Special: Lox with Len Berk 🐟

Who says there are no second acts in American lives? Len Berk has already had about five.

A successful CPA, Len could have lived out a comfortable retirement. Instead, the affable and gregarious workaholic did a stint in the travel business before finding a second home in a place that many New York Jews also consider their second home — Zabar’s, the venerable food store on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. There, Len worked part-time behind the counter for two-and-a-half decades, slicing lox, weighing smoked fish and chit-chatting with celebrities about sable and caviar.

Earlier this year, when Zabar’s management let their last Jewish lox slicer go, fearing he might contract COVID, Berk, now 90, found a new calling — lox columnist for The Forward. Since the spring, Berk, in his inimitably personable style, has taught us about the different varieties of smoked fish and the 16 sorts of people who buy them; he has written of his encounters with Woody Allen’s mother and Itzhak Perlman. He has even tried his hand at poetry. Soon he will be regaling us with his adventures with one of his lifelong passions: Chinese food.

And on Tuesday, September 22 at 5 pm, he will take part in a live conversation with New York Times food writer Melissa Clark and Forward editor-in-chief Jodi Rudoren about lox and life, and how, for food writers, 90 is the new 30. Please join us before Len embarks on yet another new career.
— Adam Langer, senior culture editor