Antisemitism in the Olympic Games

The history of antisemitism within the Olympic Games reflects broader currents of Jewish persecution and resilience across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At its most systematic, it took the form of state policy: beginning in 1933, the Nazi government systematically excluded Jews from German athletic institutions, while the 1936 Games temporarily masked that campaign of persecution behind a propaganda image of a peaceful and tolerant Germany.[1] At its most violent, it included the murder of eleven members of Israel's Olympic delegation in Munich in 1972.[2]

Other episodes include the disputed removal of Jewish American athletes from competition in 1936 and later refusals by athletes to compete against Israelis.[3][4] Paris 2024 brought reported death threats, data leaks, Nazi salutes, and genocidal chants directed at Israeli athletes and teams.[5][6] A further controversy concerned whether the International Olympic Committee adequately commemorated the Munich victims, culminating in an opening-ceremony minute of silence at Tokyo in 2021.[7][8] The ADL's educational overview frames Jewish athletes' Olympic experiences as combining participation and resilience with moments of violence and antisemitism.[9]

The IOC awarded the 1936 Summer Games to Berlin in 1931, when Germany was the democratic Weimar Republic.[1] Two years later, Adolf Hitler became chancellor and rapidly transformed the country into a dictatorship that persecuted Jews and other minorities. In April 1933, German athletic organizations adopted an "Aryans only" policy, systematically excluding Jews, people with Jewish parents, and Roma from sports facilities and associations.[1] Jewish athletes were left to compete in separate, poorly resourced organizations such as Maccabee and Shield, which could not match the facilities available to well-funded German groups.[1]

The exclusion reached accomplished athletes at every level. The German Boxing Association expelled amateur champion Eric Seelig in April 1933 because he was Jewish.[3] Daniel Prenn, Germany's top-ranked tennis player, was removed from the Davis Cup team.[3] Lilly Henoch — a world-record holder in discus, shot put, and long jump, and a co-holder of the 4×100-meter relay world record — was expelled from Berlin Sports Club and forced into a club exclusively for Jews; she was later deported to the Riga Ghetto in 1942 and murdered there with her family.[10] The 1935 Nuremberg Laws denied Jews German citizenship, formally barring them from representing Germany in tournaments.[11]

Before the Games, the regime sought to neutralize an international boycott campaign that had taken hold in the United States, Great Britain, France, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, and the Netherlands.[1] Nazi officials promised the IOC that the Games would not be racist and that Jewish athletes could try out for the German team.[12] The US Amateur Athletic Union voted narrowly in December 1935 to participate, and once the United States committed, the boycott movement collapsed; 49 nations ultimately sent teams, giving the Nazi regime a propaganda victory by lending it an air of international respectability.[1] American IOC member Ernest Lee Jahncke opposed participation and argued that attending amounted to tacit approval of Nazi contempt for fair play; IOC president Henri de Baillet-Latour removed Jahncke from the committee, and Avery Brundage took his place.[12]

During the August 1936 Games, Nazi authorities concealed the scale of their persecution from foreign visitors. The regime temporarily removed most anti-Jewish signs from public display and toned down newspaper rhetoric under Propaganda Ministry directives — a temporary camouflage that left the underlying policies unchanged.[1] Several Jewish athletes chose to boycott, while others participated and thereby defied Nazi racial theories by their presence.[13]

Gretel Bergmann's case illustrates both the cynicism of Nazi management and the resilience of Jewish athletes. Bergmann had been expelled from her athletics club in Ulm after the Nazis came to power in 1933.[14] She moved to Britain, became British high-jump champion in 1934, and joined the London Polytechnic sports team.[14][15] Nazi officials then demanded she return to Germany for pre-Olympic qualifying — a bid to fend off international accusations of racism — and in June 1936, at a Stuttgart trial, she equaled the German women's high-jump record of 1.60 meters (5 feet 3 inches).[14][16] Two weeks before the Games began, German officials informed her that she had been dropped from the team; they used only two of their three allotted high-jump places.[16] Her record was erased from the history books.[14] She emigrated to the United States in 1937 and won the US high-jump championship in 1937 and 1938.[15] In 2009, the German Track and Field Association restored her record, calling it "an act of justice and a symbolic gesture of respect."[14]

