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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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After New York stabbing, Netanyahu says Mamdani is making Jews less safe
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani of “fomenting” hate and making Jews less safe through his fierce criticism of Israel. Netanyahu suggested the mayor’s rhetoric on the Gaza war contributed to the climate that led to Thursday’s stabbing of an Orthodox man outside a Manhattan synagogue.
“I don’t think it’s accidental that after he made this hate speech against Israel and against me, the next day a Jew is stabbed coming out of a synagogue,” Netanyahu said Sunday morning on Fox News.
Authorities said the suspect, Jose Morales, 51, allegedly yelled “Allahu Akbar” as he stabbed an Asian man in the back with a knife and an Orthodox man in the torso with a screwdriver before being subdued and arrested. Morales was arraigned Friday on several hate crime charges and was held without bail. Both victims were hospitalized and are expected to recover.
Investigators have not publicly linked the suspect’s motives to the mayor’s comments in a video address last week conceding he did not have the authority to arrest Netanyahu when he visits the city for the United Nations General Assembly in September, while also calling Netanyahu a war criminal and accusing him of orchestrating a genocide. Mamdani encouraged New Yorkers to protest instead.
The controversy has also been fueled by reports that members of Mamdani’s inner circle believed long before the legal review was completed that the city lacked the authority to arrest Netanyahu. Despite that, Mamdani proceeded with the review and used a mayoral address to announce the legal conclusion while renewing his criticism of the war in Gaza. Critics say the episode was a calculated political move aimed at energizing the pro-Palestinian and progressive base that helped elect him. The speech drew more than 200 million views across social media.
Speaking outside the Manhattan synagogue on Friday, Jewish leaders and some prominent rabbis expressed concern that the comments risked endangering Jewish New Yorkers, the largest concentration of Jews in the United States.
Netanyahu escalated his feud with Mamdani by directly linking the mayor’s embrace of the International Criminal Court’s case against him to the rise in antisemitism. “I speak to Jewish Americans in New York, and they’re afraid right now,” Netanyahu said. “I speak to quite a lot of my friends, and they say, ‘Look, it’s like a different world. We’re afraid to go into the streets. We certainly do not want to wear yarmulkes or any clothing that would give away that we’re Jews.’”
The Israeli leader further accused Mamdani of “basically supporting” Hamas, despite the mayor describing the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel as a “horrific war crime” that should be opposed “with every single fiber of our being.” Asked on Thursday whether he considers the Hamas massacre a genocide, Mamdani stopped short of using that term.
“The genocide charge belongs to our enemies,” Netanyahu said in the Sunday interview. “What we are doing is try to fight this genocidal terrorist organization that embeds itself among civilians.”
Netanyahu (6 minutes ⬇️) accuses Mamdani of fueling antisemitism by embracing ICC case:
“He’s fomenting hate… I speak to Jewish Americans in New York, and they’re afraid right now. And I don’t think it’s accidental that after he made this hate speech against Israel and against… pic.twitter.com/qjb5uj4xNM
— Jacob N. Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) July 26, 2026
The latest clash shows how the war in Gaza has become one of the biggest political issues of Mamdani’s administration. His outspoken criticism of Israel has won support from progressives but has also deepened tensions with many Jewish leaders, who say his rhetoric has made an already difficult climate even worse. In an interview on Thursday, Mamdani suggested that New Yorkers “have been aghast at this genocide over the last few years, and not only the continued denial of that genocide but also the fact that it continues itself.”
A recent Associated Press survey conducted before Mamdani’s recent comments found that Mamdani, who won just 26% of the Jewish vote in last year’s mayoral election, is viewed more favorably by American Jews than Netanyahu, who is facing a tough reelection in October.
Netanyahu is expected to visit Washington, D.C., on Monday for a meeting with President Donald Trump and attend the funeral of Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close political ally.
Despite acknowledging he cannot arrest Netanyahu, Mamdani has vowed to continue speaking out against the Israeli leader ahead of his expected appearance at the United Nations this fall. Netanyahu said Sunday that he still intends to travel to New York “to speak the truth” and defend Israel before the international body.
The post After New York stabbing, Netanyahu says Mamdani is making Jews less safe appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel’s shameful West Bank front
Two mosques burned in the West Bank on Sunday.
One, in the village of Qusra south of Nablus, was torched and defaced with graffiti reading “Revenge for Benayahu,” referring to Benayahu Mellet, who was killed in the deadly clashes near the village of Tel two days earlier. Another mosque, in the village of Kur, was also set ablaze. Cars were burned. Fields were set on fire. Elsewhere, according to witnesses, extremist settlers blocked a major road, attacked Palestinian motorists, and allegedly did so in full view of Israeli security forces. No arrests were reported.
