Watching Queen of Chess, Rory Kennedy’s Netflix documentary about the top-ranked woman chess player and her long contest with world champion Garry Kasparov, I was reminded — of all things — of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

It comes down to one moment. In a montage in the 2018 superhero cartoon, we briefly see Peter Parker’s wedding, where he steps on a glass. This one second of film inspired an avalanche of speculation that Spider-Man (or at least a version of him) was Jewish.

In Kennedy’s film, we see footage from Polgar’s wedding, where her husband breaks a glass. This is the only clue I saw in the entire film that she is Jewish. We need not speculate if this is the case, as we might with fictional characters with arachnid physiology — it’s a matter of public record. And it’s a pretty big part of her story to leave out.

As the film’s early moments make clear, Polgar, now 49, and her older sisters, Grandmaster Susan and International Master Sofia, were not instant prodigies, but the result of a social experiment. The Polgars lived in a ramshackle house with wet walls in the workers’ district of Budapest. The country was poor and, in the Soviet era, topped Europe in suicides.

Their father, László, an educational psychologist, was desperate to make a better life for his children, and so he studied the lives of geniuses and alit on the idea to homeschool his daughters — unheard of in a collectivist country — and from the age of 5 drill them in chess.

Why chess? Their mother, Klára, explains in an interview for the film: “Very simple. The chess board, it’s easy to have it and very cheap.”

When his daughters started drawing attention for their early victories, and for decades after as they rose to international acclaim, the press would frame Polgar’s regimen as child abuse; one headline called him a “Hungarian Daddy Dearest.” Interviews conducted for the film with László give the impression that he’s a demanding eccentric, but skip over some crucial context: He was born in 1946 to parents who survived Auschwitz.

László’s father, Armin, lost his first wife, six children and his own parents in the death camp. For someone with this background, family, and survival, couldn’t be taken for granted.

As László  told the Jerusalem Post in 2017, “being a Jew gave me extra motivation to succeed.”

Sofia Polgar wrote in her autobiography that the “fighting spirit that is running through my veins,” came from her survivor grandparents.

“My grandparents were the ‘lucky ones,’ with the numbers tattooed on their arms and nightmares for the rest of their lives,” but who had the strength to rebuild, Sofia wrote, adding that she still has “a bad feeling when seeing train tracks.”

In her 2025 memoir, Rebel Queen, Susan Polgar, Judit’s eldest sister, recalls her father returning home from work and finding a letter with no return address.

“Inside was a photo of him with his eyes cut out,” she writes. “There was also a one-page handwritten letter, which he refused to let me read. He only said that it was dripping with antisemitic remarks and violent threats.”

Within the country Susan sensed that the Polgars were not regarded as “real” Hungarians. The government denied them travel permits and Klára recalls being woken up by armed police. There were threats to take their children away.

Things changed when, after criticism from the international press, the Polgars were allowed to leave the Eastern Bloc for the 1988 Olympiad in Thessaloniki, Greece. The three sisters and their teammate Ildikó Mádl triumphed over the Soviets women’s team and returned as heroes.

Judit, then 12, soon emerged as the top female chess player and sought out men to compete against. After becoming the youngest grandmaster at 15 and 4 months, beating Bobby Fischer’s record, she faced world champion Garry Kasparov for the first time in Linares in 1994. She was 17, he was 30. Their contests and (spoiler), Polgar’s ultimate victory over Kasparov in 2001, form the arc of the film.

Buoyed by a soundtrack of women-led rock and punk bands like Tilly and the Wall and Delta 5, Queen of Chess is primarily about the first woman to smash the chess world’s glass ceiling, cracking into the top 10 overall world ranking — still the only woman to do so — and defeating the number one-ranked player.

Interviews with younger women chess players speak of her as an inspiration. Kasparov, while he now respects Judit, still comes off as sexist in contemporary interviews with remarks like “one of the typical weaknesses of many female players is that they are panicking if there’s a threat.”

This by itself, is enough material for a film, and Kennedy does an admirable job building suspense using archival video from tournaments and a digital chess board tracking the moves of the match.

What’s fascinating about the omission of the girls’ Jewishness is that Kennedy, a director of a couple dozen documentaries about social issues and historical injustices, and the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy and sister of RFK Jr., rightly, acknowledges it as an obstacle in an interview for the press notes.

“The odds were staggering,” Kennedy said. “They were poor. They were Jewish. They were girls.”

The last factor may well trump the others (Kasparov was born Garik Kimovich Weinstein).

