At Los Angeles’s Skirball Cultural Center until September 18, and slated to come to the New-York Historical Society on November 11, a new exhibit seeks to tell the history of the American Jewish kosher deli—and to recreate the sights and experiences, if not the tastes. Adam Nagourney writes in his review:

The exhibition is an exploration of the food and culture that thrived in New York and later Los Angeles, with their large Jewish and show-business communities, along with cities like Chicago, Houston, Miami, and Indianapolis. As such, it surveys the story of immigration as a force behind changing American tastes: the pushcarts, as the curators note, foreshadowed the food trucks now operated by a new generation of immigrants. A grainy film clip near the start of the exhibit shows police officers fanning out to clear carts from a New York street in the early 1900s, a scene reminiscent of the 2020 crackdowns in Los Angeles on unlicensed food vendors.

But there is also something elegiac about the exhibit, a reminder that delis and the food they served are no longer as prevalent as they were 50 years ago, even in Jewish life. The show is an exercise not only in history, but in nostalgia. There were an estimated 3,000 Jewish delis in New York City in the 1930s; now there are just a few dozen, according to the New-York Historical Society.

But Lara Rabinovitch, a food writer and historian who helped curate the exhibition, said this was not intended as a sentimental journey. “When I came on board I had two caveats: One is we had to treat the Jewish deli as part of the American landscape,” she said. “And two, we could not succumb to kitsch and nostalgia. When it comes to Jewish food, deli or Jewish foo can evoke a lot of conversations and a lot of kitsch and nostalgia.”

With the IDF engaged in ground maneuvers in both northern and southern Gaza, and a plan about to go into effect next week that would separate more than 100,000 civilians from Hamas’s control, an end to the war may at last be in sight. Yet there seems to be no agreement within Israel, or without, about what should become of the territory. Efraim Inbar assesses the various proposals, from Donald Trump’s plan to remove the population entirely, to the Israeli far-right’s desire to settle the Strip with Jews, to the internationally supported proposal to place Gaza under the control of the Palestinian Authority (PA)—and exposes the fatal flaws of each. He therefore tries to reframe the problem:

[M]any Arab states have failed to establish a monopoly on the use of force within their borders. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Sudan all suffer from civil wars or armed militias that do not obey the central government.

Perhaps Israel needs to get used to the idea that in the absence of an entity willing to take Gaza under its wing, chaos will prevail there. This is less terrible than people may think. Chaos would allow Israel to establish buffer zones along the Gaza border without interference. Any entity controlling Gaza would oppose such measures and would resist necessary Israeli measures to reduce terrorism. Chaos may also encourage emigration.

Israel is doomed to live with bad neighbors for the foreseeable future. There is no way to ensure zero terrorism. Israel should avoid adopting a policy of containment and should constantly “mow the grass” to minimize the chances of a major threat emerging across the border. Periodic conflicts may be necessary. If the Jews want a state in their homeland, they need to internalize that Israel will have to live by the sword for many more years.