(New York Jewish Week) — The classic and very Jewish 1988 film “Crossing Delancey” is one of those movies that feels both extremely of its time and also completely timeless.
Director Joan Micklin Silver’s film has all the classic rom-com trappings: A woman who’s torn between two men (and to that end, two worlds); complaints about how hard it is to meet a man in New York City (as true in 1988 as it is in 2022), and a “mother” figure who knows better (here, a Jewish grandmother known as Bubbe, and in this case, she actually does know better). You could pluck all these specifics and drop them into a present-day film — and, if told with the heart and care of “Crossing Delancey,” still have a pretty good movie.
Yet there’s one thing about the “Crossing Delancey” that fully anchors it in the past, and that is its late-1980s Lower East Side setting. While our heroine, Izzy (Amy Irving), lives and works on the Upper West Side, she pays frequent visits to her Bubbe (Yiddish theater actress Reizl Bozyk), her grandmother, downtown. From the moment that Izzy steps off the train at Delancey Street, she’s transported to another world: a bustling Jewish enclave with market-goers shopping for produce, friends and neighbors in the streets kibbitzing and a Hasidic child sitting outside the subway, enjoying a treat from a local bakery.
This dichotomy between the “Old World” of the Lower East Side and the “New World” uptown is the central conflict of the film: Izzy’s inability to reconcile her Jewish roots with her desire to live a secular, intelligentsia lifestyle, as represented by her two love interests (Sam the Pickle Man and Anton, the self-important author).
However, rewatching the film in the present day, I can’t help but wonder: Would Izzy run from the shtetl if she knew that in a few years, it wouldn’t exist anymore? That due to rising rents and a shift in population, many Jewish businesses would meet their end — or, somewhat ironically, be part of the flight to Brooklyn that began in the early-to-mid 2000s? In some ways, 1988 itself was the beginning and the end: It marked the opening of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, an effort to preserve the neighborhood’s immigrant past, and it was the very same year that Mayor Koch created a new redevelopment proposal for the Seward Park Extension, a canary in the coal mine for the sea change of development the city would see over the next 30 years.
Re-watching the film in 2022, it struck me how the Lower East Side’s bustling Jewish enclave — the same place where my grandparents were born and raised — has since been lost to time, gentrification and re-zoning plans. These days, the neighborhood paints a different picture entirely: giant buildings hog entire city blocks, with construction promising even more sky-high buildings. There’s no specific character to the neighborhood, no story to tell, few places more integral to the city’s fabric than the Delancey-Essex McDonald’s.
Of course, if you’ve lived in the city long enough, you know there’s no getting comfortable. New Yorkers have to, in essence, harden their hearts. We must accept that the local business you love that’s here today very well could be gone tomorrow — even if that business is a Duane Reade. The Lower East Side of today is not the neighborhood of 1988, or 1968 or 1928.
But amongst all of the present-day residential developments, upscale clothing stores and fast food chains, old-school Jewish businesses like The Pickle Guys, Kossar’s Bagels and Bialys and Yonah Schimmel’s Knish Bakery are still thriving. (And, I’d like to think that if you look hard enough, you’ll find some meddling but well-meaning bubbes and yentas, too.)
While we might not be able to fully experience the Lower East Side as the cast and crew of “Crossing Delancey,” here are four places from “Crossing Delancey” that you can still visit, and four that are sadly gone forever.
Bubbe’s Apartment
154 Broome Street
The interior shots of Bubbe’s apartment, where Izzy fulfills all of her granddaughterly duties, like singing with her grandmother in Yiddish and plucking her chin hairs, were filmed at 154 Broome Street. The 181-unit building sits at the mouth of the Williamsburg Bridge — which is why Bubbe has that spectacular view — and is part of the New York City Housing Authority’s Seward Park Housing Extension. So while you still can visit the exterior of Bubbe’s apartment building today, don’t linger too long — it might weird out the current tenants.
