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This kosher cafe in Riverdale attracts a diverse clientele from across the Bronx
(New York Jewish Week) — When Emily Weisberg arrived in the Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale in 2014, she was surprised that the coffee options didn’t extend far beyond Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts.
So she set out to create a cafe of her own, one that would not only serve up third-wave coffee but also function as a community hub outside of the relatively insular worlds of her kids’ daycare or her synagogue, the open Orthodox Hebrew Institute of Riverdale. She wanted a place where she could get to know everyone who lived in the neighborhood.
Nearly a decade later, Moss Cafe stands out the northern Bronx neighborhood — both because of its vivid mural of carrots, beets and red onions that pops on its otherwise drab block, and because of its unusual combination of seasonal foods, ethical practices and kosher supervision.
“Our clientele is really diverse, and I think that’s my greatest accomplishment here,” Weisberg told the New York Jewish Week. “We made a restaurant that everyone wants to come to that also happens to be kosher.”
Much of what a visitor to Moss encounters would not be out of place in any hip, upscale cafe. A selection of seasonal pastries, all baked in house, changes throughout the year; flowers in mason jars brighten every table. Moms with yoga mats tucked under their arms grab lattes to go and high schoolers cluster around the window seat with their laptops. The shakshuka is fragrant with garlic and za’atar, and chef Brian Engel’s kale salad, enriched with parmesan and pepitas and studded with roasted beets, is as good as any in the city. The restaurant recently added dinner service, with a menu including a “picky plate” designed to accommodate families.
At the same time, the cafe is strictly kosher — it serves fish and dairy, but not meat, under the supervision of the Vaad of Riverdale — and closes on Shabbat. Its bakery case includes fluffy challahs on Friday mornings, and special catering menus feature traditional foods for Jewish holidays. Customers can often be overheard discussing Jewish texts, the neighborhood’s multiple day schools and upcoming trips to Israel.
On a recent breezy April day — the first spring morning that rhubarb appeared in the cafe’s farm deliveries — Moss was jammed with neighborhood regulars and visitors from all walks of life. Samuel Marder, a nonagenarian violinist and Holocaust survivor — whose wife, the pianist Sonia Vargas, was Riverdale native Regina Spektor’s music teacher — sat at a table adjacent to Sage Vasquez and Diamond Wynn, two culinary professionals from the South Bronx. It was their first visit, but they discovered that a friend worked at Moss and felt at home.
Moss’ pastry counter is always filled with seasonal items. (Ben Resnick)
“I see a lot of people who look like me, and that’s important when I go out to eat,” says Vasquez, a pastry chef. “The neighborhood is like a breath of fresh air from the South Bronx.”
Moss also stands out for its commitment to mutual aid in the borough. Case in point: Few other independent neighborhood coffee shops employ a dedicated director of community outreach. Tess Watts, who has that role at Moss, started at the cafe as a server while she was a student at nearby Manhattan College. Now, she leads Moss’s collaborations with neighborhood nonprofits such as the Riverdale Community House.
Last year, the cafe donated nearly $11,000 of its revenue to local nonprofits and charities, and raised an additional $2,900 for those groups. It also donated more than $7,400 worth of excess food to local community fridges, putting food directly into the hands of those who needed it. Watts says as a community-oriented cafe located in a well-to-do enclave in New York’s poorest borough, Moss has a responsibility to help its neighbors, not just its customers.
“If your mission is to build community around food, you can’t discount the ways that the community is impacted by food,” she said. “You have to look at food insecurity, you have to look at economic inequality. In order to operate a restaurant and call ourselves ethical, we have to do it.”
Moss Cafe sits on a nondescript block in the commercial heart of Riverdale in New York City. (Ike Allen)
Moss has stuck with that commitment since it opened in 2015. Weisberg, the co-owner and face of the cafe, was raised in the rural Midwest, where she got a job at 16 in a small-town coffee shop. That cafe — Perc Place in Hartford, Wisconsin — gave her a lasting appreciation for the communal spaces that coffee shops can provide. Even in a small heartland town like hers, many of the cafe’s workers were immigrants from Latin America, and people from all walks of life chatted together at the tables over cups brewed from beans grown in the highlands of Guatemala and Colombia.
“Living in a place that was not very diverse, I always longed for that,” Weisberg said. “This was a special way to connect with where I was and also to open up my world, through food and coffee and through my coworkers.”
Weisberg lived for a time in Peru and took classes in Latin American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, intending to eventually practice immigration law. While living in Madison, Wisconsin, she worked at restaurants and frequented the local farmers market where, she said, “local food was a thing before it was on a national scale.”
