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An East Williamsburg appetizing shop offers ‘a taste of nostalgia’ to its customers
(New York Jewish Week) — Let’s face it: Classic Jewish deli and appetizing shops are having a moment. According to Bon Appetit, “the old school deli is the newest hot girl hangout,” while an exhibit on Jewish delis at the New-York Historical Society continues to draw crowds. These days, we’re basically all Estelle Reiner and we want to have what Sally Albright is having.
In recent years, a whole new crop of appetizing stores and delis have popped up in New York, with even Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) from “Succession” getting into the business: He’s an investor in the newish Jewish lunch counter S&P. And while some of these establishments, like Edith’s Sandwich Counter, seek to bridge the gap between an older generation and a new one, the year-old Simply Nova in East Williamsburg is all about harkening back to the days of yore.
From their tagline (“A taste of nostalgia”) to their classic deli boards, Simply Nova hopes to transport their clientele to the past.
According to Sean Brownlee, co-owner of Simply Nova, their emphasis on nostalgia is having the intended effect. “When people come in, the first thing they say is, ‘This reminds me of my childhood,’” Brownlee, 25, told the New York Jewish Week. “And that’s a really good, good feeling to know that we bring old memories — old, good memories — to people.”
The menu’s old-school offerings certainly help, too: Simply Nova boasts everything you’d want from an appetizing store and more — including, but certainly not limited to, bagels and all of the requisite fixings, pastrami and roast beef sandwiches, chopped liver, herring, matzah ball soup, latkes and a bakery corner featuring babka, rugelach, macaroons and black and white cookies. Simply Nova has scores of lox options on offer, like a pastrami cured salmon, beet gravlax and an Icelandic salmon of which Simply Nova is New York City’s exclusive purveyor. (My favorite is the classic Eastern Nova Scotia.) And yes, gluten-free bagels and dairy-free cream cheese are available as well.
Brownlee first met co-owner Felix Placencia, 52, when they worked together at a few other New York City appetizing stores. (Brownlee and Placencia declined to name those shops, though this Instagram post indicates they both had worked at Russ & Daughters.) They realized that with their combined experience and passion, they could go into business for themselves.
Brownlee has spent his entire seven-year career at appetizing shops, Placencia has 26 years devoted to the same. But perhaps just as important as work history was the shared conclusion that there was something missing from their previous places of employment: an emphasis on service.
“We wanted to create a more close relationship with the customers and bring nostalgic spirits to them, especially neighborhoods like these, where they don’t have that close relationships with those businesses out there,” Brownlee said. He estimates that their clientele is about evenly divided across generational lines, with approximately 45% of them Jewish.
“These days there is not many truly neighborhood store[s] where people go and it’s ‘their’ store, where they can go every week or every day if they desire to, and feel comfortable,” Brownlee said, estimating that 80% of their clientele are repeat customers.
“We believe that the first experience of the food is the service,” he added. “So if you come to a place that doesn’t give you that first impression of customer service, even though the food is great, you’re not going to taste it.”
Brownlee and Placencia are both of Dominican heritage, and although neither is Jewish, their time working in appetizing stores has instilled in them a deep love of traditional appetizing foods. “I felt very connected to it,” Placencia said, both of the cuisine and the process of making it.
Brownlee said that at Simply Nova, they work to cater to their customers’ individual needs (pun somewhat intended). Brownlee said Simply Nova recently catered a wedding at Gracie Mansion. Although they typically prepare their platters in-house and drop them off, the customer requested staff prep on site, and so their wish was granted.
Simply Nova’s predilection for the past also stands in contrast with its neighborhood. Nestled on Metropolitan Avenue between Graham Avenue and Humboldt Street, Simply Nova is on a block where a giant luxury apartment building replaced a beloved White Castle, and where many of the local establishments seem to be more interested in chasing trends than serving their customers. Simply Nova is a departure from some of the neighborhood’s other, trendier fare — as well as its many coffee shops and bars.
“Many customers always say, ‘This is so good, we needed a place like this in the neighborhood,’” Placencia said.
When the partners were looking a location, Brownlee, who lives in the area, happened to know the landlord of the building that previously housed The Bagel Store — famous for creating the rainbow bagel — which closed its Williamsburg doors in the summer of 2019.
