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Long-delayed Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial to begin Monday, igniting pain, fear and hopes for closure
(JTA) — Every Thursday, Brad Orsini gets on a conference call with dozens of other security specialists who, like him, focus on preventing threats to American Jews. But in a few days, and for the coming months, the conference call won’t just address the dangers of the present and future. It will also deal with events that occurred more than four years ago.
That’s because next week marks the beginning of the trial of the gunman who is accused of killing 11 worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018.
Orsini, who oversaw the city’s Jewish communal security on the day of the attack in the neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, hopes to find a sense of closure in the alleged shooter’s prosecution. But he also knows that the trial threatens to broadcast the white supremacist ideas that lay behind the attack, and continue to pose risks for Jewish communities. And he worries that, in addition to providing a possible pathway for survivors and victims’ families to move into the future, it could also thrust them back into a painful past.
“It’s long overdue,” Orsini said. “This has been looming large over the Pittsburgh community and, quite honestly, the Jewish community in the nation. We’re all looking toward finishing this trial and prosecuting this actor for what he did.”
At the same time, he added, “This trial is going to reopen wounds that this community has suffered for almost five years now, and it’s going to have the ability to retraumatize many people in the community. And we have to be concerned about that.”
Beginning on Monday, those countervailing emotions and expectations will come to bear as the deadliest antisemitic attack in American Jewish history is litigated in court. The trial, which will begin with jury selection, is expected to last about three months. Few doubt the guilt of the accused shooter, Robert Bowers, whose name is hardly uttered by Jewish residents of Squirrel Hill. But what remains unclear is what the trial will mean for American Jews — and for the families most directly affected by the attack.
Some hope for the defendant to get the death penalty — even though that will mean prolonging the legal ordeal — while others have advocated against it. Some hope for the trial to shed light on the threat of white supremacy, even as renewed attention on the attack could inspire other violent extremists. And some hope the trial will help them move past the tragedy, even as they know it will be difficult to hear the details of the shooting laid out in court.
“The country is going to have to undergo this unprecedented trial of the country’s worst mass killer of Jews,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League. “It’s going to be really hard, so I think our community is really going to have to buckle down and brace ourselves.”
The attack on Saturday morning, Oct. 27, 2018, killed 11 people from three congregations, all of which met at the same building, and injured six others, including four police officers. The defendant faces 63 criminal charges, including hate crimes and murder charges. He has pleaded not guilty. The prosecution is seeking the death penalty — a choice some relatives of victims are vocally supporting. Previously, leaders of two of the three congregations that suffered the attack had opposed the death penalty in this case.
“This massacre was not just a mass murder of innocent citizens during a service in a house of worship,” Diane Rosenthal, sister of David and Cecil Rosethal, who died in the attack, told local journalists, according to reporting by the Pittsburgh Union Progress. “The death penalty must apply to vindicate justice and to offer some measure of deterrence from horrific hate crimes happening again and again.”
For the survivors and families of victims, the trial will likely be especially painful. Some told the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle that they intend to take time off work, delay a vacation or be away from family for an extended period of time to be present at the proceedings.
“I want to see justice happen, but at the same time, I hate to think about the families having to potentially see images of what happened and things of that sort,” Steve Weiss, who survived the attack, told the weekly Jewish newspaper. “I’m sure they have mental images, but to have to actually see photos of victims and things of that sort I think can really be difficult for them.”
One thing few people question is the shooter’s guilt, despite his plea of not guilty. He offered to plead guilty in 2019 in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table, but prosecutors, determined to pursue capital punishment for the crime, rejected the plea.
It was the same thing that had happened in the case of the man charged with killing nine Black worshippers in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015. But there, despite the rejected guilty plea, the trial took place a year and a half after the attack, and the shooter was sentenced to death. (In an illustration of the length of death penalty cases, his latest court proceeding happened in October, and he has not yet been executed.)
In contrast, the Pittsburgh trial is not starting until four and a half years after the shooting there. Part of the reason for the delay stems from the work of the defense team, which has pushed back the trial through various court filings. The alleged shooter’s lead attorney, Judy Clarke, has defended a series of high-profile attackers: the Unabomber, the attacker in the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics bombing and the Boston Marathon bomber, among others. According to Pittsburgh’s local CBS affiliate, her singular goal is to avoid the death penalty for her client.
