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Waiting on line on Christmas is a time-honored New York tradition — was it ever thus?
At 6 a.m., the morning before Christmas, Charles Licata was waiting outside the door of Russ & Daughters, two hours before the century-old Manhattan appetizing store opened. Each Christmas Eve for the past 42 years, Licata, jones this time by a family member and a friend, has made the hour-long drive from central New Jersey. “I like to be first in line,” he told me.
Licata, who manufactures granite countertops, told me he was hosting 40 for a traditional Italian feast of seven fishes on Christmas Eve, and on Christmas Day, his family had plans to devour another seven fishes and then some. “We got sable, lox, caviar, the spreads, pickled herring, tuna fish salad, hot and cold smoked salmon,” he started to list, before adding, “we got everything.”
Nikki Russ Federman, the fourth-generation owner of Russ & Daughters, instantly greeted Licata who she recognized from years past. By 9 a.m., she was hustling off to the shop’s Brooklyn bakery because they were already running out of bagels.
The Christmas Eve crowds rival Erev Yom Kippur and they grow throughout the day.
“Christmas is a Jewish holiday,” Russ Federman quipped.
For Licata, the line itself, with its banter and camaraderie is part of the ritual, except queuing at Russ & Daughters isn’t traditional. Lower East Side Jews didn’t wait in line; they jostled at deli counters and mobbed pushcarts.
“When I arrived on the scene in 1978 to take over the business,” third-generation owner Mark Russ Federman recounted in his 2013 book Russ & Daughters, “I discovered that there had never been a real attempt to implement a method to maintain crowd control and customer flow.”
First, the lox slicers behind the counter would pick out their regulars from the crowd, and then call “Who’s next?” To which, according to Mark Russ Federman, several elderly women would yell in their Yiddish-inflected English, “My next.” Mayhem would ensue.
“Grandpa Russ, my parents, and my uncles and aunts,” wrote Mark Russ Federman, “felt that having customers take a number from a machine and wait their turn was insulting, impersonal, and too ‘uptown.’”
It was during the Yom Kippur rush of 1978 that Russ Federman established a numbered ticketing system, turning the huddled mass of customers into an orderly line — something he saw as both more efficient for business and fairer for the customers. Since then, the appetizing store’s line has only grown, as have lines throughout the city.
Weathering the wait for Russ & Daughters seems more legit than camping out for the latest TikTok trend. Since the pandemic, lines in New York have become ubiquitous — for oversized pastries, for stunt croissants, for hype pizza. This past spring, a Saturday Night Live skit joked that a New Yorker’s favorite pastime is to “wait in a big dumb line.”
Waiting on line for West Village brunch often feels performative, but for Licata at Russ & Daughters, it isn’t about clout, it’s about continuity. It was a Jewish friend who first brought bagels and lox over for Christmas breakfast at Licata’s home decades ago. “I’m just carrying the tradition forward,” he said.
Down the block, most every year, Jeremy Kahn and his family make a pilgrimage from Washington, D.C. to Katz’s Deli. This past week, he was shocked to find that, even at the off-time of 4 p.m., the line still stretched to the corner. He speculated that there were more tourists. “I thought we’d be able to just walk right in,” he said.
After the 30 minute-plus wait at Katz’s, customers hungry for pastrami take a ticket at the door; they must sort into new lines to wait their turn with a cutter at the counter. And before leaving, customers must again wait their turn at the cashier’s line.
For Kahn, the wait is worth it. “This is where my grandfather would come to eat,” he said, and now he was taking his two young children and his father. “It means something that there is a line to get in. People are willing to wait in the cold.”
Katz’s with its shared cafeteria tables is known for its hustle and bustle, but things feel orderly compared to how it once was. In 1966, the iconic cheap eats guide, Underground Gourmet, deemed Katz’s “the largest, nosiest, busiest, and sloppiest delicatessen in Manhattan.” The guide’s authors, the illustrators and graphic designers Milton Glaser and Jerome Snyder, described ordering as a “struggle” that involved having to “muscle your way up to the endless serving counter and try to make yourself heard.”
Standing on line was foreign enough to Jewish immigrants that the Forverts mostly referred to queues, not by the Yiddish word “rey” (meaning row), but with the English “line,” spelled out in Hebrew letters. In 1930, the Forverts reported that boxing fans were waiting on long lines in the cold and rain to watch a Jackie Kid Berg lightweight championship bout at Madison Square Garden, but Jews at the time mostly seemed to be lining up at Depression-era soup kitchens and unemployment lines in the U.S. or, worse, for handouts at refugee centers in Europe.
