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The high price of kosher food takes a bite out of these NYC teens’ budgets
This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives.
(JTA) — On a recent Tuesday before his basketball team’s evening practice, sophomore Gabe R. and several of his friends headed to Grill Point NYC, a kosher Mediterranean restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Looking at the menu, Gabe was stunned by the prices: $26.50 for a bowl of schnitzel over rice, quinoa or salad. With no other kosher options open in the neighborhood, Gabe passed on dinner, practicing his ball-handling and shooting and ignoring his growling stomach.
Usually, though, he tries to find something he can afford. “I don’t like missing out. When all my friends go out for lunch, I don’t want to be the only one absent,” said Gabe. “I just look for less expensive items.” Most frequently this means ordering “a drink, dessert, or a side of fries,” said Gabe, who asked that his full name not to be used for fear of bullying over his financial situation at his Jewish high school.
Kosher food is hardly immune from the trend of rising inflation. In March 2022, inflation in the U.S. hit a 40-year high at an annual rate of 8.5%. Since then, the Federal Reserve has been aggressively raising interest rates to lower inflation, which, in January 2023, was 6.4% higher than January 2022. Although many Americans are struggling with food inflation, observant Jews bear an additional burden, as kosher meat already costs approximately 20% more than non-kosher meat, according to Slate Magazine.
Faced with high prices, many Jewish teens who keep kosher are limiting the frequency in which they patronize kosher restaurants. Some teens, primarily those who regard eating out as a key aspect of their social lives, have committed to ordering cheaper menu items when meeting friends. Others have eliminated eating out entirely. Such sacrifices have tangible effects on the relationship of kosher teens to Judaism. In addition to the crimp on their social lives, some teens say it is affecting their relationship with Judaism.
Yonatan Benichou, a junior at the Abraham Joshua Heschel School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, said that he has recently stopped going out to eat at kosher restaurants with friends. “As a student with no income, I have no control over how much money I can spend. Kosher restaurants are very expensive,” he said.
Being kosher during a period of high inflation impacts Benichou’s social life. “Some of my non-kosher friends can eat a Big Mac [Combo] Meal at McDonalds” or a burger, fries and a drink for about $12 in New York City. “There is no such option for me. It’s frustrating,” said Benichou. At Burgers and Grill, a popular kosher eatery on the Upper West Side, a similar combination meal starts at $18.
This new reality has altered Benichou’s relationship to Judaism. “I didn’t choose my denomination. The truth is that I can’t get a cheaper lunch with my [non-kosher] friends because of some random laws in the Torah,” he said. “This makes me more resentful of Orthodox Judaism.” Primarily, the prohibitive cost of a kosher restaurant meal has led Benichou to question the validity of mitzvot for which the Torah does not give a specific reason, called “chukim.” Traditional sources include the rules of kosher food among these “non-rational” regulations.
There are few cheap, kosher fast-food options, in large part because of the wholesale price of kosher food. While a pound of chicken drumsticks at Park East Kosher Butcher in NYC costs $9.98 — $9.30 a year ago — a pound of non-kosher Springer Mountain Farms Chicken Drumsticks, sold on FreshDirect, is $2.79. The kosher fast food restaurant Holy Schnitzel offers a regular chicken sandwich, coined the “Holy Toasty,” for $15.99 at its Upper West Side location. Chick-fil-A’s classic chicken sandwich is $6.29 at their Upper East Side location.
But the higher cost of kosher meat is not the sole reason for the lack of kosher fast food restaurants, said Dani Klein, founder of YeahThatsKosher, a guide to kosher restaurants and travel. Since fast food restaurants need to sell a high volume to turn a profit, the pandemic — which “killed the volume game,” according to Klein — meant that kosher restaurants could succeed only if they had high profit margins. “Every restaurant will choose the best way to maximize its profits,” said Klein. “Fancy restaurants can charge a lot more than the cost of their products by virtue of the fact that they are offering an upscale experience.”
Hunter Bernhardt, also a junior at the Heschel High School, said that he rarely goes out to eat with his friends due to inflation. Living in Riverdale in the Bronx, getting to school in Manhattan is often costly. “Everything, from gas prices to Uber fares, have increased with inflation. I can’t spend too much on expensive food when transportation is my priority,” Bernhardt said.
Although inflation has altered his spending, Bernhardt said that his relationship to Judaism has not been affected. “I am grateful to live in a place and attend a Jewish day school where kosher foods are accessible to me.” Indeed, students at the Heschel School, which gave three times more financial aid in the 2022-23 school year than a decade prior, have access to kosher breakfast and lunch every school day for no additional fee on top of tuition. Bernhardt also said that going out to eat isn’t that important to his social life. “Many of my friends aren’t kosher anyways. We do other things, like play basketball in Central Park and chill at a friend’s house.”
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The post The high price of kosher food takes a bite out of these NYC teens’ budgets appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Trump Says ‘Clock Is Ticking’ for Iran
US President Donald Trump speaks about research into mental health treatments in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, April 18, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Nathan Howard
US President Donald Trump on Sunday threatened consequences for Iran if its leaders do not act quickly.
