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Car talk: Jewish auto writers gather for a Passover seder at Katz’s Deli
(New York Jewish Week) — The idea of eating pastrami with matzah instead of rye bread may strike some as a sacrilege, but for members of the Jewish Auto Writers Society of America (JAWS), who will gather this week for a Passover seder at Katz’s Delicatessen, it’s become a tradition.
“Frankly, bread is a filler,” said Joel Feder, a senior producer for the web sites Motor Authority, The Car Connection and Green Car Reports. “You can eat more pastrami if you don’t waste space on the bread.”
Feder will lead the JAWS seder on Wednesday evening, the first night of Passover. About 30 automotive industry journalists and public relations professionals are expected to attend the gathering, which is held in a back room at the iconic Lower East Side deli. The annual event, which began in 2013, is timed for the press day at the massive New York International Auto Show at Javits Center, which opens to the public this year on Friday. A bus brings JAWS members and their guests to the deli on Houston Street.
The seder is JAWS’s big annual event, though there are efforts underway to gather in Los Angeles at the Genghis Cohen Chinese restaurant in the Fairfax section of the city during the Los Angeles Auto Show in November. The seder is sponsored by Volvo and Nissan and, yes, it has been duly noted that Passover takes place in the Hebrew month of Nisan.
“If a rabbi ever walked in, I think he’d have a heart attack,” joked the seder’s founder, Russel Datz, the national media relations manager for Volvo Car USA.
But not necessarily: Though the gathering is decidedly informal, and the food is not kosher, the JAWS seder features all the accouterments you’d expect at a seder: a seder plate, matzah, wine and a festive meal that, in addition to pastrami, includes brisket, corned beef, tzimmes and matzah ball soup.
What’s more, the group uses a haggadah written by an Orthodox rabbi. “The World’s Shortest Kosher Hagaddah” by Rabbi Yonah Bookstein of the Pico Shul in Los Angeles fulfills all the halachic (Jewish legal) requirements of the Passover seder, and it takes just 10 minutes to get from the blessing on the first cup of wine to the concluding “Next year in Jerusalem!”
The haggadah was found on the internet by Dan Passe, who worked for Nissan for 17 years and left recently to take a job as global head, communications and marketing, for the Nikola Motor Company, an electric truck manufacturer.
Passe has embraced the speedy seder concept for years and readily concedes it is an act of rebellion. “I grew up going to my grandparents in Bayside, Queens, who did a three-hour long seder where you thought you were going to pass out before you got to eat,” he said. “This haggadah, if you want to call it that, is such a great way of making [the holiday] really clear and making it very snackable, if you will.”
Bookstein, who created the 10-minute seder in 2010 for the Jewish rapper known as Kosha Dillz, was delighted that the car guys and women would be, um, speeding through his haggadah. “That’s awesome. I’m originally from Detroit so I have a soft spot for the automobile writers,” he told the New York Jewish Week.
According to its Facebook page, JAWS has 110 members. Datz started the group in 2013 as a way for Jewish industry people to gather as a community during the New York auto show, which is almost always held during the week in which Passover falls.
Feder, who hails from Plymouth, Minnesota, said he is getting grief from his mother for not being home for the holiday this year. (He’ll catch a flight Thursday morning and land in Minneapolis in time to make it to the second seder.) As this year’s seder leader, Feder is filling in for Datz and Passe, who aren’t coming to the New York auto show this year because of family commitments.
Russel Datz, right, leads the annual JAWS seder at Katz’s Deli in Manhattan in 2022. (Kevin Albinder)
In addition to the traditional wine cup left for the prophet Elijah, there will be two unoccupied seats for Datz and Passe, said Evelyn Kanter, president of the International Motor Press Association and a regular at the JAWS seder since its first year. (When Datz was informed of the empty seat gesture, he quipped: ”Is she lighting yahrzeit candles as well?”)
Kanter called the deli gathering “a beloved tradition. It’s a family of people in the automotive business who are all homeless [during the auto show].”
An Upper West Sider, Kanter grew up in Inwood, back when the nearby neighborhood of Washington Heights was known as Frankfurt-on-the-Hudson because of its large German Jewish immigrant population. After stints as an investigative consumer reporter for New York radio and TV stations, Kanter became known as the ecoXplorer, writing about travel and the environment, in addition to cars.
