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As an American rabbi in King Charles’ court, I’m learning to love the king (in addition to the King)
(JTA) — Perhaps the strangest part was sitting through a Sunday service in the 1,000-year-old nave of St. Albans Cathedral (the longest nave in England!) and hearing the Hebrew Bible (specifically I Kings 1:32-40) read aloudt in English. Maybe stranger yet was hearing part of that passage set to the music of 17th-century maestro George Friedrich Handel! These, and many other oddities, were only a fraction of the wonderful and unusual experiences of being an American-born British rabbi during the first coronation this country has seen in 70 years.
As with the funeral last year of the late Queen Elizabeth, the scale of organization and competence required to pull off such an event is astounding. For a country where it often feels that small-scale bureaucracy can get in the way of day-to-day life, the coronation was, by all accounts, seamless. This of course makes it the exception rather than the rule, as coronations past were often marred by logistical issues, bad luck and sometimes straight-up violence.
It was the coronation of Richard I in 1189 that unleashed anti-Jewish massacres and pogroms across the country and led to the York Massacre in 1190, in which over 150 local Jews killed themselves after being trapped in Clifford’s Tower, which was set ablaze by an angry mob. During that year there were attacks in London, Lynn, Bury St. Edmunds, Stamford, Lincoln, Colchester and others. It was exactly 100 years later, in 1290, that Edward I would expel Jews from England altogether. They wouldn’t return (officially) for 400 years — or get an official apology from the church for 800.
This weekend’s festivities, thankfully, were of a very different caliber. Not only were Jewish communities front and center, but Jews, religious and not, were active and welcome participants in the ceremony in Westminster Abbey. Indeed, despite the ceremony taking place on Shabbat, the United Synagogue (a mainstream Orthodox denomination that accounts for 40-45% of British Jewish synagogue membership) was represented by Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, who, together with other faith leaders, played a role in greeting the king as he left the church. This was especially unusual as it has long been the position of the United Synagogue that their rabbis and members should not go into churches (much less on Shabbat). In many ways, this demonstrates one of the consistent themes of the coronation: the interruption of normal routine and the continued exceptionalism of the royal family.
Rabbi Adam Zagoria-Moffet stands atop the bell tower of St. Albans Cathedral before Rosh Hashanah in 2020. (Talya Baker)
Judaism is agnostic, at best, about kings. Our own monarchy came about because the people insisted on it, but against the will of the prophet Samuel against the desire of God. Once it was established — a process which involved several civil wars, a lot of bloodshed and the degradation of many historical elements of Israelite society — it did, for a brief time, bring some stability to the fragile confederacy of Israelite tribes. But it was really only the half-century golden era under King Solomon that managed this feat. After him, and ever since, the monarchy has been a source of conflict and violence. While we still hope that a righteous heir of the Davidic monarchy will reappear and take their place as king of Israel, we, famously, are not holding our breath.
Our approach to non-Jewish monarchs is even more complex. Whilst King Charles III was being coronated to the words of our holy texts and being anointed in oil (the ceremony for our monarchs) from the Mount of Olives (in our holy land), we were at the same time reciting a litany of prayers, as we do daily, to remind us (in the words of our prayers): “We have no king but You” (Avinu Malkeinu); “Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom” (Ashrei); “God is King, God has ruled, God will rule forever (Y’hi Khavod); “God’s kingship is true there is none else” (Aleinu).
These words were chosen by our sages for our prayers in part because they shared the biblical anxiety about monarchs. Halacha, Jewish law, does retain the notion of a king over Israel, but that king is so heavily bound by legislation, it is far from the absolutist monarchies of most of Europe.
However, since 1688 at least, after the brief (and failed) experiment with the notion of divine right of kings, England (and now the United Kingdom) has endorsed the notion of a constitutional monarch — a king or queen who is esteemed, but also bound by the law and by restrictions imposed by the people. In practice, this makes today’s monarchy an awful lot like that of ancient Israel, and very different from historic European monarchies, as well as very different from how Americans and others often see it. After nearly six years living and working on these green isles, I’ve come to appreciate the complexities and absurdities of the British monarchy, and to value the role that the ceremonies play in the collective life of Britons.
Many here are surprised to find that, being a Yankee, I’m not also a republican (an anti-monarchist, in the British context). Indeed, while I have my doubts about the idea of monarchy and while, religiously, there is a strong argument against human authority, the monarchy as it operates in modern Britain is fairly compatible with the idea of kingship as established by halacha — restrained, limited and primarily occupied with being a moral exemplar rather than an authoritarian ruler. Maybe then it shouldn’t be so strange that so much of the ceremonies this weekend were drawn from our texts, and so much of the symbolism referential to our tradition. We can be grateful that King Charles’s coronation, the first in a generation, went off without a hitch and without bloodshed, and with the support and involvement of a diverse representation of Britain’s peoples and faiths.
To the outside, this weekend has likely appeared to be just a lot of pomp and pageantry. No doubt, it is often Americans who are camping out on the Mall in see-through tents or wearing the royal family’s faces as masks in coronation parties — but this American, after more than half a decade here in Britain, can appreciate the depth of the monarchy in ways I couldn’t before. I see both its deep significance and history, its connection to our own tradition (sometimes through appropriation), and its negatives. As a rabbi and a Jew, I will always be of the opinion that there is only one Sovereign who truly rules, but there is something to be said for having a king as well as a King.
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They were the Messis and Ronaldos of their time. And their fellow countrymen murdered them.
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 1 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 between them, in 1924, 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,” Bolchoverf 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 the founders now, or on the chairman? 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.
