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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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‘Vote him out’: Israeli-Americans rally against Netanyahu, plan to return to Israel to vote against him
Gripping Israeli flags in Union Square, a crowd of roughly three dozen chanted “Vote him out,” as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepared to speak before the United Nations on Thursday.
“It’s really an embarrassment that he’s even at the U.N.,” said Israeli-American protester Steve Lax, who is planning to fly to Israel to vote in the upcoming election.
UnXeptable, an organization founded by Israeli expats who say they are striving to save Israeli democracy, organized the demonstration. While those protesting opposed the Netanyahu government, the rally was intended more broadly to support change in Israel as the election looms. Roughly three dozen Israelis, Israeli-Americans and Jewish-Americans joined the protest.
Lax, who splits his time between Israel and America, said he supports Yair Golan and the Democrats. The main issues driving his vote are government corruption, settler violence in the West Bank and “the lack of hope for peace.”
“Jewish terrorism is creating more Arab terrorism,” said Lax, chairman of Naot Worldwide. “The settlers are totally out of control, and unfortunately some of the Israeli army, and certainly [Itamar] Ben-Gvir, have been supporting the settlers in what they’re doing.”
Israeli citizens living abroad may vote in the election if they are physically in the country to cast their ballots and have resident status. This is different from America, where citizens can vote by absentee ballot while outside the U.S.
Change, for those at the protest, means supporting one of the many opposition blocs. Offir Gutelzon, the Israeli-American co-founder of UnXeptable, is supporting the Gadi Eisenkot bloc. Critics of Eisenkot question what significant changes he will bring, as he aligns with Netanyahu on opposing Palestinian statehood. However, Gutelzon said Eisenkot’s stance on internal issues is what really matters to Israelis.
These include opposing judicial overhaul, setting term limits for prime ministers and drafting the Haredim into the military.
“I know that from the outside, everyone is looking at what will be different with Palestinians, what will be different in Gaza,” Gutelzon, who moved to America in 2011 for business reasons, said. “Most Israeli voters don’t think about that right now. They want to secure the country as a Jewish and democratic state, and then start talking about other things.”
But for Israeli-American Leora Agron, Gaza is one of the main reasons she is flying back to vote.
“Innocent people are dying,” she said. “Let them live. Give them support to do it, because everything is broken.”
Agron moved to Argentina in 1987 at age 30 to be with her husband. The couple considered moving back to Israel when they had children, but were discouraged by then opposition leader Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, which inflamed tensions with Palestinians.
What’s at stake?
Gutelzon is confident Netanyahu won’t remain in power. Even so, he says the stakes couldn’t be higher, and that if the PM doesn’t change, the country will slip into a “messianic theocracy.” This is in part due to brain drain, the concept of highly educated citizens emigrating.
Nearly 300,000 Israelis have left the country for at least three months since 2023, suggesting a mass emigration trend, according to a study from Tel Aviv University. Professor Itai Ater, who led the study, said the country is currently able to sustain itself despite these numbers. However, if the trend continues, emigration will severely harm the nation’s security and economy.
“We see that it’s many, many physicians, engineers, tech people and academics,” Ater told i24 News. “This is the best of Israel in a sense. The Israeli economy depends on human capital.”
Citing Ater’s study, Gutelzon noted healthcare would be impacted by physicians leaving, along with education if academics emigrate. Additionally, this group of people is paying the highest taxes, he said. They also serve in the military, and are needed given the exemption for Haredim.
Yonatan Schwartz, 19, participated in the protest and said he is reconsidering immigration to Israel. Schwartz, an American with two Israeli parents, attended the UnXeptable protest and said he had been planning to join the Israel Defense Forces. But if Netanyahu is reelected – or a different “right-wing extremist” wins – he said he’ll likely stay in America and go to college instead.
Supporting Israel, not the government
UnXeptable was initially inspired by the 2020 Balfour protests when hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to streets and bridges demanding Netanyahu resign after he was indicted on corruption charges.
“The Balfour protests started with a very simple statement that said that an indicted prime minister is unacceptable,” said Gutelzon, explaining how UnXeptable got its name.
The Bay Area-based organization wanted to show Israelis back home that those in the diaspora supported them. So they demonstrated at their own bridge, the Golden Gate.
Now, the protests have gone beyond showing solidarity with Israelis back home. As Gutelzon puts it, UnXeptable wants to show the world “the other Israel,” one that’s looking “for change.”
The post ‘Vote him out’: Israeli-Americans rally against Netanyahu, plan to return to Israel to vote against him appeared first on The Forward.
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A candy crisis has cast a pall on upcoming bar and bat mitzvahs
Ahead of my New Jersey synagogue’s first bar mitzvah this weekend, we learned that Sunkist Fruit Gems, the popular sacred confection lovingly lobbed at the end of many services to shower the b’nai mitzvah boy or girl with sweetness, had been discontinued by its candy maker.
