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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.
The post Netflix’s ‘Queen of Chess’ tracks the rise of Judit Polgar — but leaves her Jewishness out of it appeared first on The Forward.
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The Jewish secret to affordable eyewear that isn’t so secret anymore
The business cards on the counter at Minzer’s Optical proclaim “45 years of 15-minute service.” If your wait drags on for longer than 15 minutes, you can pick up one of the prayer books that line a shelf beneath the counter. But there’s no need to pray that your eyeglasses won’t cost you an arm and a leg. Minzer’s is known for its low prices, so customers who are feeling charitable might slip a few shekels into one of the pushkes, the tin tzedakah boxes, on the counter.
Once known solely within Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, today a majority of Minzer’s customers are not Haredi Jews, let alone members of the tribe. According to Mordechai Minzer, who started the business when he was just 19, this is entirely the result of word of mouth. And Minzer’s has held on in an age where Internet competitors such as Zenni have come close to matching its prices but can’t offer its speedy, in-person customer service.
“There’s an old saying that if you want something fast, good, and cheap, pick any two out of the three. Minzer’s amazingly manages to do all three,” Cheryl Krauss, a Brooklyn jewelry maker who has been a customer for close to 20 years, told me.
Up a flight of stairs in a two-story building on a block of attached homes, customers peruse shelves and carousels displaying frames that run the length of the store, amid the drone of computerized edging machines that grind lenses. Customers stand across the counter from employees who peer through a pupilometer, a device which measures the distance from the center of one pupil to the center of the other, a critical measurement needed to make accurate lenses.
Mordechai Minzer, 64, was trained as an optician in Manhattan at the Bramson ORT Institute of Technology, which began in 1942 as a series of workshops for World War II refugees and is part of a global educational network driven by Jewish values. Early in his career, he worked at a Cohen’s Fashion Optical store in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. Minzner said he stopped working for them because they wanted him to work on Shabbos. In 1981, a few years after the country western hit “Take This Job and Shove It” hit the airwaves, Minzer quit his job. It’s unlikely Minzer, the son of a Bobover Hasid, heard the song on the radio, but he sure did know the words to the chorus.
“I worked very hard there at Cohen’s and they schmatte-ed me,” he said, using the Yiddish word for “rag” as a verb.
So, Minzer started his own business by setting up a lab in the basement of his family home in Borough Park, making eyeglasses for wholesale customers. He also made glasses on the side for friends and students at his yeshiva.
“My customers told other people about it and before I knew it, it exploded. I charged a quarter of the price that Cohen’s charged for the same stuff and I did the glasses on the spot,” he said.
Shulem Deen, author of the memoir All Who Go Do Not Return, remembers going to Minzer’s when he was growing up in Borough Park where his family was part of the Krasna Hasidic community. Deen said he was about 11 when word of the new optician spread.
“Suddenly there’s this new place everybody was talking about and the prices for glasses were ridiculous,” he recalled. “I remember that every time I went there to the basement, the place was packed.”
Deen, a keen observer of the Haredi Jewish world he left behind, said that because Jewish boys focus on the tiny text during Talmud study, it’s no wonder that so many of them need spectacles.
Back then, Minzer’s served frum Jews exclusively. But, over the years, Mordechai Minzer said, many of his observant Jewish customers went elsewhere because they had gotten “spoiled.”
“They want certain very expensive frame styles like Lindberg and I don’t want to carry $500 frames here,” he said. “I don’t want to get involved with that. They still come here, but they’re only 30% of my clientele.”
Nevertheless, Minzer’s ties to Haredi Brooklyn remain strong. He owns two sefer torahs, one of which was written to honor his parents. The scrolls are lent to yeshivas in New Jersey that don’t own sefer torahs. Every year he goes to the yeshivas to inspect them.
“Whenever I go to check up on my sefer torahs, polish the silver a bit, this and that, they always ask me to make them glasses,” Minzer said.