Essex Market
108 Essex Street
This one is a little complicated. The original Essex Market, where Bubbe shows off her Korean-language skills, still stands today. (If you get off at the subway at Delancey Street, you can’t really miss it.) But that iteration of the market closed its doors in 2019 — in order to relocate to a building across the street so big and so glassy it would make Michael Bloomberg blush. In addition to apartments, office space and a movie theater (it’s a truly mixed-use building for our modern times!), Essex Market does boast local, independent vendors, such as Essex Olive & Spice, Porto Rico Importing Co. and Puebla Mexicana food. Per the New York Times, only one of the market’s vendors decided to forgo the move, opting instead for retirement. But you might want to pay a visit to the original Essex Market while you still can — even if only to give it one last look. Following the move, Essex Market initially housed some avant-garde art installations, but it has since seemingly closed its doors for good. According to Gothamist, it’s to be razed to create — what else? — more condos.
Seward Park Handball Court
Essex Street between Grand and Hester Streets
From the moment Sam and Izzy meet, he makes no effort to hide his ardor. In fact, I’d say he uses every weapon in his arsenal to demonstrate his interest — even going so far as to try to impress her with his handball skills when she unexpectedly drops by the court. (You might also clock his CUNY sweatshirt, as I most certainly did.) The handball court is still there, should you decide you want to play a pickup game, but sadly the court’s colorful mural depicted in the film has since been painted over.
Bonus: Gray’s Papaya
2090 Broadway
While this article is focused on the film’s Lower East Side locations, and with good reason, we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out that one important New York institution Izzy visits triumphantly remains: The Upper West Side Gray’s Papaya. There, Izzy celebrates her birthday with a friend and a hot dog — the right way to do it, in my opinion — when a woman bursts in singing “Some Enchanted Evening,” for everyone and no one in particular. It’s one of many of the film’s classic New York moments.
Steinberg’s Dairy
21 Essex Street
When Izzy emerges from that train at Delancey Street, director Silver takes great care to immerse us in this world. The camera stays on Izzy as she walks from the subway to Bubbe’s apartment, passing a host of local businesses along the way. Among them is Steinberg’s Dairy, which once lived at 21 Essex Street. Steinberg’s Dairy, which also had an Upper West Side location, offered staples like herring, egg salad and vegetarian chopped liver for less than a dollar back in 1941. Today, if you’re in the area, you can grab a drink at the punk rock bar Clockwork, which opened in 2013.
Zelig Blumenthal
13 Essex Street
Izzy also takes us by Zelig’s Blumenthal (also known as Z & A Kol Torah), where three older women sit outside, enjoying the sights and sounds around them. Once a popular Judaica store, it unexpectedly closed its Lower East Side doors in 2010 after 60 years in business. At the time, then-owner Mordechai Blumenthal made the decision to relocate the store to Flatbush due to a dwindling Orthodox population and foot traffic in the area, and a landlord who made clear he “wanted him gone.” It’s unclear if the Flatbush location remains open today, but a vintage clothing store called Country Of has taken up its original spot.
Posner’s Pickles (AKA Guss’ Pickles)
35 Essex Street
Posner’s Pickles, as run by Sam the Pickle Man in the film, was never exactly a real place to begin with. Filming took place at the world-famous Guss’ Pickles, which first opened on Hester Street in 1920, before relocating to Essex Street, where there were once over 80 pickle vendors for locals to choose from. After a stint on Orchard Street, Guss’ Pickles followed in the footsteps of so many others by then, leaving Manhattan to open up shop in Brooklyn’s Dekalb Market in 2017. While Guss’ Pickles is today based out of the Bronx, their delicious pickles are available to order no matter where you are in the country, via Goldbelly. Today, 35 Essex Street is home to Delancey Wine — appropriately named, but doesn’t offer possibilities for a slogan like “a joke and a pickle for only a nickel,” as Posner’s Pickles did in the film.
