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A ‘Jewish luncheonette’ returns to the Flatiron District, with a killer egg cream
(New York Jewish Week) — It’s just after 1 p.m. on an unseasonably warm autumn day, and the line at the recently opened Flatiron restaurant S&P, which describes itself as “a new place for a very old lunch counter,” is out the door.
Fortunately for my rumbling stomach, the crowd is mostly due to the tight quarters within: Many customers are simply waiting for takeout orders of pastrami sandwiches and matzah ball soup. The barstool seating at the vintage marble counter means space near the entrance is at a premium, and my dining companion (none other than Shannon Sarna, the editor of The Nosher) and I are quickly seated at a two-top in the cramped yet convivial rear, which is dominated by a long green banquette.
S&P officially opened Sept. 28, the latest venture from Eric Finkelstein and Matt Ross, the founders of hip local sandwich mini-chain Court Street Grocers. It’s the newest iteration of an old-school luncheonette at 174 Fifth Ave., which first opened in 1928 and had been known for decades as Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop.
I myself had once been a regular Eisenberg’s customer: At the tail-end of the ’90s, my first “real” job in New York was at the Flatiron Building across the street. To me — and, clearly, to many other New Yorkers — Eisenberg’s was the kind of place that seemed to be entwined with the very fabric of the city, like pigeons, hot dog carts and subway cars. I can’t say the food was particularly good at Eisenberg’s, but washing down a tuna melt with an egg cream in the vintage environs always felt special.
After a series of owners, Eisenberg’s shuttered for good during the pandemic in March 2021. Finkelstein and Ross — who first met as undergraduates at the Rhode Island School of Design, where they graduated in 2003 — were tapped to take over the space this spring, as the building’s landlord was committed to having a tenant who would preserve the vibe (if not the name, due to legal reasons) of Eisenberg’s.
The partners have spiffed up the interior and the menu a tad — but not enough so that the eatery feels unrecognizable. In fact S&P very much feels the same as Eisenberg’s always has, even if the floor is new and dishes such as bananas and sour cream are recent additions. As Finkelstein, 40, who grew up in a Jewish family in Hollis Hills, Queens, told me in a phone interview: “This is the kind of food I grew up around and with.”
In an effort to preserve the space’s long history, the new owners settled on a name that honors the restaurant’s original owners, Charles Schwadron and Rubin Pulver. “You can see that these two guys, Schwadron and Pulver, had built this place out right when the building was erected, and they were going to run a restaurant together,” Finkelstein said, explaining research that included scouring old lawsuits and tax documents. “In a 1940 tax photo, which is how we found out it had been called S&P, you can see five other sandwich shops on the same block.”
Following a hectic weekday lunch rush, I spoke with Finkelstein about the luncheonette’s legacy, its Jewish influences and how to make a perfect egg cream.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
New York Jewish Week: Eisenberg’s felt like the kind of place that’s been around forever — and the new S&P still does. The nostalgia is there, but at the same time, the restaurant really feels like a living, breathing part of the city. Is that what you were aiming for?
Eric Finkelstein: This kind of place has always been really important to my business partner, Matt [Ross], and I — and to, obviously, a lot of people in New York. It’s the kind of place that people associate with New York. When you think about the city, you assume that these places are everywhere — and they should be. There are a number of reasons why they aren’t; some of them are organic, and some of them aren’t.
We found ourselves with an opportunity to help the city retain this one. And I think, fundamentally, what we really wanted to do was just make sure that if we were going to do this, that we did it in a way that was honest — where we tried to make the best food that we can, and try to provide the most appropriate level of service that we can, and that it’s not, to use a phrase Matt uses, a “theme-park version.” Because we definitely feel that this kind of thing is timeless, and it’s not, you know, it’s not an exercise in nostalgia to try to keep this place open.
Were you familiar with Eisenberg’s before you opened S&P?
I wasn’t aware of Eisenberg’s as a kid. My father definitely knew of it; my great-grandparents worked in the neighborhood, where there were a ton of places like Eisenberg’s. When we opened Court Street Grocers [in 2010], Matt and I used a number of things as a model for what we wanted to do [and this was one of them]. Like everybody else, I was kind of bummed to see the place had declined so precipitously in those last couple of years, then even more devastated to see it close.
