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Founded by a Holocaust survivor, a Bronx bakery’s kosher cheesecake is as tasty as ever after 6 decades
(New York Jewish Week) — Near the northern terminus of the 1 train, just south of Van Cortlandt Park, an unassuming Bronx storefront has been producing thousands of dense, delectable cheesecakes each day for more than 60 years.
Adorned with a simple red-and-blue sign and occupying the same storefront throughout its history, S&S Cheesecake has become the stuff of legend: Though other spots — say, Junior’s — may have better name recognition, many in-the-know New Yorkers consider S&S’s cheesecakes to be the best in the city. What’s more, its cheesecake recipe hasn’t changed one bit since Holocaust survivor Fred Schuster, 98, first opened the kosher bakery in 1960.
Though Schuster remains a regular presence at the bakery, these days S&S Cheesecake is operated by one of his daughters, Brenda Ben-Zaken, and her husband Yair. But other than a few nods to modernity — an espresso machine and a small cafe for dine-in enjoyment; upgradedg equipment to increase output to 2,000 cheesecakes a day — little has changed in the past six decades.
“The secret is to bake with love and serve with pride and passion,” Yair Ben-Zaken told the New York Jewish Week of the shop’s success. Since its founding, S&S has supplied cheesecakes to countless restaurants and shops, from as far away as Alaska to as close as the iconic Upper West Side grocery Zabar’s. Their products are available for nationwide shipping via their web site or Goldbelly as well.
Ben-Zaken and Schuster spoke to the New York Jewish Week on a sunny, temperate morning just a few days ahead of Shavuot — a holiday, which this year begins the evening of Thursday, May 25, when Jews traditionally eat cheesecake and other dairy food. Ben-Zaken was busy packing up hundreds of cheesecakes that he is shipping around the country, as well as several that S&S donates to the Riverdale Jewish Center, the Orthodox synagogue where he and Schuster are members.
“It gets busy with Shavuot, [but] there is a lot to celebrate with summer and graduations this time of year as well,” Ben-Zaken said. “We are feeling [the busy season] now, but it’s not the same as Christmas and Thanksgiving — those are the real cheesecake holidays for us.”
Before he established his modest cheesecake empire, Fred Schuster was born in Germany in 1925 — only eight years before Hitler came to power. “That was the end of my childhood,” Schuster told the New York Jewish Week.
In an effort to keep him safe, Schuster’s parents first sent him to a Jewish boarding school near Frankfurt and, when it was forced to close down, he moved in with his grandparents. In 1938, when they became too old to take care of him, Schuster said goodbye to his family — with a commitment to see each other again — and went to live in an orphanage in Frankfurt.
Just before his 14th birthday, Schuster and other children at his orphanage were sent to Switzerland via the Kindertransport. On the train, he met a girl named Karola (middle name Ruth), who went on to become the famous sex therapist and talk show host Dr. Ruth Westheimer.
“I always say, of the group there, Dr. Ruth went into the sex business and did very well. And I went into the cheesecake business and didn’t do too badly myself,” Schuster joked.
In Switzerland, Schuster “developed a passion for baking and worked in kitchens and bakeries there,” he said. He arrived in New York in 1941, where he reunited with his parents and sister. (His father had arrived in the United States via England around 1939, and his mother and sister via France, Spain and Portugal in 1940.)
“Thank God, my parents and everybody made it here,” he said. “We are very happy here. The United States was very good to us.”
And yet, even though many of his family members survived — and Schuster is blessed with four grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren — Schuster still thinks about what the Holocaust took from him, especially his own grandparents. “I’ll never forget it,” he said. “I am very proud of what I have built in spite of that.”
In the 1940s and 50s, Schuster lived in Washington Heights — home to a sizable German Jewish community, including Dr. Ruth, who is still a fixture in the neighborhood at 94 — and worked as a general baker at various restaurants, where he learned to make all types of pastries. However, “cheesecake was always on my mind,” he said. “I said to myself, ‘There isn’t a good cheesecake here. Let me see what I can do.”
Yair Ben-Zaken joined the team in 1986 and works every day except for Shabbat. Pictured in the bakery in New York City, May 22, 2023. (Julia Gergely)
The recipe he landed on — a combination of eggs, vanilla, sugar, butter and heavy cream — is something Schuster calls “absolutely perfect.”
