Dairy Restaurants’ Lost World of American Jewish Sociability

July 17 2020

While the kosher deli is a staple of American Jewish nostalgia, its more modest cousin, the dairy restaurant, has largely been forgotten. The Brooklyn-born cartoonist Ben Katchor attempts to correct this state of affairs in his recent illustrated history of the institution. Jenna Weissman Joselit writes in her review:

The text that accompanies [Katchor’s] images is [highly] idiosyncratic; not so much composed as accumulated, it’s history à la carte. Where conventional historical accounts place a premium on context and a sustained narrative, not to mention a table of contents and formal chapters, this sprawling volume purposefully eschews all that. Instead, it throws everything it has at the reader: the intricacies of the Jewish dietary laws; the history of the restaurant, which first took off in Paris in the wake of the French Revolution; the relationship between temperance and its banishing of beer to vegetarianism and its embrace of milk; the emergence of the “milkhedike personality,” who preferred contemplation to action.

[But] I’d even go so far as to say that food doesn’t really fire [Katchor’s] imagination. . . . Recovering [the dairy restaurant’] mild-mannered patterns of sociability, its chatter and conviviality, drives him forward. That much of it was informed by “Yiddishkayt,” the constellation of behaviors, gestures, and sensibilities carried from the Old World into the New by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, raises the stakes, prompting this keen-eyed observer of urban life to linger a while longer.

He mourns the passing of a way of life—“these intimations of a better time”—that once encompassed the simpler pleasures of the palate along with a place to hang one’s battered hat. Contemporary readers of The Dairy Restaurant may no longer be familiar with baskets of onion rolls set atop a stainless-steel counter, or, for that matter, with protose steak [a precursor to today’s veggie burger], but, in their current hungering for the kind of community this humble eatery once provided, they’re apt to recognize themselves.

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: American Jewish History, Food

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023