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Irving Berlin’s 1926 interfaith marriage sparked a Jewish debate that, 100 years later, hasn’t gone away
(JTA) — Exactly 100 years ago, on Jan. 4, 1926, legendary American Jewish songwriter Irving Berlin married Ellin Mackay, a Roman Catholic heiress, in a civil ceremony in Manhattan’s City Hall. What some considered a misalliance of prominent figures from different worlds was the subject of much comment, as much for their class differences as their religious ones. This is the story of how Irving met Ellin, of the difficulties they faced at the start of what proved a happy, 62-year marriage, and of how Irving’s fellow Jews felt about the union.
For more than a century, interfaith marriage has functioned as a kind of Rorschach test within American Jewish life, alternately framed as an existential threat, a sociological inevitability or, more recently, a potential avenue for renewal. Only last month, for example, the Conservative movement formally apologized for decades of discouraging intermarriage and committed itself to a new approach centered on engagement. This is worlds apart from the prevalent attitude in the second half of the 20th century, when intermarriage skyrocketed and communal leaders warned that it was hastening assimilation, eroding a fragile minority culture and causing a crisis.
Such voices were also heard in the 1920s, but in Irving and Ellin’s day the attitude of most Jews was a good deal more benign. A robust Yiddish and Jewish press — including the Jewish Telegraphic Agency — closely followed the couple’s romance, and pulpit rabbis discussed it in their sermons, but there was no consensus on whether the celebrity intermarriage was a “menace” to the Jews or, indeed, a sign of their growing acceptance.
The couple’s courtship began on a May evening in 1925 at the home of Frances Wellman, the socially prominent wife of a New York district attorney. Frances had invited her good friend Ellin to dinner. The 21-year-old Ellin, presented to society four years earlier, had recently begun writing for The New Yorker as a voice of the younger, privileged set.
A publicity photo of Irving Berlin taken by his early music publishing company, 1906. (Life magazine images via Wikipedia)
A theater aficionado, Frances was also close enough to 38-year-old Irving Berlin that she felt comfortable calling him to fill in when a dinner guest cancelled at the last minute. That was what happened on the Saturday night that Irving was introduced to Ellin in a meeting that was entirely unplanned.
Irving’s rags-to-riches story was already well-known. Journalist Alexander Woolcott had just published a biography of him and like most everyone, Ellin had enjoyed his songs. Born Israel Baline in a shtetl in Belarus, he had arrived in America in 1893 at age five. His father, a cantor, worked as a meat cutter and a Hebrew tutor in New York; his mother was a midwife. Young Izzy left school to earn a living when his father died in 1901. He began by selling newspapers, but the musical ability he had inherited opened other doors. He found work as a singing waiter in Chinatown, and later at Jimmy Kelly’s Greenwich Village nightclub, the “Montmartre of New York.”
By 1907 he was already writing music. He was erroneously identified on the sheet music of his first published song, “Marie from Sunny Italy,” as “I. Berlin” and the spelling stuck; he also began going by “Irving” rather than “Izzy.” His first megahit, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” which sold over a million copies, came in 1911 and catapulted him to fame. Drafted into the army in 1917, he wrote a patriotic musical, Yip Yip Yaphank, and produced it with an all-soldier cast. His blockbuster hit, “God Bless America,” was composed for that show, but not released until years later. By the 1920s, he was internationally famous and quite wealthy, with assets estimated at a million dollars (about $25 million in today’s currency).
Lean and wiry at five feet six, Berlin had briefly been married before. He had wed Dorothy Goetz, a 20-year-old Catholic girl, in a civil ceremony in 1912. During their honeymoon, however, Dorothy had contracted typhoid fever and she died just five months after the wedding. After her tragic death, he composed a plaintive waltz called “When I Lost You” to express his grief. From time to time since then, Irving’s name had been linked with those of other women, but in 1925 he was unattached. He liked to quip that if he were engaged to anyone, it was to Sam Harris, his partner at New York’s Music Box Theatre.
Ellin, for her part, was a bit more attached. She had been seen with Leopold Stokowski, the eminent conductor, and wooed by a Scottish aristocrat, Capt. Ian Campbell, heir to the Dukedom of Argyll. She had even accepted an expensive bauble from the latter, but no engagement had ever been announced.