Though cheesecake may be an ancient food, Jews took to cheesecake the way a fish might take to water, according to The Nosher. Though its varieties are numerous — from light and fluffy to dense and sweet — it was Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants who came to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who originated the ultra-rich dessert that’s known as New York-style (or Jewish-style) cheesecake.
That’s Schuster’s specialty, though when Schuster and his wife Sidi opened S&S Cheesecake, he baked all kinds of pastries and cakes. Quickly, however, he narrowed down the menu to only cheesecakes, the bestsellers. These days, S&S sells a chocolate mousse cheesecake, as well as strawberry-, pineapple- and cherry-topped versions of the classic original, which is flavored with vanilla. The OG — which retails in-store for $40 for an 11-inch cake and $20 for a 7-inch one — is his favorite, Schuster said, adding that he always keeps a cheesecake in his fridge for snacking on.
As for Ben-Zaken, after serving in the Israeli Defense Forces as a combat soldier, then working at various food labs in Israel, he began working at the bakery in 1986. Has he dared to change the recipe? “God forbid,” said Ben-Zaken. “Once you know it’s done right, that’s it.”
Schuster, whose wife died in 2017, moved into the Ben-Zakens’ Riverdale home around eight years ago. These days, the two men spend the majority of their time together, baking and talking. “We’ve worked together for many, many years shoulder to shoulder,” said Ben- Zaken, who affectionately calls Schuster “Opa,” which is German for grandfather. “But he is still in charge, I still learn from him.”
During the course of the New York Jewish Week’s visit to the bakery, a handful of customers came in to pick up the cheesecakes for Shavuot. “It’s always worth a trip,” said a man, who was picking up half a dozen cheesecakes for his synagogue in Pelham Parkway, who declined to provide his name. “It’d be worth the trip even if I lived in Atlantic City.”
For Ben-Zaken, his favorite part of the job is working alongside Schuster. Running S&S Cheesecake has been life-changing, he said, particularly following his recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder he suffered as an Israeli soldier. “I think if there’s anybody that I love more than anything in the world, it is this guy. I owe him everything,” Ben-Zaken said. “But I don’t just owe him, I also just enjoy being with him all the time. He’s still young. In spirit, he’s younger than all of us.”
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Mamdani appoints Phylisa Wisdom, progressive Jewish leader, to run Office to Combat Antisemitism
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has picked Phylisa Wisdom, the executive director of the progressive New York Jewish Agenda, to lead the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism. This announcement comes as the city grapples with a sharp rise in antisemitic attacks and as the Mamdani administration faces scrutiny from the Jewish community following a divisive election that turned, in part, on Mamdani’s positions on Israel.
Wisdom, 39, has aligned herself with some of the positions Mamdani has taken on countering antisemitism, including opposition to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which considers most forms of anti-Zionism as antisemitic. Mamdani has thus far declined to say how his administration will define antisemitism when determining which cases to investigate or pursue. Wisdom has also called for more sympathy towards Palestinians, and in November 2023, Wisdom’s organization, under her leadership, spearheaded a statement by liberal Jewish elected officials calling for a bilateral ceasefire in Gaza.
In her new role, Wisdom will serve as Mamdani’s point person to the Jewish community. Her appointment is another signal that Mamdani’s anti-Zionist posture will continue to factor importantly into his leadership of the city, which is home to the largest concentration of Jews outside Israel. Her challenge will be facilitating dialogue with people who hold widely diverging viewpoints, without overriding a mayor whose positions on Israel are deeply held and long-standing.
Wisdom told Jewish Insider last month that Mamdani’s pledge to tackle the scourge of antisemitism “will require a comprehensive strategy” with input from the diversity of New York’s Jewish community.
The office’s current executive director, Moshe Davis, is a holdover of the Adams administration.
Josh Binderman, a political strategist who handled Jewish outreach during the mayoral campaign and transition, will continue in a leadership role under the agency headed by Wisdom, a City Hall spokesperson said. Binderman was Mamdani’s informal Jewish liaison in the opening days of the new administration. He worked with both allies of the mayor and leaders of mainstream Jewish organizations who are unsettled by Mamdani.
