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An East Williamsburg appetizing shop offers ‘a taste of nostalgia’ to its customers
(New York Jewish Week) — Let’s face it: Classic Jewish deli and appetizing shops are having a moment. According to Bon Appetit, “the old school deli is the newest hot girl hangout,” while an exhibit on Jewish delis at the New-York Historical Society continues to draw crowds. These days, we’re basically all Estelle Reiner and we want to have what Sally Albright is having.
In recent years, a whole new crop of appetizing stores and delis have popped up in New York, with even Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) from “Succession” getting into the business: He’s an investor in the newish Jewish lunch counter S&P. And while some of these establishments, like Edith’s Sandwich Counter, seek to bridge the gap between an older generation and a new one, the year-old Simply Nova in East Williamsburg is all about harkening back to the days of yore.
From their tagline (“A taste of nostalgia”) to their classic deli boards, Simply Nova hopes to transport their clientele to the past.
According to Sean Brownlee, co-owner of Simply Nova, their emphasis on nostalgia is having the intended effect. “When people come in, the first thing they say is, ‘This reminds me of my childhood,’” Brownlee, 25, told the New York Jewish Week. “And that’s a really good, good feeling to know that we bring old memories — old, good memories — to people.”
The menu’s old-school offerings certainly help, too: Simply Nova boasts everything you’d want from an appetizing store and more — including, but certainly not limited to, bagels and all of the requisite fixings, pastrami and roast beef sandwiches, chopped liver, herring, matzah ball soup, latkes and a bakery corner featuring babka, rugelach, macaroons and black and white cookies. Simply Nova has scores of lox options on offer, like a pastrami cured salmon, beet gravlax and an Icelandic salmon of which Simply Nova is New York City’s exclusive purveyor. (My favorite is the classic Eastern Nova Scotia.) And yes, gluten-free bagels and dairy-free cream cheese are available as well.
Brownlee first met co-owner Felix Placencia, 52, when they worked together at a few other New York City appetizing stores. (Brownlee and Placencia declined to name those shops, though this Instagram post indicates they both had worked at Russ & Daughters.) They realized that with their combined experience and passion, they could go into business for themselves.
Brownlee has spent his entire seven-year career at appetizing shops, Placencia has 26 years devoted to the same. But perhaps just as important as work history was the shared conclusion that there was something missing from their previous places of employment: an emphasis on service.
“We wanted to create a more close relationship with the customers and bring nostalgic spirits to them, especially neighborhoods like these, where they don’t have that close relationships with those businesses out there,” Brownlee said. He estimates that their clientele is about evenly divided across generational lines, with approximately 45% of them Jewish.
“These days there is not many truly neighborhood store[s] where people go and it’s ‘their’ store, where they can go every week or every day if they desire to, and feel comfortable,” Brownlee said, estimating that 80% of their clientele are repeat customers.
“We believe that the first experience of the food is the service,” he added. “So if you come to a place that doesn’t give you that first impression of customer service, even though the food is great, you’re not going to taste it.”
Brownlee and Placencia are both of Dominican heritage, and although neither is Jewish, their time working in appetizing stores has instilled in them a deep love of traditional appetizing foods. “I felt very connected to it,” Placencia said, both of the cuisine and the process of making it.
Brownlee said that at Simply Nova, they work to cater to their customers’ individual needs (pun somewhat intended). Brownlee said Simply Nova recently catered a wedding at Gracie Mansion. Although they typically prepare their platters in-house and drop them off, the customer requested staff prep on site, and so their wish was granted.
Simply Nova’s predilection for the past also stands in contrast with its neighborhood. Nestled on Metropolitan Avenue between Graham Avenue and Humboldt Street, Simply Nova is on a block where a giant luxury apartment building replaced a beloved White Castle, and where many of the local establishments seem to be more interested in chasing trends than serving their customers. Simply Nova is a departure from some of the neighborhood’s other, trendier fare — as well as its many coffee shops and bars.
“Many customers always say, ‘This is so good, we needed a place like this in the neighborhood,’” Placencia said.
When the partners were looking a location, Brownlee, who lives in the area, happened to know the landlord of the building that previously housed The Bagel Store — famous for creating the rainbow bagel — which closed its Williamsburg doors in the summer of 2019.
“It was perfect,” Brownlee said.
Just last month, Simply Nova celebrated its one-year anniversary. And Brownlee and Placencia, a Bronx resident, couldn’t be happier with how their business has evolved. Instead of relying on advertising, their customer base has built by word of mouth — exactly as they’d hoped it would.
