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Founded by a Holocaust survivor, a Bronx bakery’s kosher cheesecake is as tasty as ever after 6 decades
(New York Jewish Week) — Near the northern terminus of the 1 train, just south of Van Cortlandt Park, an unassuming Bronx storefront has been producing thousands of dense, delectable cheesecakes each day for more than 60 years.
Adorned with a simple red-and-blue sign and occupying the same storefront throughout its history, S&S Cheesecake has become the stuff of legend: Though other spots — say, Junior’s — may have better name recognition, many in-the-know New Yorkers consider S&S’s cheesecakes to be the best in the city. What’s more, its cheesecake recipe hasn’t changed one bit since Holocaust survivor Fred Schuster, 98, first opened the kosher bakery in 1960.
Though Schuster remains a regular presence at the bakery, these days S&S Cheesecake is operated by one of his daughters, Brenda Ben-Zaken, and her husband Yair. But other than a few nods to modernity — an espresso machine and a small cafe for dine-in enjoyment; upgradedg equipment to increase output to 2,000 cheesecakes a day — little has changed in the past six decades.
“The secret is to bake with love and serve with pride and passion,” Yair Ben-Zaken told the New York Jewish Week of the shop’s success. Since its founding, S&S has supplied cheesecakes to countless restaurants and shops, from as far away as Alaska to as close as the iconic Upper West Side grocery Zabar’s. Their products are available for nationwide shipping via their web site or Goldbelly as well.
Ben-Zaken and Schuster spoke to the New York Jewish Week on a sunny, temperate morning just a few days ahead of Shavuot — a holiday, which this year begins the evening of Thursday, May 25, when Jews traditionally eat cheesecake and other dairy food. Ben-Zaken was busy packing up hundreds of cheesecakes that he is shipping around the country, as well as several that S&S donates to the Riverdale Jewish Center, the Orthodox synagogue where he and Schuster are members.
“It gets busy with Shavuot, [but] there is a lot to celebrate with summer and graduations this time of year as well,” Ben-Zaken said. “We are feeling [the busy season] now, but it’s not the same as Christmas and Thanksgiving — those are the real cheesecake holidays for us.”
Before he established his modest cheesecake empire, Fred Schuster was born in Germany in 1925 — only eight years before Hitler came to power. “That was the end of my childhood,” Schuster told the New York Jewish Week.
In an effort to keep him safe, Schuster’s parents first sent him to a Jewish boarding school near Frankfurt and, when it was forced to close down, he moved in with his grandparents. In 1938, when they became too old to take care of him, Schuster said goodbye to his family — with a commitment to see each other again — and went to live in an orphanage in Frankfurt.
Just before his 14th birthday, Schuster and other children at his orphanage were sent to Switzerland via the Kindertransport. On the train, he met a girl named Karola (middle name Ruth), who went on to become the famous sex therapist and talk show host Dr. Ruth Westheimer.
“I always say, of the group there, Dr. Ruth went into the sex business and did very well. And I went into the cheesecake business and didn’t do too badly myself,” Schuster joked.
In Switzerland, Schuster “developed a passion for baking and worked in kitchens and bakeries there,” he said. He arrived in New York in 1941, where he reunited with his parents and sister. (His father had arrived in the United States via England around 1939, and his mother and sister via France, Spain and Portugal in 1940.)
“Thank God, my parents and everybody made it here,” he said. “We are very happy here. The United States was very good to us.”
And yet, even though many of his family members survived — and Schuster is blessed with four grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren — Schuster still thinks about what the Holocaust took from him, especially his own grandparents. “I’ll never forget it,” he said. “I am very proud of what I have built in spite of that.”
In the 1940s and 50s, Schuster lived in Washington Heights — home to a sizable German Jewish community, including Dr. Ruth, who is still a fixture in the neighborhood at 94 — and worked as a general baker at various restaurants, where he learned to make all types of pastries. However, “cheesecake was always on my mind,” he said. “I said to myself, ‘There isn’t a good cheesecake here. Let me see what I can do.”