Mamdani’s first month
The appointment comes as antisemitic incidents continue to account for a majority of reported hate crimes in New York City. According to the New York City Police Department, antisemitic incidents made up 57% of all hate crimes reported in 2025. The trend continued into the new year: NYPD data show that more than half of all hate crime incidents reported in January were targeted at Jews or Jewish spaces, including a rabbi who was verbally harassed and assaulted, and swastika graffiti that, two days in a row, appeared at a playground frequented by Orthodox families in the Borough Park neighborhood in Brooklyn.
More recently, Mamdani drew praise from Jewish leaders for his rapid and forceful response to the attempted car attack at Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters.
Mamdani said the office, established by former Mayor Eric Adams last year through an executive order, will pursue his commitment to addressing rising acts of hate against Jews. The office is tasked with monitoring antisemitic incidents, coordinating city agencies, engaging with Jewish communities across the city and advising the mayor on policy responses to antisemitism and related hate crimes. Mamdani opted to keep the office open while revoking, as one of his first acts in office, executive orders tied to antisemitism.
Mamdani faced a rocky first month in navigating Jewish communal concerns. His Day One move to repeal the adoption of the controversial IHRA definition, which the office to combat antisemitism pursued as a framework for investigating hate crimes, prompted swift backlash from mainstream Jewish organizations. A week later, he was criticized for his response to protests outside Park East Synagogue. City Hall quietly engaged Jewish leaders to defuse tensions, but Mamdani’s eventual statement that “chants in support of a terrorist organization have no place in our city” came later than many had hoped and was viewed by critics as restrained and overly cautious.
Last week, City Council Speaker Julie Menin, who is Jewish, announced a new task force dedicated to combating antisemitism; its co-chairs said the group would take a more assertive legislative role in addressing rising concerns among Jewish New Yorkers. One of its co-chairs is Inna Vernikov, a Republican and Mamdani critic, which could set up potential tension between the City Council and the mayor’s office over how to respond to the rise in antisemitism.
Mamdani also expressed reservations about legislation proposed by Menin to create a 100-foot buffer zone around synagogues and other houses of worship. “I wouldn’t sign any legislation that we find to be outside of the bounds of the law,” he said. However, he broadly supports the Council’s five-point plan to combat antisemitism, including $1.25 million in funding for the Museum of Jewish Heritage and the creation of a city hotline to report antisemitic incidents, he said.
Who is Phylisa Wisdom?
Born and raised in San Diego, California, she grew up in the Reform movement, actively engaged in NFTY, and learned advocacy through the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center under Rabbi David Saperstein. Wisdom is a member of Park Slope’s Congregation Beth Elohim, where Mamdani addressed the congregation while running for mayor.
Wisdom’s positions and past work drew scrutiny from some Orthodox leaders as rumors of her possible appointment began to circulate recently. She previously served as director of government affairs for Yaffed, a pro–secular education group that scrutinized private yeshivas in Brooklyn over inadequate secular education.
In 2023, Wisdom was tapped as head of the New York Jewish Agenda, a progressive advocacy group formed in 2020 to be a voice for liberal Jews in New York. On a recent webinar, Wisdom described her group’s mission as advocating, organizing and convening “liberal Jewish New Yorkers to impact policy, politics and communal discourse.”
The group criticized Adams’ Jewish advisory council in 2023 because it overrepresented the Orthodox community and men.
On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, NYJA — whose founders include Rep. Jerry Nadler and former City Comptroller Brad Lander, both of whom describe themselves as liberal Zionists — has backed a two-state solution and called for a rights-based and humane approach toward Palestinians living under occupation. It is listed as a member of the Progressive Israel Network. In public statements and on social media, Wisdom has criticized Israeli settlement expansion while also stressing the security and safety of Israelis. Under her predecessor, Matt Nosanchuk, the group advocated for missions to Israel to learn firsthand about the conflict from Israelis and Palestinians. (Mamdani has said he would not continue the tradition of mayoral visits to the Jewish state.)
“We believe that legitimate criticism of policies of the government of Israel is not inherently antisemitic, and those who weaponize it only undermine our efforts and put us in harm’s way,” Wisdom wrote in an op-ed during the mayoral election. “While it is not necessarily antisemitic to criticize Israel, there are those who are antisemitic who use criticism of Israel as a mask for their antisemitism.”