“It was perfect,” Brownlee said.
Just last month, Simply Nova celebrated its one-year anniversary. And Brownlee and Placencia, a Bronx resident, couldn’t be happier with how their business has evolved. Instead of relying on advertising, their customer base has built by word of mouth — exactly as they’d hoped it would.
“We’ve always wanted to build a place that grows slowly by customers who really trust us, and that fulfills us, knowing those people keep coming back,” Brownlee said, adding that their customers come from all over the city.
Now, Brownlee and Placencia are looking to the future. “We’re already planning to expand,” Brownlee said, sharing that they’re hoping to open a second location later this year.
Brownlee expressed how important it is to provide their Jewish customers with an authentic experience to connect them with their heritage. “I feel that this food is very special,” he said. “Many different cultures, or countries, they have their type of food, and it’s easy for people to find it. It’s not so easy for people who grew up with this kind of food to find it.”
While there has been a surge of appetizing shops in Brooklyn and Manhattan over the last decade or so, this wasn’t always the case — particularly when you consider how bountiful appetizing shops once were in New York City. When Shelsky’s Cobble Hill location opened in 2011, it was the first new appetizing store in Brooklyn in 60 years.
Brownlee insists appetizing stores can and should be for everyone. “Anybody who loves food, and loves lox or good soup or good bagel — they could come and enjoy [it] if it’s presented to them the right way,” he said. “They don’t necessarily have to know about the food.”
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The post An East Williamsburg appetizing shop offers ‘a taste of nostalgia’ to its customers appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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In ‘Coexistence, My Ass!’ the anxiety of an Israeli influencer
There are plenty of funny lines in Coexistence, My Ass! but make no mistake, this is not a comedy. As director Amber Fares follows Israeli comedian and peace activist Noam Shuster Eliassi from her excited 2019 arrival at Harvard on a stand-up and peace-building fellowship (who knew such a thing existed?!) through escalating political and pandemic problems to her anguish at the war in Gaza, the documentary is nothing less than a tragedy.
Shuster Eliassi leapt to fame in early 2019 with “Dubai Dubai,”a song of “peace and love” in the wake of the Abraham Accords which celebrated Arabs (“especially when they are 4000 miles away”). It was satire, in Arabic, on Israeli television (Shuster Eliassi also speaks Farsi). She was poking fun at Israel’s peace with UAE’s millionaires while both sides ignored “those who suffered the Nakba.” She properly went viral across the region, though, when she jokingly proposed marriage to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on an Arabic-language program of the Israeli news channel i24. Arabic news outlets and social media were not sure what to make of it but Israeli and western news outlets knew that the furor and fluster were newsworthy.
Shuster Eliassi notes in Coexistence that her movement to comedy vindicated her decision to move away from more serious peace-building. ”20 years of peace activism, I influence 20 people. One joke about dictators, 20 million people saw it!” If she wanted to achieve her dream of peace in the Middle East, maybe she was right to use the power of social media to amplify her gift of making people laugh.
Filmed over five of the bleakest years for believers in democracy and equality in Israel, Coexistence also follows Shuster Eliassi from hope to despair. After COVID, Fares made a short documentary about Shuster Eliassi for the New Yorker – “How One Woman Is Using Comedy To Speak Up About Palestinian Rights.” From that moment of hope though, Benjamin Netanyahu’s anti-democratic push, Oct. 7, and the Israel Gaza War render the 2021 film obsolete.
The title Coexistence, My Ass! changes its significance through the movie. Initially, Shuster Eliassi scoffs at “coexistence” as a risible minimum aim, one so boring it puts her to sleep. By the end of the movie in 2024, when extremists on both sides have succeeded in destroying trust in humanity and any hope for peace, even that low bar seems unattainable. The phrase – also the name of Shuster Eliassi’s standup show — is Coexistence, My Ass! because “coexistence” no longer even seems possible.
As a child of Romanian and Iranian parents in Neve Shalom/Wahat as-Salam (Oasis of Peace), Shuster Eliassi grew up in a particular limelight. Set up as a cooperative village where Israeli Jews, Muslims and Christians could live together, the small settlement of about 60 families was a regular stop for American peacebuilding luminaries. The documentary features archival footage of Jane Fonda speaking there in 2002 as well as a young Shuster Eliassi handing flowers to Hillary Clinton in 1998.
