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Eli Zabar debuts a chocolate matzah ice cream, just in time for Passover
(New York Jewish Week) — Move over, donut hamantaschen! Now that Purim has come and gone, it’s time to start thinking about Passover desserts. Famously tricky to get right, but with huge potential to steal the show, traditional Passover desserts include macaroons, flourless cakes and chocolate-covered matzah.
At Eli Zabar’s on the East Side, however, innovation is the name of the game this year. For Passover 2023, the eatery and grocery is beckoning customers to the freezer aisle and selling homemade chocolate-caramel matzah ice cream at three different locations: their flagship at 1411 Third Ave., Eli’s Essentials at 1270 Madison Ave., and at Grand Central Market at 89 East 42nd St.
The dessert, officially known as Chocolate Covered Caramel Matzoh Ice Cream, is made in-house, according to Sasha Zabar, Eli Zabar’s managing director and son of the chain’s eponymous founder. (Eli Zabar’s brothers run the famous Zabar’s delicatessen and grocery, located across the park on the Upper West Side.) The frozen delicacy is made with a rich vanilla base mixed with broken-up chunks of Eli’s signature chocolate matzah — a homemade sourdough matzah topped with a chewy salted butter caramel, a thin layer of chocolate and toasted almonds.
“Think cookies and cream but using chocolate covered matzah” instead of Oreos, Zabar told the New York Jewish Week. (The chocolate matzah used in the ice cream can also be purchased on its own, and costs $16 for two pieces.)
The seasonal ice cream flavor, which hit the stores’ coolers yesterday, will be available throughout Passover, which ends on April 13.
As for its price, well, there’s a reason why The New York Times called Eli Zabar a “pioneer in the field of eye-popping prices.” The ice cream is sold by the pint for a steep $20 — nearly twice the price of other designer ice cream brands with funky novelty flavors like Jeni’s Everything Bagel ice cream ($12) and Van Leeuwen’s (also $12), which has sold Grey Poupon- and Hidden Valley Ranch-flavored ice cream. (Is it just me, or does chocolate matzah ice cream sound… a lot better?)
Eli Zabar is not under any rabbinical supervision, so the ice cream is not certified kosher or kosher for Passover. However, as Sasha Zabar explained, the chocolate matzah and other homemade Passover desserts sold at Eli’s, like macaroons, chocolate chip meringue kisses and various cakes, are unleavened and made with kosher-for-Passover ingredients.
Eli Zabar (the store) was founded by Eli Zabar (the man) as a gourmet food shop and café on the Upper East Side in 1973. Zabar had grown up at Zabar’s, the Upper West Side institution founded by his parents, Louis and Lillian Zabar, in 1934.
According to the Eli Zabar store website, the shop’s founder wanted to pursue a different vision for his own grocery chain, inspired by the food halls and gourmet products of Europe. Today, there are eight Eli Zabar locations on the East Side, which include gourmet groceries, bakeries, a flower shop, a wine shop and a recently reopened farm-to-table restaurant.
Eli’s sons, Sasha Zabar and his twin brother Oliver, both 31, have helped expand the business. They opened cocktail bar Devon on the Lower East Side in 2018, which closed after three years, and now operate Eli’s Night Shift, a bar and restaurant at 189 East 79th St.
Eli Zabar is also selling made-to-order seder plates and Passover meals from its catering side — but they aren’t shipping the ice cream quite yet because of the logistics involved with using dry ice, Sasha Zabar said. “Hopefully that pushes people to come to the store and grab a pint,” he added. “It’s really good.”
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The post Eli Zabar debuts a chocolate matzah ice cream, just in time for Passover appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Nick Fuentes says his problem with Trump ‘is that he is not Hitler’
(JTA) — In the fall, a video of Nick Fuentes criticizing Donald Trump drew the praise of progressive ex-Congressman Jamaal Bowman.
