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László Krasznahorkai, whose family hid Jewish roots during Holocaust, wins literature Nobel
For decades, Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai has written sentences that seem to stretch to the end of time — long, feverish, unpunctuated meditations on chaos, faith, and collapse. Now, the writer once dubbed “the contemporary master of apocalypse” has received the world’s highest literary honor. On Thursday, the Swedish Academy awarded Krasznahorkai, 71, the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Born in 1954 in the small Hungarian town of Gyula to a Jewish family that survived the Holocaust and concealed its identity, Krasznahorkai has spent decades chronicling moral disintegration and spiritual endurance.
If you don’t read Hungarian, you might know Krasznahorkai through film: his longtime collaborator Béla Tarr turned several of his novels into movies — Sátántangó (a seven-hour black-and-white epic), Werckmeister Harmonies, and The Turin Horse — all staples of international art-house cinema.
Who is László Krasznahorkai?
A cult figure in world literature, Krasznahorkai is known for sprawling, hypnotic prose and bleak humor. He first drew attention in 1985 with Sátántangó, a novel about life in a decaying Hungarian village.
He has since written a series of darkly comic epics, including The Melancholy of Resistance and Seiobo There Below — each circling questions of despair and transcendence.
Some of his later novels, including Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming and Herscht 07769, feature neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists. The latter contains only a single period in 400 pages. The rest is one relentless cascade of clauses — a symbol of his determination to hold chaos together by grammar alone.
He won the Man Booker International Prize in 2015.
How does his Jewish background fit into his work?
Krasznahorkai rarely writes explicitly about Judaism, but the sense of exile, concealment, and moral reckoning runs through his fiction. As antisemitism intensified in the 1930s, his grandfather changed the family name to the more Hungarian-sounding Krasznahorkai. “Our original name was Korin, a Jewish name. With this name, he would never have survived,” the writer told an interviewer in 2018. “My grandfather was very wise.”
Decades later, Krasznahorkai gave the name Korin to the doomed archivist who narrates his 1999 novel War and War — turning family history into fiction. Krasznahorkai didn’t learn about his Jewish ancestry until he was 11, when his father finally told him. “In the socialist era, it was forbidden to mention it,” he recalled.
That buried history gives his novels their haunted tone. In a way, his work continues a Jewish literary tradition: bearing witness in extremity, searching for meaning in ruin.
In that 2018 interview, Krasznahorkai described himself as “half Jewish,” then added darkly: “If things carry on in Hungary as they seem likely to do, I’ll soon be entirely Jewish.”
Do Jews disproportionally win Nobels?
Jews make up about 0.2 percent of the world’s population but have received roughly 20 percent of Nobel Prizes across all categories — a record that spans science, peace, and the arts. That lineage stretches from Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Richard Feynman in physics to Rita Levi-Montalcini and Gertrude Elion in medicine, Milton Friedman and Daniel Kahneman in economics, and Henry Kissinger and Elie Wiesel in peace.
Krasznahorkai now joins that global pantheon — one that also includes Isaac Bashevis Singer, a longtime Forward staff writer, whose Yiddish storytelling won him the 1978 Nobel in Literature.
Who are some other Jewish Nobel laureates in literature?
Louise Glück (2020): The American poet mined family grief and faith, blending autobiography and myth to confront the quiet devastations of ordinary life.
Bob Dylan (2016): The folk legend was honored “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” His Jewish heritage and biblical imagery made his win both celebrated and debated.
Imre Kertész (2002): A Holocaust survivor who was honored in 2002 for Fatelessness, a semi-autobiographical work about a boy in Nazi concentration camps.
Elias Canetti (1981): Born to a Sephardic family in Bulgaria and raised in Vienna, he spent much of his life in exile from fascism. His noted work of nonfiction, Crowds and Power, dissects how mobs become monsters — and how leaders learn to feed them.
Saul Bellow (1976): The Canadian-born American novelist who captured the restless intellect and moral hunger of postwar Jewish life. His novels, including Herzog and The Adventures of Augie March, turned immigrant striving and urban alienation into high art.
