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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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Far-right win in German regional race sends shockwaves through Europe
(JTA) —
A victory for Germany’s far-right party in an eastern federal state has reverberated across the globe, exposing the widening rifts between alarmed centrist leaders and insurgent nationalist movements in Europe.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party won 43.8% of the vote in an election in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, crushing the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party, which held 17.2% support, according to preliminary figures.
The AfD is now heading toward 39 seats in Saxony-Anhalt’s 83-seat state parliament. It’s expected to fall 3 seats short of an outright majority, leaving open the question of whether it can form Germany’s first far-right state government since World War II. The party has proposed a sweeping nationalist agenda that includes deporting immigrants, defunding “anti-German art” and teaching children less about the country’s Nazi past.
Merz told reporters in Berlin on Monday he was “deeply shocked” and “unsettled” by the results, which he said rippled through the rest of the country and the world. He added that it was impossible for Germany to “go back to business as usual” after so many voters in Saxony-Anhalt chose a party that “questions the democratic institutions in our country.”
The results dealt the CDU its “most severe defeat” in decades, conceded Merz, who leads the party once headed by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Merz said that he was searching for answers to “why far-right populism and far-right extremism was able to rise in such a rapid manner,” suggesting that his party may have underestimated the “fears of our population” amid economic crises and rapid technological change. He said that minorities in Saxony-Anhalt would be particularly vulnerable under an AfD government, but noted that the state would still have obligations to follow federal law, including regarding immigration policy.
Merz also directed his message to the rest of Europe, saying that Germany had a “special responsibility because of its history” to keep its political order “deeply anchored in Europe.”
Despite the scale of the CDU’s defeat in Saxony-Anhalt, Merz ruled out stepping down, saying, “Giving up is not an option.”
Though Saxony-Anhalt is one of Germany’s smallest regions, home to some 1.7 million voters, its election results quickly sent shockwaves through other European countries whose leaders, like Merz, are fighting to fend off far-right, anti-immigrant parties in national elections next year.
French Europe Minister Benjamin Haddad called the AfD’s regional win a “grave moment in Europe” and said that “nationalism and xenophobia will never be a solution.”
“We cannot forget our history,” said Haddad, an ally of centrist President Emmanuel Macron. “That is the meaning of the choices made by France and Germany.”
France’s government faces its own fears of a right-wing populist wave. Marine Le Pen, the head of the far-right National Rally, has dwarfed all other candidates in polls heading into France’s presidential election in 2027, when term limits force Macron to step down.
Across the Channel, British Chief Secretary to the Treasury Emma Reynolds said in an interview on Times Radio that the U.K.’s Labour government “will not be reaching out to a right-wing populist party.” She added that she put the AfD in “the same political bracket” as Reform UK, the far-right party that surged in local elections earlier this year.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk also condemned the AfD’s victory. The far-right party has alarmed Poland, Ukraine’s neighbor, with its pro-Russia stance, as it seeks to halt Germany’s military aid to Ukraine and sanctions against Russia.
“In Poland, only idiots or traitors can rejoice at the triumph of the AfD in Germany,” said Tusk.
Meanwhile, the AfD was cheered by nationalist, anti-immigration party leaders in Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands, all of whom have sought to capitalize on economic and social grievances similar to those that contributed to the AfD’s victory Sunday.
Santiago Abascal, the head of Spain’s far-right Vox party, called the result “a great hope for Germany and for Europe.”
André Ventura, the founder of Portugal’s far-right Chega party, said that “the Germans too are opening their eyes against illegal and uncontrolled immigration, corruption, and the capture of our freedom and identity.”
And in the Netherlands, the AfD received a “Congratulations” from the far-right Party for Freedom’s leader, Geert Wilders.
While President Donald Trump has yet to officially respond to the Saxony-Anhalt election, he posted a screenshot of the results without comment on his Truth Social account Sunday night.
Trump’s post was shared by Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian presidential envoy and businessman, who said the AfD scored a “historic win” that would “put migration under control.”