At the same time, her spiritual interests steered her toward Judaism — she was raised Catholic — and she converted at 21, after studying with a campus Chabad rabbi and rebbetzin. In Madison, she also met Alex Weisberg, who had been raised by a secular Jewish family in New York’s Westchester County but became more interested in religion after a Birthright trip.
The two got married in Jerusalem and lived there for three years, where Weisberg opened a coffee and pastry window from their home, where customers would sit on chairs set up on the cobblestone street.
That was the experience she hoped to recreate in Riverdale after they moved to New York City in 2014 — Weisberg felt she could help her community as a good employer. The ethical mission of Moss, she said, starts with pay and conditions for its own employees.
Snapshots of Moss Cafe’s menu and interior. (Courtesy of Moss Cafe)
“These people are the heart and soul of our neighborhoods,” she said. “It’s true that I opened Moss, but Moss is really the people who are, day in and day out, showing up at 4 in the morning to bake things, or scrubbing tables at 4 p.m. on a Friday.”
But Moss also stays afloat because its entire team is committed to the ethical mission of the cafe, including its close relationships with small New York and Pennsylvania farms — during the early days of the pandemic, Weisberg helped support farms and her own business by selling produce boxes from the cafe — and postpartum meals for new mothers through the Bronx doula groups the Birthing Place and Ashe Birthing Services.
With a large and growing Orthodox community in Riverdale, it was important to Weisberg for Moss Cafe to be strictly kosher. But while the certification allows some diners who wouldn’t otherwise be able to eat there, not all customers come looking for a kosher dining experience.
“I grew up Jewish and all the Passover and kosher food can be very bland,” said Brian Silbert, a former Manhattanite who plans to open an ice cream shop nearby. “This is savory and flavorful without it suffering. Across the board, everything is done right.”
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Candace Owens and the Dangerous Myth of ‘Talmudic Jews’
Candace Owens speaks at CPAC on March 2, 2023. Photo: Lev Radin via Reuters Connect
In a recent viral video responding to Ben Shapiro’s accurate description of her long-standing pattern of spreading baseless fear and animus, Candace Owens urged her audience to “wake up” about Jews, Judaism, and what she called “Talmudic Jews.”
As part of that exhortation, she recommended a book titled The Talmudic Jew, presenting it not as a historical artifact, but as a suppressed key to understanding not only Shapiro, but Jewish behavior and morality writ large.
This is not a new genre of argument. It is one of the oldest weapons in the antisemitic arsenal.
Owens’ framing follows a familiar script: for those predisposed to view Jews as powerful, alien, or suspect, the explanation is presumed to lie hidden in Jewish religious texts.
The Talmud, in this telling, is not a complex legal and ethical corpus but a secret code — one that allegedly explains Jewish behavior and justifies suspicion toward Jews as a group. Owens’ invitation for non-Jews to “wake up” is actually an invitation to stop seeing Jews as human beings — let alone as neighbors or fellow citizens — and to begin seeing them as something else entirely: a threat.
In the same video, Owens widens the accusation. She urges viewers to believe that Jews are behind conflicts pitting “Christian against Christian” and “Christians against Muslims” around the world — an echo of a medieval antisemitic fantasy that casts Jews as the hidden engineers of war and civilizational collapse. This trope, documented for centuries, has no basis in history. Its function is not explanation but absolution: it diverts responsibility away from actual political, religious, and imperial actors, and deposits it onto a convenient, ever-available scapegoat.
Owens then extends this logic further, telling Black audiences that “white people” were not responsible for the Transatlantic slave trade — or slavery more broadly — and that Jews were. This claim is not merely false; it is grotesque.
The Transatlantic slave trade was a European enterprise, driven by explicitly European Christian empires — British, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and later American — whose colonial economies depended on enslaved labor. Likewise, the vast Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades were driven primarily by Arab-Muslim empires and traders over many centuries. Between roughly the 7th and 19th centuries, European and Arab imperial systems conquered and controlled much of the known world — and they were the principal engines of slavery wherever it was practiced. Jews, overwhelmingly a tiny, marginalized minority without imperial power, were not — and could not have been — the drivers of these systems.
The Talmudic Jew, the book Owens cites approvingly as the purported “key” to understanding Jews, was written by August Rohling, an Austrian, German-language Catholic theologian of the late 19th century whose work relied on mistranslations, selective quotation, and outright fabrication. Rohling did not attempt to understand rabbinic Judaism. His aim was polemical: to portray Judaism as inherently immoral and hostile toward non-Jews, and to argue that Jewish emancipation in Western Europe had been a catastrophic mistake.
Rohling’s book was discredited even in his own time. Contemporary scholars demonstrated that he mistranslated Hebrew and Aramaic texts, stripped legal debates of context, treated marginal opinions as binding doctrine, and in some cases invented quotations outright. Yet the book endured because it served a purpose: it gave readers permission to see Jews not merely as wrong, but as inherently dangerous.
