New York Magazine spent thousands of words in its “Habibi City” issue asking why Israeli restaurants have quietly dropped the word “Israeli” from their menus, their signage, and their Instagram bios. Then it gave every answer except the honest one. The feature, Madeline Leung Coleman’s “When Eating Out Is Political,” treats the disappearance of Israeli identity from the New York dining scene as a story of guilt catching up with the guilty. The truth is the opposite. These restaurants are not hiding because they have something to apologize for. They are hiding because people keep smashing their windows, and a magazine that could have said so decided instead to explain why they had it coming.
What the magazine actually ran
The piece charts the rise of what critics and boosters alike called New Israeli cuisine, the za’atar-dusted, salad-forward, chef-driven food that racked up awards and Michelin stars across the city through the 2010s. So far, so accurate. Israeli chefs did have a decade in the sun. But Coleman frames that success as something closer to a heist. The most popular dishes, she notes, were Mizrahi, Arab, and North African, and many were Palestinian, as if a Jewish chef whose grandmother left Baghdad or Aleppo were an interloper in her own kitchen. Half of Israel’s population traces its roots to the greater Middle East and North Africa. Falafel, hummus, shakshuka, and stuffed vegetables were their inheritance too. The magazine never says what an Iraqi Jew was supposed to cook instead.
From there the framing hardens. The feature groups Zionism with xenophobia and Islamophobia. It quotes former employees of Michael Solomonov’s K’Far and Laser Wolf describing those rooms as “safe spaces for Zionism,” and relays a secondhand, uncorroborated claim that a diner once said, “We should bomb them all from the air.” It profiles a Jewish New Yorker who now screens restaurants’ social media to vet the owners’ politics before she will sit down to eat. And it presents an Israeli chef apologizing for the “cultural appropriation” of Palestinian food. This is the emotional architecture of the whole package: Israeli identity as a thing to be interrogated, explained, and where possible atoned for.
“The land mass currently called Israel”
Two choices give the game away. The first is a phrase that even outlets far from the pro-Israel camp flagged as bizarre. Describing a tourist-style map on the menu of the Palestinian restaurant Ayat, in which Israel is relabeled “Discover Palestine,” Coleman calls the country “the land mass currently called Israel.” Not Israel. A land mass that happens, for now, to go by that name. A magazine that would never describe any other sovereign country this way reached for the one formulation that treats a nation of nine million people as a temporary clerical error.
The second is the word genocide, which the piece deploys repeatedly as settled fact. It is not settled fact. It is one of the most contested legal questions in the world right now, and the International Court of Justice has issued no such finding. A fair feature notes that the charge is disputed. An activist feature states it flat and moves on. Coleman chose the second. Every Israeli restaurateur in New York then gets folded into that verdict, held accountable for the decisions of a government 7,000 miles away that they do not run and did not elect.
The record the magazine left out
Here is the part that makes the “why are they hiding” question insulting rather than curious. There is a documented, multi-year record of violence against Israeli, Jewish-owned, and even Palestinian-owned restaurants, and the magazine waved at it in a single line about places being “spray-painted with notices.” The reality is uglier than a notice.
In February 2022, vandals sprayed “F– Jews” across the wall of a Brooklyn restaurant. In December 2023, a mob surrounded Goldie, Solomonov’s falafel counter in Philadelphia, chanting “long live the intifada.” In February 2024, a masked man took a baseball bat to the windows of Rothschild TLV on the Upper East Side. In July 2025, intruders broke into an Israeli restaurant in Melbourne, hurled chairs, and shattered glass while people were still eating. In August 2025, Manny’s in San Francisco was ransacked and tagged with “Die Zionist.” The list runs longer than that, which is exactly why we have kept a running tracker of kosher, Jewish, and Israeli-owned restaurants vandalized since October 7th. This is not a handful of kids with spray cans. It is a climate.
The climate does not spare Palestinians either. Palestinian restaurants have been vandalized. Kanaan in Berlin, jointly owned by an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian, was hit too. If the standard is that a restaurant answers for its government, then a Palestinian chicken shop near LAX answers for Hamas, which is an absurd thing to say out loud, and just as absurd when the target is Jewish.
Why this is the damage, not a description of it
A magazine feature is not a spray can. But it is not neutral either. When a publication with New York Magazine’s reach tells its readers that Israeli restaurants got expensive by appropriating other people’s food, that their owners are complicit in genocide, and that the smart move before dinner is to audit the chef’s politics, it does not merely observe a hostile environment. It supplies the permission structure for it. It tells the reader that suspicion is sophistication and that a boycott is a form of taste.
Then the same feature turns around and asks, with apparent innocence, why Israeli owners are scrubbing the word “Israeli” from their storefronts. The answer is sitting in the tracker. They are stripping their own identity off the window because the alternative is having it broken. A restaurant that relabels itself “Levantine” or “Mediterranean” in 2026 is not reckoning with anything. It is buying insurance. The magazine had the whole story in front of it and chose to write the version where the victims did something to deserve it.
What kosher and Israeli diners should take from this
Read the coverage, and then go eat. The most direct response to a feature that wants Israeli food to feel radioactive is to keep the tables full at the places that still put their name on the door. Support the owners who have not med-washed their menus, tip the ones who have because they had reasons, and understand that “is this place Israeli” has quietly become a question with a cost attached. The reason Einat Admony can tell a reporter “we are busy, we are doing good” is that enough people decided a hostile magazine is not going to pick their dinner reservations for them.
New York Magazine could have written the story of restaurateurs under siege for what they are rather than what they cook. It had every fact it needed. It ran the other piece instead, and innocent owners and diners are the ones left holding the check.