The Nazis included one athlete classified as "non-Aryan": fencer Helene Mayer, whose father was Jewish, competed for Germany as a token gesture intended to placate international opinion.[1] Mayer had won Olympic fencing gold in 1928; in Berlin she took silver.[11] No other Jewish athlete competed for Germany in the 1936 Summer Games.[1] On the medal podium, Mayer wore the German uniform bearing the swastika and gave the Nazi salute.[1] When Nazi Germany's consul general in Jerusalem was asked whether a Jewish delegation from Mandatory Palestine might be invited, he reportedly told the Berlin Olympic organizer: "there is no chance Jews will be allowed to participate, and I don't think there's any need to explain the motives to you."[11] The Palestine National Olympic Committee, formed in 1933 and recognized by the IOC in 1934, ultimately declined the invitation after the Nuremberg Laws were enacted; chairman Frederick Kisch said the athletes were not ready and believed outright rejection might endanger German Jews.[11]

More than 70 Jewish athletes representing 20 countries nevertheless competed in Berlin.[17] Among them was Alfred Nakache, an Algerian Jew representing France, who helped his team finish fourth in the 4×200-meter relay, six seconds short of a bronze medal.[13] Nakache later survived Auschwitz, where his wife and daughter were murdered, and returned to competitive swimming after the war.[13] Jewish athletes from other nations collectively defied the racial ideology the Games were meant to celebrate. Sources disagree on how many won medals: the USHMM reports nine athletes who were Jewish or of Jewish parentage, including Helene Mayer and five Hungarians, while the Jewish Virtual Library reports 13 Jewish athletes or people of Jewish descent earned medals.[1][3] The sources use different counting criteria that cannot be reconciled from the cited material.

Jesse Owens, an African American athlete, won four gold medals at the Berlin Games, widely regarded as a blow to the Nazi belief in Aryan supremacy.[18]

A separate and contested episode involved American Jewish sprinters Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, the only two Jewish athletes on the US track-and-field team at Berlin.[19] Both had qualified for and trained for the 4×100-meter relay. About a day before the race, coaches announced that Ralph Metcalfe would replace Stoller and Jesse Owens would replace Glickman.[20][21] The American team ran the final and set a world record.[20]

The motive for the change has never been definitively established. Coaches stated that the team needed its fastest runners for a competitive reason.[3] Stoller did not attribute the decision to antisemitism and called the experience the "most humiliating episode" of his life.[3] Glickman later said that the decision had been fueled by antisemitism and alleged that Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had told US Olympic Committee chairman Avery Brundage that Hitler would be unhappy to see Jews run in the Games; Brundage and the coaches denied any religious motivation.[21][3] Historian Jeffrey S. Gurock, writing in the American Jewish Archives Journal in 2024, presents the decision as driven by officials who did not want Jewish athletes to win medals in front of Hitler and his entourage, characterizing those officials as "Nazi sympathizing sports leaders"; this account relies substantially on Glickman's later autobiography and does not present a detailed weighing of contemporary evidence against alternative explanations.[22] A 2011 American Jewish Archives announcement, by contrast, posed antisemitism and deference to Nazi hosts as open questions rather than settled conclusions.[19] The disputed motive is better treated as an unresolved historical question than as an established fact.

