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Zingerman’s, Michigan’s famous Jewish deli, is coming to New York City
(New York Jewish Week) — My hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan, is world-famous for precisely two things: It’s where the University of Michigan is located — Go Blue! — and it is home to Zingerman’s, a 41-year-old Jewish deli that’s both a local icon and a national treasure that regularly makes “best of” lists.
And now, one of these storied institutions will make an appearance in New York City for one day, and one day only — and it’s not the well-regarded public university.
On Saturday, Zingerman’s Deli will host a pop-up at Chelsea’s Olly Olly Market, where the Midwestern deli masters will be slinging sandwiches from noon to 8 p.m., or until sold out. There, at 601 West 26th St. near 11th Avenue, New Yorkers can expect top-notch variations on the classic Reuben sandwich, the company’s signature enthusiastic customer service and a host of Zingerman’s-branded sides and merch.
“We had this thought about taking the Reubens on the road, just having some fun with it,” Rodger Bowser, head chef and a managing partner of Zingerman’s Deli, told the New York Jewish Week.
Saturday’s event will be the popular deli’s second-ever popup; their first was in Chicago in 2019 at a location run by 16” on Center, a Windy City-based “hospitality collective.” The experience, said Bowser, was an overwhelmingly positive one — and when 160C expanded to Manhattan last year with Olly Olly Market, the Zingermen decided to give it another go.
Zingerman’s Deli was founded in 1982 by Paul Saginaw and Ari Weinzweig, “two friends who dreamt of creating a traditional Jewish deli that would bring very special foods to Ann Arbor,” according to their web site.
The pair, who are both Jewish, came up with the name Zingerman’s because they wanted something “that would convey the sense of a good local deli, something that would ‘sound Jewish,’ would somehow telegraph that this was a real delicatessen,” Weinzweig once wrote. (Weinzweig declined to use his own surname, calling it “unpronounceable,” while the name Saginaw evokes the mid-Michigan town from which it took Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel four days to hitchhike.)
Their concept was a hit, and over the decades, Zingerman’s resisted the siren call of expansion or franchising and instead evolved into a progressive-minded “community of businesses” across the Ann Arbor area. These include the consulting business Zingtrain, which shares “the ‘Zingerman’s experience’ with forward-thinking organizations”; Zingerman’s Bakehouse, making classic breads and pastries; a candy manufactory, a creamery, event spaces and more.
These days, “the Zingerman’s Experience is now made and delivered by nearly six hundred people — partners, managers and staff in ten different businesses in addition to the Deli — to the tune of roughly $60,000,000 in annual sales,” Weinzweig writes. (A prolific writer, the Chicago native and Russian history major pens regular newsletters and has authored several books, including “Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon: Stories of Pork Bellies, Hush Puppies, Rock ‘n’ Roll Music and Bacon Fat Mayonnaise” and the four-part “Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading: A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Building a Great Business.”)
Despite all that growth, popups remain a relatively new venture for Zingerman’s — and for Olly Olly Market, too. “We thought, what better time than our one-year anniversary to start introducing a little bit more of the Midwest to New York?” Tim Wickes, director of food hall operations at 160C, told the New York Jewish Week. Zingerman’s “jumped on it. So we’re fortunate and we’re super excited for the weekend.”
“We also know that there is a large population of Michiganders here in New York, University of Michigan alumni,” said Wickes, who lives in Brooklyn and is, tragically, an alumnus of rival Michigan State. “And we felt like the city would resonate well with that as our first of hopefully [pop-ups] from Chicago and the Midwest in general.”
Initially the idea was “to bring the Zingerman’s gameday experience to as many people as we can in New York,” Bowser said of Saturday’s event. (The Wolverines play the Minnesota Golden Gophers on Saturday night.) “Clearly we have a pretty good fan base there that always can’t get to Ann Arbor for a game. And we just want to share that experience and have some fun.”
As anyone who ever worked at Zingerman’s attest — and that includes me: Working at Zingerman’s is practically a rite of passage for “townies” — and football game days are especially busy day at an already busy place; lines are long and the wait for sandwiches can exceed an hour.
Since the game and the open-to-the-public popup won’t overlap, the Zingerpeople are also selling tickets “to an exclusive tailgate experience with guaranteed seats and sandwiches.”