I dreaded delivering this news to my son and daughter, Max and Rose, who are beginning to celebrate their classmates’ bar and bat mitzvahs and prepare for their own. For children, even those on the brink of adulthood, fruit-flavored gummies matter.
This also deals a blow to a silent protest that had already begun to percolate last spring when I celebrated my own bat mitzvah. When my classmates and I asked where we should take cover when our fans pelted us with the traditional fruit-flavored gummies, we were promptly informed that candy had been banned from the sanctuary.
A candy ban? I audibly gasped.
“This is unacceptable,” Rose declared when I told my kids the news. “We have to do something.”
The Los Angeles-based Ben Myerson Candy Company introduced Fruit Gems in 1955 after working with Sunkist on pectin candies, or natural fruit gels. Sunkist began putting its name on the label in 1966.
To focus more attention on wine and spirits, the Myerson family sold the candy business in 2006 to Jelly Belly Candy Co., which 17 years later was acquired by The Ferrara Candy Company. Apparently, Fruit Gems could not compete with Ferrara’s other products, which include Atomic Fire Balls, Fun Dip, Nerds, Pixy Stix and Lemonheads. And so, in May, Ferrara retired the Gems.
But an Atomic Fire Ball to the head is no way to celebrate a job well done. And lightweight Pixy Stix can not be lobbed hard enough to clear 10 rows of pews and hit their target. In fact, none of those confections can truly replace the sugar-coated, cellophane-wrapped Fruit Gem, which by the way, is also kosher.
While tossing sweets isn’t a sacred ritual, it does add a dose of cathartic joy for children at the end of a two-hour religious service and for the bar or bat mitzvah and their family at the end of a stressful occasion. Scholars trace the practice back to a passage in the Talmud, which mentions throwing grains and nuts at a couple during wedding celebrations.
As other milestones have taken on greater importance, a similar custom has spread to bar and bat mitzvahs in which jelly candy is used to bestow joy and sweetness on the teen as they transition into maturity.
I asked Kenneth Feibush, our temple’s former cantor, how the tradition there started. Now the cantor of Congregation Beth Israel in Houston where no one throws sweets, Feibush said it’s actually more common in Conservative and Orthodox congregations than Reform temples. But a handful of families at Temple Sholom introduced it on their own and it caught on. He had seen it before at a temple in Alaska where he had interned. There, the bar or bat mitzvah would don a helmet or open a parasol to shield themselves from the projectiles.
When I asked our spiritual leader, Rabbi Laurence Groffman, how the tradition ended, he said Temple Sholom prides itself on being an inclusive congregation but there are limits. “Unfortunately, ants don’t make the cut,” he said.
Turns out ants had infested the piano ahead of our Purim spiel last year. And as our temple readied for a costly renovation to our sanctuary, the powers-that-be said no more food fights.
So now that Sunkist Fruit Gems are no longer an option, is the protest against the candy ban a moot point? Is there a way to do a symbolic Gatorade dump to salute the sweat that went into the proverbial win? That’s precisely what our religious school director Cara Moroze recommended.
“I like a good compromise,” she said. “How ‘bout Rose dumps all the candy at once over her brother’s head? Then the kids come up to get the candy. No errant Twizzlers buried in a piano.”
I warned her that she had just reignited the protest movement.
The post A candy crisis has cast a pall on upcoming bar and bat mitzvahs appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu attacks Mamdani in UN speech. ‘You tried to silence me. Well, you can’t.’
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu turned the world’s biggest diplomatic stage into a platform for a blistering attack on New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has repeatedly called the Israeli leader a war criminal and had called for his arrest while campaigning.
“Shame on you for distorting the facts,” Netanyahu said during a defiant, 40-minute address to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday. “Shame on you for spitting in the face of truth, Mr. Mamdani.”
Netanyahu addressed the mayor directly over his repeated accusations that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and his calls for Netanyahu’s arrest under an International Criminal Court warrant. In July, Mamdani announced that his office acknowledged he lacks the power to arrest Netanyahu while visiting the city, a pledge he made during his mayoral election campaign.
“Mr. Mamdani, you tried to stop me from coming here,” Netanyahu said at the UN. “You tried to silence me. Well, you can’t silence me. You can’t silence the truth.”
Netanyahu also accused Mamdani of associating with people who have expressed support for Hamas or made inflammatory comments about Israel, describing him as the “antisemitic mayor” of New York and suggesting that his anti-Israel rhetoric has fueled antisemitism. The Israeli leader singled out Mamdani for his association with Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and for refusing to rebuke his wife, Rama Duwaji, for liking social media posts praising the Oct. 7 attack and saying Tel Aviv should not exist.
