The one café Jerusalem can't leave alone

Feds open Title VI probes at two Cal State campuses. The Education Department's Office for Civil Rights is investigating San José State and San Francisco State over complaints that Jewish students were threatened, shunned, and excluded from classrooms, that anti-Israel protests disrupted classes, and that neither school meaningfully responded. The SJSU complaint cites an email from a university vice president distinguishing "good Jews" from "bad Jews." Announced Aug. 6. ¹

39% of young Jews have pulled back. A Jim Joseph Foundation study of 2,071 Jewish adults aged 22–40 found that share has engaged less, more selectively, or not at all with Jewish spaces since recent events. Of those, 48% said the conversations felt "hostile, toxic, or unproductive." Three quarters still do something Jewish regularly. ²

Forward editor out after seven months. Alyssa Katz, who took over the Forward in January, is no longer editor-in-chief as of Friday. No reason given; her author page was quietly switched to past tense. ³

Mamdani meets the rabbis. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani sat down with a group of rabbis behind closed doors on Monday, a week after meeting Satmar leaders including Rabbi Moishe Indig. He called it "candid and productive" and said his door "will always be open to every Jewish New Yorker." What was discussed, nobody's saying. ⁴

Cafe Basimta opened at the end of May off Agrippas Street, near Mahane Yehuda, and stays open on Shabbat. Roughly 100 restaurants, bars, and cafés in Jerusalem do the same. Only Basimta has drawn six straight Saturdays of Haredi protest. ⁵

The protests started July 4 with banging on windows and overturned tables. By early August, protesters had broken through police barricades trying to get inside. On July 25 someone threw a bag of feces at the entrance; on Aug. 7 police arrested a 15-year-old for it. Last Saturday, dozens of Haredi men shouted "Shabbos" and threw eggs while hundreds of secular counter-protesters, including Democrats party leader Yair Golan, formed human chains and chanted "Shabbat belongs to all of us." Residents upstairs threw bags of water at them. No injuries, no arrests. ⁵⁶

The part most of the crowd didn't know: Basimta is an official project of Jews for Jesus, and its operator, Yoel Ben David, is a member of that community. When that came out, some secular supporters got uneasy, and Hapoel Jerusalem pulled an advertising offer. ⁵⁶

The Haredi side says the fight is about Shabbat and about secularizing Jerusalem, a city that is 46% Haredi and 13% secular by JTA's numbers. The secular side says it's about who owns a public day of rest. Both are defending a storefront neither of them looked into. ⁵

Klezmer is having a moment again. Kveller's Leah Grisham rounds up the people modernizing it: fiddler Jake Shulman-Ment, Sarah Gordon's Yiddish Princess, Daniel Kahn and The Painted Bird (formed 2005; their Yiddish "Hallelujah" went viral in 2016), Isabel Frey, Basya Schechter's Pharaoh's Daughter, and the Grammy-winning Klezmatics, who never left. Klez Kamp in the Catskills is still the summer pilgrimage. Worth a playlist before the holidays. ⁷

The Cal State investigations may find real failures, and if they do, good. But a Title VI letter tells a university what it did wrong last year. It doesn't make a 19-year-old feel welcome in a lecture hall, and it doesn't teach anyone what "Zionist" means. The 39% number above is the one that should worry us more than any docket. That's not students being pushed out by antisemites. That's students walking out of Jewish rooms because the rooms got exhausting. Fixing that isn't a job for the Office for Civil Rights. It's ours. ¹²

The Danube is so low this month that dozens of German warships are sitting in the open air near Prahovo, Serbia. Nazi Germany's Black Sea fleet scuttled up to 200 of them in September 1944 to slow the Soviets, and some are still loaded with munitions, which is why nobody can haul them out. So they sit there. Every drought. Rusting, armed, and blocking the river. Eighty-two years and we still can't get rid of the things. ⁸

Hero: Tyler Steele. Converted to Judaism in spring 2023, asked his Apple manager in Virginia for Shabbat off that September, was told no, complained about religious discrimination in November, and was fired in January 2024. He took it to the EEOC, which sued Apple last September. Apple settled Aug. 7: $150,000 ($80,000 back pay, $70,000 damages), plus a rewrite of its religious-accommodation policy and mandatory training in its Virginia operations within 90 days. One guy, one Shabbat, a new policy for everyone after him. ⁹

Villain: Apple. Same story. The company denied Shabbat accommodation, fired the man who asked for it, settled the federal lawsuit, and, per the agreement, "denied wrongdoing." Debra Lawrence, the EEOC's Philadelphia regional attorney, put it plainly: employees "should not have to violate their religious beliefs to keep their jobs." A trillion-dollar company needed a court to explain that. ⁹

Parashat Shoftim, 2 Elul 5786. Candles in Miami 7:39. Elul starts this weekend; shofar every weekday morning from here to Rosh Hashanah. ¹⁰