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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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Nina Davidson Presses Universities to Back Words With Action as Jewish Students Return to Campus Amid Antisemitism Crisis
Nina Davidson on The Algemeiner’s ‘J100’ podcast. Photo: Screenshot
Philanthropist Nina Davidson, who served on the board of Barnard College, has called on universities to pair tough rhetoric on combatting antisemitism with enforcement as Jewish students returned to campuses for the new academic year.
“Years ago, The Algemeiner had published a list ranking the most antisemitic colleges in the country. And number one was Columbia,” Davidson recalled on a recent episode of The Algemeiner‘s “J100” podcast. “As a board member and as someone who was representing the institution, it really upset me … At the board meeting, I brought it up and I said, ‘What are we going to do about this?’”
Host David Cohen, chief executive officer of The Algemeiner, explained he had revisited Davidson’s remarks while she was being honored for her work at The Algemeiner‘s 8th annual J100 gala, held in October 2021, noting their continued relevance.
“It could have been the same speech in 2025,” he said, underscoring how longstanding concerns about campus antisemitism, while having intensified in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, are not new.
Davidson argued that universities already possess the tools to protect students – codes of conduct, time-place-manner rules, and consequences for threats or targeted harassment – but too often fail to apply them evenly. “Statements are not enough,” she said, arguing that institutions need to enforce their rules and set a precedent that there will be consequences for individuals who refuse to follow them.
She also said that stakeholders – alumni, parents, and donors – are reassessing their relationships with schools that, in their view, have not safeguarded Jewish students. While supportive of open debate, Davidson distinguished between protest and intimidation, calling for leadership that protects expression while ensuring campus safety.
The episode surveyed specific pressure points that administrators will face this fall: repeat anti-Israel encampments, disruptions of Jewish programming, and the challenge of distinguishing political speech from conduct that violates university rules. “Unless schools draw those lines now,” Davidson warned, “they’ll be scrambling once the next crisis hits.”
Cohen closed by framing the discussion as a test of institutional credibility, asking whether universities will “turn policy into protection” in real time. Davidson agreed, pointing to students who “need to know the rules aren’t just on paper.”
The full conversation is available on The Algemeiner’s “J100” podcast.
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Brown University Reactivates Students for Justice in Palestine Following Suspension
Illustrative: Brown University students gathered outside University Hall. Photo: Amy Russo of USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters Connect
Brown University has reinstated Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a notorious anti-Zionist group widely recognized as a leading driver of campus antisemitism, following a suspension related to its conduct at anti-Israel demonstrations last year.
“Brown leaders have continued to work to ensure that all members of our campus community understand the expectations and community standards for demonstrations and protests on campus,” university spokesman Brian Clark told The Brown Daily Herald, which first reported the story on Tuesday. “While Brown’s policies make clear that protest is an acceptable means of expression on campus, it cannot interfere with the normal functions of the university.”
Brown University first launched investigations into its anti-Israel groups and individual students following their riotous conduct during a protest of the Brown Corporation that was held in October 2024.
Staged outside the Warren Alpert Medical School to inveigh against the corporation’s recent rejection of a proposal to adopt the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement — which aims to isolate Israel from the international community as a step toward its eventual elimination — the demonstration saw the Ivy League students engage in harassment and intimidation, according to a community notice obtained by The Algemeiner. The protesters repeatedly struck a bus transporting the corporation’s trustees from the area, shouted expletives at them, and even lodged a “a racial epithet … toward a person of color.”
Other trustees were stalked to their destinations while some were obstructed from entering their bus, according to the missive by Russell Carey, Brown’s interim vice president for campus life and executive vice president of planning and policy. The official added that the students — many of whom are members of Students for Justice in Palestine, which has links to terrorist organizations, and its spin-off, Brown Divest Coalition (BDC) — harmed not only the trustees but also the university as an institution of higher learning.