JTA contributed to this report.
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VIDEO: A Hasid gives us a tour of Morocco in Yiddish
דער ירושלימער יוטוב־שטערן וועלוול קירשנבוים האָט לעצטנס אַרויסגעשטעלט אַ ווידעאָ אויף ייִדיש פֿון אַ פּרעכטיקן וויזיט, וואָס ער האָט געמאַכט אין מאַראָקאָ. עס באַגלייט אים זײַן חבֿר אַבֿרהם פּרץ.
אינעם ווידעאָ זעט מען ווי קירשנבוים דאַוונט שחרית מיט די אָרטיקע ייִדן און באַזוכט אַ גוט אָפּגעהיטענעם בית־עולם, וווּ עס ליגן באַערדיקט גרויסע צדיקים ווי למשל הרבֿ חיים בן עתר (1696–1743), באַקאַנט ווי דער „אור החיים“. „מענטשן מיינען, אַז נאָר אין אייראָפּע זענען דאָ קבֿרים פֿון צדיקים!“ זאָגט קירשנבוים.
מיר זעען אַ גרויסע, שיינע שיל מיט אַ פֿײַנער אַרכיטעקטור אין קאַזאַבלאַנקאַ; דעם גרויסן אַראַבישן שוק, וווּ קירשנבוים קויפֿט זיך אײַן מלבושים פּונקט ווי די מאַראָקאַנער גייען אָנגעטאָן. ער באַוווּנדערט אויך די שיינע טיי־גלעזער און טשײַניקן, וואָס מע פֿאַרקויפֿט דאָרט, און באַקענט זיך מיט אַ ייִדישן סוחר וואָס האַנדלט מיט זילבער און גאָלד, פּונקט אַזוי ווי זײַן טאַטע און זיידע האָבן געטאָן פֿאַר דור־דורות.
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Conservative and Christian movies are coming for Hollywood
A star-studded new movie set in a Soviet prison is coming out in November. James Franco and Rob Lowe anchor the cast of Confession, playing a brutal prison guard and an imprisoned dissident professor, and a disheveled Nick Nolte appears as a fellow prisoner.
These actors were once huge gets, and their names could convey legitimacy to a project. Nolte and Franco both have received Academy Award nominations. Lowe was a member of the Brat Pack, and was a regular on The West Wing.
Confession, written by Ben Shapiro and produced by the rightwing tabloid-esque news site The Daily Wire, is not the expected fare for actors with that kind of name recognition; Shapiro’s screenwriting aspirations have been the target of ridicule for years.
Nevertheless, this isn’t the only Daily Wire production getting big names; Danny Trejo signed onto a pro-ICE movie about Minneapolis in the aftermath of the Renee Good shooting, and Jonathan Majors led Run, Fight, Hide: Infidels earlier this year.
Each one of these actors has been, in some way, canceled or in career doldrums so may have been more open to working with The Daily Wire. And some have claimed that they did not know who Shapiro was, or what his politics were; Trejo’s son, Gilbert, said his 82-year-old father did not endorse ICE and was misled about the movie before he signed his contract.
Movie studios have struggled through the pandemic and the streaming era, both of which have tanked box office receipts, leaving the field open for movies from offbeat production studios. In addition to The Daily Wire, there has been a whole ream of Christian movies attempting to shift the stereotype of bible movies — that they’re preachy, low-budget straight-to-TV affairs with cardboard acting — to something more prestigious, or at least profitable.
The Christian company Angel Studios has been placing screenings of the half philo-semitic, half-antisemitic Jesus TV series The Chosen in movie theaters across the country, produced the right-wing hit The Sound of Freedom and is pumping out faith-based movies like the animated King of Kings Christmas story and David, a kiddie movie about the biblical king. Recently, Pinnacle Peak Pictures, another faith-based production company, premiered Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, another bible movie that was notable enough to merit a review in The New York Times. (Though admittedly it wasn’t a particularly positive one.)
