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A chance discovery connected US soccer star Matt Turner to his Jewish roots
(JTA) — Unexpected events converged not only to forge Matt Turner’s career as a professional soccer player. They enabled him to find Jewish roots he never knew he had.
Turner, 29, the starting goalkeeper for the U.S. men’s national team and Nottingham Forest in England’s Premier League, discovered those roots in finding his paternal great-grandmother’s emigration papers. Those papers allowed her to leave Lithuania and escape the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of over 150,000 Lithuanian Jews.
“Once I found the documents, I was certainly very, very excited,” Turner told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “America, in general, it’s a melting pot, and everybody has those roots elsewhere. So to understand your story, your history a little bit is really nice.”
Before finding those documents, Turner’s curiosity about his roots went unfulfilled while growing up in Park Ridge, New Jersey.
“Growing up in northern New Jersey, you’re around everyone who has a bit of identity about their family life,” he said. “There’s a lot of Italian-Americans, a lot of Irish-Americans. We know families that are like, ‘Yeah, my great-grandmother came here from Italy and she’s been cooking for us for 30 years.’
“Naturally, when you’re around a pack of people, you just gravitate towards what everybody else does. Everybody celebrates Christmas and the holidays, and you want to do all those things.”
Though Turner met his great-grandparents “when I was really little,” he said, “we never had those talks, or they never talked to my parents about that stuff.”
As a result, Turner’s Jewish father, Stuart, and his Catholic mother, Cindy, had no specific answers to his questions.
“Whenever I asked my parents, ‘Where’s our family from?’ I never got a clear, clear answer,” he said. “My mom was pretty unsure and same with my dad, to be fair.”
But when Matt and Stuart were cleaning the house of Matt’s late grandfather in 2015, they found the great-grandmother’s emigration papers. Taube Sobel left Lithuania in 1921 and arrived at Ellis Island in New York.
“My great-grandmother had a Lithuanian foreign passport issued on Aug. 25, 1920, in Kaunas that was issued in two languages, Lithuanian and German,” Turner said. “On the page in the Lithuanian language, it says that her name is Taube Sabelaite, and on the page in German language, Taube Schabel.”
But to get her emigration papers, she had to go to Riga, Latvia, where the United States had its diplomatic representative to Lithuania until 1930.
“When my great-grandmother applied for the immigration papers at the U.S. consulate in Riga, the U.S. consulate ‘simplified’ her last name into ‘Sobel,’” Turner said. “That became her last name until she got married.”
Two years later, the man who would become her husband, Polish-born Chakiel Turnovski, arrived from Paris. They married in 1927, with his name changed to Charles Turner. The family owned a multi-family home in Brooklyn, where Charles worked as a printer.
“We didn’t even know we were Lithuanian to begin with,” Turner said. “My initial feeling was, ‘Wow, this is cool.’ I finally have a little piece of me that I can look into and understand a little bit more. I was very intrigued about the history. And the more my father and I dug, the more we learned, the more connected I felt to my Jewish side, the Jewish culture of my family. It really changed a lot of me because I understood different values.”
Turner brought those values into his marriage with Ashley, whom he married in 2022. The couple has a 15-month-old son, Easton, and a daughter, Everley, born on Sept. 14. Ashley is Catholic, like Turner’s mother, and they are letting their children decide what religion they want to adopt, if any.
“The general foundations of both religions are the same, and the values of marriage would be the same,” said Turner, who identifies as Jewish. “I think it’s really great to have religion as a guideline because having faith and values and seeing the bigger picture are what we believe.
“But at the same time, we want our kids to be able to choose for themselves or connect with things for themselves. We want to open their eyes to the world and have them experience different religions in different ways and different rites of passage, have a really open mind and find things in the values that they might connect with more.”
That approach comes directly from Turner’s own experience in a household with a Jewish father and a Catholic mother.
“A lot of times, people would say that those two groups of people might not get along,” Turner said. “But I saw them love and go through conflict together and work together and be great partners, even to this day. Over time, I was able to connect with both sides in different ways at different moments in my life. I think it made me really well rounded as a person and more accepting. It was amazing to have that experience, to be honest. I’m really grateful.”