“We’ve always wanted to build a place that grows slowly by customers who really trust us, and that fulfills us, knowing those people keep coming back,” Brownlee said, adding that their customers come from all over the city.
Now, Brownlee and Placencia are looking to the future. “We’re already planning to expand,” Brownlee said, sharing that they’re hoping to open a second location later this year.
Brownlee expressed how important it is to provide their Jewish customers with an authentic experience to connect them with their heritage. “I feel that this food is very special,” he said. “Many different cultures, or countries, they have their type of food, and it’s easy for people to find it. It’s not so easy for people who grew up with this kind of food to find it.”
While there has been a surge of appetizing shops in Brooklyn and Manhattan over the last decade or so, this wasn’t always the case — particularly when you consider how bountiful appetizing shops once were in New York City. When Shelsky’s Cobble Hill location opened in 2011, it was the first new appetizing store in Brooklyn in 60 years.
Brownlee insists appetizing stores can and should be for everyone. “Anybody who loves food, and loves lox or good soup or good bagel — they could come and enjoy [it] if it’s presented to them the right way,” he said. “They don’t necessarily have to know about the food.”
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Anti-Israel Activist Cameron Kasky Drops US Congressional Bid in New York
Cameron Kasky, former US congressional candidate in New York’s 12th district. Photo: Screenshot
Cameron Kasky, a prominent Gen Z political activist and Parkland school shooting survivor, has withdrawn from the Democratic primary race to succeed US Rep. Jerry Nadler in New York’s 12th Congressional District, saying he plans to focus instead on human rights in the West Bank.
Kasky, 25, announced his decision on Tuesday in a social media post, ending a short-lived congressional bid that had drawn attention for its sharp criticism of Israel and its appeal to younger progressive voters. He said recent travel to the West Bank had influenced his decision to step away from electoral politics for now.
“Thank you to everyone who supported our human rights-centered campaign for New York’s 12th Congressional District,” Kasky posted on X.
“It’s the honor of my life to be walking out of this race with the chance to do what must be done,” he continued, adding that he intends to focus on documenting and opposing what he described as “settler violence” in the West Bank.
His exit marks the latest shake-up in the already crowded Democratic primary to represent one of Manhattan’s most reliably blue districts, which spans parts of the Upper East Side, Upper West Side, and Midtown. Nadler, who has represented the district for decades, announced his retirement last year, triggering a wide-open contest.
Kasky, who is Jewish and rose to national prominence as a co-founder of the March for Our Lives movement after surviving the 2018 Parkland shooting, entered the race late last year with a platform centered on gun reform, progressive domestic policies, and a call to halt US military aid to Israel. He had repeatedly accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, a position that set him apart from much of the Democratic establishment in New York.
Kasky has also accused Israeli leaders of advancing the war in Gaza in service of the “Greater Israel” agenda — a fallacious conspiracy theory which claims that Israel seeks to expand its borders into the Sinai Peninsula, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iraq.
Such views drew praise from some younger activists but also criticism from pro-Israel groups and Democratic leaders in the district, where support for the Jewish state has historically been strong.
During his short-lived campaign Kasky notably vowed to vote against all aid to Israel, including aid to furnish the Iron Dome missile interception system.
With Kasky’s departure, the field remains packed with well-known figures, including New York State Assembly members Micah Lasher and Alex Bores, journalist and former cable news anchor Jami Floyd, and Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of former President John F. Kennedy. Conservative lawyer George Conway, a longtime critic of US President Donald Trump, is also running as a Democrat.
Political analysts have said Kasky was unlikely to emerge as a frontrunner in a district dominated by older, highly engaged voters, but his candidacy reflected broader generational and ideological tensions within the Democratic Party, particularly over US policy toward Israel.
His withdrawal removes one of the race’s most outspoken critics of Israeli government policy, potentially narrowing the ideological range of the debate as the primary campaign accelerates.
The Democratic primary is scheduled for June, with the winner heavily favored to hold the seat in November.
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UK Home Secretary Says She ‘Lost Confidence’ in Police Chief Following Ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv Soccer Fans
British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood speaks on stage at Britain’s Labour Party’s annual conference in Liverpool, Britain, Sept. 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hannah McKay
British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood told Parliament on Wednesday that she has lost confidence in the chief constable of the West Midlands Police (WMP) and will push for a new law that will give her power to fire him, after it was revealed that intelligence used by the police force to justify a ban against fans of the Israeli soccer team Maccabi Tel Aviv was “exaggerated or simply untrue.”
Mahmood’s comments came on the same day that her office announced new plans to give the home secretary the power to fire “failing chief constables.”
