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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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What Muhammad Ali taught me from his Jerusalem hotel
The one time I got to talk to Muhammad Ali was a summer evening when I was working at one of my favorite college internships — in the McClurg Court newsroom of WBBM Newsradio 78, the Chicago affiliate of CBS Radio.
The scene came to mind earlier this week when I released a new audio documentary called Broken Hologram about Ali and his brief stint as a Broadway star. But back then, I was one of a quartet of interns who included a cool girl from Hyde Park named Gwen Billings with whom I occasionally took lunch at a nearby hot dog stand and discussed important news figures like, say, Depeche Mode and The Smiths. There was also Linda, a hard-nosed news reporter in the mold of Holly Hunter in Broadcast News. Sometimes she came around to my cubicle and took sips of my Dr. Pepper. Not in a flirtatious way, more in a proto-Daniel Day-Lewis “I drink your milkshake” kind of way. There was a fratty guy named Scott who wore a class ring from (redacted). He went on to a lucrative career, just not in journalism. There was one other dude; he was from Crown Point, Indiana, but that’s just about all I remember.
My job consisted of answering phones, ripping wire copy from the AP and UPI machines, getting sources on the phone and calling every major fire and police station every night to see if there was a story to be reported (“Hi, Sergeant Kupka, it’s Adam from WBBM: Do you have anything working in your area?”).
Even though every sergeant told me the same thing every night, I kept calling because that’s what journalists do: You keep making the calls. In fact, I did pretty much whatever was asked of me, and turned feisty only when one of the few asshole reporters tried to get me to run downstairs to the loading area to fetch him a “Green Streak” edition of the Tribune so he could check on his stocks or intimated that my job description should include making him coffee.
“Sure could do with a cup o’ coffee right now, Adam.”
“Cool, why don’t you make yourself one?”
Note: The individual referred to is decidedly not John Cody, a truly great man who remains a friend to this day. (Fun fact: During Vietnam, John worked for Stars & Stripes alongside Seth Lipsky, founder of the English language edition of the Forward)
Nor am I referring to sports reporter Rich King, a prince of a man who always offered to get people sandwiches from the White Hen Pantry (“Anyone need anything from ‘The Hen?’”).
Sometimes, when the news day got super-slow — for example, when Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz was in the studio doing a live call-in show — I passed the time by trying to guess the usually ridiculously easy passwords for the WBBM staff’s new computers and snooping in the reporters’ early version of email in a futile effort to find anything interesting. Apologies to the late Dale McCarren (DMC123).
I was working the evening shift when the top news story was about Father Lawrence Martin Jenco, a Catholic priest from Joliet, Illinois, who had been taken hostage in Beirut while he was working for a relief agency. Muhammad Ali was part of a delegation that had flown to the Middle East to try to arrange his release.
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My supervisor was a terrific guy named Duane Gray, an African-American Conservative who was big on conspiracy theories (“You should read this book. It’s called The Terror Network.”). He was a great manager and colleague who made sure that we kept to the schedule and that traffic, weather, sports and news headlines always came right when they were supposed to. On this particular night, Duane gave me a mission: “Get ‘The Champ’ on the phone.”
“Uh, how do I do that, Duane?”
“Call every hotel,” he said.
He scrawled a list of hotels in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem on a legal pad and I started calling Information to get their numbers. Advantage of working for a CBS affiliate: You got to make all the long-distance calls you wanted.
How many calls did I make? What were the names of all the hotels? I have no idea. But I do remember that one of them was the King David Hotel in Jerusalem because this time, when I asked to be transferred to Ali’s room, no one said, “Sorry, no one here by that name.”
Ali picked up. His voice had that raspy quality it got after he retired from boxing. “Hullo?”
“Hi, I’m calling from Newsradio 78. I was hoping one of our anchors could speak with you.”
“You’re calling from Chicago?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Man,” Ali told me, sounding weary but amiable. “It sounds like you’re calling from right next door.”
Duane could be a wise-ass and a cynic, but now he was star-struck. He sprang to his feet. “Is that the Champ?”
I nodded.
