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Jewish institutions awaken to climate crisis, with hundreds pledging action
(JTA) — For a decade starting in 2002, Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi devoted herself to pro-Israel advocacy. After that, the Jewish philanthropist and activist from Annapolis, Maryland, went all in to fight for disability rights, working in the field for the next decade. Now, Mizrahi is focused on climate change.
“Let me put it this way: In 2021, we donated to one climate organization, and in 2022, we donated to 17 of them,” Mizrahi said, referring to the small charity fund she runs with her husband, tech entrepreneur Victor Mizrahi. This year, the couple made their largest climate-related donation yet, sending a group of nine climate reporters to Israel to meet tech startups working on ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Mizrahi and her husband have also begun commercially investing in such startups.
“I was hoping other people would solve it,” she said. “But the pace of the change is not nearly meeting the demand at the moment. I felt that even though I don’t know the subject, I’m just going to have to do it because I have kids and I don’t want this world to fall apart.”
Climate change has long ranked at or near the top of a list of issues concerning Jews in the United States, according to multiple surveys, and Jews have been heavily involved in the wider climate movement. But until recently, the issue had a marginal place on the agendas of Jewish communal organizations, which neglected climate even as the subject took on importance in the activism and policies of other religious communities and in the larger philanthropic world.
Mizrahi’s newfound emphasis on climate is an early example of a larger shift that is underway in Jewish philanthropy, a multibillion-dollar world made up of thousands of individual donors, charitable foundations and nonprofit organizations.
“It’s the beginning of what will become a more widespread focus among Jewish groups,” said Rabbi Jennie Rosenn, the founder and CEO of the Jewish climate group Dayenu. “We’re seeing an awakening to this as a profoundly Jewish issue, and awakening to the role that the Jewish community has to play in addressing the climate crisis.”
Scientists say that decisions regarding carbon emissions made in the next few years will affect life on Earth for thousands of years to come. The most recent warning came in March, when leading global experts with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a new report, stating that “there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.”
The large Jewish populations living in the coastal United States are vulnerable to extreme storms, sea-level rise, severe heat and other weather disruptions — a situation dramatized in the recent Apple television series “Extrapolations,” in which a rabbi contends with rising sea waters infiltrating his Florida synagogue. Meanwhile, Israel is experiencing a slew of impacts from drought and floods to security threats tied regional climate-related instability.
A flooded road after heavy rainfall in the central Israeli city of Lod, Jan. 16, 2022. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)
Israeli officials visit the site where a road collapsed into a large sinkhole at Mineral Beach in the Dead Sea on December 7, 2017. Many facilities and beaches have been closed or shut down in recent years following the increase in sinkholes caused by ever-declining sea levels, as climate change strains the country’s water resources. (Mark Neyman/GPO)
The last few months have seen a flurry of new initiatives aimed at both greening Jewish institutions and directing collective action on climate.
In December, for example, Rosenn’s group published a report calculating that endowments of Jewish organizations, from family foundations to local federations, are invested in the fossil fuel industry to the tune of at least $3 billion. The report launched an ongoing campaign called All Our Might that urges Jewish leaders to withdraw these investments and put the money toward clean energy instead.
Meanwhile, many of the most prominent Jewish organizations in the country — representing local federations, Hillel chapters, summer camps, community centers, day schools and nearly every religious denomination — had already joined a new green coalition organized by another Jewish environmental group and were preparing to unveil pledges to do more in the fight against climate change.
The unveiling of the climate pledges happened in March, under the leadership of Adamah, a nonprofit created through the merger of two stalwarts of Jewish environmentalism, Hazon and the Pearlstone Center.
“Climate and sustainability have not been on the list of priorities for the vast majority of Jewish organizations; this coalition and these climate action plans reflect a deep paradigm shift and culture change moving forward,” Adamah CEO Jakir Mandela said at the time.
The commitments made by members of Adamah’s Jewish Climate Leadership Coalition include sending youth leaders to global climate summits, reducing emissions of buildings and vehicles and lobbying the federal government to pass climate policies.
