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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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This isn’t Mark Ruffalo’s first antisemitism controversy
Mark Ruffalo is in the spotlight after facing accusations of antisemitism for his criticism of the Ellison family — but this isn’t the first time the actor has been caught in controversy on this topic.
Last Friday, the actor connected the merger of David Ellison’s Paramount with Warner Bros. Discovery to Israel’s war with Hamas. He called Larry Ellison an “oligarch” due to his financial backing of his son David’s merger using wealth earned from his time at Oracle, which created technology used by the Israeli military. His statements immediately drew criticism, with Paramount leaders accusing Ruffalo of invoking antisemitic tropes.
Ruffalo, a four-time Academy Awards nominee best known for playing the Hulk in Marvel movies, has long been an outspoken advocate for progressive causes — including the Palestinian one.
In 2014, Ruffalo made his first public statements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, posting criticisms of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge military operation against Hamas.
He criticized Israel for striking Gaza’s el-Wafa hospital, writing that, “Sorry, I thought blowing up Hospitals [sic] was something that all human beings could agree was off limits.”
Ruffalo also questioned the claim that Hamas used civilians as “human shields.”
“Do you honestly think these people, these fellow human beings, would use their own children as shields?” he wrote. “Use your heart.”
Around the same time, Ruffalo also disputed whether Hamas had actually kidnapped three Israeli teenagers, one of the incidents that sparked the 2014 hostilities — an incident that the terrorist group later admitted to.
Ruffalo received criticism for his posts, but stood by his perspective. “Empathizing w/ Gaza does NOT make me anti-Semitic, nor pro-Hamas or anti-Israel,” he wrote in 2014. “It makes me human.”
As clashes between Israel and Hamas sprouted up again in 2021, Ruffalo once again took to Twitter to denounce Israel, likening the situation to South Africa and calling “for sanctions to free Palestinians.”
Soon after, Ruffalo wrote another tweet apologizing for his rhetoric.
“I have reflected & wanted to apologize for posts during the recent Israel/Hamas fighting that suggested Israel is committing ‘genocide,’” he wrote. “It’s not accurate, it’s inflammatory, disrespectful & is being used to justify antisemitism here & abroad. Now is the time to avoid hyperbole.”
Following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack in 2023 and Israel’s military response, Ruffalo returned to pro-Palestinian activism. Less than two weeks after the attack, on Oct. 20, Ruffalo — along with more than 50 others creatives through the organization Artists for Ceasefire — sent a letter to President Joe Biden demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. At the following Academy awards, Ruffalo wore a pin from the organization.
In Sept. 2025, Ruffalo, and along with more than 5,500 others in the film industry, signed a letter pledging to boycott “Israeli film institutions” that they believed were “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people.”
Ruffalo has publicly aligned himself with the Boycott Divest Sanction (BDS) movement, calling to “boycott, divest, sanction and prosecute” Israel, on a podcast with Mehdi Hasan. During the same interview, he said that he has stopped talking to former friends who don’t agree with his perspective on the issue.
“I can’t talk to them anymore,” he said. “They’re either trying to convince me that the Palestinian people are all terrorists and they all deserve to die, or in the same breath will tell me that they’re actually human shields, and they deserve to die because they’re human shields.”
Now, after making statements connecting the Paramount-Discovery merger to Israeli military technology, Ruffalo has been accused of antisemitism by numerous Jewish organizations including the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Weisenthal Center.
The actor has now taken to social media to denounce the accusations of antisemitism, calling the accusation “appalling and fundamentally dishonest,” and saying that criticizing “the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract, or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticising Jewish people.”
He added, “Everything I know about acting, activism, and humanism has been profoundly shaped by the Jewish friends, colleagues, and loved ones who have been integral and family throughout every point of my life.”
The post This isn’t Mark Ruffalo’s first antisemitism controversy appeared first on The Forward.
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American synagogues are spending more than ever on security. How much is enough?
At Temple Israel in Bloomfield, Michigan, which was attacked in March by a gunman, getting ready for the High Holidays this year means more than preparing for crowds of worshippers.
The synagogue is spending millions of dollars on security upgrades, including a new gatehouse, artificial intelligence technology and physical and ballistic hardening of its building.
“There are major changes coming,” Rabbi Josh Bennett of Temple Israel said in an interview. “I think that extends then to many of the other places of worship in town, and then, by extension, the entire Jewish community around the country.”
But as congregations install barriers, hire guards and tighten access to their buildings, Jewish leaders are struggling to balance budgets and keep their synagogues welcoming.
