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Jewish comedian Modi Rosenfeld, a mainstay for Orthodox audiences, is gay. So what?
(JTA) — Mordechi Rosenfeld, the Jewish comedian, insists that the recent Variety article in which he reveals he is married to a man is not a “coming out” piece.
“This article is showing that I’m a veteran comedian and I’m married to a man,” said Rosenfeld, who is known to his friends and fans by the nickname Modi. “This is it. It doesn’t feel like a coming-out piece to me because I’ve been out.”
Anyone who has listened closely to Rosenfeld’s podcast in the last year would know that he and his husband have been married since 2020. The pair talk about living and traveling together, and in a recent episode revealed they would be vacationing on Fire Island, which has a famous gay scene, with prominent gay Jewish cookbook author Jake Cohen.
But the news could easily have come as more of a surprise for one swath of Rosenfeld’s core audience: Orthodox Jews from communities like the one where he grew up, where LGBTQ inclusion remains an unfamiliar and often frowned-upon frontier. Rosenfeld has delivered his signature blend of highly informed Jewish comedy, which often digs into the technical details of Jewish law, on kosher Passover cruises; at benefits for Orthodox organizations including yeshivas, Young Israel chapters and Hatzalah, the Orthodox ambulance service; and on the annual Chabad-Lubavitch movement telethon. But until recently, his routine has contained little whiff of his personal life — in fact, some of his jokes suggested to his fans that he had a wife named Stacy.
“Stacy” is in fact his manager and husband, Leo Veiga, a millennial raised Catholic in South Florida whom the 52-year-old Israel-born, Long Island-raised comedian met on the New York City subway in 2015. The split content has reflected Rosenfeld’s long-espoused belief that the only way comedy can work is to tailor the set to the crowd.
“Even though some religious organization has brought me in and people are coming to see me, I understand I’m under the umbrella of a certain demographic that I need to respect and know the audience,” Rosenfeld told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “If you put me in front of an audience, I give them what they need. And they don’t need gay material — they need the material for this audience.”
“But when I’m on the road doing my material, I can do whatever I want,” he added. “They came to see me.”
The Variety article was born of Rosenfeld’s deepening belief that it’s possible to merge his Orthodox and gay identities more publicly — something that he has long done as a congregant and sometimes-cantor at the Modern Orthodox synagogue he attends in the East Village.
“The prayers are done in an Orthodox way. And somehow, gays have been attracted to come to this synagogue,” he said. “We have a whole group of gay people and we have a whole group of trans people welcome.”
“The rabbi’s thing is no one should ever feel bullied, no one should ever feel excluded,” Rosenfeld said. “Be you. Be a proud Jew and be you.”
Rosenfeld’s “not a coming out piece” is significant and part of a broader recent pattern, according to Rabbi Steve Greenberg, the founding director of Eshel, an advocacy organization for LGBTQ Orthodox Jews and their families.
“You used to leave. Coming out meant [you] had to go. Because you could either stay and be silent, or speak up and leave,” Greenberg said. “What has begun to change the story is people insisting on not choosing between their religious identities and their queer identities and insisting on staying in Orthodox communities.”
The Variety piece comes at a time of tension around LGBTQ inclusion in Modern Orthodoxy. Yeshiva University — where Rosenfeld studied at the Belz Cantorial School of Music — has made headlines for fighting for the right not to recognize an LGBTQ student club. This month, a synagogue affiliated with the Modern Orthodox flagship also made news for its treatment of a transgender congregant; Yeshiva’s top Jewish law authority said she could no longer pray there.
The episode ignited strong feelings for Rosenfeld.
“To torture someone like that, somebody who’s religious, who’s keeping the mitzvahs, who’s teaching, who’s doing that, and to open that up and to do what they did is so terrible,” Rosenfeld said. “It’s so, so terrible. That’s the only thing I can tell you.”
For Rosenfeld, there’s no tension between Jewish observance and being gay — although his articulation of why reveals an awareness of the pain that others might feel in trying.