It’s not just Jews who were late to line up; lines are actually a fairly modern phenomenon. Often cited as containing the first description of a queue in English is Thomas Carlyle’s 1837 book The French Revolution, which described Parisians lining up at bakers’ shops during a famine. By World War II, queuing had become commonplace in rationing-era Britain.
Lines were then associated with shortages and bureaucracy; now they represent wealth and leisure. There are still long waits at the DMV and over-burdened food pantries, but today, many lines are fueled by social media. A long line at a bakery signals that their $8.50 pistachio rose croissant is popular; joining the line gives you online bragging rights, not joining risks FOMO.
My friend Miriam Berger, a 91-year-old Manhattanite, says she has no memory of these types of lines in the 20th century. “I have no patience to stand on a line for anything,” she told me, “probably because such behavior didn’t exist in my growing-up environment.”
We still manage to do much without lines. We squeeze into rush hour subway cars, flag down bartenders at crowded pubs, and hail cabs. At times, it feels cut-throat, but there’s an unspoken etiquette — someone waves you into a lane, a stranger holds the door.
Lines promise efficiency and equity, but the first-come-first-serve system easily breaks down. There are cutters, professional line waiters, and ways to pay your way to the front of the line with priority passes and VIP options for most anything.
And very often, there are ways to avoid lines altogether. At the end of his book, Mark Russ Federman writes that when his daughter Nikki and his nephew Josh entered the business in 2001, they started online ordering. “This wasn’t the way the Russ family did business,” he initially thought before he accepted the idea. “If you wanted to buy our fish, you came to the store. If you wanted to place an order over the phone, we had to recognize your voice or know your family.”
Now, Russ & Daughters ships nationwide, and with delivery apps, lox and herring can be ferried almost instantly to your door on an electric moped.
That’s too uptown for my tastes. I’d rather take a number.
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Vanderbilt launches inquiry into instructor after math question about Israeli occupation draws criticism
(JTA) — Vanderbilt University has launched an inquiry into a mathematics lecturer whose classroom exercise about Palestinian territory drew criticism from the activist group StopAntisemitism.
Tekin Karadağ, a senior lecturer at the university’s department of mathematics, drew the ire of the antisemitism watchdog after it obtained a slide from one of his lectures that used a pro-Palestinian protest slogan and suggested that Israel was shrinking the Palestinian territory.
“Assume Palestine as a state with a rectangular land shape. There is the Mediterranean Sea on the west and the Jordan River on the east,” read the slide. “From the river to the sea, Palestine (…) was approximately 100 km. in 1946. The land decreases by 250 sq. km per year, due to the occupation by Israel. How fast is the width of the land decreasing now?”
Karadǎg, a Turkish national who received his PhD from Texas A&M University in 2021, included the question under “examples related to the popular issues” in a survey of calculus class, according to StopAntisemitism, which wrote in a post on X that Karadǎg was “bringing his anti-Israel, antisemitic bias into his classroom.”
In a statement shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Vanderbilt said that the content had been removed and that an inquiry had been launched into Karadağ.
“The university has received reports alleging a member of the faculty engaged in unprofessional conduct related to content shared during course instruction,” the school said. “The content in question has been removed, and a formal inquiry has been initiated consistent with relevant university policy.”
In recent years, rhetoric about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on college campuses has grown increasingly fraught, with professors’ commentary on the region sparking heavy scrutiny and, at times, disciplinary measures when their universities have determined that they exceeded the bounds of academic freedom. A recent report by Columbia University’s antisemitism task force found that students frequently experienced pro-Palestinian advocacy in classes entirely unrelated to the Middle East — such as dance or math classes.
The inquiry was not the first time that Vanderbilt took swift action against the expression of pro-Palestinian sentiments on its campus.
In March 2024, the university, which has roughly 1,100 Jewish undergraduate students, was among the first universities to expel students who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. This year, the school’s antisemitism “grade” from the Anti-Defamation League was bumped up from a “C” to an “A.”
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Hugh Laurie rejects ‘Zionist’ label after his tribute to Israeli ‘Tehran’ producer sparks social media firestorm
(JTA) — British actor Hugh Laurie pushed back against being labeled as a “Zionist” after facing a wave of online criticism for posting a tribute to the Israeli producer of the hit television show “Tehran.”
“Dana Eden, who co-created and produced ‘Tehran’, died on Sunday, seemingly by her own hand,” Laurie, who played a nuclear inspector in the show’s third season, tweeted last week. “It’s a terrible thing. She was brilliant, and funny, and an exceptional leader. Love and condolences to all who knew her.”
The seemingly innocuous post eulogizing Eden, 52, who was found dead while filming the latest season of the hit Apple TV+ series in Athens last week, quickly drew a volley of backlash on social media.