Elon Musk, the billionaire and former Trump adviser who campaigned for the AfD last year, gave his support to the national party leader Alice Weidel on X, which he owns, writing “Well done” in German.
Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s candidate in Saxony-Anhalt who hopes to become the state premier, responded by praising Musk.
“Thank you, @elonmusk, for your support and for your clear and highly important perspective on the political developments of our time — including here in Germany,” he wrote.
The post Far-right win in German regional race sends shockwaves through Europe appeared first on The Forward.
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In new ‘Fauda’ season, the aftershocks of Oct. 7, without a thought for Gaza
When Fauda Season 4 ended an eternity and a devastating war ago, our hero was at death’s door, reciting both the central prayer of Judaism, the Shema, and the Muslim Fatiha.
It was a cliffhanger with monumental implications for Doron Kavillio (Lior Raz), an Israeli Jew who spent his days undercover as a Muslim Arab — an identity crisis long in coming. Zoom out and you can see the doomed duality of Israel and Palestine, Jew and Muslim, connected in a cycle of death and more alike than they may seem.
Season 5 begins bilingually, with Hebrew and Arab definitions of the Arabic word Tha’r, blood revenge, “restoring violated honor or avenging injustice.” This concept is now the point of commonality — not how men pray, but how they seek revenge.
Welcome to a post-Oct. 7 Israel. Doron is in therapy, struggling to recall eight missing hours of his life on the day of Hamas’ attack on the Gaza envelope.
Comrades have left the country — Steve (Doron Ben-David) is protecting oligarchs in London, Sagi and Nurit are in Australia. Eli (Yaakov Zada-Daniel) is now Orthodox, living in a settlement and reeling from the murder of his wife and stepchildren at his now-torched kibbutz. When a Bedouin friend, Salem (Bian Anteer) who lost his son in the raid on Eli’s home, approaches him with a tip on the Nukhba fighter responsible, they depart for Marseille to answer the call of Tha’r.
It would hardly be Fauda if this act of vengeance didn’t give way to a much larger plot. Marseille is the staging ground for Saeed el Hatib (French-Algerian actor Hakim Djaziri), “the Sinwar of Europe,” who is recruiting sympathetic, white continentals for a fresh massacre in Israel.
Fauda has always made some viewers uncomfortable. Massively entertaining, bingeable to those of us who stream it in the Netflix aftermarket, its existence was premised on ongoing injustices in the West Bank and Gaza and the violence that bursts through their borders. (The BDS movement labelled it a “war-crimes glorifying” series;” Haaretz called it “morally dubious.”)
And yet as late as the last season it contained very real criticism of Israel’s conduct, including its costly campaigns to recover captured soldiers and the torture used to extract information on their whereabouts. The show always alluded to real operations — Cast Lead, Brother’s Keeper — in dialogue. But because it can’t merely mention an attack as raw and monumental as Oct. 7, and because it has no desire to question the response to it, it chooses to recreate its savagery.
Episodes 7 and 8, flashbacks to that day, are front-loaded with a trigger warning and a disclaimer that you can skip them and still be able to follow the main plot.
It’s hard for me to recommend those episodes. If not exactly atrocity porn, their central, race-against-time set piece is too anchored in recent events and constructed too much like an action movie. It feels in a sense exploitative, even if intended as a tribute. (To give them credit, both Lior Raz and his co-creator Avi Issacharoff, who said they “wrote from their trauma,” were on the ground helping the south of the country evacuate in the aftermath.)
The new season starts with the promise of complexity. It opens on a grieving Muslim father and shifts to a milksop accountant who worked for Hamas, seemingly tortured by Eli in a blind rage for a crime he didn’t commit. Could an excessive devotion to Tha’r, a tribal code of retribution, be the diagnosis of the show’s creators of Israeli society at this moment?
If it is, it’s not a critical one. The villains are the villains, and, most revealingly, they now number people with no connection to the conflict.