Schapiro’s Kosher Wines
124 Rivington Street
For 100 years, Schapiro’s Kosher Wines proudly served the Jewish community as the only kosher winery in New York City. It’s where Bubbe chides Izzy for her lack of interest in Sam, and while today the pair couldn’t have this conversation outside Schapiro’s, they could grab brunch at the restaurant Essex. Home to New York City’s “longest-running Brunch Party,” Essex salutes its Lower East Side roots with dishes like potato pancakes and Israeli couscous.
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Dueling pro-Israel and anti-Israel demonstrations at McGill University in Montreal, Canada; May 2, 2024. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
McGill University’s law school in Montreal, Canada lost the chair of its advisory board on Sunday, when he resigned from the position over what he described in a letter notifying the administration of his decision as an “escalating pattern of hostility toward Jewish students, faculty, and alumni.”
The immediate cause, wrote Jonathan Amiel, was the Law Students Association’s passing an academic boycott of Israel through a student referendum held on Saturday. If adopted as university policy, the measure would shutter partnerships with Israeli institutions, bar individual Israelis or known Zionists from holding teaching positions, and allow professors to refuse writing letters of recommendation for students applying to study abroad in Israel.
A majority, 57 percent, of students who participated in the referendum voted to approve it, with 67 percent of the student body casting ballots, indicating high turnout. It accused Israel of being an “apartheid” state and of perpetrating a “genocide” against the Palestinians, despite that the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics reports that the Palestinian population has “doubled about ten times since” Israel’s founding in 1948.
While a Jewish student is challenging the vote in court, as reported by the Montreal Gazette, its approval by the student body has, according to activists, left an impression on the Jewish community there while achieving a reverberant political victory for the student anti-Zionist movement.
“We are deeply concerned by the ongoing developments within student governance at McGill University Faculty of Law,” the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), a Canadian Jewish advocacy group, said in a statement.
According to Amiel, last week’s endorsement of a boycott of the world’s lone Jewish state was part of a broader, troubling trend.
“The referendum is not an isolated event,” Amiel wrote in his resignation letter, which he since made available for public viewing. “An institution once defined by intellectual rigor and principled debate has, in too many instances, become an environment where being Jewish, identifying as a Zionist, or maintaining any association with the State of Israel carries professional and personal risk.”
He added, “This includes the normalization and, at times, glorification, of events marking acts of mass violence, the obstruction of students’ access to classrooms and university facilities, and the use of academic platforms to legitimize or advance extremist ideologies.”
Amiel also charged that the institution failed to discipline “conduct involving harassment or intimidation.”
McGill University was one of hundreds of schools where anti-Zionists organized to celebrate Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, in which the terrorist group’s fighters slaughtered, kidnapped, and raped Israeli civilians during their invasion of the Jewish state.
Their activities culminated in an anti-Israel encampment which spanned across four months and did not disband until long after the end of the 2023-2024 academic year. While McGill officials took steps to limit the freedom of action of the group which staged the demonstration, such as bringing the issue before a court and denouncing the “obvious antisemitism” of its members, Amiel’s letter suggests that the university has not done nearly enough to combat anti-Jewish harassment and discrimination on campus.
“The defining feature of this period has been an absence of decisive leadership at moments when clarity and resolve were required,” Amiel continued. “In that absence, direction has effectively been ceded to actors whose objectives are fundamentally misaligned with the university’s core academic mission.”
McGill University has denounced the outcome of the referendum, with president Deep Saini saying, “The effects here are antisemitic, and that plain fact must guide McGill’s response.”
Amiel’s resignation comes amid an ongoing crisis of pervasive antisemitism on campuses across the Western world.
