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How a religious revival fed the demise of the Midtown kosher deli
(New York Jewish Week) — It happened toward the end of the last theater season, and it didn’t occasion much comment in the media. But the merging of Ben’s Kosher Delicatessen on West 38th Street with the glatt kosher Mr. Broadway around the corner marked the end of an era.
Ben’s, the last kosher deli in the Theater District that was open on Shabbat, made it possible for generations of Jewish New Yorkers — and a good many Jewish tourists as well — to enjoy a bowl of matzah ball soup and a kosher pastrami or corned beef sandwich before heading to a Saturday matinee.
In recent years, as the Orthodox world has become increasingly stringent, fewer and fewer agencies have offered kosher supervision to an eatery that remains open on the Jewish Sabbath. But all sorts of Jews eat in kosher restaurants for all kinds of reasons: nostalgia, a continuing attachment to Jewish culture, a sense of fealty to the Jewish people, a desire to be among other Jews, or even simply force of habit.
The merger of Ben’s and Mr. Broadway may represent a triumph of religiosity, but it also marks the demise of a Midtown kosher culture that was more flexible and more inclusive of the diverse ways people experience their Jewishness.
Kosher delis were, for decades, fixtures of the Garment Center and the Theater District — the twin neighborhoods, both heavily trafficked by Jews, that stand cheek by jowl in Midtown. Hirsch’s Kosher Deli on West 35th Street was immortalized in the early 1940s in a photo by Roman Vishniac of a group of clothing company executives in three-piece suits and fedoras reading Yiddish newspapers and chatting — a far cry from the photographer’s iconic shots from less than a decade earlier of impoverished Eastern European Jews, most of whom were fated to perish in the Holocaust.
In the 1960s, kosher delis in the area included the Melody on Seventh Avenue at 37th Street and Golding’s on Broadway and 48th Street (before it decamped to the Upper West Side, reopening at Broadway and 86th Street). In the 1970s, the Smokehouse on 47th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues featured smoked and spiced beef by Zion Kosher, the main rival in New York to Hebrew National.
Celebrated Theater District delis like Lindy’s and Reuben’s, and later The Stage and The Carnegie, weren’t kosher, and they sold the lion’s share of corned beef and pastrami sandwiches.
But there was no dearth of kosher food in the neighborhood. In addition to the kosher delis, there were popular upscale kosher eateries like Gluckstern’s — which claimed, in the late 1940s, to serve a staggering 15,000 customers a week — Poliacoff’s, Trotsky’s, the Paramount and Lou G. Siegel’s, which billed itself as “America’s Foremost Kosher Restaurant.” Lou G. Siegel’s occupied the same space that Ben’s took over and that Mr. Broadway is in now at 209 West 38th Street. (Mr. Broadway originated as a dairy restaurant in 1922; in 1985, it transitioned to a gourmet glatt kosher restaurant, and over time added sandwiches, sushi, Israeli food and the like.)
In addition to serving steaks and chops, these establishments sold large quantities of deli sandwiches. While these restaurants advertised themselves as “strictly kosher,” they were open on Shabbat, although notices in their menus, printed daily, beseeched patrons not to smoke on the premises on Friday nights and on Saturdays until sundown, since that, of course, would be a flagrant violation of Jewish law.
When a 2018 review in the New York Times referred to the 2nd Avenue Deli as kosher, even though it was open on Shabbat, it prompted a complaint from a reader named Fred Bernstein. Bernstein explained to restaurant critic Frank Bruni that “almost no observant Jew would consider it kosher” and cited two authorities on the subject: actor Sacha Baron Cohen and Leah Adler, Steven Spielberg’s mother and then owner of a kosher dairy restaurant in Los Angeles.
Lou G. Siegel’s billed itself as “America’s Foremost Kosher Restaurant,” while Gluckstern’s claimed, in the late 1940s, to serve a staggering 15,000 customers a week. (Courtesy Ted Merwin)
Bruni responded, quite reasonably, that he has “several friends who adapt and interpret kosher dietary rules in unusual and permissive ways.” He added: “For them ‘kosher’ — and they do use the word itself when explaining their menu choices — isn’t an exact and exacting prescription so much as it is an ideal toward which they take small steps.”
