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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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The post This kosher cafe in Riverdale attracts a diverse clientele from across the Bronx appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Hamas Expands Terror Operations Across Europe Amid Gaza War, Exploiting Criminal Networks and Weapons Caches
Palestinian Hamas terrorists stand guard on the day of the handover of hostages held in Gaza since the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack, as part of a ceasefire and a hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, Feb. 22, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hatem Khaled
Hamas has expanded its terrorist operations beyond the Middle East, exploiting a long-established network of weapons caches, criminal alliances, and covert infrastructure that has been quietly built across Europe for years, according to a new report.
Earlier this month, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center released a study detailing how Hamas leaders in Lebanon have directed operatives to establish “foreign operator” cells across Europe, collaborating with organized crime networks to acquire weapons and target Jewish communities abroad.
“Hamas has never carried out a successful terrorist attack outside of Israel, the West Bank, or Gaza — but not for lack of plotting,” Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow and counterterrorism expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote in the report.
“European and Israeli officials fear that Hamas has taken the decision to go global and carry out plots abroad, marking a significant departure from the group’s prior modus operandi,” he continued.
For example, the study cited a failed Hamas plot in which an alleged operative in Germany traveled to Lebanon to “receive orders from the Qassam Brigades [Hamas’s military wing] to set up an arms depot for Hamas in Bulgaria,” part of a broader, multi-year effort to cache weapons across Europe.
However, German authorities foiled the plot, detaining four Hamas members in late 2023 on suspicion of planning attacks.
Earlier this year, the four suspects went on trial in Berlin in what prosecutors described as Germany’s first-ever case against members of the Palestinian terrorist group.
According to German officials, the weapons “were intended to expand Hamas’s activities in Europe.”
During the investigation, German authorities also found evidence on a defendant’s USB device showing that the Hamas operatives were planning attacks on specific sites in Germany, including the Israeli embassy in Berlin.
Similar weapons depots were established in Denmark, Poland, and other European countries, with Hamas members repeatedly trying to retrieve them to support their operations and plan potential attacks.
The newly released report identified Hamas’s operational headquarters in Lebanon as the command center for its activities abroad, with senior leaders directly managing plots across Europe.
“Even before Oct. 7, Hamas leaders periodically threatened to carry out attacks abroad,” Levitt explained in his report, referring to the Iran-backed Islamist group’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel in 2023.
“The increased Hamas terrorist activity abroad correlates to the establishment of a Hamas operational component in Lebanon driven by senior Hamas leaders,” he said, noting that such network “developed over time, as senior Hamas leaders left Turkey and Qatar and later made their way to Lebanon.”
The study also reported that Hamas operatives established alliances with European organized crime networks to secure weapons and logistical support for their operations.
For example, another major plot was foiled earlier this year, when a member of the Danish, banned Loyal to Familia (LtF) gang was indicted for purchasing Chinese drones intended for attacks in Denmark or Sweden. Local authorities later revealed that the gang had been working with Hamas, which has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades.
This month, German authorities foiled another planned terrorist attack, arresting three suspects on the eve of Yom Kippur who were preparing to target Jewish institutions.
According to the report, analysts remain uncertain whether these plots signal a permanent strategic shift or reflect a short-term tactical adjustment in response to the Gaza war.
“It remains unclear how decisions about such operations are made and if this includes input and approval from a broad range of Hamas leadership or just a select few,” Levitt said.
Given the loss of Hamas’s leadership and the resulting decentralized decision-making, the report noted that external operations may now be possible where they were previously constrained by internal disagreements.
“With Hamas operational capabilities in Gaza severely degraded, and the group under pressure from both Israeli and Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank, the group’s military commanders may find that acts of international terrorism carried out by small cells … may be a more central component of Hamas’s attack strategy,” Levitt concluded.
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British Airways breaks ties with Louis Theroux after interview with ‘Death to the IDF’ artist Bob Vylan
(JTA) — British Airways has dropped its sponsorship of documentarian Louis Theroux’s podcast following an interview with British punk musician Bobby Vylan where the artist defended his chants of “death, death to the IDF” at the Glastonbury music festival.
Following the band’s Glastonbury performance in June, the two members of Bob Vylan had their U.S. visas revoked by the State Department ahead of a planned tour this month. The BBC also said the livestream of the performance broke its guidelines because Bob Vylan’s chants could “fairly be characterised as antisemitic.”
Bob Vylan’s frontman, whose real name is Pascal Robinson-Foster, Theroux that he did not regret the chants during the interview.
“If I was to go on Glastonbury again tomorrow? Yeah, I would do it again. I’m not regretful of it,” said Vylan. “I’d do it again tomorrow, twice on Sundays. I’m not regretful of it at all. Like, the subsequent backlash that I’ve faced is minimal. It’s minimal compared to what people in Palestine are going through.”
Robinson-Foster also criticized a report by the Community Security Trust, British Jewry’s antisemitism watchdog, that found antisemitic incidents had spiked the day after Bob Vylan’s set, telling Theroux that it was unclear what the group was “counting as antisemitic.”
“I don’t think I have created an unsafe atmosphere for the Jewish community,” said Robinson-Foster. “If there were large numbers of people being like, going out and ‘Bob Vylan made me do this,’ then maybe I might go, woof, I’ve had a negative impact here. Again, in that report, what definition are they going by? We don’t know that.”
During the interview, Robinson-Foster also said that the “focus” should not have been placed on the “death to the IDF” chant, but rather “on the conditions that allow for that chant to exist.”