The papers also enabled Turner to consider playing professional soccer in Europe. He found them after completing his career at Fairfield University in Connecticut, where he made the All-Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference’s second team as a senior. But none of Major League Soccer’s clubs chose him in the 2016 draft, so Turner looked to Europe as an option. For that, he needed a European Union passport. Since Lithuania joined the EU in 2004, Turner applied for a Lithuanian passport.
But in the end, the New England Revolution invited Turner to camp in 2016. He made the club, became a starter in 2018 and a standout star soon after. In 2021, he was named the MLS Goalkeeper of the Year and the MLS All-Star Game’s most valuable player.
Turner received his passport in 2020 after “a three- or four-year process,” he said, but would not need it to make his biggest career move. In February 2022, two years after Great Britain left the EU (and its soccer passport rules), the Revolution sold him to Arsenal, a club in London and one of the Premier League’s perennial contenders.
Such a move might seem impossible for a goalkeeper whose career also started accidentally. Turner played baseball and basketball in high school but watching the 2010 World Cup transformed him.
The turning point came one day before Turner’s 16th birthday, when Landon Donovan scored a late goal to give the United States a 1-0 win against Algeria, helping them move on to the round of 16.
“I watched so many games, so many sports, and nothing made me feel quite like I felt in that moment,” he said. “I was jumping up and down, screaming and cheering. I’d never done that for any other sport. I just realized right then and there that there’s something different about this sport, the way it makes me feel and the way it brings people together.”
Donovan’s goal motivated Turner to join his first youth soccer club and get a goalkeeper coach at 16. Despite that late start, Turner developed enough to receive his first invitation to the national team’s training camp in 2019.
But the young goalkeeper made an inauspicious impression in that camp, as coach Gregg Berhalter recalled.
“We’re doing a training exercise,” Berhalter said. “He receives the ball and he goes to throw it and then he second guesses himself and throws into his own goal.”
From that discouraging start, however, Turner blossomed. After making his international debut in 2021, Turner started all four of the U.S. national team’s matches in the 2022 World Cup, keeping England and Iran to 0 goals. Since joining the national team, Turner won awards as the best goalkeeper in the 2021 CONCACAF Gold Cup and 2022-23 CONCACAF Nations League tournaments.
By now, he has amassed 20 career victories and 20 career clean sheets in just 33 games, a quicker rate than any other goalkeeper in the national team’s history. Berhalter called Turner’s development “abnormal,” he said.
“You don’t have a guy go to Fairfield and then start in the World Cup for the national team,” Berhalter said. “It all has to do with his work ethic. His learning curve is steep but he learns really quickly and applies it.”
With Arsenal, Turner played only five games last season, so the club sold him in August to Nottingham Forest, where he started the club’s first six games and earned his first Premier League clean sheet Sept. 2, a 1-0 win against powerhouse Chelsea.
“I’m forged in fire, as I like to say,” Turner said at his first press conference with Nottingham Forest.
So were his Lithuanian Jewish great-grandparents, a fact Turner chooses not to take for granted.
“I’m sure a lot of families from either side have gone through Hell to give their families a better life,” he said. “It lit a fire inside of me to repay my great-grandparents for taking the risks that they did to make it over to the United States, and provide us with the opportunities that we might not have had elsewhere in the world.”
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The post A chance discovery connected US soccer star Matt Turner to his Jewish roots appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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‘Little Gaza’: US Sen. Tom Cotton Introduces Legislation to Combat Campus Radicalism
US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) speaks during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, March 11, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Julia Nikhinson
US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) has proposed two new bills which would impose legal sanctions on purveyors of seditious, pro-terror ideologies on university campuses and the higher education institutions that harbor them, advancing the Republican Party’s offensive against the pro-Hamas student movement.
Shared first with Breitbart News, a news outlet that was instrumental in launching US President Donald Trump’s populist movement, the “No Student Loans for Campus Criminals Act” and “Woke Endowment Security Tax (WEST)” come amid a series of riotous demonstrations promoting antisemitic ideas, as well as the goals of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, and a widespread perception that elite universities have not done enough to combat them.
