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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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The post Steven Salen, a tailor who survived the Holocaust and dressed presidents, dies at 103 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Tidbits: Taiwan opens its first Jewish cemetery
Tidbits is a Forverts feature of easy news briefs in Yiddish that you can listen to or read, or both! If you read the article and don’t know a word, just click on it and the translation appears. Listen to the report here:
אויפֿן אינדזל טײַוואַן האָט מען לעצטנס פֿאַרלייגט דעם ערשטן בית־עולם אין לאַנד, דרײַ יאָר נאָך דעם ווי אַן אָרטיקער ייִד האָט, בײַם גוססן, אויסגעדריקט צער, וואָס מע וועט אים נישט קענען באַגראָבן אין טײַוואַן.
הרבֿ שלמה טאַביב, אַ מיטגרינדער פֿונעם חב״ד־הויז אין דער טײַוואַנער קרוינשטאָט טײַפּיי, האָט געזאָגט אַז דער ייִד האָט אים געבעטן בויען אַ בית־הקבֿרות אין טײַוואַן, כאָטש ער האָט געוווּסט אַז ער אַליין וועט נישט דערלעבן דאָרט באַגראָבן צו ווערן.
„זײַנע ווערטער זענען פֿאַר מיר געווען אַ קול־קורא,“ האָט טאַביב געזאָגט. „איך האָב פֿאַרשטאַנען, אַז אויב איך וועל זיך דאָס נישט אונטערנעמען, וועט קיינער עס נישט טאָן.“
מיט אַ חודש צוריק האָט מען פֿאַרלייגט דעם בית־עולם און באַלד נאָך דעם האָט טאַביב אָנגעפֿירט מיט דער ערשטער לוויה על־פּי־הלכה אין דער געשיכטע פֿון טײַוואַן. 95% פֿון די מתים אין טײַוואַן ווערן קרעמירט.
דער בית־עולם געפֿינט זיך אין אַ וואַלד, בערך 40 מינוט פֿונעם חב״ד־הויז. פֿאַר טאַביב איז דער בית־עולם געווען דאָס לעצטע רינגל אין אַ קייט פּראָיעקטן לטובֿת דער אָרטיקער ייִדישער קהילה. אין 2021 האָט מען געעפֿנט אַ ייִדישן קהילה־צענטער, אַ דאַנק אַ מתּנה פֿון 16 מיליאָן דאָלאַר פֿון אַן אָרטיקן ייִדישן געשעפֿטסמאַן, דזשעפֿרי שוואַרץ. אינעם צענטער געפֿינט זיך אַ שיל, אַ כּשרע קיך, אַ יודאַיִקאַ־מוזיי, אַ מיקווה און אַ זאַל פֿאַר 300 מענטשן.
הגם דער נײַער בית־עולם איז דער ערשטער אין טײַוואַן איז ער נישט דער ערשטער אין כינע. אין האָנג־קאָנג האָט מען געגרינדעט אַ בית־הקבֿרות נאָך אין 1855, און אין שאַנכײַ — אין 1862.
צו זען דעם אַרטיקל אויף ענגליש גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
To see this article in English, click here.
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EU seeks to advance trade ban on Israeli settlements
(JTA) — The European Union could be leaning toward banning trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Foreign ministers debated various tactics to respond to the settlements on Monday at their monthly council meeting in Brussels, against the backdrop of rising violence by settlers and efforts by the Israeli government to expand settlements in Palestinian territories.
In a press conference following the meeting, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said one possibility had stood out.
“The option that got the most support was banning the trade with illegal settlements,” she said. All 27 member states consider Israeli settlements in the West Bank to violate international law.
Kallas added, “We tasked the ambassadors to take this work forward, and probably will also have an extraordinary meeting on this.”
No decisions have yet been made, and the path forward is uncertain. Some EU member nations favor aggressive action against the settlements, while others are unlikely to back any measures that take aim at Israel. A number are in the middle and have not decided whether they support trade bans.
The level of agreement between European governments needed to enact a partial or full trade ban on Israeli settlements remains an open question. Kallas said it was the European Council’s legal opinion that voting on trade issues called for a qualified majority, meaning that 15 out of 27 states would have to vote in favor, representing at least 65% of the EU population.