In response, Mamdani said in a statement that Netanyahu used his speech to “repeat baseless lies meant to sanitize his genocide of Palestinians.” The mayor added: “Yet no lie can change the fact that he remains the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
Many diplomats staged a walkout as Netanyahu rose to speak, while some of his supporters chanted, “The people of Israel live!”
Watching them from the podium, Netanyahu asked, “If there are any other moral cowards who haven’t yet left this hall, please do so now, thank you very much.” He almost seemed to be smiling as he surveyed the men and women streaming out the door.
Netanyahu flew to New York on Thursday for a brief visit that also included a number of meetings with heads of state, but absent from his itinerary was President Donald Trump. The US leader spoke at the UN on Tuesday and was in Washington when Netanyahu arrived, though he made time to meet with Mamdani while in New York.
Outside UN headquarters in Manhattan, hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets to rally against Netanyahu and his policies.
A familiar stage for a close campaign
For Netanyahu, the annual U.N. speech has long been about more than diplomacy. It is one of his favorite political stages, using it as an opportunity to speak in fluent English to the world while also projecting strength to voters back home as the Israeli leader willing to stand before an often-hostile international audience and defend his country.
Over the years, Netanyahu has turned those speeches into carefully produced performances. In 2012, he famously held up a cartoon drawing of a bomb and drew a red line to warn about Iran’s nuclear program. In 2014, he displayed a photograph of Palestinian children playing near what he said was a Hamas rocket launcher. Four years later, he presented aerial photographs he said showed a secret Iranian nuclear site. In 2023, he held up a map of what he called “The New Middle East.”
Last year, Netanyahu arrived with another prop: a QR code pinned to his suit jacket. The code directed viewers to a website showing graphic images from the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. This year, he waved a beeper, reminding viewers of the attack against Hezbollah terrorists and left on the podium a Starlink device for the Iranian delegation to watch the protests in their country.
Thursday marked Netanyahu’s 15th General Assembly address since 1998. This one came at a particularly important political moment.
Netanyahu is campaigning for a seventh term by asking Israelis to judge him not only on the failures surrounding the Oct. 7 attack, but on what came afterward: Israel’s military campaign that killed Hamas leadership and dealt major blows to Iran and its regional network. At the same time, Netanyahu portrayed himself as fighting a global political and public-relations battle against what he described as lies and efforts to isolate Israel.
Mamdani, who made Netanyahu a political target for nearly two years, has now become a useful face of Netanyahu’s campaign.
The Netanyahu-Mamdani UN connection
The Netanyahu-Mamdani confrontation also has an unusual connection to the UN stage.
When Netanyahu delivered his UN speech in 2024, Israeli warplanes were sent to strike Hezbollah’s underground headquarters in Beirut, killing its longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah and much of the group’s senior command. A photograph released by Netanyahu’s office showed the prime minister on the phone approving the mission ahead of his address.
Mamdani later cited that episode while explaining his pledge to arrest Netanyahu if he returned to New York. “What troubles me greatly is that Benjamin Netanyahu has also issued military commands from this very city when visiting it,” Mamdani said at a UJA-Federation town hall during the Democratic primary. “I do not want our city to be party to those kinds of decisions.”
After becoming mayor, Mamdani ordered a legal review that concluded New York City did not have the authority to execute the ICC warrant. He conceded that point in July but continued to use his platform to call Netanyahu a war criminal and say he was not welcome in New York. Netanyahu has denied committing war crimes.
Mamdani has been more careful about Netanyahu’s actual visit this week. He said he would not participate in demonstrations against the prime minister and insisted that he had never encouraged New Yorkers to protest him, but defended their First Amendment right to do so.
Netanyahu’s visit was also designed to leave little opportunity for a confrontation.
In contrast to past weeklong visits, Netanyahu was scheduled to spend less than eight hours in the New York area — one of his shortest foreign trips as prime minister. Netanyahu left Israel early Thursday and flew to a military facility in upstate New Jersey rather than landing at a New York airport. Israeli officials have cited security concerns surrounding the trip, including protests and the threat of drone attacks. He was expected to return to Israel Thursday night, without spending the night in New York.
But the audience that may have mattered most was watching from television monitors back home in Israel.
Speaking to the Israeli audience
Netanyahu’s Likud is locked in a competitive election with opposition parties seeking to end his long tenure. Recent polling has shown the anti-Netanyahu bloc slightly ahead of his bloc, though the fragmented opposition could still face difficulty assembling a governing coalition.
Netanyahu has survived political obituaries before. His appearances at the United Nations have helped cultivate the image at the center of his political identity: the Israeli statesman who can speak directly to an American audience and confront Israel’s critics.
On Thursday, he got to play that role once again. Whether he gets another turn at the podium next September will be decided not in New York City, but by Israeli voters next month.
JTA contributed to this report.
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