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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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NAZA exposes Israel’s crisis of credibility over Gaza
More than two decades ago, when I was the The Associated Press bureau chief for Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli military called off an attack on a senior Hamas leader after learning at the last moment that family members and children were inside the targeted building.
What stayed with me was what happened next. The military sent a senior officer to my office to explain the decision.
This was during the Second Intifada, the murderous explosion of terrorism launched by armed Palestinians after Israel had offered the Palestinian Authority an independent state in over 90 percent of the territory it sought. Hamas leaders sent suicide bombers into Israel on a daily basis to blow up buses, restaurants, malls, cafes. I checked for explosives whenever I got into my car, perhaps with my little daughters, Maya and Noa.
Yet Israeli officials understood that demonstrating concern for civilian life was part of maintaining the country’s credibility. Maybe they also thought that concern for innocent life, even on the enemy side, was the Jewish thing to do. I want to believe this, as both a Jew and as a manager who had colleagues in Gaza, some of whom were hurt over the years.
That memory returned to me amid the uproar surrounding NAZA, the new documentary by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, who shared in the 2024 Oscar for No Other Land, a critique of Israel’s practices in the West Bank.
The new film, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and won the Special Jury Prize, is titled after the Hebrew acronym for “collateral damage” (and is also a play on “Gaza”). It examines Israel’s targeting practices in Gaza through testimony from 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel who allege the IDF used artificial intelligence.
Some of those soldiers, the filmmakers say, operated or helped design the AI systems at the center of the film. Their identities are concealed in various ways, yet their testimony portrays a disturbing picture about how technology, intelligence and estimates of civilian casualties intersected in decisions to strike.
The reaction in Israel has been ferocious. Culture Minister Miki Zohar – from the governing Likud Party led by Benjamin Netanyahu – has called the filmmakers traitors and raised the prospect of revoking their citizenship.
Former football star and prominent television personality Eyal Berkovic has similarly argued that loss of citizenship should be the best-case scenario for Israelis who harm their country. As the film moves beyond Venice, efforts to prevent its screening in Israel seem likely.
That reaction creates a sad irony. One of the strongest criticisms of NAZA is that its highly combustible testimony comes from anonymous sources – and that is a valid criticism indeed. Yet threats directed at the filmmakers offer a fairly vivid illustration of why soldiers and intelligence officers making explosive allegations about their own military might fear speaking publicly. The filmmakers say anonymity was necessary to protect people who could face serious consequences for revealing classified information. I can credibly assess they’d end up in jail.
Nonetheless, the anonymity remains a serious weakness. Claims that are this grave demand intense scrutiny, and viewers have limited means of establishing whether the witnesses held the positions they claim, possessed the knowledge they describe or represent the targeting system accurately. The IDF has challenged precisely this aspect of the film and rejected its portrayal of Israeli targeting practices.
That said, and not for the first time, the military is more reasonable than the government and the IDF’s spokesman invited the filmmakers to screen it for the military. A detailed military response to the evidence presented in NAZA would provide an essential counterweight.
The central dispute also reaches beyond whether Israel used artificial intelligence. The IDF says decisions to select and approve strikes are made by human personnel. The more consequential question is what information those people received and what weight they gave to civilian lives when making those decisions. If a system identified a Hamas operative inside a residential building, what level of civilian harm was considered acceptable in order to kill him? To what degree was AI part of the decision-making process?
Amid a global uproar over fears of AI, and in particular systems operating independently in ways that harm humans, this film catapults such questions to a very high place in the global discourse.
The AI questions lead to others. Did the permissible number of civilian casualties change according to the importance of the target? How confident did intelligence officers have to be that the intended person was actually present? What happened when information indicated that children or other family members were inside? How frequently did commanders cancel strikes because the expected civilian toll had become too high?
NAZA offers disturbing answers, and its central concern is ultimately a human one: what values and tolerances were built into the targeting process, and how were they applied by the people responsible for approving strikes?