The 1972 Munich Games were intended to project a radically different image of Germany from the Nazi-era Berlin Olympics.[2][23] Organizers called the Munich event the "Smiling Games" or the "Games of Peace and Joy," and designed the Olympic Village for accessibility — its perimeter was left unguarded to create an open, festive atmosphere.[2][23] Police psychologist Georg Sieber had nevertheless prepared a scenario anticipating Palestinian commandos entering the Israeli compound, taking hostages, and demanding the release of Arab prisoners; security chief Manfred Schreiber dismissed that and similar scenarios as far-fetched.[23]

On September 5, 1972, eight members of Black September — described by sources as an arm of the Palestine Liberation Organization's Fatah group — broke into the Olympic Village and attacked the Israeli delegation's dormitories.[2][24] Wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg and weightlifter Yossef Romano were killed during the initial struggle, and nine other Israelis were taken hostage.[2] The attackers demanded the release of 236 prisoners, mainly Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, as well as Red Army Faction leaders Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof.[23]

Olympic competition continued for approximately seven hours after the attack began before being suspended.[23] German authorities transferred the hostages and attackers to Munich's Fürstenfeldbruck airfield, where a rescue attempt ended in a gunfight.[23] All nine remaining hostages were killed, along with a West German police officer and five attackers; three attackers survived and were arrested.[2][23] The Israeli death toll reached eleven. The victims were David Berger, Ze'ev Friedman, Yoseff Gutfreund, Moshe Weinberg, Yoseff Romano, Mark Slavin, Eliezer Halfin, Yakov Springer, Andre Spitzer, Amitzur Shapira, and Kehat Shorr.[7]

At the September 6 memorial service in the Olympic Stadium, IOC president Avery Brundage announced that "the games must go on," a decision that drew widespread anger and controversy.[2][8] In his remarks, Brundage described the terrorist action as one of "two savage attacks" on the Games, identifying the other as the political campaign to exclude Rhodesia; observers characterized the equation as jarring.[23] The Games resumed on September 7, two days after the attack.[23] Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir ordered the remaining Israeli team members home; delegation chief Shmuel Lalkin and race-walker Shaul Ladany favored staying, with Ladany arguing that leaving would hand the terrorists another victory.[23]

In September 2017, the German government held an official ceremony honoring the eleven Israelis killed.[2] In 2022, Germany agreed to additional compensation for victims' families, the release of files to historians, and an apology for security and rescue failures.[25] German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier described the Olympic Village as "a stage for their boundless hatred for Israel."[25]

The families of the murdered Israeli athletes spent decades pressing the IOC for official commemoration within the Olympic program, and the IOC's resistance became a secondary controversy in its own right. After what observers described as years of refusals, the IOC invited the slain athletes' children to the 1996 Atlanta Games.[23] A JCC Maccabi Games tribute had been held at opening ceremonies since 1995.[7]

Ahead of the 2012 London Games, the Israeli government formally asked the IOC to hold a minute of silence at the opening ceremony on the fortieth anniversary of the massacre.[8] IOC president Jacques Rogge said the IOC did not foresee an opening-ceremony commemoration; spokesman Andrew Mitchell said a ceremony would take place during the Games instead, with Rogge participating.[8] Israel's deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon criticized the decision, saying it implied the tragedy was "yours alone and not within the family of nations."[8] Ankie Spitzer, widow of murdered fencing coach Andre Spitzer, said the purpose of a moment of silence was to help ensure such an attack could not happen again.[26] An account of the dispute attributed the IOC's position to a reluctance to mix sports and politics.[27]

At the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games, IOC President Thomas Bach led a tribute to the murdered athletes, followed by a minute of silence, in a ceremony held inside the Olympic Village.[25] Spitzer said: "We waited 44 years to have this remembrance."[25] The IOC established a tradition of a place of mourning at future Olympics.[25] At the opening ceremony of the 2021 Tokyo Games, the Israeli delegation killed in Munich was officially commemorated for the first time in an opening ceremony, with a moment of silence after years of advocacy by family members and JCC Rockland.[7]

American gymnast Aly Raisman offered her own tribute at the 2012 London Olympics, performing her gold-medal-winning floor exercise to "Hava Nagilah" on the fortieth anniversary of the massacre. She said: "The fact it was on the 40th anniversary is special, and winning the gold means a lot to me."[28]