More than 300 congregations and nonprofits have joined. For Earth Day, Adamah announced a million-dollar fund offering interest-free loans and matching grants to Jewish groups for projects to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
If any single event can be said to mark the debut of the climate issue as a top Jewish communal priority, it is probably the recent annual conference of the Jewish Funders Network, which took place in March in Phoenix, bringing together thousands of donors and charity executives.
For the gathering’s first event, before the formal opening of the conference, a group of participants went on a field trip to downtown Phoenix to learn about the local effects of the climate crisis. Far more people signed up than organizers anticipated, and with about 55 passengers, the tour bus chartered for the occasion reached capacity. Mizrahi, who was among the participants, said the trip was helpful as a networking opportunity for like-minded philanthropists.
“We wanted to expose them to how the existential threats posed by climate change are not long term, but are already here,” Yanklowitz said. “People down in the Zone are dying every summer from heat exhaustion and dehydration.”
Based on his debrief with the group afterward, Yanklowitz feels the trip left an impact on participants.
“I didn’t hear anyone say, ‘Oh, I’m changing my commitments.’ But I did get the sense that climate change was kind of abstract for many people, and that now it really hit home,” Yanklowitz said.
The rest of the conference featured multiple talks and gatherings dedicated to climate, including on the main stage, and an announcement that Birthright, which offers free trips to Israel for young Jews, was increasing its own climate activism with the help of a new donation.
In an interview, Ellen Bronfman Hauptman and Stephen Bronfman, children of Birthright founder Charles Bronfman, said their $9 million gift is meant to honor their father on the occasion of his 90th birthday, while also bringing Birthright more in line with the values of a new generation that is environmentally-minded.
Birthright organizers will use the funding to develop programming focused on climate that could, for example, expose participants to Israel’s clean tech scene. The money is also intended to help Birthright lower its own carbon footprint, potentially by switching to electric buses or adding more vegetarian meals.
The Bronfmans hope that Birthright’s significant purchasing power in Israeli tourism will nudge the industry toward more ecologically sustainable practices.
“To me, Birthright is like Walmart — everyone wants to do business with them,” Stephen Bronfman said. “They have the power to dictate terms to their service providers and affect the supply chain.”
The widespread interest in climate mobilization among Jewish groups comes after years in which the issue languished outside the mainstream. Rosenn, the head of Dayenu, who has attended about 15 conferences of the Jewish Funder Network, noticed a change this year.
“There used to be half a dozen people at a breakfast before the program talking about climate. And it wasn’t even climate, necessarily — it was the environment writ large,” she said.
The Jewish world is, in many ways, still lagging behind the larger climate movement. Divesting endowment funds from the fossil fuel industry, for example, is seen as a bold step among Jewish groups even though at least 1,590 institutions representing nearly $41 trillion in assets have already publicly committed to doing so, according to a website tracking such pledges. About a third of the groups on the list are defined as faith-based organizations, but only three are Jewish: Kolot Chayeinu, a congregation in Park Slope, Brooklyn; the Reform movement’s pension system; and the American Jewish World Service, a global justice group.
Rabbi Laura Bellows, now Dayenu’s director of spiritual activism and education, waves matzah as she encourages major financial organizations to divest from fossil fuels at a rally in Washington, D.C., April 20, 2022. (Bora Chung | Survival Media Agency / Courtesy of Dayenu)
Adamah’s own climate plan doesn’t include a pledge to divest but only a promise that it will investigate the option of doing so for its endowment and employee retirement funds. Instead, the plan touts the group’s education and advocacy efforts, and focuses on reducing emissions at its retreat centers.
Adamah’s chief climate officer, Risa Alyson Cooper, acknowledged that Jewish community institutions have been “largely absent” from the divestment movement and said her group regards divestment as one of several required tools for addressing the climate crisis.