“Being gay, you can keep Shabbos, you can keep kosher, you can keep anything you want to do,” he said. “You can learn Talmud, you can learn Torah, the only thing you can’t do is kill yourself. You can’t commit suicide. That’s not even on the table as an option.”
When Rosenfeld shared the Variety article on his Instagram page, the vast majority of the nearly 800 comments left by fans and friends showed support for his public embrace of his gay identity.
“It’s amazing that you announce that you are gay,” one fan wrote. “You are an example to all the Jews struggling with their gayness. You are a role model to me. Cheers.”
“I think it’s great you can be out with so many of your orthodox fans,” wrote Peter Fox, a freelance writer and Jewish community advocate. “What a wonderful gift of visibility.”
But a few commenters said they would boycott his work in the future, some citing interpretations of Jewish law.
“I can’t believe you are gay,” wrote one person. “What a giant Hillul HaShem [desecration of the name of God]. I lost all respect for you. Unfollowing now. And good luck to you when it’s time to be judged by The Almighty.”
Rosenfeld doesn’t anticipate that the Variety article will lose him any gigs. If anything, he says, it might actually increase his audience. Since he has started adding gay material to his repertoire, his audiences have been increasingly LGBTQ, like at some of the “Holidazed” shows he performed in December at Sony Hall in New York.
Still, he noted, “onstage, I’m more Jewish than I am gay.”
Rosenfeld began to dabble in comedy while working on Wall Street early in his career, when his colleagues realized he was good at impressions. In the last several years, he has emerged as a leader in a wave of comedians focusing on their Jewish identities, even playing himself on an episode of HBO’s “Crashing.” Five years ago, New York City’s then-mayor, Bill de Blasio, declared June 26 as “Mordechi Modi Rosenfeld Day” in honor of his contributions to the artistic community, and last August, Rosenfeld co-hosted the first-ever Chosen Comedy Festival on Coney Island with his frequent comedy partner Elon Gold to a crowd of 4,000. The Jewish comedy show has since gone on to an audience in Miami and will head to Los Angeles in February.
Meanwhile, Rosenfeld has embarked on a steady stream of sold-out shows on multiple continents himself, while enjoying several viral moments. In one bit that was shared thousands of times last year, he pilloried the practice of taking people who have made antisemitic comments to Holocaust museums, joking, “It just gives them ideas.”
Since comedy clubs reopened after their pandemic closures, Rosenfeld has worked on new material at New York’s iconic Comedy Cellar, where patrons’ phones are kept in sealed envelopes and filming is prohibited. The absence of phones gives comedians the freedom to workshop new material — and a lot of that new material, for Rosenfeld, has been focused on living with a millennial husband.
Rosenfeld and Veiga’s story is a classic New York City meet-cute: The comedian was riding the 6 train when he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Veiga, then an intern at CAA, the talent agency, introducing himself.
“And then we went on a date,” Rosenfeld told JTA. “I picked him up and I brought him to the Comedy Cellar, where I was performing. And he didn’t know that.”
After his 15-minute set, Rosenfeld returned to the comedians’ table, where he had nabbed Veiga a seat, to gauge his date’s reaction. “I said, ‘So I’m a comedian.’ And then we had dinner, we had two more dates, and then he moved in.”
In the eight years they have been together, Rosenfeld credits Veiga with facilitating the evolution of his career as both his husband and manager. During the COVID lockdown, as comedians everywhere found themselves unable to perform in their usual crowded clubs, Rosenfeld says he thought he was getting a break from work — but it was Veiga who suggested a pivot to video. That’s when Rosenfeld grew his online presence and developed his now-beloved characters, like the Israeli know-it-all “Nir, not far” (married to the fictitious, off-camera Stacy) and the Hasidic Yoely, who reviews quarantine-era TV shows and runs for president.
