There’s a lot of good Jewish-deli merch in this world, and I would conservatively estimate that I own about 10% of it. I do my best to seek out a good (a.k.a. medium-bad) cup of coffee, bowl of matzo ball soup, and bagel wherever I go, whether at Canter’s Deli in Los Angeles’s Fairfax neighborhood, Schwartz’s in Paris’s Le Marais, or Beauty’s Luncheonette in Montreal’s Jewish Quarter.
But it’s not just the food that I crave when I go to these places—although I’ve found that a stack of lacy latkes is capable of curing more or less any ailment, from a common cold to jet lag to a broken heart. At a complicated cultural moment, I never feel more anchored to my faith than when I’m tucking into the same cabbage soup or tsimmes that my Russian Jewish ancestors must have eaten in their shtetls many generations ago.
When I’m done with my meal at these venerable institutions, invariably groaning from fullness and filling a takeout clamshell with leftovers I don’t really want because I fear the server’s disapprobation more than I do the prospect of bagels going stale in my hotel room, it’s become something of a ritual for me to consider the merch offerings. By now, I own enough Jewish-deli baseball caps from far-flung corners of the world to make Larry David proud—and yet the one I treasure most I picked up approximately 20 blocks from where I grew up: at Zabar’s, of course.
Zabar’s—which made the news this week when its longtime principal owner, “smoked fish czar” Saul Zabar, died at 97, after running the store his parents founded in 1934 for more than 70 years—is a cut above other Jewish-deli institutions in a lot of ways. (For one, they’re a notable exception to the “consistently mid coffee” rule, serving up cups that will keep you going for the entirety of an endless-feeling Passover seder.) But the deli’s signature orange merch has become a bona fide It-girl Thing over the past decade, beloved by the likes of frum-meets-high-fashion designer Batsheva Hay (who has been known to sport a Zabar’s cap herself) and even making its way onto the front of a $500 Coach sweater in 2022.
For more insight on how Zabar’s hats, shirts, sweatshirts and aprons became the cream of the merch crop, I turned to an authority on both fashion and Semitic curmudgeon-ism: Old Jewish Men of New York founder Noah Rinsky, husband of former Vogue staffer Liana Satenstein. “The Zabar’s logo is singular. It’s genius,” he says. “There’s nothing else like it, and that’s why they send out more cease-and-desist letters than anyone else. Joking. Joking.”
Rinsky is particularly struck by the power of Zabar’s merch to imbue its wearer with a sense of old-New-York bonhomie—a quality feeling harder and harder to come by in the age of rampant gentrification and bagels and schmear delivered anonymously and soullessly via Postmates. “Boy, a nice font goes a long way, eh? Show up with a bag from Zabar’s and people think you’re a sophisticate. Incredible. They struck gold with that blown-out bubble-gum orange and figured, why limit ourselves to printing only on T-shirts when we can slap it on socks and rugalach and aprons and book covers and sweatshirts and tote bags and mugs, too!”
I’ll likely never get rid of my piles of Jewish-deli merch (soft hoarding is one of my ancestral birthrights), but if I ever do, I know my beige-and-orange Zabar’s cap—which my partner and I briefly shared across state lines early on in our long-distance courtship, fulfilling the gay prophecy that all hats must be communal—will be the last to go. Should I need to replace it, though, I know exactly where to go—and I might just stop for a bialy and some whitefish while I’m at it.