Hatib’s enlistment of white Europeans for a mass-casualty terror attack services a trite narrative of postcolonial guilt finding an outlet in the pro-Palestinian cause. It works on another level too: This fighting force is squaring off against Doron’s corps of Mizrahi Jews, whose mere presence dismantles the lie that Israelis are themselves all white colonizers, and that Israel and the European empire of yore are in any way analogous.
When, back at mission control, the counterterrorists speak of “suspicious-looking Europeans” who are “in their 30s,” the derision for this type of fellow traveller is palpable. Their standard bearer, Mélanie Laurent, formerly Tarantino’s “face of Jewish vengeance,” plays Anne, a blonde, “high middle-class Catholic French woman” who straps up with C-4, a keffiyeh ever-draped around her neck. Through her, and in a quite literal way, the show suggests the Western love affair with Palestinians — which in this season’s logic means Hamas — is misguided.
All the while, we never see Gaza, where much of Season 3 was set, with some among its population humanized. We never reckon with the destruction there. We hear about it, and a kind of lip service is paid to the crime of collective punishment — the sort that we hear at the end of almost every season — but it’s secondary to storytelling as elegy and justification. One could just have easily placed the Hebrew word Zachor before that first cold open: Remember what they did to us.
At one point, after a shootout with more blood spatter than I ever recall seeing on the show, Doron empties his clip into an enemy with the words “this is for October 7.” Seconds later, in a Shin Bet command room his handler Gabi (Itzik Cohen, whose between-seasons weight gain is a running joke) quips, a la Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon, “I’m too old for this.”
He’s not the only one.
In the past week I’ve chatted with some folks older than me — they don’t know each other and are largely to my right on Israel — who don’t relish the thought of another season. Not just because they don’t want to watch Oct. 7 reenacted, but because following the exploits of Israeli security agents has vastly different optics after the Hamas-Israel war, unprecedented settler violence and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s recently-stated ideal scenario of killing “30 or 40” Palestinians in Gaza each night.
This may well be the privilege of the diaspora, but the fatigue points to a shift in attitude that’s worth paying attention to. If these horrors are out of sight, out of mind this season, they’re top of mind to many who are watching — and many others who might have once tuned in.
The post In new ‘Fauda’ season, the aftershocks of Oct. 7, without a thought for Gaza appeared first on The Forward.
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Armed attacker arrested after lunging at Ohio Jewish gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton
(JTA) — Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton, a Jewish Democrat, was unharmed following an attack by an armed individual at the sprawling Canfield Fair on Sunday.
Police arrested 38-year-old Patrick Havas, who had pushed his way through a crowd in a Democratic Party fairgrounds tent where she was speaking, the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office announced on Sunday evening.
“While attending the Canfield Fair, an armed individual lunged at Dr. Acton, injuring multiple people,” Addie Bullock, communications director for the Acton campaign, said in a statement.
“This kind of violence has no place in Ohio,” Bullock added. “Dr. Acton will always stand up to the chaos, hate and vitriol that pits us against one another.”
Acton, who would be Ohio’s first Jewish governor if elected, is a former director of the Ohio Department of Health and completed residencies in both pediatrics and preventative medicine.
Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, Acton’s opponent in the upcoming election, released a statement condemning the attack on Sunday. His communications director, Connie Luck, stressed that “candidates should be able to meet with voters without having to worry about threats or violence.”
“What happened today is completely unacceptable and has no place in politics, and we hope that no one was hurt,” she added.
Havas had at first entered the fairgrounds tent and began recording Acton’s speech on his cell phone, but when he began pushing, Ohio State Highway Patrol troopers confronted him, according to the sheriff’s office. During the confrontation, two people were knocked to the ground and Havas was taken into custody by Canfield Fair police.
Following Havas’s arrest, police said they found two handguns and a set of brass knuckles in his possession, although no weapons were ever brandished or removed from their holsters.
Detectives on Sunday night added that they’d be continuing the investigation and would be filing charges after consulting with the Mahoning County Prosecutor.
The Canfield Fair, established in 1846, describes itself as the third-largest county fair nationwide. The fairgrounds, located about 75 miles southeast of Cleveland, sits on 353 acres of land and houses more than 60 buildings.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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