While Yoely is a character, Rosenfeld, too, is religiously observant. He wraps tefillin in the morning, even while touring, and he and Veiga keep a kosher home. Though Veiga is not Jewish — the couple had a civil wedding — he attends synagogue with Rosenfeld, his Hebrew and Yiddish pronunciation is excellent, and he is extremely well-versed in Jewish ideas and lingo. That has occasionally enabled him to stand up for their relationship when encountering people who believe it is forbidden: In one anecdote on the podcast, Rosenfeld shared that at a Shabbat retreat at a yacht club in notoriously conservative Orange County, California, a man at the couple’s table told them that the Bible says two men should not live together. Veiga retorted that the Bible says people should not mix wool and linen — implying that not all strictures are always followed, and leaving the man dumbfounded, according to Rosenfeld’s account.
Veiga has been part of Rosenfeld’s podcast behind the scenes since it began in August 2021, and began appearing on-screen in the taped recordings in December of that year. (In a sign of how deeply Jewish content is woven into his own life, he once wore a kitschy shirt referring to “muktzeh,” the prohibition of touching or moving certain objects on Shabbat.) Rosenfeld co-hosts the podcast with Jewish comedian Periel Aschenbrand, where guests include a mix of mostly comedians with the occasional rabbi (one time, Alan Dershowitz made an appearance).
Leo Veiga, left, wears a t-shirt bearing the Hebrew word “muktzeh,” which refers to a prohibition of touching certain objects on Shabbat. (Screenshot via YouTube)
In the December episode with Jake Cohen, Rosenfeld and Veiga recounted their experience at the Republican Jewish Coalition meeting in Las Vegas. The couple, who admitted to following RuPaul’s Drag Race more closely than American politics, learned what causes Republican Jews were almost universally excited by (Israel and antisemitism on college campuses) and what causes they were lukewarm on (abortion) solely based on the volume of applause in the room. They also said they were surprised by how welcomed they felt as a gay couple at a Republican event, and remarked on how many of the political figures and donors they met were excited to show them pictures of all the other gay couples they knew.
Veiga said in the episode that he didn’t learn until after they agreed to the gig that the conference lineup included Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence, whom Rosenfeld said he found “a little creepy.” Both men have advanced policies and ideas that are anti-LGBTQ.
Rosenfeld said he had no principled objection to performing for Republicans, or anyone else.
“If the Democrats want to invite me, I will go there,” Rosenfeld said. “If Al-Qaeda wants to invite me, we’re there. A check and a microphone, and I’m there. It’s simple.”
The aside came as Rosenfeld, Veiga and Cohen discussed one of Rosenfeld’s favorite ideas — what he calls “moshiach energy.”
“Moshiach energy,” as Rosenfeld puts it, is akin to the Jewish principle of loving your neighbor as yourself and then putting that energy into the universe in order to bring about the coming of the Messiah. The idea is inspired by the last leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch Orthodox movement, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson — a major source of inspiration for Rosenfeld, who studied at a Lubavitch yeshiva.
Comedian Modi Rosenfeld Rosenfeld speaks with Rabbi Manis Friedman, right, and comedian Periel Aschendbrand on his podcast in November 2021. A portrait of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the last rebbe of the Chabad Orthodox movement, is behind Rosenfeld. (Screenshot via YouTube)
It’s an attitude that he says is embodied by his synagogue, which he has attended since it opened in the 1990s.
“I am so fortunate to belong to a synagogue, Sixth Street Community Synagogue, where when you put moshiach energy out, it comes right back at you,” he said.
Schneerson considered homosexuality a sin and advocated for Jews to choose not to yield to homosexual urges. Last year, on his podcast, Rosenfeld hosted a Chabad rabbi, Manis Friedman, the former translator for the Rebbe, who espouses the same view; he said he finds Friedman inspiring even though he may not agree with all of Friedman’s views. It’s one of many instances where Rosenfeld has been able to square his identities in ways that have proved challenging for others.
