One Jewish man wearing a kippah said that he came from Brooklyn to ‘drop $200 on coffee.’
Customers flooded a Manhattan coffee shop on Tuesday after pro-Palestinian baristas quit en masse over the Jewish owner’s support for Israel.
Cafe Aronne had patrons lined up around the block all day on Tuesday, multiple customers told National Review. A flag with both American and Israeli colors reading “I Stand with Israel” flew outside the door. Several people wore hats with the Jewish star printed with “Never again.”
One Jewish man wearing a kippah said that he came from Brooklyn to “drop $200 on coffee.”
Pro-Israel customers flocked to the cafe in response to an Instagram post by Dr. Ira Savestky, a plastic surgeon with a practice in the Upper East Side.
“Nearly all of the workers at my favorite cafe, @caffearonne, just down the block from my office, quit today because the owner is a proud Jew and supporter of Israel,” Savetsky wrote alongside a video appeal to locals to support the cafe.
In the video, cafe owner Peggy Dahan explains how she refused to close the shop for the day even after receiving an email from a group that included most of their employees informing the family that they were quitting effective immediately.
Peggy’s son Aaron and other family members have been lending a hand at the shop since the staff mutiny. Aaron stepped out Tuesday afternoon to greet the crowd as it broke out into song with the Jewish solidarity anthem, “Am Yisrael Chai.”
“We put Israel flags all over our location and kidnapping signs,” Aaron said of his shop’s advocacy since Hamas invaded Israel on October 7.
The mass resignation occurred after Aaron asked two baristas to refrain from wearing pro-Palestinian pins at work.
“Our staff was young. They think they know everything, liberal, college-educated,” Aaron told the New York Post.
“They think we’re supporting genocide, we’re supporting colonialism. They know the keywords but they don’t really know what they mean.”
Asked how he’d fill the staff shortage, he said, “We got a lot of applications.”
Some commenters under Savestky’s Instagram post volunteered to help at the shop to tide the owners over until they can recruit replacements.
“Do they need help tomorrow morning!?!? I can come lend a hand with my barista skills,” one woman wrote.
The cafe will donate $1 from every cup of coffee sold, no matter what it costs, to Israel’s version of the Red Cross, he said.
Three Jewish New York natives standing in line told National Review that most people in the neighborhood have some connection to Israel. They themselves all lived in the country at one point. One of the three, a woman who attended New York University, said her brother is serving in the Israeli Defense Forces as it mobilizes to defeat Hamas.
Another woman said her grandparents survived Auschwitz. She attended Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv, noting it was the “best year of her life.”
Speaking of the pro-Palestinian activists in the city who’ve ripped down signs publicizing Hamas’s kidnappings, she said: “The people who tore them down are psycho. There’s babies.”
Her community has been shocked to its core by the atrocities, she said.
“There’s no words,” she said. “To see this happening, never in my life…”
She said the pro-Palestinian demonstrators should put their money where their mouth is and “go to Gaza.”
“See what you can do,” she said. “You’re not even allowed to wear pants, wear your hair out.”
“There is so much money,” she said of the generous humanitarian aid that western nations have sent to Gaza for decades. “Where is it going?”
While she and her friends are terrified, there’s a “fire” in her now, she said.
Just a couple blocks downtown, a group of about 30 pro-Palestinian student activists from Hunter College demonstrated on the sidewalk. Only two Jewish students carrying Israel flags stood across from them.
A man in the trio in line at Caffe Arrone, who once lived in the Old City in Jerusalem and then attended Queens College in New York City, said there were always tremors of anti-semitism on college campuses but “never like this.”
“I want to make sure the business continues to be around,” he said.
A Catholic woman in her 60s, who’s called the Upper East Side home since she was a teenager, said President Biden and other Democrats are peddling a false narrative about Israel.
“When you have the president of the United States drawing moral equivalences… Obama is spewing hateful rhetoric and lies that’s very harmful to the Jewish people,” she said. “It’s this Marxist BLM movement that’s morphed into anti-semitism. They feel they’re able to spew this without any repercussions. Right after this savagery occurred the knee-jerk reaction was to blame Israel.”
The Queens College man said he knows many Jewish Republicans. Among the many Jews in America who still identify as Democrats, he predicted an impending realignment.
Because of the party harboring anti-semitism and condoning terrorism since the attack on Israel, “I think there’s going to be a huge shift in the 2024 election,” he said.
“We know the truth,” the Catholic woman said. “We have moral clarity. We’re not confused by misinformation.”
She lauded the resiliency of the Jewish people, who despite long historical experience of persecution, stand strong and rally together.
“Even though they’re the victim, they’re not the victim,” she said.
As residents brought their families for an evening coffee and after-school pastry, the mood on the street was triumphant. One smiling man wearing a kippah exited the shop and held his coffee cup high in the air, exclaiming: “Tastes like victory!”