“First, any pro-Hamas protester convicted of a crime should be ineligible for federal student loans, and federal student loan relief. The American people should not be on the hook for the tuition of Little Gaza inhabitants,” Cotton said in a social media post on Tuesday announcing his introduction of the bills. “Second, our elite universities need to know the cost of pushing anti-American and pro-terrorist agendas.”
He continued, “The WEST Act would tax the largest university endowments to help pay down national debt and secure our southern border.”
As Cotton mentioned in his social media posts, the No Student Loans for Campus Criminals Act would prevent any campus protestor convicted of a crime from receiving federal student loans or student loan relief. Meanwhile, the WEST Act would institute a 6 percent excise tax on the endowments of 11 American universities, using the proceeds to pay down the national debt and secure the southern border shared with Mexico. According to Cotton’s office, the bill would generate $16.6 billion in revenue.
Republican lawmakers have called for holding higher education accountable since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel set off an explosion of antisemitic sentiment on college campuses, causing a succession of conflagrations which still are still burning hot at schools such as Columbia University.
In December, the Republican-led US House Committee on Education and the Workforce issued a report, which said that nothing short of a revolution of the current habits and ideas which constitute the current higher education regime can prevent similar episodes of unrest from occurring in the future. Colleges, it continued, need equal enforcement of civil rights laws to protect Jewish students from discrimination and “viewpoint diversity” to prevent the establishment of ideological echo chambers. It also said that “academic rigor,” undermined by years of dissolving educational standards for political purposes, would guard against the reduction of complex social issues into the sloganeering of “scholar activism,” in which faculty turn the classroom into a soapbox and reward students who mimic them.
The new Trump administration has taken steps to convert this vision into policy since assuming power in January.
On Friday, it canceled $400 million in funding to Columbia University as punishment for the school’s alleged harboring of antisemitic faculty, students, and staff and shielding them from disciplinary sanctions. Prior to that, US President Donald Trump issued a highly anticipated executive order which calls for “using all appropriate legal tools to prosecute, remove, or otherwise … hold to account perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.”
A major provision of the order authorizes the deportation of extremist “alien” student activists, whose support for terrorist organizations, intellectual and material, such as Hamas contributed to fostering antisemitism, violence, and property destruction on college campuses. That policy is currently being challenged in the courts, as a federal judge in Manhattan has halted its application to the case of a male alumnus of Columbia University who was arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after being identified as an architect of the Hamilton Hall building takeover, which took place during the closing weeks of the 2023-2024 academic year.
On Monday, US Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced that dozens of colleges and universities will be investigated for civil rights violations stemming from their alleged failure to address campus antisemitism. McMahon named 55 institutions, public and private, in total that were not included in the administration’s February announcement of five investigations of antisemitism at Columbia University, Northwestern University, Portland State University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
The new schools include: Harvard University, Swarthmore College, Drexel University, and Princeton University — all of which have struggled with antisemitic anti-Israel activity and pro-Hamas agitation, as The Algemeiner has previously reported.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Disney Curtails ‘Snow White’ Premiere Events Amid Scandals With ‘Free Palestine’ Supporter Rachel Zegler
Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot present the award for Best Visual Effects during the Oscars show at the 97th Academy Awards in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, US, March 2, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria
Disney has not invited media outlets to attend the Hollywood premiere of “Snow White” on Saturday and canceled the film’s premiere in the United Kingdom in a reported effort to manage controversies involving the movie’s lead actress Rachel Zegler, an outspoken pro-Palestinian activist.
Disney will host a pre-party and screening at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles on Saturday for the live-action remake of the beloved 1937 animated film, and guests will include the “Snow White” title star as well as Israeli actress Gal Gadot, who plays the Evil Queen. A number of media outlets are typically invited to premieres to interview talent on the red carpet. However, Disney is not allowing red carpet press at the LA premiere except for photographers and a house crew in order to avoid having Zegler and Gadot answer questions on the spot, Variety reported. Disney said they will instead have “a more celebratory, family-friendly afternoon event to match the tone and target audience for the film,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The film, directed by Marc Webb, will be released in theaters March 21.