Greenberg, the executive director of Eshel, agreed with Rosenfeld’s hypothesis that the Variety article would have little effect on the comedian’s ability to book gigs — and he said Rosenfeld’s commitment to Orthodox ideas and practices could work in his favor.
“Maybe some of those organizations that have hired him before will actually think this is an even more important reason to have him,” Greenberg postulated. “Some people will see this as a kind of affirmative step that you don’t have to abandon your religious identity because you’re gay.”
It’s an idea that is central to one of Rosenfeld’s signature jokes. For him, being Jewish means praying with tefillin every day, eating kosher food and observing Shabbat — while also being married to his husband.
“I always say: the Jewish people — we’re not the chosen people, we’re the choosing people,” Rosenfeld said. “Being Jewish is a lifestyle — like Equinox.”
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Long after he was murdered by the Nazis, Marc Bloch enters the Panthéon
Yesterday, Paris experienced two record-breaking events. The first was that the city’s temperature hit 104 degrees Fahrenheit, forcing tourist sites like the Eiffel Tower and Louvre to close early. The second occurred at the Panthéon, which remained open to welcome the coffin of Marc Bloch, the first historian to enter this hallowed site.
The event was literally momentous. The massive 18th century structure, dedicated as the Church of Saint Geneviève, was rebranded by French revolutionaries in 1791 as the Panthéon, the monument for those “grands hommes” who devoted their lives to the French Republic. But in a time of relentless racist and antisemitic rhetoric, it was symbolically momentous, as well.
Bloch was born into a French Jewish family that chose to leave Strasbourg for Paris when Germany annexed their native Alsace in 1871. An adolescent during the Dreyfus Affair, Bloch interrupted a promising academic career in 1914, volunteering to serve in World War I. He spent four years in the infantry, then served as an intelligence officer; by war’s end, he had earned two wounds as well as four citations for bravery along with France’s most prestigious medal, the Croix de guerre.
Between the two world wars, Bloch and his friend Lucien Febvre founded Annales d’histoire et économique, a history journal that revolutionized the practice of history, turning away from the focus on great figures and events and towards the mundane and material lives of peoples. Bloch developed the influential, though elusive notion of mentalités: the term he gave to the intellectual and emotional structures that, no less certainly than was the case with material factors, shaped how past generations experienced their world. This theme informed his early book, Les Rois thaumaturges, or The Royal Touch, which examined the relationship between the myth of the king’s healing touch and the powers he was thought to embody.
The persistence of this myth was revealed in the wake of Nazi Germany’s defeat of France in 1940 and the nearly divine prestige bestowed on the nation’s new leader Philippe Pétain. The elderly hero of Verdun led a collaborationist regime whose first order of business was to pass a salvo of antisemitic legislation in late 1940 that stripped French Jews of their legal and civil rights. These laws forced Bloch out of his teaching position at the Sorbonne, despite the fact that, though 54 years old, hobbled by arthritis and father of six children, he insisted on rejoining the army in 1938.
Forced to abandon the family apartment in Paris, along with his library of 5,000 books, Bloch and his wife Simonne settled in the southern “Free Zone.” Stripped of his post, he nevertheless continued to practice the metier of historian. But he turned his critical gaze to the present rather than the past, holding fast to his claim—one as relevant now as then — that “when a widely held opinion is glaringly at odds with the truth, we are bound in honesty, I think, to attack it.”
The result was L’Étrange Défaite, or Strange Defeat, a searing account of how France’s military and political leaders managed to lose this war in a matter of weeks. Written in what Bloch described as a “white heat of rage,” he applied the same approach to these events as he did to those in medieval France, one “concerned with the task of seeking the solid and concrete behind the empty and abstract.” The principal reason for the debacle, he wrote, was that while the German strategists were fighting the present war, their French counterparts were fighting the last one. With poetic insight, Bloch observed that “thoughts of the last war clung to them because they were the thoughts of their youth. Those days long past had all the brilliance of things seen.”