I should say, obviously, that we are not Eisenberg’s. We don’t have the right to use that name. S&P is a different business. But one of the things that I loved so much about Eisenberg’s is that it was a lunch counter, that, you know, there were hundreds, or maybe thousands of lunch counters exactly like it in New York, with the same exact specs for the marble countertop and the mirrored back bar.
There are a lot of traditional Jewish foods on the menu, like latkes and matzah brei, but you also have things like cheeseburgers and bacon. Would you consider S&P a Jewish deli, or do you see it as Jewish in any way?
I would consider it a Jewish luncheonette. I think a deli has counter service, like a deli counter. Maybe a deli food case, and you could order food to go, or you could sit down at a table and maybe get a table service. But I think the lunch counter aspect of it makes it not a deli but a luncheonette.
It’s obviously not kosher. But, you know, I think there’s a tradition of this kind of lunch counter in New York that was Jewish inflected. And even a lot of diners have a lot of traditional Jewish food on their menus, for whatever reason, just because it’s New York.
I read that S&P’s desserts are made by your relatives. I love how this is a family business — a lot of the classic Jewish restaurants in the city, like Katz’s Delicatessen and Russ & Daughters, are generations-old family businesses. Do you feel like you’re recreating some of that, with something new?
My father makes the rugelach and both of Matt’s parents make the carrot cake.
The Court Street Grocers business, we’ve always thought of it as a kind of mom-and-pop-style operation. Decisions are made based on what’s actually happening with interactions between the customers and the staff, versus just kind of coming up with what people call “a concept” and executing it. These places should be living and breathing things that change.
Bonus question: I ordered a tuna melt and an egg cream at S&P, just like I used to at Eisenberg’s. I like egg creams OK but I don’t generally love them. But the one I had at S&P was by far the best egg cream I’ve ever had. What’s your secret?
First of all, we have good seltzer — we made sure that we had a good seltzer system put in, with the right amount of carbon dioxide, pressure, and a way that we can get it cold enough, which is a big deal. We’re using good milk, and we’re using Fox’s U-Bet [chocolate] syrup. So it’s sort of the same ingredients that everybody uses. I don’t know if ours is better, but the order of operations is really important. Before we opened we tried, over and over again, different ways of making it, like you put the chocolate syrup and then the milk. [Or] you put the milk and seltzer and then syrup. We’ve gotten to a place where we’re really satisfied. The amount of syrup is really important — I think it’s just proportions and order of operations, and then doing your best to try to not beat out all the carbonation.
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A farewell to Hampshire College, site of my Yiddish awakening
Zay gezunt Hampshire College. That’s where as an undergrad student worker, I first studied Yiddish at the OG Yiddish Book Center of Amherst, Massachusetts, down the road from the genteel Lord Jeffrey Inn, across the street from uber-sensitive poet lady Emily Dickinson’s alte heym.
In nearby Holyoke, in an old mill turned Yiddish book storage loft, away from the genius of Dickinson’s dybbuk, I earned my way shelving the Book Center’s staggering amounts of the collected works of Sholem Aleichem — most likely purchased as a subscriber premium by turn of the century Forverts readers — and only surpassed by the unspeakable numbers of Yiddish volumes of Guy De Maupassant. I hoisted those onto shelves as well while getting educated about Nico and the Velvet Underground which blared from speakers. Back in the 1980’s that was multitasking.
And dayge nisht, no worries — I got my klezmer awakening there too, via a Walkman and audio cassettes while laboring as a photo history slide librarian for my advisor and favorite professor, filmmaker Abraham Ravett, who is set to retire next month (can you retire if your workplace closes?).
Splayed out across acres of stunning apple orchards that once belonged to the Stiles family, Hampshire College had neither a Hillel chapter nor a Chabad nor any organized sports nor fraternities — but there was a coed sauna, plenty of rolfing on the snow outside said sauna, a successful student run food coop, an acclaimed ultimate frisbee team and a beloved outdoor program that led to my first heron sightings just like in the movie On Golden Pond.
It also had Len Glick, Elvis’ former induction physician who co-taught modern Jewish history, along with his younger historian colleague Aaron Berman, whose office door was anointed with a poster that offered a Marxist view of baseball. It was 1984 and I was hot off seeing Streisand’s film version of Yentl. I’d polished off most of Bashevis’ tomes back home, memorized my Bubby’s photo album of Eastern European Jewry as envisioned in Visniac’s A Vanished World, and collided into Marlene Booth’s documentary about the Yiddishists of Raananah who took up space in an audacious dream of a utopian summer community in Orange County, New York. Tayere Leyener, dear reader, that’s all it took.