Still, Jewishness continues to play a large role in the sisters’ lives. In 2024, Judit and Sofia played matches in Berlin’s parliament in honor of Israeli hostages. Sofia made aliyah in 1999 and is married to Israeli grandmaster Yona Kosashvili. Her parents followed her there.

In the film’s bittersweet final moments, Kennedy asks Judit how she felt being part of an experiment, and missing out on a normal childhood. She takes a while to respond, and does so with a bit of ambivalence.

“I never felt myself being a genius,” Judit says. “I know that the things I could reach, that was definitely like 95% of my work and dedication. And this came from my parents.”

The impetus behind the experiment, to do whatever they could to help their children rise above their circumstances, may be best explained by all that came before them.

In a phone call Thursday, Susan Polgar confirmed that their Jewish history came up in interviews, and acknowledged that a lot was left on the cutting room floor. Within the family, she said, Judit spoke about how this would just be one interpretation of their family’s history.

“What people tell me is actually that probably ideal would be to have a miniseries,” Polgar said.

We may need to wait for that, but for those who want the Jewish story, there’s a 2014 Israeli documentary called The Polgar Variant.

“Obviously that has a lot more of that angle, naturally,” Susan Polgar said.

Rory Kennedy’s Queen of Chess is now playing at the Sundance Film Festival. It debuts on Netflix Feb. 6.

The post Netflix’s ‘Queen of Chess’ tracks the rise of Judit Polgar — but leaves her Jewishness out of it appeared first on The Forward.

There’s a moment in the musical Oliver! when Fagin launches into one of Lionel Bart’s deliciously minor-key melodies, and suddenly the show feels about as Victorian as a hot pastrami on rye. Oliver! may be the most Jewish musical ever written that refuses to admit as much, and watching Simon Lipkin’s sly, buoyant portrayal of Fagin on London’s West End recently, I felt a jolt of something I hadn’t expected:

Home.

Not literal home, but the emotional topography of my family’s Friday night dinner tables where Holocaust survivors, former Yiddish theater actors and comedians filled the empty chairs left behind by Auschwitz itself. Improbably, Oliver! belonged to them too.

The musical’s West End revival underscores this. At a moment when antisemitism is still frighteningly on the rise, and theaters everywhere are re-examining the stories they tell and who gets to tell them, Oliver! has slipped into surprisingly contemporary territory. Matthew Bourne’s production doesn’t necessarily announce that it is a “Jewish” interpretation, but it acknowledges the show’s long, complicated history with a lighter touch and a sharper awareness. Watching Lipkin lean into the character’s humor and inherent Jewishness (“Oy, a broch!” he cries out emphatically at one point, beating his heart with his fist) but without the burden of caricature, I realized how the work has evolved — quietly, confidently — and how audiences have evolved along with it.

It’s impossible to miss the Jewish musical DNA in Bart’s score. The minor keys, the phrasing (“Such a sky you never did see!”), the cantorial wails that hold joy and heartbreak in the same breath: These were familiar to me long before I knew what to call them. Bart may have been writing about Victorian street urchins, but he couldn’t escape the musical instincts of his upbringing in London’s East End where he was born Lionel Begleiter. The melody of “Pick a Pocket or Two” could pass for a klezmer romp at a Hasidic wedding; “Reviewing the Situation,” sung by Fagin when he finds himself at a moral crossroads, is practically a cantor’s aria, ornamented with flourishes I’ve heard at countless High Holiday services.

There’s nothing explicitly Jewish in the script — no references or labels — yet many of the melodies feel instinctively Jewish in their rhythms and slyness. And that instinct carried me back to a question I’ve often considered since childhood:

How did Ron Moody, who originated this comic version of Fagin in 1960 and reimagined him for the 1968 film, manage to get away with it?

When I first saw Moody’s Fagin on screen, I was captivated by his portrayal. But I also didn’t understand how someone could play such a Jewish rogue at a time when Dickens’ caricature of “the Jew” still hovered uneasily in our cultural memory. Whenever I try to think of famous Jews on stage, the first two that pop into my head are villains: Shylock and Fagin. Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice has been around forever, first published in 1600. But Oliver! debuted only 14 years after the Holocaust — the role should have been a minefield. Yet critics adored him, Jewish audiences embraced him, and Moody’s Fagin became beloved, not reviled.

Years later, when my friendship with Moody began — after he’d expressed interest in playing a villain opposite Carrie Fisher in a horror-comedy film I’d written — I was surprised by how different he was from the man onscreen. Soft-spoken and unmistakably British; nothing like the quicksilver trickster he was so skilled at portraying. He could summon that twinkle instantly, of course, but it wasn’t his resting state. He was in his early 60s then, newly delighted by late-in-life fatherhood, devoted to his younger wife Therese and their first child (whom he called “Boo-boo” with disarming tenderness). As more children arrived — he ultimately had six — I would tease him about assembling his own soccer team, which amused him to no end.

