Uncategorized
I’m a Jewish historian; my grandparents ran a deli. Maybe we’re in the same business.
(JTA) — Like so many other American Jews from the New York area, I have been eagerly awaiting “I’ll Have What She’s Having,” the new exhibit on the American Jewish deli now on view at the New-York Historical Society. After all, the deli was our family business.
I grew up on Long Island during the baby boom era, when large groups of Jews moved to the suburbs. New synagogues opened in almost every town, and Jewish bakeries, shops and schools proliferated around them.
My family had its pick of half a dozen kosher delis within 20 minutes of our home. We tried them all but came to especially enjoy Brodie’s Kosher Delicatessen, in the Mitchel Manor Shopping Plaza in East Meadow. Like Brodie’s, most of these delis were modest storefronts, with little ambience and a straightforward menu of traditional Eastern European Jewish food and deli meats. Nothing fancy, but it was kosher and delicious and enjoyed by the whole family.
Eating in any of these delis carried special meaning for us because the experience served as a connection to our extended family, who had a long and rich history in the delicatessen world.
After immigrating from Eastern Europe, my grandfather and his brother established themselves in the food business, eventually starting a kosher catering company. In order to continue supporting their growing families, my great-uncle Abe kept the catering business, and in 1929 my grandfather Morris opened Rubin’s Delicatessen. Located in Brookline, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, its first location boasted only five tables.
The deli truly was a family business. My grandmother kept the books, my grandfather’s sister Bessie ran the kitchen and my grandfather worked at the deli counter. Bessie made all the home-cooked food, including an unforgettable hearty vegetable soup, meat knishes, russel (fleishig, or meat-based, beet soup), pot roast, roast chicken, eingemacht (a kind of beet candy preserves), taiglach (a dough and honey sweet dessert for Rosh Hashanah), jelly roll and mandlen (soup nuts). During busy times, such as before Passover and Rosh Hashanah, my grandmother and other great aunts came in and worked together to bake 4-pound sponge cakes.
The clientele of Rubin’s was something of a “Who’s Who” of Boston Jewry. As in Jewish delis around the country, businesspeople conducted informal meetings there, rabbis stopped in for lunch during their busy days and customers stopped by to pick up essential provisions or to enjoy a quick bite.
As the years passed and my grandparents got older, discussions about the future of Rubin’s began. Instead of taking over the family business, my father and his brothers pursued career paths outside of the deli, becoming religious leaders and Jewish professionals. My grandparents were proud that their children had pursued white-collar professions. And, in many ways, those children carried on a family business: The spiritual sustenance they provided as rabbis and social workers was an extension of the physical sustenance the deli provided through chicken soup and pastrami sandwiches.
This sense of providing intellectual, emotional and religious nourishment to the Jewish people has continued in various forms through several generations of my family, including my own choices as a Jewish historian, educator and institution builder.
Rabbi Moshe Schwartz, the author’s son, in front of a sign for the deli founded by his great-grandfather in Brookline, Mass., which by the time it closed in 2016 was located down the street from its original location. (Courtesy of Shuly Rubin Schwartz)
When it finally came time for my grandfather to hang up his apron in June 1974, he had one stipulation when selling the business to his great-nephew: “the Seller has for many years conducted the aforesaid business as a kosher delicatessen and restaurant under the supervision of the Vaad of the Associated Synagogues and wishes to maintain the kosher status of said business so long as the business is conducted under the name of ‘Rubin’ on said premises or on any other premises to which it may be moved.”
After all those years, his final wish was to keep the “kosher” in his “kosher deli.”
Rubin’s changed hands a few more times but eventually closed its doors in the summer of 2016, a milestone noted in Boston Magazine.
For many of us, my family especially, the kosher deli experience wasn’t just about the food (although the food of course was delicious and satisfying). Visiting and eating at a Jewish deli became a safe space, a deep link to previous generations, a fun way to comply with Jewish dietary laws, and a place to feel both Jewish and American. Deli meals didn’t simply provide nourishment, they provided comfort — true comfort food — and a way to connect to some of our Jewish traditions.
