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How a small challah-baking business is building Jewish community in Astoria, Queens
(New York Jewish Week) — Cody Butler was 25 years old when he first tasted challah, the braided bread traditionally eaten by Jews on the Sabbath. As an Irish Catholic growing up in Astoria, Queens, he had had his fair share of bagels. But challah? Never.
Six years later, Butler is now an Orthodox Jew who bakes challah for himself and the Western Queens community under the name Bread of Idleness. Each week, he bakes between 10 and 15 loaves that he sells to Astorians who have pre-ordered a challah or two; on Thursday evenings, he sits on his stoop and personally hands off the lovingly packaged loaves. Many of his customers see Butler’s challah as a key ingredient in helping to build a Jewish community in the diverse neighborhood.
“It was a way for me to get into Shabbat,” Butler told the New York Jewish Week, explaining how he got his start as a challah baker. “The process of making challah extends Shabbat another day for me.”
But increased spirituality wasn’t his only motivator. “We don’t have good challah here in Astoria,” Butler said. “I wanted to have something special.”
Butler, 31, became a lover of challah — and Judaism — following a long spiritual search. After attending Catholic school through high school, he enrolled in CUNY’s Hunter College where he initially majored in philosophy before switching to classical philology. Through his studies, he was introduced to the writings of Jewish thinkers like Maimonides, Martin Buber, Simone Weil and Emmanuel Levinas. He also read Torah with traditional commentary and discovered that he loved “the system of thought,” as he told the New York Jewish Week.
One night, while walking the streets of Astoria, in a state of despair over his growing feelings of alienation from Catholicism, he passed the open doors of a Conservative synagogue, the Astoria Center of Israel. He ventured in, and he was warmly greeted by Rabbi Jonathan Pearl, the congregation’s rabbi at the time. Pearl told Butler that Shabbat services were about to begin downstairs, followed by dinner, and he invited Butler to stay.
Butler said he loved the prayers and the music. As he sat there, “I felt my wounds beginning to knit themselves shut,” he said. At the dinner that followed, Butler had that first bite of challah and immediately liked it. “For me, at that point, all challah was good challah,” he said.
The following morning, Butler returned to the synagogue for the Saturday morning Shacharit service. He kept coming back, week after week and, said Butler, it “pretty rapidly became the centerpiece of my week.” He became a regular at Astoria Center of Israel.
As the pandemic took root in the spring of 2020, Butler continued to pray and to study, albeit alone at home. During the long months of social distancing, he explored Orthodox Judaism and discovered he was drawn to a commitment of a religiously observant Jewish life.
Like many stuck-at-home folks across the globe, Butler also decided to try his hand at baking — not sourdough bread, but challah. “My early attempts were disastrous,” Butler said. “The dough wouldn’t rise, or it rose so much the braiding disappeared, or the challah was pale or burnt,” he said. “But I worked through it one problem at a time.”
By trial and error, he found a recipe — a vegan one, at that — that worked, and he learned to braid challah by watching videos online.
Meanwhile, in August 2022, Rabbi Pearl left the Astoria Center of Israel to found a new pluralistic, unaffiliated Jewish community, Ashreynu, with his daughter, Ayelet Pearl, and Stephanie Luxenberg. “Ashreynu was created out of a desire to grow an energized, intra-connected Jewish community in Astoria,“ Luxenberg and Ayelet Pearl told Queens Scene in December 2022. “It came out of a longstanding goal of Rabbi Pearl, to create his own pluralistic, musical, Jewish community, and to offer a new model for how community can thrive, supporting clergy, creativity, and growth.”
For Butler, having Pearl as his spiritual leader was a huge draw for him to join the nascent community. Once Ashreynu began holding Shabbat services, Butler became a regular. “I attended their first service and every one since,” he said. He would bring his challahs to services and to the homes of people he met there.
“Cody started bringing challah to shul for kiddush, and everyone was excited,” Luxenberg told the New York Jewish Week. “He tried out different flavors. For Purim he did a sprinkle challah and the kids loved it. We didn’t know what to expect each week.”