Speaking to UK lawmakers, Mahmood said that WMP Chief Constable Craig Guildford “no longer has my confidence” and that he should have ensured “more professional and thorough work was done” by police before the ban was implemented late last year. She claimed it has been over 20 years since a home secretary has made such comments about a chief constable.
West Midlands Police had a “failure in leadership” which “harmed the reputation and eroded public confidence in West Midlands police and policing more broadly” across the country, the UK’s home secretary explained in front of the House of Commons.
Maccabi supporters were banned from attending a soccer game at Villa Park in Birmingham on Nov. 6 last year, a decision made by Birmingham City Council in October following advice from a safety advisory group which acted on a recommendation by West Midlands Police. Traveling Israeli fans were banned from the soccer game between Maccabi and Aston Villa due to “public safety concerns.”
“I do believe all of us in this country need to be able to trust the police when they come forward and they say they have risk assessed an upcoming event; they have come to a professional judgment as to whether an event can take place safety or not,” Mahmood said. “We all need to be able to trust that they have gone about making that risk assessment in a way that is robust, consistent, in line with the law, and just plain old truthful. That is not what’s happened in this case … It’s why I set out what I said about losing confidence in the chief constable.”
Mahmood does not have the power to fire a chief constable because of law changes implemented in 2011. Guildford would have to be dismissed by Simon Foster, the West Midlands Police and crime commissioner. However, Mahmood’s office announced on Wednesday she will push new legislation that will once again restore power to the home secretary to “force the retirement, resignation, or suspension of chief constables on performance grounds.”
Mahmood said she came to the conclusion about Guildford after receiving a “damning” and “devastating” report by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services, Sir Andy Cook, that “catalogues failures that did not just affect traveling fans” but also “let down our entire Jewish community in West Midlands and across the country.”
Cook’s report provides evidence that WMP only sought evidence to support what Mahmood called the police force’s “desired position” to ban Maccabi fans. The report also elaborates on a series of “misleading” public statements made by the police force, including Guildford, and “misinformation” promoted by the police. Cook’s report showed police “overstated the threat posed by Maccabi fans while understating the risk that was posed to the Israeli fans if they traveled to the area,” according to Mahmood.
“What is clear from this report [is] that on an issue of huge significance to the Jewish community in this country and to us all, we have witnessed a failure of leadership that has harmed the reputation and eroded public confidence in West Midlands police and policing more broadly,” the home secretary said.
When the ban against Maccabi supporters was first announced in October, Mahmood and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer were among those who voiced concerns about the decision and said Israeli soccer fans should be allowed to attend the game.
Mahmood said police forces across the country should learn a “lesson” from the mistakes of WMP. Police around the UK should remember “they are called to their profession to serve truth and the law, to police our streets without fear or favor, and that community trust and cohesion depends upon them doing that above all else,” she said.
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Deborah Lipstadt has second thoughts about tying Jackson synagogue arsonist to ‘Globalize the Intifada’
(JTA) — As news broke over the weekend of an arson attack that heavily damaged the only synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi, a few prominent individuals connected the culprit to pro-Palestinian activism.
“This is a major tragedy. But it’s more than that,” Deborah Lipstadt, formerly the State Department’s special envoy to combat antisemitism, wrote on the social network X. “It’s an arson attack and another step in the globalization of the intifada.”
Later, upon learning that the arsonist appeared to have been motivated by a strain of antisemitism associated with the far right, not the pro-Palestinian movement, she walked back her comments — to a degree. But Lipstadt’s initial comments about the arsonist’s motives reflect a larger sense of disorientation among diaspora Jews as they face increased levels of antisemitism from across the spectrum of left-wing, right-wing and Islamist extremism.
Jewish activists and communities have been engaged in fierce debate over which corner poses the greatest threat, and reports of new incidents are often met with immediate speculation over the attacker’s motivations. Lipstadt, an Emory University professor who had served in the State Department under President Biden, has herself criticized the politicization of antisemitism charges. “When you only see it on the other side of the political transom,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2024, “I have to ask: Are you interested in fighting antisemitism, or was your main objective to beat up on your enemies?”
“Globalize the Intifada” is a term commonly used in left-wing, pro-Palestinian protests. Most of the perpetrators of the large-scale antisemitic attacks in the diaspora since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks in Israel — including in Washington, D.C.; Boulder, Colorado; Bondi Beach, Australia; and the arson attack on Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home — have made their pro-Palestinian and/or Islamist affiliations public.
But when the identity of the Jackson arsonist was revealed and the suspect appeared in court, his comments and social media presence betrayed no obvious link to the pro-Palestinian movement.
