 11-second clip, which was posted Tuesday on X but appeared to originate on Snapchat. The caption, composed in ordinary hoop parlance, was affirming.<\/p>\n

\u201cChet back in the lab working on his 3 ball,\u201d wrote Oklahoma City Thunder fan @SkyedOKC, who uploaded the video to X.<\/p>\n

\"FREE<\/p>\n

What Holmgren does in the clip \u2014 making three three-pointers in a row from the left wing \u2014 is, as these videos go, unremarkable; for Holmgren, a lanky seven-footer known for his marksmanship, it is extremely basic. Yet this video has been viewed millions of times \u2014 it had 2.8 million impressions on X as of this writing \u2014 for reasons that will be obvious to most people who watch it: On the walls behind Holmgren are a pair of Israeli flags.<\/p>\n

what happened chetanyahu?<\/p>\n

\u2014 fei (@fyzzi04) August 21, 2025<\/a> <\/p>\n

The reaction was fierce. \u201cYour boy\u2019s a Zionist?\u201d asked one commenter. \u201cDelete this,\u201d wrote another. \u201cNow it\u2019s a hate watch,\u201d said a third. At least a dozen comments were variants of \u201cF\u2014 Israel.\u201d By Wednesday night, commenters had taken their outrage to Holmgren\u2019s X profile, where a comment calling him \u201cChetanyahu\u201d had accrued more than 7,000 likes.<\/p>\n

The \u201clab\u201d where Holmgren was working out is a Jewish school in Los Angeles whose gym has become popular among NBA players<\/a>, for various reasons that have nothing to do with Israel \u2014 privacy and location, mainly. Shalhevet High School, which is Orthodox and pro-Israel, has hosted many athletes with greater wattage than Holmgren, among them the LA Clippers\u2019 James Harden and the Philadelphia 76ers\u2019 Joel Embiid. LeBron James has been spotted a couple miles away, at Shalhevet\u2019s Orthodox rival YULA, which also identifies as pro-Israel.<\/p>\n

Holmgren, 23, has been working out at Shalhevet in the offseason since the summer before the 2022-23 season \u2014 that is, long before Oct. 7, 2023 \u2014 when, reporting an article about the trend of NBA players practicing at Orthodox high schools, this writer saw him there. That Holmgren has never posted about Israel or the war in Gaza, much less opined on a topic as complex and fraught and as irrelevant to his profession as Zionism, hardly matters. He has now been sucked into the vortex of Israel-Gaza discourse.<\/p>\n

The backlash to Holmgren, apparently for not turning around and leaving the gym as soon as he saw the flags, reflects the sheer revulsion many people have to the Israeli flag as the country\u2019s war in Gaza approaches the two-year mark. (The New York Knicks\u2019 Isaiah Hartenstein \u2014 he\u2019s not Jewish \u2014 is seen shooting in the same video but seems to have escaped criticism.)<\/p>\n

For a professional athlete like Holmgren, who signed a five-year, $239 million contract extension last month, outrage over the court he\u2019s shooting on is likely the only fallout from the war he will feel directly. For the people trolling him online, expressing that outrage might feel like their only recourse against the war, or just the safest one. And for a Jewish student who goes to that high school, it\u2019s a reminder that the flag inside the gymnasium may mean something very different outside of it.<\/p>\n

Louis Keene is a reporter for the Forward. His work has also been published in The New York Times, New York magazine and Vice. He is based in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

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