Duane grabbed the phone. “How’re you doin, Champ? You’re gonna be on with Dale McCarren. I’m gonna patch you through, Champ.” He gave me a hearty high-five.
Some time later — perhaps after a week, perhaps after two — when Madonna was in town for some concert, movie junket or photo shoot and Duane told me he wanted to get her on the air, I knew exactly what to do.
After I got her on the phone at her hotel and transferred the call to Duane, he shouted: “This kid,” he said, complimenting both me and his own managerial talent, “has the best news instincts of anyone in this newsroom!”
“Hello, Madonna?” Duane said into the phone. “You’re gonna be on with Dale; let me patch you through.”
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Rock legend Steven Van Zandt’s new gig: Holocaust education
(JTA) — Steven Van Zandt is worried about the Jews.
“There is that pre-Holocaust vibe,” the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency recently about what he sees on social media, where he is a prolific user. “They spread lies around year after year after year, and if you say something often enough, people start to believe it.
“And that’s what happened that led to the Holocaust in the first place, and that’s what’s going on now.”
For a man equally beloved for his longtime work with Bruce Springsteen in the E Street Band and his role as Silvio on HBO’s “The Sopranos,” such a detour might seem unusual. But Van Zandt is looking to make his own mark in the world of Holocaust education, via his education initiative TeachRock, which since 2013 has provided K-12 lesson plans on a range of subjects built around popular music.
Titled “Jewish Heritage and the Holocaust: Exploring an Enduring Culture Through Music,” the initiative’s four-day lesson plan, launched this week, includes the onset of antisemitism in prewar Europe, survivor testimony and Jewish values. Anchoring the lessons are rock songs from the likes of KISS, the half-Jewish glam metal band, beloved Jewish folk singer Leonard Cohen and contemporary New York pop band Lawrence, which is fronted by two Jewish siblings.
It’s a departure from the somber tone of most Holocaust education programs, a space that the Jewish community has heavily invested in despite mounting questions about the effectiveness of such lessons in curbing antisemitism. Other contemporary Holocaust learning initiatives have employed video games, artificial intelligence and similarly novel approaches as educators struggle to adapt to a near future without living survivors to share their testimonies.
For Van Zandt, the lessons aren’t just teaching about the Holocaust, but also about highlighting positive Jewish influence in the world of popular culture. He rattled off a list of Jewish artists he admires, including Bob Dylan and the pop songwriting team Lieber and Stoller.
“I have a lot of gratitude for what they have contributed to my life, just in terms of enjoyment,” he said. “Show business doesn’t exist without the Jewish contributions.”
The guitarist founded TeachRock in 2013 alongside other big names from the world of music and the arts, including Springsteen, U2 frontman Bono, Jackson Browne and the director Martin Scorsese. On Thursday, the organization piloted its new Holocaust education lesson plan to 50 high school students at the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, timed to the state’s Holocaust Education Week. Florida’s Holocaust education task force is promoting the material to districts across the state.
“We always want to be educating in a way that feels like you’re not being taught. And I think this captures that,” Michael Igel, a contributing author on the TeachRock lesson plan who also chairs the statewide task force, told JTA.
For Igel, a descendant of survivors, the project fits neatly into his own efforts to bring Holocaust education into unconventional spaces. He’s planning future courses that incorporate food and theater.
“It’s still standards-based Holocaust education. But it’s being delivered to students in these different portals,” he said.
It was through Igel’s promotion of such nontraditional methods that he was approached by a member of TeachRock’s leadership council a year ago. TeachRock had recently been looking to offer lessons on Jewish heritage, and saw an opportunity to broach the subject of the Holocaust through Igel.
A huge E Street Band fan, Igel laughed as he recalled how the council member asked him if he had ever heard of Van Zandt.
The first of the curriculum’s four days opens with students listening to “Rock and Roll All Nite,” the 1975 hit by rock band KISS, before segueing into Jewish life in prewar Europe and the rise of antisemitism.
Igel noted the unique nature of the lesson. “When Gene Simmons with his tongue out is the first thing you see, you’re wondering, ‘What the heck happened to Holocaust education?’” he said.