As for the six sandwich types on sale, all are Reubens or riffs on them, “what we like to call the Russian dressing group,” Bowser said. Among them is the deli’s most popular sandwich, the #2 Zingerman’s Reuben — made with corned beef, Swiss Emmental cheese, sauerkraut and Russian dressing on grilled Jewish rye bread, a combination that former President Barack Obama described as “killer” — as well as the #18 Georgia Reuben, with turkey breast, Swiss Emmental cheese, coleslaw and Russian dressing.
Bowser, who was a vegetarian when he started working at the deli 28 years ago, will also be making “a personal favorite”: #36 Lila & Izzie’s Skokie Skidoo, a vegetarian Reuben consisting of Swiss Emmental cheese, coleslaw and Russian dressing on grilled farm bread.
As it happens, the Reuben’s origins lie neither in New York nor Ann Arbor: Legend has it the legendary sandwich was invented in an Omaha hotel in the 1920s “to satisfy a group of hungry Jewish poker players,” according to The Nosher.
To bring Zingerman’s Reubens to NYC, Bowser and his team will be driving two trucks packed with food and supplies from Ann Arbor to Manhattan — a distance of 621 miles, or 9 hours and 24 minutes in traffic at the time of this writing. “Obviously you can’t make a Zingerman’s sandwich without Zingerman’s Bakehouse bread,” said Bowser. “And it’s gonna take quite a few loaves of that.”
Bowser estimated the road crew of three will likely leave on Thursday, which would give them a day to set up the space on Friday. (Three other Zingerman’s employees will travel by plane.)
When asked if he had any qualms about bringing deli sandwiches to the birthplace of American deli culture — a place whose denizens are known to be “kind” but not exactly “nice” — Bowser demurred. “I’m not throwing shade at anybody,” he said, emphasizing the main impetus was to have a fun time.
Wickes concurs. Acknowledging that New York “is the mecca of Reuben sandwiches,” he said the pop-up will have a “humble approach.” “We’re certainly in tune with the fact that there’s plenty of fantastic Reubens in the city,” he said. “We just wanted to showcase Zingerman’s.”
As for Bowser, he conceded to one possible challenge: “Navigating two big trucks though traffic sounds daunting,” he said. “But I’m sure we’ll figure it out.”
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The post Zingerman’s, Michigan’s famous Jewish deli, is coming to New York City appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Down and Out in Paris and London
The Oxford Circus station in London’s Underground metro. Photo: Pixabay
JNS.org – In my previous column, I wrote about the rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl in Paris at the hands of three boys just one year older than her, who showered her with antisemitic abuse as they carried out an act of violation reminiscent of the worst excesses of the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in southern Israel. This week, my peg is another act of violence—one less horrifying and less traumatic, but which similarly suggests that the writing may be on the wall for the Jews in much of Europe.
Last week, a group of young Jewish boys who attend London’s well-regarded Hasmonean School was assaulted by a gang of antisemitic thugs. The attack occurred at Belsize Park tube station on the London Underground, in a neighborhood with a similar demographic and sensibility to New York’s Upper West Side, insofar as it is home to a large, long-established Jewish population with shops, cafes and synagogues serving that community. According to the mother of one of the Jewish boys, an 11-year-old, the gang “ran ahead of my son and kicked one of his friends to the ground. They were trying to push another kid onto the tracks. They got him as far the yellow line.” When the woman’s son bravely tried to intervene to protect his friends, he was chased down and elbowed in the face, dislodging a tooth. “Get out of the city, Jew!” the gang told him.
Since the attack, her son has had trouble sleeping. “My son is very shaken. He couldn’t sleep last night. He said ‘It’s not fair. Why do they do this to us?’” she disclosed. “We love this country,” she added, “and we participate and we contribute, but now we’re being singled out in exactly the same way as Jews were singled out in 1936 in Berlin. And for the first time in my life. I am terrified of using the tube. What’s going on?”
The woman and her family may not be in London long enough to find out. According to The Jewish Chronicle, they are thinking of “fleeing” Britain—not a verb we’d hoped to encounter again in a Jewish context after the mass murder we experienced during the previous century. But here we are.
When I was a schoolboy in London, I had a history teacher who always told us that no two situations are exactly alike. “Comparisons are odious, boys,” he would repeatedly tell the class. That was an insight I took to heart, and I still believe it to be true. There are structural reasons that explain why the 2020s are different from the 1930s in significant ways. For one thing, European societies are more affluent and better equipped to deal with social conflicts and economic strife than they were a century ago. Laws, too, are more explicit in the protections they offer to minorities, and more punishing of hate crimes and hate speech. Perhaps most importantly, there is a Jewish state barely 80 years old which all Jews can make their home if they so desire.