A recurring pattern at Olympic Games from the early twenty-first century onward involved athletes from certain nations withdrawing from competition rather than face Israeli opponents. At the 2004 Athens Olympics, Iranian judoka Arash Miresmaeili refused to compete against Israeli Ehud Vaks and was disqualified.[29] At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Iranian swimmer Mohammad Alirezaei withdrew from the 100-meter breaststroke heat in which he was scheduled to race Israeli Tom Be'eri; initial reporting attributed the withdrawal to instructions from Iranian delegation officials.[29] Alirezaei later said he had been tired and drowsy and denied that the withdrawal was political, leaving the motive in his case disputed.[29]

At the Tokyo 2020 Games, Algerian judoka Fethi Nourine withdrew before a potential match against Israeli Tohar Butbul, publicly stating that his support for the Palestinian cause made competing against an Israeli impossible.[30][4] Sudanese judoka Mohamed Abdalrasool did not appear for his scheduled match against Butbul and gave no reason in the available reporting.[4] The IOC stated it was monitoring the cases and would take necessary measures for flagrant breaches of the Olympic Charter; Nourine and his coach had their accreditation withdrawn and were sent home.[4] The International Judo Federation subsequently banned Nourine from competition for ten years.[30]

The ADL frames these refusals as a form of exclusion and discrimination against athletes based on nationality or identity — singling out Israeli competitors for treatment not applied to athletes from any other nation.[30]

The Paris 2024 Olympics were preceded by and accompanied by a series of antisemitic threats and incidents directed at Israeli athletes, set against a broader backdrop of heightened security and tensions arising from the ongoing conflict in Gaza. Ahead of the Games, fifteen Israeli athletes received threatening emails signed by a purported "People's Defense Organization." The messages threatened harm to Israeli participants, invoked the 1972 Munich attack with words including "We will repeat Munich 1972," and included the antisemitic conspiracy claim that a "Jewish lobby" controlled the French Parliament.[5] The Israeli Olympic Committee said it was taking the messages seriously but did not believe they would be carried out; security officials concluded the messages had been generated by a bot rather than by a real organization capable of posing a threat.[5]

The family of Israeli gymnast Shani Bakanov received separate messages threatening their lives, including a warning to expect something "10 times greater" than the 1972 Munich attack, with threats extending to airports, hotels, and streets.[31] The French interior minister reported threatening messages against delegation members to prosecutors, who assigned France's national online-hate body to investigate.[31] Israel's National Cyber Directorate and Ministry of Culture and Sport attributed a broader campaign of threats and data exposure to Iran, though the reporting presents this as an Israeli government allegation rather than an independently established finding.[31]

Israeli athletes' personal information — including blood-test results and login credentials — was leaked on social media.[30][32] Israel's Shin Bet protective-security unit worked with Mossad and French security services on enhanced safety protocols, and Israeli athletes received round-the-clock protection from elite tactical units.[32][33] French security spending for the Games was ultimately reported at approximately €1.44 billion.[30]

During the July 27 Israel–Paraguay men's soccer match, spectators chanted "Heil Hitler," performed Nazi salutes and other antisemitic gestures, waved Palestinian flags, booed the Israeli team during its national anthem, and displayed a banner reading "Genocide Olympics."[6][32] Demonstrators were removed, Paris 2024 organizers condemned the acts and lodged a complaint, and the Paris public prosecutor opened an investigation into possible aggravated incitement to racial hatred and threats against Israeli Olympians.[6][32] France also opened a separate investigation into death threats against three Israeli athletes.[32] These are reported incidents and investigative steps; the cited material does not provide a final legal finding about individual participants.[6]

The ADL additionally reported that Israeli athletes were required to hold a memorial ceremony for the 1972 victims in secret, and that Israeli Olympians were barred from wearing yellow ribbons in support of hostages held by Hamas while a Palestinian Olympian was permitted to wear a shirt depicting bombs dropping from planes — incidents the ADL characterized as unequal treatment.[34] Post-Games reporting noted that anti-Israel demonstrations were largely limited to a handful of signs and occasional booing and were less widespread than had been feared, providing context alongside the more serious individual episodes.[35] Israel's athletes won seven medals at Paris 2024, the country's best-ever Olympic performance.[35]