Nonetheless, the attraction that Saturday night in 1925 was strong and mutual, and the evening did not end with dessert. After dinner, Irving invited Ellin to hear the band at Jimmy Kelly’s. The evening marked the beginning of a passionate romance.
Dancing with the Prince of Wales
To say Ellin Mackay came from money would be a colossal understatement. Her grandfather, John William Mackay, was one of the 20 richest people in the world at his death in 1902. Born into poverty in a Dublin slum, John had arrived in New York in 1840 and answered the call of the California Gold Rush. But it was silver rather than gold that accounted for his vast wealth. He and three other miners had struck it rich in the silver mines of the Comstock Lode.
Ellin Mackay’s insider chronicle of Manhattan nightlife, published in The New Yorker in 1925, became a sensation. (The New Yorker)
John used some of his fortune to form the Commercial Cable Company, which broke financier Jay Gould’s monopoly on transatlantic telegraphy, and the Postal Telegraph Company, which operated networks in the U.S. His wealth rivaled that of Gould and railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt II. But his money could not buy him and his wife Louise social acceptance when they moved back east in 1878. As a nouveau riche Irish Catholic, John was snubbed by New York society.
Upon his death, his son Clarence, known as Clarie, inherited some $45 million ($1.7 billion today) and became president of both enterprises. He would eventually extend the telegraph and cable service to three quarters of the circumference of the earth. In 1898 he wed Katherine “Kitty” Duer, a Protestant and a member of the New York “smart set” whose family was listed among the “Four Hundred”; in so doing, he bought himself the social standing that had eluded his parents.
For a wedding gift, John gave the couple a 648-acre estate in Roslyn, Long Island known as Harbor Hill, and Clarie spared no expense in building his new wife a dream house there. He engaged world-famous architect Stanford White to design a 52-room, 80,000-square-foot French chateau at a cost of $6 million ($207 million today) that took two years to complete. Erected on the second highest point on Long Island, it commanded impressive views of the ocean and the sound. The manor boasted a grand entrance hall, a ballroom, a library, a music room, a dining room, a billiard room, an indoor swimming pool, squash courts, a private chapel and multiple bedroom suites with bathrooms equipped with indoor plumbing. Kitty’s personal lavatory included a $17,000 ($664,000 today) sunken bathtub imported from Italy, carved from a solid block of marble.
This was conspicuous consumption at its grandest, and it was the fairyland in which Ellin Mackay grew up, together with her elder sister Katherine and a younger brother, John. But her sheltered life was not without its share of heartache. When Ellin was eight, her mother took up with her husband’s physician and departed for Europe with her paramour, causing one of the most sensational scandals of the Gilded Age. In the divorce, Clarie retained Harbor Hill and Kitty received $2 million ($65 million today), but had to forfeit custody of their children.
Because Clarie was viewed as a victim, his social standing did not diminish. In fact, he became one of the most lavish hosts in America. In 1921, for example, he outspent the parents of all the other debs on Ellin’s coming out party. The $20,000 event — the equivalent of about $360,000 today — was held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Among the luminaries in attendance were the Cornelius Vanderbilts, the John D. Rockefeller, Jrs., the Kermit Roosevelts, the August Belmonts, Mrs. J. P. Morgan and the Harry Payne Whitneys.
The most memorable event Clarie ever hosted, however, was his 1924 reception for the future British King Edward VIII, who was on a two-week tour of the United States. One thousand guests were invited for dinner and dancing at Harbor Hill. Ellin would remember that party as the night she danced with the Prince of Wales — seven years before he would meet Wallis Simpson. His Royal Highness found her “one of the most charming girls I ever met.”
Clarence’s social position demanded that he marry his daughters off to prominent, well-to-do young men. He approved of Kenneth O’Brien, son of a New York State Supreme Court justice and fellow Irish Catholic, as a proper helpmate for Ellin’s sister Katherine. The couple were wed in September of 1922 and feted at a 2,000-guest event. Ellin, who served as her sister’s maid of honor, had every reason to expect a similar celebration when the time came for her to marry. But such a wedding, it would soon be clear, was not to be.
‘A songwriter? And a Jew to boot!’
