The Making of “Jew Clubs”: Performing Jewishness and Antisemitism in European Football and Fan Cultures Event
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- Time:
- 18:00 to 19:30
- Date:
- 2026-09-29 18:00:00
- Venue:
- Online
Event details
Join The Parkes Institute for an online talk from Dr Pavel Brunssen titled ‘The Making of “Jew Clubs”: Performing Jewishness and Antisemitism in European Football and Fan Cultures’.
Why do non-Jewish football fans chant “Yid Army” or wave “Super Jews” banners - especially in support of clubs that are not Jewish? The Making of “Jew Clubs” explores how four major European football clubs - FC Bayern Munich, FK Austria Wien, Ajax Amsterdam, and Tottenham Hotspur - came to be associated with Jewish identities despite never officially identifying as Jewish.
Drawing on archival research, fan culture, media representations, and club histories, Pavel Brunssen examines how Jewishness, antisemitism, and philosemitism have been performed and negotiated in European football over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The talk argues that football stadiums have become unexpected sites where questions of memory, identity, and the legacy of the Holocaust are publicly contested, offering new perspectives on the intersections of sport, history, and Jewish studies.
Speaker Bio
Pavel Brunssen is Research Associate and Alfred Landecker Lecturer at the Research Center on Antigypsyism at Heidelberg University. He received his PhD in German Studies from the University of Michigan, where he was awarded the Marshall Weinberg Prize. His research focuses on antisemitism, antigypsyism, memory cultures, and European football. He is the author of The Making of “Jew Clubs” (Indiana University Press, 2025) and Antisemitismus in Fußball-Fankulturen (Beltz Juventa, 2021), and co-editor of Football and Discrimination: Antisemitism and Beyond (Routledge, 2021) and Antigypsyism and Film (Heidelberg University Publishing, 2020).