But she also acknowledged that legal experts disagreed about how much backing was needed for a trade ban. “You can always find different lawyers who come up with different ideas,” she said.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar accused Kallas of an “obsessive campaign against Israel” in a post on X. “There was no consensus. There was no qualified majority. In fact, there was no majority at all,” he wrote, adding, “Tricks like this do nothing to advance our shared interests.”
The EU has hotly debated measures against Israel as settlements in the West Bank have expanded and settler violence has sharply intensified over recent years. The Israeli NGOs Peace Now and Kerem Navot said in a report last week that “the current Israeli government has advanced de facto annexation of the West Bank at an unprecedented pace.”
The ministers considered measures including a stricter export licensing system, higher tariffs and a partial or outright ban on goods produced over the pre-1967 lines. The options were first presented in a paper last week by the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, as pressure mounted from European governments.
Kallas said these potential moves were not “options against Israel,” but “options against the illegal settlements that undermined the two-state solution.” She told reporters before the meeting that member states had been pressing for a trade ban on Israeli settlements, saying, “Everyone agrees that the situation in the West Bank is really intolerable.”
In May, the EU sanctioned Israeli settlers over violence against Palestinians after Hungary’s new government, led by Peter Magyar, gave its approval and allowed the states to reach a consensus.
To protest the Gaza war, the commission last year proposed suspending the EU’s free trade agreement with Israel as set out under the EU-Israel Association Agreement, the cornerstone of economic and political cooperation between Europe and Israel. The proposal was not advanced because it lacked the majority support of 15 member states.
The EU is Israel’s largest trading partner, accounting for 33.1% of its imports and 29.4% of its exports in 2025, according to a summary on the European Commission website, which did not provide data on settler goods. The free trade agreement does not apply to goods originating from Israeli businesses located over the pre-1967 lines.
Revoking the association agreement requires unanimous approval from the EU’s 27 member states, while a partial suspension, such as freezing the free trade agreement, calls for a qualified majority. Germany, Italy, Hungary and Czechia have consistently opposed such suspensions.
Israel’s most vocal critics in Europe, including Ireland and Spain, have pushed for suspending the association agreement along with proposing their own import bans at the national level. Ireland now holds the rotating presidency of the European Council, a six-month term that ends in December 2026.
The legal basis of trade restrictions on Israel lies at the heart of debates in the EU. Support from a qualified majority is sufficient to enact a commercial policy, while changes in the common foreign and security policy — such as sanctions — require unanimity.
Some legal scholars have argued that an EU ban on imports from Israeli settlements should be imposed as a trade measure rather than a sanction, making it easier to pass.
A group of 40 scholars said in an open letter last month to Kallas, trade chief Maroš Šefčovič and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen that a blanket ban on settlement imports had a legal basis under the EU’s common commercial policy. Claims that unanimity was needed for the prohibition were “grounded in political rather than legal considerations,” they said.
The scholars also referenced an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice in 2024, which said that Israel’s military control of Palestinian territories in the West Bank constituted an illegal occupation.
“In that regard, it should be noted that the EU Court of Justice has ruled that, in its acts, the EU is ‘bound to observe international law in its entirety,’” they said.
Daniel Mariaschin, Honorary CEO of the pro-Israel Jewish advocacy organization B’nai Brith International, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that reducing trade “would only weaken one of Europe’s most important partnerships in the region.”
“There are those within the EU who are looking for any way to undercut Israel’s international standing, and this is yet another example,” Mariaschin said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post EU seeks to advance trade ban on Israeli settlements appeared first on The Forward.
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PEN America president, defending Israel’s critics, resigns after report warns of threats to Jewish authors
(JTA) — The president of PEN America resigned over the weekend in protest of a report on boycotts targeting Jewish and Israeli authors, part of yet another round of internal division over Israel at the literary free-speech institution.
Dinaw Mengestu, an Ethiopian-American novelist and Bard College professor, told The Atlantic he was stepping down because he believed the PEN report, “A Silent Moratorium,” failed to defend the free-speech rights of participants in the movement to boycott Israel.