This year, Kanter’s daughter is in Los Angeles and her son in New York is working the night of the first seder. So, in addition to the JAWS seder, she’ll attend a virtual seder on the second night. “I’ll have dinner with my son early next week and we’ll have a delayed Passover,” Kanter said.
According to Passe, half of the seder’s participants at the deli are not Jewish. “They ask to attend because they’ve never been to a seder before,” he said. “We have people who return year after year after year who are not Jewish because they love the ceremony.”
Jenni Newman, the Chicago-based editor-in-chief of cars.com, was invited by two Jewish colleagues at her company and attended JAWS seders in 2019 and 2022. She’s planning to go to her third this week. (There were no seders during the pandemic.) Although Newman describes herself as “super active” in the Lutheran Church growing up, she considers it a gift to experience other peoples’ religions and cultures. “I really enjoyed going through the ritual with everyone and having people sitting next to me explain things,” she said. “I was kind of overcome emotionally just being part of it.”
Last year Newman “found” the afikomen, though it wasn’t much of a hunt: At the JAWS seder, the hidden piece of matzah is taped underneath a random seat. The person who finds the afikomen gets their choice of a high-end Nissan or Volvo to drive for a week after the auto show.
But the real prize goes to local JAWS members, Passe noted. “If you are local and you attend, you go home with the biggest doggy bag you can possibly imagine,” he said.
Kanter, the recipient of said doggy bags, concurs. “Leftovers at Katz’s are simply too good to waste,” she said.
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Will Anything Change After Bondi — and How Will the Story End?
A man lights a candle as police officers stand guard following the attack on a Jewish holiday celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia, December 15, 2025. REUTERS/Flavio Brancaleone
Jews arrived in Australia with the First Fleet in 1788. That is the Australian equivalent of the Mayflower, albeit with convicts.
From their earliest days, Australian Jews integrated into national life visibly, with patriotism and confidence. They built their shuls without apology, established businesses without resentment, and raised families with great pride.
They were disproportionately represented in the military, academia, medicine, and commerce. They embraced their Australian identity fully, while remaining true to their Jewish faith and seeing no contradiction between the two.
Australia was once a country that understood how integration worked. Newcomers were welcome, but they were expected to participate in a shared civic culture. Loyalty, contribution, and respect for Australian society were not considered controversial demands — they were the price of admission. For more than two centuries, Australian Jews lived by that bargain.
This is why the massacre at Bondi Beach during a public Hanukkah celebration seems like more than an act of terror. It feels like a betrayal. Holocaust survivor Alex Kleytman, 92, shielded his wife of 57 years in the crowd before dying. That is the Jewish-Aussie spirit that symbolized this community.
Hanukkah is, by design, a public holiday. It commemorates a minority preserving its identity while remaining part of a broader civilization. Light is placed deliberately in the public square. Faith without withdrawal. Cultural continuity without separatism. That is the message of Hanukkah.
That such a celebration was targeted in one of Australia’s most iconic public spaces is not incidental. It was an attack on a place and a community that exemplified successful integration during a festival that celebrates cohesion and tolerance.
Speaking to Australian Jews over the past two years, a new theme has emerged — not only of fear, but abandonment. The country they love increasingly hesitates to defend them, is embarrassed by its own culture, and is unwilling to confront hateful belief systems it has imported.
This is not an immigration crisis. It is a governance crisis.
Great countries are built by immigrants. The Greeks, Romans, and Americans all understood that growth comes from outsiders who want to become insiders. But instead of importing entrepreneurs, innovators, and builders, we have incubated an endless supply of cultural resentment. A nation cannot transmit to its citizens what it no longer values. Assimilation requires national pride and confidence in one’s own civilizational values.
Deterrence is dismissed for fear of “sending the wrong signal.” Enforcement is denounced as cruelty. Borders are discussed endlessly but defended reluctantly. Politicians still perform the language of control, but with the conviction of actors reciting lines they no longer believe.