I knew my final paper was going to be about women and Yiddish. Well, I recall Len saying, if you want to investigate Bashevis’ inspiration for his Yentl and research women writers and women’s lives in Yiddish, you’re going to have to learn Yiddish; there isn’t much about that available in translation. Why don’t you go over to the Yiddish Book Center, he continued, and talk to them. And just like that, I found myself on the top floor of an old elementary school in Amherst, spending evenings learning Yiddish and my days trying to grasp enough of it to complete my assignment.
I’d love to tell you that just like Yentl, I too spent hours bent over tomes, deep in study, but as previously disclosed, Hampshire had much to distract and much to offer. And besides, I had books to shelve, boxes to unpack and roads to travel, joining the center’s trips to pick up YET MORE Yiddish books. My mazel was that Hampshire hosted the Book Center’s first summer seminars. Once longtime staffer Frieda Howards and I finished inspecting attendees’ dorm rooms, making sure the beds had hospital corners, I was warmly invited to attend lectures.
Hampshire hosted artists and activists like Yippie founder Abbie Hoffman. When Hampshire alum and Yiddish Book Center founder Aron Lansky talked about him, he highlighted all the Yiddish influences in Hoffman’s Steal This Book, as well as the Yiddish-inflected tensions of the Chicago 7 trials. All this came to a head when I met Yiddish lesbian poet, child survivor and hero to Jewish feminists Irena Klepfisz. A Bundist descendant, keeper of the flame, she — vu den — called a hastily gathered group into action. If we wanted Yiddish women’s writing to be translated, we were the translating liberators we were waiting for, so to speak. It was on us.
Tayere leyner/dear reader, I could, like so many Yiddish authors, go on in depth without so much as a break for a comma or a paragraph, such was the depth of my mazel at Hampshire. Ok, a bisl more. There was the weekend trip with Lansky and local poet and Book Center staffer Gene Zeiger to the Newport Folk Festival to hear Joan Baez sing. There was the summer Yiddish genius Naomi Seidman was a fellow at the Book Center — thanks to Seidman, that was my summer of Nico, the Velvet Underground, of reading Ginsberg’s “Howl,” and much much more. That was the summer I interned for the filmmaker Marlene Booth who was making a film about that Yiddish newspaper everyone talked about, the one I recalled picking up for my bubby. I spent time in my cooperative household on campus, bent over an audio transcription machine, typing out interview after interview with Forverts readers, spellbound by their love for it and activism on its behalf as it fell on hard times.
And reader, though Hampshire will likely close for good, you and I now know that if not for Hampshire College, where now upon a nice parcel of that former apple orchard sits the Yiddish Book Center in all its well earned koved, I and many like me, would not spend our days bending over our morgue of Forverts photos, back issues and more, reaching back over time to keep remembering our past and making it available for future generations.
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Moderation cuts leave most extremist, antisemitic content on Instagram unchecked, ADL finds
(JTA) — White supremacist networks, terror group supporters and Nazi merchandise vendors have gone largely unchecked on Instagram amid weakened content moderation by its parent company Meta, according to a new analysis by the Anti-Defamation League.
Instagram failed to remove 93% of hateful and extremist content reported by the ADL’s researchers, a figure the watchdog said demonstrated a “systemic failure” to protect users, according to the report published on Wednesday. The content included accounts and posts linked to white supremacist networks, groups that are designated as foreign terrorist organizations by the U.S. government and vendors selling Nazi merchandise.
The report comes over a year after Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced that the company would do away with its fact-check program and stop using automation to detect and remove hate speech.
“Instagram is developing into a hub for hate and antisemitism, and our research demonstrates this clearly,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO and national director of the ADL, said in a statement. “Meta’s moderation rollback has created a permissive environment where extremists thrive, bad actors turn Instagram’s own features into amplification tools for hate, and as a result, vulnerable communities suffer.”
While Elon Musk’s decision to permit formerly banned extremist account-holders to return to X has made his platform the most prominent avatar of social media’s abandonment of moderation, Meta has undergone a similar shift more recently. The ADL has sparred with Musk and X in the past as well.
Meta still does not allow “organizations or individuals that proclaim a violent mission or are engaged in violence to have a presence on our platforms,” according to the company’s community standards, which also say the company removes “dehumanizing speech” and “harmful stereotypes.” But it has also scaled back its capacity to enforce the rules.