In the incident on Friday, villagers had confronted armed settlers who had entered the village in a provocation, triggering a gun battle that left two Israelis and four Palestinians dead. The clash was the latest in an escalating wave of settler-Palestinian violence that has killed dozens of Palestinians and wounded hundreds this year, according to the United Nations and the Palestinian Authority — and not denied by Israel.
The images should horrify every Israeli and Jew. Not because they will generate another round of hostile headlines abroad, though they certainly will. Not because Hamas or Iran will exploit them for propaganda, though they will. They should horrify Israelis because they reveal a sickness that has been growing inside the Jewish state for years — one that the Netanyahu government has failed to confront, and some would say abetted.
For all the disasters that have befallen Israel in recent years, few have been as shameful as the tolerance of violent Jewish extremism in the West Bank. This is no longer a matter of isolated “price tag” attacks or a handful of hooligans. It has become a persistent phenomenon that includes the burning of places of worship, attacks on civilians, destruction of homes and farmland, vigilante raids into Palestinian villages, and organized acts of intimidation designed to terrorize entire communities. Sometimes it results in deaths, almost always in material damage, and without exception in reputational damage. Whatever political cause its perpetrators imagine they are serving, they are inflicting immense damage on Israel itself.
Two arrests were reported by Israeli police for the latest widespread mayhem – far from a crackdown; if past is prologue, those detained will soon be released. There have been no known convictions for the murder of Palestinians by radical settlers; a security apparatus that knew the exact location of Iranian leaders could not, apparently, find the perpetrators.
This is a moral failure and a national security disaster. At the very moment Israel is preparing for the possibility of renewed confrontation with Iran, remains engaged against Hamas, and continues to try to deter Hezbollah, it is simultaneously forced to contend with Jewish extremists opening yet another front. Every burned mosque, every unauthorized raid into a Palestinian village, every revenge attack requires soldiers, commanders, intelligence assets, and police resources. Every incident inflames the West Bank precisely when Israel can least afford another arena of instability.
The latest violence illustrates the pattern. And every burned mosque and vigilante actions helps Hamas and strengthens Iranian propaganda. Every assault on innocent Palestinians makes Israel’s diplomatic task immeasurably harder. Israel’s enemies could scarcely invent a more effective narrative than the one Jewish extremists hand them themselves.
Israel’s security establishment understands this better than anyone.
Reserve Major General Gadi Shamni, who commanded the IDF’s Central Command and served as the army’s top officer in the West Bank, warned on Israel Radio that the military has too often looked the other way while influential members of the government have effectively encouraged the radical fringe.
Shamni also described what he sees as the strategic vision animating the most extreme elements of the settler movement: gradually forcing Palestinians into disconnected islands of “Area A” autonomous zones while emptying much of the rest of the West Bank in preparation for eventual annexation.
If that assessment is correct, it represents one of the most cynical political projects imaginable.
Apart from its profound moral implications, it would guarantee perpetual conflict. It would invite international isolation, deepen Israel’s demographic and diplomatic dilemmas, and condemn another generation of Israelis to policing an endless insurgency. It is a blueprint for permanent instability.
Defenders of the government cry foul when settlers are criticized, claiming that the vast majority of them reject violence and are not responsible for the crimes committed by a handful of extremists. This is a misleading presentation.
Sure, most of the half million “settlers” are living in communities close to the pre-1967 border which Israel expects to receive in border swaps as part of any future two-state deal. But the 20% or so living well beyond the “security fence” line, deep inside the West Bank, are another matter.
Many of them are deeply committed ideologues who, in the best-case scenario, envision a future of permanent subjugation of the Palestinians. Moreover, those who dream of the Palestinians leaving altogether, one way or another, are not a handful, as I know very well from countless off-the-record conversations. And the radicals who commit actual crimes are quietly backed by a massive infrastructure that is run by radical Cabinet ministers with real political power. So the violent fringe has acquired influence wildly disproportionate to its numbers — and is serving a vile cause with real support.
That influence is visible not only in the attacks themselves but also in the willingness of prominent politicians to minimize them, excuse them, or rally publicly behind individuals accused of serious violence against Palestinians. Such gestures send a devastating message: that political loyalty may matter more than the rule of law.
It is a tragic indication of the foresight of the late Israeli philosopher Yishayahu Leibowitz, who warned over a half century ago that the occupation will eat away at Israel’s decency and democratic character.
The ideological ancestry of much of this movement leads back to Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose Kach movement was eventually banned from the Knesset because of its openly racist platform. Even former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir — a career Likud politician, former underground fighter, and hardly a man of the political left — refused to remain in the Knesset chamber while Kahane spoke.
