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Jews in Iran and in the diaspora find respite in celebrating Nowruz amid war
Anna Hakakian, a resident of Great Neck, New York, grew up in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. At that time, Nowruz, the secular Persian New Year, offered a rare moment of respite from a conflict that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
That war came in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when Iran’s new leaders tried to ban Nowruz, seeing it as un-Islamic. But Iranians of all religions refused to let it go.
This week, Hakakian is celebrating Nowruz in the shadow of another war. For her, the holiday carries the legacy of Iranians fighting to preserve thousand-year-old traditions despite efforts to suppress them.
“They really tried to erase this from our culture these past 47 years, but it didn’t work,” she said. “It had nothing to do with religion, and all the religions celebrated it, and that’s why it really lasted, because they all fought to keep it.”
How Jews celebrate a Zoroastrian holiday
Nowruz is a 3,000-year-old celebration rooted in ancient Persian tradition, predating the religious divisions that later shaped the region. Its name, meaning “New Day,” marks the arrival of spring.
Though rooted in Zoroastrianism, one of the world’s oldest monotheistic religions, Nowruz is celebrated by Iranians of all faiths. Even observant Jews mark the holiday. “You don’t get the sense that Iranian Jews took Nowruz any less seriously than non-Jewish Iranians,” said Lior Sternfeld, an expert on Iranian Jews and author of Between Iran and Zion.
The holiday lasts 13 days and begins at the exact moment of the spring equinox. Every year, the start time varies, so Iranians often stay awake until the early hours of the morning to welcome the new year. This year, Iranians brought in the holiday on March 20, around 6 p.m. in Tehran. The celebrations will continue until April 2.
Iranians mark the event by setting up a haft-seen table — a vibrant display of symbolic objects that represent themes of spring and renewal. The table traditionally includes seven items beginning with the Persian letter “S,” like sprouts (sabze), the Iranian spice sumac, and hyacinth flowers (sombol). Iranians also visit one another’s homes, hold neighborhood parties and — during the final days of the holiday — gather for picnics.
According to an Iranian Jewish woman living in the U.S., who asked to remain anonymous because her family remains in Iran, some Jewish Iranians are going to great lengths to celebrate the holiday even amid the war. During her biweekly, one-minute phone calls with her parents — kept short to avoid state surveillance and the exorbitant cost of roughly $50 per minute — they told her they had celebrated Nowruz at home, the last thing they did before fleeing to a safer part of the country to avoid bombardment.
“We only talk for one or two minutes. Usually, they just call to tell me they’re alive. But this time because of Nowruz, the call was a little bit longer,” she said. “It was three minutes! Now three minutes is long.”
Videos and photos circulating on social media show the bazaar in Tehran, which had been closed since the war began, alive once more with patrons shopping for Nowruz essentials like fresh flowers and greens.
Most Nowruz traditions are shared across religions, but Jews have adapted certain customs to reflect their heritage.
Many Muslim families include a Quran on their haft-seen table, but “We Jews … put a little Torah in there,” Hakakian said. “We just adjust a little bit to include our history, but everything else is the same.” Some Jewish families elect instead to include a book of Hafez poetry, a secular symbol of Iranian culture and literary tradition.
The holiday typically falls a week or two before Passover, which shares similar themes of renewal and rebirth. While Nowruz is traditionally marked by spring cleaning, Sternfeld said many Jewish Iranians connect the two for practical reasons.
“If Pesach is a few days away, you want to use this occasion to get rid of chametz while you’re cleaning for Nowruz.”
The only holiday celebrated in public
In Iran, Jewish holidays are kept quiet, confined to private homes, and sometimes even basements or secret locations to maintain discretion. But Nowruz is the one holiday Jews are able to celebrate outwardly.
“Holidays were stressful. They were very stressful. I associate holidays with having to watch myself. I thought there was no such thing as a carefree holiday,” said the anonymous Iranian Jewish woman.
Cindy Chaouli, an Iranian Jew who left the country in 1978 and now lives in Los Angeles, recalled how “subdued” it felt celebrating holidays like Purim and Passover during her childhood. “It was celebratory, but it was still quiet from the outside world.”
