Since yesterday’s newsletter ended with the kosher dairy restaurants of old Jewish New York, it seems fitting that today’s should end with the grocery stores. Jenna Weissman Joselit writes:

In 1902 . . . residents of the Lower East Side and other hard-hit Jewish neighborhoods throughout the greater New York area took to the streets in protest what they took to be the exorbitant cost of kosher meat, then a household staple for many. . . . On the Lower East Side in 1913, . . . 259 grocers, 216 butchers, 56 fruit dealers, 30 fish dealers, 19 herring dealers, and seven butter-and-egg dealers turned to the Hebrew Free Loan Society for financial help.

Also in 1902, the New York Sun sent a journalist to investigate this vibrant Jewish immigrant neighborhood:

What fascinated the Sun reporter most of all was the centrality of food to the local landscape. Everywhere he turned, he’d happen upon someone or something purveying some sort of comestible. “Every other store and street stand is devoted to foodstuffs,” he observed, wondering if those who called Orchard, Houston, and Grand streets home ever “ceased eating.” Row after row of grocery stores, their wares displayed every which way; butcher shops, whose windows with their dead chickens hanging from a string resembled an “execution ground”; and bakeries, whose strangely shaped loaves gave its windows a “fantastic foreign appearance” vied with numerous pushcarts and stationary street stands to fill a “land so unknown to the mass of the rest of the population that it might as well be Siberia.”

How did Qatar, an American ally, become the nerve center of the leading Palestinian jihadist organization? Natalie Ecanow explains.

When Jordan expelled Hamas in 1999, Qatar offered sanctuary to the group, which had already become notorious for using suicide-bombing attacks over the previous decade. . . . Hamas chose to relocate to Syria. However, that arrangement lasted for only a decade. With the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, the terror group found its way back to Qatar.

In 2003, Hamas leaders reportedly convened in Qatar after the IDF attempted to eliminate Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, following a Hamas suicide bombing in Jerusalem that killed seven people, including two American citizens. This episode led to one of the first efforts by Qatar to advocate for its terror proxy.

Thirteen years and five wars between Hamas and Israel later, Qatar’s support for Hamas has not waned. . . . To this day, Qatari officials maintain that the office came at the “request from Washington to establish indirect lines of communication with Hamas.” However, an Obama White House official asserted that there was never any request from Washington. . . . Inexplicably, the United States government continues to rely on Qatar to negotiate for the release of the hostages held by Hamas, even as the regime hosts the terror group’s political elite.

A reckoning is needed between our two countries. Congressional hearings, legislation, executive orders, and other measures to regulate relations between our countries are long overdue.