Asher Martin- A "positive light" for Campus Sport

Asher Martin has been on one of the most fascinating journeys in student sport, moving from South Africa to the UK and finally to America, where he currently represents the Yeshiva University (YU) football team (or soccer in American), in the third division of the American university league.

A former JFS student, Asher had originally planned to go to university in the UK, before deciding to join an organisation called FirstPoint in order to get a scholarship to play football in America. He decided to follow in the footsteps of other friends, and first wanted to attend the University of Charleston in West Virginia, which had an incredibly successful football team as the champions of the Second Division.

Unlike other high-profile Jewish sportspeople, who can often be forced to choose their career over their religion, Asher has incredibly been able to use sport as a means to become more involved with Judaism. Although he had previously not been religious, Asher said that the reason he had decided to sign for YU was ultimately due to the fact that had he signed for Charleston, he would have had matches over Shabbat and “the idea of dropping Judaism completely, I didn’t like the sound of that”. He was even surprised by the standard of football in America, finding it to be far more technical and less physical than expected.

Universities in America have been the site of some of the worst acts of antisemitism since the beginning of the war, with some examples being anti-Israel protesters marching through the UCLA campus calling for Jewish genocide, to students at George Washington University projecting “glory to our martyrs” (in reference to the Hamas terrorists) on the walls of their library and one instance of Jewish students barricading themselves in a library to shelter from an anti-Israel mob.

Amidst these horrific incidents on campus, Asher says that sport on campus has helped to provide him and other students with an incredible sense of unity, and that his own team strongly bonded over all that has happened in the last month. In their first game after October 7th, the team, which includes some former IDF soldiers, showed up with Israeli flags and armbands, and after the game Asher said that “people on the team said that they’d never been prouder to be Jewish”.

“With everything going on in Israel…we all understand our responsibility to represent the Jewish people”.

The YU team have faced some antisemitism themselves since the war, with Asher telling me that one team called them “murderers” during a match and demanded that he remove his kippah during the match. In spite of this incident, Asher told me that his team was able to “rise above these things…to show a positive light for Judaism”.