But in many other ways, the parallels between the Charleston trial and this one are clear. Both concern shootings by alleged white supremacists in houses of worship, tragedies that have become gruesome symbols of a national rise in bigotry. In both, the culpability of the defendant was assumed before the trial began. Like the Pittsburgh defendant, the Charleston shooter has been lionized by white supremacists, including some who cited him as an inspiration for their own violent acts.
And in both cases, there is an understanding that a conviction does not heal the wounds opened by the shooter.
“This trial has produced no winners, only losers,” said the judge in the Charleston shooter’s trial, Richard Gergel, according to the New Yorker. “This proceeding cannot give the families what they truly want, the return of their loved ones.”
Still, some who are watching the Pittsburgh trial closely hope that it will bring new facts and connections to light. Amy Spitalnick, the executive director of Integrity First for America, a nonprofit that spearheaded a multimillion-dollar victory in a civil trial against the organizers of the 2017 far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, hopes that the Pittsburgh trial illustrates the links among different white supremacist shootings — such as the attacks in El Paso, Texas; Christchurch, New Zealand; and at a synagogue in Poway, California.
Those attackers spouted similar conspiracy theories and referenced other recent violent attacks in their manifestos. Spitalnick said that the accused Pittsburgh shooter allegedly communicated with the organizers of the Charlottesville rally on the social network Gab, which is known as a haven for right-wing extremists.
“Trials like this can really be illustrative of how deep the poison of white supremacy and antisemitism goes,” she said. In the Charlottesville trial, she said, “The reams and reams of evidence… really helped pull back the curtain on what motivated the defendants, how they operated, the tools and the tactics of the movement, the conspiracy theories at its core.”
There’s also the possibility that, with the attack resurfacing the shooter’s motivations, and putting him back in the spotlight, it will act as an inspiration for other white supremacists. In the years following the synagogue shooting, Pittsburgh became a kind of pilgrimage site for the defendant’s admirers — leading to continued harassment of local Jews.
“We’re giving a platform to an individual who is a Jew hater, who wanted to kill all Jews,” Orsini said. “What does that spark in other like-minded people? We need to be very cognizant throughout this trial on what kind of chatter is going to be out there on the deep dark web, or even in open portals.”
In the face of concerns about retraumatization, Greenblatt said the ADL is preparing resources on how to discuss the trial with students and amid the Jewish community.
“To relive the horrors of, the grief of, the event — this thing being constantly in the news — it’s going to be hard to avoid, it’s going to be difficult and it could be grisly and upsetting,” Greenblatt said. “I would much prefer this trial didn’t happen — I would much prefer this crime never happened, I would much prefer that those people were all still with us today — but this is where we are.”
He added, “If there might be some ability to raise awareness among the non-Jewish population of what we’re facing, [that] would be of value.”
One potential challenge for American Jews as a whole, Spitalnick said, is that federal prosecutors don’t necessarily share the needs of Jews who will be following the proceedings. While the trial will conjure a mix of emotions for Jews locally and beyond, she said, prosecutors will be more focused on the nuts and bolts of what happened that day and the details of the accused attacker’s actions and motives.
“We’re going to probably spend a lot of time hearing from the prosecution about what motivated him, but it’s not through the lens of what we as Jews think about when we think about Jewish safety,” she said. “It’s through the lens of making the case that this guy did what he did motivated by this extremism and hate… It’s going to be very deliberate and tactical and precise, versus where we as American Jews have been thinking about this from a deeply personal, communal safety perspective.”
The deliberate and detailed work of prosecutors, however, may not be at cross purposes with the emotional needs of Jews, Orsini said. When the trial ends, he said, the establishment of Bowers’ guilt may itself prove to be transformative for how Jews relate to the tragedy, in Pittsburgh and beyond.
“The fact that this individual has not been fully brought to justice… and is not convicted yet of this mass shooting — in some way, yes, that closure and finality will be done at the end of this trial,” he said. “The community can kind of regroup and truly become resilient once this phase is over with.”
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The post Long-delayed Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial to begin Monday, igniting pain, fear and hopes for closure appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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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.
The post Tidbits: A publishing firm for Jewish writers excluded by mainstream publishers appeared first on The Forward.
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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.
