Deby Goodman used to be a cantor at a Conservative synagogue. She also has worked as an accountant and once owned a spa, “the only one around with a mezuzah on every doorpost,” said the Hadassah life member who sits on the board of directors of the Jewish National Fund’s local office in Orange County, Calif. Largely retired, Goodman, 70, now writes a Substack column about Israel and, occasionally, freelances as a karaoke DJ and as a cantor for weddings and funerals.

She and her husband, Jeff, are also currently shomrim, or guards, at their Orthodox shul, Chabad Beth Meir HaCohen in Yorba Linda, roles they have held ever since they helped to establish the synagogue’s security team seven years ago. They carry their firearms every day, even on Shabbat.

“We are observant, and I normally don’t carry anything on Shabbat,” said Goodman, who has been shooting for more than 60 years and described herself as politically conservative. “But a number of prominent Israeli rabbis”—most notably chief rabbi of the Israel police, Rami Berachyahu, in 2023—“encouraged people to carry on Shabbat because it’s pikuach nefesh [saving a soul], protecting your friends, neighbors and family.”

Roberta “Robbie” Tarnove also feels strongly about protecting her synagogue. A National Rifle Association-certified shooting instructor, Tarnove has a concealed carry permit but, before the October 7 attacks, had never carried a gun to Temple Beth David, her Reform congregation in Temple City, Calif. Now, after checking with the rabbi and the security guard, she brought a gun to a recent service.

“I don’t love carrying a gun all the time,” said Tarnove, who is in her early 60s and identifies as a political progressive. “It’s not my lifestyle. I don’t like to live that way.” But with family members present, “I wanted to be able to defend them, so I did bring a gun with me to shul.” 

Tarnove and Goodman may not align religiously and politically, but both own multiple guns and identify as pro-Israel. They find common ground not only in actively protecting their synagogues but also as members of Bullets & Bagels, a self-described “Jew-ish,” Zionist and apolitical gun club in Southern California.

For many Jews, the October 7 Hamas terror attacks in Israel shattered their assumption of safety, which had already been shaken in the wake of incidents like the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018. The national and global picture since then has further fractured any sense of security as stories of antisemitic attacks have flooded Jewish news and social media accounts with increasing and alarming frequency.

In the United States, the Anti-Defamation League reported a 200 percent increase in antisemitic incidents between October 7, 2023, and September 24, 2024. They range from vandalism and graffiti, like the hateful words spray-painted on the San Francisco Hillel, located near San Francisco State University, and the Chabad of Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, to arson and physical violence, including assaults on Jews in Brooklyn like an attack on a 13-year-old boy in Crown Heights on his way to school.

In Goodman’s neighborhood, where she said Jews have good relationships with the wider community, she and others are nevertheless concerned about anti-Jewish hate.

“You almost never see it in this corner of Orange County,” Goodman said, “but that doesn’t mean it isn’t out there. This makes it easy for people to become complacent that it can’t happen here. But the bad guys are mobile and [bad things] can happen anywhere.”

“There’s a much stronger urge to want to be armed and ready,” said Tarnove, a member of the Los Angeles-based L.A. Progressive Shooters, an association of people who define themselves to the left politically. Like many progressives these days, she has felt isolated from former friends because she supports Israel. After one friend gave her the cold shoulder, Tarnove said, she “tried to explain the nuance, that I’m not anti-Palestinian, but anti-terror and anti-Hamas,” but he cut her off in an email by calling her a Zionist. 

On the Sunday morning after the November 2024 elections, about 40 Californians drove past signs for Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park and Disneyland in Anaheim to arrive at FT3 Tactical, a shooting range in Stanton, by 7:00 a.m. Meeting so early on Sunday all but ensures that group members have the range to themselves. Privacy provides a safe space where “we control the environment and the social culture,” explained Dr. Fred Kogen, a retired mohel who founded Bullets & Bagels in 2013.

Inside the anteroom to the range, one wall is decorated with “We the People” in bold calligraphic script; opposite stands a display case with varied firearms and ammunition. The group of mostly 50- and 60-somethings greeted each other warmly and bellied up to the breakfast bar, set right next to the weapons case. Coffee, bagels and spreads were laid out atop a table draped in a banner reading “Bullets & Bagels: Ready, Aim, Schmear.”