Western governments have not failed to implement their will. They have abandoned the idea that they are entitled to have a will in the first place. The result is a system engineered for failure while absolving those responsible for it. Illegal entry is rewarded. Removal is treated as a scandal. Integration becomes optional.
What emerges is grievance without gratitude, and hate without consequence. Flags become suspect. History is reduced to a catalogue of sins. Elites perform ritualized shame as a marker of sophistication. A country that cannot defend its own identity cannot plausibly ask newcomers to adopt it.
Bondi was not a random eruption of violence. It was the predictable outcome of a system that encouraged hate, refused to do anything about years of incitement and terror attacks on Jews, and will likely change nothing after this attack.
The bitter irony is that the community that proved integration was possible is now among the first to feel the consequences of a society that has stopped insisting on it.
Nations do not decline in a single dramatic moment. They erode through a thousand small capitulations; each defended as compassion.
Bondi was not an aberration. It was a warning. The only question is whether the warning arrived too late. The story of Hanukkah ends with our salvation and spiritual redemption; how will this story end?
Philip Gross is a Manhattan-born, London-based business executive and writer. He explores issues of Jewish identity, faith, and contemporary society through the lens of both the American and British experience.
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Why Are Greek Media Erasing the Murder of a Greek Priest from the Barghouti Coverage?
Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who was part of the Global Sumud Flotilla seeking to deliver aid to Gaza and was detained by Israel, gestures as she is greeted by supporters upon her arrival to the Athens Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport, in Athens, Greece, October 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Louisa Gouliamaki
Father Germanos, born Georgios Tsibouktzakis in Greece, was a Greek Orthodox monk-priest who moved to Israel in the early 1990s to serve at the St. George Monastery in the Judean Desert. He was widely respected and known for maintaining warm relations with the local community.
On June 12, 2001, while returning to the monastery from Jerusalem, Father Germanos was ambushed and murdered by Palestinian terrorists. The attack was carried out by Fatah-affiliated gunmen, making him one of more than 1,000 Israelis and foreign nationals killed in Palestinian terror attacks during the Second Intifada.
In 2004, arch-terrorist Marwan Barghouti was convicted in a Tel Aviv court and sentenced to five life sentences for orchestrating a series of attacks that killed five civilians, including Father Germanos.
200+ celebrities want Marwan Barghouti freed. But the man they’re calling a “Palestinian Mandela” is a convicted murderer. pic.twitter.com/b9Ak4vJUAy
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) December 10, 2025
Since 2004, calls for Marwan Barghouti’s release have become a cause célèbre among those willing to overlook terrorism and murder, clinging to the idea that he could somehow emerge as a unifying figure in Palestinian politics or even a partner for peace with Israel.
Support for Barghouti has ebbed and flowed over the past two decades, but the past few months have seen a marked resurgence in articles, commentary, and sympathetic profiles of the Palestinian terror leader. His release was floated in the lead-up to the most recent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and more recently, 200 artists and celebrities publicly endorsed freeing him.
This renewed wave of attention has not been limited to English-language media. Coverage of Barghouti has been widespread, appearing in news outlets across the world.
The Greek media has been no exception to the renewed global interest in Marwan Barghouti. Over the past few months, several Greek outlets have published pieces spotlighting the imprisoned Palestinian leader.
Yet one striking omission appears across these articles: none of them mention Father Germanos. The last time a mainstream Greek news outlet referenced his murder in connection with Barghouti was in November 2023.
A review of recent Greek-language coverage shows that these articles devote minimal attention to the actual reasons for Barghouti’s imprisonment. Instead, they focus largely on the arguments being advanced for his release, while entirely overlooking Father Germanos and the other victims whose deaths led to Barghouti’s conviction.
These Barghouti-centered pieces have appeared in numerous major publications, including Business Daily, Kathimerini, ERT News, ProtoThema, Naftemporiki, Skai, and Ethnos.
Instead of highlighting Barghouti’s responsibility for the murder of one of their own countrymen, these Greek news outlets dedicated only a few brief paragraphs to Barghouti’s record of terrorism and violence. Their coverage focused largely on the campaign to free him.