“’I’ll Have What She’s Having’: The Jewish Deli” tells the story of how Jewish immigrants like my grandparents helped create a new type of American restaurant and an important piece of American food culture. Reflecting on the many stories I heard about the business growing up, the too-numerous-to-count meals I ate when visiting my grandparents, and the memories of family, Jewish culture and delicious food, I know my visit to the New-York Historical Society will be both emotional and stimulating.
And I think I know what I’ll have for lunch after my visit.
—
The post I’m a Jewish historian; my grandparents ran a deli. Maybe we’re in the same business. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Manhattan Central Synagogue attacker faces federal hate crime charges
(JTA) — The man accused of disrupting Shabbat services at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue last week now faces federal hate crimes charges in addition to the state ones leveled against him immediately after the attack.
“These charges serve as notice that the Department of Justice will intervene to protect the public in the face of antisemitic and racially motivated attacks,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement on Tuesday.
Larry Montes, 46, of the Bronx, New York, was charged with two counts of committing hate crimes, each of which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, and one count of damage to religious property resulting in bodily injury, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.
During the attack last Friday at the Reform synagogue in Manhattan, Montes, who was sitting near the front of the sanctuary, allegedly stood up nine minutes into the service and began shouting, “You know who the f–ck I am.”
Montes then approached the stage of the synagogue and knocked over two ceremonial silver candle sticks, causing them to be damaged, according to the complaint filed by an FBI agent investigating the case.
As the synagogue’s head of security attempted to remove Montes from the sanctuary, he then said “F–ck you people” and “I don’t f–ck with you people” before punching a 63-year-old congregant in the face and knocking her to the ground.
While Montes was handcuffed and arrested in the lobby of the synagogue, he then allegedly told a security guard “F–ck you [n-word]” and headbutted him near his left eye socket.
During his subsequent interview with NYPD officers following his arrest, he allegedly told officers, “F–ck the Jews. … It’s racial” and “I will never affiliate with no filthy f–cking synagogues, either here or in fucking Israel.” Montes allegedly told officers that he had felt disrespected at the service, so he “got up, start[ed] some sh–t, [and] smacked somebody around.”
When asked by NYPD officers why he felt disrespected at the service, Montes allegedly replied, “it’s all a racial thing” and that it was “all religious motivated.” Montes also stated during his post-arrest interview that he identified as Jewish, according to the complaint. Montes’ aunt previously told the New York Post that he was “mentally traumatized because of his desire to belong to that religion [Judaism].”
Montes has been in custody since his arrest immediately after Friday’s attack. He was arraigned that same night and is due in Manhattan Criminal Court on Thursday.
The federal charges come as the attack has sparked widespread condemnation from New York leaders, including Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and spurred a Jewish security watchdog group to call on the NYPD to place more officers in hotspots for potential hate crimes.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Manhattan Central Synagogue attacker faces federal hate crime charges appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
He’s campaigning to regulate Texas oil and gas. Why is he linking his Jewish opponent to the Bolshevik Revolution?
A Texas race that would normally focus on oil wells, pipelines and energy policy has spilled into accusations of antisemitism.
In a fundraising email last month, Bo French, the Republican nominee for the powerful Texas Railroad Commission, circulated an AI-generated image of Jon Rosenthal, his Jewish Democratic opponent, smiling inside the room where Russia’s Romanov royal family was killed after the Bolshevik Revolution.
Rosenthal has “much in common with the Marxist revolutionaries who brutally executed the Romanov family,” the email reads. “My opponent has spent his time in office mocking Christianity, the Virgin Birth, and Christian Communion, while voting against religious liberty and for the spread of Islam.”
The text “Radical Rosenthal” with a blood-red outline overlays the black-and-white image.
“I do see it as antisemitic,” Rosenthal, the only Jewish member of the Texas statehouse, told the Forward. “Look at the history of the Bolsheviks and how the Jews were scapegoated. To invoke that here and now is disturbing.”
French did not respond to the Forward’s request for comment.
The message echoes the antisemitic conspiracy theory “Judeo-Bolshevism” that Jews created or controlled communism to undermine Western society. It became central to the Nazi propaganda used as a justification for violence against Jews. The fundraising email was first reported by Texas Monthly magazine.
“This is something that Jews have faced in the arena forever,” said Arthur Pronin, the Jewish president of the Meyerland Area Democrats Club in Houston. “This sort of thing that ‘They’re not one of us. They’re communists. They don’t have allegiance to the values of this country.’ It has a very specific resonance.”