By 1942, Bloch had come to see that, as a French patriot, he was duty-bound, despite his age, to join the Resistance where he assumed code names ranging from the majestic Narbonne to the mundane Monsieur Blanchard. His good fortune lasted nearly two years when, in the late spring of 1944, he was captured in Lyon, then imprisoned and tortured in its notorious prison Mount Luc. On June 16, he was taken in a truck with two dozen other résistants to an empty field outside the city and summarily shot to death. His buried remains were discovered shortly after the war, as was the manuscript for Strange Defeat.
Inevitably and rightfully, Strange Defeat provided much of the script for the evening ceremony at the Panthéon, which somehow managed to be both severe and stylish. Actors read passages from the book while military guards carried Marc and his wife Simonne’s empty caskets . (Bloch’s family did not want his remains to be removed from the cemetery where he is buried, while Simonne’s remains were never found.) Tellingly, when the caskets were set down inside the vast hall of the monument, an army officer recited, according to Bloch’s wishes, the several military citations for bravery he had received.
In his address, given while standing in front of a column which carried Bloch’s epitaph— dilexit veritatem (“He loved the truth”) — President Emmanuel Macron underscored the tragic relevance of the historian’s life to our own era. Referring to recent efforts made by figures on the extreme rightwing to reclaim Bloch as one of their own, Macron warned against “those who declare themselves more French than you…and yet are always the first to sell out France to hostile powers.” (Among the conditions Bloch’s descendants insisted upon was that representatives from the extreme-rightwing National Rally party could not attend the ceremony.)
But the words written by Bloch, in the introduction to Strange Defeat, are the most powerful evocation of who he was and what he represents. “By birth I am a Jew, though not by religion, for I have never professed any creed, whether Hebrew or Christian. I feel neither pride nor shame in my origins. I am, I hope, a sufficiently good historian to know that racial qualities are a myth, and that the whole notion of Race is an absurdity.” “I try never to stress my heredity save when I find myself in the presence of an antisemite.” Bloch concludes, simply and beautifully, “I was born in France. I have drunk of the waters of her culture. I have made her past my own. I breathe freely only in her climate, and I have done my best, with others, to defend her interests.”
In the other book he wrote during this period, The Historian’s Craft, Bloch quotes one of his sons who, when still a child, asked him what historians do. (The good historian, Bloch writes, “is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.”)
As Bloch would have wished, he will always stand as an exemplar of what, in fact, historians do. And in the life he lived and values he died for, Marc Bloch will always stand as a reminder of what true patriots do.
The post Long after he was murdered by the Nazis, Marc Bloch enters the Panthéon appeared first on The Forward.
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Why Israel’s soccer team competes in Europe rather than Asia
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — More than five decades after Israel’s only World Cup appearance, the Israel Football Association says it has no intention of trying to leave Europe for the Asian regional qualifying system that once took the country to the tournament, before Arab-led boycotts helped force it out.
The launch this month of the tournament hosted by the United States has renewed attention to Israel’s absence from the World Cup. Despite a thriving local soccer scene and success in competition abroad, the only time the country appeared in the tournament was in Mexico in 1970.
That’s because Israel seeks to qualify through the Union of European Football Associations, whose ranks are so strong that even a solid campaign can become a long shot for the World Cup. Even titans like four-time World Cup winner Italy failed to qualify this year.
Israel is the only non-European country trying to reach the tournament through UEFA, while most of its neighbors seek places through the Asian Football Confederation. Israel was ousted from the Asian soccer body in 1974. It bounced around the qualifying zones for a few years — it played in the Oceania qualifiers ahead of the 1986 and 1990 World Cups — before settling in the European grouping in 1991.
Shlomi Barzel, head of communications for the Israel Football Association, said a return to Asia is not on the table, both because Israel does not want to leave European soccer, where it has built a standing, and because he does not believe the Asian confederation would accept it back.
The only upside to such a move, he joked, would be if Israel’s opponents boycotted matches against it: “Israel would automatically qualify.”
