North Oakland cafe Jerusalem Coffee House was sued by the Trump administration for allegedly kicking out a customer wearing a Star of David hat. Now two months after that lawsuit was served, the owner made his first public remarks.
A full nine months ago, the outrage du jour on both sides of the Bay Area’s Israel-Palestine debate was a video where an Oakland cafe owner asks a customer with a Star of David ballcap to leave the shop. The video, seen below, went viral. The cafe in question is Telegraph Avenue’s Jerusalem Coffee House, and the patron asked to leave was Jonathan Hirsch, whom the SF Standard found had a curiously long history of smartphone-recorded arguments that were often posted online.
WATCH: On Saturday, a Jewish man and his five-old-son were directed across the street to Jerusalem Coffee House in Oakland while looking for a restroom.
— JCRC Bay Area (@SFJCRC) October 30, 2024
After purchasing drinks and sitting down, the cafe owner confronted the man about the Star of David on his hat, stating it was… pic.twitter.com/aJEKybkbQW
Hirsch filed a lawsuit against the coffee shop in March of this year, alleging anti-semitic discrimination. And just weeks before that, another Jewish customer filed his own lawsuit saying that he was denied service for being Jewish in a separate incident. The Trump-run Justice Department then filed a large federal lawsuit against the cafe last month, calling out the coffee shop’s owner Abdulrahim Harara and saying, “It is illegal, intolerable, and reprehensible for any American business open to the public to refuse to serve Jewish customers.”
We had not heard from Harara publicly since that federal lawsuit was filed. But the Chronicle reports that Harara spoke publicly for the first time on the matter at a Wednesday press conference.
An Oakland coffee shop accused of antisemitic discrimination in a civil rights lawsuit is pushing back against allegations its employees and owner harassed and denied service to Jewish people. https://t.co/1pJmunqSca
— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) July 31, 2025
“These lawsuits, these campaigns to silence and destroy us, they are desperate attempts to fracture our community, dismantle our faith, erase our voices, and suppress our will to fight,” Harara said Wednesday, according to Oaklandside. “But they will not succeed.”
A Palestinian-owned coffee shop in Oakland, CA has released a new menu in honor of its one-year anniversary, the shop said. Among its offerings is a drink called "Sweet Sinwar," a $10 orange, ginger, and carrot juice. pic.twitter.com/t0xjVaytf6
— Gabe Stutman (@jnewsgabe) October 10, 2024
The lawsuits against Harara and his shop all reference the cafe serving drinks on the anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israelis, drinks that had the names “Iced in Tea Fada” (a play on the word “Intifada”) and “Sweet Sinwar” (an alleged reference to Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar). The cafe denies this was the intent.
Harara’s attorney also spoke to the lawsuit from the Trump administration in his Wednesday remarks.“It is a cut-and-paste job of the two bogus private lawsuits,” Glenn Katon said to the crowd, per the Chronicle. “DOJ appears to have done no independent investigation.”
With the three lawsuits, Jerusalem Coffee House is facing significant legal bills. They’ve started a GoFundMe that claims Harara is a target of “smear campaigns and politically-driven lawsuits,” and that the Trump administration lawsuit is “meant to silence his stance against the genocide in Gaza and disrupt the community space that has grown around the cafe.”
Related: Department of Justice Sues Oakland Cafe for Kicking Out Guy Wearing Star of David Hat [SFist]
Image: Jim G via Yelp