Instead the suspect, 19-year-old Catholic school graduate Stephen Spencer Pittman, used language —including “synagogue of Satan” and “Jesus Christ is Lord” — popular among leading figures of the online far right who peddle antisemitism, including Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens. (“Synagogue of Satan” also has deeper roots; it was popularized by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.)
An Instagram account appearing to be Pittman’s also contains references to a “Christian diet” and a clip from “Drawn Together,” an adult animated series, referencing an antisemitic “Jew crow.” (One of the show’s creators is Jewish.) Neither Pittman’s public statements in court, nor his Instagram account, referred to pro-Palestinian activism.
In hindsight, was Lipstadt right to preemptively link the fire to “globalize the intifada”?
“It may have been inopportune of me to say that,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about her invocation of the phrase.
Lipstadt insisted, “I was not saying this was a leftist attack. Clearly it’s not.” Nor did she “mean to suggest that this was an Islamist attack.”
She offered that the phrase, which uses the Arabic word associated with the violent Palestinian uprisings of the late 1980s and early 2000s, could be interpreted as hatred toward Jews coming from all sides.
“If ‘globalize the intifada’ means ‘attack Jews everywhere,’ then it certainly fits,” she said. “So it depends on how you want to interpret the sentence.”
Lipstadt wasn’t the only prominent figure linking the arsonist to “globalize the intifada” and other pro-Palestinian phrases before his identity was revealed.
“It began with BDS. Some said, it’s just words,” Marc Edelman, a Jewish law professor at the City University of New York, wrote on X over the weekend.
He continued, “CUNY Law speech: ‘globalize the intifada.’ Still, just words? Recent pro-Hamas chants. Words again? And now the violence in Pittsburgh, Washington D.C., Sydney, Jackson, Mississippi and more. As the Left used to say, words matter!”
Even a pro-Palestinian politician condemned the arson while also addressing recent hard-line pro-Palestinian activism in her own city.
“Mississippi’s oldest and largest synagogue, and two of their Torah scrolls, were burned yesterday on Shabbat in a horrific antisemitic attack—days after protestors chanted ‘We support Hamas’, here in NYC,” Shahana Hanif, a New York City council member from Brooklyn who won re-election in a race that pivoted largely on Israel, wrote on X.
She was referencing recent pro-Hamas protesters outside synagogues in New York, who have been denounced by progressives who are critical of Israel including Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Hanif added, “These chants are antisemitic and deeply harmful. You can oppose land sales in the West Bank without supporting violence against Jews. Yesterday’s arson in Mississippi is a stark reminder of the consequences of hate.”
She attracted some criticism from the pro-Palestinian movement for her statement — including from the group that organized the pro-Hamas New York synagogue protests, which took offense at the comparison.
“Linking chants at a Palestine protest that support a resistance movement of occupied people to the klan bombing of a synagogue is absolutely irresponsible and disgusting,” PAL-Awda NY/NJ, a radical group, wrote to Hanif.
In the group’s Telegram channel viewed by JTA, PAL-Awda added, “We see you, politicians who claim to support Palestine but then follow the hasbara playbook to link people resisting colonial oppression with white supremacists bombing synagogues in Mississippi.” “Hasbara” is a Hebrew term used to describe Israeli public relations efforts.
Pro-Israel groups, meanwhile, claimed hypocrisy, with some sharing a screenshot of Hanif previously retweeting a pro-Palestinian activist’s post that included the phrase “Globalize the Intifada.” JTA was unable to verify the post.
Unlike Lipstadt, Edelman, the CUNY law professor, told JTA he stands by his initial assessment of the arson.
“Nothing changes the fact that the actions taken in Washington, D.C. and Sydney, Australia, coalesced with an extreme left anti-Israel position,” he said, referring to the mass shootings at the Capital Jewish Museum and Bondi Beach — the former by a declared pro-Palestinian activist, the latter by declared Islamists. (Edelman noted that he recently undertook a Fulbright scholarship in Australia.)
Edelman added, “It is also not surprising that far-right rhetoric, much as it has for generations in this country, has also led to increased violence against minority groups including Jewish Americans.”
But there’s a key difference between the two sides, in Edelman’s eyes.
“The big distinction here, and I say this as a member of the Democratic Party, is that the left has historically been better than this,” he said. “And now, perhaps, they are not.”
For Lipstadt, the incident has largely taught her that Jews shouldn’t spend time trying to determine which kinds of antisemitic attacks, whether from the left or right, are worse.
“It’s all horrible,” she said. “Much of it is lethal. It’s toxic and it’s dangerous.”
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