“Ultimately, the fight is against white supremacy, right?,” said Robinson-Foster. “That is what the fight is against. And I think white supremacy is displayed so vividly in Zionists.”
In response, Theroux replied, “They say we’re not white, we’re Jewish, right?”
Later, Theroux appeared to agree with Robinson-Foster’s assertion that the “Zionist movement and the war crimes being committed by Israel” should be viewed through the “lens of white supremacy.”
“I think I’d add to that, there’s an even more macro lens which you can put on it, which is that Jewish identity in the Jewish community, as expressed in Israel, has become almost like an acceptable quote, unquote, way of understanding ethno-nationalism,” said Theroux, later adding that “this sense of post-Holocaust Jewish exceptionalism or Zionist exceptionalism, has become a role model on the national stage for what these white identitarians would like to do in their own countries.”
Following the interview, Theroux drew criticism for failing to challenge Robinson-Foster’s defense of his chants during the interview.
“Louis Theroux has every right to interview whoever he wants, but with that right comes responsibility,” Jewish film producer Leo Pearlman told the British outlet Jewish News. “When you give a microphone to someone who proudly repeats a genocidal chant that played a part in inspiring attacks on Jews across Britain, you’re not probing hate, you’re amplifying it.”
Dave Rich, the head of policy at the Community Service Trust, wrote in a blog post that he had been distressed that Theroux did not note that Robinson-Foster had publicly undercut the idea that his chant of “death to the IDF” was not meant as a call to voice when he commented at another concert, “We are for an armed resistance. We wanna make that explicitly f–king clear.” Rich also criticized the decision to release the interview even after the attack on a Manchester, England, synagogue in which two people were killed on Yom Kippur.
“Theroux’s podcast was recorded before the Manchester attack, which he acknowledges in the introduction,” Rich wrote. “But they still went ahead and published it anyway, as if the death of two Jews due to an Israel-hating jihadist doesn’t change the context of an interview with someone who became famous for calling for death for Israelis.”
After the interview aired on Spotify last Friday, British Airways issued a statement to announce it had dropped its sponsorship of Theroux’s show.
“Our sponsorship of the series has now been paused and the advert has been removed,” the airline wrote in a statement shared with the British outlet Jewish News. “We’re grateful that this was brought to our attention, as the content clearly breaches our sponsorship policy in relation to politically sensitive or controversial subject matters.”
The episode follows the release, in April, of a documentary by Theroux titled “The Settlers” that served a searing portrayal of the far-right Israeli settler movement in the West Bank.
The post British Airways breaks ties with Louis Theroux after interview with ‘Death to the IDF’ artist Bob Vylan appeared first on The Forward.
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Prominent Orthodox politician swaps endorsement of Sliwa for Cuomo as NYC mayoral election nears
(JTA) — Curtis Sliwa has long pointed to Dov Hikind, a former New York state assemblyman who represented Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn for more than three decades, as one of strongest allies within the New York Jewish community.
Last month, in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Sliwa named Hikind, who also founded the nonprofit Americans Against Antisemitism, as a key Jewish figure in his circle. The pair also canvassed together during Rosh Hashanah.
“Without a doubt, the man that I’ve been through so many struggles over the years is Dov Hikind,” said Sliwa. “He knows everyone, and he is completely in support of me because he knows, whenever Jews have been in need, he says, ‘Curtis was always there.’”
But on Sunday, as early voting started in the election, Hikind dropped his support for Sliwa. Instead, he urged New Yorkers to vote for former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in a last-ditch effort to halt frontrunner Zohran Mamdani’s march to City Hall.
“As difficult as it is for me to post this video, I must face the reality as I see it,” Hikind said in a message posted to social media. “I endorsed Curtis Sliwa and while I never thought I’d say this, I am now asking that you vote for Andrew Cuomo. Why? Because if Mamdani wins, the very future of New York City is at stake.”
He added, “You don’t have to love Cuomo. I’ve been clear about how I feel about him. This election though isn’t about who we like. It’s about saving New York City from Mamdani.”
Hikind’s flip-flop comes as Jewish advocates increasingly urge voters to back Cuomo as a way to consolidate opposition to Mamdani, a democratic socialist who is staunchly critical of Israel. With Mamdani posting a double-digit lead over Cuomo in polls, and Sliwa is tailing third in the race, some Jewish voices are intensifying efforts to persuade Sliwa to drop out and back Cuomo. That includes in Hikind’s region of Brooklyn, where the exit last month of Mayor Eric Adams from the race caused some Jewish leaders who had not committed to a candidate to back Cuomo.
Hikind has indeed long criticized Cuomo for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the sexual harassment allegations against him in 2021 that led to his resignation.
“I believe that the person that is best for the people of New York is Curtis Sliwa,” said Hikind during a Fox News interview posted by Sliwa on Instagram earlier this month. “We have Cuomo, who was governor of the state of New York, and quit. He decided to quit because of things that he was involved in, the inappropriate behavior with so many women, and let’s not forget, Cuomo is responsible for 1000s and 1000s of senior citizens being sent to nursing homes during COVID.”
In 2020, Hikind published a book trolling Cuomo’s decisions during the pandemic titled “Lessons in ‘Leadership,’” that included a foreword lambasting “King Covidius Cuomo” followed by 100 pages of blank white paper.
Now, he said in his new post, he had no choice but to vote for Cuomo. “We do not have the luxury of misplacing our votes. I like Curtis. I still think he’d be a great mayor, but right now, there’s only one person who can stop Mamdani, and that’s Andrew Cuomo,” he said. “You don’t have to love him. You don’t have to like him. You just have to save New York City. So I urge you to vote for Cuomo.”
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