Earlier this month, the Union of Jewish Students (UJS) released survey results showing that Jewish campus life in Great Britain is rapidly deteriorating. The group found that 47 percent of Jewish students report having heard their classmates justify the Oct. 7 massacre in which Hamas slaughtered civilians and committed mass rape; 23 percent have witnessed Jewish students persecuted over their identity; as many as 36 percent have either lost friends in this new milieu or know someone who has; and a shocking 40 percent report “having changed their journey through campus” to avoid anti-Zionist protests occurring every week at some universities.
Some of the report’s most concerning findings focused on anti-Jewish sentiments expressed by non-Jewish students. Twenty percent said they prefer not be roommates with a Jewish person, while a quarter of students surveyed believe that arguing that “Zionists control the media/government” does not constitute antisemitism. Responding to a separate question, 16 percent expressed approval of saying outright that “Jews control the media/government.”
“This report demonstrates that antisemitism on campus is not isolated but normalized,” Union of Jewish Students president Louis Danker said in a statement. “No Jewish student should have to face social ostracism, abusive language, or physical violence — there is a right to protest but not harass. If we are serious about combating extremism in Britain, we have to start on campus, where half of students have seen glorification of Hamas or Hezbollah. Concerned sentiments and piecemeal progress are not enough.”
The issue is no less severe in the US.
In February, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and Hillel International reported that a striking 42 percent of Jewish students reported experiencing antisemitism during their time on campus. Of that group, 55 percent said they felt that being Jewish at a campus event threatened their safety. Meanwhile, 34 percent of Jewish students avoid being detected as Jews, hiding their Jewish identity due to fear of antisemitism.
According to the data, 38 percent of Jewish students said they decline to utter pro-Israel viewpoints on campus, including in class, for fear of being targeted by anti-Zionists. The rate of self-censorship is significantly higher for Jewish students who have already been subjected to antisemitism, registering at 68 percent.
“No Jewish student should have to hide their identity out of fear of antisemitism, yet that’s the reality for too many students today,” Hillel International chief executive officer Adam Lehman said in a statement released with the survey results. “Our work on the ground every day is focused on changing that reality by creating environments where all Jewish students can find welcoming communities and can fully and proudly express their Jewish identities without fear or concern.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
Eden Golan, Israel’s representative at the Eurovision Song Contest, reacts during a press conference following the official unveiling of Israel’s song submission, in Tel Aviv, Israel, March 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins
Eden Golan, who represented Israel in the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest, talked in a new interview about still experiencing anxiety, fear, and nightmares of threats against her life two years after the competition ended.
“I’m always afraid. I look in every direction like a security guard,” the 22-year-old Israeli singer said in an interview published on Friday in the “7 Nights” supplement of Yedioth Ahronoth. “I’ve had recurring anxiety since Eurovision: I walk into a place, a restaurant, or a show, and someone shoots me from behind. I have recurring nightmares of people chasing me and killing me. But I’m learning to live with it. No one will silence me anymore.”
Golan told Yedioth Ahronoth that she also still faces antisemitism almost everywhere she goes.
“Quite a few of my performances abroad had protests,” she explained. “In Switzerland they threw red paint at the entrance to the venue, supposedly to say the blood is on our hands. There was one protest with signs against [Israeli Prime Minister] Bibi [Netanyahu] and against me. After all the threats I received, there’s definitely fear for my life, but what could be worse than what I went through at Eurovision?”
Golan participated in the 2024 Eurovision in Malmo, Sweden, with the song “Hurricane” and finished in fifth place. The song was originally titled “October Rain,” but the name and its original lyrics were disqualified by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which organizes the Eurovision competition, for being too political since it referenced the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack in southern Israel.
Golan made it to the top five of the competition even after being booed on stage by anti-Israel audience members, facing death threats, and having a Eurovision jury member refuse to give her points because of his personal feelings against Israel’s military actions during its war against Hamas in Gaza.
Golan has also said she had to conceal her identity outside her hotel room in Malmo during the Eurovision contest because of the threats she received from anti-Israel activists, who were angry about the Jewish state’s participation in the international competition. At the time, the deputy director general of the EBU condemned the harassment that participating singers had experienced.