Indeed Ronnie Dragoon, who owns the restaurants in the Ben’s Kosher Deli chain — all of which are open on Shabbat — and is now a part-owner in Mr. Broadway, estimated that only about 20 percent of his clientele, across all his restaurants, keep the Jewish dietary laws.
Most of the kosher delis in New York were historically open on Shabbat, from the heyday of the kosher deli in the 1930s, when there were a staggering 1,550 such delis in the five boroughs, to today, when less than one percent of that number remains. Deli owners needed their establishments to be open on the weekends to make a profit — in Manhattan, they did the bulk of their business on Friday and Saturday nights, as opposed to kosher delis in the outer boroughs, which were typically busiest on Sunday nights for both eat-in and takeout.
Some kosher delis, especially in the outer boroughs, did close for the entirety of the Sabbath. As Alfred Kazin writes in his lyrical memoir, “A Walker in the City,” “At Saturday twilight, as soon as the delicatessen store reopened after the Sabbath rest, we raced into it panting for the hot dogs sizzling on the gas plate just inside the window. The look of that blackened empty gas plate had driven us wild all through the wearisome Sabbath day. And now, as the electric sign blazed up again, lighting up the words JEWISH NATIONAL DELICATESSEN, it was as if we had entered into our rightful heritage.”
In Manhattan, many owners of kosher delis got around the strict rules of kashrut by “selling” their restaurants to non-Jews, usually employees, before sundown on Friday and buying them back on Saturday night, so they technically didn’t own them and so weren’t doing business during the Sabbath. (This echoes the practice that many Jews engage in by selling forbidden food items to a non-Jew before Passover.) Many justified staying open on Shabbat because it enabled Jews to remain faithful to Jewish tradition in their food consumption, without regard to other ways in which they were transgressing Jewish law.
Kosher delis nowadays adopt different strategies to deal with this issue. Some, like the 2nd Avenue Deli, do still sell their businesses to a non-Jew. Yuval Dekel, the owner of Liebman’s, the last kosher deli in the Bronx (which is about to debut a second store in Westchester) told me that he just ensures that all his ingredients are kosher and leaves it at that.
Some kosher delis, especially outside the New York area, like Abe’s Kosher Deli in Scranton, Pennsylvania, are owned by non-Jews. While relatively unusual, there is nothing new about this: The Kosher Irishman, a deli in East Orange, New Jersey, was open for more than a half a century.
Staying open on Shabbat in the city, however one did it, could be a problem if a neighborhood became heavily populated by Hasidic Jews. My mother worked in the 1950s in her uncle’s kosher deli in Williamsburg, Brooklyn until the restaurant was forced to close because of opposition from the growing haredi population in the neighborhood, who insisted that keeping an otherwise kosher restaurant open on Shabbat was a chillul haShem (desecration of God’s name).
A view outside the 2nd Avenue Deli in New York in 1985. (Eugene Gordon/The New York Historical Society/Getty Images)
In today’s world, in which most Orthodox Jews will eat only in glatt kosher delis like Mr. Broadway, Jewish food doesn’t play the kind of unifying role it once did, according to Jeffrey Gurock, a professor at Yeshiva University and a historian of Modern Orthodoxy. In the past, Gurock has explained, seeing a neon Hebrew National sign in the window made even Modern Orthodox Jews comfortable eating in a deli, whether it was open on Shabbat or not.
Early one Wednesday afternoon in July, I stopped at Mr. Broadway for a bite. I had a ticket to “Funny Girl,” so I didn’t have too much time to eat. I sat and chatted with Dragoon while I chowed down on a brisket sandwich and a potato knish. Two kippah-wearing businessmen were sitting at a nearby table and we took bets on what they would order, since it was during the Nine Days before Tisha B’Av and observant Jews refrain from eating meat during that time of year.