When the RMS Olympic arrived in New York harbor from Cherbourg on April 15, 1925, Ellin, who had been in Europe for half a year, was mobbed by newspapermen even before she disembarked. Decked out in the latest fashion, Ellin was the picture of poise as she consented to answer a few questions.
“We understand there are well-founded reports that you and Irving Berlin are engaged,” one of them asked.
“There is positively not a jot of truth in it,” she replied. “I have met Mr. Berlin at a number of parties, but I have met many men at social events, and I don’t see that this calls for the creation of something out of nothing.” Taking her father’s arm, she continued, tongue firmly in cheek, “If I married, I would leave Dad alone, and I cannot bear to think of parting with him. I have not met the young man I would marry and give up my father.”
The truth was, she had met him. Whether or not there was an actual engagement, there was something serious going on between her and Berlin. They had kept company for the four months between their first meeting and her departure for Europe. In fact, not only were Ellin and Irving already an item before she left, but Irving was the reason for the trip. Clarie, deeply unhappy about the relationship, voiced many concerns: her youth, the gap in their ages, their religious differences, how any children would be raised, his lack of education and his lifestyle as an entertainer. He actually hired detectives to tail Berlin, hoping to catch him misbehaving, and it was he who had arranged his daughter’s extended vacation in Europe. He hoped it would break the couple up.
Clarie’s attempts to part them proved fruitless, however. By mid-June it was widely reported that the two would soon marry. Ellin, it was said, had secretly traveled to Rome and secured special dispensation from the Pope to marry outside her faith on the condition that any children be raised Catholic. Clarie denied that rumor, certainly untrue. And Irving, accustomed to speculation about his love life, continued to deny that the couple were betrothed.
“The story of our engagement seems to be based on my writing ‘What’ll I Do?’ and ‘All Alone,’” he told Time Magazine. “It has always been assumed after I have written a ballad that I have been through some heartbreaking experience.” The smash hit “What’ll I Do,” the lament of a man apart from his beloved “with just a photograph to tell my troubles to” has indeed often been cited as a wedding tribute composed by Berlin for his new bride while she was away. But the piece was actually published several months before the composer ever met Ellin. “All Alone,” on the other hand, whose lyrics also suggest a man separated from his love, was indeed written in the summer of 1924 when Ellin was in Europe.
The Jewish newspapers used their imagination in reporting about the nuptials. The fact that they were in no position to listen in on private conversations did not stop them from reporting ostensible verbatim transcripts of them. By one account in the Yiddish-language Forverts (Forward), Clarie said to Ellin, “A songwriter? And a Jew to boot! How can an aristocrat tolerate this?” And this, from Di Yidishe Shtimme (The Jewish Voice): “Very well. Marry your ragtime peddler. But the children — Catholic, every one! And the ceremony — no synagogue stench.”
Irving’s Irish Rose
Berlin would not be the first prominent American Jew to intermarry. Harry Houdini (born Erik Weisz) had married out of the faith in 1894, and, more recently, Al Jolson (born Asa Yoelson) had wed twice, both times to gentiles. None of those weddings had made headlines, however. Jolson did get plenty of publicity when his first wife sued him for divorce, but the coverage had focused on accusations of desertion and did not mention ethnic differences.
The lobby card for the 1928 film adaptation of Abie’s Irish Rose, the popular Broadway play about an intermarriage. (LMPC, via Getty Images)
This, however, was different. Jewish intermarriage had caught the public’s imagination when a Broadway hit called Abie’s Irish Rose, a three-act comedy by playwright Anne Nichols, opened in 1922. Nichols had weaved a tale of a secret Jewish-gentile marriage and the discord it caused in the bride and groom’s families. It was still running when the papers announced the Berlin-Mackay engagement, and the comparison was too obvious to resist.
In the play, Abraham Levy and Rosemary Murphy, Jewish and Catholic, meet and marry in France. When the couple returns to New York, Abie introduces his bride as his fiancée and allows his parents to believe she is Jewish. Similarly, Rosemary’s father assumes that her betrothed is an Irishman. But when the parents meet, the ruse is discovered. A priest and a rabbi get involved and there are two more weddings. Reconciliation eventually comes about when Rosemary gives birth to twins, strategically named Rebecca and Patrick.
