Jewish Café Culture in New York City
Storymap by Isabella Buzynski. Based on A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture by Shachar M. Pinsker.
The history of Jews and coffeehouses in New York began in the American colonial era. On September 1654, twenty-three Sephardi Jewish refugees from Brazil were granted asylum at New Amsterdam. Soon after, with the surrender of the Dutch to the British, New Amsterdam was renamed New York. English customs were introduced to the city, including the coffeehouse. Early New York coffeehouses—such as the Exchange Coffee-House, the Merchants’ Coffee-House, and Tontine Coffee-House—were sites of commerce and attracted the business of Jewish merchants.
Sinsheimer Café
The 1830s and 1840s saw a rise of immigration to America from central Europe. German Jewish migrants would gather in Sinsheimer Café. Eventually, B’nai B’rith (Sons of the covenant) was founded in Sinsheimer Café under the leadership of Henry Jones. B’nai B’rith is a secular fraternal organization combining the traditions of Judaism and the Free Masons, which still exists today.
Pfaff's Beer Cellar
In the 1850s and 1860s, saloons, taverns, and clubs replaced English-style coffeehouses in New York. A beer cellar on Broadway near Bleecker Street owned by Charles Ignatius Pfaff earned a reputation among journalists, critics, writers, and artists as New York’s first and only “bohemian” nightspot. In an unfinished poem from the 1860s, Walt Whitman, a habitué, memorialized the vault at Pfaff’s
“where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink and carouse.”
As far as we know, Jews were not part of the new bohemian circles at Pfaff’s, with the exception of the actress and poet Adah Isaacs Menken.
Harmonie Club
Alongside bohemian taverns like Pfaff’s, social clubs arose in mid-19th century New York. The first to open in 1836 was the Union Club, reserved for “gentlemen of social distinction.”
In 1852, six German Jewish immigrants who were excluded from the Union Club established Harmonie Gesellschaft (Harmonie Club). Much like other clubs, membership in the Harmonie Club was limited and granted only to those men able to pay its high initiation fee and annual dues, usually prosperous bankers, businessmen, and professionals.
By the early 1880s, beer cellars, saloons, and clubs dominated New York’s social and cultural realm, and for a time cafés were scarce. In 1881, the New Yorker, businessman, and writer Francis B. Thurber wrote,
“The coffeehouse...no longer exists among us...we are perhaps too busy a people to support cafés like those of Europe.”
Immigration
This changed, however, in the next few decades as migrants from Eastern Europe—including countless Jews—immigrated to New York, fleeing poverty and violence. By 1920, there were over a million and a half Jews in New York City. These Yiddish-speaking, mostly poor eastern European Jews settled en masse in the area we now refer to as the Lower East Side. These immigrants supported a revival of cafés in New York.
Schwab's Café and Sachs' Café
Many Eastern European Jewish immigrants were attracted to Schwab’s Café, which was established in the 1880s by a radical socialist, and later anarchist, immigrant, Justus Schwab. Schwab’s quickly became “the gathering place for all bold, joyful, and freedom-loving spirits,” including a number of eastern European Jewish immigrants involved in radical socialist and anarchist politics, such as Shoel (Saul) Yanovsky, Dovid Edelshtat, and Abraham (Abe) Cahan, who became important figures in Yiddish journalism and literature.
Such Jewish intellectuals also settled in Sach’s Café where “Mrs. Sachs served fine coffee and cheese cake, and where the ‘cream’ of the radikalen gathered nightly.”
The Jewish poet Emma Goldman was one notable habitué of Sach’s, being one of the few women who frequented the café. Goldman saw her initiation into Sachs’ Café as establishing her lifelong intellectual and political engagement, first as a Yiddish lecturer and writer and later as a writer in English, as “red Emma” or “the most dangerous woman in America.”
The cafés of New York also nurtured Yiddish theater, providing actors and playwrights a space to collaborate and create.
Zeitlin's Café and Schreiber's Café
Pioneers of Yiddish Theater like Jacob Gordin traveled from the cafés of Odessa to New York and became habitués of Zeitlin’s Café, and later Schreiber’s Café.
Herrick's Café and Sholem's Café
During the 1890s and early 1900s, Herrick’s Café was “the gathering place of the East Side intelligentsia.” Owned by two Jewish brothers, Herrick’s was especially home to Yiddish writers and journalists during a time when New York became home to the world’s first mass-circulation Yiddish newspaper market. There
“the various factions...and the fractions of factions, met nightly at the round tables with their red and black checkered cloths, smoked Russian cigarettes, downed oceans of tea, and consumed pounds of Hungarian strudel.”