I glanced at a huge, framed oil painting that was sitting on the floor, leaning up against one of the walls that, when it was still Ben’s, was decorated with the famous deli joke about an immigrant Chinese waiter who speaks Yiddish (and thinks he’s speaking English). In its place, the oil painting showed a tall Orthodox rabbi standing on a plush red carpet before the ark in a synagogue; he was clad in sumptuous blue and white robes and sported a long, flowing white beard. The painting seemed like the perfect symbol of what had happened to the deli as it had acquired a depth of religiosity that neither Lou G. Siegel’s nor Ben’s had ever aspired to.
Ronnie saw me looking at it. “Do you want it?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “No, I really don’t.”
—
The post How a religious revival fed the demise of the Midtown kosher deli appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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University of California Rejects Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement in Faculty Assembly Vote
Demonstrators holding a “Stand Up for Internationals” rally on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, in Berkeley, California, US, April 17, 2025. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect.
The University of California (UC) Faculty Assembly has rejected a proposal to establish passing ethnic studies in high school as a requirement for admission to its 10 taxpayer-funded schools for undergraduates.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the campaign for the measure — defeated overwhelmingly 29-12 with 12 abstaining — was spearheaded by Christine Hong, chair of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department at UC Santa Cruz. Hong believes that Zionism is a “colonial racial project” and that Israel is a “settler colonial state.” Moreover, she holds that anti-Zionism is “part and parcel” of the ethnic studies discipline.
Ethnic studies activists like Hong throughout the University of California system coveted the admissions requirement because it would have facilitated their aligning ethnic studies curricula at the K-12 level with “liberated ethnic studies,” an extreme revolutionary project that was rejected by California Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2023. Had the proposal been successful, school officials of both public and private schools would have been forced to comply with their standard of what constitutes ethnic studies to qualify their students for admission to UC.
Being indoctrinated into anti-Zionism and “hating Jews” would essentially have become a prerequisite for becoming a UC student had the Faculty Assembly approved the measure, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, executive director of antisemitism watchdog AMCHA Initiative, told The Algemeiner on Friday. AMCHA Initiative first raised the alarm about the proposal in 2023, calling it “a deeply frightening prospect.”
“Ethnic studies never intended to be like any other discipline or subject. It was always intended to be a political project for fomenting revolution according to the dictates of however the activists behind the subject defined it,” Rossman-Benjamin explained. “And anti-Zionism has been at the core of the field, and this became especially clear after Oct. 7. Most of the anti-Zionist mania on campuses that day — the support for the encampments, the Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters — it was a project of Ethnic Studies. At UC Santa Cruz, 60 percent of Faculty for Justice in Palestine members were pulled from the ethnic studies department.”
Founded in the 1960s to provide an alternative curriculum for beneficiaries of racial preferences whose retention rates lagged behind traditional college students, ethnic studies is based on anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, and anti-Western ideologies found in the writings of, among others, Franz Fanon, Huey Newton, Simone de Beauvoir, and Karl Marx. Its principal ideological target in the 20th century was the remains of European imperialism in Africa and the Middle East, but overtime it identified new “systems of oppression,” most notably the emergent superpower that was the US after World War II and the nation that became its closest ally in the Middle East: Israel.
UC Santa Cruz’s Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) department is a case study in how the ideology leads inexorably to anti-Zionist antisemitism, AMCHA Initiative argued in a 2024 study.
Following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, CRES issued a statement rationalizing the terrorist group’s atrocities as political resistance. Additionally, the department days later participated in a “Call for a Global General Strike,” refusing to work because Israel mounted a military response to Hamas’s atrocities — an action CRES called “Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza.” Later, the department held an event titled, “The Genocide in Gaza in our [sic] Classrooms: A Teaching Palestine Workshop,” in which professors and teaching assistants were trained in how to persuade students that Zionism is a racist and genocidal endeavor.