The production broke Broadway box office records by racking up a record 2,327 performances during its five-year run; even Jewish theatergoers enjoyed it. But it was reviled by most reviewers and was especially unpopular around the Algonquin Round Table, the famous gathering spot for wits. Humorist Robert Benchley called it “something awful”; theater critic Heywood Broun derided it as “synthetic farce” and journalist Dorothy Parker noted that it had defeated another production “for the distinction of being the season’s worst play.”
The attitude of the Jewish press toward the play, however, was mostly favorable. The American Israelite found “not the slightest affront to even the most devout adherent in either of the faiths involved.” The Jewish Exponent noted that “on your way out you are still laughing at some of the humor typical of the respective race.” And the Jewish Advocate went even further, commenting on “the deep regard the Jewish people of the metropolis have for this wonderful play of love and tolerance.”
Only the Forverts was unimpressed, condemning it as stupid and noting that “it doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to Jewish or Irish life.” Missing, even from the Forverts’ rebuke, was any outrage over the stereotypical portrayal of the characters, the mocking of Jewish religious and cultural practices or the sympathetic depiction of interfaith marriage.
Inevitably, Irving and Ellin were widely compared to Abie and Rose. Ann Nichols even reported that attendance at the play rose substantially after the couple’s nuptials were announced. And a Tin Pan Alley duo wrote a song about them that echoed the play, entitled “When a Kid Who Came from the East Side Found a Sweet Society Rose.”
‘Mazel tov, Mr. and Mrs. Berlin!’
By September, Ellin was still insisting to reporters that she knew Berlin only “slightly.” But the reporters weren’t buying it, nor should they have. Because just a few months later, on January 4, 1926, Irving Berlin and Ellin Mackay were united in a civil ceremony in New York City. The bride and groom arrived at City Hall by subway — the first subway ride of the aristocratic Ellin’s life, she maintained — and a deputy city clerk performed the ceremony. Only after it was all over did Ellin wire her father with the news.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Daily Bulletin reports that Irving Berlin and Ellin Mackay were wed on Jan. 6, 1925. The article quoted Clarie Mackay, saying, “The bride’s father, when informed of the wedding, declared: ‘The marriage comes as a complete surprise to me and was done without my knowledge or approval. Beyond this I have nothing to say.’” (JTA archive)
The marriage became a front-page story all across the United States. Most of the coverage mentioned the religious difference between the new spouses, but the focus was more on class difference. The reports ran more less along these lines, penned by columnist Eddie Dougherty:
A Catholic girl, finely reared, splendidly educated, a girl who had only to wish for a thing to obtain it, gave herself to a Jew who came out of poverty and hardship into the stars. She gave up for him her religion, her people, her countless society friends, everything she had known and held priceless before Berlin came into her existence.
After receiving his daughter’s cable, Clarence Mackay asserted that the wedding “was a complete surprise and was without my knowledge or consent.” Ellin’s mother, who had initially raised some red flags, was supportive of the marriage. Berlin’s parents were deceased by the time of the wedding, but one reporter managed to track down his sister Ruth in New Jersey. She told him she had expected the marriage and wished her brother Izzy and his bride “every happiness.”
The couple disappeared to Atlantic City for a couple of days, biding time before their departure for Europe. Irving had originally planned to travel there alone, but now they would go as a couple. He booked the $5,000 presidential suite on the S.S. Leviathan, which was to set sail on Saturday, Jan. 9. Tackled by reporters at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on the Boardwalk, Ellin asserted that “We are supremely happy, and that is all that counts.” She also allowed that the “greatest wedding present” she could receive would be her father’s blessing and that she was hopeful of receiving it.
But on the same day, Kenneth O’Brien, Ellin’s brother-in-law, told the newspapers that Clarence would neither “forget nor forgive” his daughter. Mackay insisted that his son-in-law’s statements had been unauthorized, but he refused to comment on the possibility of a reconciliation. A press account held that he had disinherited Ellin.
By the day of their departure for Europe, the only signal from Ellin’s father was a statement that his opposition to the marriage was unchanged. The couple made no attempt to contact him and went ahead with their plans. Late that night, to avoid gawkers, they slipped down the fire escape of Berlin’s apartment building and hailed a taxi for Chelsea Piers. At midnight they boarded the S.S. Leviathan and set sail for Southampton, England in luxury.