A boycott of Israel did affect the team’s path to the 1970 World Cup. North Korea was ejected from the Asian qualifying tournament after refusing to play in Israel. As a result, Israel advanced to the final round after winning only two games against New Zealand. In the finals, Israel faced an Australian team already exhausted after fending off South Korea, Japan and Rhodesia (itself in the Asian tournament after being banned in Africa over its white governing regime).
In the tournament in Mexico, Israel’s all-amateur team defied expectations, losing 0-2 to Uruguay but notching draws against Sweden and Italy before being eliminated.
Four years later, Israel was effectively ejected from the Asian Football Confederation following a resolution introduced by Kuwait that passed 17 to 13, with six abstentions. The vote came a day before a high-profile Israel-Iran game in Tehran that Iran won 1-0 on an Israeli own goal.
Today, Barzel rejects the premise that rejoining the AFC would guarantee Israel a place in the World Cup going forward.
“It would be a little patronizing and arrogant for me to say that,” he said, adding that he was not sure Israel would beat teams such as Jordan or Qatar.
Barzel also cited Israel’s place inside UEFA’s institutions as a benefit for sticking with the current arrangement. Current IFA chairman Moshe “Shino” Zuaretz was elected to UEFA’s Executive Committee in April 2025, despite the war in Gaza and growing calls to sanction Israeli soccer, while former IFA chairman Avi Luzon previously served in a senior role on the same body.
Institutional backing has extended beyond Europe, Barzel said, pointing to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, where Israeli fans were allowed to attend despite the absence of diplomatic ties. He also cited the global soccer body FIFA’s decision to move the 2023 under-20s World Cup from Indonesia to Argentina after Indonesia objected to hosting Israel’s team. Israel went on to finish third.
Still, Israel’s formal place in international soccer has done little to shield its teams and supporters from hostility. Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were attacked in Amsterdam after a match against Ajax in November 2024, and the club’s supporters were later barred from attending an Aston Villa match in a decision that became a political and policing scandal in Britain.
Despite its absence from the World Cup, Israel has remained a political flashpoint around the event, which U.S. President Donald Trump vowed to make “an unprecedented success.” Speculation that Trump’s hopes for a World Cup untainted by war spurred his push for a ceasefire with Iran prompted a denial from the top White House official dealing with the World Cup.
That didn’t keep the conflict from seeping into the events.
In Boston on June 19, kilt-clad Scotland fans waiting in blocks-long lines to board shuttles to the stadium where their team would face Morocco accepted Palestinian flags from activists lining the route.
Hours before Canada’s opening match on June 12, activists draped a “Kick Israel out of FIFA” banner over a World Cup logo near one of Toronto’s busiest highways.
Days later, a viral video from Iran’s match against New Zealand in Los Angeles showed security guards confiscating an Israeli flag from a fan — who was told they were acting on orders from their superiors — while other spectators behind him held Palestinian flags.
Trump’s special envoy for global partnerships, Paolo Zampolli, told Israel’s Kan public broadcaster he was “very disturbed” by the incident in Los Angeles, adding that there was “no place for antisemitism or double standards in sports.” Zampolli, who had previously urged FIFA to replace Iran with Italy at the World Cup, called on the soccer body to treat the episode seriously.
Barzel drew a distinction between the flag incident, which he said was likely a poor decision by stadium staff, and any official FIFA policy against Israel, noting that Israel’s flag is displayed alongside those of other member associations at official FIFA and UEFA events. FIFA generally discourages flags of teams not playing in a given match, he said, and added that Israeli teams have grown used to seeing Palestinian flags in soccer stadiums.
“Personally, I don’t get worked up by flags — they don’t scare me,” he said.
Yoav Borowitz, head of sports at Kan, said FIFA appeared wary of flags being used as protest symbols, pointing to the Iranian lion-and-sun flag, the country’s flag before the 1979 revolution installed the current theocratic regime, which some fans waved at the same match. FIFA’s failure to clarify whether Israeli flags were allowed in stadiums in the days after the incident, he said, “shows where Israel stands at the moment.”