Imposing such noxious views on all California students would have been catastrophic, Rossman-Benjamin told The Algemeiner.
“The goal of admissions requirements is to make sure that students are adequately prepared for college,” she noted. “Their goal was to use their power to force students to take the kind of Critical Ethnic Studies that is taught at the university, with the goal of revolutionizing society. The idea should have been dead on arrival, being rejected on the grounds that there is no evidence that it is a worthwhile subject that should be required for admission to the University of California.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post University of California Rejects Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement in Faculty Assembly Vote first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israeli FM Praises Paraguay Decision to Label Iran’s IRGC, Proxies Hamas and Hezbollah as Terrorist Organizations
Paraguayan President Santiago Peña praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on Dec. 12, 2024. Photo: The Western Wall Heritage Foundation
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar praised Paraguay’s decision to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization, and to broaden the country’s previous designation to include all factions of Hamas and Hezbollah.
The top Israeli diplomat congratulated the South American country and described President Santiago Peña’s decision as a “landmark move” in addressing security challenges and fostering international peace.
“Iran is the world’s leading exporter of terrorism and extremism, and together with its terror proxies, it threatens regional stability and global peace,” Sa’ar wrote in a post on X. “More countries should follow suit and join the fight against Iranian aggression and terrorism.”
I commend Paraguay and @SantiPenap for the landmark decision to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hamas, and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations.
Iran is the world’s leading exporter of terrorism and extremism, and together with its terror proxies, it threatens… https://t.co/OzWACbWcno— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) April 24, 2025
On Thursday, Peña issued an executive order designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization “for its systematic violations of peace, human rights, and the security of the international community.”
The executive order also expanded Paraguay’s 2019 proscription of the armed wings of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, the al-Qassam Brigades, and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist group in Lebanon, to encompass the entirety of both organizations, including their political wings.
“With this decision, Paraguay reaffirms its unwavering commitment to peace, international security, and the unconditional respect for human rights, solidifying its position within the international community as a country firmly opposed to all forms of terrorism and strengthening its relations with allied nations in this fight,” Peña wrote in a post on X, emphasizing the country’s strategic relationship with the United States and Israel.
Iran is the chief international backer of Hamas and Hezbollah, providing the Islamist terror groups with weapons, funding, and training. According to media reports based on documents seized by the Israeli military in Gaza last year, Iran had been informed about Hamas’s plan to launch the Oct. 7 attack months in advance.
Last year, Peña reopened Paraguay’s embassy in Jerusalem, making it the sixth nation — after the US, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, and Papua New Guinea — to establish its embassy in the Israeli capital. During the same visit, he condemned the Hamas-led massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, calling the perpetrators “criminals” in a speech at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.
The Trump administration also praised Paraguay’s decision to officially label the IRGC as a terrorist organization, describing it as a major blow to Iran’s terror network in the Western Hemisphere.
“Iran remains the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world and has financed and directed numerous terrorist attacks and activities globally, through its IRGC-Qods Force and proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas,” US State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a statement.
The US official said Paraguay’s action will help disrupt Iran’s ability to finance terrorism and operate in Latin America — particularly in the Tri-Border Area, where Paraguay borders Argentina and Brazil, a region long regarded as a financial hub for Hezbollah-linked operatives.
“The important steps Paraguay has taken will help cut off the ability of the Iranian regime and its proxies to plot terrorist attacks and raise money for its malignant and destabilizing activity,” the statement read.
“The United States will continue to work with partners such as Paraguay to confront global security threats,” Bruce added. “We call on all countries to hold the Iranian regime accountable and prevent its operatives, recruiters, financiers, and proxies from operating in their territories.”
During his first administration, Trump designated the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), citing the Iranian regime’s use of the IRGC to “engage in terrorist activities since its inception 40 years ago.”
At the time, Trump said this designation “recognizes the reality that Iran is not only a state sponsor of terrorism, but that the IRGC actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft.”
“The IRGC is the Iranian government’s primary means of directing and implementing its global terrorist campaign,” he continued.