During the voyage, the couple hosted a dinner to which they invited a small group of passengers with whom they were acquainted. That Ellin was now being snubbed by her “people” became clear when fellow voyagers Alice Claypoole Vanderbilt and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney declined to attend. And soon her name was dropped from the Social Register. There appeared to be some truth in Eddie Dougherty’s prediction that in marrying Irving, Ellin would be giving up her society friends.
The Jewish press actually reported the news of the wedding rather proudly. It was almost as if, in an era that demanded that Jews balance tradition with assimilation, they thought it a badge of honor that an immigrant Jewish boy from the slums could be deemed a suitable helpmate for a high-society, patrician girl. It meant that Jews were achieving a measure of acceptance among America’s gentiles. The only part of the story that gave the lie to the assimilation dream was the stubborn prejudice of some like Ellin’s father.
Irving Berlin with actors Alice Faye, Tyrone and Don Ameche on the set of the 1938 film, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” based on Berlin’s first major hit. (Boston Globe/Wikipedia)
“Berlin is of Jewish immigrant parentage,” the American Israelite noted. “He attained his present position by strenuous efforts and certainly the good fortune that has come to him is well-deserved. As for the religious question, that is a matter of concern only to the parties themselves.”
From the Forverts: “Old Mackay is terribly embittered . . . he hates Irving. Yes, Irving is a talented man. For the aristocrat Mackay that means nothing. Song-writer, actor — for him it is a lowly orphan.” And from the editor of the Jewish Criterion: “Mazel tov, Mr. and Mrs. Berlin! That’s what I call an ideal marriage. The bride is satisfied, the bridegroom is satisfied . . . The only one who seems unanimously against it is Clarence Mackay.”
The Zionist weekly Jewish Transcript took exception to Dougherty’s characterization of the match as a misalliance. It pointed out that Ellin, despite her lofty social standing, was in fact the granddaughter of a common laborer who had struck it rich by pure chance.
If any Jewish newspaper might have been expected to be judgmental about the marriage, it was surely the Yidishes Tageblatt (Jewish Daily News), an Orthodox, Yiddish-language daily. And sure enough, in a column published a couple of days after the wedding, Rabbi Isaac Lipa Brill offered this snide comment:
Irving, our very own, once upon a time of Cherry Street, is not much of a Jew. So it does not matter at all, although we expect him some day to be invited to lay the cornerstone of a synagogue or preside over a Zionist meeting. He may be good for a donation. But we refuse to get excited.
A muted debate around intermarriage
The prohibition against Jews marrying out of the faith has roots in Biblical and later rabbinic sources. There is a proscription against it in Deuteronomy and similar admonitions in Ezra and Nehemiah. Over the ages, the rabbis came to believe that exogamy posed an existential threat to Jewish identity, and Jewish communities often imposed severe social consequences on those who married out. It was not uncommon for the Jewish party in such a union to be mourned as if dead.
The rate of such marriages in Russia and Eastern Europe had thus been exceptionally low, and that did not change significantly among the immigrant generation when they got to America. The only statistical survey of Jewish intermarriage from the early 20th century, a study by a Smith College professor, concluded that the interfaith marriage rate for Jews in America was less than five per 100 marriages and that for New York City it was even less — just over one percent.
That number was surely still quite low in the 1920s, but the match did spawn a robust discussion of interfaith marriage. Rabbis preached against it, social organizations discussed it — even the Junior Hadassah girls in San Francisco debated it — and the Jewish press was full of articles and letters about it.
Nathaniel Zalowitz, a prominent Jewish-American journalist, opposed mixed marriage but didn’t discern much of a threat in it. “Intermarriage, I emphatically believe, is decidedly not a growing menace,” he wrote in the Forverts, calling it “at most, one of the minor ailments of Jewish life in the United States.” Reform Rabbi Ferdinand Isserman, on the other hand, could not have disagreed more. “Intermarriage is an assault on the Jewish home,” he wrote. It is a breach in the defense of our faith against which we must guard ourselves . . . Our opposition against it is not that of bigots or of narrow-minded people, but is based on our belief that when the bars against intermarriage are removed, the death knell of Judaism will be sounded.”
