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Israeli sandwich shop Sherry Herring goes belly up on the UWS
(New York Jewish Week) – The Upper West Side outpost of the popular Israeli sandwich shop Sherry Herring closed last week, after less than two years in business.
Sherry Herring announced its closure in an Instagram post on May 31. “We have some important news to share,” the post said. “Regrettably, we are closing the doors of Sherry Herring, our beloved restaurant at 245 West 72nd St. We appreciate your support and the memories we’ve created together.”
“The only thing I can say is that I’m very sad that we are closing,” Israel-based founder Sherry Ansky told the New York Jewish Week when asked the reason for the restaurant’s closure. “Maybe if I was there it would have been different, but I had to stay in Israel and couldn’t be there.”
Ansky started Sherry Herring in a Tel Aviv farmer’s market in 2011, where it quickly became a destination. Its signature herring sandwich consists of “a fresh baguette, slathered with sour cream and French butter, seasoned with hot pepper, seeds and juice from a tomato, onions and scallions, and finished off with brined herring.”
Ansky got the idea to open a New York City outpost during the pandemic, sending her son-in-law and business partner, Eyal Amir, to scout a location for the first of what they hoped would be several Sherry Herring shops. They chose the Upper West Side, Amir told the New York Jewish Week, “because it is a Jewish neighborhood where our penetration to the market will be easiest.”
Sherry Herring opened on West 72nd Street in October 2021 with “no sherry and no herring,” the New York Jewish Week reported at the time. Ansky was stuck in Israel waiting for travel documents to be approved, and the herring that would be the star of the menu was still aging in brine in the Netherlands. (It eventually arrived mid-December.) The New York menu also included salmon, mackerel and tuna sandwiches.
The first time Ansky saw the line for her shop, ““I fainted and ran away,” she said. “I told the people to go away! I can’t do it.”
The eatery was beloved both by locals and globe-trotting foodies. “Somebody Feed Phil” star and “Everybody Loves Raymond” creator Phil Rosenthal described the herring sandwich at the Tel Aviv shop as “a perfect example of something seemingly simple yet a very sophisticated work of art.”
Changes had been made to the menu and the New York restaurant in the months leading up to its closure. In February, they announced an “elevated” evening menu called “Sherry Herring After Dark,” which featured various tapas style dishes and Israeli wine and beer. The restaurant also posted on Instagram that it was hiring on March 5. Later that month, Sherry Herring lost its kosher certification — and indicated to the website Yeah That’s Kosher that “they will likely close their UWS location by September.”
Instead, the closure happened several months earlier. “The owners decided that it’d be best for everybody to close,” the New York restaurant’s general manager, Alex Ben Chimol, said when reached by phone by the New York Jewish Week. “Maybe we’ll reopen another time in a different location.”
Sherry Herring’s May 31 Instagram post hinted at that possibility, stating: “Although we won’t be at this location anymore, we’re excited for new culinary adventures. Stay connected for updates on our future plans.” The text on the image reads: “See you soon New York.”
“They made me fall in love with herring and they tried their best in recreating an old Jewish niche,” Uncle Edik’s Pickles proprietor Edward Ilyasov told the New York Jewish Week. “We loved their creativity and they carried our pickles from the very beginning. They will be missed!”
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The post Israeli sandwich shop Sherry Herring goes belly up on the UWS appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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‘Hamas in a Suit’: Melanie Phillips Says the US Must Stop Treating Qatar as an Honest Broker
British author and journalist Melanie Phillips speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in Brussels, Belgium in April 2024. Photo: Nicolas Landemard / Le Pictorium via Reuters Connect
The war against terrorism will never end “until the West stops pretending Qatar is neutral,” according to British author and journalist Melanie Phillips.
The prominent commentator told The Algemeiner that Doha’s patronage of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and its influence on Western media and universities are among the many reasons not to trust the Middle Eastern monarchy.