Yair Ben-Zaken joined the team in 1986 and works every day except for Shabbat. Pictured in the bakery in New York City, May 22, 2023. (Julia Gergely)
The recipe he landed on — a combination of eggs, vanilla, sugar, butter and heavy cream — is something Schuster calls “absolutely perfect.”
Though cheesecake may be an ancient food, Jews took to cheesecake the way a fish might take to water, according to The Nosher. Though its varieties are numerous — from light and fluffy to dense and sweet — it was Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants who came to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who originated the ultra-rich dessert that’s known as New York-style (or Jewish-style) cheesecake.
That’s Schuster’s specialty, though when Schuster and his wife Sidi opened S&S Cheesecake, he baked all kinds of pastries and cakes. Quickly, however, he narrowed down the menu to only cheesecakes, the bestsellers. These days, S&S sells a chocolate mousse cheesecake, as well as strawberry-, pineapple- and cherry-topped versions of the classic original, which is flavored with vanilla. The OG — which retails in-store for $40 for an 11-inch cake and $20 for a 7-inch one — is his favorite, Schuster said, adding that he always keeps a cheesecake in his fridge for snacking on.
As for Ben-Zaken, after serving in the Israeli Defense Forces as a combat soldier, then working at various food labs in Israel, he began working at the bakery in 1986. Has he dared to change the recipe? “God forbid,” said Ben-Zaken. “Once you know it’s done right, that’s it.”
Schuster, whose wife died in 2017, moved into the Ben-Zakens’ Riverdale home around eight years ago. These days, the two men spend the majority of their time together, baking and talking. “We’ve worked together for many, many years shoulder to shoulder,” said Ben- Zaken, who affectionately calls Schuster “Opa,” which is German for grandfather. “But he is still in charge, I still learn from him.”
During the course of the New York Jewish Week’s visit to the bakery, a handful of customers came in to pick up the cheesecakes for Shavuot. “It’s always worth a trip,” said a man, who was picking up half a dozen cheesecakes for his synagogue in Pelham Parkway, who declined to provide his name. “It’d be worth the trip even if I lived in Atlantic City.”
For Ben-Zaken, his favorite part of the job is working alongside Schuster. Running S&S Cheesecake has been life-changing, he said, particularly following his recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder he suffered as an Israeli soldier. “I think if there’s anybody that I love more than anything in the world, it is this guy. I owe him everything,” Ben-Zaken said. “But I don’t just owe him, I also just enjoy being with him all the time. He’s still young. In spirit, he’s younger than all of us.”
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The post Founded by a Holocaust survivor, a Bronx bakery’s kosher cheesecake is as tasty as ever after 6 decades appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Jews cared more about Israel and antisemitism this election – but it didn’t change their votes much, exit poll shows
Jewish voters overwhelmingly backed Democrats in Tuesday’s midterm elections, even as concerns about Israel and antisemitism played a growing role in their political decisions, according to a new exit poll published on Thursday.
The GBAO Strategies survey of 800 Jewish voters found that 72% of Jewish respondents supported Democratic candidates for Congress, compared with 24% who voted Republican. The poll, sponsored by J Street, a progressive pro-Israel, pro-peace advocacy group, was conducted via text message from Oct. 28 to Nov. 3 and had a reported margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
The Democratic share was slightly lower than in previous midterm elections, when Democrats received 74% of the Jewish vote in 2022 and 76% in 2018. In the 2020 presidential election, 77% of Jewish voters backed Joe Biden, according to GBAO’s polling. These findings differ from a national NBC News exit poll, which found that 68% of Jewish voters supported Democrats this year and 31% backed Republicans, compared with 78% who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. (The national surveys used different methods, making it harder to say how preferences actually changed.)
Jim Gerstein, GBAO’s pollster and a Democratic campaign consultant, cautioned against reading too much into the change over time. “You’d have to squint really hard to try and see that that is a shift or anything really meaningful,” Gerstein told the Forward during a press briefing. He noted that Republican support also fell, from 25% in the 2022 midterms to 24% this year. Gerstein suggested that strong opposition to President Donald Trump during his first term, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, may help explain the higher Democratic numbers in 2018 and 2020.
He also noted that campaigns and outside groups have spent significantly more money targeting Jewish voters in the past two election cycles. “These are really negligible, and we don’t look at this as much shifting,” he said.