How far Israel has fallen that ideas once considered beyond the pale increasingly receive sympathy, protection or political indulgence.
The irony is, of course, that those who proclaim themselves the fiercest defenders of Israel are among those inflicting some of its deepest wounds. They weaken Israel’s international standing, strengthen its enemies, undermine society’s resolve, force young Israeli soldiers into impossible situations and stain Judaism itself.
The burned mosques of Qusra and Kur are another indication of what is at stake in the Oct. 27 election. If the opposition comes to power, this will not be tolerated any more.
The post Israel’s shameful West Bank front appeared first on The Forward.
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Troy Jackson wins Maine Democratic Senate nomination, keeps mum on Israel, AIPAC
(JTA) — BANGOR, Maine – Troy Jackson accepted the Democratic nomination for Maine’s U.S. Senate race on Saturday with no mention of Israel, sidestepping an issue that has become a focal point for many Maine Jews as they assess the party’s new standard-bearer.
Jackson secured the nomination in a landslide 566 to 5 vote by delegates at the nominating convention. Saundra Pelletier, the only remaining challenger after the rest of the field dropped out in the days leading up to the gathering, picked up the handful of votes that didn’t go to the winner.
While Jackson took several shots during his acceptance address at Sen. Susan Collins, the incumbent Republican he will now face in the general election, it was Pelletier who used her remarks to specifically malign Collins’ voting record on Israel.
“She voted to increase federal funding in defensive arms for Iran, and did not vote to take moderate measures to hold Netanyahu accountable,” Pelletier said, receiving a chorus from the crowd.
The victory for Jackson came after the state’s former Democratic nominee, Graham Platner, a staunch Israel critic, left the race earlier this month amid a sexual assault allegation, which he has denied. The resulting scramble to replace him upended the Democratic primary and prompted fresh scrutiny from Jewish Mainers of Jackson’s recent evolution on Israel.
Jackson, a former state lawmaker and union advocate, had previously said little publicly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during his two-decade career in state legislature. However, during the race to replace Platner, he has embraced the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza and called for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel on his campaign website, both positions championed by Platner before his exit. Jackson also has said he wouldn’t accept any funding from AIPAC.
But on Saturday, as a sea of supporters sporting his campaign’s blue and yellow “Troy Jackson” t-shirts cheered their new nominee, Jackson omitted any mention of Israel from his remarks. Instead, Jackson reaffirmed his commitments to passing Medicare for all, supporting union rights and restoring abortion rights nationwide, among other issues.
During his address following the decisive victory, Jackson also offered a message to Maine voters who remain on the fence:
“Whether you supported me from the beginning, supported another candidate, or are still deciding what you think of this fifth-generation logger from Allagash,” Jackson said. “I’ve always known this, that your trust has to be earned, and so I want you to hear this directly from me. There is a place in this campaign for all of you. There is work for you in this movement, and I will spend every day, now through November, earning that trust because today we turn the page.”
Amy Fried, a professor emerita of political science at the University of Maine who attended Saturday’s conference as an alternate delegate but did not cast a ballot, said that while she believed Jackson had addressed Israel in the lead-up to Saturday because “a lot of people are interested in the topic,” his speech reflected the issues he had been “concerned about his whole political career.”
“Obviously, he’d have to take votes on foreign policy and funding when he’s in the Senate,” Fried said. “But I think that his main interest is always in issues that have to do with housing and healthcare, you know, all of the matters that are sort of more day-to-day kitchen table issues.”
While Jackson avoided revisiting his recent stances on Israel, which have raised concern among some Jewish voters in Maine, about a dozen pro-Palestinian protesters rallied outside the convention hall in support of his candidacy.
“It’s a really positive step that you have nominated Troy Jackson,” one protester shouted through a megaphone. “I think he’s going to be a strong voice for the kind of values that I believe in and the people of Palestine, the children of Iran, and all the other places the U.S. bombed.”
Ronna Lugosch, a 71-year-old Jewish grandmother and delegate from Round Pond, Maine, said that she was “more excited now than I was before” about Jackson’s candidacy.
Lugosch, who supports Jackson’s stances on Israel, said she hadn’t noticed he had left the topic out of his remarks. “Unfortunately, it’s a sensitive topic, so that’s my guess that maybe he didn’t bring that up because it was just too much,” Lugosch said. “You know, he was being careful.”
Still, Lugosch said that she was “really impressed with all his comments about working people and organizing.”
“I’m going to campaign for him because we need to get rid of Susan Collins,” Lugosch said. “Before it was more of a sort of a defensive stance, but now I’m supportive, and so I feel better about going out into the community.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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