Although most of the time, questions of art and literature were on the table at Herrick’s, in September 1898, the café became the site of violent religious tension. As the New York Sun reported, unlike other Jewish establishments, Herrick’s decided to stay open for the Eve of the Day of Atonement. This offended “the gray-bearded orthodox patriarchs,” who protested the café’s decision, and eventually a row broke out which required police intervention. After the night’s violence, the café opened in the morning of the holy day, and more violence ensued, with several people arrested by the police, who had to use clubs to control “the riotous mob of several thousand Hebrews.”
When Café Herrick closed down, a new café called Sholem’s opened in the same location. Here, the older and the younger generations of Yiddish writers clashed, both drawn to such Lower East side cafés.
The younger generation was represented by a group of writers who became known as Di Yunge (The young ones). Di Yunge ushered in a modernist revolution in Yiddish literature, aiming “to create for Yiddish literature in America its own, independent home.” They eschewed the “sweat- shop poetry” of their predecessors and redefined Yiddish literature as “a probing into the self.” In turn, the old “sweatshop poets” like Morris Rosenfeld dismissed Di Yunge as “decadents.”
Goodman and Levine's Café
Di Yunge eventually abandoned Sholem’s Café, and migrated instead to a small and simple café at East Broadway named after its two owners: Goodman and Levine’s. In his memoirs, Reuven Iceland, a member of Di Yunge, remembered that “the young writers then in New York” used to stream into Goodman and Levine’s Café not because of the food, which was very bad, but because
“there you could read or listen to a poem. There, you could always hear and learn something about poetry and stories, because discussions about literature never ceased. There, you could meet the few young writers whom talent or luck had lifted...and who were already famous, while others were unknown. And there, one could also expect to hear— with beating heart—how you were currently rated as a writer or a poet.”
By leaving Sholem’s, the young poets also avoided “being under one roof with the older writers.”
Café Central
While these poetic revolutions took place in Sholem’s and in Goodman and Levine’s, the Yiddish writer Lamed Shapiro and his wife opened Café Central which became
“a neutral ground, a place where both Di Yunge and older writers could meet and feel at home.”
It was, however, a short-lived venture, since Shapiro was reluctant to charge many of his customers, who were also good friends of his.
Café Europa
Café Europa seemed to replace both Goodman and Levin’s and Shapiro’s Café Central in the years following World War I. The journalist Berl Botwinik wrote in the Forverts about Café Europa:
“now there is a new Kibitzarnya...There had to be a rendezvous for Jewish writers, because without it the world could not exist...The little tables are exactly the same as in the old place...As long as the café remains small and the owner is one of them, the breath of Jewish literature will be in the air.”
Chaver Paver (the pen name of Gershon Einbinder) arrived in New York in 1923 as a young, aspiring Yiddish writer and journalist. Paver recalled,
“the land of Yiddish writers in America was an area the size of the interior of Café Europa, about twenty feet wide and forty feet long. If you pushed open the door and stepped outside, you found yourself on the other side of the border, in an alien country.”
Strunsky's Café
Around 1910, a company of writers, theater people, political radicals, and artists began to settle in Greenwich Village; they declared their neighborhood a new bohemia, a center of “experimental life.” “In the bohemian geography of the imagination,” the historian Christine Stansell writes, “Greenwich Village was proximate and permeable to the Jewish Lower East Side.”
One of the cafés in Greenwich Village catering to the bohemians was Strunsky’s Café, known as “Three Steps Down.” It was owned and operated by Mascha and Albert (“Papa”) Strunsky, Jewish migrants from Russia, and was located in the basement of 19 West Eighth Street. As in Europe, and on the Lower East Side, Strunsky’s Café advertised in the literary magazines of the village as
“one of the most popular gathering places for villagers and those who appreciate well-cooked food and a congenial atmosphere”
Café Royal
During the 1920s, Jewish immigrants and their children abandoned the East Side’s cramped quarters in favor of more spacious and modern housing in Brooklyn and the Bronx. The East Side remained the seat of many communal and cultural institutions, synagogues, and the editorial offices of Yiddish newspapers, but only the poorest of the city’s Jews resided there.
Of the cafés which opened uptown, including Café Monopol and Café Boulevard, it was Café Royal that thrived and persisted for decades. Far different from the small, familiar cafés in the Lower East Side, Café Royal was expensive to poor writers, its “continental décor, tablecloths, high ceilings, paneled walls, and long windows” daunted “the casual passerby.”
The café was divided into sections: “to the left...sat the writers and to the right the actors. In a rear room, shut off from sight by a curtain and a large credenza, chess players mixed with card experts and horse-race betters.”
The Café Royal attracted Jewish and non-Jewish celebrities from near and far. E. E. Cummings would drop in on occasion for a conversation with the In Zikh Yiddish poets. The Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, with his wife, Isadora Duncan, came there when in New York, and even Charlie Chaplin would visit from time to time. Leo Rosten wrote in the New Yorker,
“Everybody who is anybody in the creative Jewish world turns up at the Café Royal at least one night a week. To be seen there is a social duty, a mark of distinction, and an investment in prestige.”
By the 1930s, the Café Royal became more of a place where tourists went to visit—as if it were a museum or as if the Yiddish actors there were acting a play. The Jewish folklorist Nathan Ausubel wrote about Café Royal as a bygone world in his unpublished manuscript “Hold Up the Sun,” a series of vignettes focusing primarily on the East Side. In a chapter called “Art with Tea and Lemon,” Ausubel writes,
“It is all unreal, utterly unreal, like some stage play—a pantomime of quaintly amusing ghosts. For years, the Café Royal on Second Avenue has been Yiddish bohemia’s lyrical protest against the Machine Age. For years, those rare souls looking for the conversational warmth of other rare souls...have made it their rendezvous, their club. With the same habituation and fervor that their fathers attended their synagogues in the Russian and Polish Ghettos, these intellectuals have been haunting the sacred precincts of the Café...”
Now, the habitués are a “strange assortment of museum pieces,” who “do not fit well into the present scheme of things” and the Yiddish actors are “old troupers...men and women fallen from the past glory and affluence.”
Even so, Café Royal remained open until 1952, in the meantime attracting Jewish refugees from World War II Europe who found a home among the aging Yiddish actors and journalists.
Although the heyday of cafés was waning, New York Jewish café culture was continued in mid-century cafeterias. Jewish students at the City College of New York (CCNY) in Harlem ate lunches and argued endlessly about politics and everything else in particular alcoves of the cafeteria, self-divided by ethnicity and politics. Writers and editors for new American newspapers and magazines also gathered in the cafeteria. William Phillips, the Jewish co-founder and editor of the Partisan Review since 1934, remembered,
“Our favorite hangout was...Stewart’s cafeteria on Sheridan Square, where for a dime you could get coffee and cake, and sit for hours arguing and solving the problems of the world.”
Garden Cafeteria
From the mid-1940s to the 1970s, cafeterias attracted Jewish immigrants, Holocaust survivors, and even some American-born Jews, providing habitués with food, drink, and a place to socialize and talk. One of the best examples of such spaces was the Garden Cafeteria.
The Garden Cafeteria, established in 1941 by Charles Metzger, was open twenty-four hours a day and was quite successful from the beginning. It was, according to Wakefield, “a refuge...of the spirit of the old East Side.” Here, Yiddish literary culture found a home much like it had in previous cafés. Isaac Bashevis Singer, the most well-known postwar Yiddish writer, who wrote for the Forverts for many decades, was a habitué of the Garden Cafeteria and described it as “a second home.”
Garden Cafeteria
By the 1970s, the Garden Cafeteria ceased to be a center for Jewish writers, journalists, and artists. Still, it attracted many old Jewish habitués who held on to memories of the cafeteria as it once was. Bruce Davidson, a photographer, immersed himself in this cafeteria community. Among the people whom Davidson spoke with and photographed was a man who worked for Forverts newspaper, who told him,
“The place means to me a lot...In the cafeteria I felt home, just like I would be in Warsaw, in 1939, before the war...is was my refuge...I found a gallery of living Jewish writers—Asch, Singer, Leivik—whom I adored.”
Jewish café culture as it once existed in New York within the walls of Herrick's, Europa, Royal and many other cafés and cafeterias no longer survives. Today there are no spaces where Jewish writers, artists, actors, and thinkers meet over a cup of coffee to laugh and argue and recite poetry. Many habitués of New York cafés would bring Jewish culture to the cafés of Tel Aviv and elsewhere, just as it had been brought to New York in the first place by migrants from the cafés of Europe. Even more would preserve it in the cafés of their memories, inspiring generations of nostalgia for the golden era of cafés.
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Europa Café, BotwinikB. Botwinik, “Der kafe vu es ferzomelen zikh yidish aktioyren,” Forverts, November 14, 1916, 4.