Even as Democrats regained control of both chambers of Congress, Republicans did appear to make gains among Jewish voters in some closely watched races amid a divide over U.S. support for Israel. Several outspoken critics of Israel won seats in the House, including five members of the Democratic Socialists of America. Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and Troy Jackson of Maine, two new senators who made criticism of Israel a major part of their campaigns, also won highly contested races.
The exit poll suggests that disagreements over Israel have not fundamentally changed how American Jews vote.
The future of American democracy remained the top concern for Jewish voters, with 44% naming it as one of the two most important issues influencing their vote, followed by 34% who said the cost of living was among their leading concerns. But Israel and antisemitism became more important than in previous elections. Twenty-one percent named antisemitism as one of their top two issues, up from 11% in 2024. Israel ranked sixth, cited by 14% of voters, compared with just 4% in 2022.
Compared to previous elections, Israel and antisemitism moved up the list of priorities — 21% identified antisemitism as one of their top two issues, up from 11% in 2024. Israel was ranked six with 14%, compared with just 4% in 2022.
Gerstein argued that rising antisemitism and the debates over support for Israel serve as a basic test for candidates rather than the deciding factor in most elections. “I think we see candidates in both parties passing that threshold quite easily,” Gerstein said.
Asked which positions expressed by candidates during the campaign they agreed with most, 30% chose unconditional support for Israel, while 39% favored support tied to Israel’s compliance with American interests and values. Another 31%, including 60% of voters between the ages of 18 and 34, agreed with the statement that Israel has committed genocide and should no longer receive U.S. aid.
Orthodox voters, representing 9% of the sample, voted Republican by a 63-34 margin.
A Jewish split on Israel
The survey also found a Jewish electorate that itself is becoming more divided over Israel.
Thirty-nine percent said their sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were primarily with Israelis, compared with 23% who sided with Palestinians. Another 38% sided with both. Among younger Jews, 49% said they sympathized more with Palestinians, compared with 20% who sided with Israelis.
A majority — 51% — said it supported continuing $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military assistance to Israel, while 49% opposed it. However, 44% also said arms sales should be conditioned on compliance with U.S. law.
Jewish voters showed greater agreement on how criticism of Israel should be treated and whether Israel’s policies directly impact them.
Sixty percent said Jewish organizations that label harsh criticism of Israel as antisemitic are using concerns about antisemitism to defend unpopular Israeli policies. About two-thirds said AIPAC’s spending against candidates critical of Israel increases antisemitism in the United States, while 80% said Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank contribute to antisemitism. An overwhelming majority of 76% support sanctions against violent Israeli settlers.
The survey also found that 39% of Jewish voters, including 63% of those under 35, said that spending by AIPAC to defeat Israel critics this election cycle made them less likely to support candidates backed by the pro-Israel group.
Mamdani scores high
One of the more striking findings was that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was more popular among Jewish voters nationwide than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, despite his criticism of Israel and strained relationship with some Jewish organizations.
The poll found that 49% of respondents viewed Mamdani favorably, compared with 43% who viewed him unfavorably. Netanyahu received a favorable rating of just 20%, while 72% viewed him unfavorably. That marks a 12% decline in two years for the Israeli leader, who is struggling to form a government after the last Israeli election ended in deadlock.
In an interview with CNN Wednesday night, Mamdani pointed to his approach to governing as an example of how elected officials can represent Jewish voters even when they disagree with them on Israel.
“I represent the most Jewish city in the United States of America, and I know that there are some Jewish New Yorkers, for example, that may have a different set of opinions on Israel and Palestine as I do, and that doesn’t mean that I work any less hard to deliver for them across the board,” Mamdani said. “I think that’s the same truth for anyone who was elected last night.”
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Now that the election is over, can we stop dismissing everyone we disagree with by calling them ‘wrong’ or a ‘liar?’
I was walking to get a coffee on Election Day when a man screamed at me as he nearly ran me over with his bicycle. “Democratic Socialists aren’t Democrats!” he yelled.
After I regained my balance, I looked up. He turned back and called out to me a second time.
“It’s true, you know!” he said.