Noam Bettan is Israel’s representative in the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest, which will take place in Vienna, Austria, in May. He is competing with a trilingual song titled “Michelle.”
A map showing the Strait of Hormuz is seen in this illustration taken June 22, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
In the war between Iran and the joint force of the US and Israel, the Islamic Republic’s strongest tactic is to obstruct shipping in its coastal Strait of Hormuz.
The regime has strangled the world’s supply of oil and natural gas by attacking several commercial vessels as they transited the Persian Gulf channel. Some of Iran’s naval weapons have killed members of the ships’ crews.
As a political matter, Iran hopes that creating a global energy crisis will generate opposition to the US-Israeli military campaign. But as a legal matter, Iran’s targeting of civilian ships is a flagrant violation of international law.
Article 16(4) of the 1958 Geneva Convention on the Territorial Sea prohibits “the suspension of the innocent passage of foreign ships through straits” such as the Strait of Hormuz. Iran signed the 1958 document, as well as an updated version of the treaty, the 1982 United Nations Convention for the Law of the Sea.
The regime never “ratified” either treaty because it did not incorporate the international laws into its domestic law. That means Iran never became a formal party to the two pacts. However, the “innocent passage” framework of at least the 1958 convention is considered legally binding on Iran through customary international law, a consequence of widespread maritime practice.
The United Nations Security Council applied the principle of innocent passage during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. The council rebuked both combatants for firing on commercial oil tankers in the Persian Gulf.
In the current war, the UN Security Council likewise chided Iran’s lethal interference with civilian shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. A coalition of 22 countries including two Arab Gulf states recently signed a joint statement that condemned Iran’s violent closure of the strait and warned of “appropriate efforts” to reopen it. A US military contingent is now headed to the strait, presumably to clear the key coastal terrain.
Iran attempts to evade its maritime obligations with two legal arguments.
First, it asserts self-styled “maritime claims,” in which every commercial ship’s right of innocent passage through the Strait of Hormuz is subject to the regime’s “prior approval.” Iran accordingly grants safe passage to vessels from “friendly” states like China and Pakistan but not ships that could “benefit the aggressors.”
Assuming an additional power of prior approval, Iran has threatened to impose toll charges on ships passing through the waterway. International maritime organizations such as the United Kingdom Maritime Operations Center have confirmed that Iran’s self-serving legal concoction is unfounded. In fact, most of the shipping lanes in the strait run through the territorial waters of Oman, which lie beyond Iran’s legal reach.
Iran alternately contends that its anti-shipping terrorism in the strait is a “tool of pressure” to combat the US and Israel, implying a right of military self-defense. But the laws of naval warfare do not permit attacks on ordinary civilian vessels as a means of self-defense.
Finding Iran in breach of maritime law is easy. Enforcing the law is another matter.
The International Court of Justice cannot assert jurisdiction over a state without that state’s consent. The International Criminal Court lacks authority over Iran because the state never signed the court’s enabling treaty. The Security Council could vote on Bahrain’s proposed March 23, 2026, resolution authorizing “all necessary means” to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But the measure would probably be vetoed by Russia and/or China, states that oppose the use of force against Iran.
At stake is nothing less than freedom of navigation, which is vital to global trade and security. If Iran can paralyze the Strait of Hormuz, other nations may block similar chokepoints such as the Strait of Taiwan, the Turkish Straits, the Panama Canal, or the Suez Canal. The resulting chaos could render maritime law a dead letter.
It may be difficult for American-Israeli warfare to release Iran’s illegal grip on the Strait of Hormuz. Nevertheless, military action may be the only way to restore the rule of law in the waterway and deter future maritime aggressions.
Joel M. Margolis is the legal commentator of the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, US Affiliate of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists. He is the author of The Israeli-Palestinian Legal War.