Bennett fears fortressing the Jewish community through ever-expanding security upgrades is “unsustainable at all levels,” from the emotional to the financial.
The Secure Community Network, a Jewish security organization that provides threat intelligence and safety training to Jewish institutions across the country, told the Forward that the American Jewish community now spends between $765 million and $1 billion annually on security and safety.
CEO Michael G. Masters said that figure is dramatically higher than it was several years ago, when it was the exception, rather than the rule, for a Jewish institution to have a security plan, let alone layers of cameras, guards, and coordination with law enforcement.
The spending reflects what Mitchell Silber, CEO of the Community Security Initiative, a New York-focused Jewish counterterrorism and security organization, described as “the most complicated threat picture that the Jewish community in the United States has ever faced.”
According to the FBI, Jews were the victims of nearly two-thirds of religion-based hate crimes in the United States in 2025. And these days, Silber’s analysts are tracking threats from white supremacists and neo-Nazis, Islamist extremists and actors inspired by or connected to Iran and Hezbollah, and left-wing violence connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“That’s taking a tremendous toll just financially on our Jewish institutions,” Silber said.
The growing costs have pushed Temple Israel to lobby Congress in support of the bipartisan Jewish American Security Act, which would increase federal funding available to protect Jewish institutions. Last week, members of Congress, including the bill’s co-sponsor, Rep. John James of Michigan, visited the Temple to see the security updates.
When congregants help screen for danger
But as congregations pour money into keeping potential attackers out, another question looms: At what point does protecting a synagogue begin to change the experience for those coming in?
“The more you build, there’s, I think, an inverse proportion to how safe people will actually feel when they’re coming in,” said Bennett, whose congregants have been emotionally rattled since the March attack, during which a gunman rammed a truck loaded with gasoline and fireworks into the synagogue. “Nobody wants to walk into a building where you walk by loaded semi-automatic machine guns.”
A person arriving at a synagogue for the first time could have harmful intentions. They could also be new to town, exploring Judaism, or simply looking for a place to spend Shabbat. Distinguishing between those is an important challenge.
Unlike an outside guard, a longtime congregant may know who normally attends services, which unfamiliar face is expected for a wedding or bar mitzvah, and when someone’s behavior genuinely seems out of place. That’s why organizations like SCN and the Community Security Service train community members to serve as additional protection at their own institutions.
In 2026 alone, SCN has conducted close to 1,000 in-person safety trainings, reaching roughly 25,000 people. For the High Holidays, they are offering Zoom Webinars for Jewish institutions across the country, as synagogue-goers who ordinarily recognize most people walking through their doors may suddenly welcome hundreds of unfamiliar worshippers.
Preparation was put to the test at Central Synagogue in Manhattan last Friday, when a man stormed the temple, punched a congregant, and headbutted and spat on a security guard while directing a racial slur at him.
Silber described the response as a “tactical success.”
“Their security team had drilled. Their clergy and staff had drilled. And when the moment came, within less than 60 seconds, they had this individual moved outside of the sanctuary.”
At Temple Israel, the congregation has been fundraising specifically for security. After the March attack, Bennett said, some congregants would like to see “a moat and a full army around our buildings.”
He understands the impulse. But he worries there may be no end to what a synagogue can spend in pursuit of safety.
“How do you do this with the knowledge that it’s financially unsustainable?” Bennett said. “This is not the way we should be spending dollars.”
The post American synagogues are spending more than ever on security. How much is enough? appeared first on The Forward.
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The far right is more dangerous to Jews than the far left. A historian explains why.
When Jewish leaders speak out these days, it’s often to blast the anti-Israel actions of one Democratic Socialists of America politician or another. Given all the attention — and the millions of dollars raised within the Jewish community to help defeat these candidates — you’d think the greatest existential threat to American Jews was coming from the left.
But a new book by historian Steven Ross is here to tell you: You’d be mistaken.
“What you’ve seen seeping in on the far left is more anti-Israel and some antisemitism,” Ross told me in a phone interview. “But here’s the thing: the left has never called for death to people, the right has.”
Right-wing extremist groups have spent 80 years calling for the death and deportation of Jews and minorities — and sometimes acting upon those calls. The far left, whatever its failures on antisemitism, has not. And unlike in previous years, the far right today has found the two things it lacked: a single leader to unite behind, and a technology to reach millions.
In The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy, Ross, a professor of history at University of Southern California, tracks the continuous, noxious activity of hate groups in the United States from the end of World War II to the present day — and the brave and secretive men and women who sought to thwart them.
