A man and his child were kicked out of a cafe because they were Jewish. Oakland, in 2024? Brooklyn, last week? Or Nazi Germany, 90 years ago? 

Try all three.

In Oakland, Abdulrahim Harara, owner of the Jerusalem Coffee House, allegedly ejected a Jewish man and his 5-year-old son last year because they were wearing baseball caps that had a Star of David in their design.

But what started in Oakland didn’t stop there.

In Brooklyn last week, Dan Goldman, a Democrat and Jewish member of Congress, and his 7-year-old daughter visited Poetica Coffee, a cafe in the tony Park Slope section of Brooklyn. That’s the neighborhood where a co-op grocery store recently voted to ban Israeli products.

After discovering that the Goldmans had been in the cafe, Poetica Coffee owner Parviz Mukhamadkulov announced on social media that he was refunding their money and banning them from the premises because they are “genocide enablers.” (That’s a code word for “Jews.”)

Meanwhile, a TikTok influencer known as “redhead heretic” has been visiting Los Angeles cafes such as Couplet Coffee to “let everyone know” that the owners are Israeli citizens. In one snippet, she cheerfully calls out “Thank you for leaving” to departing customers.

These episodes are tragically reminiscent of a darker era.

The Australian scholar Michael E. Abrahams-Sprod has chronicled the ways in which Jews in the town of Magdeburg, in Nazi Germany, gradually were excluded from public life in the 1930s.

Signs proclaiming “Jews Not Served Here” (Juden unerwünscht) and “Jews Not Welcome Here!” (Juden unerwünscht) began appearing in stores, hotels, cinemas, public transportation, groceries, and restaurants.

Abrahams-Sprod interviewed a survivor who recalled that at age 8, in 1933, such signs were posted “on nearly every shop and I know it was difficult for my mother to do the shopping.”

Another survivor, Gisela Kent, told him: “There was one place in Magdeburg called ‘Schwarzs Kaffee-Garten’ [Schwarz’s Coffee Garden] where [we] used to go every Sunday … my parents, my aunt, uncle and my grandparents, for quite a while, until about 1936. And then they stopped, or perhaps they were asked to stop.” As the signs proliferated, “you just didn’t go out.”

Survivor Gerry Levy recounted how his aunt once took him to a Magdeburg restaurant for ice cream. When they were identified as Jews, they were “approached by the manager and asked to leave.”

Cafe exclusions were not the only way in which food was weaponized for antisemitic purposes. Ninety years before the Park Slope Co-op weaponized food against the Jews, grocery stores in Magdeburg began restricting what Jews could buy: In December 1935, the chief of police announced that only those Jews who were deemed “inconspicuous” and “of acceptable appearance” would be allowed to purchase cases of milk.

By 1938, according to Abrahams-Sprod, “Jews in Magdeburg were so isolated in their city that they avoided going out in public …They were effectively living in a ghetto without walls, owing to the threats that surrounded them in non-Jewish spaces.”

That description of life in 1930s Magdeburg was an eerie precursor to the horrific chants of “We have to make them scared!” by pro-Hamas demonstrators outside a Manhattan synagogue last year.

The Jews of Magdeburg were too scared to leave their homes. Today’s antisemites have the same goal.

Of course, there are many important differences between the rising antisemitism in the United States in 2026 and the antisemitism gripping Nazi Germany in 1936.

One of the most crucial differences is the response of the authorities. The US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the Oakland cafe owner; the suit is pending. The DOJ has announced that it is now also investigating the Manhattan incident involving Congressman Goldman. 

Swift and forceful action by the authorities is vital to keeping American society from going down the slippery slope from Oakland, to Park Slope, to a reincarnated Magdeburg.

Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust.