“Let not your heart tremble in the heart of the sea, when you see mountains trembling and heaving, and sailors’ hands as limp as rags, and soothsayers struck dumb. When they set their course, they were full of joy, but now they are beaten back in shame. The whole ocean is yours to escape in, but your only refuge is the snare of the deep. The sails quiver and quake, the beams creak and shudder. The hand of the wind toys with the waves, like reapers at the threshing: now it flattens them out, now it stacks them up.”
— Judah Halevi, from “The Poet Imagines His Voyage”, The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse
I’m going to say it actually. It’s insane to call Israel genocidal for defending themselves against a terrorist group founded with the intent to kill Jews. Also insane to say you’re against genocide while advocating for the destruction of the country that houses half the Jews in the world.
Do you think the Jews in Israel will be allowed to stay in Palestine if Israel is dissolved? You’d do well to learn the history of what happens to Jews in Muslim countries.
Something thats been helping me a lot on my journey with converting is actually being a part of the community. You don't need to wait for your mikveh or even the beginning of your classes to find a Synagogue or temple willing to let you attend service or watch it online.
I go to dinners with other members when I can, I do friday Shabbat service and Saturday morning torah study and seevice if I can. My temple has hosted many events and everyone has been nothing but kind to me. I feel at home there. I may not be fully Jewish yet- but the Jews are my people and the community is what matters the most.
I do not think people should be trying to convert in isolation you absolutely need to get involved in community in real life. Am I one of the younger members? Yep. Am I unable to attend sometimes because my job doesn't care about my religion and I'll lose full time if I take Saturdays off? Yep. But thats okay life happens.
I still make time for my community. I know many people by name and they know me.
We are a people- I am joining a people. Not just a religion.
something my rabbi has said a few times that I find super fascinating is that one way to read the relationship between the Jewish people and Hashem is as a relationship between lovers (kind of along the same lines as how on Shabbat we frame Shabbat as a bride and the Jewish people collectively as the groom).
other groups of people have relationships with Hashem, but the relationship between Jews and Hashem is unique and is one we and Hashem both chose
one reason that we actively choose to follow the commandments in the Torah is because we're aligning our interests with Hashem's, and sometimes that means doing things that look irrational to people outside the relationship but that make sense to us
sometimes a relationship between lovers is erotic! in that light it makes complete sense to include the Shir Hashirim in the Tanakh
take this with a slight grain of salt because I'm paraphrasing verbal conversations that I had probably a few weeks ago, but regardless of this post's exact accuracy the idea is really fun to throw back and forth with a rabbi!
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David Bolchover's brutal new book recounts how the Nazis destroyed the lives and legacies of 11 Jewish soccer superstars
The World Cup is in full swing. Cristiano Ronaldo, CR7 himself, is improbably, arrogantly playing his sixth tournament at the age of 41. The media loves it: the Lionel Messi vs Ronaldo rivalry continues. Ronaldo plays on with tears and tantrums, breaking records and refusing to simply grow old and go home.
But David Bolchover, author of Digging Deep: Unearthing the Stories of Eleven Murdered Jewish Footballing Greats, finds himself thinking about a different 41-year-old: Jozsef Braun. Arguably the greatest Jewish footballer who ever lived, he was killed by the very Hungarians who had once cheered his name.
“When he was murdered, he was 41,” Bolchover told me when we spoke recently. It was less than 15 years after he had last scored an international goal for Hungary — then one of the top few international teams in the world.
Millions of Jews across Europe were part of the burgeoning soccer culture that was sweeping the continent, with disproportionate representation among elite players, coaches and referees, The way Bolchover tells it, the Jewish soccer culture lost in the European Holocaust was as substantial as the foundational Jewish contributions to culture that helped bring western civilization into the 20th century.
Although he restricts himself to people who played for their countries and who were murdered in the Shoah, Bolchover has selected a team of greats in all 11 positions. He quotes Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, in 2022, saying “There is no Europe without European Jews,” but where she was thinking that “Europe is Mahler and Kafka, and Freud,” Bolchover is thinking Braun, Zygmunt Steuermann, Béla Guttmann and Arpad Weisz.
These were some of the elite players, coaches and visionaries of the sport — the Messis, Ronaldos, Pep Guardiolas, Zinedine Zidanes, and Carlo Ancelottis of their time. Indeed, Bolchover says that one significant reason that Hungary and Austria’s all-conquering soccer teams became second rate was that they murdered the Jewish populations who were instrumental in achieving and perpetuating that excellence. Dave Rich, who wrote about the UK release of the book, made a point that Bolchover says he wishes he had thought of himself: “Jewish footballers were as prevalent in the football leagues of central and Eastern Europe in the 1920s and 1930s as Black players are in the Premier League today.”
The team that Bolchover unveils in his book would strike fear into the hearts of any pre-War expert on European soccer. Wunderkind Steuermann scored Poland’s first ever international hat trick. Max Scheuer played his whole career for the Jewish, Zionist team Hakoah Wien and led them to the Austrian national title. Weisz went from international star player to record-winning coach, winning the Italian championship for Bologna and Inter Milan. He remains the youngest coach to win Serie A.
Across eight chapters, Bolchover tells the stories of his 11 selected players of his selection and, in so doing, tells a particular history of the Shoah. He can even ignore György Molnár and József Eisenhoffer who alongside József Braun, in 1924, were the Jewish players who scored Hungary’s first six goals as they humiliated Italy 7-1 in Budapest. But, along with the glory, it seems like on every page there are footnotes chronicling the tragic fate of the Jews in the towns and villages from which players, their wives, and their families hail.
“I’m not going to just mention a place where Jews lived and not tell you what happened,” Bolchover said. “To me, that’s an abandonment of responsibility. You often get non-Jewish English writers just letting it lie: ‘He was from this area and he died in Auschwitz.’ It’s not good enough.”
Bolchover deliberately avoids saying that these men “died” or that they “perished”; he says they were murdered. “Vocabulary is very important,” he told me. “You have to use ‘murder.’ You can’t use ‘died.’ Even ‘perished,’ I don’t like… I talk about the Holocaust as the Holocaust was. A Jew who’s not angry about the Holocaust is a strange Jew.”
Bolchover is also scathing about the nations for whom his protagonists played. He resists describing many of his players simply as Hungarian, Austrian or German. History, he argues, has already rendered its verdict. “The ones that thought they were Hungarian, the ones that thought they were German, the ones that thought they were Austrian were proven to be wrong,” he said. “They were rejected by the host societies… In the end, they were Jews.”
This is not a polite book. Bolchover does not soften his account for squeamish readers, and he does not traffic in the comforting framing that has come to dominate Holocaust memory in the West: the survivor, the righteous gentile, the redemptive arc. His previous book, The Greatest Comeback, told the story of Béla Guttmann — the brilliant Jewish coach saved by his future brother-in-law — and even that book, Bolchover insists, “did not pull any punches.” This one pulls even fewer. This one is about the rule that Jews were industrially murdered by diverse populations across the continent, not the exception of a few that were saved.
“I felt I needed to write this book,” he said. “I felt more and more drawn to the stories of those who didn’t make it. You feel a responsibility to tell their stories because nobody else can tell them. I felt if I don’t write this book about these 11 players, nobody would. And certainly not in the right way.”
The book was sparked, in part, by fury. In 2019, the release of the biopic about Bert Trautmann — the German goalkeeper who played for Manchester City and who had served in the Wehrmacht — generated a wave of admiring press coverage that Bolchover found intolerable. Trautmann had, it was widely noted, apologized for being a Nazi; the coverage seemed to imply that he was a great guy who had simply made some unfortunate early choices.
“He apologized for being a Nazi, but he was a Nazi,” Bolchover said. “He apologized for being an antisemite, but he was an antisemite. And the regime he fought for and supported murdered all these great Jewish footballers that nobody’s ever heard of.”
That nobody has heard of them is not an accident. It is, Bolchover argues, a failure of collective memory — one that begins with the mass extermination of the Jewish crowds who would remember their heroes and proceeds to the shame and repression of the national crowds who gleefully murdered their Jewish compatriots. Jews too have been too quick to embrace the “people of the book” stereotype and look to claim credit for founding football clubs (Bayern Munich, yes; Eintracht Frankfurt, yes; Ajax, yes) while remaining curiously silent or ignorant about the fact that Jews were also, for a golden pre-war generation, many of the very best players on the continent.
“Jews, even Jews, are slightly uncomfortable with the fact of their own ignorance, that actually it wasn’t the founders that were important,” he said. “Why all the focus on that? Why not all the focus on all the top international footballers and coaches? Do we focus really on club founders now, or on the chairmen who run the teams? No, we focus on Messi and Ronaldo.”
The answer, Bolchover suggests, is the Holocaust. Not just because it killed the players, but because it killed the memory of the players. The destruction of European Jewry was so total, so final, that it erased not only lives but legacies. When people laugh and say Jews aren’t really footballers — better suited to medicine, to finance — they are, Bolchover argues, “laughing at our own destruction.”
The 11 players in the book are drawn from across Europe. Bolchover’s structural rule — that they must all be full internationals — was deliberate. He is making a point: These were not obscure club players; they were the stars of their nations, the best their countries could produce. And then their countries killed them.
Only three of the 11 — Julius Hirsch, Otto Fischer, and Weisz — have had some biographical attention in German and Italian and a few English-language articles. With the exception of a few recent Polish language articles about Józef Klotz’s famous penalty, the others are, as Bolchover puts it, “completely forgotten, really.
And they’re not now. They’re in print, their names are there, and people can read about them.”
Bolchover mentions the research he and others have done using Holocaust Yizkor Books — the Jewish memorial books, where decimated communities honored their obligation to remember the dead by listing the names and fates of former neighbors. Bolchover resists that simplistic framing. This is not a memorial volume in the old community sense. It is a piece of serious sports history and Holocaust scholarship, with deep archival research, extensive footnoting, and the kind of narrative drive that makes it readable to someone who has never opened a Jewish history book in their life.
He is withering, too, about the broader European refusal to reckon honestly with the nature of the Holocaust. As Simon Schama has argued — and Bolchover echoes — the Holocaust was not something that happened to the Jews while Europe stood helplessly by. It was something Europe did to the Jews, on a grand scale, with widespread participation. “That’s something Europe doesn’t want to talk about,” Bolchover said. “And even European or British Jews and American Jews don’t want to talk about it.”
None of this is comfortable reading. None of the conversation I had with Bolchover was comfortable. But, in the way that Bolchover insists the Holocaust itself must be discussed, it is honest. As he writes in the book, “to say that the destructive assault on European Jewry was some sort of historical blip or carried out and supported only by an elite cadre of committed German Nazis, constitutes a highly underestimated and sophisticated form of Holocaust denial.”
Which brings us, inevitably, to the 2026 World Cup. To the question of what this history means for the Jews who are alive today, watching the tournament on their screens and phones, where only one Jewish player is on the roster of any of the 48 teams and not a single one is from Europe. This isn’t because Jews are good at business not sport, it’s because Europeans murdered all the Jews who were brilliant sportsmen and coaches and all the Jews who would remember them.
At his UK book launch, Bolchover made the link explicit. Ronaldo at his sixth World Cup. The greatest Jewish footballer who ever lived, murdered at 41. The crowds in their national colors, Norwegians rowing, Senegal drumming, the Scots with their bagpipes, the Dutch in orange. And then the question that nobody wants to ask: What would happen if Israel qualified for the World Cup?
