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Gertrude’s, a new Jew-ish bistro, gains a following in Brooklyn
(New York Jewish Week) — New York City has gained another classic corner Jewish restaurant, this time at the intersection of St. Marks and Carlton Avenues in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Gertrude’s, on a quiet, tree-laden block, opened earlier this summer. It’s the latest offering from restaurateurs Nate Adler, 33, and Rachel Jackson, 34, the couple behind Gertie, the popular Jewish diner in South Williamsburg that opened in 2019.
“At its base, it’s a neighborhood bistro,” Adler told the New York Jewish Week about a sensibility he calls “Jew-ish.” “It brings together my traditional Jewish upbringing with a more modern sensibility.”
The couple’s original spot, Gertie, is a daytime, Jewish-inflected eatery. Specializing in classic deli sandwiches with a modern twist, like a turkey pastrami club with a “jalapeno schmear” and chicken schnitzel sandwich with “dilly cukes pickled cabbage,” the restaurant closes at 4 p.m. each day. Adler considers Gertie “an amazing homage to Russ & Daughters with full service.”
Gertrude’s, which opened in late June, is a more sophisticated, nighttime destination, with cocktails and menu items like a warm challah roll with duck butter — an appetizer — and Nicoise salad with smoked fish.
Both restaurants have the same namesake: Adler’s Jewish maternal grandmother, Gertrude Aronow. The dedication is in honor of the spirit she imbued into every room she entered. Grandma Gertrude, said Alder, was “a really colorful and eccentric human being who was the life of the party.”
In order to bring Gertrude’s to life, Alder and Jackson brought in a third partner: Eli Sussman, a chef who has Jewish cred under his belt, thanks to his work at Brooklyn’s Mile End Delicatessen, which specializes in Montreal-style Jewish deli eats, and Samesa, a Middle Eastern counter joint in Midtown.
Ahead of Gertrude’s opening, the trio spent months going back and forth about how to execute their Jewish bistro concept. “We spent a ton of time trying to be very cognizant of not going too far in one direction — not being too conceptual, not being only appealing to this sort of broad-reaching neighborhood,” Adler said. “We wanted to keep it really simple.”
Ashkenazi-inspired items on Gertrude’s menu include latkes topped with celery creme fraiche and trout roe. (Liz Clayman)
Adler also said that rather than opting for a more Sephardic or Israeli feel — with familiar items like pita and hummus — they wanted to “push the Ashkenazi tradition” at the restaurant. As such, Gertrude’s menu has inventive items like a burger available to order “Reuben-style” (a beef patty topped with melted swiss, Russian dressing and sauerkraut in between a challah roll), and a black & white seven-layer cake, a mashup of two popular Jewish desserts: black and white cookies and seven-layer cake.
The Jewish theme extends to the drinks menu, designed by Jackson, who previously served as the wine and beverage director at Williamsburg’s modern classic Marlow & Sons. A particular standout is the Seder Plate Martini (its ingredients include parsley and saltwater), as well as the Dirty Gertie, a martini made with pickle brine.
Adler and Jackson, who married in August 2021, come by their devotion to New York City throwbacks honestly: Both were born and raised on the Upper West Side. Although the pair grew up 10 blocks from each other, they didn’t meet until they worked at the Danny Meyer restaurant, Blue Smoke, during Adler’s stint there from 2011 to 2014 (Jackson’s was from 2013 to 2015). They later began dating when they reunited at Huertas, a tapas restaurant co-owned by Adler in the East Village that closed its doors for good on Aug. 12.
Adler told the New York Jewish Week that he was raised “traditionally” Jewish: His family celebrated Shabbat every week and he grew up attending B’nai Jeshurun on the Upper West Side, where he had his bar mitzvah. Both of Adler’s parents are first-generation Americans, his paternal grandparents Holocaust refugees from Germany.
Adler’s decision to enter the restaurant world stems from two long-held interests: His consistent desire to push himself to do something creative as well as his passion for food from a young age. “When I was in college I read Anthony Bourdain’s ‘Kitchen Confidential,’ and read the line about nine-out-of-10 restaurants failing in the first year,” Adler recalled. “I wanted to be the one-out-of-10.”