“There were official FIFA stewards there,” he said, “and if the fan was effectively forced to remove the flag, then I would have expected FIFA to have issued a response by now and said that Israeli flags are allowed into stadiums, just as Palestinian flags are allowed into stadiums, just as the flag of any country is allowed into stadiums.”
Any limits placed on Israel’s soccer association have been imposed solely on security grounds, Barzel said, though in October UEFA came close to holding an emergency vote on whether to suspend Israel over the war in Gaza.
At FIFA’s congress in Vancouver in April, when Palestinian Football Association president Jibril Rajoub refused to shake hands with Israel FA Vice President Basim Sheikh Suliman despite repeated appeals from FIFA President Gianni Infantino, who called on the sides to “give hope to the children.”
Despite such gestures, Israel continues to compete as usual — almost. It has been unable to host matches at home for close to three years because of war and has had to play its home World Cup qualifiers in neutral third countries. It is hosting several contests this fall in Moldova, which last year gained an Israeli embassy, and direct El Al routes, for the first time. (Russia, by contrast, has had its national teams and clubs suspended from FIFA and UEFA competitions since its invasion of Ukraine.)
Despite the controversies, FIFA has kept pressing ahead with its vision of soccer as “a force for unity, peace and hope,” including reported discussions about opening a new under-15’s tournament in the United States in September with a symbolic match between Israeli and Palestinian youth teams.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Why Israel’s soccer team competes in Europe rather than Asia appeared first on The Forward.
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A klezmer virtuoso, Joseph Moskowitz was a cymbalist of Jewish progress in America
The restaurant occupies a long narrow basement on the Lower East Side. It is packed with a hundred Jews who fill the air with a fog of blue tobacco smoke as steak and lamb grills over charcoal. Everyone, it seems, has a glass of red Romanian wine, including the cymbalom player who is banging out a sad peasant ballad. The whole room sings along.
The scene is from the early 1900’s in Jews Without Money, Michael Gold’s 1930 novel about the poor of the Jewish Lower East Side. The mustachioed man at the cymbalom is not a fictional character, though. He is Joseph Moskowitz, a Romanian-born Jew who ran the restaurant with his wife.
One of the first klezmer virtuosos in America, Moskowitz had a hand in several of the city’s restaurants, including a wildly successful Second Avenue establishment frequented by underworld figures, politicians and showbiz royalty. The Kardashians would envy his shrewdness in garnering publicity for his multifaceted career.
In April 1908, just four months after Moskowitz came to Amerike, he landed on to the front-page of The New York Times in a review headlined “CHAMPION CYMBALIST IS PLAYING HERE NOW.” The story noted his strange instrument, a hammered dulcimer popular in Eastern Europe, looked like “a baby grand piano with the top off.” The newspaper reported that Moskowitz’s performance was greeted with cries of “Bravo!”
Nixon was here
Moskowitz’s career as a musician met with great success but his life as a restaurateur had its ups and downs. He ran a number of eateries in New York, including one in the Bronx and another in what is now referred to as the East Village with three waiters as partners. Then, after a performance in Akron, Ohio, he ran a restaurant there called The Romany.
The Moskowitz family lived above the joint. Its clientele included members of the Firestone and Goodrich families but the patronage of the rubber barons was not enough to sustain the restaurant, so Moskowitz moved to Washington, D.C. There, he performed at Michel’s, a restaurant started by a violinist he played with. Legend has it that among the regulars at Michel’s was congressman Richard Nixon who would bring in a brown paper bag concealing a fermented beverage.
“I would like to point out that one of Nixon’s first foreign trips as president was actually to Romania, where he was photographed dancing the hora at the Museum of the Romanian Peasant with Nikolai Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator,” said Pete Rushefsky, a widely esteemed cymbalist who is also executive director of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance in New York.