This has been a routine for more than 20 years. He goes a few weeks before Purim, and brings a box of inexpensive frames and optical instruments. He then proceeds to make more than a hundred pairs of free glasses for the boys.
“I like to see the kids smiling,” he told me.
Zenni and other online eyewear retailers have taken a toll on his business in recent years, Minzer said, adding that one of the big advantages he has is that customers who come to the store can try on the frames and see how they look before deciding whether to buy them. And in an era when fewer and fewer opticians still have a lab on the premises, Minzer’s can often make customers new glasses while they wait, and even dip them into sunglass tints on the spot.
One Jewish customer told me she felt uncomfortable as a non-Orthodox single woman walking into Minzer’s wearing pants but added, “that may be me projecting.” Another Jewish woman, whose husband advised her to dress modestly before her first visit, scoffed at the advice after seeing other customers wearing tank tops and shorts.
A Manhattan painter who had never been to Minzer’s recently paid less than $300 to have lenses made for her complex progressives prescription. The previous pair she had purchased at another store cost between $700 and $800. Pamela Hecht was reluctant to make the 40-minute subway ride from her loft in Manhattan to Borough Park but decided to make the schlep after learning what her new lenses would cost.
“It’s a long trip out there on the train but I will do it again because my lenses cost so much less than what I have been paying,” she told me. “I was very dubious that the quality was going to be sufficient. How could the price be so low without cutting corners? But the quality is very good. I’m very satisfied.”
The post The Jewish secret to affordable eyewear that isn’t so secret anymore appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel’s First Ambassador to Somaliland Acclaims Deepening Partnership, Broader Strategic Outreach in Africa
Israeli diplomat Michael Lotem in Kenya, July 2025. Photo: Screenshot
The relationship between Israel and Somaliland has rapidly evolved into a strategic partnership spanning security, energy, infrastructure, and economic cooperation, according to the Jewish state’s first ambassador to the self-declared republic, who noted the strengthening of ties was part of a broader outreach effort by Jerusalem across Africa.
“They are looking to deepen cooperation in nearly every field — from energy and infrastructure to technology, education, and communications — and their desire to work with Israel is stronger than ever,” Michael Lotem said of Somaliland in an interview with Israeli news outlet N12 published on Friday.
“Security discussions are naturally part of the relationship, but our political dialogue extends far beyond that into many different areas,” he added.
In December, Israel became the first country to officially recognize the Republic of Somaliland as an independent and sovereign state.
Somaliland, which has claimed independence for decades in East Africa but remains largely unrecognized, is situated on the southern coast of the Gulf of Aden and bordered by Djibouti to the northwest, Ethiopia to the south and west, and Somalia to the south and east. It has sought to break off from Somalia since 1991 and utilized its own passports, currency, military, and law enforcement.
Unlike most states in its region, Somaliland has relative security, regular elections, and a degree of political stability.
Last month, Israel appointed Lotem as its first ambassador to Somaliland, after the two governments formally established full diplomatic relations.
Lotem, who was serving as a non-resident economic ambassador to Africa at the time of his appointment, will now shift to work as a non-resident ambassador to Somaliland. He previously served as Israel’s ambassador to Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, and Seychelles, a position he concluded in August.
In his interview, Lotem described the growing bilateral relationship as part of Israel’s broader diplomatic and strategic push across Africa, saying the partnership also sends a wider message of legitimacy and engagement to Muslim-majority countries throughout the region.
“Over the past several years, Israel has invested significant diplomatic effort in strengthening its presence across Africa, an initiative that Foreign Minister Gideon Saar has strongly prioritized, and the results are already becoming visible very quickly,” the diplomat said.
He also pointed to what he described as major untapped potential for economic cooperation, particularly regarding Somaliland’s vast natural resources and minerals sector — including oil, gas, coal, iron, and gold.
“They are extremely interested in partnering with Israel across the entire minerals industry supply chain,” Lotem said, adding that there are also strong prospects for cooperation in energy, medicine, agriculture, education, water management, and communications.