I scurried away. But his words — “true” and the assured “you know” — made me think about how language around American politics has come down to “truth” or “lies,” which leaves out a lot.
Maybe the simplicity of that thinking helped create a landslide.
Once it became clear that Democrats had triumphed, opinion writers frequently relied on the word “lie” to explain voters’ sudden seismic shift.
“Trump claims he kept more promises to American voters than he made. Like so many things he has said, that’s a lie, and voters punished him and his party for it,” Josh Barro wrote in The New York Times.
The problem with the theory that voters punished Trump for lying is that the man has been lying for decades, most famously about winning the 2020 election — which, of course, he lost.
He entered politics by lying about Barack Obama. So the real question is why Trump’s lies bothered people now.
Maybe a clue was in the language during the leadup to this election, and how it changed as the watershed results came in.
I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t help noticing that Israel was a hot topic that somehow disappeared on election night as journalists marveled that Mississippi was in play for a Senate seat while every kind of Democrat won — moderate, far-left, young, old.
But it didn’t seem that would happen a mere five days ago, in that other lifetime when former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, during a discussion with podcaster Donny Deutsch, categorized debate over Israel as a fight between ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’
Back then, Michigan felt crucial, not one in a pile of Democratic wins. It was news that the elegant former speaker used the word ‘wrong.’
“When you say Israel doesn’t have the right to be a Jewish state, that’s antisemitic as far as I’m concerned,” Deutsch said, in reference to statements made by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and then-Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
“It’s more than concerning,” Pelosi responded. “It’s wrong. It’s wrong. And it isn’t a reflection of the Democrats in the Congress of the United States.”
I flashed back to that one-syllable word — “wrong” — early Wednesday morning when, with El-Sayed’s victory, it seemed that, contrary to what Pelosi said, objecting to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state was apparently no longer viewed as categorically “wrong.”
Wrong vs. right
If objecting to Israel’s existence was “wrong,” then what was “right”?
Some Jewish politicians — like Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel — told Jews to put their own concerns aside for the “needs of the world.”
“We have a moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival,” Nessel said, acknowledging that Jews faced a “stark choice” due to some of the comments made by Democrats.
After the election, anti-Israel commentators mocked Jewish politicians — and journalists.
Mehdi Hassan, founder of media company Zeteo, taunted Representatives Josh Gottheimer and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, along with CNN anchor Dana Bash, all Jewish. “He won,” Hasan said, calling El-Sayed a “left-wing Muslim anti-Zionist.”
“And so for all of you, I have two words — two words — cry more.”
The dismissiveness is the point
What got me about Hasan’s comments wasn’t just the hatred; it was the dismissiveness — as if all the existential worry within the Jewish community didn’t matter at all.
As if Nessel, who tried to find the “right” thing to do in a time when lies from the leader of the free world — not to mention violence against immigrants, humiliating comments toward and threats against brave Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and fleecing the United States in one of the biggest cons in history — meant asking her fellow Jewish Democrats who worried about Israel and attacks on their own local synagogues to ignore their own inner voice.
In its post-midterms statement, the Anti-Defamation League used the word “dismissed” with regard to Jewish Americans’ concerns — on a night when some candidates proved that ignoring Jews’ worries is not a barrier to electoral victory.
“Antisemitic rhetoric and scapegoating fuels hatred and can lead to harassment, threats and violence. In too many places, Jewish Americans’ concerns about this were overshadowed by competing priorities or dismissed outright,” the statement read.
Hmmm, I thought thinking about what that bicyclist had yelled at me: “You know it’s true.”
But I can’t help thinking that I don’t know what’s true; none of us know yet why so many voters finally dumped Trump.
I do, however, think that the framing given by the bicyclist, so convinced he knew what was and wasn’t true, and the dismissiveness problem, are related. That’s because the easiest way to dismiss another person’s thought process is to say “that’s a lie.”
I don’t know what’s worse — to be called a liar, or to be ignored — but amid all the celebration, I fear many in the Jewish community may soon find out.
In the months ahead, I’ll be listening for dismissiveness. I’ll be watching the distance between truth, lies, right, wrong, and “cry more.”
And I’ll notice when anyone — whether they’re a screaming bicyclist, journalist, or a politician — tells me I should already know what the truth is.
