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Steven Salen, a tailor who survived the Holocaust and dressed presidents, dies at 103
NEW YORK — (JTA) — Nothing riled Steven Salen like a powerful man in a bad suit.
“‘That suit fits terribly!’” his daughter Elayne Landau recalled him as yelling at the TV, multiple times. “‘How’s he going to get elected? Elayne, send him a letter.’ He would dictate the letter. ‘I’m watching you on television. That suit fits horribly. You really look like you’re one-sided. Come see me!’
Sometimes, Landau recalled in an interview, she would even send the letter. And a couple of times there was a polite and friendly reply.
Salen, 103, died on Nov. 23 at a hospital in Manhasset, New York. He was a Holocaust survivor, a savvy war-era black marketeer, and then once landing New York, he built up a reputation as an outfitter — a “bespoke tailor,” as his family put it — to the powerful and influential, working until he was 95.
Salen loved talking about the opportunities this country gave him, but like many survivors, he didn’t begin to open up about the horrors he witnessed and suffered until late in his life — in his case, in his 90s.
He enjoyed regaling his children and grandchildren about his clients and what he designed to make them look good, recalled his granddaughter, Rachel Landau Fisher. One time, he saw an old photo of a man on a tarmac in a trim gray overcoat. Salen said he had made the coat.
The photo was of President Richard Nixon shaking hands with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai in Beijing, the launch of a history-shaking visit that thawed U.S.-China ties.
President Richard Nixon shaking hands with Chou EnLai while wearing a coat that Steven Salen told his family he’d made, Feb. 21, 1972. (U.S. National Archives)
“His grandchildren, Jake, Sofia, Rachel and Sam enjoyed his many stories, including a favorite of a Mafia client walking in on FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in his underwear during a fitting,” his granddaughter, Landau Fisher, wrote in a remembrance.
At his home in Bayside, Queens, he kept mementos of his career: Handwritten entries in ledgers spanning decades, including names like Nixon, and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. A framed 1980 check from former President Gerald Ford for $3,170. Gerald Ford tie clips. A hardcover and pristine copy of Kissinger’s remembrance, “White House Years,” with an inscription, “To Steve Salen, who makes me look almost presentable.” A client list from 2000 that includes names like Hearst and Scorcese.
“Martin Scorsese was one of his last clients,” Elayne Landau said of the film director. “So was Harvey Keitel.”
Salen was an old-school, word-of-mouth tailor who started working at FL Dunn on Fifth Avenue in New York, and eventually had his own full-floor atelier on Madison Avenue and 53rd Street, at the heart of the city’s high-fashion district.
In 2011, when Salen already topped 90, the New York style blog “The Trad” profiled his shop. It began, “Back in the ’50s, there were 300-400 bespoke tailors in NYC. Today — there might be 30.”
“They don’t have a web site. They sure as hell don’t have any marketing savvy. Steven can’t even figure out his phone. But they can build you a suit. In fact, they build suits for a lotta shops in NYC who claim to build their own,” the blog reported. “You get chalked up. And then what? Where does your suit go? China? Mexico? Turkey? Or, to the 11th floor of an office building in midtown Manhattan.” (“It ain’t cheap,” the blogger advises.)
Occasionally Salen would pop up in an aside in an article about the rarefied occupants of New York’s social stratosphere, as when the New York Times Magazine profiled antiquarians Leigh and Leslie Keno in 1986 (they are now famed as appraisers on PBS’s “Antiques Road Show”).
“After years of searching for the perfect tailor, they finally found one they feel meets their specifications, a man named Steven Salen,” the Times said. “He passed the brothers’ acid test for tailors by spotting immediately that each twin has an arm that’s a quarter of an inch longer than the other.”
Steve Salen at his granddaughter Rachel Landau’s wedding in 2020. (Family)
Salen would not tell his children about his life before his arrival in the United States unless he had to explain the marks his suffering had left on his body.
“He told the story of how, to his amazement, he twisted off his frozen toes and didn’t even feel it,” Elayne Landau wrote in a eulogy, describing the time her father spent on the Russian front as a slave of the Nazi war machine. “We had seen his feet, you see, so he had to say something about that.”
“He was a Holocaust survivor, but as much as that experience shaped who he was, he did not want to be defined by it,” she wrote. “I understood this because growing up in a community of refugees, we didn’t ask these questions and for the most part, people didn’t offer. People needed to move on.”
