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Netflix’s ‘Queen of Chess’ tracks the rise of Judit Polgar — but leaves her Jewishness out of it
Watching Queen of Chess, Rory Kennedy’s Netflix documentary about the top-ranked woman chess player and her long contest with world champion Garry Kasparov, I was reminded — of all things — of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
It comes down to one moment. In a montage in the 2018 superhero cartoon, we briefly see Peter Parker’s wedding, where he steps on a glass. This one second of film inspired an avalanche of speculation that Spider-Man (or at least a version of him) was Jewish.
In Kennedy’s film, we see footage from Polgar’s wedding, where her husband breaks a glass. This is the only clue I saw in the entire film that she is Jewish. We need not speculate if this is the case, as we might with fictional characters with arachnid physiology — it’s a matter of public record. And it’s a pretty big part of her story to leave out.
As the film’s early moments make clear, Polgar, now 49, and her older sisters, Grandmaster Susan and International Master Sofia, were not instant prodigies, but the result of a social experiment. The Polgars lived in a ramshackle house with wet walls in the workers’ district of Budapest. The country was poor and, in the Soviet era, topped Europe in suicides.
Their father, László, an educational psychologist, was desperate to make a better life for his children, and so he studied the lives of geniuses and alit on the idea to homeschool his daughters — unheard of in a collectivist country — and from the age of 5 drill them in chess.
Why chess? Their mother, Klára, explains in an interview for the film: “Very simple. The chess board, it’s easy to have it and very cheap.”
When his daughters started drawing attention for their early victories, and for decades after as they rose to international acclaim, the press would frame Polgar’s regimen as child abuse; one headline called him a “Hungarian Daddy Dearest.” Interviews conducted for the film with László give the impression that he’s a demanding eccentric, but skip over some crucial context: He was born in 1946 to parents who survived Auschwitz.
László’s father, Armin, lost his first wife, six children and his own parents in the death camp. For someone with this background, family, and survival, couldn’t be taken for granted.
As László told the Jerusalem Post in 2017, “being a Jew gave me extra motivation to succeed.”
Sofia Polgar wrote in her autobiography that the “fighting spirit that is running through my veins,” came from her survivor grandparents.
“My grandparents were the ‘lucky ones,’ with the numbers tattooed on their arms and nightmares for the rest of their lives,” but who had the strength to rebuild, Sofia wrote, adding that she still has “a bad feeling when seeing train tracks.”
In her 2025 memoir, Rebel Queen, Susan Polgar, Judit’s eldest sister, recalls her father returning home from work and finding a letter with no return address.
“Inside was a photo of him with his eyes cut out,” she writes. “There was also a one-page handwritten letter, which he refused to let me read. He only said that it was dripping with antisemitic remarks and violent threats.”
Within the country Susan sensed that the Polgars were not regarded as “real” Hungarians. The government denied them travel permits and Klára recalls being woken up by armed police. There were threats to take their children away.
Things changed when, after criticism from the international press, the Polgars were allowed to leave the Eastern Bloc for the 1988 Olympiad in Thessaloniki, Greece. The three sisters and their teammate Ildikó Mádl triumphed over the Soviets women’s team and returned as heroes.
Judit, then 12, soon emerged as the top female chess player and sought out men to compete against. After becoming the youngest grandmaster at 15 and 4 months, beating Bobby Fischer’s record, she faced world champion Garry Kasparov for the first time in Linares in 1994. She was 17, he was 30. Their contests and (spoiler), Polgar’s ultimate victory over Kasparov in 2001, form the arc of the film.
Buoyed by a soundtrack of women-led rock and punk bands like Tilly and the Wall and Delta 5, Queen of Chess is primarily about the first woman to smash the chess world’s glass ceiling, cracking into the top 10 overall world ranking — still the only woman to do so — and defeating the number one-ranked player.
Interviews with younger women chess players speak of her as an inspiration. Kasparov, while he now respects Judit, still comes off as sexist in contemporary interviews with remarks like “one of the typical weaknesses of many female players is that they are panicking if there’s a threat.”
This by itself, is enough material for a film, and Kennedy does an admirable job building suspense using archival video from tournaments and a digital chess board tracking the moves of the match.
What’s fascinating about the omission of the girls’ Jewishness is that Kennedy, a director of a couple dozen documentaries about social issues and historical injustices, and the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy and sister of RFK Jr., rightly, acknowledges it as an obstacle in an interview for the press notes.
“The odds were staggering,” Kennedy said. “They were poor. They were Jewish. They were girls.”
The last factor may well trump the others (Kasparov was born Garik Kimovich Weinstein).
Still, Jewishness continues to play a large role in the sisters’ lives. In 2024, Judit and Sofia played matches in Berlin’s parliament in honor of Israeli hostages. Sofia made aliyah in 1999 and is married to Israeli grandmaster Yona Kosashvili. Her parents followed her there.