Therein lies the rub, however. Since 1948, Israel has allowed Jews inside and outside the Jewish state to hold their heads high and to feel as though they are a partner in the system of international relations, rather than a vulnerable, subjugated group at the mercy of the states where we lived as an often hated minority. Israel’s existence is the jewel in the crown of Jewish emancipation, sealing what we believed to be our new status, in which we are treated as equals, and where the antisemitism that plagued our grandparents and great-grandparents has become taboo.
If Israel represents the greatest achievement of the Jewish people in at least 100 years, small wonder that it has become the main target of today’s reconstituted antisemites. And if one thing has been clear since the atrocities by Hamas on Oct. 7, it’s that Israel’s existence is not something that Jews—with the exception of that small minority of anti-Zionists who do the bidding of the antisemites and who echo their ignorance and bigotry—are willing to compromise on. What’s changed is that it is increasingly difficult for Jews to remain in the countries where they live and express their Zionist sympathies at the same time. We are being attacked because of these sympathies on social media, at demonstrations and increasingly in the streets by people with no moral compass, who regard our children as legitimate targets. Hence, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that while the 2020s may not be the 1930s, they certainly feel like the 1930s.
And so the age-old question returns: Should Jews, especially those in Europe, where they confront the pincer movement of burgeoning Muslim populations and a resurgent far-left in thrall to the Palestinian cause, stay where they are, or should they up sticks and move to Israel? Should we be thinking, given the surge in antisemitism of the past few months, of giving up on America as well? I used to have a clear view of all this. Aliyah is the noblest of Zionist goals and should be encouraged, but I always resisted the notion that every Jew should live in Israel—firstly, because a strong Israel needs vocal, confident Diaspora communities that can advocate for it in the corridors of power; and secondly, because moving to Israel should ideally be a positive act motivated by love, not a negative act propelled by fear.
My view these days isn’t as clear as it was. I still believe that a strong Israel needs a strong Diaspora, and I think it’s far too early to give up on the United States—a country where Jews have flourished as they never did elsewhere in the Diaspora. Yet the situation in Europe increasingly reminds me of the observation of the Russian Zionist Leo Pinsker in “Autoemancipation,” a doom-laden essay he wrote in 1882, during another dark period of Jewish history: “We should not persuade ourselves that humanity and enlightenment will ever be radical remedies for the malady of our people.” The antisemitism we are dealing with now presents itself as “enlightened,” based on boundless sympathy for an Arab nation allegedly dispossessed by Jewish colonists. When our children are victimized by it, this antisemitism ceases to be a merely intellectual challenge, and becomes a matter of life and death. As Jews and as human beings, we are obliged to choose life—which, in the final analysis, when nuance disappears and terror stalks us, means Israel.
The post Down and Out in Paris and London first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Hamas Says No Major Changes to Ceasefire Proposal After ‘Vague Wording’ Amendments by US
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a campaign rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S., June 28, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz/File Photo
i24 News – A senior official from the terrorist organization Hamas called the changes made by the US to the ceasefire proposal “vague” on Saturday night, speaking to the Arab World Press.
The official said that the US promises to end the war are without a clear Israeli commitment to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and agree to a permanent ceasefire.
US President Joe Biden made “vague wording” changes to the proposal on the table, although it amounted to an insufficient change in stance, he said.
“The slight amendments revolve around the very nature of the Israeli constellation, and offer nothing new to bridge the chasm between what is proposed and what is acceptable to us,” he said.
“We will not deviate from our three national conditions, the most important of which is the end of the war and the complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip,” he added.
Another Hamas official said that the amendments were minor and applied to only two clauses.
US President Joe Biden made the amendments to bridge gaps amid an impasse between Israel and Hamas over a hostage deal mediated by Qatar and Egypt.
Hamas’s demands for a permanent ceasefire have been met with Israeli leaders vowing that the war would not end until the 120 hostages still held in Gaza are released and the replacement of Hamas in control of the Palestinian enclave.
The post Hamas Says No Major Changes to Ceasefire Proposal After ‘Vague Wording’ Amendments by US first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Sacred Spies?