There’s a family connection to the restaurant business, too: Alder said his great-grandfather owned a coffee import/export business in Cologne, Germany, and there was a cafe attached called Kaffe Adler.
Five years after opening Huerta’s in 2014, Alder and two partners launched Gertie at 357 Grand St.; Jackson came on as a partner and director of operations during the pandemic. “Gertie wasn’t specifically Jewish when we opened it, it was more like New York City food,” Adler said, noting that the “daytime cafe” concept evolved during the pandemic. “Only recently has it become more focused and concentrated on the Jewish diner idea.”
The shift, said Alder, was a “salient” one, calling the decision to home in on the Jewish theme a “very successful pivot.”
With Jackson on board (and the other two partners, Will Edwards and Flip Biddelman, out) the couple introduced bagels to Gertie’s menu; the popular carbs were hand-rolled and kettle boiled in house. As the long months of shutdown continued, they devised ways to help local Jews celebrate important holidays, selling “Hanukkah at Home” boxes and to-go Passover seders, helping to put the eatery on more solid ground in the midst of the pandemic.
“Passover has been our most successful holiday year-in and year-out, doing these to-go seders, and we sell them out every year,” Adler said.
That same sharp sense of brand definition was on Adler’s mind when creating Gertrude’s. After their offer was accepted at 605 Carlton Ave., Adler reached out to a few different people he knew for the chef role, including Sussman (another Prospect Heights resident, by way of Detroit).
“Eli and I had been friendly, and I remembered that he worked in or lived in the neighborhood and it turns out that he was interested in the gig,” Adler said of their partnership. “It kind of happened very quickly after that.”
Sussman was eager to build on what he’d learned during his tenure at Mile End, where he initially started off as a prep cook.
“I just always really wanted to be involved with a restaurant that sort of had those [Ashkenazi] types of flavors on their menu,” Sussman told the New York Jewish Week. “As someone who’s culturally Jewish, I think it’s exciting that I can put certain things on the menu, like beef tongue, that might not be something that everyone has had a lot of experience with, but really hearkens back to Lower East Side, old-school Jewish appetizing delicatessen-style cuisine.”
Adler hopes his new restaurant will continue to enjoy a certain buzz, and that people will travel from Manhattan to dine at his establishment. But first and foremost, Gertrude’s is a restaurant that seeks to serve its community.
“Our number-one goal and priority was to create a menu that was sort of neighborhood-first,” he said. “We wanted to have this type of place where you could come once a week, get your burger, get your chicken or your schnitzel, and be really satisfied.”
“Or you could come and have a salad and a glass of wine at the bar — there are a lot of different experiences for everybody,” he added. And by “everybody” Adler means everybody: He wants Gertrude’s to be the kind of place customers can feel comfortable perched at the bar for a first date, or sitting down to a long meal with their parents, or braving a restaurant meal with a toddler (this is Prospect Heights, after all).
So far, the Jewish bistro has been met with enthusiasm, with folks lining up to dine at the restaurant right when it opens at 5 p.m., something he called “awesome and also scary, because it means we have to be completely ready to go right at 5 o’clock.”
But overall Adler seemed thrilled with the turnout. “It’s amazing to be busy at 5:30,” he said.
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The post Gertrude’s, a new Jew-ish bistro, gains a following in Brooklyn appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Israeli Minister of Culture Urges FIFA to Remove Senior PA Official for Inciting Terrorism Against Israel
Palestinian Football Association head Jibril Rajoub speaks during a press conference regarding the cancellation of the soccer match between Argentina and Israel, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Sunday, June 6, 2018. Photo: Flash90.
Israel’s Minister of Culture and Sports Miki Zohar called on Tuesday for FIFA, the international governing body of soccer, to remove Jibril Rajoub as president of the Palestine Football Association (PFA) for inciting, justifying, and supporting violence against Israel.
Zohar wrote in a letter to FIFA President Gianni Infantino that Rajoub’s alleged incitement to violence is a “blatant infringement of the core values that international sports aim to promote — values of peace, unity, and mutual respect.” He urged Infantino and the FIFA Executive Committee to act swiftly and expel Rajoub from his senior position.
