Renowned Greek photographer Vangelis Kyris presents a striking series of portraits featuring over 80 models adorned in traditional garments from Jewish communities worldwide. These photographs, printed on cotton and intricately embroidered with gold and metallic threads, breathe new life into historical attire, connecting past traditions with contemporary artistic expression.

The exhibition is available at MUZA - Eretz Israel Museum. Photos via @/eretzisraelmuseum

I go to dinners with other members when I can, I do friday Shabbat service and Saturday morning torah study and seevice if I can. My temple has hosted many events and everyone has been nothing but kind to me. I feel at home there. I may not be fully Jewish yet- but the Jews are my people and the community is what matters the most.

I do not think people should be trying to convert in isolation you absolutely need to get involved in community in real life. Am I one of the younger members? Yep. Am I unable to attend sometimes because my job doesn't care about my religion and I'll lose full time if I take Saturdays off? Yep. But thats okay life happens.

I still make time for my community. I know many people by name and they know me.

We are a people- I am joining a people. Not just a religion.

other groups of people have relationships with Hashem, but the relationship between Jews and Hashem is unique and is one we and Hashem both chose

one reason that we actively choose to follow the commandments in the Torah is because we're aligning our interests with Hashem's, and sometimes that means doing things that look irrational to people outside the relationship but that make sense to us

sometimes a relationship between lovers is erotic! in that light it makes complete sense to include the Shir Hashirim in the Tanakh

Did you know about the custom of pulling grass when leaving a cemetery? 🌱 Tradition says throwing grass behind you confuses the Angel of Death so they can't follow you home.

Discover more fascinating, lesser know folklore traditions like this in our new "Jewish Folklore of Eastern Europe" zine! 📖

Support the Indiegogo campaign and grab your copy here: 

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 11 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 alongside József Braun, in 1924, were the Jewish players who 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,” Bolchover 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 club founders now, or on the chairmen who run the teams? 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.

Only three of the 11 — Julius Hirsch, Otto Fischer, and Weisz — have had some biographical attention in German and Italian and a few English-language articles. With the exception of a few recent Polish language articles about Józef Klotz’s famous penalty, the others are, as Bolchover puts it, “completely forgotten, really.

And they’re not now. They’re in print, their names are there, and people can read about 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.

In America, she adopted the name Eve Adams — a playful nod to her androgyny, invoking the biblical Adam and Eve — and wore men’s clothing.

“She was a vibrant activist, who was daring. She had an androgynous appearance, which immediately identified her as a lesbian,” said Jonathan Ned Katz, author of The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams. “Wearing pants for women was just unthinkable in the time period.”

Adams soon immersed herself in New York’s anarchist circles, befriending prominent Jewish anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. She worked as a traveling saleswoman for leftist publications including Mother Earth, activities that landed her on the Bureau of Investigation’s watch list during the First Red Scare.

In 1923, Adams published Lesbian Love, a collection of essays about the romantic lives of dozens of women in Greenwich Village. Katz described the book as far ahead of its time.

“The word “lesbian” was not used much. It was like a dirty word at the time, so you didn’t say it out loud,” Katz said. “Here she was, putting it on a book jacket.”

Two years later, Adams opened Eve’s Hangout in Greenwich Village. The underground tearoom became a rare refuge where lesbian women could socialize openly.

But the haven proved short-lived. In 1926, an undercover detective named Margaret Leonard visited Eve’s Hangout, where she met Adams. The following day, the two attended a play in Times Square together. Adams gave Leonard a copy of Lesbian Love — evidence of “obscenity” that prosecutors later used against her — and Leonard alleged Adams made sexual advances toward her during the taxi ride to the theater.

Adams was convicted and spent 18 months in jail before the United States deported her to Poland.

She settled in Paris, where she began a relationship with Jewish cabaret singer Hella Olstein Soldner. In 1943, the two women were arrested and sent to the Drancy internment camp. From there, they were deported to Auschwitz, where both were murdered.

Eve in Paris

I feel like Jews have lost.

The societal ruptures that happened after October 7 made open Jew hate okay, and there was nothing we could do, and we've already lost the fight.

The celebrations that occurred on Oct 8 made it obvious what we suspected for a while, that Jew hate had been festering for a long time, waiting for an excuse to become mainstream.

No response that Israel could have had would have changed that.

And now Jew hate is entrenched on the left and the right around the world. It has become the top issue for the American left.

I have seen myriad Jewish voices in the diaspora fight against antizionism and rising Jew hate. Israel is fighting for its very existence.

But no matter how accurate and eloquent those Jewish voices are, about history and Arab colonialism and Jewish refugees after the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing in MENA and how views about Israel are directly affecting and killing Jews... It seems like it isn't changing the tide.

I think the Iran debacle has actually made Israel less safe and entrenched the regime bent on its destruction.

I know there are good people out there, no few of them are friends and my followers on here. But for every righteous non Jew that offers me comfort, there were 10 friends or lovers or acquaintances that I lost and couldn't get back no matter how much I tried to talk to them.

I can never trust some people again, knowing that they'll always be reflexively skeptical of any Jew.

And in the court of public opinion, I feel like Jews have lost.

I try not to let hopelessness consume me. But I don't know what to do.

I'm not a fighter. I want to keep my job, which necessitates being quiet about public issues and not making a name for myself, tempting as it may be.

I tried to have polite private conversations with friends and 9 out of 10 times it failed spectacularly. So I just don't do it anymore.

So like. What do I do?

I'm on my synagogue's board now, which is exciting. Because they have need of financial and legal acumen, which are talents I can provide. Should I be satisfied just trying to help make Jewish community in the nerdiest way I can help? I know every little bit helps, and making community is truly something important. Not everything can be splashy. But it still feels so small and I still feel so restless.