He worked ceaselessly, Landau said in the interview. “I remember on Sundays we used to go to Schwartzbaum, which was a woolen shop on the Lower East Side on Delancey street to buy cloth, so this was a seven-day-a-week thing for him,” she said.
And then, in his 90s he began to open up, and Elayne Landau saw an opportunity to get close to the father who spent her childhood working.
“He remarked frequently that he can’t believe he made it,” she wrote in her eulogy. “And he began to want to talk about it. Sadly, by this time, well into his 90s, he could not recall many specifics. But with the help of the few reminiscences that I’d written down through the years, Rachel and I were able to piece together the outlines of his story.”
He was born Zoltan Salomon in Nelipyno, Czechoslovakia in 1919. In 1939, in what he would later describe as some of the best years of his life, he was learning tailoring at a trade school run by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
Then the Nazis arrived and they deported Salen. He never saw his parents or seven of his 11 siblings again. Russians liberated him in 1943. “He told me how the Russian soldiers gave the Jews guns to shoot their German captors,” Elayne Landau recalled. “He said some people did.”
He joined the Czechoslovakian army and became a supply sergeant, which required sharp business skills to negotiate the black market. A fellow black marketeer had a cousin, Frantisca, who was 18; she and Salen were married within three weeks. They arrived in New York in 1949, and Salen landed a job as a tailor almost immediately.
His wife, who took the American name Frances, predeceased him, and so did his son, Jeff, a founder of the seminal 1970s punk band, Tuff Darts, who died of a heart attack in 2008. He is survived by his daughter, Elayne, son-in-law Matthew Landau, daughter-in-law Diana Salen and his four grandchildren.
“He really wanted to be defined by his American life,” Elayne Landau said. “He was so grateful for being here you could never say anything bad about against America.”
His granddaughter, Rachel Landau Fisher, said he and her grandmother drew slightly different pleasures from their American experience.
“He and his wife were most honored to have tea with First Lady Betty Ford after fitting the president at the White House,” she said. “His happiest place was at a poker table in the Catskills’ Concord Hotel.”
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Pete Hegseth compares media to the Pharisees, ancient Jewish sect derided by Christians
(JTA) — Almost exactly seven years after a presidential candidate stopped referring to “Pharisees” in response to allegations of antisemitism, another prominent political Pete has invoked the term.
And this time, it’s not just Jews but Christians who are finding the allusion offensive.
In 2019, it was Pete Buttigieg, then an Indiana mayor on the verge of declaring his Democratic presidential run, who compared an adversary to Pharisees, the sect of ancient Jews who are portrayed as hypocrites in the New Testament.
“There’s an awful lot about Pharisees in there,” Buttigieg told the Washington Post while speaking about then-Vice President Mike Pence, a Republican who frequently touted his Christian values. “And when you see someone, especially somebody who has such a dogmatic take on faith that they bring it into public life, being willing to attach themselves to this administration for the purposes of gaining power, it is alarmingly resonant with some New Testament themes, and not in a good way.”
Scholars of ancient Judaism and liberal Jewish leaders objected, saying that the term carried antisemitic implications even if not intended that way. Just days later, Buttigieg’s team announced he would no longer use the term, saying, “We appreciate the people who have reached out to educate us on this.”
Now, it’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth who has derisively name-dropped the sect, understood to be precursors of modern rabbinic Judaism in their approach to Jewish practice.
Speaking to members of media on Thursday, Hegseth said he had thought of the Pharisees in church when his minister preached about a New Testament story describing Jesus entering a synagogue and healing someone sick.
“The Pharisees — the so-called and self-appointed elites of their time — they were there to witness, to write everything down, to report,” he said. “But … even though they witnessed a literal miracle, it didn’t matter. They were only there to explain away the goodness in pursuit of their agenda.”
An 1843 engraving of Jesus with the Pharisees by Friedrich August Ludy, after a painting by Johann Friedrich Overbeck. (Getty Images)
To Hegseth, the comparison was clear amid critical coverage of the U.S. war on Iran. “Our press is just like these Pharisees. Not all of you, not all of you, but the legacy Trump-hating press, your politically motivated animus for President Trump nearly completely blinds you from the brilliance of our American warriors,” he said. “The Pharisees scrutinized every good act in order to find a violation, only looking for the negative.”
