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If mollusks are kosher, the world can be your oyster
I’ve gone to work on an oyster farm on Block Island, a tiny dot of land midway between Long Island and Rhode Island, every May for the past few years.
If you are, like most people, unfamiliar with the mechanics of oyster farming, here’s what it looks like, at least on this farm. First, you toot around a saltwater pond in a glorified bathtub with a motor hanging off the back. From the boat, wearing chest waders, you hop in the water to unmoor dozens of giant floating mesh bags full of oysters from lines anchored in the pond. The bags are usually also bogged down with a mess of extraneous sea dwellers like kelp, mussels, green crabs and goopy creatures called sea squirts, so they’re heavy. You pile as many bags as you can into the boat, clamber back in — which is harder than it sounds, because your wader boots are probably stuck in the mud at the bottom of the pond — and bring those bags to a floating barge.
Finally, you dump the bag onto a muddy wooden table, pick out everything that isn’t an oyster, since all of those aforementioned sea critters will kill the prize bivalve, and chuck the extra stuff back into the pond. Then you hand-sort the oysters by size. You harvest ones that are big enough to eat — oysters take a few years to reach full size, and grow unevenly, so each bag always has a range of oysters — shovel the rest back in the bags, get back in the boat and tie them back onto the lines. Then you do it again. On a good day, you get through around 100 bags of oysters in a shift.
Bigger farms might have machinery to help sort the oysters; this farm does everything by hand. This may sound backbreaking, and it is, but it’s also a great break from desk work. A day spent out on the water doing repetitive physical labor is a kind of a reset. You can’t look at your phone with the wet, muddy oyster gloves on, and there’s barely service anyway. Plus you’d probably drop it in the pond, so it’s best not to try.
You may, at this point, notice that you’re reading a Jewish newspaper, that I’m a Jewish journalist, and that oysters are not kosher.
But what if I told you oysters were, in fact, kosher? That a rabbi once argued they are actually vegetables, by virtue of the fact that they “root” on rocks in the ocean? And that their shells are a form of scales, thus making them part of the kosher category of scaled and finned fish?
These are real arguments that were made around the turn of the 20th century by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the founder of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, the first American institution for Reform Jewish ordination.
The impetus for this Talmudic bit of logic was in large part a now-infamous feast that has come to be known as the “Trefa Banquet,” due to the amount of non-kosher food that was served. The menu included littleneck clams, shrimp salad, soft-shell crabs, a lobster bisque and frog legs in a cream sauce. Bordeaux wine and Champagne, also not kosher, were served alongside each course, and ice cream — real ice cream, made with dairy — followed with dessert, despite previous meat courses that included beef tenderloins and squab.
The occasion was a triple-header of religious Jewish events: HUC’s first ordination, a meeting of the Rabbinical Literary Association and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the previous name of today’s Union for Reform Judaism. And the discourse this meal set off about the place — or lack thereof — for kashrut in American Jewish life went on for years.
Despite the fact that oysters had not even been on the menu, in Jewish newspapers across the country, rabbis and laypeople wrote warring op-eds on the kosherness of oysters. Somehow, oysters became the symbol of what American Judaism would be. And, of course, what American Jews would eat.
The symbol of an oyster
I had never eaten an oyster until I lived in Seattle after college; for my first anniversary with a long-ago ex-boyfriend, we went to what was then the hottest restaurant in the city, an oyster bar. We were broke, but playing at a kind of sophisticated adulthood we hadn’t quite reached, and oysters seemed like the way to act out that sophistication.
Presented with a menu of oysters from across the country and not knowing where to begin, we got an array on the half shell, two each of a dozen types presented on a beautiful bed of ice with lemon and mignonette. Unsure how to slurp them out of the shell, I had to ask the waiter whether one chews oysters or just swallows. (You chew.)
The first one tasted like a stormy ocean, another buttery and mild, a third one sweet and meaty. They were evocative, like eating the memory of a day at the beach.