“There is no place for individuals who incite or support terrorism and violence within sports institutions,” he added. “His continued membership in senior roles within the sports world undermines public trust and sends a dangerous message — that the platform of sports can be exploited for political agendas and the promotion of hatred and violence … It is our collective responsibility to ensure that sports remain a unifying force that brings people together, rather than a stage for incitement and terror. I trust in your leadership and in FIFA’s commitment to upholding the integrity of international sports, and I am confident that you will act to safeguard its moral future.”
Zohar noted in his letter that following the Hamas-led deadly terrorist attack in southern Israel on Oct, 7, 2023 — in which 1,200 people were murdered and over 250 were kidnapped – Rajoub “publicly justified these acts of terror, stating that they were a ‘natural response to the occupation.’”
“He has repeated this appalling justification on several occasions,” Zohar added. He additionally pointed out that on Sunday, Rajoub made a guest appearance on television and “openly called for continued violent attacks against innocent Israeli civilians. He even encouraged the Palestinian Authority to take responsibility for overseeing such acts.”
“Tragically, within 24 hours of Mr. Rajoub’s statement, multiple terrorist attacks were carried out in Israel, resulting in the deaths of three innocent civilians: a 70-year-old woman, a 73-year-old woman, and a 35-year-old man,” Zohar explained.
Rajoub was fined and temporarily suspended by FIFA’s Disciplinary Committee in 2018 for inciting hatred and violence. He received the suspension after he called on soccer fans to burn jerseys of the Argentinian Football Association as well as pictures of Argentinian soccer player Lionel Messi ahead of a soccer match between Argentina and Israel. The Argentinians ultimately pulled out of the soccer game.
Since the start of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, the PFA has repeatedly called for FIFA to suspend Israel from all international soccer matches because of its military actions in the Gaza Strip, which target Hamas terrorists who orchestrated the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel. FIFA is expected to make an announcement regarding the matter in May. A number of international soccer organizations have voiced support for the PFA’s efforts to have Israel suspended from FIFA, including the Asian Football Confederation and the Norwegian Football Association (NFF).
“The Norwegian FA is not indifferent to the disproportionate attacks Israel has subjected the civilian population of Gaza to over time … The NFF is actively advocating for FIFA to address the Palestinian FA’s proposal for sanctions against Israel,” NFF President Lise Klaveness said in December. “We are also closer to the region and the Palestinian Football Association than most other European associations. For over 10 years we have worked on the ground in the region and the Palestinian West Bank to train female football coaches and create football activities for children in schools and refugee camps.”
Kaveness also denied reports that Norway has refused to compete against Israel.
“Israel is currently part of UEFA’s competitions. We are following the situation closely, and follow the policies set by FIFA, UEFA, and the Norwegian authorities,” Kaveness added. “This means our national team will play against Israel — in March away on a neutral pitch, and in October at home at Ullevaal Stadium. Everyone now has a clear responsibility to protect and respect the football matches and the players on both teams.”
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Jewish, Anti-Hate Groups Express Concern Over Meta’s New Fact-Checking Policy: ‘All of Society Will Suffer’
Meta logo is seen in this illustration taken August 22, 2022. Photo: Reuters
Jewish groups and a slew of other organizations said this week they are extremely worried about how Meta’s new community-driven, fact-checking system will worsen online antisemitism, hate speech, and disinformation, and increase the targeting of Jewish communities and individuals.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that starting in the United States, the social media giant is ending its third-party fact-checking program and replacing it with a Community Notes model, like the one on Wikipedia and Elon Musk’s X. Zuckerberg said Meta —which owns Facebook, Instagram, and Threads — made the move in an effort to enhance free expression on its platforms.
“We will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations” Meta announced. “We’ve seen this approach work on X — where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see. We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing — and one that’s less prone to bias.”
Meta added that besides “high-severity violations” — such as terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud, and scams — it will not take action to enforce its policies unless someone reports an issue, to avoid “too much content being censored that shouldn’t have been.” Meta will also be “getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity, and gender.”
