A poster from Pittsburgh Regional Transit’s rider etiquette campaign, instructing passengers to “Keep it Kosher.” Courtesy of Pittsburgh Regional Transit
By Hannah Feuer
June 6, 2025
Don’t relish your morning commute? Pittsburgh Regional Transit hopes to make bus and subway rides a little less sour, with a new pickle-themed campaign reminding riders to steer clear of jarring behavior.
“Keep it kosher,” one sign reads, “Littering. Salty language. Messy food. That stuff spoils the ride for everyone.”
The text is accompanied by an image of anthropomorphic pickle and hot dog passengers. The misbehaving, mean-looking pickle eats a messy hotdog while standing next to a human-size hot dog passenger who looks understandably glum.
Anyone worth their salt knows Jews and pickles go way back. In the ghettos of Eastern Europe, pickling was a practical way for Jewish communities to preserve food through harsh winters. And Jewish immigrants in New York’s Lower East Side in the late 1800s and early 1900s popularized the now-iconic kosher dill.
So the campaign’s “kosher” nod and use of a classic Jewish deli staple invite the question: Is Pittsburgh Regional Transit intentionally channeling Yiddishkeit?
Adam Brandolph, a spokesperson for Pittsburgh Regional Transit — who is Jewish and whose favorite pickle is “anything spicy” — said the transit authority hadn’t looked at the campaign through a Jewish lens, at least not until the Forward called. He emphasized the secular nature of the campaign.
“‘Kosher’ is at this point so mainstream that we felt that was fine,” he said.
The project began last March, when Pittsburgh Regional Transit polled passengers about the peskiest behaviors they had witnessed on public transit. Among more than 1,000 respondents, top complaints included littering, use of foul language, not using headphones while listening to music or taking a call, smoking or vaping, and refusing to give up seats for passengers in need.
The resulting rider etiquette campaign includes messages such as “Loud noises can be jarring,” accompanied by a pickle carrying a boombox; “They’d relish the seat,” along with a pickle reclining across two subway seats as an elderly pickle slice holding a cane stands by; and “Want a smoke? Just dill with it,” accompanied by a brazen pickle smoking a cigarette next to distressed, humanoid french fries.
Brandolph said the transit authority timed the pickle-themed campaign around the tenth anniversary of Picklesburgh, the city’s annual festival for all-things pickled.
Pittsburgh and pickles have a storied past. H. J. Heinz Company may be best known for its ketchup, but it also helped put Pennsylvania pickles on the map. Today, that tradition is carried on by the Pittsburgh Pickle Company, which has a patented method of cutting their pickles: flat on the bottom, crinkly on the top.
While the Jewish connection may not have been intentional, it’s not far-fetched, according to Eric Lidji, director of the Rauh Jewish Archives at the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh.
In the early 20th century, pickle barrels were a familiar sight along the main retail street of Pittsburgh’s Hill District, then a thriving Jewish neighborhood. And waiters at Pittsburgh’s Jewish delis doled out pickles as an amuse-bouche.
“We’re no different than any other old Ashkenazi Jewish community where pickles were a major part of the cuisine,” Lidji said.
Jewish or not, pickles, it turns out, are the perfect passengers. The transit authority opted for a cartoon character, Brandolph said, because turning a real person into the face of public transit rule-breaking felt a bit harsh. But a pickle? That’s fair game — and oddly relatable.
“We also found that if it’s a little bit more playful, people would say, ‘Yeah, I get it. Okay, I’m not going to do it’,” Brandolph said, “As opposed to being told, like much more directly, ‘No smoking.’ People tend not to listen.”
But the indirect messaging may have an unintended implication. If one must “keep it kosher” on Pittsburgh public transit, can passengers eat messy hot dogs on the light rail so long as the franks are all-beef Hebrew Nationals?
Alas, according to Brandolph, eating is not permitted on any Pittsburgh Regional Transit vehicles.