I try to find Jewish joy so I don't wallow, but it's hard.

Do I just bear witness? Memorialize what I've seen for future generations?

Do I go to cantorial or rabbinical school? (A semi-serious consideration of mine)

Do I *gulp* start a podcast or start making videos? I am eloquent, authoritative, and engaging. Speaking is a talent of mine. But again, I'm not a fighter, nor do I want to make a name.

This is my very long archive of Jewish titles, collected according to what I find personally interesting, and so the authors here span many denominations/viewpoints. If you come across this as a reblog, check in on the original post to see if I have made any updates or corrections. As a general disclaimer, Judaism is a closed religion (yes, including Lilith) and so the books I have recommended on Kabbalah and mysticism are not for goyische readers, thank you for understanding.

TEXTS (Torah/Tanakh, Talmud, Midrash, etc.)

"After the Apple: Women in the Bible" — Naomi Rosenblatt

"Begin­nings: Reflec­tions on the Bible’s Intrigu­ing 'Firsts'" — Meir Shalev

"Bib­li­cal Seduc­tions: Six Sto­ries Retold Based on Tal­mud and Midrash" — Sandra Rapoport

"But Where Is the Lamb?: Imag­in­ing the Sto­ry of Abra­ham and Isaac" — James Good­man

"Covenant & Conversation: Genesis" — Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

"Covenant & Conversation: Exodus" — Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

"Covenant & Conversation: Leviticus" — Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

"Covenant & Conversation: Numbers" — Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

"Covenant & Conversation: Deuteronomy" — Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

"Eli­jah and the Rab­bis: Sto­ry and Theology" — Kris­ten Lindbeck

"Essays on Ethics: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible" — Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

"Eter­nal­ly Eve: Images of Eve in the Hebrew Bible, Midrash, and Mod­ern Jew­ish Poetry" — Anne Lerner

"From Gods to G-d: How the Bible Debunked, Sup­pressed, or Changed Ancient Myths and Legends" — Avig­dor Shi­nan & Yair Zakovitch

"Glean­ings: Reflec­tions on Ruth" — Stu­art Halpern

"In Scrip­ture: The First Sto­ries of Jew­ish Sex­u­al Identities" — Lori Lefkovitz

"It Takes Two to Torah: An Ortho­dox Rab­bi and Reform Jour­nal­ist Dis­cuss and Debate Their Way Through the Five Books of Moses" — Abi­gail Pogrebin & Dov Linz­er

"Jew­ish Bib­li­cal Inter­pre­ta­tion and Cul­tur­al Exchange: Com­par­a­tive Exe­ge­sis in Context" — Natal­ie Dohrmann & David Stern

"Jus­tice for All: How the Jew­ish Bible Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Ethics" — Jere­mi­ah Unterman

"Lessons in Leadership: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible" — Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

"Moses’ Women" — Shera Tuch­man & San­dra Rapoport

"Nar­rat­ing the Law: A Poet­ics of Tal­mu­dic Legal Stories" — Bar­ry Wimpfheimer

"Out­side the Bible: Ancient Jew­ish Writ­ings Relat­ed to Scripture" — Louis Feld­man, James Kugel & Lawrence Schiff­man

"Rab­bis, Sor­cer­ers, Kings, and Priests: The Cul­ture of the Tal­mud in Ancient Iran" — Jason Mokhtarian

"Rashi’s Com­men­tary on the Torah: Can­on­iza­tion and Resis­tance in the Recep­tion of a Jew­ish Classic" — Eric Lawee

"Read­ing Gen­e­sis: Beginnings" — Beth Kissileff

"Right­eous Gen­tiles in the Hebrew Bible: Ancient Role Mod­els for Sacred Relationships" — Rab­bi Jef­frey Salkin

"Sin­ning in the Hebrew Bible: How The Worst Sto­ries Speak for Its Truth" — Alan Segal

"The Art of Biblical Narrative" — Robert Alter

"The Art of Biblical Poetry" — Robert Alter

"The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis" — Avivah Zornberg

"The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel" — Halbertal & Holmes

"The Book of Exodus: A Biography" — Joel Baden

"The Book of Genesis: A Biography" — Ronald Hendel

"The Book of Job: A Biography" — Mark Larrimore

"The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Biography" — John Collins

"The Essen­tial Talmud" — Adin Steinsaltz

"The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary" — Robert Alter

"The Jewish Study Bible" — Adele Berlin & Marc Zvi Brettler

"The Lad­der of Jacob: Ancient Inter­pre­ta­tions of the Bib­li­cal Sto­ry of Jacob and His Children" — James Kugel

"The Lost Matri­arch: Find­ing Leah in the Bible and the Midrash" — Jerry Rabow

"The Mad­woman in the Rabbi’s Attic: Reread­ing the Women of the Talmud" — Gila Fine

"The Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls" — Hershel Shanks

"The Passover Haggadah: A Biography" — Vanessa Ochs

"The Song of Songs: A Biography" — Ilana Pardes

"The Talmud: A Biography" — Barry Wimpfheimer

"The Talmud for Beginners" — Judith Abrams

"With All Thine Heart: Love and the Bible" — Ilan Sta­vans & Morde­cai Drache

"Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne" — Wilda Gafney

"Wrestling Jacob: Decep­tion, Iden­ti­ty and Freudi­an Slips in Genesis" — Shmuel Klitsner

"Wrestling with Angels: What Genesis Teaches about our Spiritual Identity, Sexuality, and Personal Relationships" — Naomi Rosenblatt