Oysters, if you haven’t had them, have terroir in the same way as wine does. Just as grapes take on the characteristics of the soil they grew in, oysters taste different depending on the water they came from; even though there are only a few different species of the bivalve, there are countless variations. East Coast oysters tend to be sharp and briny and refreshing, while West Coast oysters are usually creamy and sweet. But past that, each one is completely unlike the next.
One oyster I had from Maine tasted like pennies. (Maybe that doesn’t sound appetizing, but neither does petrol, yet aged rieslings are prized for their petrol notes.) I’ve had oysters that tasted delicately vegetal, like a cucumber, or deeply umami like a mushroom.
When the Trefa Banquet occurred, oysters were in vogue across the U.S. And the occasion was a lavish and sophisticated one, almost a coming-out party for American Jewry. It was, after all, the celebration of the first class of rabbis ordained in the U.S., proof to the country that Jews were here to stay, and a statement to the rabbis and Jews of Europe that these American Jews were just as good, just as learned, as their European counterparts. In fact, perhaps more so — they were creating a new model of Reform Judaism, leaving the Old Country’s ways behind for a modern, American image of what it meant to be a Jew. The menu had to be the pinnacle of refinement.
Plus, these Cincinnati Jews had a bunch of New Yorkers in from the big city to impress. In a 2005 paper published in The American Jewish Archives Journal, rabbi and historian Lance J. Sussman argued that the menu, which included numerous French misspellings, may have been the caterer’s attempt to appeal to what he imagined were the more elevated tastes of the event’s East Coast guests.
Of course they served shellfish.
In 1883, the year of the banquet, America’s Jews were largely German immigrants. (Though newer waves of immigration had begun to bring in more traditionally observant Russian Jews fleeing pogroms.) Some of them had been associated with the Haskalah in Europe, a progressive Jewish education movement that advocated for secular education, modern dress and assimilation into wider society. By and large, these Jews were urban, educated and middle-class, having left the shtetl Judaism of their elders behind when they left the village.
These Jews began to develop a modernized form of Judaism, largely based in Germany. They changed the liturgy, axing concepts they found backwards, such as the idea that, in a coming Messianic era, Jews would return to Zion and resume sacrificing animals in a restored temple. They recited prayers in German instead of Hebrew and lightened many of the restrictions involved in observing Shabbat, kashrut and festivals. They took on a Christian aesthetic, exchanging synagogue chanting for an organ and choir. Sermons emphasized universal ethical themes instead of Jewish rituals. Some rabbis even argued for allowing both intermarriage and eating pork, though these topics remained hotly debated.
Once imported to the U.S., this newfangled Judaism got more popular.
“Part of the Reform ideology is to get away from all of the laws, all the do’s and don’ts of Judaism, which are considered primitive and superstitions almost,” said Jane Ziegelman, a Jewish food historian and curator of food talks at the Tenement Museum.
Instead, these Reformers wanted to turn Judaism into a more introspective, morally and socially focused religion. And thanks to its roots in the Haskalah, science was core to this new, modern Judaism. Oysters made for a perfect example. At the time, bivalves were considered an aphrodisiac and a health food, and they were both plentiful and popular. (So popular, in fact, that they got over-harvested, which is one of the reasons they’re so expensive today; the mountains of shells from the oysters eaten by New Yorkers were so large they posed a sanitation challenge.) These modernizing Jews understood kashrut to be, fundamentally, about health and ethics, which meant that anything healthy should be kosher.
“The idea was that the unhealthy categorization of the oyster had been proven wrong by modern science,” said Ziegelman.
American Reform Jews saw kosher rules, which they dismissively referred to as “kitchen Judaism,” as a contrast to their more noble pursuit of an intellectual, moral and scientific Judaism. Embracing the oyster was a way to live out their ideals about assimilation, modernization and religious ethics.