Gradually the link becomes clear: The lesson explains that KISS frontman Gene Simmons is the son of a Holocaust survivor. Much of the curriculum is built around similar ideas of Jewish survival and resilience, as students are asked to contemplate how Simmons’ family background may have informed his outré stage persona. (Co-founder Paul Stanley is also Jewish.)
Such concepts, he said, help expand the idea of a Holocaust lesson beyond Jews as “victims in a snapshot of time.” In teacher training sessions, educators have responded well to the musical framing and excitedly discussed which songs they would want to pass down to future generations — a positive sign for Igel, who hopes to convince teachers to use the curriculum even outside of the state-mandated Holocaust Education Week lessons.
While Van Zandt, who is not Jewish, doesn’t craft the curriculum himself, he is friends with Simmons and the two have spoken before about wanting to use music to teach Jewish history. Max Weinberg, the E Street Band’s longtime drummer, is also Jewish.
The initiative comes at a moment when the world of popular music, like many other cultural sectors, has become engulfed in controversy over Israel. A recent dustup involved Ed Sheeran and Macklemore, in which Jewish venue owner Robert Kraft pressured Sheeran to drop the rapper from his tour over his onstage pro-Palestinian activism. That prompted many artists to support Macklemore, including Jewish actor Ilana Glazer, who spoke at one of his “Free Palestine” tour stops. Several leading musicians, including Lorde, Paramore and Björk, have also signed pledges to boycott Israel over its conduct in Gaza, while others including Pink and Boy George have taken opposite tracks.
All of this discourages Van Zandt, who famously led an international artist boycott of the South African resort venue Sun City in 1985 to protest Apartheid. The artists now backing the Boycott, Divestment Sanctions movement targeting Israel have cited the Sun City protests as a direct inspiration. (Sun City itself was founded by Sol Kerzner, the son of Jewish Russian immigrants.)
But Van Zandt says the two causes are different.
“Yes, I am known as the boycott king of the world,” he said. “It’s not the same situation. Trying to deny weapons for Israel to defend itself is obscene. It’s ridiculous. It’s terrible.”
He has feuded with Roger Waters, the Pink Floyd co-founder and outspoken pro-Palestinian activist, over BDS.
“I wrote him a very nice, detailed letter saying that it was misconceived, it’s a mistake, it’s not going to accomplish anything,” Van Zandt recalled. “I was very nice to him. Very diplomatic, very respectful. And then he starts just calling me names in the press.” (Waters has directed expletives at Van Zandt and other contemporaries who disagree with him about Israel in interviews.)
Igel, too, is thinking about how TeachRock’s lessons can address contemporary discourse over Israel, a subject that many Holocaust educators often are reluctant to bring up in the classroom even when students press the topic. His curriculum defines what a genocide is — “for a generation that needs to know what that word means, and what it doesn’t mean,” he said.
Following this week’s pilot program, both Igel and Van Zandt hope states beyond Florida will take an interest in their lessons. The rock star has ambitious goals for the initiative: to try to change the national conversation around Jews and Israel that has filled his social media feeds, which he describes as “lies on top of lies.”
“Eventually there’s got to be a national public conversation about this, which is not taking place,” he said. “So eventually it’s going to have to be. At that point, all bets are off.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Were Leopold and Loeb inspired by Nietzsche, or Jewish self-loathing?
Any production of Patrick Hamilton’s popular thriller Rope, like any game of Clue, can be reduced to props, setting and culprits.
The central prop is a large chest, containing a freshly-murdered body. The setting can vary: Mayfair in Hamilton’s 1929 original, Manhattan in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 screen adaptation starring Jimmy Stewart. The names of the players are sometimes different, but there are always two students in their finely-appointed apartment with the titular murder weapon.
Gordon Greenberg’s new adaptation, now playing off-Broadway at the New Group’s space at St. Clement’s, presents a novel clue as to what prompted the crime: a Christmas tree upstage right. In his take on this “well-made play,” which Greenberg believes has its deficiencies, the central characters, inspired by University of Chicago students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, are once again Jewish, but doing their best to conceal that fact.