In the film’s bittersweet final moments, Kennedy asks Judit how she felt being part of an experiment, and missing out on a normal childhood. She takes a while to respond, and does so with a bit of ambivalence.
“I never felt myself being a genius,” Judit says. “I know that the things I could reach, that was definitely like 95% of my work and dedication. And this came from my parents.”
The impetus behind the experiment, to do whatever they could to help their children rise above their circumstances, may be best explained by all that came before them.
In a phone call Thursday, Susan Polgar confirmed that their Jewish history came up in interviews, and acknowledged that a lot was left on the cutting room floor. Within the family, she said, Judit spoke about how this would just be one interpretation of their family’s history.
“What people tell me is actually that probably ideal would be to have a miniseries,” Polgar said.
We may need to wait for that, but for those who want the Jewish story, there’s a 2014 Israeli documentary called The Polgar Variant.
“Obviously that has a lot more of that angle, naturally,” Susan Polgar said.
Rory Kennedy’s Queen of Chess is now playing at the Sundance Film Festival. It debuts on Netflix Feb. 6.
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Mamdani touts ‘Babies not Bombs’ messaging after flexing political muscle in the New York primaries
(New York Jewish Week) — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani celebrated the victories of the progressive candidates he endorsed in New York’s Democratic primaries describing their success as a “shift in the balance of power.”
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, the morning after the primaries, Mamdani touted the triumphs as a shift in the balance of power between “working people” and “special interests.”
Mamdani-endorsed candidates Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez won Democratic nominations for Congress. During the press conference, the mayor repeatedly highlighted their calls to restrict U.S. military aid to Israel and redirect federal funding to domestic priorities.
Following Mamdani’s election night sweep in New York, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that “America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country!!!”
The victories offered an early demonstration of Mamdani’s political influence beyond City Hall, as several Democratic Socialist candidates he backed, including Chevalier, defeated established Democratic incumbents in their districts.
“The working person is struggling in our city to afford basic needs,” Mamdani said, adding that Avila Chevalier’s oft-repeated slogan of investing in “Babies not Bombs,” is “the kind of conscience, the kind of clarity, the kind of conviction that has been missing in our politics for far too long.”
Mamdani responded to the president’s post on Wednesday, telling a reporter who asked whether his goal is to make America a “socialist” country that his “goal is to make America a place that every American can afford.”
When asked about federal policies that could be affected by Mamdani’s endorsed candidates, the mayor cited Valdez’s support for “foreign policy that understands human rights for all” and Lander’s commitment to co-sponsoring the Block the Bombs Act, which prohibits the sale of certain U.S.-made offensive weapons to Israel.
Mamdani also dismissed a question about whether he was concerned about how the victories would play out in November as Democrats try to win back the House.
“Every time the fight for working people takes a step forward, you will hear Republicans say that this is actually going to jeopardize the existence of that very fight,” he said.
When asked whether the election of Chevalier, who has faced scrutiny for past social media posts attacking Democrats and her appearance at an Oct. 8, 2023, pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square, could “complicate campaigns for Democrats as a whole,” Mamdani replied “No.”
“[Chevalier] often speaks about a politics of life. She speaks about ‘Babies not bombs,’” Mamdani continued. “What could be a better example of what the people of the district want to see versus what the people of the district have been forced to experience, which is tens of billions of dollars being spent at a national level to bomb children overseas, while children in our own districts are struggling.”
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Jewish anti-Zionist David Orkin defeats incumbent in NY Assembly primary
(New York Jewish Week) — David Orkin, a Jewish anti-Zionist attorney and democratic socialist, defeated incumbent New York State Assemblymember Jenifer Rajkumar in Tuesday’s Democratic primary. Orkin won State Assembly District 38, which includes parts of Queens.
Orkin, an immigrant workers’ rights attorney and union organizer, received 58.8% of the vote, while Rajkumar, who has represented the district since 2021 and is the first South Asian woman ever elected to office in the state, received 40.9%. The district covers a swath of Queens, including parts of Ridgewood, Glendale, Ozone Park, Woodhaven and Richmond Hill.
“Pro-Palestine candidates are sweeping in NYC tonight,” Jewish Voice for Peace Action wrote in a post on Instagram celebrating Orkin’s win Tuesday. “Palestine was on the ballot — and won. David will be a champion for Palestinian freedom in Albany.”
The post from JVP Action echoed a message Orkin had highlighted throughout his campaign.
“It’s so incredibly meaningful to me to be running this race as an anti-Zionist Jew, to be one of the few anti-Zionist Jewish voices that is in an elected seat in the state government,” Orkin said in an Instagram reel posted by Jewish Voice for Peace Action earlier this month.
He added that, if elected, he would be able to go in front of the state legislature and assert that “criticizing Israel for genocide, demanding an end to the occupation, demanding an end to funding war abroad is not antisemitic.”
Orkin’s victory came amid a strong night for democratic socialist candidates across New York City, including left-wing congressional candidates Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, who also defeated establishment-backed opponents in their primaries.