“It was the oyster because of its prevalence in American food culture,” Ziegelman told me. “To adopt the oyster was seen as both acculturation — that you really were American — but also you really were a modern person. You weren’t relying on these old kashrut superstitions.”
The shellfish scandal
Not everyone waxes poetic about oysters’ subtle marine nuances so much as their textural similarities to mucus. Personally, I don’t get that — I find them silky, or buttery, or meaty — but I get that oysters can seem a bit gross, and not just because of their texture.
Though on the farm, the oysters float on the surface of the water in bags, they are, at least naturally, bottom dwellers. They’re also “filter feeders,” which means they filter water for their food. This makes them an excellent resource in cleaning up polluted waterways — the Billion Oyster Project in New York City works restoring oyster reefs to the rivers around the city to help clean them and encourage biodiversity. But that also means that oysters aren’t always safe to eat because they’re consuming whatever bad stuff there is in the water. They can purify themselves given enough time in clean water, but they get polluted easily by their environment, perhaps one of the reasons they were originally forbidden under the laws of kashrut.
And even when they’re from clean water, there’s a lot to manage to make them safe. My partner and I run an oyster shucking side hustle with some friends, popping up at bars and events and turning out trays of raw oysters on the half shell. Preparing for each event takes many hours. You have to scrub the mud off each shell with a stiff-bristled brush. Then, since you want your oysters alive until you eat them lest they spoil, you pack them in coolers on ice — but you can’t bury them in too much ice lest they freeze to death. And since they’re salt-water dwellers, you have to drain the coolers regularly to prevent them from drowning in the freshwater ice melt.
On top of that, as a saying goes, oysters are best in the months that contain the letter R — September through April. Some of that is because they are plumpest during colder months when they build up their fat stores. But some of it is because colder waters reduce the risk that a raw oyster will carry a virus or bacteria like Vibrio or norovirus.
Today, farms take the temperature of their water daily and regularly test it for bacteria, so raw oysters aren’t particularly dangerous, but you can still easily get food poisoning from a mishandled oyster. As much as I love them, they’re work. I understand that, to some people, they’re not worth the risk — spiritually or physically.
Perhaps the subversive and literal danger of the oyster is what led to the legend that rabbis at the banquet threw down their napkins and stormed out. The public flouting of kashrut, at a religious event, could symbolize the end of Judaism. The Highland House Affair, as the feast is also known, has become infamous among Jewish historians and rabbis in the century since it occurred as a moment of schism. But in fact, most contemporaneous descriptions of the event make no note of any drama around the menu.
An account of the feast in The New York Herald briefly mentions the non-kosher menu, but does not say that any of the attendees were upset — in fact, to the author’s palpable distaste, quite the contrary. “Instead of rising in a body and leaving the hall, they sat down and participated,” they wrote of the rabbis in attendance.
Only one account at the time, written in New York’s Jewish Messenger by Henrietta Szold (who would go on to found the Jewish women’s society Hadassah) observed that some attendees hadn’t partaken of the food, though, she noted, it was only “a surprisingly small minority.”
“There was no regard paid to our dietary laws,” she wrote of the catering, “and consequently two rabbis left the table without having touched the dishes, and I am happy to state that I know of at least three more who ate nothing and were indignant but signified their disapproval in a less demonstrative manner.”
Wise, the Hebrew Union College founder who had organized the meal, at first defended it, saying he had hired a Jewish caterer who regularly served a Jewish association and had no idea the meal served would not be kosher. Eventually, however, Wise and his supporters changed their strategy and began to defend the non-kosher components. They railed against the idea of kashrut; one rabbi argued that it was the perfect occasion to put “kitchen Judaism to the antique cabinet where it belongs.”
When the 500 members of the Free Sons of Israel, a Jewish fraternal order that Wise belonged to, gathered and supped on oysters, the rabbi reprinted the menu in the newspaper he ran, The American Israelite. He repeated the tactic when another Jewish fraternal order put oysters on a meeting menu. Jews were not accidentally consuming oysters, he pointed out. This was how Jews were eating, and why should they pretend otherwise?