Nowruz, by contrast, spilled into the streets.
“It was totally different,” said Chaouli. “This was the one holiday that was universal. It had nothing to do with religion. You felt it as much outside as you did inside yourself.”
She recalled visiting the homes of non-Jewish neighbors during the holiday.
“I remember going to our neighbor’s house downstairs and having sweets … they’d make a drink called sharbat with cherries, sugar and water. You would just eat and play. It was just extremely celebratory.”
Nowruz in exile
After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, much of Iran’s Jewish community dispersed — many settling in Los Angeles and Long Island, New York, now home to two of the largest Iranian diasporas in the U.S., where Iranians continue to celebrate Nowruz with fervor.
“Here … everyone has parties, all the families get together, we have Nowruz billboards everywhere,” Chaouli said, referring to advertisements across the city publicizing Nowruz events, which this year, honor the plight of Iranians in Iran.
In the days leading up to the holiday, Persian grocery stores become scenes of near chaos. At Elat Market, a kosher Persian grocery store in Los Angeles, the crowds are notoriously intense when Nowruz and Passover coincide.
“There was a woman and her mother — one was standing at this container, filling bags and throwing them over people’s heads,” Chaouli recalled.
This year, many of the Persian stores are adorning their windows with the pre-revolutionary Iranian flag, a symbol of protest against the Islamic Regime.
Out on the streets, the celebratory mood is unmistakable. “Everyone I say hello to, it’s ‘Happy Nowruz,’” she said. “It’s a very celebratory time here.”
The sense of shared celebration has been tested in recent years. Chaouli said she has felt tensions between Jewish and Muslim Iranians in the diaspora grow in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel and the Gaza war that followed.
“After October 7, there was definitely a rift and a lot of friendships were lost,” she said.
But with the new war dredging up shared feelings of grief and cautious hope for the country’s future, Chaouli feels Iranians of all religions are celebrating the holiday together more intensely than before.
“I’ve heard multiple people say that it doesn’t feel the same this year,” said Hakakian. “There’s a feeling of guilt to celebrate and to be happy when all this is going on. But at the same time, we say, Nowruz is here. It’s giving us hope.”
In Hakakian’s Persian calligraphy class, which she takes alongside Iranians of different faiths, the holiday became a moment of shared mourning.
“We sat together, and first we said, ‘Happy Nowruz,’ and then we all sat together in a moment of silence for the Iranian people,” she said. “It didn’t matter who’s Jewish, who’s not. We were all grieving for Iranians. And that, to me, was a moment — like, yes, we do need a moment of silence together.”
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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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Rob Reiner delivers a posthumous parting blow to Donald Trump
In a moment that drew a rare rebuke from even Donald Trump’s stalwarts, the president took the occasion of Rob Reiner’s tragic death in December to claim the cause was “anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS.”
It was tasteless, cruel and not in the least bit funny.
Seven months later, Reiner has punched back from beyond the grave. Whether the punchlines landed is a matter of some debate.
In the second episode of Larry David’s Semiquencentennial-timed sketch series Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, Reiner appears as George Washington addressing an audience as he ends his second term in office.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” a clean-shaven, wigged-up Reiner, who filmed this appearance last November, begins. “I stand before you today as your president to announce that I shall not be seeking a third term.”
(The choice to not continue in office, George W. Bush recently opined, in what some believe to be a veiled swipe at Trump, was perhaps the first president’s greatest legacy.)
The crowd, including Larry David’s outspoken contrarian, reacts in shock. For every precedent Reiner as Washington introduces, David’s character chimes in with hypothetical challenges.
Washington’s hope that future presidents don’t abide by his two-term example? David: What if some future president doesn’t follow your lead? Washington: Congress can pass a constitutional amendment that would prohibit that. (They did, the 21st, but only after Franklin Delano Roosevelt served his three terms and 82 days of his fourth.)
David: What if there’s some narcissistic prick who doesn’t follow the Constitution?