When the first IDF soldier from Neve Shalom gets killed, news crews come to the village and end up interviewing Shuster Eliassi, then a grade school student who had known him and looked up to him. Even as a young woman, Shuster Eliassi is able to voice her pain without becoming embroiled in the conflict. Indeed, one of the film’s most compelling arguments for something more than coexistence is her best friend from home Ranin, an Arab. When Shuster Eliassi breaks her leg in an accident, Ranin pushes her wheelchair up a hill. They joke about Arabs and Jews (“How is it that the Arabs always end up serving the Jews?” Ranin asks.) They speak in Hebrew and Arabic, and argue about which language should come first in the name of their home, Wahat al-Salam/Neve Shalom. They are a visible embodiment of how easy it is to have an Arab-Jewish family, of how coexistence could be the least possible problem.
We see Shuster Eliassi perform in 2018 at East Jerusalem’s 1001 Laughs Palestine Comedy Festival. There she assures the uncertain audience that her set is short, with a joke about the Occupation: “I’m only staying for 7 minutes, not 70 years.” She adds that she stole the joke from the Palestinian-American emcee Amer Zahr. “But it’s mine now, God promised it to me!” she says. The crowd seems to love it.
Five years later, though, the atmosphere is much more tense. While the troubles had been escalating throughout 2023, Oct. 7 was a rupture, and Shuster Eliassi finds herself stuck between her communities. We see her called to condemn the people who committed the atrocities on Oct. 7 and also to condemn the government that is about to retaliate. She is aghast that there seems to be no time for her to mourn the human lives that were lost.
Fares, best known for Speed Sisters, her documentary about the first all-female car-racing team of Palestinian drivers in the West Bank, captures the ratcheted-up post-COVID tempo. When Arabs and Jews are stuck, COVID-infected, in “Corona Hotel,” they live happily together, it’s only with the chance of an Arab-Israeli peace that excludes the (Iranians and) Palestinians that Hamas starts serious sabotage. Its rocket attacks, intercepted by the Iron Dome, change the feeling in Israel.
Instead of a country moving slowly towards coexistence and peace, Israeli news shows “Arabs being attacked live on TV.” An aggressive, shirtless, tattooed young Jewish skinhead is shown saying, “We came out to fight the Arabs. To show them they can’t just shoot rockets at us… If need be, we’ll kill them. If need be, we’ll murder them.” The sequence cuts to Jewish Israelis lynching an Arab.
Furthermore, as pro-Democracy, anti-Netanyahu protests continue, the Occupation remains off the agenda. An older man, maybe from her parents’ generation, labels Shuster Eliassi an “enemy” of Israel for calling to end the occupation at a protest against the Israeli government.
Vivian Silver, one of the people killed in the Gaza envelope on Oct. 7, was a lifetime peace activist. She was a friend of my friends and a friend of Shuster Eliassi. At her funeral we see her son talking to Shuster Eliassi. “She didn’t work for peace so that when they come, they’ll spare her,” he says of his mother “She worked so there’d be no reason for them to come.” It’s a position that is no longer tenable.
Ultimately, Coexistence, My Ass! isn’t about solutions, because it’s not naïve enough to pretend that there are any. It isn’t about both sides, although heaven knows there is plenty of blame to go around. It’s about staring with Shuster Eliassi down the line of peace and seeing massive objects fall across it. It’s not cathartic. It’s honest. And sometimes, honesty is the most radical thing a film can offer.
The post In ‘Coexistence, My Ass!’ the anxiety of an Israeli influencer appeared first on The Forward.
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She survived the Tree of Life massacre seven years ago today — and still shows up to pray
Audrey Glickman showed up for morning minyan today — as she has nearly every morning since Oct. 27, 2018, when she survived the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history.
Glickman, now 68, was leading services that fateful Shabbat morning in a small chapel inside Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life when she heard the unmistakable sound of gunfire. She grabbed congregant Joe Charny, then 90, and raced up the stairs and into a small room. Together, huddled and scared, they hid under their prayer shawls.