A Torah scroll. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
JNS.org – How far away is theory from practice? “In theory,” a new system should work. But it doesn’t always, does it? How many job applicants ticked all the boxes “theoretically,” but when it came to the bottom line they didn’t get the job done?
And how many famous people were better theorists than practitioners?
The great Greek philosopher Aristotle taught not only philosophy but virtue and ethics. The story is told that he was once discovered in a rather compromised moral position by his students. When they asked him how he, the great Aristotle, could engage in such an immoral practice, he had a clever answer: “Now I am not Aristotle.”
A similar tale is told of one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell. He, too, expounded on ethics and morality. And like Aristotle, he was also discovered in a similarly morally embarrassing situation.
When challenged, his rather brilliant answer was: “So what if I teach ethics? People teach mathematics, and they’re not triangles!”
This idea is relevant to this week’s Torah portion, Shelach, which contains the famous story of Moses sending a dozen spies on a reconnaissance mission to the Land of Israel. The mission goes sour. It was meant to be an intelligence-gathering exercise to see the best way of conquering Canaan. But it resulted in 10 of the 12 spies returning with an utterly negative report of a land teeming with giants and frightening warriors who, they claimed, would eat us alive. “We cannot ascend,” was their hopeless conclusion.
The people wept and had second thoughts about the Promised Land, and God said, indeed, you will not enter the land. In fact, for every day of the spies’ disastrous journey, the Israelites would languish a year in the wilderness. Hence, the 40-year delay in entering Israel. The day of their weeping was Tisha B’Av, which became a day of “weeping for generations” when both our Holy Temples were destroyed on that same day and many other calamities befell our people throughout history.
And the question resounds: How was it possible that these spies, all righteous noblemen, handpicked personally by Moses for the job, should so lose the plot? How did they go so wrong, so off-course from the Divine vision?
Naturally, there are many commentaries with a variety of explanations. To me personally, the most satisfying one I’ve found comes from a more mystical source.
Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, in his work Likkutei Torah, explains it thus: The error of the spies was less blatant than it seems. Their rationale was, in fact, a “holy” one. They actually meant well. The Israelites had been beneficiaries of the mighty miracles of God during their sojourn in the wilderness thus far. God had been providing for them supernaturally with manna from heaven every day, water that flowed from the “Well of Miriam,” Clouds of Glory that smoothed the roads and even dry cleaned their clothes. In the wilderness, the people were enjoying a taste of heaven itself. All their material needs were taken care of miraculously. With no material distractions, they were able to live a life of spiritual bliss, of refined existence and could devote themselves fully to Torah, prayer and spiritual experiences.
But the spies knew that as soon as the Israelites entered the Promised Land, the manna would cease to fall and they would have to till the land, plow, plant, knead, bake and make a living by the sweat of their brow. No more bread from heaven, but bread from the earth. Furthermore, they would have to battle the Canaanite nations for the land. What chance would they then have to devote themselves to idyllic, spiritual pursuits?
So, the spies preferred to remain in the wilderness rather than enter the land. Why be compelled to resort to natural and material means of surviving and living a wholly physical way of life when they could enjoy spiritual ecstasy and paradise undisturbed? Why get involved in the “rat race”?
But, of course, as “holy” and spiritual as their motivation may have been, the spies were dead wrong.
The journey in the wilderness was meant to be but a stepping stone to the ultimate purpose of the Exodus from Egypt: entering the Promised Land and making it a Holy Land. God has plenty of angels in heaven who exist in a pure, spiritual state. The whole purpose of creation was to have mortal human beings, with all their faults and frailties, to make the physical world a more spiritual place. To bring heaven down to earth.
While their argument was rooted in piety, for the spies to opt out of the very purpose of creation was to miss the whole point. What are we here for? To sit in the lotus position and meditate, or to get out there and change the world? Yes, the spies were “holy,” but theirs was an escapist holiness.
The Torah is not only a book of wisdom; it is also a book of action. Torah means instruction. It teaches us how to live our lives, meaningfully and productively in the pursuit of God’s intended desire to make our world a better, more Godly place. This we do not only by study and prayer, the “theoretical” part of Torah but by acts of goodness and kindness, by mitzvot performed physically in the reality of the material world. Theory alone leaves us looking like Aristotle with his pants down.
Yes, it is a cliché but a well-worn truth: Torah is a “way of life.”
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