At Luxenberg’s and Ayelet Pearl’s urging, Butler began selling his challah to community members. The enterprise, they said, would help “strengthen the feeling of the neighborhood.”
In April, Butler began baking and selling challah under the name Bread of Idleness. “It comes from the words of ‘Eshet Chayil,’ [Woman of Valor] the poem we read on Friday nights,” Butler said. “The idea is you get to be idle — you pick up the homemade challah — because someone else is making it. But then, of course, textually it connects to sitting around the Shabbat table with family and friends.”
Butler isn’t afraid to experiment with his bread. In May, in honor of local Queens Jewish icons Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, Butler made a “Scarborough Fair” challah, flavored with — you guessed it — parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. And in June, to celebrate New York’s most iconic carbohydrate, the bagel, he made an everything bagel-flavored challah. (In addition to Trader Joe’s Everything But the Bagel seasoning, Butler incorporates barley malt syrup into the dough, which is “the secret essential ingredient for that bagel taste,” he said.)
Anastasia Nevin, a 38-year old dietician, yoga teacher and mother of two small children, is a regular customer. ”The challah gives us more connection to the Ashreynu community,” Nevin told the New York Jewish Week, adding that she often runs into people she knows at pickup. “There is something nice about eating something that is not store bought but made with love by someone you know.”
Butler sells the challah for $12 each, although members of Ashreynu get the preferential rate of $10. As a bonus, he also makes babka from the challah dough, in flavors ranging from chocolate hazelnut to peach and sweet cheese or savory babka stuffed with caramelized onions and sundried tomatoes.
His bread has a growing number of fans in Astoria. Butler said that, in recent weeks, his customers have extended beyond the Ashreynu community. “I get people who I hadn’t seen at any of the shuls in the area,” he said. “Yet they are getting challah which makes me so happy because I know that they are getting a little piece of Shabbat for themselves.”
Astoria is home to Ashreynu, Astoria Center of Israel and Congregation Sons of Israel, a small Modern Orthodox congregation.
And yet, “Astoria feels a little bit like a Jewish desert,” Ayelet Pearl said. “Some things that we take for granted in living in New York, like being able to get a challah on Friday or a pomegranate before Rosh Hashanah, don’t exist. Getting challah isn’t an option [here] outside of what Cody is doing.”
Thanks to Butler’s challah, the neighborhood now feels “more Jewish,” she added. In fact, Pearl and Luxemberg, who were named to the New York Jewish Week’s “36 to Watch” list this year, named “when we ran into all our friends picking up challah from Bread of Idleness” as their “best experience” as Jewish New Yorkers.
“This is all about giving people a little bit of Shabbat that they might not otherwise have,” Butler said. “It is a taste of home. It is building community. I have parents who come with their children.”
Butler has converted to Judaism twice. His first, a Conservative conversion, was overseen by Rabbi Pearl. His second, which he completed this past May, was an Orthodox one presided over by Rabbi Adam Mintz. the rabbi of Kehilat Rayim Ahuvim, a Modern Orthodox community he founded on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
For now, Butler is keeping his “day job” as a Latin teacher at a charter school in Brooklyn. But he has already begun scouting out commercial ovens in the area to rent, once he can no longer satisfy demand for the challahs which he bakes at home. “I would love to provide challah to more people,” he said.
He is also considering creating a “Shabbat in a Box,” which would include challah, candles and spices as a way to bring Shabbat into more people’s homes. “For me, as a convert, I was amazed by the feeling of Shabbat and its palpable holiness, energy and community,” he said. “I knew I couldn’t live without it. “
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The post How a small challah-baking business is building Jewish community in Astoria, Queens appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Pro-Hamas Campus Groups Call for Toppling US Government, Killing Soldiers
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 National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) organization condemned the US bombing of nuclear facilities in the Islamic Republic of Iran over the weekend, threatening that the American government will be deposed.
