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The ‘Grand Cru Jew’ pours fine wine at Michelin-starred Japanese restaurant in the West Village
(New York Jewish Week) — Imagine an Upper West Side seder like any other: adults praying, haggadahs dappled with brisket juice, matzah ball soup a little too salty. Only that’s not a Manischewitz bottle on the table. That’s a magnum of Cru Beaujolais.
For this type of epicurean refinement, it helps to have someone in your family like Dean Fuerth, better known to his Instagram followers as the “Grand Cru Jew.” Though his nickname, derived from the highest designation for Burgundy wines, conjures up images of a “Seinfeld”-ian C-plot, Fuerth, 35, is a serious sommelier with extensive training in French fine dining. Since 2017, he has served as the beverage director for the Sushi Nakazawa empire, helming one of the most robust rare sake lists in the city, if not the world.
Fuerth’s handle comes from his time working as a young wine trainee at the Manhattan restaurant Bouley, where a senior sommelier set up challenges to sell unconventional bottles. One night, Fuerth ended up overselling his goal by about $4,000. “Oui, Grand Cru Jew,” Fuerth says the sommelier enthused — and the nickname stuck.
“It comes up in public,” Fuerth said of his moniker, with pride. “Especially in the wine community.”
Fuerth describes his family as falling into the “liberal Jew category” from the Upper West Side, attending synagogue on the High Holidays. “I have a very strong sense of family identity, personal identity,” he told the New York Jewish Week.
Fuerth was not predestined to become a sommelier — his family hardly consists of wine snobs. Via a phone interview, he tells the story of his aunt, who, at a seder in 2009, opened a bottle of Cupcake Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon. The following year, Fuerth noticed she was pouring the same vintage — she had re-corked last year’s bottle. Fuerth could only laugh.
“I’m now the culinary director for the family,” said Fuerth, half-joking.
In a family of lawyers, pursuing a fine dining career was unheard of; what’s more, sommelier isn’t a traditional Jewish profession. As wine writer Alice Feiring said last year: “It’s hard to tell your parents ‘I’m not going to medical school or law school, I’m going to be a wine waiter.’”
In the mid-aughts, Fuerth was pursuing a degree in film at Hunter College, but he dropped out after a year to become a production assistant on shows like “Law and Order” and “30 Rock.” To pay his bills, he took a job as a barback and busboy at the Upper West Side restaurant Bella Blu, a job he readily admits — with typical service industry candor — he wasn’t particularly good at. But he was able to handle bottles, a skill that gave him some currency in the wine world.
In 2010, he was off to a higher-paying gig as a server at Bar Boulud, the Burgundy wine bar at Lincoln Center run by celebrity chef Daniel Boulud. Under the auspices of the beverage director Michael Madrigale, Fuerth opened new bottles every night, giving him a crash course in the catalog of French wines. Fuerth still has an encyclopedic knowledge of this time: He recounts the exact bottle — a 1999 Cornas August Clape from the Rhone Valley — that kickstarted his ambitions.
“I was having my mind blown by how complex and deep and soulful wine can be,” he said. “Having a curiosity and a passion opened up this whole world.”
That understanding of terroir, how microclimates can impart flavor, intoxicated him. He closed out his film industry chapter for good and embarked upon what he called “French military” fine dining training. The culture privileges conformity over creativity — but Fuerth didn’t conform.
“Dean had that pirate mentality,” said Madrigale. “He’s like a New Yorker, straight up. When he gets it in his mind he wants to do something, he does it.”
Madrigale remembers a time when Fuerth, as a server, had sold enough wine to entitle him to a free meal at the upscale restaurant. He chose the decadent duck confit. “He was going to sit down and eat in the dining room, while other people are waiting for him to serve them,” Madrigale said, still astounded by Fuerth’s chutzpah. “I think even Daniel [Boulud] said, ‘Well he’s doing really well, let him do it.”’
Madrigale became a mentor to Fuerth, who began his formal wine training and accompanied Madrigale on a trip to Bordeaux. After Bar Boulud, Fuerth traversed through a Zagat list of the city’s Michelin-starred French fine dining outposts as a self-described wine “mercenary.” He landed one of his first sommelier gigs in 2014 at Bouley, the now-closed French joint from Chef David Bouley in Tribeca. His first beverage director gig came the following year at Betony, in Midtown.
“I was able to open up some of the craziest, most expensive bottles,” he said of his time at Bouley. “And I got my butt kicked.”
He arrived at Sushi Nakazawa first as a fan-boy diner. Nakazawa opened in the West Village in 2013 as a 10-seat omakase spot that was immediately lauded as one of the best Japanese restaurants in the city. Pete Wells, in his initial 4-star review for the New York Times, heralded Daisuke Nakazawa’s cookery: “The moment-to-moment joys of eating one mouthful of sushi after another can merge into a blur of fish bliss.”
He approached them for a job, and in 2017, became their beverage director. Fuerth was thrown into a new role: sake expert. “It’s a completely different animal,” Fuerth said of the rice alcohol; his French wine training proved non-transferrable.
How did the Grand Cru Jew fare? “It was a steep and harsh learning curve,” he admits. Fuerth began looking for low acid, richer grapes like Condrieu to compare with sake.