For decades, Hollywood, and the media industry at large, has been associated with liberalism, progressive politics and diversity. (This is part of why conservative conspiracy theorists often insist that Jews control the media.) Even when conservatives are in power, satirical movies have poked fun at the ruling class — Team America: World Police spoofed George W. Bush’s foreign policy, while M*A*S*H critiqued Richard Nixon. During the current Trump administration, we’ve seen One Battle After Another lambasting immigration policies and rising white nationalism, Eddington on misinformation and populism, and The Apprentice depicting Trump directly.
But a rising number of higher-budget, bigger releases from the right wing, whether The Daily Wire’s conservative political parables or the Christian fables, are bringing a new kind of messaging — about the importance of God and country, about gender roles, about about the centrality of Jesus to the U.S. — to the American movie-going public.
This is no accident. A group of powerful conservative Christians, many of whom worked on Project 2025, are proponents of the Seven Mountains Mandate, a blueprint for Christian nationalism that instructs Christians to gain influence and control over the “seven mountains” of society — which include media, entertainment and the arts. The Mandate is part of the New Apostolic Reformation, a decentralized evangelical movement embraced by millions of Americans.
Jeremy Boreing, the director of many Daily Wire movies — though he has since left the company — said on a podcast hosted by businessman Patrick Bet-David that “It had always been part of our strategy to move into making culture, not just criticizing culture” as a way of proving that “there is a future where conservatives aren’t losing. There’s a future where we have political power and cultural power.”
Cultural power, of course, requires more than just a lot of movies; they have to be well-done, or at least appear to be. Previous Daily Wire productions, as well as other right-wing, MAGA movie ventures, have been hacky. Lady Ballers, about an unsuccessful men’s basketball team pretending to be women so they can dominate the league, was an unsubtle, unfunny and ultimately unwatchable spoof of transgender athletes. And even plenty of higher-budget attempts, like Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, can still fall victim to wooden acting and writing.
But now, with the financial success of movies like The Sound of Freedom and biblical parables like The Chosen, bigger stars are being drawn to projects like the Daily Wire’s lineup of pro-ICE, anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ movies. With those bigger stars may come new audiences who might not have watched a Christian movie or Daily Wire project otherwise. And where there is money and viewers, mainstream Hollywood will go, too, no matter how progressive people expect the industry to be. We’ve already gotten a biblical epic from Amazon Prime, with The House of David, and there are likely to be many more to come.
After all, it wasn’t so long ago, after all, that Cecil DeMille’s The Ten Commandments was the biggest movie in town.
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‘Heil’ Mary? New Atlanta Falcons logo inspires Nazi comparisons
If there was something off about the logo the Atlanta Falcons unveiled on social media Wednesday, whoever runs their accounts did, uh, not see it.
Behind the black falcon graphic that began appearing on the football team’s helmets in the 1960s was a new background — a flag of red, tan, black and white vertical stripes. To thousands of people who responded to the logo, it looked distinctly German — in a 1930s kind of way.
“The Atlanta Falcons are preparing to invade Poland,” one fan wrote.
A day after its posting, the new profile picture had unleashed a deluge of Nazi memes in the 4,000-plus replies on X. One picture swapped in the logo for Nazi flags in the background of a historical photo of a Hitler rally. Another edited the Falcon claw to look like a Nazi salute.
Others depicted Hitler in a Falcons cap, references to Inglourious Basterds and the Battle of the Bulge and a World War II joke invoking a blown lead in Super Bowl LI.
“Falcons were up 28-3 at Dunkirk,” that tweet read.
The Falcons’ snafu enters a small but growing catalogue of Reich-coded brand mixups. Who can forget the German national soccer team’s ‘44’ soccer jerseys? There was also the swastika-emblazoned Hallmark gift wrap; the accidental Hitler mugs; and (for my money) the worst of the bunch, Zara’s concentration camp uniform shirt.
All of those have been addressed; so far, the Falcons’ has not. We’ve reached out to them for comment.
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