The post Now that the election is over, can we stop dismissing everyone we disagree with by calling them ‘wrong’ or a ‘liar?’ appeared first on The Forward.
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I’m glad El-Sayed won – but I wish he’d lost
The election of Abdul El-Sayed is my least favorite dream to come true.
I’m glad he won the race for senator because, along with a clear majority of Americans, I believed it was time to elect a Congress and Senate that would serve as a check on the presidency and put forth policies to repair our struggling country.
If I lived in Michigan, I would have voted for him for that reason. But as Election Night wore on and it became clear Democrats and independents had won a comfortable majority in the Senate, I hoped El-Sayed would lose.
Judging by the post-election surveys, I’m not the only Jew who felt this way. El-Sayed won about 60% of the Jewish vote. But he ran about 20 points behind Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic candidate for governor, with those same voters.
They didn’t flee the Democratic party, but they did show less enthusiasm for El-Sayed. In my case it had nothing to do with the fearmongering over his religion or family. (The Republican Jewish Coalition called El-Sayed, “the most antisemitic U.S. Senate candidate in America.”).
My problem was that El-Sayed too often mirrored the toxic politics of his opponents. He aligned himself with Hasan Piker then offered tepid, tardy disavowals of the popular streamer’s extremism. I criticized President Donald Trump for doing the same with the Proud Boys, David Duke, QAnon and the Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
And, like Trump, El-Sayed lied, constantly telling Michiganders that their schools and hospitals were underfunded because the government sent the money to Israel instead. He’s a smart man who knows that aid money amounts to .05% of the federal budget, is mostly spent in America and is hardly the reason for underfunded education.
But he repeated the lie in his victory speech Tuesday night. “We want our taxes spent here,” he said, “for schools here, and healthcare here, and infrastructure here. We don’t want our money sent to do apartheid, or genocide, or war.”
Sound familiar? “This tsunami of Illegals has destroyed Americans’ Public Schools, Hospitals, Parks, Community Resources, and Living Conditions,” Trump wrote on Truth Social last year.
How is a Democratic candidate who scapegoats the Jewish state for the ills of Flint any different than a Republican who blames crime on Haitians, fraud on Somalis and bad schools on Mexican immigrants? Both invite hate and divert attention from real solutions. When El-Sayed points at Israel as the cause of Michigan’s problems, the blame falls on American Jews, Haile Soifer, chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, pointed out during the race.
The least surprising twist in the dramatic campaign was when Tucker Carlson endorsed El-Sayed — both men push a simple theory of who’s to blame for America’s ills.
But as much as I would have preferred to win without El-Sayed, his election is far from the nightmare many American Jews fear.
He is one senator out of 100, and one Democratic senator out of 54, or 56, depending on the Mississippi and Alaska races.
El-Sayed will soon learn that accomplishing the things that are most important to Democratic voters — universal health care, campaign finance reform and affordability — has nothing to do with Israel.
Trump, on Election Day morning, helped politicians in both parties by announcing an end to U.S. aid to Israel. It’s unclear how that putative end will look in fact, but what’s certain is that as the U.S. and Israel redefine their relationship, El-Sayed and others in both parties who have been fervent critics of that aid will have to say what they’re for, not just what they oppose.
In a pre-election interview with the New Yorker, and elsewhere since his victory, El-Sayed said he wants a process that offers peace and self-determination to Palestinians and the “Jewish Israeli people.”
That’s a promise that the 40% of Jewish voters who didn’t back him — and the majority who did — should hold him to, and work beside him to help make happen. The Jews who stuck with El-Sayed have especially earned that right.
“Political coalitions that grow and endure can only be built when we join with those with whom we have real – even profound – disagreements,” wrote Jeremy Ben-Ami, founder of the liberal Zionist lobby J Street, following the election.
On the campaign trail, El-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric clearly resonated with some core constituencies. Inside the Senate, where moderate Democrats are a majority, El-Sayed will find a constituency for pragmatic steps to moving Israelis and Palestinians in that direction.
And that would indeed be a dream come true.
The post I’m glad El-Sayed won – but I wish he’d lost appeared first on The Forward.