The anti-government comments came one day after US President Donald Trump ordered the bombing of three key Iranian nuclear sites — Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz — where Western governments believe the Islamist regime was working to build nuclear weapons. Tehran has claimed its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes
“The empire will fall, from Gaza to Tehran,” NSJP said, writing on the Instagram social media platform. “The unprovoked attacks the US and the Zionist entity have launched against Iran prove only one thing: imperialism in the region will not stop at suffocating Palestine. From Iraq to Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and now Iran, the Empire [sic] demands constant expansion and destabilization.”
It added, “We must be clear: Nuclear development is neither a crime nor the reason for the US’ war against Iran. The US Empire cannot permit the continued existence of a country that dares to stand against Zionism and imperialism.”
On Monday, Asaf Romirowsky, a Middle East expert and the executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), said that NSJP is mirroring an ideology that university professors have trafficked and taught to their students since the 1960s.
“Left-wing academics have loathed ‘American imperialism’ since the Vietnam War and used it to explain and more importantly justify violent ‘’iberation movements’ around the world. Both communist and Muslim revolutions and insurgencies have been applauded over the years by American academics and their European counterparts,” Romirowsky said. “Some of that has been transmitted to students disinterested in the details of Islamic theology (which underlie Iranian policy). Anti-imperialism situates the Palestinian cause firmly on the political left and glosses over its theological basis in Sunni theology — which is perfectly well expressed in the Hamas Charter and countless other Hamas statements.”
SJP splinter groups across higher education rallied to share NSJP’s post, as noted by the antisemitism watchdog group AMCHA Initiative on Monday. Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapters at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Florida reposted it to their Instagram stories, while an SJP group for graduate students of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) did so as well. At Columbia University, a group which calls itself “Unity Fields” posted a photograph of the coffins of fallen US soldiers, captioning it, “Soon, Inshallah,” which means “God willing” in Arabic.
Within Our Lifetime (WOL), another pro-Hamas group which directs campus activities, said, “From Iran to Palestine, from Lebanon to Syria to Yemen, it is our duty from within the belly of the beast to stand against the US empire and zionist [sic] entity’s barbaric, illegal genocidal aggression, and to stand by all those resisting the ongoing genocide in Gaza by any means necessary.”
The tight coordination of the group’s messaging demands a complete accounting of NSJP’s funding, according to Alex Joffe, a historian and editor of the BDS Monitor for SPME.
“The relationship between NSJP and other action-oriented groups, such as Within Our Lifetime and the Party for Socialism and Liberation, suggest nearly complete overlap in interests and even personnel. Most problematic are the relationships between these Muslim and communist vanguard groups and the nominally legitimate Democratic Socialists of America and Working Families Party,” he explained. “These overlaps and penetrations into broader politics leaves outstanding the question of who is directing whom. The instant pivoting of Communist Chinese Party-backed groups like Code Pink to support Iran points to the fact that they, like NSJP, are not grassroots movements but primarily tools for state actors, above all Qatar, China, Iran, Russia and North Korea.”
He continued, “The question of who funds NSJP is therefore more important than ever. With NSJP and other organizations threatening and engaging in domestic violence, the national security threats have increased and should be addressed by local and federal authorities.”
As The Algemeiner has previously reported, National Students for Justice in Palestine, which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations, has publicly discussed its strategy of using the anti-Zionist student movement as a weapon for destroying the US.
“Divestment [from Israel] is not an incrementalist goal. True divestment necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself,” the organization said in September 2024. “It is not possible for imperial spoils to remain so heavily concentrated in the metropole and its high-cultural repositories without the continuous suppression of populations that resist the empire’s expansion; to divest from this is to undermine and eradicate America as we know it.”
The tweet was the latest in a series of revelations of SJP’s revolutionary goals and its apparent plans to amass armies of students and young people for a long campaign of subversion against US institutions, including the economy, military, and higher education. Like past anti-American movements, SJP has also been fixated on the presence and prominence of Jews in American life and the US’s alliance with Israel, the world’s only Jewish state.
On the same day the tweet was posted, Columbia University’s most strident pro-Hamas organization was reported to be distributing literature calling on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group’s movement to destroy Israel during the school’s convocation ceremony.
