Wednesday, December 03, 2025
Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.
When Tatiana
Schlossberg—the granddaughter of John F. Kennedy—revealed her diagnosis of
acute myeloid leukemia in a poignant essay published in The
New Yorker, it resonated as a deeply personal tragedy. At 35, she's a
young mother of two, a journalist, and a woman whose life was just beginning to
expand in new ways after the birth of her second child. Her story evoked
widespread sympathy—but it also stirred up an old, insidious rumor in the
shadows of social media: “The Kennedy curse. Again.”
The truth is, the torrent
of bad things that have happened to the Kennedy family does seem more curse
than coincidence. So much so that Wikipedia has a page devoted to the
subject of the Kennedy
Curse. And yet, Wikipedia says nothing of the rumor that has been
around since the early 20th century: that it was a rabbi who was
responsible for cursing the Kennedys.
I guess we can thank God
that at least in this one case, Wikipedia didn’t blame the Jews. Of
course, there’s always that next edit!
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| Rabbi Aharon Kotler |
The myth of a rabbinic curse on the Kennedy family stems from the widespread knowledge that Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. was possessed of a thick, boundless hatred for the Jewish people. Those who believe in the curse say that it was meant as retribution for Joe Kennedy’s refusal to aid Jewish refugees escaping the Holocaust. Some say it was Rabbi Aharon Kotler who cursed the Kennedys, vowing that Joe Kennedy would "never see joy from his descendants" after Kennedy senior declined to lobby President Roosevelt for rescue certificates. Others ascribe the curse to the Lubavitcher Rebbe Rav Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn or the Ponevezher Rav. Still another version of this story claims the origins of the curse hail from a 1937 ocean liner incident where Kennedy complained about noisy Rosh Hashanah prayers by Rabbi Israel Jacobson and yeshiva students, prompting a curse on his male heirs.
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| President Franklin D. Roosevelt (seated) congratulates Joseph P. Kennedy on becoming the new ambassador to Great Britain, January 1938. Associate Justice Stanley Reed, center, administered Kennedy’s oath. Because of intemperate remarks, Kennedy’s ambassadorship lasted less than three years. |
It’s not only non-Jews who keep this story alive. Some Jews repeat the rabbinic-curse rumor with a kind of pride, as if the Kennedys’ misfortunes prove the spiritual power of great rabbis. But this inward-facing bravado has no more evidence behind it than the antisemitic version of the tale. Folklore doesn’t care who repeats it; it survives because the story is irresistible, not because it’s true.
Such stories, popularized
in books like Edward Klein's The
Kennedy Curse, lack any historical evidence. There are no eyewitness accounts,
diaries, or corroboration, leading us to dismiss the idea of a rabbi-invoked
Kennedy curse as an urban legend. We know this not just from the absence of any
Jewish tradition supporting such curses, but from the response of the late Rabbi Berel Wein, a respected
historian and scholar, who weighed in on a question about the rumor in 2002:
"The story of the alleged curse is pure legend, fabricated after Kennedy
was running for President. In any event, Jews don't put curses on
anybody."
 |
| Rabbi Berel Wein |
While there is no real
evidence of a rabbinic Kennedy curse, Joe Kennedy’s Jew-hatred and pro-Nazi
sympathies were all too real and very well known.
The Kennedy story is
soaked in loss, enough to make even the most rational observers reach for
patterns that might make sense of things. Because it really is a lot. Joseph P.
Kennedy Jr. was killed in a 1944 plane explosion during WWII. His sister
Kathleen died four years later when her plane went down in a storm. Then came
the assassinations that shook the world: John F. Kennedy in 1963, Robert F.
Kennedy in 1968.
The tragedies didn’t stop
there, and the losses continued to mount. Ted Kennedy barely survived a 1964
plane crash, only to face the 1969 Chappaquiddick tragedy and the implications
surrounding the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. David Kennedy died of a drug
overdose in 1984. Michael Kennedy was killed in a skiing accident in 1997. John
F. Kennedy Jr. perished in a 1999 plane crash. Saoirse Kennedy Hill overdosed
in 2019. And in 2020, Maeve Kennedy Townsend McKean and her young son Gideon
drowned in a canoeing accident.
Even before these events,
bad things were happening to the Kennedy family. There was, for example,
Rosemary Kennedy’s disastrous 1941 lobotomy. It was Joe, her father, who
insisted on the lobotomy, which left Rosemary incapacitated for life. The
Kennedy tragedies differed in significant ways, yet taken as a whole, it does
seem like the Kennedy family has experienced more tragedy than most.
People struggle
with randomness. A curse gives shape to chaos, turning a series of tragedies
into a story with structure. But this says more about human psychology than
about the Kennedys themselves. When faced with repeated misfortune, people
often reach instinctively for meaning, even where none exists.
Pinning such
misfortunes on a rabbi reinforces the old, durable stereotype of Jews as wielders
of dark or vengeful powers. This stereotype,
rooted in centuries of hatred, has no basis in reality. But it hasn’t
stopped people from repeating the trope.
Jewish tradition stands
in stark opposition to curse-casting. Key principles include:
- *Prohibition in the Torah: "Lo tekalel" (Do not curse), emphasizing ethical speech.
- *Halachic guidance: Cursing is viewed as a grave misuse of words, akin to verbal harm.
- *Mystical focus: Judaism is a religion of repentance and prayer, not one of maledictions.
- *Historical context: No credible records exist of rabbis placing curses on non-Jewish families over political or personal slights. As Rabbi Berel Wein noted, ‘Rabbis don’t put curses on people. It’s not part of their job description nor our religion.’”
Rabbi Wein's response is a perfect fit to these tenets. He didn’t need to document or refute any historical precedents for rabbinic curses. All he had to do was dismiss a fabrication. The Kennedy Curse, real or not, didn’t come from any rabbi. That’s just a “grandmother’s tale,” a “bubbe meisa.”
Calling Schlossberg’s diagnosis part of a “Kennedy curse” doesn’t illuminate anything; it only repeats a narrative that has been stitched onto every Kennedy family tragedy for nearly a century. The misfortunes keep coming, and so does the folklore. A new loss appears, and the myth switches on, ready to explain everything at once: assassinations, crashes, overdoses, drownings, even bad decisions made by Joe Kennedy. |
| Tatiana Schlossberg |
And now, with Schlossberg's illness, the myth is back in circulation again — the curse refreshed, the narrative extended. But isn’t it interesting the way Jews get pulled into American mythology even when the facts don’t support it. When the Kennedy tragedies pile higher, someone inevitably dredges up a rabbinic figure as the supposed architect of all their misfortune. It’s a pattern: another Kennedy crisis, another Jewish rumor. The linkage is baseless, but persistent — as Jew-hatred tends to be.
Schlossberg’s news is the latest entry in a long, grim list. The tragedies accumulate, the curse narrative resurrects itself, and the alleged rabbinic source remains as fictional as ever. If this saga has any pattern at all, it’s that the misfortunes and the mythology advance together — and so does the impulse to place Jews at the center of everything.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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