His Fagin, I came to realize, wasn’t a caricature but a cultural inheritance he carried lightly — a set of rhythms and comic cadences he understood from growing up as Ronald Moodnick in a warm Jewish household. And that was why the performance didn’t offend, and why it felt so familiar.

Though my mother lit the Sabbath candles and whispered the Hebrew blessing each Friday night, our dinners were less about religious ritual than about the rebuilding of a life she had salvaged from Auschwitz with nothing but willpower and the hope of joy still intact. In New York, she fashioned a new family out of survivors, actors from the Yiddish theater, and intellectuals whose humor carried both bruises and brilliance. These friends became surrogate aunts and uncles to my sister and me.

My mother was endlessly curious and had a gift for gathering people. She co-hosted a weekly language club with radio personality Barry Farber, a Southerner who startled me by speaking fluent, musical Yiddish. Occasionally he’d turn up at our Friday night table alongside an unlikely combination of guests, including my Bostonian Jewish piano teacher, a wryly funny family friend who once published an anarchist newspaper in Cuba until Castro forced him to flee, other European Holocaust survivors, and whichever schoolmates of mine my mother decided ought to be fed. The orbit was colorful and improbable, but it made sense. These were people who made her feel alive.

Some of our guests were well-known in the Yiddish arts — like Fyvush Finkel and his wife, Trudi; Broadway stage actors Muni Seroff and Irving Jacobson; Malvina Rappel, who had appeared in the classic Yiddish film Motel the Operator (Motl der Operator) and later hosted a radio program on WEVD back when it still broadcast in Yiddish.

Friday nights tended to unfold the same way: dinner first, then an impromptu cabaret. Someone sat down at the piano; someone else — usually my parents — burst into song or shtick. In an instant, our modest living room became a sort of vaudeville house. It was unself-conscious and exuberant, a weekly affirmation that even those who had lost everything could conjure laughter with astonishing force.

I didn’t know it then, but this was an education. Not in religion, but in rhythm. In timing. In the strange alchemy that binds sorrow to humor. Long before I ever wrote a script, I had already absorbed the comedic cadences that would shape my work.

As I grew older, that early immersion quietly charted the course of my career. Writing my book They’ll Never Put That on the Air brought me into long, generous conversations with some of the greatest architects of American television comedy — Carl Reiner, Larry Gelbart, Norman Lear, David Steinberg — artists whose work dismantled censorship and altered the medium. They offered insights I hear in my head to this day when I write.

In one of those unlikely, full-circle pinch-me moments, a few years ago I found myself directing Mel Brooks in the recording booth for Flower of the Dawn, an animated musical film I co-wrote and produced. Mel quickly corrected a joke of mine on the spot: “You’re cluttering the line with all this extra stuff at the end. End it here, with the punch!”

What stayed with me wasn’t just the correction; it was the realization that the comic instincts I’d carried since childhood had an architecture. Mel didn’t echo my family’s living room cabaret; he clarified what all that laughter had taught me.

So when I sat in the Gielgud Theatre watching Simon Lipkin give Fagin new life, it felt less like a reinterpretation than a recognition. Lipkin wasn’t parroting Moody — he was putting his own youthful spin on the role, while tapping into the same emotional and musical DNA: a blend of humor, vulnerability and those unmistakable minor-key inflections that carry an entire history inside them.

Not everyone in that audience heard what I heard. But I did. And for a moment, the distance between my family’s living room and a West End stage felt very small.

The post Could this be the most Jewish musical that never admits its own Jewishness? appeared first on The Forward.

The announcement Thursday by New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin of a new task force dedicated to combating antisemitism — co-chaired by a critic of Mayor Zohran Mamdani — is setting up potential tension between the City Council and the mayor’s office over how to respond to the rise in antisemitism.

So is the introduction of a measure that could limit protests outside synagogues, part of a package of new Council bills aimed at antisemitism.

Councilmember Eric Dinowitz, a Democrat from the Bronx, who was selected along with Brooklyn Councilmember Inna Vernikov, a Republican, as co-chair of the seven-member working group, said they intend to take a more assertive legislative role in addressing rising concerns among Jewish New Yorkers “in a way that may be different than what the mayor wants to do.”

That includes weighing the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which considers most forms of anti-Zionism as antisemitic, as a framework for investigating hate crimes — a position Mamdani opposes. “I believe that IHRA has a good structure for defining antisemitism,” Vernikov said in an interview. In 2023, Vernikov passed a resolution to create an annual day to “end Jew-hatred.”