“What would happen if they were there? Nobody would go, ‘Oh, look at those fun-loving Israelis.’ Even in America. And imagine if they were anywhere else in the world.” The same hatred, he said quietly, that accounted for the murder of his eleven players — it is still there. Still in football. FIFA, he noted, has never held a memorial for the great Jewish footballers and coaches who were murdered in the Holocaust.
Born with the name Chawa Zloczower in Poland in 1891, Adams immigrated to the United States through Ellis Island at age 20.
In America, she adopted the name Eve Adams — a playful nod to her androgyny, invoking the biblical Adam and Eve — and wore men’s clothing.
“She was a vibrant activist, who was daring. She had an androgynous appearance, which immediately identified her as a lesbian,” said Jonathan Ned Katz, author of The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams. “Wearing pants for women was just unthinkable in the time period.”
Adams soon immersed herself in New York’s anarchist circles, befriending prominent Jewish anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. She worked as a traveling saleswoman for leftist publications including Mother Earth, activities that landed her on the Bureau of Investigation’s watch list during the First Red Scare.
In 1923, Adams published Lesbian Love, a collection of essays about the romantic lives of dozens of women in Greenwich Village. Katz described the book as far ahead of its time.
“The word “lesbian” was not used much. It was like a dirty word at the time, so you didn’t say it out loud,” Katz said. “Here she was, putting it on a book jacket.”
Two years later, Adams opened Eve’s Hangout in Greenwich Village. The underground tearoom became a rare refuge where lesbian women could socialize openly.
But the haven proved short-lived. In 1926, an undercover detective named Margaret Leonard visited Eve’s Hangout, where she met Adams. The following day, the two attended a play in Times Square together. Adams gave Leonard a copy of Lesbian Love — evidence of “obscenity” that prosecutors later used against her — and Leonard alleged Adams made sexual advances toward her during the taxi ride to the theater.
Adams was convicted and spent 18 months in jail before the United States deported her to Poland.
She settled in Paris, where she began a relationship with Jewish cabaret singer Hella Olstein Soldner. In 1943, the two women were arrested and sent to the Drancy internment camp. From there, they were deported to Auschwitz, where both were murdered.
Kimberlé Crenshaw teaches that when a person faces more than one type or oppression, their experience of those oppressions will be more than the sum of their parts. Had Eve been Jewish and not a lesbian, she would not have been deported to Poland and would have lived safely in New York. Had she been lesbian and not Jewish, she would have been deported but then lived safely in Paris. She died because she was a Jewish lesbian.
If you are fasting tomorrow please be careful!!! Hydrate (with lots of electrolytes) NOW, stay out of the sun and the heat, and don't exert yourself more than necessary. If fasting may be dangerous for you for whatever reason, ask your local rabbi for advice on your situation. Stay safe and have a meaningful Shiv'a Asar B'Tammuz.
I've been trying to find a way to articulate how I feel as a Jew right now that doesn't use maximalist, damning language, but I can't find a way around it.
I feel like Jews have lost.
The societal ruptures that happened after October 7 made open Jew hate okay, and there was nothing we could do, and we've already lost the fight.
The celebrations that occurred on Oct 8 made it obvious what we suspected for a while, that Jew hate had been festering for a long time, waiting for an excuse to become mainstream.
No response that Israel could have had would have changed that.
And now Jew hate is entrenched on the left and the right around the world. It has become the top issue for the American left.
I have seen myriad Jewish voices in the diaspora fight against antizionism and rising Jew hate. Israel is fighting for its very existence.
But no matter how accurate and eloquent those Jewish voices are, about history and Arab colonialism and Jewish refugees after the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing in MENA and how views about Israel are directly affecting and killing Jews... It seems like it isn't changing the tide.
I think the Iran debacle has actually made Israel less safe and entrenched the regime bent on its destruction.