Hamilton, who wrote his play shortly after Leopold and Loeb’s conviction, was struck by the men’s alleged lack of motive, beyond a desire to pull off the perfect crime based on their nihilistic misreading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy. Greenberg doesn’t buy that the killing was dispassionate, and believes a crisis of identity was at play.
“What drew me to it was thinking about what the factors might have been that went into this murder that I personally find hard to believe was just theoretical,” said Greenberg, a director and playwright, who recently revived Joseph Stein and Stephen Schwartz’s The Baker’s Wife off-Broadway. “I don’t think anyone does anything for purely theoretical reasons. We can extrapolate them later, but in the moment we are going on gut impulses and human needs and sexuality and jealousy and all of these fiery emotional poles that make us human.”
Greenberg, who is gay and Jewish, had long been fascinated by the Leopold and Loeb case, wondering what led two well-bred, cerebral Jews to commit a supposedly “motiveless” murder. (In the real crime, notably fictionalized in Meyer Levin’s Compulsion, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb killed a 14-year-old boy, Robert Franks; in Rope, they kill a wealthy classmate.)
Hamilton’s play, which Greenberg found to be “antiseptic,” de-Judaized and stripped of queerness, is not concerned with the “why” of the killing.
His murderers, Brandon, described as “tall, finely and athletically built, and blonde” and Granillo, “a Spaniard” with the “shrug of the shoulders characteristic of his race,” are in it for the thrill. They convene a dinner party and serve the meal on the chest containing their victim, certain they won’t be caught.
In Greenberg’s version, set in 1957 Manhattan, Brandon is Garret Stern (Cameron Monahan), a working-class striver who declaims, in a break of the fourth wall, that he “wants to be mistaken for the son of assimilated German Jews, not the shtetl Jews with bent vowels and calloused hands from whom he actually descends.” (As part of the ruse, he’s abandoned his given name of Gary.)
Granillo is now Nate Singer (Corey Fogelmanis), the Yekke scion of a garment district macher who, to his upwardly-mobile mother’s delight, “can almost pass for gentile.” Both are students at Princeton and plan to drop the body back in Jersey after their macabre dinner party.
Like the real Leopold and Loeb, they are also involved sexually and sadomasochistically. Greenberg says he was partially inspired by Tom Kalin’s 1992 film Swoon, which revisited the killers through a queer lens.
Nate’s instilled self-hatred likely feeds into his desire to be dominated by Garret, whose rough upbringing as a Jew in postwar Skokie taught him the utility of violence. (His school principal praised him for breaking a boy’s nose, saying “your people aren’t exactly known for defending themselves.”)
Greenberg, who said that, as an actor he played “every Herb Gardner and Neil Simon play around,” chose to move the action up to the era Lavender Scare and a resurgence of casual, clubby antisemitism following the “chemotherapy of World War II” that briefly put it into remission.
Nate and Garret’s guests, for their post-Christmas shindig, whose centerpiece is a chest containing a corpse, include a polished, pedigreed classmate; a droll Sarah Lawrence student; their closeted professor, who will catch them in the lie; and a Mayflower-descendant judge who happens to be the father of Ronald Kentley, the deceased.
Driving the boys’ motive and cue for passion is Nate’s tormented attraction to Ronald, who he fears might out him and land him on McCarthy’s list. Garret is jealous, but sees an opportunity: In bumping Ronald off, he hopes to take his place as the judge’s surrogate son, gaining entry to the patrician world to which he aspires.
But their guests’ routine macroaggressions show the futility of trying to overcome their backgrounds. The Christmas tree is fooling no one. Greenberg is similarly unconvinced that Leopold and Loeb’s murder was merely a Nietzschean performance, undertaken to prove that morality need not apply to superior intellects.
“No one really knows what was going through their mind, and no one ever will,” Greenberg said of Leopold and Loeb’s crime. “But taking one of these fascinating true crime stories and positing what the humanity is behind it, what’s all the flesh on the bone, is to me the fascination and the fun exercise.”
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