Seven years later, she still prays in Squirrel Hill. But what she thought would be a wake-up call ended up being a warning: She’s watching the rise of antisemitism, the political rhetoric that helped fuel the shooting, and the divisions that persist. “The hatred is increasing,” she told me Sunday by phone. “And it’s taking different shapes.”
Below is our conversation, edited for length and clarity ahead of tonight’s memorial gathering at the Jewish Community Center in Pittsburgh.
Does this anniversary feel different to you?
Everything feels different this year. There’s more talk about how the shooter was influenced — the idea that Jews were “bringing in immigrants.” It’s a reminder that words matter. Hatred starts small and travels fast.
The shooter is now on death row. Does that bring you a sense of closure?
Death isn’t a penalty. It ends punishment. Being on death row — cut off from society — that’s the punishment. And that’s fine with me.
What do you most want people to remember seven years later?
That the victims weren’t just those in the building. The whole city was wounded. The first responders who were working that day felt it. We have to give people space to understand their own grief — to inhabit their victimhood and come to terms with it.
Antisemitism has increased since the 2018 attack, especially after Oct. 7 2023.
Antisemitism from the right is a physical threat. Antisemitism from the left is an existential threat. They’re different. We can sometimes work with the left — at least talk — but it’s hard to work with the right when they’re against us.
What worries you most about antisemitism right now?
The hatred is increasing, and it’s taking new shapes. And we’re not battling it efficiently. People are discontented, and they need someone to blame — and leaders exploit that. They push people toward hate because it keeps them divided.
What do you want people to know about Jews?
Jewish people are just people. We don’t spend our whole lives “being Jews” and doing mysterious things that make people want to hate us. We serve in the army, we run libraries, we teach children. My father cleaned rugs. We’re ordinary people who want to live and work alongside everyone else. And as long as we can all work together for a better world, we’re going to be a lot better off.
The post She survived the Tree of Life massacre seven years ago today — and still shows up to pray appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump sets deadline for Hamas to release hostages’ bodies as Egyptian team enters Gaza to help
(JTA) — An Egyptian team has entered Gaza to join in the search for the remains of 13 hostages whose bodies have still not been released following the ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.
The ceasefire’s first phase required the release of all hostages, living and dead. Hamas freed all 20 living hostages as required but has released the remains of only 15 of 28 hostages who were killed on Oct. 7, 2023, or subsequently in captivity.
On Saturday, U.S. President Donald Trump, who brokered the ceasefire and is applying pressure to maintain it, issued a stern warning to Hamas about freeing the remaining hostages.
“Hamas is going to have to start returning the bodies of the deceased hostages, including two Americans, quickly, or the other Countries involved in this GREAT PEACE will take action,” Trump posted on Truth Social. He did not offer details about which countries would step in or what actions they might take.
The Israelis reportedly believe that Hamas is aware of the locations of the majority of the hostages’ bodies but is slow-walking their release to delay a shift to the deal’s second phase, which would require it to disarm and cede control of Gaza.
Trump acknowledged both concerns in his post, in which he implied a deadline of Monday afternoon for swift action on Hamas’ part.
“Some of the bodies are hard to reach, but others they can return now and, for some reason, they are not. Perhaps it has to do with their disarming, but when I said, ‘Both sides would be treated fairly,’ that only applies if they comply with their obligations,” he wrote. “Let’s see what they do over the next 48 hours. I am watching this very closely.”
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, meanwhile, said on Monday that Israel and the United States should pause efforts to advance the peace plan until the hostages are returned.
“Hamas knows exactly where every one of the deceased hostages is held,” the group said in a statement, adding, “The families urge the Government of Israel, the United States administration, and the mediators not to advance to the next phase of the agreement until Hamas fulfills all of its obligations and returns every hostage to Israel.”
Israel has endorsed the entry of Egyptian forces to locate the hostages but has not accepted an offer from Turkey, which took Hamas’ side in the war, to help.
The 13 remaining hostages include two, Omer Neutra and Itay Chen, who were dual American citizens. They also include Thai and Tanzanian agricultural workers; several older men murdered on Oct. 7; a hostage killed in a failed rescue attempt; and a soldier, Hadar Goldin, whose body has been held by Hamas since 2014.
The post Trump sets deadline for Hamas to release hostages’ bodies as Egyptian team enters Gaza to help appeared first on The Forward.