The invocation alarmed some Jews who heard it, according to posts on social media. They were responding with an awareness that in Christian tradition, the Pharisees have come to be thought of as “hypocrites, fools and a brood of vipers, full of extortion, greed, and iniquity,” as the Jewish scholar of early Jewish-Christian relations Amy-Jill Levine put it in a 2015 article arguing that Christian criticism of the Pharisees is antisemitic.
But this time, the comparison triggered a sharper outcry among some Christians and conservatives, because it likened Donald Trump and the U.S. military to Jesus at a time when the president has roiled some of his Christian base by posting an AI image of him as a Jesus- or God-like figure. (He said the image was depicting him as a doctor rather than Jesus, then deleted the picture.)
“Hegseth and Trump need to leave the religious jargon out of this,” wrote Peter Laffin, a senior editor at the conservative Washington Examiner, on X. “It is grotesque to compare the press to Pharisees, because it implies that they, Hegseth and Trump, are Jesus. “This is a hole they need to stop digging.”
The Jesus image closely followed Trump’s sparring this week with Pope Leo XIV. After the pope criticized the Iran war, Trump lambasted him on Truth Social, saying he should “get his act together” and implying that Trump played a role in his appointment. The pope rejected Trump’s criticism, adding fuel to a feud that has captivated Catholics around the world and even reshaped elements of Italian politics.
Soon after Hegseth’s speech, Pope Leo XIV tweeted again: “Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.”
Hegseth’s comments come as the Trump administration has injected overtly Christian ideas, references and practices into government activities. They were not his only comments citing scripture to draw criticism this week. He has also been mocked for quoting a biblical verse — Ezekiel 25:17 — using not the text found in Jewish or Christian texts but the one used by a character in Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” to justify violence.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Jewish groups urge Trump to prioritize Americans held in Iran during ceasefire talks
(JTA) — The American Jewish Committee is calling on President Donald Trump to make the return of Americans in Iranian custody an “urgent national priority,” as his administration works to preserve a fragile ceasefire with Iran.
“The United States must be unequivocal: the wrongful detention or hostage-taking of Americans will not be accepted or sidelined,” the ADJ said in a statement issued jointly with other North American groups. “Our adversaries must recognize that harming Americans has lasting consequences, and Americans must be assured that their government will pursue their return with unwavering resolve.”
Along with the AJC, the call came from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights and United Against Nuclear Iran. The co-founders of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum U.S., the American branch of the group that advocated for the Israeli hostages in Gaza, also signed on.
The groups celebrated the Trump administration’s record of negotiating hostage releases, writing that it had “already demonstrated an extraordinary record in recovering Americans from hostile regions, securing the release of over 70 Americans since January 2025, including every last hostage held in Gaza, living or deceased.”
The groups wrote, “The ability of the U.S. to lead in the recovery of not just Americans held in Gaza, but to secure the release of all hostages taken by Hamas showcases that the time to act decisively is now.”
Among those in captivity is Robert Levinson, a Jewish retired FBI special agent who went missing in Iran in 2007 during a business trip. Levinson’s family announced that he had died in Iranian custody in 2020.
“President Trump has brought more than 70 Americans home since January 2025,” Levinson’s family said in a statement. “We urge him to make Bob and every American held in Iran a priority in these talks — and to demand that the men responsible for our father’s abduction finally account for what they did. After 19 years, please help our family get the truth we need to move forward, and give our heroic father the justice he so rightfully deserves.”
The statements came as Trump announced that Israel and Lebanon had agreed to a 10-day ceasefire, a condition that Iran has said was essential for any longer-term peace deal with the United States and Israel.
On Friday, Trump told Axios that he expected a permanent deal with Iran to be reached “in the next day or two,” and negotiators for the two countries are expected to meet over the coming days.
The potential deal, which has largely focused on suspending Iran’s nuclear activity, is not expected to include any provisions about the release of American hostages, which are often handled through separate negotiations. In 2023, former President Joe Biden negotiated the release of five American prisoners in Iran in exchange for releasing $6 billion in frozen Iranian assets.