The changes, which Zuckerberg billed as a “trade-off” between catching hateful content and reducing the number of “innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down,” drew criticism from Jewish groups, including the World Jewish Congress and CyberWell.
Of the 253 posts that the ADL’s Center on Extremism reported earlier this year, Instagram removed only 11 accounts and 8 posts, according to the new report, titled “How Meta’s Content Moderation Changes Risk Turning Instagram into a Hub for Hate.” In 20 cases, the watchdog said that Instagram said it lacked the bandwidth to review the reports.
The report also found a number of accounts that were linked or indirectly linked to terrorist groups, including at least 23 accounts that spread Islamic State and Al-Qaida Propaganda, as well as 33 accounts with direct or indirect connections to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
While Meta has maintained a ban on official accounts run by Nick Fuentes, the avowed white supremacist and antisemite at the center of a growing divide in the Republican party, the ADL study found that his content is shared on the platform by 105 Instagram accounts affiliated with Fuentes’ Groyper movement, which combined had over 1.4 million followers as of January 2026.
One Southern California-based merchandising company, Curb Stomp MFG, which sells apparel with Nazi symbols including Sonnenrads, Totenkopfs and SS bolts, and its owner had garnered over 3.2 million views on hateful content posted to Instagram, according to the study.
Oren Segal, the senior vice president for counter-extremism and intelligence for the ADL, said in a statement that the lack of content moderation on the platform amounted to a “public safety crisis,” adding that the company’s “decision to gut content moderation puts Instagram at risk of being a megaphone for the world’s most dangerous antisemites and extremists.”
Releasing the report ahead of a Meta shareholder meeting, the ADL is calling on the company to “reinstate proactive moderation measures against violative content.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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JD Vance heckled over Middle East policy at conservative event
(JTA) — Vice President JD Vance was interrupted by antiwar hecklers during a Turning Point USA event on Tuesday, underscoring growing backlash over U.S. policy in the Middle East among young Republicans.
“Jesus Christ does not support genocide,” one person shouted out during the event at the University of Georgia. Shortly after, a voice yelled out, “You’re killing children! You’re bombing children!”
“I agree,” Vance responded. “Jesus Christ certainly does not support genocide, whoever yelled that out from the dark.”
But he said the audience should be thankful for the Trump administration’s negotiation of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
“You know who’s the person who got a peace agreement in Gaza? Donald J. Trump,” Vance said. “So if you want to complain about what happened in Gaza, why don’t you complain about Joe Biden and the last administration? We’re the administration that solved that problem.”
Vance also addressed criticism of the Iran war later in his remarks during the evening. “I recognize that young voters do not love the policy we have in the Middle East, OK,” he said, adding, “I understand.”
The incident at Turning Point USA, an influential youth organization in conservative politics that was founded by Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist who was killed last September, comes as the Republican party has faced blowback over the Iran war from top conservative activists, including Tucker Carlson.
Carlson, who has disparaged the joint U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and increasingly spread anti-Israel and antisemitic conspiracy theories on his show, has long maintained a relationship with Vance, whose refusal to rebuke the commentator has drawn scrutiny from Jewish conservative leaders.
While roughly seven in ten Republicans support the war with Iran, favorable views of Israel have declined among young Republicans in recent years, with 57% of Republicans ages 18 to 49 having an unfavorable opinion of Israel, up from 50% last year, according to the Pew Research Center.
Vance has defended the war in public despite reports he privately opposed entering the conflict. He urged the crowd to remain politically engaged despite potential disagreement with the administration.
“I’m not saying you to have to agree with me on every issue,” Vance said. “What I am saying is: Don’t get disengaged because you disagree with the administration on one topic. Get more involved, make your voice heard even more. That is how we ultimately take the country back.”
When asked by an attendee which “influencers” he would recommend young people listen to, Vance pointed to the popular podcaster Theo Von, who last June asked the vice president on his show about the “genocide” in Gaza. During that appearance, Vance rebuffed the idea that Israel was committing genocide.
The Turning Point USA event came shortly after Vance sparred with Pope Leo XIV over the pope’s criticism of the war. He said on Friday that “God does not bless any conflict” and that Christians should never be on the side of those who drop bombs.
Vance, who is Catholic, offered a different view. “Was God on the side of the Americans who liberated France from the Nazis?” he said. “I certainly think the answer is yes.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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