Plans for a star-studded premiere in the UK have also been nixed, and Disney will instead host a “handful” of tightly controlled press events, a source told the Daily Mail. “Disney are already anticipating an anti-woke backlash against ‘Snow White’ and have reduced the media schedule to just a handful of tightly controlled press events,” the insider said. “That is why they have taken the highly unusual step not to host a London premiere for the film and are minimizing the amount of press questions that Rachel Zegler gets.”
Zegler, 23, has made a number of controversial remarks about her role in the film but also triggered a political media storm when she posted on social media in support of a “Free Palestine.” In August last year, three days after the trailer for the new “Snow White” film was released, the Golden Globe-winning actress took to X (formerly known as Twitter) to thank fans for their support of the film. Zegler wrote in part, “I love you all so much! thank you for the love.” In a separate post on X, she added: “And always remember, free palestine [sic].” Zegler was heavily criticized for the comment by many pro-Israel supporters, especially in light of the fact that Gadot, her lead co-star in “Snow White,” was born and raised in Israel, and is a former soldier in the Israel Defense Forces.
Gadot, who is the eighth generation in her family to be born in Israel, is an avid supporter of her home country, and has several times condemned on social media the Hamas terrorist attack that took place in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Earlier this month, the “Wonder Woman” star addressed hundreds at the Anti-Defamation League’s 2025 Never is Now Summit on Antisemitism and Hate, expressing pride in being Israeli and Jewish. She told the crowd: “My name is Gal … I am a mother, a wife, a sister, a daughter, an actress, I am an Israeli – and I am Jewish. Isn’t it crazy that just saying that, just expressing such a simple fact about who I am feels like a controversial statement? But sadly, this is where we’re at today.” She also declared on stage “Am Yisrael Chai (Long Live Israel).”
When Ziegler’s casting was first announced in 2021, some Disney fans took offense to the fact that the character of Snow White will being played by an actress of Colombian descent even though the character is meant to famously have skin “as white as snow.” Some also questioned the studio’s decision to have Snow White be played by Zegler after the “West Side Story” star called the 1937 original film “weird” and “dated,” and said the prince “literally stalks Snow White” in various interviews two years ago. Supporters of US President Donald Trump also criticized Zegler for her negative comments about his reelection. “May Trump supporters and Trump voters and Trump himself never know peace. There is a deep deep sickness in this country,” she wrote on Instagram at the time. She later apologized for her remarks.
Others took offense to the fact that the film’s title makes no mention of “seven dwarfs,” even though they are critical characters in the movie, while the original film was titled “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”
Famed actor Peter Dinklage accused Disney of promoting negative stereotypes with the film’s portrayal of little people. “Literally no offense to anything, but I was sort of taken aback,” the “Game of Thrones” star said in January 2024. “They were very proud to cast a Latino actress as Snow White, but you’re still telling the story of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ Take a step back and look at what you’re doing there.”
Not long afterward, Disney clarified how it will handle Dinklage’s concerns in the new film. “To avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original animated film, we are taking a different approach with these seven characters and have been consulting with members of the dwarfism community,” the studio said in a statement to “Good Morning America.” They will appear as CGI characters in the new film.
The post Disney Curtails ‘Snow White’ Premiere Events Amid Scandals With ‘Free Palestine’ Supporter Rachel Zegler first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel Seeking to Normalize Ties With Lebanon in New Border Talks: Reports
Smoke billows after an Israeli Air Force air strike in southern Lebanon village, amid cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel, as seen from northern Israel, Oct. 3, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Jim Urquhar
Israel is seeking to normalize ties with Lebanon in upcoming talks that could potentially bring an end to decades of tensions and conflict, according to Israeli media reports.