“Finally getting it Nick,” Bowman commented, apparently recognizing some common ground between himself on the left and Fuentes, on the far right, who said in the video that Trump was “better than the Democrats for Israel, for the oil and gas industry, for Silicon Valley, for Wall Street,” but said he wasn’t “better for us.”
Now, Fuentes says there is actually no common ground between him and those on the left.
“My problem with Trump isn’t that he’s Hitler — my problem with Trump is that he is not Hitler,” Fuentes said during his streaming show on Tuesday, which focused mostly on the potential for an American attack on Iran.
He continued, “You have all these left-wing people saying, ‘Why do I agree with Nick Fuentes?’ It’s like, I’m criticizing Trump because there’s not enough deportations, there’s not enough ICE brutality, there’s not enough National Guard. Sort of a big difference!”
Fuentes, the streamer and avowed antisemite who has previously said Hitler was “very f–king cool,” has been gaining more traction as a voice on the right. His interview with Tucker Carlson in October plunged Republicans into an ongoing debate over antisemitism within their ranks, inflaming the divide between a pro-Israel wing of the party and an emerging, isolationist “America First” wing that’s against U.S. military assistance to Israel.
Once a pro-Trump MAGA Republican, Fuentes has become the leader of the “groyper” movement advocating for farther-right positions. The set of Fuentes’ show includes both a hat and a mug with the words “America First” on his desk.
In a New York Times interview, Trump recently weighed in on rising tensions within the Republican Party, saying Republican leaders should “absolutely” condemn figures who promote antisemitism, and that he does not approve of antisemites in the party.
“No, I don’t. I think we don’t need them. I think we don’t like them,” replied Trump when asked by a reporter whether there was room within the Republican coalition for antisemitic figures.
Asked if he would condemn Fuentes, Trump initially claimed that he didn’t know the antisemitic streamer, before acknowledging that he had had dinner with him alongside Kanye West in 2022.
“I had dinner with him, one time, where he came as a guest of Kanye West. I didn’t know who he was bringing,” Trump said. “He said, ‘Do you mind if I bring a friend?’ I said, ‘I don’t care.’ And it was Nick Fuentes? I don’t know Nick Fuentes.”
Trump flaunted his pro-Israel bona fides in the interview, mentioning the recent announcement that he was nominated for Israel’s top civilian honor and calling himself the “best president of the United States in the history of this country toward Israel.”
Fuentes, meanwhile, spent the bulk of his show on Tuesday speculating that Trump will order the U.S. to attack Iran, and concluded that “Israel is holding our hand walking us down the road toward an inevitable war.”
The post Nick Fuentes says his problem with Trump ‘is that he is not Hitler’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Larry Ellison once renamed a superyacht because its name spelled backwards was ‘I’m a Nazi’
(JTA) — Larry Ellison, the Jewish founder of Oracle and a major pro-Israel donor, has recently been in the headlines for his media acquisition ventures with his son.
The new scrutiny on the family has surfaced a decades-old detail about Ellison: that he once rechristened a superyacht after realizing that its original name carried an antisemitic tinge.
In 1999, Ellison — then No. 23 on Forbes’ billionaires list, well on his way to his No. 4 ranking today — purchased a boat called Izanami.
Originally built for a Japanese businessman, the 191-foot superyacht was named for a Shinto deity. But Ellison soon realized what the name read backwards: “I’m a Nazi.”
“Izanami and Izanagi are the names of the two Shinto deities that gave birth to the Japanese islands, or so legend has it,” Ellison said in “Softwar,” a 2013 biography. “When the local newspapers started pointing out that Izanami was ‘I’m a Nazi’ spelled backward, I had the choice of explaining Shintoism to the reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle or changing the name of the boat.” He renamed the boat Ronin and later sold it.
The decades-old factoid resurfaced this week because of a New York Magazine profile of Ellison’s son, David Ellison, the chair and CEO of Paramount-Skydance Corporation.