The book reads like a great suspense novel, except, unfortunately, it’s nonfiction. And its conclusion — spoiler alert — is that the threat is only growing more dangerous.
Uncannily, in his research, Ross found that Jewish leaders predicted as much — in 1945.
Even before the Allies declared victory in Europe, leaders of the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Nazi League, who had launched undercover operations to infiltrate and disrupt hate groups, had come to a disturbing conclusion. They could defeat any hate group, even the Ku Klux Klan, unless the disparate groups could one day “communicate on an instantaneous basis,” and unless the far right figured out a way to make it into one of the two mainstream political parties.
“Here we are,” Ross said. “Everything has come true.” Social media has enabled hate groups to communicate and organize at scale, and President Donald Trump’s pardon of the Jan. 6 rioters — direct ideological descendants of the postwar far right, Ross says — was but one example of the Republican flirtation with extremist and violent groups.
Descendants of the ‘Betrayed Generation’
In the early 1940s, Jewish leaders also predicted that when the war ended, antisemitism and racism would increase — despite Americans having just fought a savage battle against prejudice and fascism.
The Greatest Generation also birthed what Ross calls “the Betrayed Generation,” men and women who returned to a changed America in which liberals, Blacks and Jews were mobilizing and upwardly mobile.
“The Founding Fathers, they insisted, had created a nation based on white Christian rule and they would not allow traitors or people of color to change that,” Ross writes.
Groups like the American Nazi Party, the Columbians and the National States Rights Party warned that Jews were behind “race suicide,” plotting to replace white people with non-white immigrants. They accused Jews of being secret Communists and undermining the cause of “America First.”
“I will solve the Jewish problem once and for all,” James Madole, founder of the fascist National Renaissance Party, told a boisterous rally in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood in February 1953. “I will finish the job that Hitler started.”
During this period, there were an estimated 3,114 right-wing organizations and periodicals that reached a combined membership of over 10 million Americans, says Ross.
The groups carried out a series of bombings against synagogues and Black churches that were, Ross writes, “unrelenting, unpredictable, and unnerving.”
How to fight back
J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which should have been tracking these groups, was far more concerned with persecuting potential communists. So the ADL, AJC and the ANL fielded undercover agents to infiltrate and disrupt these groups, often at the risk of their lives.
One of them, a 19-year-old Columbia University student named William Goring, rose to the head of the National Renaissance Party’s leadership. In a memo to his handlers, Goring described the far-right members he encountered as “the failures, the lonely,” who feel “abandoned by their government and gain a strong internal feeling of camaraderie” from the far-right parties.
“To ease their lack of self-respect they make up excuses and find scapegoats. Some fix upon the Jews, others on the Blacks,” Goring wrote.
By the 1970s, this spy network as well as internal strife had weakened these hate groups, their memberships dwindling to hundreds.
Jewish groups “thought they had won the battle against hate,” wrote Ross, and turned their attention to the causes of civil rights and Israel.
But the ideology and organizations festered and regrouped, manifesting in the anti-government militia movement, the white supremacist march in Charlottesville and the Jan. 6 riots. Between 2008 and 2016, the number of militia and anti-government groups rose to 1,400.
Media personalities with millions of followers, like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, push warnings against shadowy Jewish influence and the “great replacement theory,” the new term for “race suicide.”
The bombings that wracked Jewish communities in the postwar period have declined, Ross acknowledged. What’s replaced them is a constant stream of hate pushed into people’s social media feeds. Social media has made it harder to infiltrate and disrupt hate networks, while making it easier to constantly find new recruits.
“You don’t have to bodily harm someone,” he said. “Creating a life where they’re afraid, whether it’s Muslim, Jew, immigrant — that’s terrorism, that’s domestic terrorism.”
Meanwhile, Trump and others in his administration openly engage with Holocaust deniers and antisemites. In Florida’s Republican primary races earlier this month, two candidates, Dan Bilzerian and Jake Lang, spouted raw antisemitism. Bilzerian, who lost to a Jewish congressman, had asked his 30 million online followers if Hitler “was a good person.”
Ross, whose father survived the Warsaw Ghetto and Dachau and whose mother survived Auschwitz, said he believes the answer is better education, but that’s “long term.”
I asked him what the short-term solution is.
“Take two people to the polls,” he said. “Get two people in their young 20s who aren’t used to voting, and get them out to the polls. That will change things right now.”
Bilzerian lost badly, but he’s not going away, and neither is the ability to infect minds and harvest hate. The question isn’t whether the far right is more dangerous — Ross has answered that. It’s whether we’re paying attention.
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