Washington says that there are sufficient guardrails — the Congress and Judiciary wouldn’t allow this.
David: What if the Supreme Court is a bunch of yes-men and Congress is a bunch of p—ies who care more about party than country?
It goes on like this, rather Talmudically, with Reiner remaining staid as David suggests a scenario where a future president might interfere with a peaceful transfer of power with an insurrection or kill American citizens to distract from his friendship with a pedophile.
This is satire not with a scalpel, but a bone saw.
The sketch isn’t quite funny. Mostly, it’s sad, even as Jimmy Kimmel makes a cameo, an allusion to Trump’s attempts to censor him, to wave away scenarios silencing free speech as improbable.
What can we make of it all? There are philosophical camps that place great value in the jester’s privilege and the imperative for comedy to knock the corrupt and powerful down a peg. This whole sketch seems as though it was devised to flatter the outrage of David and Reiner’s fellow travelers and, like the Declaration of Independence, make mad a tyrant.
Kimmel is proof that humor can get under Donald Trump’s skin. Some claim Trump’s presidential campaign truly launched the night Obama made jokes at his expense at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (Obama is a producer on David’s show). Trump’s loathsome attack on Reiner signaled his continued preoccupation with Hollywood figures who never welcomed him.
“I love that in this weird way, Rob gets the last word” director Jeff Schaffer said on the Obsessed podcast, adding that if the sketch “spoils a sad octogenarian’s weekend, so be it.”
But what else happened this weekend?
A mixed bag for the presidency: Trump overruled a recommendation to cancel his shambolic 4th of July festivities on the National Mall over weather concerns. (He delivered his keynote to empty seats, and is at press time revising the crowd numbers.) On the other side of the ledger, he appeared to get FIFA to withdraw a red card from Team USA’s leading scorer. Ahead of Independence Day, the Supreme Court expanded his fiat as Commander in Chief, but defied him on Birthright Citizenship.
While this sketch is a final gift to fans of Reiner, who exactly had the last laugh is about as clear as an algae-blighted reflecting pool. But perhaps the sketch’s premise is no laughing matter at all, just a diagnosis.
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Netanyahu pushes back on Vance’s claims that US is Israel’s ‘only powerful ally’
(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected Vice President JD Vance’s recent claims that the U.S. is Israel’s “only powerful ally” left in the world.
When asked on Fox News Sunday what his reaction was to Vance’s remarks, which came as Israeli ministers criticized the framework deal signed by the U.S. and Iran to end hostilities, Netanyahu replied, “I respect JD Vance. We have a very good relationship, but that doesn’t mean that I agree with everything that he says.”
“I have to point out this: Donald Trump is a great, the greatest friend we ever had in the White House, and I stand by that completely,” Netanyahu continued. “Secondly, we have some other friends, like a small country called India, you know, it has 1.4 billion people, and boy, do we have a tremendous support there.”
Netanyahu added that Israel also has the support of “many others,” but did not elaborate on which countries he was referring to.
“The relations are not quite as they appear, and we have, we have many, many friends, and I have to tell you, we also take care of our friends, especially the Christians in the Middle East,” Netanyahu said.
The prime minister also dismissed the claim that there was any rift between the United States and Israel regarding the deal with Iran, telling Fox that he and President Donald Trump were “set on the same goal.”
“President Trump is the leader of the United States. He does what’s good for America. I’m the leader of Israel, the one and only Jewish state. I do what’s good for Israel,” Netanyahu said. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, we see eye to eye, but as any, in any family, in any close friendship, there are sometimes differences of opinion, and we discuss them openly.”
Netanyahu also said that he and Trump have “common objectives” regarding the U.S. deal with Iran.
“We want to see Iran give up its nuclear weapons program. We want to see the nuclear enriched material removed. We want to see the enrichment sites for nuclear material dismantled,” Netanyahu said, adding, “as long as I’m prime minister, Iran will not have nuclear weapons.”
On Saturday, Trump told Axios that Netanyahu had requested a meeting at the White House and said that the pair gets along “very good” and that the Israeli leader “knows who the boss is.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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