“Qatar is Hamas,” Phillips said in a conversation on the “J100” podcast with host David M. Cohen, the CEO of The Algemeiner. “It sponsors Hamas, it shelters Hamas, it protects Hamas’s leadership.”
Speaking from Jerusalem, Phillips called Qatar’s role “the great unspoken scandal” of modern diplomacy, describing how the regime has bankrolled Hamas while posing as a mediator in negotiations with Israel over the Gaza war.
“You can end this war tonight,” she said, “by doing what should have been done long ago: throw Qatar overboard.”
Negotiations have hit several hurdles in recent weeks to halt the advancement of last month’s Israel-Hamas ceasefire, including the refusal of the terrorist group to disarm in accordance with US President Donald Trump’s pace plan for Gaza.
Despite Qatar’s support for Hamas and far-reaching financial entanglements within American institutions, the US has designated the country as a major non-NATO ally and committed, via executive order, to defend it if attacked.
For Phillips, the danger runs deeper than money or politics. “It’s Hamas in a suit,” she said. “A power that wears respectability while advancing terror by other means.”
Since 2012, Doha has housed Hamas’s political bureau and funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into Gaza, often with Western approval. Simultaneously, it has built vast soft-power influence, financing Al Jazeera, sponsoring academic programs on Middle Eastern studies, and endowing think tanks and universities across the West.
That dual role, Phillips argued, has distorted the world’s moral compass. “You cannot be both patron and peacemaker,” she said. “That is moral incoherence masquerading as strategy.”
She connected Qatar’s reach to what she called the “eighth front” of Israel’s war against Iran’s terrorist network including Hamas — the cognitive front, where perception and truth are under siege. By funding educational and media institutions that frame Israel as the aggressor, Phillips said, Doha helps export the same ideological rot that excuses terrorism.
“You cannot build coexistence on a curriculum of hatred,” she warned. “And you cannot defend civilization if you reward the people funding its destruction.”
Cohen noted that Washington’s posture toward Doha remains contradictory. “You can’t confront a sponsor of terror,” he said, “while treating it like an ally at the same time.”
Phillips concluded that lasting peace requires more than military victory — it demands confronting the global enablers that dignify extremism. “If the West continues to pretend Qatar is neutral,” she said, “then Hamas will never truly be defeated.”
The full conversation — “The Eighth Front Is the Mind” — is available now on “J100” via Apple Podcasts, Substack, and YouTube.
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Australia Lists Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard as State Sponsor of Terrorism
Commanders and members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps meet with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran, Iran, Aug. 17, 2023. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Australia has listed Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a state sponsor of terrorism, Foreign Minister Penny Wong said on Thursday, following an intelligence assessment that it had orchestrated attacks against Australia‘s Jewish Community.
Australia in August accused Iran of directing two antisemitic arson attacks in the cities of Sydney and Melbourne and gave Tehran’s ambassador seven days to leave the country, its first such expulsion since World War II.
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After Meeting Pope, Erdogan Praises His ‘Astute Stance’ on Palestinian Issue
Pope Leo XIV and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan shake hands as they meet at the Presidential Palace, during the pope’s first apostolic journey, in Ankara, Turkey, Nov. 27, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Umit Bektas
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan praised Pope Leo’s stance on the Palestinian issue after meeting him in Ankara on Thursday, and said he hoped his first overseas visit as Catholic leader will benefit humanity at a time of tension and uncertainty.
“We commend [Pope Leo’s] astute stance on the Palestinian issue,” Erdogan said in an address to the pope and political and religious leaders at the presidential library in the Turkish capital Ankara.
“Our debt to the Palestinian people is justice, and the foundation of this is to immediately implement the vision of a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders. Similarly, preserving the historic status of Jerusalem is crucial,” Erdogan said.
Pope Leo’s calls for peace and diplomacy regarding the war in Ukraine are also very meaningful, Erdogan said.
In September, Leo met at the Vatican with Israeli President Isaac Herzog and raised the “tragic situation” in Gaza with him.
Turkey has emerged as among the harshest critics of Israel’s military campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.