“For Iran, the Clock is Ticking, and they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!,” he wrote in a Truth Social post.
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Netanyahu Warns Israel Prepared for ‘Any Scenario’ with Iran, Vows to Defeat Drone Threat in Lebanon
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a press conference at the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem, Aug. 10, 2025. Photo: ABIR SULTAN/Pool via REUTERS
i24 News – Speaking at a special government meeting marking Jerusalem Day at the Knesset Museum, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israeli forces in Lebanon are holding and clearing territory while confronting a growing threat from fiber-optic FPV drones. He said he convened a special team with the defense minister and civilian and military experts, telling them they have “no budget limit” to find a solution. “Whatever it costs, it costs,” Netanyahu said, adding that he has “no doubt that Israel will be the first country to deliver a complete solution to this problem.”
Netanyahu also said he would speak with President Donald Trump to hear his impressions from his trip to China and discuss Iran and various regional scenarios. “There are certainly many possibilities; we are prepared for any scenario,” he said, adding that Israeli authorities remain vigilant regarding Iran.
Over the weekend, Israel eliminated Izz ad-Din al-Haddad, whom Netanyahu described as “number one in Hamas’s military wing” and a “master murderer,” responsible for the killing, injury, and kidnapping of thousands of Israeli civilians and IDF soldiers.
Netanyahu said Israel now controls 60 percent of the Gaza Strip and reiterated that the operation’s objective is to ensure Gaza will “never again pose a threat to Israel.” He added that Israel has fulfilled its promise to return all hostages, including “the hero of Israel, the late Ran Gvili.”
“Every single architect of the massacre and the hostage-taking will be eliminated down to the last one, and we are very close to completing this mission,” he said.
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Pacific Palisades Jews, displaced by fire, reopen their synagogue as part of returning home
(JTA) — Sixteen months after the fires that devastated the Pacific Palisades and uprooted hundreds of Jewish families, congregants of Kehillat Israel are returning to their synagogue.
On Friday, hundreds of congregants are carrying their Torah scrolls back into the building that became a symbol of the Los Angeles neighborhood that was devastated by fire in January 2025.
While the synagogue suffered significant smoke damage from the fires, the building, constructed in 1950, remained standing, providing desperately needed continuity for the roughly 250 congregants who lost their homes and 250 others who were temporarily displaced.
All three of the synagogue’s clergy members, including Rabbi Daniel Sher, lost their homes in the fires, a tragedy that Sher said imbued Friday’s reopening ceremony with mixed emotions.
“It’s a mixed blessing. I’m going to move back into my place of work before I break ground on my home,” Sher told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But Judaism knows how to survive hardship, and so our job is to take this tradition and take 1000s of years of understanding that and put it into action.”
The reopening of the synagogue after months of repairs and renovations will also carry added weight as it coincides with a celebration honoring Cantor Chayim Frenkel and his wife, Marsi, for 40 years of service to the congregation.
“I feel very honored and proud,” Frenkel told JTA. “They’re dedicating the new ark to me and my wife, so that’ll be something in perpetuity that I’m honored to — if I’m blessed with grandchildren — to have them go in there and say, my daddy and my grandfather participated in working with others to create a very meaningful and a very loving and a very heimish shul filled with Yiddishkeit, a Zionistic, just a beautiful community.”
In the months after the fires, Kehillat Israel became what Frenkel jokingly called a “wandering” congregation, holding services in the Santa Monica mall while its religious school borrowed space from a Los Angeles public school. Clergy also held b’nai mitzvah services in neighboring synagogues, homes, hotels and even a restaurant.
“I can’t help but feel like it was this strangely entrepreneurial, energetic space in which this initial point of grief and loss very quickly manifested into a communal excitement and connection and has changed the way we will forever operate as a community, even once we’re back in our own sacred space,” Sher said.
Frenkel said that many of his congregants had told him that the “one of the main reasons they’re coming back to the Palisades to rebuild is because the synagogue did not burn.”
“That was a huge component for them to go through the rebuilding process, because they knew they had their synagogue,” Frenkel said.
As some congregants prepare to move back to the area, Sher said he had received hundreds of donated mezuzahs that clergy plan to distribute to families returning to rebuilt homes, helping them rededicate their spaces after months of displacement.
“For the families, the home is a mikdash me’at, it’s a small sanctuary, and I always tell our kids that there is an invisible bridge that leads from the synagogue directly to their home,” Frenkel said. “And now that their homes have burned or are being rebuilt, those bridges are being rebuilt, and that mezuzah is helping create that.”
But even as some of the congregation remains displaced around Los Angeles, Sher said the reopening ceremony was about much more than restoring a building. Instead, he said, it serves as a declaration that the community was “still here,” and that they had “never actually left.”
“For us as people who work there, but for congregants who have put a piece of their emotional connection into that building, they get something to still remain as home,” Sher said. “So our reopening isn’t just that statement, it’s saying, if you want home to be there still, it is.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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