“She was part of the occupation force’s propaganda arm,” wrote one user in response to Laurie’s post. “What a shame, didn’t expect you to be a closet Zionist.” Another wrote that Eden “creates propaganda for Israel so that they can kill kids more effectively. People should have no sympathy for her.”
The award-winning series, which follows a young Israeli Mossad agent in Iran, was produced by the Israeli public broadcaster Kan and purchased by Apple TV+ in 2020 for roughly $20 million. Eden’s death, for which no cause has been announced, occurred during production of the show’s fourth season, which had already stalled following Oct. 7.
Laurie is not the first actor to spurn the “Zionist” label, as entertainers in recent years have increasingly faced pressure to declare their views on Israel. In December, Jewish actress Odessa A’zion pushed back on claims she was a Zionist after an image of her wearing an IDF shirt as a teenager circulated online.
On Friday, Laurie, who previously starred in the Emmy Award-winning medical drama “House,” shot back at the criticism.
“Nothing I have ever said or done could lead a sane person to believe that I am a Zionist,” wrote Laurie in a post on X. “However. If someone exults in the death of a friend of mine, yes I will block them. If you wouldn’t do the same in my position, you can f—ck off too.”
Laurie’s subsequent post also drew outcry, but this time from pro-Israel influencers who lamented the actor’s disavowal of the Zionist label, calling him “weak” and a “pathetic weasel” in the replies.
Freelance journalist Angela Epstein replied to Laurie’s post, writing, “Not Hugh Laurie as well. I thought he was one of the decent ones….”
“God almighty, why does no one understand English any more?” wrote Laurie in response to Epstein’s critique. “I have not spoken or written a word that would indicate pro or anti Zionism. That’s what those words mean. Blimey.”
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German anti-Zionist group’s plan to protest at Buchenwald memorial over kaffiyeh ban sparks outrage
(JTA) — An anti-Zionist group in Germany has drawn condemnation after it announced plans for a protest against the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial in response to a ban on pro-Palestinian symbols at the site.
The group Kufiyas in Buchenwald claims that the memorial has become a place of “historical revisionism and genocide denial.” It announced a demonstration for April 11, the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp.
“Instead of honoring the persecuted and resolutely opposing every genocide, the memorial spreads Israeli propaganda and provides the ideological ammunition for the ongoing genocide in Palestine,” the group says on its website.
Buchenwald, one of the first concentration camps built by the Nazis and one of the largest in the country, was the site of the murder of roughly 56,000 male prisoners, including 11,000 Jews, from 1937 to 1945.
Last year, a German court ruled that the concentration camp had a right to refuse entry to visitors who wear a keffiyeh, a traditional Palestinian headscarf that has been adopted by pro-Palestinian protesters. The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit by a woman who attempted to wear the scarf to an event commemorating the concentration camp’s liberation.
The woman, who was only identified by her first name, Anna, posted a testimony about her actions on the Kufiyas in Buchenwald Instagram page in which she said she was inspired by the resistance of Buchenwald prisoners.
“Our fundamental principle is this: criticism of the Israeli government’s policies, settlement policy, or actions in the Gaza Strip is legitimate,” said the Buchenwald Foundation’s director Jens-Christian Wagner in a statement outlining the memorial’s protocols. “However, it becomes antisemitic when used to relativize the Holocaust and discredit its victims as perpetrators. We will not tolerate this at the Buchenwald Memorial.”
The campaign against the memorial has been signed onto by a host of pro-Palestinian groups, including the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and the German group Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, which has defended the protest on X as evidence of what “commemorating past German crimes has to do with rejecting current ones.”
In a post on Instagram announcing the protest earlier this month, the Kufiyas in Buchenwald group wrote that it would hold a “public protest” in Weimar, the German city located nearby the concentration camp. The group also said it planned to host lectures and a “tour that vividly illustrates the events in the former concentration camp.”
It was unclear whether the protest is intended to take place outside the memorial itself. Kufiyas in Buchenwald did not immediately respond to an inquiry from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the location of the protest.
The protest quickly drew condemnation from German leaders, including the country’s antisemitism czar Felix Klein, who told the Swiss outlet Neue Zürcher Zeitung that the protest marked a “new low point in the unfortunately all-too-common reversal of perpetrator and victim roles.”
Michael Panse, the commissioner for combatting antisemitism for the German state Thuringia, where Weimar is located, told the outlet that the protest was “tasteless and historically ignorant.”
The protests also drew condemnation from the European Jewish Congress, which wrote in a post on X that the demonstration represents a “deeply troubling instrumentalization of Holocaust remembrance.”
“Holocaust memorial sites are places of solemn reflection and respect for the victims of National Socialism,” the post continued. “They must never be exploited to promote agendas that deny Israel’s legitimacy or glorify those who perpetrate violence against Jews.”
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