Antisemitism in California cafs a dark history of discrimination

A man and his child were kicked out of a cafe because they were Jewish.Oakland, in 2024? Brooklyn, last week? Or Nazi Germany, 90 years ago? Try all three.In Oakland, Abdulrahim Harara, owner of the Jerusalem Coffee House, allegedly ejected a Jewish man and his 5-year-old son last year because they were wearing baseball caps that had a Star of David in their design.But what started in Oakland didn’t stop there.In Brooklyn last week, Dan Goldman, a Democrat and Jewish member of Congress, and his 7-year-old daughter visited Poetica Coffee, a cafe in the tony Park Slope section of Brooklyn.

That’s the neighborhood where a co-op grocery store recently voted to ban Israeli products.After discovering that the Goldmans had been in the cafe, Poetica Coffee owner Parviz Mukhamadkulov announced on social media that he was refunding their money and banning them from the premises because they are “genocide enablers.” (That’s a code word for “Jews.”)Meanwhile, a TikTok influencer known as “redhead heretic” has been visiting Los Angeles cafes such as Couplet Coffee to “let everyone know” that the owners are Israeli citizens.In one snippet, she cheerfully calls out “Thank you for leaving” to departing customers.These episodes are tragically reminiscent of a darker era.The Australian scholar Michael E.

Abrahams-Sprod has chronicled the ways in which Jews in the town of Magdeburg, in Nazi Germany, gradually were excluded from public life in the 1930s.Signs proclaiming “Jews Not Served Here” (Juden unerwünscht) and “Jews Not Welcome Here!” (Juden unerwünscht) began appearing in stores, hotels, cinemas, public transportation, groceries, and restaurants.Abrahams-Sprod interviewed a survivor who recalled that at age 8, in 1933, such signs were posted “on nearly every shop and I know it was difficult for my mother to do the shopping.” California's top news, sports and entertainment delivered to your inbox every day....