From Conservative Rabbi Israel Goldstein of New York’s Congregation B’nai Jeshurun: “Marrying out of the faith is the crucial step leading to the extinction of Israel’s separate identity, and is for that reason to be condemned as the ultimate breach of loyalty.” And from Brooklyn Reform Rabbi Alexander Lyons, “I say that Catholic, Protestant and Jew who still represent radically antagonistic traditions and tendencies should marry within their own folds until such time, still — alas! — a long way off, when all denominations are more truly divine in being more nobly human in mutual respect, considerate sympathy and cooperative helpfulness.”
‘When it comes to love’
While on the couple’s extended honeymoon, Ellin became pregnant. They returned by way of Montreal, where their efforts at disguise — they registered as Mr. and Mrs. Johnson — failed miserably. “I traveled from Europe to America via Quebec to avoid publicity,” Berlin complained, “and the first three people I met on landing there were newspapermen!”
They came home to New York to speculation that to appease Ellin’s father they would marry a second time in a Catholic church. Berlin had gotten kudos in Jewish circles for the civil union; Chicago-based Reform Rabbi Samuel Felix Mendelson, for example, had noted that by choosing civil marriage “he has displayed more self-respect than certain leading Jews of New York who had allowed Christian clergymen to perform the ceremony.” The matter of a Catholic wedding met with a firm denial from an annoyed Berlin.
Berlin and Mackay, shown together at the Stork Club, were married for 62 years. (Bettmann vis Getty Images)
Ellin gave birth to Mary Ellin, their first child, on Thanksgiving Day. Her mother immediately went to the hospital to greet the new arrival, but even the appearance of a grandchild failed to move her father toward reconciliation. That would come, but not until the fall of 1928, at the bedside of Ellin’s grandmother Louise, who had expressed a deathbed wish that father and daughter reconcile.
Marya Zaturensky, a well-known Russian-born Jewish-American poet and herself a spouse in a mixed marriage, gave her take in the Forverts on why the Berlin-Mackay match had caused such a furor. “Not because it was an intermarriage, surely,” she opined. It was the social and not the religious background that really mattered. “Similarity of taste, of mental and social adjustment are of more importance than the background of religious differences,” she insisted, though she did allow that “if you are an intense and Orthodox Jew and a fanatical and devout Catholic, you cannot do it.”
Berlin, of course, was not an observant Jew, nor was Ellin a zealous Catholic. Although he embraced his Jewish heritage, he had abandoned the Orthodoxy of his parents. And Ellin had been raised as a Protestant until her parents divorced, at which point, under her father’s influence, she became a Catholic. She continued to go to Mass after the marriage, but was otherwise not especially devout.
Irving Berlin shared Zaturensky’s opinion that factors other than religion were more important. The composer of “God Bless America” — not to mention “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade” — believed in a broadly inclusive American cultural narrative with room for everyone. He had little use for sectarianism and rejected the notion that religion and culture had to divide people.
Perhaps without intending to, he had the last word on the subject. While the couple was still in Paris, he was cornered at a cabaret by an American reporter. She engaged him in conversation without revealing that she was a journalist, and he was quite candid with her. He didn’t know his remarks would wind up on the pages of American Jewish World, but he probably didn’t mind it when they did.
“When it comes to love, religion passes to the background. It never struck me that I would be sacrificing a parcel of my Jewishness by marrying Ellin, and I suppose Ellin felt the same way about her religion,” he said. “I am proud of my Jewishness, but you will never convince me that intermarriage is anti-anything.”
“If the subjects are well-mated, religion, race, or any other collective definition for a group does not hold any serious difficulty. To make a definite problem of intermarriage is narrow-minded. It is a matter of individuals. Age, material circumstances, temperament and character of the two people may be considered. But for God’s sake, leave out religion.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Irving Berlin’s 1926 interfaith marriage sparked a Jewish debate that, 100 years later, hasn’t gone away appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel’s government just took a terrifying new step toward authoritarianism
For the first time since Israel’s founding, the government has rejected a binding ruling of the Supreme Court.
At first glance, the effects of the latest outrage from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government may appear narrow in scope. The immediate dispute concerned the Second Authority for Television and Radio, an independent broadcasting regulator, and a technical disagreement over whether it may continue operating after resignations left it without the quorum ordinarily required by law.
