The Seen

Seen The Seen Compiled from JTA reports

Former Major League Player Cody Decker Says Anti-Semitism Is ‘Rampant’ in Pro Baseball

Former pro baseball player Cody Decker said that anti-Semitism is “rampant throughout baseball” and that an Oakland Athletics coach should be suspended for making a Nazi salute after a game.

Decker, who played briefly for the San Diego Padres and for Israel’s national team in the World Baseball Classic, spoke candidly on the topic with TMZ Sports on Aug. 8. He detailed several instances over the course of his career in which he was singled out for being Jewish and called Jewish slurs by fans and teammates.

Decker said that while playing a minor league game against the Frisco Rough Riders in Texas, several members of the opposing team called him and fellow Jewish teammate Nate Freiman an anti-Semitic slur. He also said he was fired from a team the day after being called into a coach’s office to “explain my Judaism to him because he was born again Christian.”

And in 2012, Decker said he was at a bar with teammates when a group of girls asked him to leave the table when they found out he was Jewish.

The talk was spurred by a recent incident involving Oakland A’s bench coach Ryan Christenson, who was widely criticized for making a Nazi salute — he claims

Cody Decker

“unintentionally” — after a recent game against the Texas Rangers.

“In the world today of Covid, I adapted our elbow bump, which we do after wins, to create some distance with the players,” Christenson said in a statement last week. “My gesture unintentionally resulted in a racist and horrible salute that I do not believe in. What I did is unacceptable and I deeply apologize.”

Decker said he accepted Christenson’s apology but that he should be educated

‘Harry Potter’ Actor Jason Isaacs Opens up About His Struggle With Addiction

on the issue and suspended nonetheless.

“Actions have consequences. That’s not cancel culture, that’s life,” Decker said.

Decker took issue with the A’s response for saying it “looked like a Nazi salute.”

“No, he did a Nazi salute. He did a Nazi salute twice,” Decker said. “Let’s not sugarcoat around it … I really, really despise their response. I hate every half-measure response Major League Baseball always makes.”

— Gabe Friedman

British Jewish actor Jason Isaacs opened up about his longtime struggle with drug addiction to the British magazine The Big Issue on Aug. 3, saying he first got drunk at age 12 and “by the age of 16 I’d already passed through drink and was getting started on a decades long love affair with drugs.”

“Every action was filtered through a burning need I had for being as far from a conscious, thinking, feeling person as possible. No message would get through for nearly 20 years,” he said.

“I think what would surprise the 16-year-old me is that I’m okay,” he added.

Isaacs, 57, born in Liverpool to Jewish parents who have since moved to Israel, is perhaps best known for playing Lucius Malfoy in all eight “Harry Potter” films. He has spoken at length about growing up in the Jewish community, and his experience with anti-Semitism as a Jewish teenager in London.

“There were constantly people beating us up or smashing windows,” he told the Independent in 2013 about his upbringing in the suburb of Childwall. “If you were ever, say, on a Jewish holiday, identifiably Jewish, there was lots of violence around.” — Emily Burack

Jason Isaacs