There are signs that the United States is interested in securing the release of Americans in Iran. In February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated Iran as a “state sponsor of wrongful detention,” writing in a release at the time that “for decades, Iran has continued to cruelly detain innocent Americans, as well as citizens of other nations, to use as political leverage against other states.”
While it is unclear exactly how many American hostages are currently in Iranian captivity, United Against Nuclear Iran currently maintains a list of 13 individuals.
“The Iranian regime must stop taking hostages and release all Americans unjustly detained in Iran, steps that could end this designation and associated actions,” Rubio said. “We encourage it to do so.”
The Jewish and pro-Israel group are calling on the Trump administration to “make the safety, security, and freedom of Americans held captive in Iran a top priority and ensure this is integrated into broader strategic discussions regarding Iran.”
They added, “We stand ready to work with the Administration to bring every American held in Iran home safely and swiftly. There is no time to waste—the moral and strategic imperative is clear.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Jewish groups urge Trump to prioritize Americans held in Iran during ceasefire talks appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump’s antisemitism envoy says US will bar World Cup attendees tied to antisemitism abroad
(JTA) — Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the U.S. special envoy for monitoring and combating antisemitism, said this week that the United States will bar individuals from attending the World Cup who are accused of fostering antisemitism in their home countries.
“The president and the secretary of state have made it perfectly clear that people who want to sow discord in this country are not welcome here,” Kaploun told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday. “People who want to bring their brand of hate to the United States with antisemitism are not welcome. Coming to this country is a privilege. It’s not a right.”
Kaploun’s comments on a potential ban were first reported by Euractiv, which said he told a European Jewish Association conference in Brussels that the United States was “holding countries accountable for ministers who are saying things, and they are not being allowed into the country.”
But Kaploun dismissed Euractiv’s report that the United States would institute a ban specifically on European politicians, instead saying that “everybody is judged as an individual.”
“If there is a minister that is promoting, you know, there are people who are promoting right-wing antisemitism or left-wing antisemitism,” Kaploun said. “Either way, coming to the United States is a privilege, not a right, and everybody is judged on making sure that they’re going to be coming to this country, that they’re going to not ferment hate.”
The FIFA World Cup, which will be hosted in cities across the United States, Mexico and Canada from June 11 to July 19, will be the organization’s largest event to date, featuring 48 national teams.
The countries that qualified include several that have battled openly — and in some cases literally — with Israel, such as Iran, Turkey and South Africa. (Israel, which has faced widespread calls to be banned from the Union of European Football Associations, will not participate, having lost in qualifying competition last year.)
Participating countries also include several where antisemitism is seen to be on the rise or where U.S. officials have sparred with leaders over issues related to Jewish safety — for example Belgium, where the U.S. ambassador recently challenged the health minister publicly over the arrest of mohels who performed Jewish circumcisions.
Kaploun, who was confirmed as antisemitism envoy in December, has taken aim at antisemitism in Europe in recent months, including in January when he split with the president of the Conference of European Rabbis over the root of antisemitism in the region.
Kaploun’s comments came as FIFA President Gianni Infantino confirmed at CNBC’s Invest in America Forum on Wednesday that Iran would participate in the World Cup, despite its ongoing war and fragile ceasefire with the United States and Israel.
“The Iranian team is coming for sure, yes,” Infantino said. “We hope that by then, of course, the situation will be a peaceful situation. As I said, that would definitely help. But Iran has to come. Of course, they represent their people. They have qualified. The players want to play.”
On Thursday, Andrew Giuliani, the executive director of the White House FIFA World Cup task force, told Politico that the Trump administration did expect Iran to be in attendance.
“I’m not going to speak for the Iranian team, but I will say that the president, when I’ve talked to him, has invited the Iranian team here,” Giuliani said. “The president of FIFA made a statement, I think, yesterday, that they’re going to be coming. So we expect them here.”
Discussing who could be affected by potential bans, Kaploun pointed to those involved in the October decision by England’s Aston Villa Football Club to prohibit Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from attending a match, as well as individuals tied to the violence in Amsterdam last year that left several Maccabi Tel Aviv fans injured.
“Those people who are responsible for what occurred in Amsterdam at the soccer matches, or that are responsible for the lies that ended up resulting in tourists, people, not being allowed to come to a soccer match — those people who do those things will be held accountable and aren’t welcome to come to the United States of America,” Kaploun said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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