“It’s the First Amendment that allows all of us to engage in boycotts, not PEN America,” Mengestu told the publication. “PEN America as a free expression organization is supposed to defend that right.”
The author did not respond to multiple Jewish Telegraphic Agency requests for comment, but in an Instagram post Monday alluded to an interest in creating a new organization to rival the prominent nonprofit, which defends the free expression rights other writers.
In response to an interview request, PEN sent a statement to JTA saying it was “grateful” for Mengestu’s leadership and would “respect” his decision. The statement also alluded to PEN’s own past turmoil: “We tell hard stories, in politically challenging moments, about writers from a range of perspectives, even when it’s uncomfortable for us given our own recent history.”
In its report, published on its blog, PEN described “Jewish and Israeli writers who feel that the mainstream literary world is increasingly shutting them out because of their identity, nationality, or views.” Interview subjects include several Israel critics, as well as literary agents who assert that they face more difficulties signing Jewish authors after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and amid the subsequent war in Gaza. The report also repeatedly cited a JTA report about a 2024 viral list of “Zionist” authors to boycott.
Among other details, PEN’s report revealed that Israeli novelist Etgar Keret and public radio host Ira Glass had cancelled a planned live event in Australia over fears of threats and protest.
“This silencing and exclusion of writers is a threat to what PEN America is fundamentally committed to defending: a culture of free expression for all,” according to the report.
In addition to the report, PEN also altered its institutional policy toward cultural boycotts, which the organization has long opposed. Although its report on Jewish authors asserted that boycotts “threaten the free expression rights” of their targets, the revised guidelines say that the group will also defend the right of writers to participate in boycotts.
Mengestu’s resignation comes at a perilous moment for Jews facing cultural boycotts, both within the standard-bearers of PEN and elsewhere. PEN’s Jewish former longtime CEO stepped down in 2024 following months of blowback from rank-and-file authors who felt the organization was insufficiently critical of Israel and caused PEN to cancel a festival for global authors.
Since the leadership change, PEN leadership has published and retracted a condemnation of a boycott effort trained at an Israeli comedian and also published a report cataloguing Israel’s “cultural destruction in Gaza.”
Mengestu had assumed the role of board president in 2025. But PEN’s report about Jewish and Israeli writers on Thursday, he wrote, “makes clear that [change] will not happen.”
The Anti-Defamation League said it was “deeply troubled” by Mengestu’s resignation Monday. “Freedom of expression means opposing efforts to boycott, silence, or exclude writers because of their identity or nationality,” the organization tweeted, saying that the author’s decision to leave PEN over his objections to the report on Jewish authors “sends a chilling message.” Jewish authors also objected.
“Imagine running a free expression org and resigning because it refuses to blacklist authors based on their nationality,” the author David Zweig wrote on X, musing whether Mengestu would object to boycotting authors from his birth country: “Ethiopia doesn’t exactly have a good human rights record.”
In response to The Atlantic’s story that quoted sources from inside PEN who were critical of his resignation, Mengestu wrote a lengthy Instagram post Monday in which he stated, “This piece is about trying to suppress constitutionally protected speech,” criticized past PEN reports critical of the BDS movement, and added, “What PEN America fails to understand is that boycott is a form of dialogue.”
He announced his intention to “help make something better,” receiving affirmative comments from notable authors including Viet Thanh Nguyen, Angela Flournoy, Jewish pro-Palestinian novelist Jess Row and Pulitzer Prize-winner Benjamin Moser, author of a forthcoming history of Jewish anti-Zionism.
Other Jewish authors on the left were among those defending Mengestu’s decision to step down.
“Dinaw is one hundred percent correct that this kind of fake victim propaganda can be used to support anti-Boycott legislation which violates the First Amendment and is everywhere as popular support for Palestinians grows,” author Sarah Schulman wrote on Facebook. Calling PEN’s blog about Jews “one of those fake anti-semitism pieces,” Schulman added, “If PEN wants to survive, they have to get out of the Israel/Zionism business.”
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