Skydance Corporation, which David Ellison founded in 2006, completed an $8 billion merger last year with Paramount Global. Larry Ellison, meanwhile, joined an investor consortium that signed a deal to purchase TikTok, the social media juggernaut accused of spreading antisemitism. Together, father and son also staged a hostile bid to purchase Warner Bros. but were outmatched by Netflix.
After acquiring Paramount, David Ellison appointed The Free Press founder Bari Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News, in an endorsement of Weiss’ contrarian and pro-Israel outlook that has been challenged as overly friendly to the Trump administration.
Larry Ellison, who was raised in a Reform Jewish home by his adoptive Jewish parents, has long been a donor to pro-Israel and Jewish causes, including to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. In September, he briefly topped the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as the world’s richest man.
In December, Oracle struck a deal to provide cloud services for TikTok, with some advocates hoping for tougher safeguards against antisemitism on the social media platform
The post Larry Ellison once renamed a superyacht because its name spelled backwards was ‘I’m a Nazi’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Alex Bregman, who drew a Jewish star on his cap after Oct. 7, inks $175M deal with the Cubs
(JTA) — For the second year in a row, Jewish star third baseman Alex Bregman has signed a lucrative free-agent contract with a team that is run by a Jewish executive and plays in a historic ballpark in a city with a significant Jewish community.
Last year, it was the Boston Red Sox. Now, Bregman is headed to the Chicago Cubs — a team whose Jewish fans possess almost religious devotion.
Bregman, who had opted out of a three-year, $120 million deal with Boston, has signed a five-year, $175 million pact with the Cubs. It is the second-largest contract ever signed by a Jewish ballplayer, behind Max Fried’s $218 million contract in 2024. Bregman previously signed a five-year, $100 million extension with the Houston Astros in 2019.
Bregman, who played the first nine years of his career in Houston, has been one of baseball’s premier third basemen over the past decade, with three All-Star selections, a Gold Glove, a Silver Slugger and two World Series rings. He’s also heralded for his leadership on and off the field.
Bregman grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he played baseball in high school and also, according to his mother, was once teased while leaving school for a bar mitzvah lesson. His grandfather, the onetime attorney for the Washington Senators whom she said Bregman called “zeyde,” gave him a collection of baseball cards featuring Jewish players.
His great-grandfather fled antisemitism in Belarus and fell in love with sports in the United States, The Athletic reported in 2017, as Bregman hurtled toward his World Series win.
“It’s the fulfillment of four generations of short Jewish Bregmans who dreamed of playing in the major leagues,” his father Sam, now the district attorney in Albuquerque’s county as well as a Democratic candidate for New Mexico governor, said at the time. “The big leagues and the World Series. One hundred twenty years in America fulfilled by Alex in this World Series.”
Bregman has also been vocal about his Jewish pride. He celebrated Hanukkah with a local synagogue in Houston, and following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that launched the Gaza War, Bregman drew a Star of David on his hat during a playoff game and participated in a video of Jewish players calling on fans to support Israel.
Some Jewish fans hoped Bregman’s shows of solidarity with Israel would lead him to suit up for another new squad this spring, Team Israel at the upcoming World Baseball Classic. But Bregman announced this week that he will play for Team USA again. Another Jewish ballplayer, Rowdy Tellez, will rejoin team Mexico, taking two big names off the recruitment board for Israel.
Back in 2018, as Bregman was first emerging as a major star, he said he regretted taking a pass on Team Israel the previous year, when it made it to the second round of play. Suiting up for the U.S. team, Bregman had just four at-bats as a backup player.
Now, he has selected a jersey number for his Cubs era that reflects his aspirations.
“I wore No. 3 because I want a third championship,” Bregman said during his first press conference with his new club on Thursday.
The post Alex Bregman, who drew a Jewish star on his cap after Oct. 7, inks $175M deal with the Cubs appeared first on The Forward.