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Europa Café, PaverChaver Paver, Gershn in Amerike (Warsaw: Ikuf farlag, 1963), 178.
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Garden CafeteriaEmma Jacobs, “Garden Cafeteria,” Place Matters, accessed July 19, 2012, www.placematters.net.
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Garden Cafeteria, DavidsonBruce Davidson, “The Cafeteria,” New York, October 15, 1973, 40.
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Garden Cafeteria, Lower East SideDan Wakefield, “New York’s Lower East Side Today,” Commentary 27 (1959): 461.
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Garden Cafeteria, SingerBruce Davidson and Isaac Bashevis Singer, Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Lower East Side (Amherst, MA: Mead Art Museum, 2004), plate 1.
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Goodman and Levine's, IcelandReuben Iceland, Fun unzer friling (New York: Farlag Inzl, 1954), 187-189.
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Greenwich Village, StansellChristine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of aNew Century (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), 6.
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Harmonie ClubHarmonie Club, Harmonie Club of the City of New York: One Hundred Years,1852–1952 (New York, 1952); Annie Polland and Daniel Soyer, Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840–1920 (New York: NYU Press, 2012), 207–212.
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Harmonie Club, Union ClubSven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 58.
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Herrick's, BlumensonS. L. Blumenson, “From the American Scene: Utopia on Columbia Street,” Commentary, October 1, 1948.
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Herrick's, New York SunNew York Sun, September 26, 1898, 4.
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Herrick's, New York Times“Riot on the East Side,” New York Times, September 27, 1898.
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Immigrationhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8fNSpAlVoI
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Pfaff's Beer Cellar, Whitman
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Royal Café, AusubelNathan Ausubel, “Hold Up the Sun! Kaleidoscope: e Jews of New York,”Works Progress Administration Historical Records Survey: Federal Writers’ Project, Jews of New York, New York Municipal Archives, box 7, micro lm 176, MN 21175, 270–288.
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Royal Café, Café Crown illustrationIllustration for Café Crown by Al Hirschfeld, 1942. Source: http://fineanddandyshop.blogspot.com/2010
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Royal Café, EpsteinMelech Epstein, Pages from a Colorful Life: An Autobiographical Sketch (Miami Beach: Block, 1971), 52.
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Royal Café, exterior view
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Royal Café, PaverChaver Paver, Gershn in Amerike (Warsaw: Ikuf farlag, 1963), 410.
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Royal Café, RostenLeo Rosten, “Café Royal,” New Yorker, April 10, 1937, 45.
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Royal Café, TellerJudd L. Teller, Strangers and Natives: The Evolution of the American Jew from 1921 to the Present (New York: Delacorte, 1968), 51.
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Sach's CaféS. L. Blumenson, “From the American Scene: Culture on Rutgers Square,” Commentary, July 1, 1950.
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Schreiber's CaféS. L. Blumenson, “ The Golden Age of Tomashefsky: At the Tables Down at Schreiber’s,” Commentary, April 1, 1952; Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 237.
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Schwab's CaféTony Michels, Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 43.
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Shapiro's Café CentralZishe Weinper, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern (New York: Farlag Oy um, 1940), 91–92; Iceland, Fun unzer friling, 73–74.L. Miller, autobiographical note, in Lamed Shapiro, Ksovim (Los Angeles: L. Shapiro Ksovim Komitet, 1949), 11.
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Sholem's Café, Di YungeQuoted in Ruth Wisse, “Di Yunge: Immigrants or Exiles?,” Prooftexts 1, no. 1(1981): 44.
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Sholem's Café, RosenfeldForverts, November 20, 1910. For English translation and discussion of this feuilleton, see Marc Miller, Representing the Immigrant Experience: Morris Rosenfeld and the Emergence of Yiddish Literature in America (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 39–40.
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Sinsheimer CaféHoward B. Rock, Haven of Liberty: New York Jews in the New World, 1654–1865(New York: NYU Press, 2015), 158.
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Stewart's Cafeteria, LibenMeyer Liben, “CCNY—A Memoir,” Commentary, September 1965, 68.
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Stewart's Cafeteria, PhillipsWilliam Phillips, “New York Intellectual Life in the 1930s,” New York Times, January 4, 1978, 21.
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Strunsky's CaféAdvertisement for Strunsky’s Café, Society of Independent Artists, 1920.
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ThurberFrancis B. Thurber, Coffee from Plantation to Cup: A Brief History of Coffee Production and Consumption (New York: American Grocer Publishing Association, 1881), 44.
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