The post Israeli FM Praises Paraguay Decision to Label Iran’s IRGC, Proxies Hamas and Hezbollah as Terrorist Organizations first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Yale’s Silence Is Allowing Blatant Campus Antisemitism — and Betraying the Promise of ‘Never Again’
Yale University students at the corner of Grove and College Streets in New Haven, Connecticut, U.S., April 22, 2024. Photo: Melanie Stengel via Reuters Connect.
As darkness fell over Yale University on Wednesday evening, Jewish students faced intimidation that echoed history’s darkest chapters. The following day, as the sun rose on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the world solemnly reflected on the devastating consequences of unchecked hatred.
Yet, disturbingly, at Yale, the shadows of that same hatred linger once again.
For several nights now, radical anti-Israel activists, primarily organized by “Yalies for Palestine,” an anti-Israel hate group, have targeted Jewish students at Yale — in many cases, based solely on their outwardly Jewish appearance.
On Wednesday, protestors blocked walkways, physically intimidated Jewish students, and hurled bottles and sprayed liquids at them — all while campus police stood by and did nothing.
One Jewish student described her chilling encounter with the protesters the night before, on Tuesday: “When I tried to get through, they blocked me, ignored my requests to pass, and handed out masks to those obstructing me. Yale security told me they couldn’t help.”
The immediate trigger for this harassment is the invitation extended by Shabtai, a Yale Jewish society, to Itamar Ben-Gvir, an Israeli government minister. Whether one supports or opposes Ben-Gvir’s politics is beside the point. Notably, Naftali Bennett, a former Israeli prime minister, was also protested and disrupted during a separate campus event in February, underscoring a broader trend of hostility toward Israeli speakers regardless of their political affiliation.
These events signal more than isolated protests; they constitute a redux of hatred that historically escalates when met with institutional silence or indifference.
Yale’s administration, under President Maurie McInnis and Dean Pericles Lewis, has failed to adequately respond. Though Yale revoked official recognition from Yalies for Palestine, its tepid actions have not halted the dangerous slide toward overt hostility. The silence — from both the university and the Slifka Center, Yale’s center for Jewish life — is deafening.
This isn’t the first troubling instance at Yale. A year ago, similar demonstrators disrupted campus life with vitriolic anti-Israel rhetoric, silencing dialogue and fostering an atmosphere hostile to Jewish students.
Earlier this year, CAMERA on Campus documented Yale’s Slifka Center pressuring students to erase evidence of anti-Jewish harassment during a pro-Israel event, effectively whitewashing antisemitism and emboldening extremists.
As CAMERA’s Ricki Hollander has powerfully documented, the rhetoric of anti-Zionism today often revives the antisemitic patterns of the past, particularly those propagated by the Nazi regime in the 1930s. These tactics, she explains, echo Nazi-era propaganda that portrayed Jews as subhuman, sinister, and uniquely malevolent — a narrative used to justify marginalization and, ultimately, genocide.
These dynamics — scapegoating, dehumanizing, and ostracizing Jews under the guise of “anti-Zionism” — are not relics of history. They are alive and active across elite American campuses. And now, unmistakably, they have taken root at Yale.
McInnis must break the silence and condemn the open harassment and assault of Jewish students. She must also hold the perpetrators of the heinous actions and those responsible for the safety of students accountable for their inaction.
This week has revealed a grave failure of moral and institutional duty on many fronts. When law enforcement stands by as Jewish students face intimidation and assault, it sends a chilling message: their safety matters less.
We must demand a full investigation and real accountability. Condemnations of antisemitism are not enough. Policies must be changed to ensure Jewish students and organizations can freely exercise their right to free expression without being subject to harassment and assault. Anything less would betray Yale’s stated values — and the promise of “never again.”
Douglas Sandoval is the Managing Director for CAMERA on Campus.
The post Yale’s Silence Is Allowing Blatant Campus Antisemitism — and Betraying the Promise of ‘Never Again’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.