Buying sakes also proved opaque. The echelon of sake producers Fuerth was working with required a certain level of trust among buyers due to their microscopic scale. Take, for example, Dassai’s “Beyond the Beyond” Junmai Daiginjō. A known producer of high-end sake, Dassai started a contest in 2019 among Japanese farmers cultivating the very specific Yamada-Nishiki grain. After machine analysis and DNA testing, the company chose to buy just one plot of land for this sake. They made 23 bottles and sent just four to America. Nakazawa is selling their bottle for $19,000.
“Sake should be consumed at the right environment, at the right temperature and tell the story of what makes it special,” he said.
Fuerth has certaintly caught up: Just last week, World of Fine Wine selected Sushi Nakazawa as the best sake list in North America.
Now six years in, Fuerth’s conception of wine pairings has evolved, too. He matches high-ticket Burgundy and Champagne with new age bottles from places like Hungary and Quebec, all with a Japanese palate in mind. He has overseen Nakazawa’s expansion to Washington, D.C., as well as a pop-up in Aspen, Colorado, and will be continuing onto a new location in Los Angeles.
It’s not unusual for diners at Nakazawa to spend four figures on a bottle. Is it mind-blowing to regularly sell bottles the price of a used car? “I’m a little numb to it at this point,” Fuerth said.
It’s all a far cry from the Cupcake wine Fuerth’s aunt served at the seder years ago (although Fuerth admits to drinking Manischewitz at synagogue).
The day after our conversation, Fuerth was set to depart New York for Bordeaux, as part of a trip organized by a wine distributor to some of the most storied, cloistered chateaus of the region. There they would open decades-old bottles that had never left the vineyard.
“It never gets old,” Fuerth said. “I feel like a kid again.”
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The post The ‘Grand Cru Jew’ pours fine wine at Michelin-starred Japanese restaurant in the West Village appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Biden Administration Shifts $100 Million in US Military Aid From Israel and Egypt to Lebanon
Lebanese army soldiers gesture as they secure the area near the US embassy in Awkar, Lebanon, June 5, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir
In the final days of US President Joe Biden’s time in office, his administration has redirected over $100 million in military aid from Israel and Egypt to Lebanon, citing a need to strengthen a ceasefire agreement to halt fighting between the Jewish state and the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah.
The US State Department issued two separate notices to Congress dated Jan. 3, announcing that it would shift $95 million in military aid intended for Egypt and $7.5 million intended for Israel toward the Lebanese military and its government, the Associated Press reported.
The move came after some lawmakers in Congress expressed concerns about Egypt’s human rights record, particularly the arrests of thousands of political prisoners.
Most of the money will go to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), which has a central role in enforcing the November ceasefire that stopped nearly 14 months of war between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Islamist terrorist organization that wielded significant political and military influence in Lebanon.
“Successful implementation [of the ceasefire] will require an empowered LAF, which will need robust assistance from the United States and other partners,” the State Department said in its letters.
Hezbollah relentlessly pummeled northern Israeli communities with daily barrages of missiles, rockets, and drones in the months following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel from Gaza in the south. Roughly 80,000 Israelis were forced to evacuate Israel’s north due to the unrelenting attacks.
Israel intensified its military efforts against Hezbollah in September, using airstrikes and ground operations in southern Lebanon — bolstered by sophisticated intelligence operations — to decimate much of the terrorist group’s leadership and weapons stockpiles.
In late November, both Israel and Lebanon agreed to a ceasefire, which in part requires Israeli forces to gradually withdraw from southern Lebanon over 60 days. Meanwhile, the Lebanese army will enter these areas and ensure that Hezbollah retreats north of the Litani River, located some 18 miles north of the border with Israel.
The newly shifted US aid is largely meant to help the LAF in dispatching troops throughout southern Lebanon to supplement UN peacekeeping efforts there.
“US security assistance to the LAF increases its capacity as the country’s only legitimate military force and defender of Lebanon’s territorial integrity, enables the LAF to prevent potential destabilization from ISIS and other terrorist groups, and enables the LAF to provide security both for the Lebanese people and for US personnel,” the State Department said in its notices.
The department also rejected the claim that members of Hezbollah are serving in the LAF, insisting that the Lebanese army serves as a valuable “counterweight” to Hezbollah’s influence in Lebanon.
“US support to the LAF reinforces the LAF as an important institutional counterweight to Hezbollah, which receives weapons, training, and financial support from Iran,” the State Department wrote. “The LAF continues to be an independent, non-sectarian institution in Lebanon, and is respected across all sectors.”
Critics have noted that UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the last war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006 and is the basis for the current ceasefire, failed to disarm Hezbollah, with the terrorist group becoming more powerful despite the presence of the LAF and the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).
Nonetheless, US Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) applauded the Biden administration’s announcement, arguing that the diversion of funds to Lebanon helps bolster American priorities in the region.
“Our military aid should advance US values and national security interests in the Middle East — not reflexively reward the Egyptian government, despite its failures to meet human rights conditions set by Congress,” Murphy said.
However, Richard Goldberg, senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington, DC-based think tank, argued that shifting money toward the LAF was ill-advised.
“If we actually saw the LAF take on Hezbollah, there might be value in this support, but right now, we are throwing away taxpayer money to a Hezbollah enabler. Egypt should be pressured to do much more to secure the release of hostages held by Hamas, but moving money from a Hamas enabler to a Hezbollah enabler makes no sense,” Goldberg said in a statement.
The post Biden Administration Shifts $100 Million in US Military Aid From Israel and Egypt to Lebanon first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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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.”
The post Israeli Minister of Culture Urges FIFA to Remove Senior PA Official for Inciting Terrorism Against Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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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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