I know there are good people out there, no few of them are friends and my followers on here. But for every righteous non Jew that offers me comfort, there were 10 friends or lovers or acquaintances that I lost and couldn't get back no matter how much I tried to talk to them.
I can never trust some people again, knowing that they'll always be reflexively skeptical of any Jew.
And in the court of public opinion, I feel like Jews have lost.
I try not to let hopelessness consume me. But I don't know what to do.
I'm not a fighter. I want to keep my job, which necessitates being quiet about public issues and not making a name for myself, tempting as it may be.
I tried to have polite private conversations with friends and 9 out of 10 times it failed spectacularly. So I just don't do it anymore.
So like. What do I do?
I'm on my synagogue's board now, which is exciting. Because they have need of financial and legal acumen, which are talents I can provide. Should I be satisfied just trying to help make Jewish community in the nerdiest way I can help? I know every little bit helps, and making community is truly something important. Not everything can be splashy. But it still feels so small and I still feel so restless.
I try to find Jewish joy so I don't wallow, but it's hard.
Do I just bear witness? Memorialize what I've seen for future generations?
Do I go to cantorial or rabbinical school? (A semi-serious consideration of mine)
Do I *gulp* start a podcast or start making videos? I am eloquent, authoritative, and engaging. Speaking is a talent of mine. But again, I'm not a fighter, nor do I want to make a name.
I feel like this is such a critical moment and I feel called to action but I'm not courageous and I also feel like we've already lost and I don't know what to do
This is my very long archive of Jewish titles, collected according to what I find personally interesting, and so the authors here span many denominations/viewpoints. If you come across this as a reblog, check in on the original post to see if I have made any updates or corrections. As a general disclaimer, Judaism is a closed religion (yes, including Lilith) and so the books I have recommended on Kabbalah and mysticism are not for goyische readers, thank you for understanding.
TEXTS (Torah/Tanakh, Talmud, Midrash, etc.)
"After the Apple: Women in the Bible" — Naomi Rosenblatt
"Beginnings: Reflections on the Bible’s Intriguing 'Firsts'" — Meir Shalev
"Biblical Seductions: Six Stories Retold Based on Talmud and Midrash" — Sandra Rapoport
"But Where Is the Lamb?: Imagining the Story of Abraham and Isaac" — James Goodman
"Covenant & Conversation: Genesis" — Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
"Covenant & Conversation: Exodus" — Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
"Covenant & Conversation: Leviticus" — Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
"Covenant & Conversation: Numbers" — Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
"Covenant & Conversation: Deuteronomy" — Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
"Elijah and the Rabbis: Story and Theology" — Kristen Lindbeck
"Essays on Ethics: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible" — Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
"Eternally Eve: Images of Eve in the Hebrew Bible, Midrash, and Modern Jewish Poetry" — Anne Lerner
"From Gods to G-d: How the Bible Debunked, Suppressed, or Changed Ancient Myths and Legends" — Avigdor Shinan & Yair Zakovitch
"Gleanings: Reflections on Ruth" — Stuart Halpern
"In Scripture: The First Stories of Jewish Sexual Identities" — Lori Lefkovitz
"It Takes Two to Torah: An Orthodox Rabbi and Reform Journalist Discuss and Debate Their Way Through the Five Books of Moses" — Abigail Pogrebin & Dov Linzer
"Jewish Biblical Interpretation and Cultural Exchange: Comparative Exegesis in Context" — Natalie Dohrmann & David Stern
"Justice for All: How the Jewish Bible Revolutionized Ethics" — Jeremiah Unterman
"Lessons in Leadership: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible" — Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
I cannot recommend bringing your heritage and culture into how you view media enough.
It is important to consider the culture of the person who created the piece, absolutely; but the different perspectives offered by the viewers is fascinating in and of itself and does not always detract from the message.