By omitting Father Germanos from recent reporting on Marwan Barghouti, Greek-language media organizations are doing a disservice to their audiences. They present Barghouti’s potential release as an issue confined to the Middle East, rather than one that also carries profound resonance for Greece. What is lost in this coverage is the simple truth that this story is not distant at all, and it is tied directly to the murder of a Greek citizen whose name deserves not to be forgotten.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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Hamas Rejects Disarmament, Threatens Another October 7 — Media Silence
Palestinian Hamas terrorists stand guard at a site as Hamas says it continues to search for the bodies of deceased hostages, in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, Dec. 3, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
Two years after Hamas’ horrific massacre in southern Israel on October 7, 2023 — and barely two months after the terror group agreed to the first phase of US President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan — Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal delivered an unfiltered message in Arabic: no disarmament, no relinquishing rule of Gaza, no acceptance of any international authority, and a renewed commitment to Israel’s annihilation.
Yet not a single major Western news outlet reported the speech.
Meshaal’s comments were delivered remotely in Arabic at a conference in Istanbul titled, “The Commitment to Jerusalem.” According to experts, his statements were not rhetorical flourishes. They were a clear repudiation of the peace plan Hamas supposedly accepted.
And the silence surrounding them is staggering.
Hamas in Its Own Words
The speech directly contradicted the commitments Hamas has agreed to or said it would consider under the US-brokered ceasefire deal: disarmament, transfer of Gaza governance to an external body, and cessation of hostilities.
Meshaal instead declared: “The time has come for the nation to decide on the liberation of Jerusalem as a symbol of the liberation of Palestine, the cleansing of the Al-Aqsa Mosque … And Gaza, which started ‘Al-Aqsa flood’ in 2023 and turned into the pride of the nation and the conscience of nations, this mighty Gaza deserves more from us.”
On the ceasefire itself, he dismissed it outright: “Yes, two months ago, a ceasefire was announced, but the war is not over.”
He called for “rejecting all forms of guardianship, mandate, and occupation over Gaza, over the West Bank, and over all of Palestine.”
And on rearming, he was very clear: “The resistance project and its weapons must be protected. It is the right of our people to defend themselves. The resistance and its weapons are the honor and strength of the nation.”
According to researcher Idit Bar, who specializes in the Arab and Islamic world, Meshaal’s words amount to a strategic declaration: “Meshaal, one of Hamas’ prominent leaders, says here very clearly, he puts all the cards on the table: No to disarmament, no to relinquishing Hamas’ rule, yes to the annihilation of Israel, yes to the liberation of Jerusalem. He even uses the term ‘cleansing’ al-Aqsa from impure Jews.”
Bar added: “He also calls for the release of prisoners, which he calls captives, from the Israeli prison, which is literally a call to kidnap hostages, because he saw on October 7 that it’s worthwhile. As far as he is concerned, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, there’s space for only one state, an Islamic state, clean of Jews. That’s why he says the war isn’t over.”
What’s Behind the Media Silence
There are only two explanations for the omission: a lack of Arabic-speaking reporters or bias.
But major news organizations do have Arabic-speaking reporters across the Middle East. They could understand Meshaal’s words. They would have known he was speaking — it was all over Arabic social media feeds, and Al-Jazeera covered it. They should have reported it.
Which only leaves the second option as a viable explanation: those “reporters” chose not to publish what they knew. It was easy to hide that choice from editors who do not speak the language. And when newsworthy events or statements go unreported, they effectively cease to exist for the public record.
The bias is all the more striking because the AFP had a reporter covering the conference, yet chose to highlight only the more moderate remarks of Gaza Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya, who claimed the group would accept governance by a UN force.
The agency even sought clarification from Hayya, who — knowing his comments would be quoted in English — added that Hamas would disarm only if the “occupation” ended. Meshaal’s far more explicit rejection of disarmament and peace was omitted entirely.
Media outlets have committed a journalistic sin — a manipulation of reality. Meshaal’s speech was a rare glimpse into Hamas’ true intentions: unfiltered, unambiguous, and damning. It contradicted diplomatic assumptions, exposed the fragility of the ceasefire, and signaled preparations for future violence.
But Western audiences, including policymakers, never heard a word about it.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.