“We hope more countries will come to recognize the strategic value and importance of this relationship,” he continued.
Although no other UN-recognized country has formally recognized Somaliland (Taiwan did so in 2020), several — including the United Kingdom, Ethiopia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Denmark, and Kenya — have maintained liaison offices, allowing them to engage diplomatically and conduct trade and consular activities without full formal recognition.
According to experts, the growing Israel-Somaliland partnership could be a “game changer” for the Jewish state, boosting the country’s ability to counter the Iran-backed, Yemen-based Houthi terrorist group while offering strategic and geographic advantages amid shifting regional power dynamics.
“Somaliland’s significance lies in its geostrategic location and in its willingness — as a stable, moderate, and reliable state in a volatile region — to work closely with Western countries,” argued a report by the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), a prominent Israeli think tank.
“Somaliland’s territory could serve as a forward base for multiple missions: intelligence monitoring of the Houthis and their armament efforts; logistical support for Yemen’s legitimate government in its war against them; and a platform for direct operations against the Houthis,” it continued.
Somaliland President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi has previously said that the republic would join the Abraham Accords, calling it a step toward regional and global peace and affirming his government’s commitment to building partnerships, boosting mutual prosperity, and promoting stability across the Middle East and Africa.
The strategic partnership comes at a time when Israeli and US officials have warned of rising Islamist terrorist threats across Sub-Saharan Africa, placing the region at the forefront of global concern over jihadist activity.
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‘We Are One Community’: New York University Condemns Swastika Flag Raised Near Campus
Swastika flag raised over New York University this week. Photo: Screenshot
New York University (NYU) on Thursday condemned the raising of a flag containing the swastika near its campus in the Greenwich Village section of New York City, an incident which comes amid a spate of antisemitic hate crimes across the municipality.
“Campus safety responded immediately to remove it, and we are working closely with the NYPD to identify whoever is responsible,” NYU said in a statement after news of the act went viral on social media. “We are one community. We protect each other. And we will not let hate and division find a foothold on our campus.”
Designed to counterfeit NYU’s official purple and white standard, the offensive display featured two swastikas flanking the Star of David in a blue and white color palette representing the state of Israel. Historically, similar illustrations and symbols signal belief in antisemitic conspiracies of Jewish power and control, and in recent years anti-Zionists at NYU have castigated the university’s academic partnerships with Israel, as well as its efforts to combat antisemitism.
Anti-Zionists active in the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) organization have alluded to antisemitic conspiracies to criticize Israel’s alliances before. Just last month, SJP’s Duke University chapter posted on social media a political cartoon in which “Zionism” is personified as pig hoisting a Star of David while its arm interlocks with another pig, labeled “US Imperialism,” hoisting the Torch of Liberty.
Historically, depicting Jews as pigs has been done to reduce them to the status of animals and mock the fact that dietary restrictions forbid Jews to eat pork.
The perpetrators of the NYU incident remain at large. The incident comes amid a surge in antisemitic hate crimes across New York City.
Jews have been targeted in the majority of all hate crimes committed in New York City this year, continuing a troubling trend of rising antisemitism following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
Over the past couple weeks, there have been multiple incidents of rampant swastika graffiti across the borough of Queens, highlighting the extent of the antisemitism crisis in the city home to the world’s largest Jewish population outside of Israel.
Meanwhile, mobs of anti-Zionist activists have descended on multiple synagogues over the same period to protest Israeli real estate events.
In addressing the swastika flag incident on Thursday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has been accused of doing too little to combat the rise in antisemitism, appeared to acknowledge the Jewish community’s concerns about the intentions of his administration.
“This hateful antisemitic act was meant to spread fear among and intimidate Jewish New Yorkers. It has no place in our city,” he said. “Our administration is committed to fighting antisemitism in all its forms and protecting the safety of Jewish New Yorkers. The NYPD Hate Crime Task Force is investigating this despicable act, and I am confident those responsible will be held accountable.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.