As an example, when I was younger, I watched Schindler's List. This movie is famously shot in black and white except for one section, concerning a little girl in a red coat. The camera follows her until her eventual death.
I am Turtle Island Indigenous and I was always taught that the only color spirits could see was red, because it is the color of life and blood.
So the second the girl in the red jacket came on screen, something inside me chilled with fear.
The only color in the movie was that red. At some point, I, the viewer, had died.
I remember sobbing at the sight of the burning human piles that were shown, convinced I was buried in there somewhere. The reason I had only seen red on the girl was that my death was recent. I was the ash in the air mistaken for snow. I had died before her and had followed her, helplessly, until she followed me.
The message I got for that was maybe not what the creator had intended: that there was no "being clever enough" or "good enough" or "kind enough" that would shield or protect you from such a massive tidal wave of evil.
You are not exempt from tragedy, that red jacket whispered. You are not special.
When I told some of my white friends about my experience with viewing Schindler's List, some were shocked and the rest just out-and-out mocked me for my "media illiteracy".
"it was just a filming trick to make you feel something," I remember one saying, which terrified me. How had he not felt anything even before she showed up?
However, when I repeated my viewing to a college class, they were fascinated. The implications of what I had seen and felt made the film all the more terrifying and solemn. It encouraged a lot of people to try to ask themselves what media meant from a cultural perspective, where they hadn't done that before.
Hvaing this come across my dash while I’ve been low-key crashing out over the ignored Jewish elements in X-Men comics (American superhero comics in general tbh) is. It’s a weird fucking feeling.
To be clear, I’m not here to scold @sound-the-horn because how dare they read their culture into a Jewish movie, blah blah blah. It’s more about the reaction they got? Because I have a sinking feeling that if I did the same thing, there’s not an insignificant chance that I would get shut down, too. I am Jewish, and in this hypothetical situation, I would be discussing a Jewish film made by a Jewish film about the Jewish genocide, and I still think there’s a good chance I might get dismissed. I’ve seen the Jewish elements in works by Jewish creators ignore, dismissed, or deliberately ripped out too often to not have doubts.
idk what I’m trying to say here. there’s a discomfort with interpretations outside the cultural mainstream I guess? like, it doesn’t matter whether you’re reading or writing your minority culture into a piece of work, there’s not an insignificant chance that it’ll get sanded away if that work gets popular. does that make any sense?
On a more personal note, @sound-the-horn reading your interpretation reminded me of these two bits from Night and Maus respectively:
Anti-semitism is so deep-rooted and widespread that it is heartbreaking but not surprising that you are made to feel this way. Your views are still incredibly important and your perspective is just as sacred as mine, but I know me saying that is not going to lessen the sting of having others undervalue that perspective.
For the record, I would love to read more about the Jewish elements in X-Men. It may not be my fandom, but reading about cultural analysis is something I am deeply interested in. And I know there are many out there who would be delighted to see it, both within and without of the Jewish community; it's just unfortunate that the bigots are always the loudest and take up the most space.
"Nize Baby!" A comic strip by Milt Gross that made heavy use of comedic Yiddish. In the 1920s and 1930s he was beloved by Jewish immigrants. Some of his characters' sayings, like "Banana Oil!" ("Bullshit!") became memetic.
Mickey Katz : What Gross did with pictures, he did with music. SUPER corny by modern standards but his audience ate it up-representation matters!
Ernie Kovacs: Hungarian-Jewish comedian who went on to write for MAD magazine, a bastion of Jewish humor.
Harvey Moiseyevich Volodarskii: A Russo-Jewish magician character you fight in the Japanese game No More Heroes. Many famous magicians were Jewish, including Harry Houdini (Volodarskii is based off him) and David Copperfield.
I've never really liked or cared for superheroes, but my dad did and probably would've had some things to say about their Jewish origins.
And as for death rituals...I said the Shema for him on his deathbed. He had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (throat cancer) and couldn't say it for himself.
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