Speaking to The Herald, anti-Israel activists denied any wrongdoing and accused Carey of inciting an “attempt to attack and defame student protesters holding the corporation accountable to their decision to continue to invest in companies enabling genocide and apartheid.” Framing themselves as victims, the students added that the Brown Corporation should be “deeply ashamed.”
Brown went on to suspend SJP, stripping the group of its recognition and privileges.
According to The Herald, the university has terminated the suspension and re-recognized SJP despite finding it guilty of “disruption of community” and “harm to persons.” However, the group is on probation until the end of this academic year.
An SJP operator acknowledged that political pressure may have contributed to the group’s reinstatement, noting that a local American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) chapter demanded that the university lift its suspension in January in a letter which lodged allegations of free speech violations.
Even with the group restored to good standing, its activity remains restricted. It may not “hold rallies or demonstrations for the remainder of the academic year” and is barred from holding “teach-ins and speaker events until November,” the Herald said.
Anti-Israel and far-left activity has caused Brown to incur exorbitant financial penalties imposed by the US federal government.
In July, Brown agreed to pay $50 million dollars and enact a series of reforms put forth by the Trump administration to settle claims involving alleged sex discrimination and antisemitism, the school’s president, Christina Paxson, announced.
“The university’s foremost priority throughout discussions with the government was remaining true to our academic mission, our core values, and who we are as a community at Brown,” Paxson wrote. “This is reflected in key provisions of the resolution agreement preserving our academic independence, as well as a commitment to pay $50 million in grants over 10 years to workforce development organizations in Rhode Island, which is aligned with our service and community engagement mission.”
The resolution made Brown University the latest higher education institution at the time to accede to US President Donald Trump’s demands for policies that would pull academia back from what he has described as an ideologically leftward drift that has precipitated racial hatred against Jews and violations of the rights of women designated as female at birth. The government is rewarding Brown’s propitiating by restoring access to $510 million in federal research grants and contracts it impounded.
Per the agreement, shared by Paxson, Brown will provide women athletes locker rooms based on sex, not one’s self-chosen gender identity — a monumental concession by a university that is reputed as one of the most progressive in the country — and adopt the Trump administration’s definition of “male” and “female,” as articulated in a January 2025 executive order issued by Trump. Additionally, Brown has agreed not to “perform gender reassignment surgery or prescribe puberty blockers or hormones to any minor child for the purpose of aligning the child’s appearance with an identity that differs from his or her sex.”
Regarding campus antisemitism, the agreement calls for Brown University to reduce anti-Jewish bias on campus by forging ties with local Jewish Day Schools, launching “renewed partnerships with Israeli academics and national Jewish organizations,” and boosting support for its Judaic Studies program. Brown must also conduct a “climate survey” of Jewish students to collect raw data of their campus experiences.
Another major provision shutters any Brown initiatives which may advance the aims of the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement.
“Brown shall not maintain programs that promote unlawful efforts to achieve race-based outcomes, quotas, diversity targets, or similar efforts,” the agreement stipulated. “Brown will cease any provision of benefits or advantages to individuals on the basis of protected characteristics in any school, component, division, department, foundation, association, or element within the entire Brown University system.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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New MIT Accuser Comes Forward With Harrowing Antisemitism Allegations
Illustrative” A pro-Hamas encampment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, May 6, 2024. Photo: Brian Snyder via Reuters Connect
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is being accused by another alleged victim of refusing, as de-facto policy, to quell antisemitic discrimination which violated rights guaranteed by Title VI of the US Civil Rights Act.
The complainant, a male researcher, came forward to join a lawsuit that the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed in June, which required its being amended to include him. According to court documents shared with The Algemeiner, he endured psychological torment, having been swarmed by “masked” pro-Hamas activists clamoring for the destruction of Israel and students who “interrogated” his Jewish identity, pelting him with slurs and threatening to “prevent” his reproducing to bring “more Jewish children” into the world.