She said the Jewish community hit a milestone when 12 of the 20 founding members of Adamah’s climate coalition said in their climate plans that they would consider amending their financial practices. That was significant, she said, in light of the organizations’ complex and deliberate governing structures, which can make executing such changes onerous.
“While the Jewish community may have lagged behind in years past, we are catching up quickly,” Cooper said.
Such a shift would mark not only a milestone for Jewish climate activism but also a departure from how the Jewish community has historically done philanthropy, said Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster, executive vice president of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility.
She said wielding financial holdings for social impact has been a hallmark of advocacy by Christian groups. Last year, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) opted to divest from fossil fuels in light of the climate crisis.
The Jewish community, meanwhile, has tended to act primarily through charitable donations. One of the reasons for the difference, she said, is that the Jewish community is much less centralized with communal assets spread across many endowments, making the actions of any single group relatively less impactful.
“Adamah had done some really important work to change individual behavior and grow people’s connections to the environment, but the bigger piece of bold collective action to fight the climate crisis was missing,” Kahn-Troster said. “The overall community is late to respond to the urgency of the problem. But I do think that the work of these organizations is very significant, so I’m excited to see it.”
Kahn-Troster’s historical view is informed by the legacy of her father, Rabbi Lawrence Troster, an environmental activist who had pushed for communal Jewish action on climate, and by the passion for climate justice displayed by her 15-year-old, Liora Pelavin, a member of the Jewish Youth Climate Movement, an arm of Adamah.
“Finding a meaningful Jewish space to do grassroots-level climate advocacy that many young people are demanding has been really important to Liora,” Kahn-Troster said.
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Tidbits: A publishing firm for Jewish writers excluded by mainstream publishers
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:
אין ניו־יאָרק איז די וואָך געגרינדט געוואָרן אַ פֿאַרלאַג פֿאַר ייִדישע און ישׂראלדיקע שרײַבער וואָס זאָרגן זיך, אַז זייער אָפּשטאַם אָדער מיינונגען קאָנען שטערן צום פּובליקירן זייערע ביכער.
לויט אַ סטאַטיסטיק פֿונעם מחבר מעג קין, איז בײַ די הויפּט־פֿאַרלאַגן, צווישן 2023 און 2024, געפֿאַלן מיט 76% די צאָל בעלעטריסטישע ביכער, וואָס דערמאָנען ייִדן, ייִדישקייט אָדער ישׂראל.
„הײַלײַן פּאָבלישינג סטודיאָ“, וואָס האָט דעביוטיִרט אין ענגלאַנד מיט אַ חודש צוריק, האָט געעפֿנט אַן אַמעריקאַנער צווײַג אין מאַנהעטן בײַ „פּאָרט סאַיִד“, דעם רעסטאָראַן פֿונעם וועלטבאַרימטן קוכער איל שני (עיאַל שאַני).
„הײַלײַן“ איז לאַנצירט געוואָרן דורך ניל בלער, דעם לאַנגיאָריקן ליטעראַרישן אַגענט פֿון דזשיי קיי ראָלינגס — דער שרײַבערין פֿון די האַרי־פּאָטער ביכער.
„איך האָב שוין פֿון לאַנג באַמערקט, אַז אַ צאָל שרײַבער קענען נישט געפֿינען קיין פֿאַרלאַג,“ האָט בלער געזאָגט. „נישט צוליב דער קוואַליטעט פֿון זייער שרײַבן אָדער אַ דוחק פֿון אָריגינעלע געדאַנקען, נאָר ווײַל זייער וועלטבאַנעם שטימט נישט מיטן קוקווינקל פֿון די פֿאַרלאַגן — אָדער אפֿשר ווײַל זייער משפּחה־נאָמען איז אַ ייִדישער אָדער ישׂראלדיקער.“
די פּראָבלעם, זאָגט ער, איז געוואָרן נאָך ערגער נאָך די טעראָריסטישע אַטאַקן פֿונעם זיבעטן אָקטאָבער, האָט בלער געזאָגט. ער האָט למשל דערמאָנט די שוועריקייטן בײַם געפֿינען אַ הויפּטשטראָמיקן בריטישן פֿאַרלאַג פֿאַר אַ בוך פֿון אלי שרבי (עלי שאַראַבי) וועגן זײַנע איבערלעבונגען ווי אַן ערובֿניק אין עזה — נישט געקוקט אויף דעם וואָס אין אַמעריקע האָט מען שוין געהאַט פֿאַרקויפֿט הונדערטער טויזנטער עקזעמפּלאַרן דערפֿון. צום סוף האָט זײַן בוך אַרויסגעגעבן אַ קליינער בריטישער פֿאַרלאַג, „סוויפֿט בוקס“.