Wisdom was a member of Mamdani’s inaugural committee and hosted him at a Hanukkah celebration for the leadership of the liberal Jewish group. In his remarks at the Hanukkah event, Mamdani said he associates himself with NYJA in “the bringing together of people” on critical issues.
The post Mamdani appoints Phylisa Wisdom, progressive Jewish leader, to run Office to Combat Antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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Yiddish theater is revived in Tbilisi, Georgia after 100 years
When Lasha Shakulashvili was a grad student at Tbilisi State University in 2022, he stumbled onto something unbelievable. In the National Archives of Georgia, he found Yiddish posters from 1910 announcing theater performances put on by a grassroots, community-run troupe in Tbilisi in what was then still part of the Russian Empire. The troupe was called the Jewish Division of Musical-Melodrama Art.
The posters were fragile and there were only a few of them. Along with them was a single photo he found in a 1917 copy of The Jewish Daily Forward, found in the archives of the National Library of Israel. The paper had a short dispatch mentioning the Ashkenazi school in Tbilisi and the photo showed a teacher writing the Yiddish word friling — spring — on a chalkboard.
Shakulashvili was surprised. Almost nothing had been written about Ashkenazi Jewish heritage in Georgia because most Jews in Georgia were kartveli ebraelebi or Georgian Jews; ‘Mountain Jews’ (Jewish inhabitants of the eastern and northern Caucasus) and Sephardic Jews. Shakulashvili was eager to find out more.
Born in Tbilisi to Orthodox Christian parents, he was raised in part by a Jewish nanny who taught him Russian and Yiddish. That early exposure set him on his scholarly path – and instilled in him a love for Yiddish and Ashkenazi culture.
Before turning to academia, Shakulashvili, who’s now a Yiddish scholar, Jewish history educator and digital storyteller, worked as a diplomat for Georgia’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations and the Georgian Foreign Ministry. Thanks to this career, he told me: “I look at things as an academic and a diplomat. As a diplomat, you have to be cautious but also persistent. A scholar does that, too.”
That persistence led him to write a dissertation on his findings, and publish some of his early discoveries in the Forward in 2022. His thesis is on the role of Yiddish theater in Georgia in the Jewish enlightenment. “Yiddish theater was groundbreaking at a time when Georgia was a very conservative place,”Shakulashvili said. “There were more actresses than actors, women were leading it, and there were plays that explored arranged marriages and women getting revenge. It was a ‘Belle Epoque’: Ashkenazis had been in Georgia less than a century and they changed the life of the whole community.”
Shakulashvili traced how Ashkenazi Jews began arriving in Georgia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, fleeing poverty and pogroms in densely populated communities in the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement. Before the 1917 Revolution, about 5,000 Ashkenazim lived in Georgia, joining an already diverse Jewish population.
Shakulashvili visited Jewish cemeteries, eventually finding graves of every actor whose name was mentioned on the 1910 theater posters. He conducted oral history interviews with Jewish residents of Georgia from different Jewish communities and learned how interconnected different Jewish populations were: Sephardic and Georgian-Jewish sources told him about their grandmothers being educated at the Yiddish school in a time when many schools didn’t accept girls. In turn, the Sephardic community has taken on the task of preserving the two historic Ashkenazi synagogues.
His journey took him to archives in Tbilisi, Jerusalem and Oxford, England. “I had to bring these stories back to life somehow,” he said. “It’s one thing to find a poster and prove the theater existed, but who played there and where did they come from and how did they learn? My curiosity for the theater led me to find out more about the Yiddish schools. One thing led to another — there was a school, there was a society, a whole culture. I wanted to find a complete picture.”
The majority of Georgian-born Jews have since emigrated to Israel or the United States. According to his interviews, most of them did so not because of fear or persecution, but simply for better economic opportunities after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Shakulashvili shared discoveries with his students at the Paideia Institute in Stockholm and Tbilisi State University, where he was lecturing. He then began sharing his discoveries on Instagram. One early video he posted showed him offering his mostly non-Jewish students cookies shaped like letters of the alef-beyz (the Hebrew alphabet) — a traditional way of welcoming children into Jewish learning.