While administrators received formal complaints describing in harrowing detail the severity of the bullying being perpetrated against the student, they allegedly took no action. Left to stand alone, the student resorted to concealing his Jewishness on a campus which purports to be one of the most inclusive in the country.
“Antisemitism continues to persist at MIT, ultimately allowing the abuse to escalate until a promising Israeli researcher was forced from his lab. This not only deeply impacts this individual, but an entire campus and the communities this researcher, and other like them, could help through their work over the course of their careers,” Brandeis center founder and chairman Kenneth Marcus said in a statement. “MIT has had countless opportunities to stop this harassment and protect their Israeli and Jewish students and faculty. Instead, antisemitism has only worsened at MIT — an outcome made possible by the administration’s continued negligence.”
As previously reported, the other plaintiffs, Lior Alon and William Sussman, allege that MIT became inhospitable to Jewish students after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, as pro-Hamas activists there issued calls to “globalize the intifada,” interrupted lessons with “speeches, chants, and screams,” and discharged their bodily fluids on campus properties administered by Jews. Jewish institutions at MIT came under further attack when a pro-Hamas group circulated a “terror-map” on campus which highlighted buildings associated with Jews and Israelis and declared, “resistance is justified when people are colonized.”
The suit added that Alon — who lived through both intifadas, or periods of sustained Palestinian terrorism against Jews and Israels, as a citizen of Israel and lost his childhood friend to the Hamas Oct. 7 massacre — has personally been victimized by campus antisemites. During anti-Israel encampment protests in spring term 2024, Alon was prohibited from entering the Kresge Lawn section of campus, through which he needed to pass to access his office. The edict allegedly came down from pro-Hamas activists and was enforced by an MIT police officer, who became an accessory to the group’s usurpation of school property.
Later, Alon was allegedly harassed by Michel DeGraff, a tenured linguistics professor. According to the suit, DeGraff posted videos of Alon on social media, replete with his “personal information, including details of his Israeli military services,” as well as spurious accounts of his life which portrayed him as sinister. The productions inspired misfits to approach him in the streets, as they showed up at “the grocery store and his child’s daycare.”
All the while, MIT’s administration allegedly refused to correct the hostile environment.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, MIT has allegedly ignored dozens of complaints of antisemitic discrimination. Discrimination there has been described in harrowing testimony provided by students at hearings called by the US Congress, in social media posts, and in comments to this publication. Only last year, MIT student Talia Khan told members of Congress that attending the institution “traumatized” her, charging that it has “become overrun by terrorist supporters that directly threaten the lives of Jews on our campus.”
Khan went on to recount MIT’s efforts to suppress expressions of solidarity with Israel after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, which included ordering Jewish students to remove Israeli flags from public display while allowing Palestinian flags to fly across campus. She described the double standard as a “scandal” alienating Jewish students, staff, and faculty, many of whom resigned from an allegedly farcical committee on antisemitism. Staff were ignored, Khan said, after expressing fear that their lives were at risk, following an incident in which a mob of anti-Zionists amassed in front of the MIT Israel Internship office and attempted to infiltrate it, banging on its doors while “screaming” that Jews are committing genocide.
“These incidents demonstrate what happens when antisemitism is allowed to flourish in the absence of leadership and accountability,” Jonathan Polkes, global co-chair of legal practice White & Case, the law firm partnering with the Brandeis Center to litigate the suit, said on Wednesday. “Through its inaction, MIT allowed a tenured professor to use his position of power to persecute Jews without consequence — breaking both federal and university laws in the process. Our clients are taking a courageous stand against injustice, and we are proud to represent them.”
Commenting on the lawsuit, MIT has previously said, “MIT will defend itself in court regarding the allegations raised in the lawsuit. To be clear, MIT rejects antisemitism. As President Kornbluth has said, ‘Antisemitism is real, and it is rising in the world. We cannot let it poison our community.’”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.