„הײַלײַן“ וועט באַשטיין פֿון צוויי אימפּרעזומס: „אָדעסאַ עדישאָנס“ און „אַנטידאָט בוקס“. „אָדעסאַ עדישאָנס“, אָנגעפֿירט פֿונעם רעדאַקטאָר דזשעקי קלײַן, וועט דרוקן ייִדישע און ישׂראלדיקע בעלעטריסטיק און פֿאַקטפּראָזע אויף טעמעס פֿאַרבונדן מיט דער ייִדישער געשיכטע, אַנטיסעמיטיזם, פֿילאָסאָפֿיע, עסן און קולטור.
„אַנטידאָט בוקס“ וועט דרוקן פֿאַקטפּראָזע מיט אַ שייכות צו טעכנאָלאָגיע, עטיק, דעמאָקראַטיע, אידענטיטעט און מאַכט.
קלײַן האָט געזאָגט, אַז מע וועט אויך באַטראַכטן מאַנוסקריפּטן פֿון אַראַביש־ישׂראלדיקע און נישט־ייִדישע שרײַבער, וואָס זייער אַרבעט פֿאַרנעמט זיך מיט דער ייִדישער קולטור, געשיכטע אָדער געדאַנקען.
צו לייענען וועגן דעם אויף ענגליש גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
To read about this in English click here.
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In ‘Fatherland,’ Thomas Mann finds a Germany divided
Speaking at the Library of Congress, just before the end of World War II, Thomas Mann insisted “that there are not two Germanies, a bad and a good one, but only one whose best qualities were perverted by devilish cunning into evil.”
Two years later, in 1947, he would publish Doctor Faustus, a meditation on his homeland’s slide into fascism in the idiom of Germanic legend. Two years after that, accepting the prize named for Goethe, the Faust legend’s greatest chronicler, he would return to Germany, which, by then, had split in two.
Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, is about the 1949 trip Mann took with his daughter Erika from American-administered Frankfurt to East German Weimar, then in the grips of Soviet control. They glide through bombed-out streetscapes in a black, all-American Buick. During the tour, dignitaries try to win Mann over to one of two ideologies vying to replace the fascist model: that of the free market, or that of Communism.
By the time the film takes place, Mann was an American citizen who had lived outside of Germany for over a decade. He railed against the Nazis and appealed to the conscience of his countrymen in radio broadcasts from exile in California. He had married into a Jewish family, and his anti-Nazi credentials were beyond reproach. But at a press conference in Frankfurt, when an AP reporter asks “where is home,” he responds in English with a German word that English can only approximate.
“I am an American citizen,” Mann, played by Hanns Zischler, answers. “I am also a German writer. Where my heimat is, where I belong, is a much more difficult question.”
His country no longer exists.
Pawlikowski, a Polish director whose silken, black-and-white films excel in painting the surreality of the Iron Curtain, plucked this compelling episode from Colm Tóibín novel of Mann’s life, The Magician. Zeroing in on the 1949 tour, he’s crafted an intimate story of a father and daughter navigating a new political order where one’s allegiance, as summed up by Mann’s son Klaus, is either to “Stalin or Mickey Mouse.”
When Klaus (August Diehl) dies by suicide while Erika and Mann are in the middle of the excursion, and Mann insists on sticking to the itinerary, the Great Man’s faults are blown open: He believes his lecture tour, and the power of words, can improve conditions for a nation, but he had long ago declared his son a lost cause.
