(Jewish Group) How a Black Jew from Alabama became an Israeli basketball legend [View all]

Willie Sims. During his two years at Maccabi Haifa he averaged over 20 points per game. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Willie Sims, an American-born star of Israeli basketball in its adolescence – and rare for the local game, a Jewish-born foreigner – died Friday at 64.

The Alabama-born Sims, who had suffered a heart attack in August, was one of the leading players in Israel’s Premier League, and played for 15 seasons in the 1980s and early ’90s for Maccabi Haifa, Hapoel Tel Aviv, Elitzur Netanya, Maccabi Tel Aviv, Hapoel Eilat and Maccabi Hadera.

Unlike many Americans at the time, who converted in order to play as Israelis, Sims was a Jew from birth – his mother was born to a Jewish father named Jack Miller, and her mother had converted.

Sims’ parents divorced when he was 5, and he was raised as a Reform Jew by his grandmother in Queens, New York. Sims attended synagogue until adolescence, and when he studied at Louisiana State University he encountered both racism and antisemitism. Someone once wrote on the door to his room: “Black and Jewish, why are you in Louisiana?”

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