All legal restrictions around firearms are upheld at club gatherings. New shooters are trained in the basics off-range with a patient instructor and a fake gun before they can even touch, let alone load, aim and shoot, a real one.

Tarnove discovered Bullets & Bagels by Googling “Jewish” and “guns” not long after the 2016 election, when she said she began feeling the “need to protect myself” in an era of heightened political rhetoric. She attended her first Bullets & Bagels brunch with “a lot of trepidation,” she recalled. “When Fred announced that the club was apolitical, it was an incredible relief to know that I wasn’t going to be bombarded with politics,” said the clinical laboratory scientist. “It was a politically safe space for me to have my Jewish identity and gun identity together.”

Dr. Kogen, who is in his mid-60s and practiced family medicine until the early 1990s, spent three decades as a mohel for Conservative and Reform Jews and Jews-by-choice in Southern California. In 1996, The New York Times dubbed him “The Mohel of the Moment,” and in 2014, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency named him to its list of “American Top Mohels.”

At 40, he discovered an interest in shooting and planned an informal event at a local range; 60 people showed up. Six months later, he founded Bullets & Bagels and began hosting quarterly meetups.

More “people would want to shoot if the culture was different” surrounding guns, Dr. Kogen said, referring to the politically conservative, testosterone-infused stereotypes that, accurately or inaccurately, are associated with those who use firearms. He said that Bullets & Bagels has 220 members who pay the $10 monthly dues—an almost 20 percent increase since October 7—and a mailing list of more than 675 names.

Ninety percent of attendees at Bullets & Bagels events are returnees, according to Dr. Kogen. Participants range in age, with an estimated average age of about 55.

He said the two oldest enthusiasts were both 102 years old when they found Bullets & Bagels. One was a woman, who has since passed away, who had never pulled a trigger before her first meeting and, by event’s end, was shooting a .22 caliber revolver at a target 10 yards away. The other is a Holocaust survivor—and practicing dentist until age 93—who at one gathering shared his reflections on the Shoah.

About 30 percent of current Bullets & Bagels members are women over 40 who had “never contemplated holding a firearm, let alone shooting one” until joining the club, Dr. Kogen said.

Attitudes about guns vary among American Jews, and they may be changing. A survey by the American Jewish Committee in 2018 found that 70 percent of those polled believed it was more important to control gun ownership than to protect the rights of Americans to own guns.

“The majority of Jews in the country historically have been liberal on the left, pro-gun reform, pro-gun control, opposed to personal gun ownership,” Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran New York-based political strategist who is also an Orthodox rabbi, told NBC News just weeks after the October 7 attacks. “Jews with guns were always seen as an odd event.”

But now, Sheinkopf added, it seems the long-held view—of the United States being the “one place in the world where Jews are safe—is coming to an end.”

Reports over the past year in media outlets such as Haaretz, The Washington Post, The Jerusalem Post, NBC News and Fox News suggest anecdotally that more American Jews are interested in learning to shoot and own guns for self-defense after October 7. But there isn’t hard data to support those claims.

Firearm surveys from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Everytown for Gun Safety and the Pew Research Center include data only from the first half of 2023, and don’t break down their findings by faith. A June 2023 Pew study, for example, analyzed gun ownership through variables such as gender and race but not religion. Pew found that 40 percent of American men and 25 percent of women said they own a gun, while 38 percent of White Americans, 24 percent of Black Americans, 20 percent of Hispanic Americans and 10 percent of Asian Americans are gun owners.

Yet, there are a growing number of initiatives for Jews who want to bear arms. Like Dr. Kogen’s group, many of these launched prior to October 7, 2023, but have since seen an increase in interest.

In Charleston, S.C., Bagels and Bullets (no relation to Dr. Kogen’s club) trains members of the Jewish community to shoot. Rabbi Raziel Cohen, a nationwide firearms instructor and speaker known as “The Tactical Rabbi,” offers a line of merchandise with the logo “Glocks and Bagels.” The organization Magen Am provides armed security services and training for a number of West Coast Jewish communities. The New York State Jewish Gun Club, based in Rockland County, N.Y., helps its members obtain permits and training and advocates upholding the Second Amendment. And the Washington, D.C.-based Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership identifies itself as “America’s most aggressive civil rights organization” working to destroy gun control.