But don’t be deceived: The Netanyahu cabinet’s Sunday choice to adopt a resolution declaring it would not recognize a court order that would allow the regulator to continue functioning has serious implications. Whatever one thinks of the legal merits of the underlying case, that declaration establishes a constitutional precedent unlike any that has existed in Israel until now. And it underlines a longstanding theme of Netanyahu’s campaigning in advance of the October elections: His claim that the Supreme Court is the unelected enemy of the people.
The dispute itself arose after the Supreme Court froze controversial appointments to the Second Authority, including for a new chairperson, while it considered petitions challenging the appointments.
Following the court’s intervention, several members of the council resigned in what the justices suggested appeared to be a coordinated effort to prevent the regulator from functioning. Their departure left the council without the statutory quorum needed to conduct business, including deciding on the proposed acquisition of the TV station Channel 13 by a liberal group led by tech mogul Asaf Rappaport.
The Supreme Court responded in June by ruling that those resignations could not be used as an excuse to avoid implementing its earlier orders, and allowed the regulator to continue operating pending a final decision. Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi and Justice Minister Yariv Levin argued that the court had effectively rewritten the governing statute.
Now, rather than seeking reconsideration or pursuing legislative change, the cabinet has adopted a resolution declaring that it will not recognize decisions made by the Second Authority in the wake of the court’s order.
Reasonable lawyers can and should disagree about whether the Supreme Court reached the correct legal conclusion. Courts issue controversial rulings, and governments are entirely entitled to criticize them, seek legislative remedies, campaign to change the law or argue that judges exceeded their authority. That process is an essential part of how a healthy democracy works.
But until this past weekend, such disagreements in Israel always took place within a constitutional framework in which the government’s obligation to obey binding judicial decisions remained unquestioned.
For several years, the current coalition has waged an increasingly aggressive campaign against institutions that constrain executive power.
The judicial overhaul proposed in 2023 sought to weaken the courts’ ability to review government action, sparking months of massive protests against what Israelis rightly viewed as a sharp turn toward authoritarianism. Since then, ministers have repeatedly attacked the attorney general, legal advisers, prosecutors and senior civil servants as unelected officials frustrating the will of the majority. And the government quietly revived some parts of the proposed overhaul last year.
The latest confrontation carries that argument one decisive step further.
Levin, the justice minister, argued that the court’s ruling “contradicts the clear language of the law.”
The subtext to his statement is clear: it’s an anti-democratic assertion that only the governing coalition can determine what laws actually mean. And the timing is no coincidence. Israel is approaching what many regard as the most consequential election in its history, and public discussion has increasingly been shaped by fears that Netanyahu — who is still on trial for bribery, fraud and breach of trust — will attempt to sabotage the election, launching the country into an unprecedented constitutional confrontation over the electoral process.
If those fears materialize, the Supreme Court will be the institution called upon to determine what the law requires. A government that has already established the principle that it may refuse to recognize judicial rulings has inevitably altered the context in which that dispute would unfold.
Thus, the implications of Levin’s words are grim. If the Supreme Court attempts to counteract Netanyahu in the fall, it’s easy to imagine the cabinet making a version of this exact argument as an excuse to ignore those rulings, too.
With that context in mind, the cabinet’s decision prompted sharp outcry, including from President Isaac Herzog, who said it struck “at the heart of the nation’s unity.”
And it called to mind a famous — if possibly apocryphal — declaration attributed to former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who founded Netanyahu’s Likud Party, that “there are judges in Jerusalem.” Those words became foundational in Israel because they reflected a foundational democratic principle: that elected leaders, no less than ordinary citizens, are themselves subject to the law as interpreted by the courts.
The post Israel’s government just took a terrifying new step toward authoritarianism appeared first on The Forward.
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A synagogue will soar above the Venice Biennale’s politics, and its lagoon
The wandering Jew. The rootless cosmopolitan. Being homeless and belonging nowhere has long been a negative Jewish stereotype.
But what if this trait was, instead, something beautiful?
That’s the idea posed by Nabatele, an art installation from Ukrainian-Jewish artist Anna Kamyshan. A synagogue, an amalgam of different wooden shtetl synagogues across Europe, perches on a heap of earth. But it’s not on the ground — the synagogue is soaring in the sky.
It sounds impossible, but Kamyshan is installing Nabatele as an official project of the Venice Biennale, where it will float over the city’s lagoon, starting July 16. She worked with engineers in the U.K., a production company in Spain, and she imported some supplies from Denmark to make it all come together.