Upcoming discussions between Beirut and Jerusalem to demarcate their countries’ shared border are part of “a broad and comprehensive plan,” with Israel aiming to establish formal diplomatic relations with Lebanon, unnamed sources told multiple Israeli news publications on Wednesday,
“The prime minister’s policy has already changed the Middle East, and we want to continue the momentum and reach normalization with Lebanon,” a political source told the Israeli news outlet Ynet. “We and the Americans think that this is possible after the changes that have occurred in Beirut.”
“Just as Lebanon has claims regarding borders, we also have claims and we will discuss these matters,” the source continued.
Israel’s Channel 12 reported similar quotes, as did the Times of Israel, the latter of which cited an unnamed official as saying that “the goal is to reach normalization.”
On Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office announced that Israel and Lebanon will begin negotiations to resolve border disputes.
“During the meeting, it was agreed to establish three joint working groups aimed at stabilizing the region which will focus on the following issues: the five points over which Israel controls southern Lebanon, discussions on the Blue Line and points that remain in dispute, and the issue of Lebanese detainees held by Israel,” the statement read.
Following US and French mediation, Israel and Lebanon agreed to establish “working groups” to discuss the demarcation line between the two countries and keep the process on track. The groups would also address Israel’s ongoing presence at five strategic points in southern Lebanon, which borders northern Israel.
“Everyone involved remains committed to maintaining the ceasefire agreement and to fully implement all its terms,” US Deputy Presidential Special Envoy Morgan Ortagus said in a statement. “We look forward to quickly convening these diplomat-led working groups to resolve outstanding issues, along with our international partners.”
Despite a brief peace agreement in 1983 and past military and economic ties with Christian factions in Lebanon, Israel’s relations with Beirut have remained tense, with no formal diplomatic ties, an unstable border, and ongoing concerns about a major conflict.
A key reason for conflict has been the role of Hezbollah, an Iran-backed terrorist group that for years has wielded significant political and military influence in Lebanon, especially the country’s south. Hezbollah leaders have long stated their goal is to destroy Israel.
Since 2020, as part of the Abraham Accords — a series of historic US-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab countries — Jerusalem has expanded defense and economic cooperation with the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Bahrain, and Morocco. Israel also has long-standing peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan.
On Wednesday, the editor of the Hezbollah-affiliated news outlet Al-Akhbar said that Israel is trying to disarm Hezbollah by force, arguing that this”“will lead to civil war” and “devastating results.”
“Opening the door to negotiations under these conditions means that there are those in Lebanon who do not read history and who do not know the risks inherent in such a step,” editor-in-chief Ibrahim al-Amin said. “Those responsible must understand that they bear responsibility for everything that results from this process of normalizing relations, and there will be devastating results.”
He also accused Israel of kidnapping Lebanese prisoners from their villages and forcibly occupying Lebanese territory.
“There are no security or military considerations that justify their continued occupation, other than to exert pressure on the residents of the border villages to prevent their return to their villages and to prevent the rehabilitation process,” Amin said.
According to local media reports, a total of 11 Lebanese nationals are currently being held by Israel. In a post on X, the Lebanese president’s office announced that Beirut had already received four Lebanese “hostages” from Israel, with a fifth to be handed over on Wednesday.
In November, Lebanon and Israel reached a US-brokered ceasefire agreement that ended a year of fighting between the Jewish state and Hezbollah. Under the agreement, Israel was given 60 days to withdraw from Beirut’s southern border, allowing the Lebanese army and UN forces to take over security as Hezbollah disarms and moves away from Israel’s northern border.
However, Israel announced last month that it would keep troops in five locations in southern Lebanon past a Feb. 18 ceasefire deadline for their withdrawal, as Israeli leaders sought to reassure northern residents that they can return home safely.
Tens of thousands of residents in northern Israel were forced to evacuate their homes last year and in late 2023 amid unrelenting barrages of rockets, missiles, and drones from Hezbollah, which expressed solidarity with Hamas amid the Gaza war.
Last fall, Israel decimated much of Hezbollah’s leadership and military capabilities with an air and ground offensive, which ended with the ceasefire.
The post Israel Seeking to Normalize Ties With Lebanon in New Border Talks: Reports first appeared on Algemeiner.com.