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.
We know why.
The post They were the Messis and Ronaldos of their time. And their fellow countrymen murdered them. appeared first on The Forward.
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Rob Reiner delivers a posthumous parting blow to Donald Trump
In a moment that drew a rare rebuke from even Donald Trump’s stalwarts, the president took the occasion of Rob Reiner’s tragic death in December to claim the cause was “anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS.”
It was tasteless, cruel and not in the least bit funny.
Seven months later, Reiner has punched back from beyond the grave. Whether the punchlines landed is a matter of some debate.
In the second episode of Larry David’s Semiquencentennial-timed sketch series Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, Reiner appears as George Washington addressing an audience as he ends his second term in office.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” a clean-shaven, wigged-up Reiner, who filmed this appearance last November, begins. “I stand before you today as your president to announce that I shall not be seeking a third term.”
(The choice to not continue in office, George W. Bush recently opined, in what some believe to be a veiled swipe at Trump, was perhaps the first president’s greatest legacy.)
The crowd, including Larry David’s outspoken contrarian, reacts in shock. For every precedent Reiner as Washington introduces, David’s character chimes in with hypothetical challenges.
Washington’s hope that future presidents don’t abide by his two-term example? David: What if some future president doesn’t follow your lead? Washington: Congress can pass a constitutional amendment that would prohibit that. (They did, the 21st, but only after Franklin Delano Roosevelt served his three terms and 82 days of his fourth.)
David: What if there’s some narcissistic prick who doesn’t follow the Constitution?
Washington says that there are sufficient guardrails — the Congress and Judiciary wouldn’t allow this.
David: What if the Supreme Court is a bunch of yes-men and Congress is a bunch of p—ies who care more about party than country?
It goes on like this, rather Talmudically, with Reiner remaining staid as David suggests a scenario where a future president might interfere with a peaceful transfer of power with an insurrection or kill American citizens to distract from his friendship with a pedophile.
This is satire not with a scalpel, but a bone saw.
The sketch isn’t quite funny. Mostly, it’s sad, even as Jimmy Kimmel makes a cameo, an allusion to Trump’s attempts to censor him, to wave away scenarios silencing free speech as improbable.
What can we make of it all? There are philosophical camps that place great value in the jester’s privilege and the imperative for comedy to knock the corrupt and powerful down a peg. This whole sketch seems as though it was devised to flatter the outrage of David and Reiner’s fellow travelers and, like the Declaration of Independence, make mad a tyrant.
Kimmel is proof that humor can get under Donald Trump’s skin. Some claim Trump’s presidential campaign truly launched the night Obama made jokes at his expense at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (Obama is a producer on David’s show). Trump’s loathsome attack on Reiner signaled his continued preoccupation with Hollywood figures who never welcomed him.
“I love that in this weird way, Rob gets the last word” director Jeff Schaffer said on the Obsessed podcast, adding that if the sketch “spoils a sad octogenarian’s weekend, so be it.”
But what else happened this weekend?
A mixed bag for the presidency: Trump overruled a recommendation to cancel his shambolic 4th of July festivities on the National Mall over weather concerns. (He delivered his keynote to empty seats, and is at press time revising the crowd numbers.) On the other side of the ledger, he appeared to get FIFA to withdraw a red card from Team USA’s leading scorer. Ahead of Independence Day, the Supreme Court expanded his fiat as Commander in Chief, but defied him on Birthright Citizenship.
While this sketch is a final gift to fans of Reiner, who exactly had the last laugh is about as clear as an algae-blighted reflecting pool. But perhaps the sketch’s premise is no laughing matter at all, just a diagnosis.
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Netanyahu pushes back on Vance’s claims that US is Israel’s ‘only powerful ally’
(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected Vice President JD Vance’s recent claims that the U.S. is Israel’s “only powerful ally” left in the world.
When asked on Fox News Sunday what his reaction was to Vance’s remarks, which came as Israeli ministers criticized the framework deal signed by the U.S. and Iran to end hostilities, Netanyahu replied, “I respect JD Vance. We have a very good relationship, but that doesn’t mean that I agree with everything that he says.”
“I have to point out this: Donald Trump is a great, the greatest friend we ever had in the White House, and I stand by that completely,” Netanyahu continued. “Secondly, we have some other friends, like a small country called India, you know, it has 1.4 billion people, and boy, do we have a tremendous support there.”
Netanyahu added that Israel also has the support of “many others,” but did not elaborate on which countries he was referring to.
“The relations are not quite as they appear, and we have, we have many, many friends, and I have to tell you, we also take care of our friends, especially the Christians in the Middle East,” Netanyahu said.
The prime minister also dismissed the claim that there was any rift between the United States and Israel regarding the deal with Iran, telling Fox that he and President Donald Trump were “set on the same goal.”
“President Trump is the leader of the United States. He does what’s good for America. I’m the leader of Israel, the one and only Jewish state. I do what’s good for Israel,” Netanyahu said. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, we see eye to eye, but as any, in any family, in any close friendship, there are sometimes differences of opinion, and we discuss them openly.”
Netanyahu also said that he and Trump have “common objectives” regarding the U.S. deal with Iran.
“We want to see Iran give up its nuclear weapons program. We want to see the nuclear enriched material removed. We want to see the enrichment sites for nuclear material dismantled,” Netanyahu said, adding, “as long as I’m prime minister, Iran will not have nuclear weapons.”
On Saturday, Trump told Axios that Netanyahu had requested a meeting at the White House and said that the pair gets along “very good” and that the Israeli leader “knows who the boss is.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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