Israel, this time around, has provided only a limited public account of those calculations during the war. Officials have emphasized the extraordinary difficulties of fighting Hamas in densely populated Gaza, the organization’s use of civilian areas for military purposes and Israeli estimates of a civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio that they say compares favorably with other episodes of urban warfare, including Mosul. The precise civilian death toll in Gaza also remains contested, particularly the division between civilians and combatants.
There is no doubt in my mind – none whatsoever – that Hamas is the embodiment of evil. It is obvious to anyone paying attention that the jihadist group engineered the entire war to maximize casualties on its own side in order to make Israel an international pariah. But it is also rather obvious by Israel’s conduct in the war and the tens of thousands of civilians who have died, that Israel to walked into the trap laid by Hamas.
Aggregate ratios tell only part of the story. They reveal little about why a particular building was struck, how many civilians were expected to be inside, what military advantage commanders anticipated or how that anticipated advantage was weighed against the likely human cost. Repeated incidents involving substantial civilian casualties have often been followed by broad explanations rather than detailed accounts of the decision-making that produced them. Foreign journalists, of course, have not been freely allowed in.
That is where my memory from more than 20 years ago feels especially relevant. The military that sent an officer to my office understood the value of a transparent process. It understood that credibility depended partly on demonstrating, in specific cases, that civilian lives carried meaningful weight in operational decisions. During the Gaza war, amid extraordinary civilian loss of life, that instinct has been far less visible, to say the least.
Why did Israel act this way? Part of it has to do with the unspeakable trauma of the Oct. 7 Hamas invasion and massacre, which left Israelis in no mood for explanations, and placed its government in a defensive posture. Part of it is the nature of that government – an ultranationalist assemblage of highly illiberal and astoundingly cynical politicians. And part of it is the global demonization targeting Israel – so thorough and unfair that it almost explains the surrender of any serious effort at PR.
None of this was smart. The resulting information vacuum has given NAZA much of its power. A documentary built substantially around anonymous testimony carries an obvious credibility burden, particularly when its allegations concern classified practices that outsiders have little ability to examine independently. Yet Israel’s sparse public accounting of its targeting decisions has left relatively little detailed evidence against which those accounts can be measured. The filmmakers have supplied one version of what happened inside the targeting system; a detailed Israeli account could provide another.
Demonizing a couple of filmmakers based on the idea that they meant to do Israel harm will not convince intelligent people and will deepen Israel’s isolation. Israel needs to explain to its own people how it failed so utterly to protect the massacre of Jews. It needs to explain to the world what went on in Gaza. In fact, it needs to explain that to its own people as well.
All of that will await another government. This will not come from Netanyahu.
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Police investigating threats against prominent Munich Holocaust survivor and AfD opponent
(JTA) — Police said they are investigating death threats made against a senior Jewish leader in Germany, after she criticized the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
A witness found graffiti scrawled in white ink on a park bench and a trash bin in Munich’s English Garden park, threatening the life of 93-year-old Holocaust survivor Charlotte Knobloch, , the Munich Police Department said in a statement.
Citing police sources, The Abendzeitung on Sept. 11 reported the threat contained the phrase “Die AfD hat gewonnen, morgen hängen wir die Knobloch,” which translates to, “The AfD has won, tomorrow we’ll hang Knobloch.” A police spokesperson had not responded to JTA’s request for confirmation of the threat content by press time.
The witness reported the graffiti to police and an investigation was launched on Wednesday, Sept. 9, police said.
Knobloch, chair of the Jewish Community of Munich and Upper Bavaria, canceled plans to attend a public event as an audience member right after learning of the threat, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency has confirmed with the Jewish Community in Munich.
The Munich Criminal Investigation Department has categorized the incident as a case of incitement to hatred, threats, and property damage, and has asked witnesses to contact police.
The AfD won 43.8% of the votes in the state of Saxony-Anhalt on Sept. 6. The election set the stage for a right-wing party to control a German state government for the first time since the Nazi era. But the AfD fell three seats short of a majority and has yet to secure enough support to form a government, Reuters reported Sept. 11.