That durability proved deadly. In the 20th century, Rohling’s arguments were revived and repurposed by Nazi ideologues, who cited anti-Talmud literature like The Talmudic Jew as supposed evidence that Jewish tradition itself justified exclusion, persecution, and annihilation. The book did not cause the Holocaust — but it helped supply the intellectual scaffolding that made genocide conceivable.
Owens’ amplification of Rohling is therefore not incidental. It places her squarely within a long and infamous lineage of antisemitic accusations that treat Jews as the hidden hand behind social conflict, moral decay, and historical evil.
When Owens speaks of “Talmudic Jews,” she is not describing a religious practice. She is issuing an indictment: that Jews are governed by a hidden code that renders them morally alien and hostile to the societies in which they live. That indictment depends on a fundamental misrepresentation of the Talmud itself.
The Talmud is not a single book or a secret code. It is a sprawling legal record spanning centuries, comprising 63 tractates and more than 2,700 folio pages, dense with debate, disagreement, and layered interpretation. It preserves arguments rather than decrees, questions rather than answers, and features minority opinions alongside majority rulings. To lift a line from this corpus and present it as “what Jews believe” is not scholarship. It is distortion.
That distortion is not accidental. It is the engine of a genre designed to turn Jewish complexity into Jewish hate.
Candace Owens presents herself as a truth-teller urging her audience to “wake up.” What she is really doing is attempting to mainstream a discredited and dangerous form of antisemitic propaganda — one that history has already tested and found catastrophic. When such claims are broadcast by someone with her reach and influence, they do not merely misinform. They habituate. They train audiences to see Jews as a civilizational menace. And once a people are cast as a menace, cruelty is easily rebranded as responsibility — and even as self-defense.
Terrible moments in history do not repeat themselves automatically. They are repeated when influential figures persuade their followers that ancient libels are newly discovered truths.
Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.
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We Need Elie Wiesel’s ‘Against Despair’ Right Now
The late Professor Elie Wiesel, speaking at the Algemeiner’s 40th anniversary gala, on April 22, 2013. Photo: Sarah Rogers / Algemeiner.
As antisemitism is again surging across the world, it can feel frightening and isolating to be Jewish.
The familiar question returns: how do we hold on to our identity and our pride, when the world seems intent on testing both?
Every generation of Jews has faced its own test of endurance. Ours is unfolding now, as antisemitism again plagues our streets, our campuses, and our interpersonal relationships. Many Jews feel vulnerable, isolated, and unsure how to respond.
In 1973, shortly after the Yom Kippur War, Elie Wiesel answered that question in a speech at the United Jewish Appeal’s National Conference.
Wiesel addressed a Jewish community grappling with fear and uncertainty, reeling from the surprise attack that cost the lives of more than 2,500 Israelis. Decades later, that speech, titled Against Despair, offers a roadmap for reclaiming our pride by drawing strength from our history and traditions.
Against Despair begins with a striking observation about our people: “To me, the essence of Jewish history is mystical and not rational. From the strictly rational viewpoint, we should have long ago yielded to the pressures and laws of the enemy … The mystery of our survival is matched only by our will to survive in a society embarrassed and annoyed by our presence.”
It is a reminder that Jewish endurance stems from the countless generations of Jews who chose courage over surrender. We survive because our history, culture, and traditions carry us forward in a world that has too often attempted to eliminate all three.
As he continues, Wiesel reminds us that no Jewish person is ever truly alone. He says, “When Jews are sad in Jerusalem, Jews everywhere reflect their sadness … An assault on Jews anywhere means an attempt to humiliate Jews everywhere.”
The individual may struggle, but we are connected across time and space. Facing adversity is not only about personal resilience — it is about our collective responsibility to safeguard the moral center of our people.
Professor Wiesel shows us how to confront despair head-on. He teaches that surviving and resisting antisemitic persecution while remaining Jewish is more than a physical phenomenon; it’s an existential one that has sustained Judaism across millennia, a way to honor all those who came before. He reminds us that choosing life is an active endeavor that takes precedence over mourning. Jewish joy and Jewish education are themselves acts of resistance.
“Faced with despair,” said Wiesel, “the most difficult but most beautiful [option] of all [is] to face the human condition and do so as a Jew … We shall resist them in our own Jewish way, which means that we will not allow them to tell us when to be joyous and when to mourn, when to sing and when to be silent.”
This is the heart of Wiesel’s thesis: Jewish identity is itself a moral stance. To live as a Jew is to face life, history, and human cruelty with awareness, integrity, and hope. Even when the world seems hostile, even when antisemitism threatens, Wiesel shows us that we are called to endure, to remember, and to celebrate Jewish life with pride.
