Avital Carroll

Don't ask why, but some of us have taken a cursory look at the possibility of obtaining European citizenship. (Alright, you had to ask why. How dare we, America is so great! Well, perhaps it has to do with this obsession with its greatness...)

As it turns out, every EU country has its own rules, but many have loopholes due to your ancestry. In the Netherlands (to take one at random), you're SOL unless a parent was born there. In Portugal, as we discussed previously, one needs to simply have Portuguese Sephardic ancestry, regardless of how far back that goes. And Austria welcomes back descendants of "displaced persons". Yeah, you know what that means.

One such descendant is New York-born Avital Carroll (her maiden name; born Shimko), whose grandmother escaped Austria during World War II. (You know what that means.) Avital is a mogul skier, with two world championship bronzes to her name. She decided to obtain Austrian citizenship, and now competes for that country. It was a tough decision, but she was driven by the desire to get other Jewish Austrians to return to their roots.

Oh, she also wants to increase Jewish participation in mogul skiing.

Worse odds on that than us getting European citizenship...