Hate speech and antisemitism will no longer be automatically flagged by Meta, and the company will not proactively remove such content unless a user reports the issue. However, even after receiving a report, there is no guarantee that Meta will delete the harmful content or that the report will be reviewed.
Yfat Barak-Cheney, executive director of the World Jewish Congress Technology and Human Rights Institute (TecHRI), said Meta’s new community notes system for fact-checking “must be approached with great caution.”
“Platforms like X and Wikipedia, which employ similar user-driven concepts, have demonstrated how easily misinformation and disinformation can be manipulated, and putting the onus on the vulnerable communities to report and correct information online,” she noted in a statement. “In an online environment already marked by hostility, we are deeply concerned that the reduction of protections and clear guidelines will open the floodgates to content that fuels real-world threats, including violent acts targeting Jewish communities and individuals.”
“Meta has made important strides in recent years to make its platforms safer, and it is critical that this work continues,” she added. “Rolling back these efforts risks undoing hard-won progress at a time when vigilance against online hate and antisemitism is needed more than ever.”
“It is mind blowing how one of the most profitable companies in the world, operating with such sophisticated technology, is taking significant steps back in terms of addressing antisemitism, hate, misinformation, and protecting vulnerable & marginalized groups online,” said ADL CEO and National Director Jonathan Greenblatt. “The only winner here is Meta’s bottom line and as a result, all of society will suffer.”
“Meta must significantly reform their average user reporting process unless they intend to completely abdicate their responsibility to address antisemitism and hate at a time when it is surging online and offline,” the ADL Center for Technology and Society added. “If all of this is the direction Meta is heading in 2025, it is a bad sign of what is to come for Jews and all marginalized people on their platforms.”
Others outside of the Jewish community also expressed concern about the changes that Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday.
Cyberwell, a nonprofit organization that tackles online antisemitism, said in a released statement on X that the new Meta Community Notes system is “a systematic lowering of the bar on how Meta intends to enforce their Community Standards against hate speech and harassment online.” It also criticized Meta for now giving itself “less accountability” for hate speech that can now spread easier on its platforms. It said the move will result in “more hate speech, more politicized content, more silos, and less effective responses from the platforms.”
“Given the mounting evidence of how hate speech, incendiary content, and harassment lead to real-world harm including hate crimes, terror attacks, and child suicide, CyberWell is deeply concerned at the purposeful deterioration of Trust & Safety best practices at Meta,” the organization said. “For the Jewish community this announcement means that Meta is making it easier for antisemitism to flourish online. It will likely lead to an uptick in hate-posting, harassment, and even a migration of white supremacists and extreme racists onto Meta’s platforms, much like the period immediately following the Twitter acquisition.”
“This is not a victory for free speech — it’s an exchange of human bias in a small, contained group of fact-checkers for human bias at scale through Community Notes,” CyberWell added. “The only way to prevent censorship and data manipulation by any government or corporation would be to institute legal requirements and reforms on Big Tech that enforce social media reform and transparency requirements.”
“The new era for Meta is one in which it has decided to let liars, snake oil salesman, fraudsters, hate actors, propagandists for autocrats like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Ayatollah Khamenei unleash a tidal wide of disinformation many times the size of anything we’ve seen to date,” he added. “This is going to increase the spread and visibility of unchallenged lies, it’s going to worsen the spread of hate. It’s going to create more risk to our communities, our democracy, public health, and to our kids.”
Rose Burley, co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit organization the Center for Information Resilience, said the change will “undoubtedly” result in much more disinformation spreading on Meta’s platforms. “Meta, by doing this, are retreating from fact, they are retreating from truth,” he argued. “And by switching to a Community Notes model, they are effectively trying to capture a tidal wave in a bucket, and it’s not going to work … By getting rid of the fact-checkers, what you’re doing is taking away a safeguarding and you’re sending a message to users and to the wider community that truth and facts just don’t really matter anymore.”
The post Jewish, Anti-Hate Groups Express Concern Over Meta’s New Fact-Checking Policy: ‘All of Society Will Suffer’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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US Education Department Launches Probe Into Sarah Lawrence College Over Antisemitism Complaint
Illustrative: A pro-Hamas demonstrator uses a megaphone at Columbia University, on the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, in New York City, US, Oct. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Mike Segar
The US Department of Education has opened a civil rights investigation into Sarah Lawrence College to determine whether it failed to correct an allegedly hostile environment caused by antisemitism.