Zischler’s performance is at once understated and monumental. His response to Richard Wagner’s glad-handing grandchildren, who want him to put in a good word for reviving his festival in Bayreuth, is a punchy quotable: “The opera should be razed to the ground and your mother should be put on trial.” His mystified look when a Soviet colonel asks him to discuss “Mephistophelian dialectics,” is better than any bon mot.
Hüller is dependably excellent, glowering at the supposedly de-Nazified guests at a banquet and musing to a former war correspondent comrade about “what they were up four years ago.”
Mann’s controversial visit to Weimar is marked by a perfunctory pilgrimage to Goethe’s final home for a photo op. Among the effects are Goethe’s death mask, a blunt-force metaphor following Mann’s speeches, to East and West Germans, extolling how the great poet “rejected the German Romantic death cult.”
When Goethe’s dead, can the winner of his eponymous prize make the rejection last?
History has a verdict. While Mann rejects his own Faustian bargains — the invitation to put in a good word for Wagner or take a job as president of the Arts Academy in East Germany — his fate is teased when Erika sees a catalogue of “Fifth Columnists,” which has his headshot near Einstein and Arthur Miller.
Mann was a victim of McCarthyism, and left his adopted country in 1952 to settle — and die — in the neutral environs of Switzerland.
The film has enough restraint to spare us this epilogue. It ends with a father, a daughter and a sublime expression of grief and untainted German art. (Fitting for Pawlikowski, whose films so often center music, it is a Bach composition that delivers the final beat.)
Mann never did make his homecoming permanent, but on this score, he had a properly self-aggrandizing, if apt credo: “Where I am, there is Germany.”
The post In ‘Fatherland,’ Thomas Mann finds a Germany divided appeared first on The Forward.
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This deli serves ham and calls itself Jewish. New Jersey says it’s not kosher.
The Kibitz Room in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, just outside of Philadelphia, serves shrimp salad. It also has a ham sandwich, and its doors are open on Saturdays.
So the people who run it were surprised this month when a state investigator walked in carrying a notice saying a deli with a “Jewish cheesesteak” on the menu needs to tell customers, in writing, that it isn’t kosher.
The backstory and fallout involve a brisket-boosting talk radio host, a rock-and-roll dive bar in Los Angeles, a historian known as Dr. Pastrami, a famous rye bread ad, and a question Jewish diners have been fighting over for the better part of a century: Can a deli be Jewish if it isn’t kosher?
Here’s the beef. The New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs, which, yes, has a kosher fraud enforcement unit, sent an investigator to the Kibitz Room with a simple message. If you call yourself a Jewish deli, state consumer-fraud rules say you also have to post a sign, or otherwise let customers know, that your food isn’t under kosher supervision. The state isn’t accusing the deli of passing itself off as kosher, and it isn’t banning the word “Jewish.” It just wants a disclaimer next to it.
Neil Parish, 62, who runs the Kibitz Room with his son, Brandon, wasn’t having it. He told the investigator, “You’re not going to come in here and dictate to me the verbiage that I’m going to put on my menu,” he said in an interview with the Forward.
Parish grew up working in delis, first as a dishwasher at 14, and then he was slicing meat by 16. Apart from a six-year stretch in a job with health insurance (“I wasn’t cut out for that,” he says), he’s been in delis ever since.
Which is why the notice struck him as absurd. In Parish’s telling, no observant customer has ever mistaken the Kibitz Room for a kosher deli.
The state is proposing a $1,000 penalty and wants a sign that’s visible to customers saying the deli isn’t kosher. For Parish, it’s the principle, and what he calls government overreach. He says he told the investigator, “I’ll see you in court. I hope the Supreme Court,” adding that “we’re taking this thing to the end. Period. I’m not stopping.”
The fraud squad
New Jersey’s kosher unit spends most of its time on businesses that say they’re kosher.
