Pavel Brunssen, ‘The making of “Jew Clubs”‘
BISA online seminar
Date: 21 January 2026
Time: 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm GMT
Location: Online – the joining link will be sent the day before the event
Speaker: Pavel Brunssen, Heidelberg University
Free seminar for scholars. Book here or contact bisa@bbk.ac.uk for further information.
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 Vienna, Ajax Amsterdam, and Tottenham Hotspur – came to be seen as “Jew Clubs,” even though they have never officially identified as Jewish.
In this transnational study, Pavel Brunssen traces how both Jewish and non-Jewish actors perform Jewishness, antisemitism, and philosemitism within European football cultures over the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Drawing on a wide array of primary sources – from fan chants and matchday rituals to media portrayals and club histories – he reveals how football stadiums have become unexpected stages for negotiating memory, identity, and historical trauma.
Offering a new approach to Holocaust memory, sports history, and Jewish studies, Pavel Brunssen shows how football cultures reflect and reshape Europe’s conflicted relationship with its Jewish past.
Pavel Brunssen is a Research Associate and Alfred Landecker Lecturer at the Research Center on Antigypsyism at Heidelberg University. His research interests include antisemitism, antigypsyism, memory cultures, European football, and fan cultures. He holds a PhD in German Studies from the University of Michigan, where he received the Marshall Weinberg Prize. He is the author of The Making of “Jew Clubs”, Antisemitismus in Fußball-Fankulturen: Der Fall RB Leipzig (2021, Beltz Juventa) and the co-editor of Football and Discrimination: Antisemitism and Beyond (2021, Routledge) and Antigypsyism and Film / Antiziganismus und Film (2020, Heidelberg University Publishing).