When Shakulashvili started speaking publicly about the long-lost Yiddish theater, non-Jewish Georgian actors and directors reached out. Many were stunned to learn that Tbilisi once had a Yiddish stage, shut down in 1926 by Soviet authorities. A question emerged: Could the theater be revived?
Shakulashvili’s discovery and networks forged online brought together Georgian historians, Jewish community leaders and actors of all backgrounds. Ana Sanaia, a prominent Georgian actress, director and playwright emerged as the producer who’d make this dream a reality.
A century after its last performance, the Tbilisi Yiddish Theater reopened in 2023. The first production – performed in Yiddish and old Russian, with Georgian supertitles – was Osip Dymov’s 1907 drama Shema Yisroel (named for a centerpiece prayer in Judaism). Jewish protagonists convert to Christianity to survive, only to be rejected by their families and left stranded between identities.
The reopening in Tbilisi came at a tense time. Since the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and the war in Gaza, Jewish cultural institutions elsewhere have faced protests and boycotts. Georgia has largely avoided that backlash, something Shakulashvili attributes to the country’s strong identification with its Jewish history.
Still, Georgia is politically polarized, especially as Russia’s war in Ukraine continues to shape regional affairs. The theater is self-funded exclusively through independent fundraising, Ana Sanaia, the theater’s producer, told me.
While Shakulashvili has since stepped back from the theater, his research paved the way for recovering the forgotten Yiddish culture of Georgia. He is now based in Israel, where he produces digital content, leads heritage tours and travels for lectures. He still spends the spring semester teaching in Tbilisi.
Meanwhile, Sanaia continues to produce plays, raise funds and recruit actors. She is currently producing her own play in Georgian about the Yiddish-speaking community and their relationship with Abkhaz Muslims in a Black Sea town in 1907.
Shakulashvili’s latest project focuses on online public education about the diverse arts, culture and languages of the Jewish people, through a platform he calls “Jewish Storytelling.” He is also working on a memoir about his discovery and the journey it sent him on.
“I’m proud to be a Georgian Orthodox Christian, and I am proud to work in Jewish studies,” Shakulashvili said. “Everyday I say ‘thank you’ to God that I have been able to do what I love.”
The post Yiddish theater is revived in Tbilisi, Georgia after 100 years appeared first on The Forward.
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US Condemns South Africa’s Expulsion of Israeli Diplomat
South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa attends the 20th East Asia Summit (EAS), as part of the 47th ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Oct. 27, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hasnoor Hussain
The United States on Tuesday condemned South Africa’s decision to expel Israel’s top diplomat last week, a State Department spokesperson said, calling the African nation’s step a part of prioritizing “grievance politics.”
“Expelling a diplomat for calling out the African National Congress party’s ties to Hamas and other antisemitic radicals prioritizes grievance politics over the good of South Africa and its citizens,” Tommy Pigott, the State Department’s deputy spokesperson, said on X.
South Africa’s embassy in Washington had no immediate comment.
On Friday, South Africa declared the top diplomat at Israel’s embassy persona non grata and ordered him out within 72 hours.
It accused him of “unacceptable violations of diplomatic norms and practice,” including insulting South Africa’s president.
Israel responded by expelling South Africa’s senior diplomatic representative to its country.
Relations between the countries have been strained since South Africa brought a genocide case over Israel’s defensive military campaign against Hamas in Gaza at the International Court of Justice. Israel has rejected the case as baseless, calling it an “obscene exploitation” of the Genocide Convention and noting that the Jewish state is targeting terrorists who use civilians as human shields in its military campaign.
The genocide case has also contributed to US President Donald Trump’s attacks on Pretoria, including verbal scolding, trade sanctions, and an executive order last year cutting all US funding.
Since the start of the war in Gaza, the South African government has been one of Israel’s fiercest critics, actively confronting the Jewish state on the international stage.
Beyond its open hostility toward Israel, South Africa has actively supported Hamas, hosting officials from the Palestinian terrorist group and expressing solidarity with their “cause.”
In one instance, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa led a crowd at an election rally in a chant of “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free” — a popular slogan among anti-Israel activists that has been widely interpreted as a genocidal call for the destruction of the Jewish state, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.