Yet ironically, given his vociferous rejection of tradition, Wise also provided Talmudic arguments as to why the meal may have in fact been kosher; even as he chose assimilation he used Jewish wisdom to justify his choice. In the pages of The American Israelite, he argued “that the oyster shell is the same to all intents and purposes as the scales to the clean fish” and referenced both Moses’ and Maimonides’ statements on the topic. Elsewhere, he called the oyster an “ocean vegetable” to explain why it might be kosher. (Today many vegans take a similar stance; oysters have no nervous system and some vegans are more willing to consume the bivalves than they are honey.)
Others wrote back, citing their own raft of Jewish sages. One B. Younker wrote in to The Jewish Voice to reference Talmudic debates over what constitutes a scale, concluding that the oyster’s shell does not count.
But amid the debate, everyone else kept eating oysters. Sussman’s article in The American Jewish Archives Journal notes oyster-filled menus from the double wedding of two rabbis, a synagogue dedication and a banquet for a Jewish fraternal order; the last even used the same caterer as the Trefa Banquet. Apparently, there was something to that luxurious menu they planned — it was impressive enough to earn them repeat customers.
Today, many Jewish historians look to the Trefa Banquet as the beginnings of the Conservative movement in Judaism, as some of those horrified Jews rejected the idea of kosher oysters and decided they needed to develop a middle ground between the Reform and Orthodox movements. The debate the banquet set off over kashrut, as well as Wise’s liberal interpretations of Jewish law, concerned some Jews who wanted to protect tradition. Soon after the great oyster debate began, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the flagship institution of the Conservative movement, opened its doors as a place to retain some amount of tradition in text and theology.
Fishy Jewish cooking
In my time manning the pop-up, I’ve come to believe that shucking an oyster is an art form. First, there’s the basic problem of opening the oyster. Usually that means inserting an oyster knife at the narrow hinge of the shell — though some people shuck from the side — and wiggling until you feel the point of the knife settle in deeper. Then you lever the knife down to pop the shell, slice along the flat top shell to separate the oyster, and then scoop the knife underneath the oyster to sever the adductor muscle. Personally, I prefer a Duxbury-style knife, which comes to a sharper point, but many people prefer the more classic New Haven-style knife, which curves slightly at the tip, providing a bit more leverage and a bit less likelihood of stabbing yourself in the palm.
Every oyster is different, not only in taste, but in shape, so finding the right spot to pop open the oyster is difficult; it takes practice. And that’s just the first challenge. A well-shucked oyster must be clean, free of shattered shell or sand. Just as importantly, it cannot be pierced by the knife (“scrambled”) and should retain all the liquor inside the shell. Ideally, it’s served on pebble ice, not just cubes, so that it doesn’t tip over and spill.
There’s something meditative to running the oyster pop-ups, trying for the perfect shuck with every oyster. They’re rushed and busy and stressful — there’s always a line and shucking a dozen without scrambling or shattering is hard to do when you’re working fast. You have to reach a sort of zen state to fly through them, finding the right point on each shell to insert the knife, cleanly severing them from the shell and cleaning out any sand inside. No one wants that grinding sensation you get when you have a snack at the beach and feel the grit between your teeth. And you can’t appreciate the unique texture and taste of each varietal if they’re a scrambled mess inside.
The oyster should be a plump, pearly arc in the shell, with lacy frilled edges. It should be beautiful.
Apparently everyday Jews saw the beauty in the bivalve. They largely left the debates over kashrut to the pages of The American Israelite and continued to eat oysters by the bushel.
A 1911 blurb in the J. Jewish News of Northern California excitedly announced the beginning of oyster season, listing several of the area’s best “oyster houses,” as did Jewish newspapers across the country over the next few decades.