Rosenthal, 63, was raised as a Reform Jew in an interfaith family, with a Jewish father and Christian mother. When Rosenthal was 14, he spent a year in Israel attending school in Hebrew and learning to speak the language while his father taught at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He later became a mechanical engineer and worked in the oil and gas industry for 30 years before entering politics in 2017. In 2018, Rosenthal was elected to the state legislature, taking his oath of office on a Torah he received as a bar mitzvah gift.
In an interview with the Forward last year, Rosenthal said that he has at times faced antisemitic comments from members in the state legislature, including stereotypical remarks about Jews and money.
“Antisemitism is alive and well in Texas,” Rosenthal told the Forward.
Last year, he led opposition to a bill requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom, which was signed into law by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in May 2025.
To underscore what he considered hypocrisy of self-identified Christian nationalists who supported the legislation, Rosenthal introduced an amendment to require the display of both the Jewish and Roman Catholic versions of the Ten Commandments, a measure that failed.
Rosenthal ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination for Railroad Commissioner. He is seeking to become the first Democrat in more than three decades to win a seat on the three-member commission, created in 1891, that regulates the state’s oil and gas industry. (Despite its name, the Railroad Commission stopped regulating railroads in 2005.) Members are elected to serve six-year terms.
Rosenthal, who previously flipped his district in northwest Houston from red to blue, is making a case that his victory would “rebuke the politics of hate.”
A recent poll of 1,200 likely voters, with a reported margin of error of plus or minus 2.8%, showed French with a slim three-point lead over Rosenthal. Rosenthal could benefit from the competitive U.S. Senate race, as other polls show Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton locked in a dead heat.
French’s past antisemitism accusations
It’s not the first time French, who previously served as a GOP leader in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, has been accused of antisemitism. Last June, he posted a social media poll asking “Who is a bigger threat to America?” and gave two options: “Jews” or “Muslims.”
After backlash, French deleted the poll and apologized, writing that “Some people clearly misunderstood the intent.” Ignoring calls to resign from high-ranking Texas Republicans, he announced in November 2025 that he was stepping down to run for railroad commissioner.
He narrowly won the Republican primary in May against the incumbent railroad commissioner, Jim Wright, with 50.5% of the vote.
Rather than focus solely on traditional regulatory issues in his campaign, French has infused culture war themes. His campaign website says he will end “the influence of radical Islam and the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) in Texas oil” and strengthen the railroad commission’s “partnership with our allies like Israel.” In March, French called on the U.S. to deport 100 million people and for Texas Republicans to more openly condemn Islam.
“To be fair, he seems to be a pretty equal opportunity hater,” Rosenthal told the Forward. “He says antisemitic stuff, but he’s also Islamophobic and anti-immigrant.”
The state’s top Republicans — Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows — had all endorsed Wright in the primary. Now, all three are backing French.
Others won’t embrace French but see his victory as inevitable. Fred Zeidman, a Houston-based Jewish Republican donor who supported French’s rival in the primary, said the controversial campaign talking points are unrelated to the commission’s work on regulating gas and oil.
“I mean, I’m dead set against all that, and that’s why I worked against him,” said Zeidman, who serves as chairman of the board of Petroflow Energy, an independent oil and gas production and consulting firm. “Would I vote for him? Probably not. But he’s going to win. He might be effective at what he’s doing.”
The GOP support for French alarms Jewish Texans like Pronin, who said the candidate’s social media poll alone should have disqualified him.
The July fundraising email “should be roundly condemned by the Democratic Party, but also by Republicans,” Pronin said. “They’ve had a history of saying French is not acceptable. So why is it acceptable now?”
The post He’s campaigning to regulate Texas oil and gas. Why is he linking his Jewish opponent to the Bolshevik Revolution? appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
‘An Israel run by undereducated Haredim risks being overrun by its enemies’
There is something surreal about Israel’s confrontation over Haredi education, which is rapidly coming to a boil. A dispute that has simmered for decades over whether ultra-Orthodox schools should be required to provide a basic secular education has become a test of something much larger: whether the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu is still capable of governing in the interest of society when doing so threatens his own political survival.