Knobloch, an ardent critic of the AfD, had said the party’s record of success “frightens me.” In a statement released Sept. 6 by her office, she said that she “couldn’t have imagined even in my worst nightmares that right-wing extremists could win elections in Germany again in this way.” She has long called for the party to be banned.
The Department for Research and Information on Antisemitism (RIAS) has a reporting mechanism for witnesses or victims, and provides statistics to federal and local authorities. Antisemitic crimes may be motivated by left, right or Islamic extremism, but the specific reference to the AfD and a specific target made this case unusual, spokesperson Felix Balandat said. “We have not recorded anything like that before,” he told JTA.
Munich Mayor Dominik Krause (Greens) asked in a public address, “How many more death threats, how much Nazi rhetoric, how many more deportation announcements do we actually need” before the federal government initiates steps towards banning the AfD.
Meanwhile, in Berlin, a woman was injured in a suspected antisemitic attack, according to city police.
Early on Sept. 11, two men attacked a 43-year-old woman in the Mitte section of Berlin. The attackers, who fled the scene, commented on her wearing a Star of David and shouted antisemitic insults at her, Berlin police said.
One of the men allegedly attacked her with a broken glass bottle, police said. While defending herself, she suffered several cuts to her hand. Paramedics transported her to a hospital for treatment. The State Security Unit of the State Criminal Police Office has taken over the investigation.
According to RIAS, more than 2,000 antisemitic and anti-Israel insults, threats, acts of vandalism and attacks were registered in Berlin in 2025, slightly down from 2024 but still more than twice as many as before the attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Jake Lang led a protest against Mamdani and Muslims. Then the Nazis showed up to protest him.
Far-right activist Jake Lang led a march last week protesting Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s presence at the 9/11 25th anniversary memorial ceremony. The protest attracted swastika-sporting men describing themselves as Nazis; they were there to counterprotest Lang, whose mother is Jewish.
Around 100 demonstrators attended Lang’s march, which happened blocks away from the ceremony held at Ground Zero. Lang described the march on X as a “Great CRUSADE on Muslim SCUM Zohran Mamdani.”
The “crusade” was laden with anti-Muslim messaging, including a poster reading “Deport All Muslims.” About 40 counter-protesters arrived to oppose Lang. While most were antiracist protesters, seven were neo-Nazis. One counter-protester got into a physical altercation with someone from Lang’s march.
Lang is best known for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. He spent four years in prison, facing assault charges for attacking a police officer with a baseball bat, before being pardoned by President Donald Trump. In August, Lang lost a campaign to secure a Republican congressional nomination in Florida.
Though Lang’s mother is Jewish, he identifies as Christian, and has brandished wooden crosses at his marches, some of which he called “Christian Crusades.” Lang has publicly renounced his Judaism and the state of Israel, burning a copy of the Talmud and performing a Heil Hitler salute outside the AIPAC headquarters in D.C.
Nevertheless, seven men wearing swastika armbands — and one clad in an Elmo suit draped with a Palestinian flag as a cape — stood near Lang’s march holding a sign reading, “Jake Lang is a Jew.”
The men performed Sieg Heil salutes and, in an unusual move for self-identifying Nazis, chanted “Free, free Palestine,” alongside the declaration, “We are the real racists.” They passed out flyers reading “no more wars for Jews” and ranted about American soldiers lost in battles they said were directed by Israel.
“I want them out of our government,” said one of the men, Gregory Conte, a former schoolteacher who was fired for his white-nationalist ties. “And not just Zionists — Jews.”
The swastika-clad men drew a bevy of critics, including one man who told them, “I agree Israel did 9/11, but you guys are Nazis, man, you guys brought them to Palestine.”
One person filming the protest asked Conte, “Do you hate Jewish people?” He replied: “I’ve never had one do a good thing for me.” Conte then asked whether the man behind the camera was Jewish and he said he was; Conte refused to speak to him further, stating that he does not talk to Jews.
Footage showed Conte on the subway, this time without his armband, talking about how “Jake Lang is trying to start a war.” Independent journalist Talia Jane asked him, “Want to show them your armband?” Conte declined to take it out.
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