“We are trying to engineer some magic,” Kamyshan said, describing the process over a video call.
The Venice Biennale, which has been around since 1895, is the oldest art festival of its kind. It is organized by country; each has its own pavilion in Venice where artists representing their nation install their pieces. But that utopian vision of inclusion isn’t always simple. This year, in protest of both Israel’s and Russia’s participation, the entire jury — the group in charge of meting out the festival’s prestigious awards — resigned from the festival after putting out a statement that they would not award artists from countries “whose leaders are currently charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.” (Both Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin fall into this group.) Protests, led by the activist group Art Not Genocide Alliance, have marched through the streets of Venice.
But Nabatele is affiliated with the Yiddishland Pavilion, a project that sidesteps the entire controversy of choosing which nations can participate. It isn’t tied to Israel, or, for that matter, any other country. In fact, arguably it isn’t tied to the Biennale. It’s not even a physical pavilion. It debuted — unofficially — at the Biennale in 2022, when artist Yevgeniy Fiks and curator Maria Veits had the idea of a “conceptual, independent, non-national” pavilion. But it’s something of a guerilla project. Since Yiddishland doesn’t have a physical pavilion, its exhibits are scattered around the city, often including performance art popping up in public spaces.
In an interview with the Forward in 2025, Fiks said the idea of Yiddishland originally emerged in the early 20th century when a group of Yiddish-speaking Jews toyed with rejecting nation-based identity in favor of “the idea that Yiddish language and culture create their own homeland — an imaginary place where Yiddish-speakers always belong.” It’s fitting, then, that its pavilion is similarly ephemeral.
Nabatele, however, is a very physical piece. Yiddishland might not have a physical state or pavilion, but despite this lack of space on land, the installation is monumental. It floats, filled with helium, over Venice’s waters. And it was too big to install without the Biennale’s official buy-in. So Kamyshan, with support from the Montreal Jewish Museum, submitted the project to become an official part of the festival, as a “Collateral Event.” It was a longshot, the artist said, and none of them expected it to be accepted.
But it was. Which meant Kamyshan had to figure out how to actually make the project.
“If there would be this stateless state of Yiddishland, what would be the representation of it at the Venice Biennale? For me it’s clear — there is no space, it has to fly,” Kamyshan said. “It’s also a very Jewish thing, not to be rooted.”
Nabatele’s synagogue rests on what appears to be a massive pile of rocks and soil — an earthly groundedness it carries into the sky. (How does all of this wood and dirt float? Well, Kamyshan told me it was made of “the most cosmic magical materials,” and also a lot of helium. Beyond that, she said that she didn’t want to spoil the illusion.)
The name comes from a compound of the Slavic word nabat, which means a beacon or alarm in Russian and Ukrainian, along with the Yiddish diminutive elle, softening the meaning. (Nabat in biblical Hebrew has a related definition, meaning “to look.”) Light shines out of its windows, a nod to every synagogue’s ner tamid, or eternal light, serving as a sort of flare or lodestar, beckoning to passersby.
“I think it’s difficult times for Jews to identify yourself as Jews,” Kamyshan said. “It’s just heavy, you know?” So she made something light — an alarm to remind people not of the danger of being Jewish, but of its beauty.
If all goes well with installation, the highest point of the floating synagogue will be 45 meters above the water — nearly 150 feet.
Kamyshan said she hopes the message of lightness, and of carrying a home within yourself, will be universal for members of an increasingly globalized world. As a Ukrainian-Jewish woman, born to a Russian-speaking family — and simply as an artist who has moved regularly and lived in cities across the world — Kamyshan said she related to the idea of rootlessness beyond its Jewish history. In the past, she struggled with the feeling that she was never quite enough of any one of her identities to belong. Today, however, she sees her lack of home as a kind of superpower that prevents her from being “trapped by some land.”
“I have to be rooted within myself, and it gives me a lot of freedom. And I enjoy this freedom,” she said. “And when you look at this art object you think: Was it ever part of the land and was uprooted? Or did it always enjoy this freedom? And I like this ambiguity.”
The floating synagogue Nabatele will be on view in Venice from July 16 through Sept. 16, 2026, weather depending.
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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.
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