While Orkin was not endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose winning endorsements of Lander, Chevalier and Valdez signaled a pro-Palestinian lurch for the party in the city with the world’s largest Jewish population outside of Israel. Nonetheless, his victory elevated a self-described anti-Zionist to the ranks of New York’s elected officials at a time when debates over Israel have become increasingly prominent within Democratic politics.
While Israel-related issues were not listed on Orkin’s platform, which centered on affordability and immigration, he repeatedly expressed his support for a “free Palestine” and attacked Rajkumar’s record of support for the Jewish state during his campaign.
“In the past several years my opponent AM Rajkumar has walked in the Israel day parade but has said NOTHING against the war in Gaza, occupation of Palestine, or Islamophobic attacks faced by the people of New York,” Orkin wrote in a May post on X.
Rajkumar, who was a close political ally of former New York City Mayor Eric Adams, in her campaign platform vowed to combat antisemitism.
After establishing a Jewish Voice for Peace chapter in Tucson, Arizona, in 2014, Orkin remained involved in pro-Palestinian activism as a member of the anti-Zionist activist group.
“I’ve been involved in the Jewish Palestine Solidarity Movement for 12, 13 years,” Orkin told Democratic Left last month. “I’ve dedicated part [of my] life to making sure that Jewish people are creating religious spaces outside of Zionism, and to making more space for Palestinian organizing to have an impact.”
On the campaign trail, Orkin received a host of endorsements from prominent progressive groups and lawmakers, including Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, JVP Action and NYC Democratic Socialists for America.
Rajkumar was endorsed by ActJew, the new nonprofit focused on combatting antisemitism, as well as the Queens Jewish Alliance and Assemblymembers Sam Berger, Kalman Yeger and Chuck Lavine.
Orkin received over $290,000 in campaign contributions for the election cycle, including over $156,000 from the office of the state comptroller, while Rajkumar received over $270,000, including $9,000 from health care executive Daniel Lowy.
“I have dedicated my life fighting for immigrants and workers, I am proud to have earned their support in this election, and I look forward to spending the rest of my life winning the beautiful and joyous lives we deserve,” Orkin said in a statement, according to QNS.
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Half of Americans think the U.S. is ‘too supportive’ of Israel
(JTA) — A new survey found that 48% of American voters think the United States is “too supportive” of Israel, the highest since the pollster started asking the question in 2017.
The survey published Wednesday by Quinnipiac University also found that 60% of respondents reported that military intervention in Iran was “not worth it” as opposed to 34% of voters who said it was “worth it.”
The number of respondents who think the U.S. support of Israel is about right is 38%, while just 7% think the U.S. is not supportive enough of Israel, the poll found.
Broken down by party, 66% of Democrats think the U.S. is too supportive of Israel, while 9% think it is not supportive enough and 18% think U.S. support for Israel is about right.
Among Republicans, 20% think the U.S. is too supportive of Israel, 69% think American support for Israel is “about right,” and 6% think the U.S. is not supportive enough.
Among independent voters, 55% think the U.S. is too supportive of Israel, 34% think U.S. support for Israel is about right, and 7% think the U.S. is not supportive enough.
The poll data were released one day after three Democrats critical of Israel swept their House primary races in New York City, and in races around the country even some reliably pro-Israel Democratic candidates distanced themselves from the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC.
A survey last year by Gallup found dwindling support for Israel among Democrats, as well as waning support among Republicans.
Still the party divide was also in sharp evidence in the latest poll. In responses to the question about whether the Iran war was “worth it”, Democrats disfavored military action in Iran at 93% and independents at 66%, while 75% of Republicans surveyed thought it was “worth it.”
Given a list of 10 issues and asked which, if any, they considered priorities in their decision-making process in the election for the U.S. House of Representatives, 41% of voters cited the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, above AI data centers (38%) and Donald Trump (38%). The high cost of living (70%) and health care (59%) topped the list.
The Quinnipiac poll was conducted from June 18 to 22, and includes responses from 1,165 self-identified registered voters.
The margin of error is 3.4 percentage points.
Among those surveyed, 48% said they had an unfavorable view of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Twenty percent said they had a favorable opinion, and 30% “haven’t heard enough” about him.
“Netanyahu gets poor marks from American voters as their appetite for supporting Israel wanes, with the share of voters who think the U.S. is too supportive of Israel hitting a new high,” Quinnipiac polling analyst Tim Malloy wrote in the report.
Voters were also asked about their views on the June 17 memorandum of understanding with Iran, which begins a 60-day negotiation period that does not outline an end to Iran’s nuclear program.
“After months of diplomatic fits and starts, global economic repercussions and a broad loss of life in the region, a majority of voters make their feelings clear: the Iran war was a bad idea,” Malloy wrote.
Voters who are either not confident or “not so confident” that the deal will succeed numbered 59%, and 61% think it is either likely or very likely that Iran will develop nuclear weapons.
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