But for most members of Bullets & Bagels, their association is as much about the schmooze as the guns. Nearly every club member interviewed for this story used the word “camaraderie” to describe what they found at events. And Dr. Kogen himself said the primary reason he runs these programs is community. 

“My passion is the networking and the educational opportunities [around guns] that this provides the people, and the people I’ve met as a result,” he said.

Over breakfast at most meetings, attendees hear from an expert. In November 2024, it was Lawrence Zanoff, known in the entertainment industry as the “armorer to the stars” for his work consulting on Hollywood productions that involve weapons. December’s gathering featured Rick Travis, legislative director of the California Rifle & Pistol Association.

One Bullets & Bagels member in her late 60s who asked not to be identified says that attending events helps her feel less alone as she trains and considers purchasing a gun for self-defense. (She wanted anonymity due to concerns about judgment from her community, which she describes as diverse religiously, ethnically and politically, for even thinking about a gun purchase.)

She said she’s not happy that getting a gun “is something I have to be thinking about.” But when she’s among the Bullets & Bagels crowd, “I realize I’m not being paranoid or an outlier. It’s a legitimate and important concern that people have taken action on, therefore it is appropriate for me to take action.”

At the November event, Deby Goodman was recovering from an injury and sat out the “bullets” part of the program. The “Bring Them Home” dog tag adorned with a yellow ribbon and hanging from a chain around her neck and the blue-and-white flags decorating her fingernails left no doubt as to her concern for the October 7 hostages being held in Gaza. The manicure, first done in October 2023, gets refreshed regularly, she said, and “it stays that way until all the hostages are free.”

Several other members also wore hostage dog tags around their necks, yellow ribbons or shirts that read “Bring Them Home Now.” Jeff Goodman sported a Bullets & Bagels branded kippah and a shirt reading: “If you can read this thank a teacher. If you can read this in English thank a soldier.”

While Bullets & Bagels members “all have something in common, I’m sure we have a lot of things that are not in common,” said Merle Newman. “That’s why politics is off the table, as Fred says, because we have guns, and since politics and those conversations tend to get heated, they’re better left outside.”

At the monthly meetups, most people engage in shooting practice using revolvers or semi-automatic pistols. One member who collects historical firearms often brings in a few unusual pieces for others to try. Dr. Kogen enjoys using a carbine—a small rifle that can use pistol-caliber rounds and has limited recoil—for target shooting. Newman has a Sig Sauer SP2022 and a 9mm.

“You have to try different guns,” said Newman, who is in her 70s. “Some feel better in your hand—if you have a big hand, a small hand. It’s kind of like utensils: Some forks feel better in your hand than others.”

The gathering was punctuated by the sharp smell and sound of gun blasts from the various firearms during the shooting part of the program, only somewhat muted by the glass separating the anteroom from FT3 Tactical’s active range. Shooters donned protective eyewear and two layers of ear protection—foam earplugs and headset-style protectors—before entering the range through two sets of doors. Members lined up in individual lanes to shoot at targets up to 25 feet away. Beyond the targets lay the berm, a barrier made of shredded car tires that prevents fired bullets from leaving the indoor range.

According to the Giffords Law Center and Everytown for Gun Safety, two organizations that promote gun safety and gun control, the state of California, with the second largest Jewish population in the country, ranks No. 1 in the nation for strong gun safety laws and has some of the lowest rates of both gun deaths and gun ownership. New York and Florida, home to the first and third largest concentration of Jews, rank fourth and 21st, respectively, for strong gun safety laws.

In the Jewish world, many individuals and groups, including Hadassah, advocate for strict gun control laws. 