Jews even ran their own oyster stands. An 1892 article in the B’nai Brith Messenger wrote a brief piece marveling at the success of one Al Levy, whose Southern California oyster cart did so well he was able to open cafes and “cocktail rooms.” Despite Levy’s obvious disregard for kashrut, the piece notes that he “has been one of the most progressive, honored and beloved Jews in this community, popular alike among Jews and gentiles.”
Some of the most popular Jewish cookbooks from the era are full of oyster recipes, literally writing the bivalves into Jewish food history alongside kugel and latkes.
Aunt Babbette’s Cookbook, a Jewish cookbook that remained in print for 25 years, featured 11 oyster recipes in its fish section; the rest of the fish, all kosher, are given one preparation apiece. A dish that sounds an awful lot like kugel — though the cookbook doesn’t use that term — includes an option to add oysters. (Notably, other seafood like clams and shrimp are omitted from most Jewish cookbooks of the era.)
For all the enthusiastic embrace of oysters, though, there was still one line that wasn’t crossed: pork, which even the Trefa Banquet did not serve.
“The debate over selective kashrut centered on two issues: pork and oysters,” wrote Sussman, the rabbi and historian, and the line was drawn, for the most part, between the two. Pigs have long been a metonym for kashrut and Judaism, and centuries of antisemitic caricatures pictured Jews riding pigs. Eating pork, apparently, was instinctively understood by most American Jews as a step too far, a symbolic denial of identity.
The power of ‘kitchen Judaism’
The oyster has always been the perfect metaphor for American Jewish life.
There’s a Judaism of purity, hewing to the safety found in tradition: keeping kashrut, retaining a degree of separation from the rest of society. But most American Jews opted for a Judaism of experimentation, in which the rules get bent, reinterpreted and altered to adapt to the ways of a new culture and new country. It’s more dangerous; one might eat a bad oyster. But in the meantime one also gets to enjoy the good ones. Yet even as Jews debated how far Judaism could stretch and remain Jewish, they did so Jewishly. Even the Jews who, over a century ago, rejected Jewish tradition and embraced shellfish justified their choices with Talmudic citations and biblical exegesis. They used Jewish law to justify why Jewish law was wrong about the oyster. What debate could be more Jewish?
Food, since then, has become both more and less central to Jewish identity. Plenty of Jews now will eat bacon or ham, and a celebration of the Trefa Banquet’s centennial in 2018 served a menu of mostly pork, connecting to Judaism specifically through a rejection of its strictures. Kitchen Judaism has become aspirational instead of pejorative as food traditions have become a rich and beloved way to connect with Jewish identity. Meanwhile, the Reform tradition has actually tipped back toward kashrut observance; in 2001, at the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Reform movement added in a recommendation that Jews follow “some element of Jewish dietary discipline.”
Through it all, the oyster has remained the perfect symbol of the decision confronting American Jews: How much should they assimilate to their new country, and how much tradition must they retain to stay Jewish?
This summer, I think I might have to miss the oyster farm; life has gotten in the way and I just don’t have the time. Still, I’m sure I’ll be shucking up trays for friends and customers somewhere (including at my Jewish wedding).
And most importantly, I’ll be carrying on the proud tradition of the oyster debate. I’ll admit that I don’t really buy the idea that shells are the same as scales, though I’m sympathetic to the idea that they should be categorized as vegetables. But the discussion I’m more interested in is how to eat them. The right answer is raw and plain. Maybe a drop of lemon. Maybe.
Cocktail sauce or horseradish or hot sauce, though? That’s heresy.
The post If mollusks are kosher, the world can be your oyster appeared first on The Forward.
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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.
The post Rob Reiner delivers a posthumous parting blow to Donald Trump appeared first on The Forward.
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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.
The post Netanyahu pushes back on Vance’s claims that US is Israel’s ‘only powerful ally’ appeared first on The Forward.