“This booklet is part of a coordinated and intentional effort to uphold the principles of the thawabit and the Palestinian resistance movement overall by transmitting the words of the resistance directly,” said a pamphlet distributed by Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) spinoff, to incoming freshmen. “This material aims to build popular support for the Palestinian war of national liberation, a war which is waged through armed struggle.”
Other sections of the pamphlet were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose is to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
“We call upon the masses of our Arab and Islamic nations, its scholars, men, institutions, and active forces to come out in roaring crowds tomorrow,” it added, referring to an event which took place the previous December. “We also renew our invitation to the free people and those with living consciences around the world to continue and escalate their global public movement, rejecting the occupation’s crimes, in solidarity with our people and their just cause and legitimate struggle.”
Middle East experts have long suspected that foreign agents are conspiring with SJP chapters — and its spinoffs — in the US to convulse college campuses and lobby for the disintegration of the US-Israel relationship, an outcome that would benefit Middle Eastern powers such as Iran, whose leaders regularly call for the destruction of both the US and Israel.
In July 2024, then-US National Intelligence Director Avril Haines issued a statement outlining how Iran has encouraged and provided financial support to the anti-Israel campus protest movement and explaining that it is part of a larger plan to “undermine confidence in our democratic institutions.” Haines also confirmed that US intelligence agencies have “observed actors tied to Iran’s government posing as activists online, seeking to encourage protests, and even providing financial support to protesters.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Pro-Hamas Campus Groups Call for Toppling US Government, Killing Soldiers first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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UK to Ban Group Palestine Action Under Anti-Terrorism Laws
Police officers block a street as pro-Palestinian demonstrators gather in protest against Britain’s Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s plans to proscribe the “Palestine Action” group in the coming weeks, in London, Britain, June 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jaimi Joy
Britain said on Monday it would use anti-terrorism laws to ban the organization Palestine Action, making it a criminal offence to belong to the group after its activists damaged two UK military planes in protest at London’s support for Israel.
The proscription would put the pro-Palestinian group on a par with Hamas, al-Qaeda, or ISIS under British law, making it illegal for anyone to promote it or be a member. Those who breached the ban could face up to 14 years in jail.
Palestine Action has regularly targeted British sites connected to Israeli defense firm Elbit Systems as well as other companies in Britain linked to Israel since the start of the conflict in Gaza in 2023.
In its latest and most high-profile action, two of its members entered a Royal Air Force base in central England on Friday, spraying paint into the engines of the Voyager transport aircraft and further damaging them with crowbars.
“The disgraceful attack on Brize Norton … is the latest in a long history of unacceptable criminal damage committed by Palestine Action,” Home Secretary [interior minister] Yvette Cooper said in a written statement to parliament.
“The UK’s defense enterprise is vital to the nation’s national security and this government will not tolerate those that put that security at risk.”
She said the group‘s actions had become more aggressive and caused millions of pounds of damage.
Under British law, the Home Secretary can proscribe a group if it is believed it commits, encourages, or “is otherwise concerned in terrorism.” The banning order will be laid before parliament on June 30 and will come into effect if approved.
Palestine Action, which says Britain is an “active participant” in the conflict in Gaza because of military support it provides to Israel, called the ban “an unhinged reaction” which it would challenge, and accused Cooper of making a series of “categorically false claims.”
“The real crime here is not red paint being sprayed on these war planes,” it said in a statement.
Earlier on Monday, the group was forced to change the location of a planned protest after police banned it from staging a demonstration outside parliament, otherwise a popular location for protests in support of a range of causes.
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MAGA Commentators Clash Over Trump’s Choice to Bomb Iran
Tucker Carlson speaks on July 18, 2024, during the final day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Photo: Jasper Colt-USA TODAY via Reuters Connect
US President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb three of Iran’s key nuclear facilities over the weekend has divided his longtime supporters, with some prominent voices in the so-called Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement opposing the strikes and others standing with the administration’s military action.
Mark Levin, the longtime conservative talk radio host and vocal pro-Israel voice, called out US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) for her disagreement with the US strikes, known as Operation Midnight Hammer.