“It’s horrible that people get shot,” Deby Goodman said. “But what you never hear about are the many cases in which guns prevent violence. Just the fact that people know that there is someone who is armed is a deterrence. ‘Gun-free zone’ signs tell the bad guys, ‘Come on in, nobody is going to stop you.’ ”

“I am a gun person in favor of gun control,” Tarnove, the NRA-certified instructor, said, noting that the majority of gun owners in the United States support some degree of gun control, for example, background checks. She also believes in a waiting period to purchase a gun because “most gun deaths are suicide, not violence.” By enforcing a waiting period, she said, it gives a person with suicidal ideation time to reconsider.

“Gun control needs to be well thought out and to make sense,” Tarnove said, “not just an inconvenience to law-abiding gun owners.”

“Concealed carry should be highly regulated, and open carry should not be allowed anywhere,” Tarnove added, unless one is licensed, trained and insured. “I don’t want to live my life as if there’s going to be a gunfight any second. So many want to be the hero in their own little movie. But statistically the chance of getting in a gun altercation—there are so many more things likely to happen to you.”

When she was cleaning out her late parents’ home, Bullets & Bagels member Wendy Grossman, who is in her 60s, found her father’s World War II .32 semi-automatic Colt. She wrapped the gun in a blanket, put it in a shoebox in her closet and forgot about it for years, until she organized that closet during a Covid lockdown and came across it.

“I realized that I needed to at least know the safety factors of having a gun,” she said. “I was worried about hurting myself or anyone else.” Grossman, who lives in Los Angeles but is planning a move out of state, has since learned from NRA-licensed safety officers and instructors at Bullets & Bagels events. She also has trained at International Tactical Training Seminars, which feature crisis-response courses.

It was Newman who introduced Grossman to Bullets & Bagels in 2021; Grossman has been attending ever since, sometimes managing food and setup. She has now invited several other women to join, including Danielle Evans, a 60-something CPA who is not Jewish but self-identifies as a Zionist. Evans has now attended approximately 25 Bullets & Bagels events and says she has found community among its members.

“In today’s world, I feel it is very important for a woman to know how to protect herself,” Evans said. “I also believe that many people have a fear of guns because they don’t understand them. Even if someone has a fear of shooting, I try to get them to learn how a gun works.”

Newman’s personal research into firearm ownership was inspired by the ascending crime rates in Santa Monica, where she and her husband, Marc Sniderman, have lived for nearly four decades. Their neighborhood was once friendly and safe, Newman said, but now “crime has become so intense” that they won’t walk the 24 steps from their front door to their mailbox after dark. The Newmans have been members of Bullets & Bagels for more than a decade.

“We feel safer knowing that if somebody came into our house, we can protect ourselves,” Newman said. “We hope to never, ever, ever have to experience it,” she added, but “if we had to protect ourselves, we have something we could do.”

When first training with guns, Deby Goodman recommends that shooters consider not just their skill level but their capacity to potentially use a firearm in a threatening situation.

“Before you pick up a gun for the first time, think about, ‘If I or my family were threatened, would I be able to shoot someone and kill them?’ ” said Goodman who, like everyone else interviewed for this story, said she has never been in a  situation during which she drew her firearm. “And if the answer is ‘no,’ leave the gun on the table and walk away. If you’re not ready to defend people completely, you shouldn’t be handling a gun, because your enemy will sense that, and they’ll take the gun away and use it on you.”

Tarnove reminds her students that shooting a gun is not a game and requires regular practice.

“You can’t stick a gun in a drawer and expect to be able to pull it out in a situation and use it effectively,” she said. “Six months from now, you’re not going to hit the target if you don’t practice regularly.

“Having a gun,” she added, “is a tremendous responsibility, because once that bullet leaves the barrel, whatever damage it does, whoever is hurt, you’re responsible.”

For her part, Goodman believes the right to bear arms is about freedom, and she cites Exodus 13:19 as support.

“The children of Israel went up from Egypt carrying arms,” Goodman said. The verse uses the word “chamushim,” which is often translated as “armed,” but which also could mean “in a military formation”—or something else entirely. “That’s the difference between slaves and free people. Slaves cannot carry arms. Free people can, and thank God, we are free people.” 

---

Esther D. Kustanowitz is a Los Angeles-based writer, editor and consultant. She also co-hosts The Bagel Report podcast.