The biggest cases involve packaging. In 2014, ShopRite’s supplier cooperative agreed to pay a $35,000 penalty for putting a kosher symbol on private-label coffee bags without the certifying agency’s approval. The state leaves the definition of kosher to rabbis. Its job is to check that sellers are telling the truth.
Delis that call themselves Jewish without claiming to be kosher are a smaller slice of the caseload, but not an unheard-of one.
The spark seems to have been lit on Sept. 14, when NJ.com published “New Jersey’s 15 best Jewish delis, ranked for 2026.” The Kibitz Room came in eighth.
Shortly after, the state investigator walked into Radin’s Delicatessen, a mile down the road and ranked No. 7, to see whether it was passing itself off as kosher.
Radin’s owner is Russ Cowan, a fourth-generation deli man, and the original owner of the Cherry Hill Kibitz Room, which he opened in 2001. He was happy to schmooze with the inspector. “Jewish does not mean kosher, and kosher style does not mean kosher,” he said in an interview with the Forward. “But for me personally, I avoid saying either because I don’t want to confuse a customer that might think we are kosher.” His shop sells bacon, ham and cheeseburgers.
When people ask what line of work he’s in, he replies, “the corned beef and pastrami business.” He had replicas made of the neon signs from his family’s old Brooklyn delis, and he says he took the word “kosher” off them.
Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel, executive vice president of the Orthodox advocacy group Agudath Israel of America, has been watching these fights for more than 20 years. His group supported New York’s kosher fraud law back when it was battling for survival in court. He argues kosher claims should be policed like any other: “From a perspective of consumer fraud,” he said, “the fact that we happen to be speaking about religious items shouldn’t make a difference.”
He isn’t bothered by what New Jersey is asking of the Kibitz Room. “The least you can do is put the disclaimer,” he said, referring to a sign saying the deli isn’t under kosher supervision, posted where customers can see it.
But he sees another problem. The word “Jewish,” Zwiebel says, “kind of implies there are certain foods which are reserved exclusively for Jews.” The current controversy reminds him of an iconic ad campaign, he says.
Starting in 1961, subway posters around New York showed an Italian grandmother, a Black child, an Asian kid and a Native American man, each enjoying a sandwich on Levy’s Real Jewish Rye, with the tagline: “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s.” The Brooklyn bakery had been losing customers as Jewish families moved to the suburbs. The campaign made Levy’s the top-selling rye in the city.
But Zwiebel takes umbrage with the larger concept. “Forget about the misleading nature that a phrase of ‘kosher style’ might be,” he says. “Jewish style is not so much misleading; it’s just deeply offensive.”
Offensive to whom, and why, depends on who you ask. And whether a deli can call itself Jewish without being kosher has been a fight for a long time.
‘A secular synagogue’
Ask people who’ve spent their careers thinking about Jewish delis what they make of the New Jersey news, and the first response is surprise.
To Jeffrey Yoskowitz — host of the podcast Meet Me at the Deli and co-founder of Gefilteria, which reimagines Eastern European Jewish cooking — the notice “clearly comes from a place of ignorance or not understanding.”
To understand the fight, start with how the Jewish deli began. In the 1880s, a wave of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe began arriving on the Lower East Side. They borrowed the format of the German delicatessen to sell the foods they’d left behind. Pastrami came from Romanian Jews. But hot pastrami on rye, says Yoskowitz, “is an entirely American innovation.”
Then the deli became a place to sit. Yoskowitz says it turned into what’s sometimes called a “secular synagogue,” where immigrants could feel Jewish, speak Yiddish and become American at the same time.
Kosher was part of the story, never all of it. In 1915, New York amended its false-labeling law to punish fraud in the sale of kosher meat, but that didn’t solve the problem. According to “I’ll Have What She’s Having,” a traveling deli exhibit, an estimated 40 percent of the meat sold as kosher in New York in 1925 wasn’t. Meanwhile, delis multiplied. By the early 1930s, the city had roughly 5,000 of them.
