Sap Sua, a Vietnamese restaurant in Boulder, Colorado, was one of Emily Lanigan’s favorite restaurants. She even celebrated her 44th birthday there in June. So Lanigan was stunned when the restaurant posted this since-deleted message on Instagram in September: “Jews are welcome, Zionists are not.”
Lanigan, a former synagogue president, identifies as a Zionist, which she defines as the Jewish right of self-determination. Was she really no longer welcome at the place where she had received a complimentary dessert just months before?
She wondered if the restaurant had a different definition of Zionism, she said, and thought maybe reaching out and offering to have an in-person discussion could clear things up.
“Being a Zionist does not mean I do not also believe in the freedom and autonomy of Palestinians,” Lanigan said she commented on Instagram. “You and I are not so far apart.”
But Sap Sua’s owner, Anthony “Ni” Nguyen, doubled down: “As you clearly saw, the full statement was ‘Jews are welcome. Zionists are not.’ Jews are a protected class, and all Jews are welcome,” Nguyen wrote in messages to Lanigan. “Zionism is a political ideology, like Nazism.”
Nguyen’s response to Lanigan implied the law was on his side. He could ban “Zionists,” it seemed, so long as he let in Jews who shared his views about Israel.
Legally speaking, Nguyen was partially correct. Neither federal civil rights law nor Colorado law prohibits businesses from refusing service based on customers’ political beliefs—meaning turning someone away based solely on their political support for Israel could be allowed.
But the line gets murkier when “Zionist” is used as a stand-in for Jewish or Israeli identity, which can violate laws prohibiting discrimination based on religion or national origin.
The distinction matters not only for Sap Sua, as spaces from coffee shops to book festivals to concert venues make disavowing Israel a condition of entry or participation. The troubling practice raises a thorny question: How should the law distinguish between excluding someone because of their political beliefs and excluding them because of who they are?
Sap Sua was not the first business to declare itself off-limits to Zionists with no legal consequences. In Utah, after a bar called Weathered Waves declared “no Zionists allowed” in 2024, the attorney general found no evidence of legal wrongdoing. (Weathered Waves later closed over a dispute with its landlord.)
But that doesn’t mean “Zionist” bans are always legal. According to Richard Katskee, a professor of law at Duke University with expertise in public accommodation law, the legality depends on how the ban is enforced.
Does the business ask only Jewish or Israeli customers to disclose their views? Does it make assumptions about the politics of customers wearing kippahs? If Jewish customers are being singled out, Katskee said, that would make a finding of illegal discrimination more likely.
Omer Wiczyk, senior counsel at the Brandeis Center, said two cases he’s currently litigating cross that line. At a coffee shop in Oakland, California, a customer wearing a Star of David baseball cap was asked on video if he was a Zionist and told to leave. At an eyebrow salon in Northern Virginia, a customer was kicked out after disclosing she was Israeli-American.
Businesses “cannot turn a customer’s identity into objectionable politics, and then invoke that to justify their exclusion,” Wiczyk said. “Being Israeli is not a political issue. Being a Jew is not a political issue. It’s who you are.”
But if a business required every customer, regardless of their identity, to affirm a particular political position on Israel before receiving service, that could be legal, Katskee said—though enforcing such a policy fairly would inevitably prove difficult in practice.
“It might be legal, like putting up a sign saying ‘Republicans only’ or ‘Democrats only,’” Katskee said.
Jenin Younes, legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, argues that businesses have some latitude to refuse service based on customers’ politics. The ADC is currently making that case on behalf of Poetica Coffee, which is fighting a Department of Justice investigation into its decision to publicly bar Rep. Dan Goldman over his support for Israel.
In Goldman’s case, Younes said, his public profile and easily searchable voting record help support the idea that the coffee shop targeted him for his political views.
“It’s harder to make the argument that ‘No, this was really about just not letting Jewish people in’—because he’s a public figure,” Younes said. “He’s said what he thinks on these issues.”
Even Goldman himself said that the coffee shop incident did not warrant a civil rights investigation because of his status as a public figure.
Younes argues that the same principle applies to situations unrelated to Israel and Zionism.
In 2018, for example, the owner of a Virginia restaurant kicked out White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders citing the Trump administration’s “inhumane and unethical” policies. The restaurant faced social backlash, but no legal consequences.
And last year, a Martha’s Vineyard farmers’ market stand refused to sell lawyer Alan Dershowitz pierogi, citing his legal defense of Jeffrey Epstein and other men accused of sexual assault. Dershowitz threatened legal action, but it appears he never actually filed suit.
“In my opinion, businesses should have the right to exclude people whose views it doesn’t like,” Younes said. “And by the way, I would apply this in the other context: If there’s a pro-Israel coffee shop owner and they wanted to say, ‘We don’t want anyone wearing a pro-Palestine pin in here,’ I think they have that right.”
Whether businesses have the legal right to exclude certain customers is a different question than whether they should.
Such bans can end up holding ordinary Jews responsible for the actions of the Israeli government—with the misguided idea that denying them a meal or a cup of coffee will somehow advance the Palestinian cause.
And since “Zionist” means different things to different people, using the label as a litmus test will almost inevitably lead to erroneous assumptions about peoples’ views.
In cases where the law is not a remedy, the free market may be. Businesses that turn away “Zionists” must be so committed to their beliefs that they are willing to refuse a paying customer, risking boycotts and reputational damage.
At the same time, some businesses may believe the publicity will draw in new clientele. Karimi Brows, which turned away the Israeli-American customer, boasted that it gained 40,000 TikTok followers in the month after the incident.
For its part, Sap Sua appeared to backtrack amid intense public pressure, posting to Instagram that it would welcome “every guest who walks through our doors.” (Sap Sua did not respond to the request for comment.)
But for Lanigan, the damage was done.
“It was one of my favorite restaurants,” Lanigan told the Forward. “But I will never set foot in that place again.”
This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward's free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.
