They Targeted Philly’s Jewish Restaurants on Kristallnacht Eve. It Backfired.
Philadelphia’s “Boycott Ride” backfired, and anyone with sense could have told the organizers it would. I’m a civil rights lawyer, and this one wasn’t hard to call.
A group called Philly Bike On Your Left put out a flyer naming six Jewish-owned restaurants in Center City and declaring: “No business for Zionists! These Zionist establishments must go! Not in our city!” Yesterday, about 300 demonstrators, roughly 200 on bicycles, gathered in Rittenhouse Square. By lunchtime, the lines outside the restaurants they targeted ran around city blocks.
Tonight is the eighty-eighth anniversary of Kristallnacht. The organizers say any suggestion about the timing is “simply false.” There are fifty-two Sundays in a year. Their ride landed on the one before Kristallnacht, with a list of Jewish-owned shops and the words “must go.” Spare me. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington didn’t buy it either. It said “antisemites chose that anniversary to terrorize Philadelphia’s Jewish community.”
None of this was about Israel. To be clear, I support Israel, and a ride targeting Israeli-owned businesses wouldn’t have been okay either. But this ride went after Jews. It also wasn’t illegal, since the First Amendment protects even an ugly boycott. When the law can’t stop something like this, the people who live alongside it have to. That is why it mattered that Philadelphia showed up the way it did yesterday.
They Went Looking for Jews
The organizers say the owners “raised funds for the Israeli military, hosted Israeli soldiers, were praised by Benjamin Netanyahu, or expressed support for Israel.” That last item is the bar: say one kind thing about the Jewish state, once. Almost every Jew I know would make that list, which is why they wrote it that way.
Nobody sane believes the guy frying falafel at Goldie is responsible for a war. Goldie, K’Far and Dizengoff belong to CookNSolo, the restaurant group of Israeli American chef Michael Solomonov. NBC reports that its Israeli co-owners have raised money for Israel, and nothing in the coverage says a dollar of it went to soldiers or the war effort. The fundraiser on the record went to ambulances: five days after October 7, Solomonov pledged a day’s sales to Friends of United Hatzalah. United Hatzalah runs free emergency medical service across Israel, and its United Rescue arm has opened volunteer chapters in New Jersey, Panama, Colombia and Ukraine. No sane person thinks funding ambulances the week after a massacre is a crime.
Then there’s Mac Mart, a mac-and-cheese kiosk at 18th and Arch. Its owner, Marti Lieberman, told Philadelphia Magazine she has never mixed religion or politics with her business. As far as she can tell, she made the list because someone said her sister once made “some sort of reference to Zionism,” and because “they saw my Star of David.” That is all it took to put Mac Mart on a list of places that “must go.”
The only way to land on these six is to go looking for Jewish restaurants first and work backward until you find something that justifies yelling at them. The people promoting the ride were open about it: they wanted to “show these zio business owners that we see them for the disgusting humans they are.” “Zio” is the slur that former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke made famous.
Anti-Zionist activists love to point out that plenty of Christians are Zionists, as proof that their cause has nothing to do with Jews. Funny how no Christian-owned businesses made the flyer. Do they think people don’t see that?
Lieberman put it plainly: “if you wanna boycott something, don’t go. That’s how that works.” A boycott asks customers to eat somewhere else. “Not in our city” tells the owners to leave. It’s Gretchen Wieners in Mean Girls yelling “You can’t sit with us!” Except the lunch table is a city, and the people she’s throwing out are the Jews.
They Did It for Themselves
They didn’t do this for Palestinians. They did it for themselves. It’s the same move as marching on Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in January 2024 and chanting “MSK, shame on you” while what appeared to be children watched from the windows. None of it had a strategy, because the goal was to feel moral. I suspect a lot of them also get a taboo thrill out of calling Jews Nazis. They are high on their own supply.
Lately it feels like the number of antisemites keeps growing and they are coming at us from every side. If there is one comfort, it is that so many of them are astoundingly stupid. They picked a Jewish deli because it was easy and it felt good, and nobody stopped to ask who it would persuade. Most of this country isn’t with them. In April, a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll found that 74 percent of registered voters back Israel over Hamas. People who don’t care about outcomes keep making unforced errors, and this was a big one.
