Hasids vs. Hipsters: A Williamsburg Story

In Brooklyn, a gentle clash over unkosher food and bike lanes.

WILLIAMSBURG — Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is home to two of New York’s most devout, and sometimes conflicting, religious sects. Inhabiting the South section of the neighborhood are the Hasidim. Often referred to as simply the Satmars, the name of their particular religious sect (which began in Hungary), they represent one of the largest communities of ultra-Orthodox Jews in New York. Their modest dress—black pants, white shirts, fur streimel hats even in the summer—is straight out of 18th-century Eastern Europe. The men keep sidecurls, the women cover their hair, and everybody prays. Yiddish is spoken; knishes are eaten.

No less diligent in their ritual garb are the neighborhood’s newer émigrés: the hipsters. The Artisten, as the Hasidim call them, obediently don their skinny jeans, fanny packs and granny glasses. They smoke Parliaments and drink Pabst Blue Ribbon while they bop, understatedly, to indie music. Irony is studied as carefully as the Talmud.

Stroll down Broadway, the unofficial divider between the two factions, and evidence of their strange co-existence abounds. Kiki’s Pet Spa sits next to the offices of Der Yid, a Yiddish newspaper. A yuppie butcher shop butts up against an Orthodox chapel. And outside Peter Lugar’s steakhouse, a group of well-heeled bankers seem oblivious to the Hasidic men walking by at their characteristic clip. Most of the time, these neighbors don’t seem to much notice each other.

But for the past six months a turf war—or shtetl feud—has raged between the two factions. At issue is a 14-block stretch of bike lane that runs along Bedford Avenue. The Hasidim long complained of being distracted by the female pedal pushers; the bikers made the point that the street is a major artery and that the lane makes everyone safer. But the Department of Transportation sandblasted the lane markings in December, and the consensus among both factions is that its removal was intended as sop to the Satmar community just before Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s re-election.

A few bikers, in the dead of a winter night soon after, took the fate of the lane into their own hands. Armed with homemade stencils, they re-painted it, and posted an accompanying YouTube video set to music. They were promptly rounded up by Hasidic community watchdogs and the lane, once again, was erased.

A naked protest ride was planned but canceled due to inclement weather. A community meeting was held, a microphone passed between a Hasidic community leader and a tattooed bike messenger. Tensions simmered. And word is that another re-paint attempt is imminent.

Enter Traif, a new restaurant whose name means unkosher or unclean, and whose raison d’être is serving up biblically forbidden foods like pork and shellfish. Traif is on hipster turf, but just barely: It looks out on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that divides secular from Satmar territory.

Given the lay of the land, you could be forgiven for imagining the owners of this establishment as mustachioed snarks. But at least on the surface, co-owners Heather Heuser (red-headed goyish manager from New Hampshire), and Jason Marcus (nominally Jewish chef from New Jersey) are just two 30-year-olds trying to start a small business in the most competitive restaurant city in the world during the worst recession in memory.

“I would not say I’m a hipster, no. I’m just a guy. I respect the hipsters, they are a powerful sect,” Mr. Marcus, a veteran of upscale Manhattan restaurants like Eleven Madison Park and Le Bernardin, says.

If they are evangelicals for anything, it’s pork. “Pork is not the other white meat,” Mr. Marcus says, “it’s the meat.” Ask him about what pork can do for a dish and you’re liable to want bacon in your water glass. “It’s what you want out of a meat: hedonistic deliciousness.”

He insists that his love of taboo protein is not meant as a rebellion, citing his lobster-loving Jewish grandmother as evidence. “My passion for traif, the stuff, is coincidental. I happen to love working with those items.” He’s clearly not alone. That pork is having a moment—a long, seemingly endless moment—is not news to anyone who watches the Food Network.

Though the chef points out that pig is the most widely eaten animal in the world, there’s no question that Traif capitalizes on the current trend. The menu, best described as soul-food tapas, features indulgences like dates stuffed with blue cheese and wrapped in bacon, mussels served in a chorizo-cream broth, potato latkes piled with hanger steak and crab béarnaise, and braised BBQ short rib sliders with smoked gouda. For dessert, there are bacon doughnuts served with coffee ice cream. And a pork-infused cocktail is in the works. The only way to make it less kosher would be to literally boil a kid in its mother’s milk.

Mr. Marcus knew that there would be a lot of New Yorkers who would relish the idea of a Jew opening up a pork shop. And he says the response, so far, has been positive.

On opening night, for example, a group of lapsed Hasidic Jews came in, giddy about the possibilities for culinary rebellion. Baruch Herzfeld, a 38-year-old who runs a used bike shop/community center, and who prides himself on being a bridge between Williamsburg’s two worlds—he calls himself a “Jew wrangler”—was also there with a small entourage. Later, Williamsburg resident and self-described Semitic swine-ologist Jeff Yoskowitz (he’s worked at the only Jewish-owned pork farm in Israel though he keeps kosher) dropped in to try the vegetarian items on the menu. (His prediction? The place “will probably offend more vegetarians than Jews.”)

So, is the neighborhood gearing up for a bike lane redux? Well, at least not so far. Though there have been some blog posts praying for Traif’s demise, as of this week, most Hasidim had not yet heard of the place.

Those who had weren’t offended. A Hasidic man I spoke to said he found the name “kind of funny and cool.”

Which is precisely how Matthew Caputo, 25, describes Gottlieb’s, the iconic kosher deli that sits at the corner of Division Street and Roebling Street, the heart of Satmar territory. It is, as the Satmars would say, heymish (homey). Mr. Caputo, a native of Riverdale who declares that he is a trust fund baby-cum-motorcycle racer, eschews the term hipster, but he is precisely the type Traif is meant to appeal to. Though he went opening night to check it out, it was Gottlieb’s that won him over. “This place has everything—good food, good prices, irony,” he says, snapping a photo of the Gefen-brand ketchup as the city’s first Hasidic cop sits in the back reading the New York Post. “I would like to find a girl to take on a date here, but she’d have to wear sleeves.”

When I describe Traif to Menashe Gottlieb, whose grandfather founded the kosher deli, he quips: “probably a Jewish owner.” As for what he thinks of his secular neighbors: “anybody who buys, money is green.” A Hasidic landlord I spoke to doesn’t want the South side to be overtaken by “young urban professionals”—he reminds me they don’t like to be called hipsters—but having them on the North side of the neighborhood has been “absolutely great for business.”

For all of the noise over the bike lane, there is mostly a symbiotic relationship between these two communities—not to mention the Puerto Ricans, Italians and Dominicans who call Williamsburg home. And so they go on, pierced cheek to bearded jowl.