Kol Ami News

SALT LAKE CITY (KUTV) — Jill Spector is Jewish and a Jazz fan.

So when Jazz rookie guard Justin Wright-Foreman retweeted a message of support Wednesday for TV entertainer Nick Cannon after Cannon was fired for anti-Semitic comments, she just couldn’t let it go.

She tapped out a message to the rising star on his Facebook page.

“I told him how much it really hurt as a Utahn and as a Jew,” she said. “I didn’t necessarily expect a response, to be honest.”

But a day later, she got one. Wright-Foreman called her on the Facebook Messenger app.

“Which caught me very much off guard so I took the phone call and we spoke for about 15-20 minutes just about how apologetic he was,” she said.

By the end of 20 minutes, Spector was ready to forgive.

“I think in today’s day in age, people are very quick to say this person needs to be gone, this person needs to be fired and I don’t think that’s the right way to go about it,” she said.

He was contrite, Spector said. And wanted to educate himself about the Jewish culture.

Unbeknownst to Wright-Foreman, Spector’s husband, Sam, is the rabbi for Utah’s largest Jewish synagogue, Kol Ami.

“It’s human to make mistakes, but that’s what people do,” Sam Spector said.

The rabbi says he was impressed that Wright-Foreman would call his wife. There was no sure-fire PR splash in making a private apology to a complete stranger.

“That says a lot about his character,” he said.

The Spectors say Wright-Foreman intends to visit Kol Ami and play basketball with the kids. Their congregation will welcome him with open arms.

“It went from a story where Jewish people were kind of hurt, to saying this is a great guy who wants to understand our community better,” Sam Spector said.

See the video here