On Sunday, Greene wrote on X, “I don’t know anyone in America who has been the victim of a crime or killed by Iran, but I know many people who have been victims of crime committed by criminal illegal aliens or MURDERED by Cartel and Chinese fentanyl/drugs.” She warned that “Neocon warmongers beat their drums of war and act like Billy badasses going to war in countries most Americans have never seen and can’t find on a map, but never find the courage to go to war against the actual terrorists who actually do kill Americans, invade our land, and make BILLIONS doing it day after day, year after year.”
In response, Levin labeled Greene a “shameless nitwit” and asked, “How incredibly dumb is this Marjorie Taylor Green? She doesn’t know anyone in America who has been a victim of crime or killed by Iran? You mean the thousands of Americans, especially military personnel, killed and maimed by the Iranian terrorist regime?”
Levin aimed his ire at other leaders on both left and right who he christened “America’s Iranian nukes coalition.” He wrote that “if the radical Democrats and their Isolationist fake MAGA reprobates had their way, Iran would have nuclear weapons. This is the new gravely dangerous coalition of Marxists-Islamists-isolationists-grifters. They’re represented by the likes of Bernie Sanders- AOC-Schumer-Jeffries and Rand Paul-Massie-MTG- Qatarlson-Bannon. And they’re giving aid and comfort to a regime that has murdered directly and indirectly thousands of Americans. Never forget. They will forever be opposed and challenged by we, the people — America First loving patriots.”
Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host-turned-podcaster, has faced recent accusations promoted by social media influencer Laura Loomer, alleging links to Qatar, claims which he denies, thus prompting Levin’s “Qatarlson” epithet. Carlson had clashed over Iran in a recent interview with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), reportedly watched by Trump.
Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart News CEO-turned-presidential adviser-turned America First podcaster, declared his disagreement with Trump’s invocation of America’s potential engagement toward regime change in a Truth Social post on Sunday.
“Is this because the ultimate goal is regime change?” Bannon asked. “And if that’s fine, Israelis, have at it. If you want regime change, go for it, baby. Just no participation by the United States government.”
The Daily Beast reported that according to anti-Trump biographer Michael Wolff, unnamed sources within the administration described how Trump had initially leaned toward the Carlson-Bannon isolationist position until shifting Friday under congressional Republicans’ influence toward seeing the value to his image of a successful strike. “The tenor of the phone calls was him saying, ‘I think I’m gonna look very good if I do this,’” Wolff said.
Further exposing the extent to which the Iran strikes have diverged from the last decade of the MAGA movement’s tilt toward isolationism, two of Trump’s former close allies who later parted ways with him and went on to criticize his actions have now voiced their support.
Former Vice President Mike Pence and former National Security Adviser John Bolton have both historically identified with former President Ronald Reagan’s “peace through strength” hawkish foreign policy philosophy. Each praised the bombings of Iran’s nuclear sites.
Pence said to Fox News on Sunday that even though “the president and I have had our differences,” he “couldn’t be more proud [sic] of President Trump’s decisive leadership in this moment or the extraordinary professionalism and courage of our armed forces that brought about this historic mission.”
On Sunday morning, the conservative magazine Washington Examiner published an article with the headline “Trump did the right thing in Iran” by Bolton, one of the conservative movement’s most steadfast and robust Iran hawks.
“It was long past time that Washington did more to aid Israel in defeating Iran and took direct action against Tehran’s nuclear proliferation efforts,” Bolton wrote. “There are undoubtedly additional measures now underway to protect American deployed forces and civilian personnel in the region against Iranian retaliation now that we have taken offensive military action. Similarly, we should continue bringing forward additional forces to bolster Israeli and Gulf Arab state defenses against Tehran military retaliation.”
Bolton warned that “peace and security in the Middle East are impossible while the ayatollahs rule in Tehran.” He urged that “overthrowing the current regime is a necessary, even if not a sufficient, condition to reach that goal. The sooner the better.”
Trump said after Saturday night’s strikes that the US was acting to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons but not seeking regime change. The next day, however, he seemed to entertain the idea. Writing on Truth Social, he posted: “It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”
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