Reading Against Despair is a practical guide for living proudly and resiliently in a difficult world. Ultimately, Wiesel asserts that despair is not an option. Jewish survival has always required vigilance, courage, and the refusal to let hatred define us.
“For this is the essence of being Jewish; never to give up — never to yield to despair.”
Every Jewish person should read Against Despair. Not simply to reflect on the past, but to understand how Jewish history, values, and traditions offer strength for the present. For Professor Wiesel, hope is not something one passively receives. Instead, it is a necessary asset we must create for ourselves, a personal duty we owe to our forebears and our children alike.
Against Despair is more than a speech; it is a call to action. It shows us how to meet the modern expressions of age-old antisemitism with the ideas that sustained Wiesel and other Survivors in the darkest of times.
Our very existence is proof that Jewish hope is not naive. It is our essence and our inheritance. We must follow Wiesel’s example by reminding ourselves and the world of how we’ve endured for millennia: taking pride in our Jewishness and fighting to ensure that our descendants have the opportunity to do the same.
Mike Igel is the Chair of The Florida Holocaust Museum’s Wiesel Archive & Legacy Council.
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If Israel Wants to Increase Immigration, It Should Take These Steps
New olim disembark at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport on the first charter aliyah flight after he Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, arriving to begin new lives in Israel. Photo: The Algemeiner
Gideon Sa’ar, Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, recently made an impassioned plea for Jews to “come home” in light of surging antisemitism around the globe, including the Bondi Beach massacre in Australia.
But antisemitism alone won’t trigger a mass exodus of Jews to Israel — at least not yet. If Israeli leaders really want to persuade large numbers of Jews, especially Jews in the West, to immigrate to Israel, they must make some fundamental changes to the country. Right now, there are too many aspects of life in Israel that make it unattractive to Western Jews.
For instance, the whole process of immigrating to Israel can be quite daunting, especially if Israeli authorities question your Jewishness.
While Israel’s Law of Return grants any Jew the right to come to the country as an “oleh” (immigrant), this isn’t what always happens in practice, particularly when radical rabbis get involved. Thus, a prospective oleh is often required to produce some sort of proof, such as a letter from a local rabbi, attesting to their religious involvement in the Jewish community, when all they should be legally required to produce is proof of their Jewish ethnicity.
Worse still, Israel doesn’t recognize many non-Orthodox streams of Judaism, which is extremely problematic considering that most Jews in the West are not Orthodox. In short, many Jews in the West won’t immigrate to Israel if the state doesn’t recognize them as Jews.
Many Western Jews who are secular also won’t want to live in a country where there’s no public transportation on Saturdays or other Jewish holidays and no civil marriage or divorce. Hence, if Israel’s leaders are intent on persuading Jews in the West to immigrate to the Jewish State, they should reform some of these onerous religious restrictions.
Another major impediment to persuading Jews in the West to “come home” is Israel’s living standards. Right now, most Jews in the West enjoy a better standard of living than Israel can offer. To improve Israel’s standard of living, the Bank of Israel, OECD, and Israel’s Ministry of Finance have made a number of recommendations, including increasing labor productivity by reducing regulation and encouraging more Haredi men and Arab Israelis to participate in the workforce.
One major problem with Israel’s living standards is the high cost of living, which is among the highest in the OECD group of countries. Few Jews in the Diaspora will want to immigrate to Israel if they know the country’s cost of living is so absurdly high. The solution advocated by the OECD, former Competition Authority heads, and social protest movements is increasing competition in the economy and reducing import barriers. Israelis pay high prices for many goods, especially food products, due to the dominance of large conglomerates and monopolies, as well as restrictions on imports.
Housing is also very expensive in Israel. In fact, housing costs are the single largest drag on household living standards in the country. To alleviate this, the Bank of Israel, State Comptroller, and housing task forces have recommended measures such as releasing more state land faster for residential development and speeding up the country’s planning and permitting process, which is among the slowest in the OECD.
Over the last few years, the government has made some reforms to lower the cost of living and raise living standards, but there’s still much more to be done. Change is slow due to many factors, including the nature of Israel’s fractured party politics and the difficulty of creating and maintaining coalition governments, as well as resistance to reform by powerful business interests. Furthermore, Israel’s immense security challenges consume budgetary resources, political attention, and bureaucratic capabilities.
Indeed, perhaps the biggest factor discouraging Jews in the West from immigrating to Israel is the security situation. After all, many Jews would be hesitant to leave the West, where the prospect of war is almost zero, and go live in Israel, a country surrounded by bloodthirsty enemies determined to wipe it off the map. Unfortunately, Israel’s ability to control its security situation is limited, because peace is simply not possible if Israel’s enemies don’t want it.