Lara Rabinovitch, who was a co-curator of the exhibit, isn’t sure the question can be answered. To really answer it, she says, “you have to get to the question of what is a deli, what is Jewish? What do those two words even mean?”
Rabinovitch has a PhD in Jewish food history from New York University. Back in grad school, her husband got tired of her long academic answers about her work and told her to “just say you have a PhD in pastrami.” The nickname stuck. She’s now Dr. Pastrami, and has a Substack newsletter.
The only part of the story that really troubles Rabinovitch is “whether the deli pays explicit homage to its namesake, the original Kibitz Room attached to Canter’s Deli” in Los Angeles. Missing that, she said, “would be a shanda.”
That Kibitz Room is a legend. It opened in 1961 as a cocktail lounge next to the dining room at Canter’s Deli. It has a full bar and a small stage, with live music or comedy most nights that often turns into a jam session by midnight. Everyone from Joni Mitchell to members of Guns N’ Roses and the Red Hot Chili Peppers has passed through. (Cowan, who founded the Cherry Hill Kibitz Room, says he was inspired by the Kibitz Rooms at Canter’s and at Attman’s in Baltimore.)
David Sax, author of Save the Deli, has been in the middle of this argument for years. He heard it constantly after his book came out, he says: deeply kosher people insisting a deli can only be Jewish if it’s kosher, and everyone else saying it’s Jewish if it serves kosher-style food.
“The same fight, the same battle, has been going on for the better part of a century,” he says. Can a deli be Jewish without being kosher? “Yeah, 100 percent.” Ban the non-kosher ones, he says, and you lose Katz’s, Carnegie, Canter’s and Langer’s, “almost every single famous and well-known Jewish deli” in the U.S.
“Does it make it less Jewish? Sure, if that’s your definition of Jewish,” Sax says. “But how do you define Jew? Who is a Jew?”
Brisket boosterism
By the second week of October, the notice to the Kibitz Room had found its way onto New Jersey 101.5, the statewide talk radio station, where host Bill Spadea spent most of his show pontificating about it.
Spadea grew up in Cherry Hill. Friday nights meant pizza from a shopping center in the Woodcrest neighborhood, next to a Jewish deli where his dad ordered the chicken livers and chopped egg. He admitted on the air that he had never been to the Kibitz Room. He wanted his listeners to go anyway. “Get them sold out today,” he said. Then, in case that was too vague, he added: Buy the brisket.
His theory of the case was that nobody was fooled. “No consumer was harmed in the creation of a kosher-style Kibitz menu item,” he argued. No observant diner, he figured, would see pastrami with Swiss and think they were in a kosher kitchen. A listener texted in that Little Caesars isn’t Italian food, it’s Italian-style.
Parish agreed with that logic. “When I go into an Italian restaurant, it doesn’t say ‘not authentic Italian American,’” he says.
What really got to him was the adjective. “You want a Jew to change his menu to not use the word Jewish,” Parish says. (The state isn’t asking the Kibitz Room to drop the word. It wants a disclaimer next to it.)
Parish says he is not planning to pay the penalty and that “a very powerful Washington D.C. law firm” will represent him at a hearing scheduled in the coming weeks.
To Parish, the notice didn’t arrive in a vacuum. He says it landed at a moment when Jews feel under threat, around the world but “especially in this country and in my community.” He says he has customers in Cherry Hill who have taken the mezuzahs off their doors “because they’re scared.” His daughter and son-in-law live on the Upper East Side, and the stories he hears from them about rising antisemitism in New York City are worse, he says.
So when the state investigator — who is Jewish — showed up to talk about his menu, Parish says he lost his temper. Echoing a quote from Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Parish says, “I’m not the trembling Jew. I’m not going to take this anymore.”
Which may explain the Kibitz Room’s Instagram bio, which now reads: “Not kosher. Still Jewish.”
The post This deli serves ham and calls itself Jewish. New Jersey says it’s not kosher. appeared first on The Forward.