On his first day in office earlier this month, Mamdani drew criticism from mainstream Jewish organizations for revoking an executive order by former Mayor Eric Adams that adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism. Liberal Jewish groups oppose that framework. Some support the Nexus Document, which states that most criticism of Israel and Zionism is not antisemitic. The mayor has declined to say how his administration will define antisemitism when determining which cases to investigate or pursue.

Mamdani has kept open the recently created Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, which he said will pursue his vision to address rising acts of hate against Jews. Mamdani said on Thursday that he’s in the final stages of selecting an executive director for that office.

Dinowitz, who also chairs the council’s Jewish Caucus, said it was important to move forward in parallel with the mayor’s efforts. “We are a separate, co-equal branch of government that has our own ideas and initiatives that we need to pursue to keep Jewish New Yorkers safe,” he said. Dinowitz, who represents the heavily Jewish neighborhood of Riverdale, added that most members of the task force are not Jewish, underscoring that antisemitism is not solely a Jewish issue.

Antisemitic incidents accounted for 57% of reported hate crimes in 2025, according to the NYPD. The new year started with a rash of antisemitic incidents across the city. On Thursday, a 36-year-old man was charged with attempted assault as hate crimes after repeatedly crashing into the entrance of the Chabad-Lubavitch world headquarters in Brooklyn the night before. On Tuesday, a rabbi was verbally harassed and assaulted in Forest Hills, Queens, and last week, a playground frequented by Orthodox families in the Borough Park neighborhood in Brooklyn was graffitied with swastikas two days in a row. In both incidents, the suspects have been arrested.

Vernikov’s past remarks draw scrutiny

Thursday’s announcement also drew controversy.

Vernikov has faced criticism for incendiary remarks on social media and has been a vocal critic of the Democratic Party’s approach to antisemitism. During the mayoral election, she warned that “Jihad is coming to NYC” if Mamdani wins, and called him a “terrorist-lover.” In response to a Yiddish-language campaign flyer, she wrote that Mamdani wants Jews “to burn in an oven.” She called the Jewish liaison for State Attorney General Letitia James a “Kapo Sell Out” for praising Mamdani’s outreach. In 2023, Vernikov was arrested after being pictured with a gun at her waist as she attended a pro-Israel counter-protest near a pro-Palestinian rally at Brooklyn College. A judge later dismissed the charges against her.

The progressive Jews For Racial & Economic Justice, which endorsed Mamdani through its affiliated political arm, The Jewish Vote, called Vernikov’s appointment unacceptable. Sophie Ellman-Golan, a JFREJ spokesperson, said Vernikov “regularly diminishes the seriousness of antisemitism by reducing it to a political cudgel.”

Menin, who some see as a check on the mayor and a potential guardrail on his actions, defended the appointment. “The Jewish Caucus voted to have this task force,” Menin told reporters. “Obviously, I don’t agree with the comments that she made in the past, and I’ve made that known to her.” Menin, the first Jewish speaker of the City Council, has pointed to the symbolism of her elevation alongside Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor, as an opportunity to “take the temperature and the rhetoric down.”

Vernikov confirmed that the Jewish Caucus approved her selection, but insisted the speaker was involved in the initiative.

In the interview, Vernikov noted that Mamdani “has said things and done things that make the Jewish community very fearful.” She added that she hopes the mayor will translate his pledge to fight antisemitism into concrete action, “but until then, we have a trust issue with him.”

Mamdani addressed Vernikov’s attacks in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Thursday. “I know that there are so many in this city who have to deal with similar kinds of smears,” he said. “But what I know that New Yorkers want to see, what I want to see, is a humanity embodied in our politics, not the language of darkness that has taken hold.”

Menin’s legislative package to counter antisemitism

Also on Thursday, Menin introduced a legislative package as part of her five-point plan to combat antisemitism, including a proposal to ban protests near the entrances and exits of houses of worship, $1.25 million in funding for the Museum of Jewish Heritage, and the creation of a city hotline to report antisemitic incidents.

Mamdani said he broadly supports the package but expressed reservations about the proposed 100-foot buffer zone around synagogues and other houses of worship. “I wouldn’t sign any legislation that we find to be outside of the bounds of the law,” he said.

At a press conference, Menin said the measure was designed not to restrict protest but to prevent confrontations. “Enforcement is not based on speech or viewpoint,” she said. “It is based on conduct that endangers others.”

The Council will vote on the measures at its next meeting in February.

The post New York City Council pushes action on antisemitism without Mamdani appeared first on The Forward.