At the center of the fight are the two major Haredi education networks, which educate most Haredi elementary-school children and receive full state funding in return for an obligation to teach the full core curriculum. For years, however, the state has largely failed to enforce that bargain, and the schools taught mainly religion.
The High Court in February demanded that the government explain why full funding continues despite failures to teach the required subjects. Still waiting for an answer, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara several days ago took the next logical step, declaring that continued funding will depend on schools actually teaching the core curriculum, employing qualified teachers, participating in national assessments and accepting meaningful state supervision.
The immediate fight is about schools and money, but there is a larger story.
The stakes are considerably larger than the argument over a few hours of mathematics or English. They concern whether Israel can remain the kind of modern state it has spent three-quarters of a century building.
Haredim already constitute almost a sixth of the population, their fertility rate remains around six and a half children per woman, and they account for more than a quarter of elementary-school pupils. On current demographic projections, their share of the population will continue rising dramatically for decades.
That might not in itself pose a national problem if the community were being equipped to participate fully in a sophisticated 21st-century economy. But among Haredi men especially, low employment, low earnings and weak proficiency in the basic skills demanded by the modern labor market remain profound problems.
A smaller proportion of highly productive workers would increasingly be asked to finance a larger population, sustain an advanced technological economy, support an expensive welfare state and pay for one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world.
At some point the math becomes strategic. An Israel that becomes substantially poorer will find it harder to finance cutting-edge weapons, intelligence, research, universities and the other institutions on which its military superiority depends. An Israel run by undereducated Haredim risks being overrun by its enemies.
Clearly this cannot continue. But the Likud-led right has spent years avoiding decisions that might antagonize indispensable Haredi coalition partners. When the moderates were in power they had little stomach for this fight, preferring to kick the can down the road as they focused on a resolution with the Palestinians.
That left the attorney general, the courts and the civil service to enforce rules that elected politicians have proved unwilling to defend.
It is important to note that in Israel the attorney general is a very powerful civil servant. Indeed, curtailing this power has been at the center of Netanyahu’s attempted “judicial reforms.”
Baharav-Miara has effectively ruled that one cannot demand the full financial benefits of the state system while rejecting the obligations that accompany them.
For years Israel has managed to avoid confronting this contradiction by maintaining requirements on paper while tolerating a political system in which they were weakly supervised, inconsistently enforced or simply ignored.
The numbers suggest how hollow enforcement became. Research by the Israel Democracy Institute found that only a small fraction of Haredi boys’ schools failing to meet core-curriculum requirements actually suffered budget reductions. It was a failure to make the rules mean anything.
The political explanation is not difficult to discern. Haredi parties have become indispensable to governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who became Israel’s longest-serving prime minister by cementing this alliance. Thus their bargaining power has allowed questions of education, avoiding military service and ever-growing public subsidies to become matters of coalition arithmetic rather than coherent national policy.
Governments understood that enforcing requirements could provoke a confrontation with parties on which their parliamentary survival depended, while postponing enforcement carried almost no immediate political cost – until now. It is the demographic reality caused by the Haredi birthrate that is transforming the argument over mathematics and English into an argument about Israel’s future.
Judging by statements from Israel’s leading opposition politicians, a new Israeli government led by them would address the issue of a core curriculum and take significant steps to end the Haredi draft evasion.
Meanwhile, even if Netanyahu somehow wins, continuing the status quo will be hard, as the High Court and the Attorney-General are now forcing the issue. The rulings mean that schools must demonstrate that they are teaching the required curriculum, employ appropriately trained teachers, participate in assessment programs, cooperate with supervision and enforcement mechanisms and comply with reporting requirements.
This, of course, intersects with Israel’s larger and increasingly poisonous argument about the power of judges, legal advisers and civil servants. There is a legitimate democratic concern when unelected officials acquire enormous influence over public policy. Neither judges nor attorneys general should be treated as infallible guardians whose decisions are beyond criticism. But there is another danger, and Israel has spent years demonstrating it: elected politicians can become so dependent on organized political interests that they cease to perform some of the basic functions for which they were elected: to protect the country from great dangers. In this case the dangers are internal – and for all the regional wars of the past several years, the main coming conflict in Israel will be the one within.
The post ‘An Israel run by undereducated Haredim risks being overrun by its enemies’ appeared first on The Forward.