The Olympic Games, conceived as a celebration of human achievement transcending national and ethnic divisions, have repeatedly become a stage on which antisemitism has been enacted, contested, and — sometimes belatedly — acknowledged. The 1936 Berlin Games remain a defining example of state-sponsored athletic exclusion: the Nazis used the event as a propaganda vehicle to present the regime as a respectable member of the international community while implementing systematic persecution.[1] The exclusion of Gretel Bergmann, the erasure of her record, and its restoration seventy-three years later encapsulate the arc from persecution to partial reckoning.[14]

The murder of eleven Israeli athletes and coaches in Munich in 1972 demonstrated that the Games' symbolic neutrality could not protect a Jewish and Israeli delegation from political terrorism. As German President Steinmeier later stated, the village became "a stage for their boundless hatred for Israel."[25] The IOC's initial response — Avery Brundage's insistence that "the games must go on" and his equation of the massacre with the Rhodesia controversy — drew lasting criticism and shaped subsequent debates about the institution's relationship to Jewish and Israeli participants.[8][23]

The decades-long campaign for an official Olympic commemoration of the Munich victims illustrates how political considerations within the IOC delayed recognition of the victims. The eventual milestone — a minute of silence at the 2021 Tokyo opening ceremony — came forty-nine years after the attack, following repeated refusals and sustained advocacy by victims' families.[7] Ankie Spitzer's words at Rio 2016 — "We waited 44 years to have this remembrance" — captured both the magnitude of the loss and the institutional reluctance that prolonged it.[25]

Through these trials, Jewish and Israeli athletes have continued to compete, often explicitly as an act of defiance. Gretel Bergmann's stated ambition to embarrass Hitler and demonstrate "what a Jewish girl can do" anticipated a posture that later athletes would echo.[14] Alfred Nakache survived Auschwitz and returned to competitive swimming.[13] Aly Raisman turned a floor-exercise routine into an act of memorial.[28] The ADL's framing of Jewish athletes' Olympic history as one of participation and resilience alongside violence and antisemitism reflects this dual reality: the Games have been a site of both persecution and defiant Jewish presence.[9]

Several episodes in this history rest on disputed or contested evidence. The removal of Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller from the 1936 US relay team remains unresolved: coaches cited competitive reasoning, Stoller did not attribute the decision to antisemitism, and Glickman's later allegations of antisemitic motivation are not corroborated by definitive contemporary documentation.[3] Jeffrey S. Gurock's 2024 account supports an antisemitic interpretation but does not provide a detailed comparison of the competing explanations.[22] A 2011 American Jewish Archives announcement posed antisemitism and deference to Nazi hosts as open questions rather than settled conclusions.[19]

The classification of the 1972 Munich attack as antisemitism, as distinct from anti-Israel political terrorism, is complicated by the sources themselves. The cited passages document that Black September targeted Israel's Olympic delegation and demanded the release of Palestinian prisoners; the available sources do not provide an analysis establishing that the attackers' primary motive was hatred of Jews as Jews, as opposed to a political attack on the State of Israel.[24][25] The distinction matters analytically, though both framings recognize the attack as a crime against the victims' lives and Israel's right to participate in the Olympic community.

Sources also disagree on the number of Jewish medalists at the 1936 Berlin Games, with the USHMM reporting nine athletes of Jewish or partial Jewish parentage and the Jewish Virtual Library reporting thirteen; the criteria for counting Jewish identity differ and cannot be reconciled from the cited material.[1][3] Finally, a 2017 National Library of Israel article stated that the IOC had not permitted a ceremony on Olympic Village premises, while the Congressional Record documents a memorial service held inside the Olympic Village at the 2016 Rio Games. The two accounts conflict on this point.[7]