The triumphs and travails of Moskowitz’s life are recounted in his unpublished and untitled memoir, which is now part of the Joseph Moskowitz Archive, acquired earlier this year by the Music Division at the Library of Congress. The archive was established after a box of artifacts was discovered in the home of one of Moskowitz’s descendants in Cleveland.
An affair to remember
In the early 1900’s there were dozens of Romanian Jewish restaurants on the Lower East Side, which was home to so many Romanian Jews it was known as Little Romania. The neighborhood was also distinguished by a large number of dance halls and libraries.
The Moskowitz memoir, which was written in Romanian, makes clear that his restaurants did not always attract the cream of the crop. One became the headquarters for some Russians gangsters, most of them pickpockets.
At Lupowitz & Moskowitz, which moved from its original location to Second Avenue and 2nd Street, dinners started at 85 cents. In Moskowitz’s telling, business was going great until his partner Sam Lupowitz, stole money with the assistance of Moskowitz’s wife Rebecca with whom he was having an affair.
According to Moskowitz, the affair went on for nine years. It all started, he writes, when Lupowitz took Mrs. Moskowitz to a party and got her “totally drunk,” after which they proceeded to the kitchen to burn off some calories. Mr. Moskowitz put an end to the affair when he came home one night and caught his partner leaving Mrs. Moskowitz’s bedroom.
In the old country, Moskowitz himself had not been exactly celibate. He recounts an affair with a Romanian widow he describes as a grifter. For nine months, he wrote, they made love every day. This feat was apparently an exhausting endeavor because Moskowitz decided to depart abruptly, leaving a letter informing the widow that he could no longer “carry on in this manner.” The widow had other ideas and asked a local magistrate to arrest Moskowitz who managed to avoid incarceration by hiding.
A heavy lift
Joseph Moskowitz’s real superpower was performing on the cymbalom, which he started playing at the age of eight, taught by his father on a small folk version of the instrument. One of his first gigs was playing on the ferries that travelled the Danube. Eventually he learned how to play the large concert version of the cymbalom, which was developed in the late 19th Century and became a major orchestral instrument in Eastern Europe.
“He was an absolute virtuoso,” said Rushefsky. “His technical competence on the instrument was just incredible.”
Moskowitz was recorded playing a wide range of music on the instrument, including ragtime, classical, as well as Turkish, Russian and Greek music.
His cymbalom weighed 150 pounds and was not an easy instrument to schlep around, which made performing at restaurants appealing, since he could just leave the instrument there, though he did perform from time to time in concert venues, including Town Hall.
Rushefsky told me he was impressed with Moskowitz’s savvy at drumming up publicity for both his performances and restaurants. Moskowitz deftly cultivated relationships with media figures and other bold-faced names of the day. His memoir notes that among the celebrities who came to hear him play were Theodore Dreiser, Chaim Weitzman and Jascha Heifetz.
“He had a meticulously curated scrapbook filled with articles about his restaurant and reviews of his performances. You can tell that was really important to him,” Rushefsky said.
In Around The World In New York, a book about the city’s ethnic neighborhoods published in 1924, the immigrant newspaperman Konrad Bercovici described Moskowitz’s restaurant as a place with “haunting melodies, tripping dances” and spicy food. “At Moskowitz’s on Houston Street the Rumanian Jews sing at the top of their voices the songs of the country they left,” Bercovici wrote.
A klezpirational figure
Many of the old scratchy 78 rpm vinyl disks that were vital to the first wave of the klezmer revival in the 1970’s and 80’s featured a clarinet-centric sound but the earliest recordings we have of klezmer, from circa 1908, the violin is the main instrument, often accompanied by cymbalom.
Moskowitz’s recordings are widely available on YouTube.
“His repertoire is performed by klezmer bands around the world,” Pete Rushefsky told me. “His recordings continue to be an inspiration for a small but dedicated group of musicians working to revitalize the cimbalom as an essential part of klezmer’s sound.”
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