How Kristallnacht Started
On November 9, 1938, Nazi mobs across Germany and its annexed territories smashed the windows of thousands of Jewish-owned stores and destroyed more than 1,400 synagogues. Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi chief of the Security Police, ordered the police not to interfere, and in almost every town they obeyed. Starting that same night, the regime arrested about 26,000 Jewish men and sent them to concentration camps. Then it billed the Jewish community one billion Reichsmarks for the damage.
The lead-up to that night began five and a half years earlier, with a boycott. On April 1, 1933, the Nazis ran a one-day national boycott of Jewish businesses. Brownshirts, the Nazi Party’s paramilitary, stood outside Jewish shops, someone painted Jude (“Jew”) across the windows, and the signs read: “Germans! Defend yourselves! Don’t buy from Jews!” Then came local boycotts, steady harassment and one anti-Jewish law after another. By the end of 1938, the Holocaust Memorial Museum says, the regime had “almost completely destroyed Jewish economic life in Germany.”
First the Nazis marked the Jewish businesses and told the public to stay away, and they kept at it until none of it looked strange anymore. The violence came at the end. That is what “never again is now” means. The promise was always about the early steps: the list, the sign on the window, the day the neighbors decide whether to walk past.
And the windows have started breaking again. In June 2025, protesters smashed the windows of Manny’s, a Jewish-owned café in San Francisco, and spray-painted “Death to Israel is a promise” across the front. In April, someone threw what police believe were fireworks through the windows of a Jewish-owned Israeli restaurant in Munich. In July, someone put a bullet through the front window of a Jewish-owned bagel shop in Toronto. In August, security footage caught a man setting fire to Nöam, a kosher restaurant in Montreal. Last Wednesday, fire destroyed Mimimelon, a kosher bakery there.
When someone publishes a list of Jewish businesses that “must go,” we know where it can lead, because we can watch it happening in other cities right now. The time to show up is at the list, in numbers, before anyone reaches for a brick.
Why This Time Was Different
In 1933, the Holocaust Memorial Museum notes, “a notable number of Germans deliberately shopped at Jewish-owned businesses” to stand by their neighbors. It didn’t save anyone, because the government was on the other side. Five years later, the Jews got the bill for their own broken windows.
This time the government was on our side. Mayor Cherelle Parker said that “singling out businesses because their owners are Jewish is unacceptable and has no place in our city.” Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s office called the ride “designed to intimidate and drive Jewish businesses out of our communities.” Yesterday, Lieberman said, fifteen officers stood outside her kiosk “joking with us, having some food.”
In 1938, the police had orders to stand aside. In 2026, they stood guard and stayed for the mac and cheese.
We Went to Lunch
A few hundred people showed up to run six Jewish restaurants out of town, and Philadelphia answered with a lunch rush. If you have ever sat shiva, you are not surprised. We know one way to tell a family it is not alone, and it comes on a platter. One rabbi’s congregation placed a nearly $6,000 group order from eighty-two families.
Mac Mart doesn’t open on Sundays. Lieberman opened anyway. “I’m very proud to be Jewish,” she said. “I’m not going to cower and be scared when I’m just existing.” When the riders reached 18th and Arch, her supporters formed a wall.
Keep Going Back
I came into this weekend with a grudge against Philadelphia. Years ago I had a toxic situationship with a man from Philly, and I have held the whole city responsible ever since. After yesterday, I consider the debt paid with interest.
Since October 7, a lot of us have kept our heads down, tucked the Star of David inside the shirt, and hoped the haters would lose interest. Yesterday, hundreds of people, Jews and plenty of neighbors who aren’t, walked into Rittenhouse Square carrying Israeli flags, and a kiosk that is closed on Sundays opened on a Sunday. That is what acting early looks like: showing up while the threat is still a flyer.
The next flyer will turn up somewhere else, and one busy Sunday won’t keep six restaurants open all year. So keep going back, in February too, when nobody is filming.
The flyer said Not in our city! Yesterday, the city answered, and it ordered lunch.