The inquiry by the department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) was precipitated by a complaint filed by Hillels of Westchester in March 2024. Among other things, the complaint alleged that only Jews who are “openly anti-Israel” are safe on campus and that those who express pro-Israel opinions are subject to browbeating, intimidation, and discrimination throughout the campus and in the school’s diversity office.
“In the face of systemic antisemitism at Sarah Lawrence College, spanning many years, our goal has always been — and remains — a safe, equitable environment for Jewish students,” Hillels of Westchester executive director Rachel Klein said in a statement announcing the news. “We hope this investigation initiates a meaningful culture shift at SLC [Sarah Lawrence College] to improve the campus and environment. We would welcome the opportunity to partner with the SLC administration in creating a safer school for Jewish students, and all gryphons.”
The complaint also alleged that anti-Zionist students at Sarah Lawrence threatened to kill Jews or kill themselves in front of them; that diversity officers assigned as advisers to the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) club are in charge of processing complaints of antisemitism; and that those same diversity officers promote anti-Zionist events which undermine Israel’s existence.
The school’s alleged disregard for the welfare of Jewish students was revealed in the days and weeks after the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the complaint says. No sooner had the tragedy occurred than a diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) official at the college called on students to ignore Jewish suffering by attending on Oct. 9 “Hour of Solidarity with Palestine,” an event co-sponsored by SJP. While promoting the event, the official invited Jewish students and Hillel members via email to attend it — a gesture, the complaint says, that the SLC Jewish community found “offensive and dehumanizing.” They soon discovered that in addition to being a DEI administrator, the official was SJP’s adviser, in which capacity she functioned acting its advocate and liaison.
The official also allegedly refused to investigate anti-Zionist students accused of antisemitic harassment. When Sammy Tweedy, a Jewish student who had been in Israel on Oct. 7, reported to the official that an anti-Zionist student threatened to beat him up and said he had “the blood of Gaza on your hands” and should have been murdered by Hamas, the official would only agree to filing a no-contact order against the student.
“The hostile environment experienced by Jewish students at Sarah Lawrence College has been among the worst we’ve seen,” Hillel International chief executive officer Adam Lehman said in a statement. “Antisemitism on the SLC campus has been exacerbated by the administration’s continued refusal to take more aggressive steps to promote the safety and inclusion of its Jewish and Israeli students, faculty, and staff. We hope this investigation serves as a much needed wakeup call for the college’s leadership to take immediate action to honor the basic civil rights of its Jewish and Israeli students.”
A representative for the college told JTA that it was reviewing the Education Department’s requests for information and committed to fostering an inclusive environment.
“We are in the process of reviewing OCR’s request for data in connection with its investigation, and the college remains committed to fostering an inclusive and respectful campus community,” the school official said, adding that they considered Hillels of Westchester to be “an outside organization not affiliated with the college.”
OCR’s investigation of Sarah Lawrence College comes on the heels of many settlements it has negotiated with other higher education institutions since Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion of Israel.
Rutgers University recently agreed to one to start off the new year after the agency developed “compliance concerns” with school officials’ handling of several antisemitic incidents, including someone’s calling for violence against an Israeli students, the graffitiing of a Jewish student’s door with a swastika, and a series of threats made against the predominantly Jewish Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEPi) fraternity.
Temple University in Philadelphia also settled a civil rights complaint with OCR in December, agreeing to address what OCR described as several reports of discrimination and harassment, including “incidents of antisemitic, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian conduct.”
As part of the resolution of the case, Temple University agreed, for example, to enact “remedial” policies for past, inadequately managed investigations of discrimination and to apprise OCR of every discrimination complaint it receives until the conclusion of the 2025-2026 academic year. The university will also conduct a “climate” survey to measure students’ opinions on the severity of discrimination on campus, the results of which will be used to “create an action plan” which OCR did not define but insisted on its being “subject to OCR approval.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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