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In ‘Jewish Matchmaking,’ a diverse set of Jews experience Orthodox dating practices
(JTA) — According to Jewish lore, God has been making matches since the creation of the world. Aleeza Ben Shalom has been at it only since 2007 — but the Jewish matchmaker is about to bring what she calls “the most important job in the world” to the masses.
As the host of “Jewish Matchmaking” on Netflix, Ben Shalom adapts the model of Orthodox arranged matches to Jewish singles from a variety of religious and cultural backgrounds, including secular, Reform and Conservative Jews from across the United States and Israel.
Formal matchmaking, known as shidduch dating and considered de rigueur in haredi Orthodox circles, has been depicted as oppressive and constricting on Netflix dramas such as “Shtisel” and “Unorthodox.” But Ben Shalom believes her basic approach to love and marriage makes sense for a wide array of people — and she’s out to prove it.
“I’m hoping that people will see that matchmaking and Judaism is not just something that’s old, but that’s timeless, that’s relevant,” Ben Shalom told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“We can use this beautiful, ancient tradition of matchmaking and bring it to modern life, and help people to find love from any age, stage, any background. It doesn’t matter. It’s universal,” she said. “The wisdom that I share is from Judaism. It’s based in Torah, but it’s for the world. Anybody of any background, of any culture can watch this, can learn something from it and can implement it in their lives.”
Ben Shalom isn’t the first to make the case that matchmaking services can help a wide array of Jews find lasting love. Ventures such as YentaNet, a pluralistic matchmaking service that arose about a decade ago, and Tribe 12, a Jewish nonprofit working with young adults in Philadelphia where Ben Shalom got her start, have sought to pair Jewish singles who might be a good fit for each other.
But the practice is most common in haredi Orthodox communities, where the norms around shidduch dating are well known and closely followed. Daters have a “shidduch resume” outlining their education, interests and family background; parents are involved in the process; and dating is intended to move quickly toward marriage. Dates typically take place in public spaces and couples are expected not to touch until they are married.
In formal Orthodox matchmaking, the shadchan, or matchmaker, is usually compensated by the parents, receiving around $1,000 upon a couple’s engagement, although higher-end services may charge more. Some matchmakers may charge a smaller amount for the initial meeting with a client, while Ben Shalom’s company, Marriage Minded Mentor, charges $50 to $100 an hour on a sliding scale based on the client’s salary. (Sima Taparia, the star and host of “Indian Matchmaking,” the Netflix show that inspired “Jewish Matchmaking,” reportedly charges her clients around $1,330 to $8,000 for similar services.)
Matchmakers keep records of who in their communities is looking for a match, but they can also tap into networks of other matchmakers and databases of singles as they seek to pair their clients. “We don’t believe in competition, we believe in collaboration,” said Ben Shalom, who is currently based in Israel.
Ben Shalom grew up in a Conservative Jewish community where matchmaking was not the norm, and later became Orthodox. She knew her husband for three weeks before becoming engaged, then touched him for the first time during their wedding four months later.
She knows that most participants on “Jewish Matchmaking” are unlikely to follow those same restrictions. Still, she encourages them to at least try.
“I’m really trying to have you guys touch hearts,” Ben Shalom tells Harmonie Krieger, a marketing and brand consultant in her 40s, as she explains why she wants Krieger to abstain from physical contact for five dates. “You will gain clarity. If there’s no physical glue holding the relationship together, then there’s actually value-based glue that’s holding the relationship together.”
“I will accept the challenge,” Krieger says. “Maybe. Let’s see how it goes.”
Harmonie Krieger, one of the clients and cast members of the show, is challenged not to touch her dates for their first five dates. (Netflix)
Krieger is one of a number of non-Orthodox Jews who opted to be cast on “Jewish Matchmaking” after being unsatisfied with their own dating efforts. There’s Nakysha Osadchey, a Black Reform Jew who is desperate to get out of Kansas City, Missouri, where she hasn’t had luck finding a partner who understands her multicultural background. Living in Tel Aviv via Rome, Noah Del Monte, 24, is the youngest of the group, an Israeli army veteran and diplomat’s son who wants to transition from so-called “king of nightlife” to husband. In Los Angeles, Ori Basly, who works for his family’s wedding planning business, is looking for a blue-eyed, blonde-haired Israeli woman to fall in love with and bring home to his family.
The Jews cast on the show are all in different places in their lives, some grieving serious breakups or committed to specific religious identities, some picky about looks or hoping their partner will be OK with riding motorcycles. Some of them are looking for particular Jewish commitments to concepts such as tikkun olam, which means “repairing the world” and has come to represent a social justice imperative for many liberal Jews; others want to be sure they’re matched only with people who share their approaches to observing Shabbat and keeping kosher.
Nakysha Osadchey from Kansas City, Missouri is looking for someone who understands her multicultural background as a Black Reform Jew. (Netflix)
Pamela Rae Schuller, a comedian whose material frequently centers on living with Tourette syndrome, a nervous system disorder, demurred when Ben Shalom first offered to set her up about seven years ago, after attending one of Schuller’s shows in Los Angeles.
“I was picking career first. And there are a lot of complicated feelings around dating and disability,” said Schuller, who stands 4 feet 6 inches tall and frequently barks because of her syndrome. “And I never even thought about a matchmaker.”
But in 2022, Ben Shalom reached out again, this time with a possible match, and a catch — it would be for a new Netflix show she was set to host. This time, Schuller was ready.
“I have this life that I really, really love. I’m just at the point where I’ve realized I’d like someone to start to share that with,” she said. “I’m not going into this looking for anyone to complete me.”
Pamela Rae Schuller, a comedian whose material frequently deals with living with a disability, makes an appearance on “Jewish Matchmaking”. (Courtesy Pamela Rae Schuller)
Getting back into dating and then appearing on the show, which Schuller hasn’t seen yet, was both scary and exciting, she says
“I’m about to put myself out there. I think that’s scary for everyone, disability or otherwise,” Schuller said. “But I also want to see a world where we remember that every type of person dates.”
Plus, she added, “I love the idea that Netflix is willing to show diversity in Judaism, diversity in dating.”
Ensuring that she show accurately represented American Jews was the responsibility of Ronit Polin-Tarshish, an Orthodox filmmaker who worked as a consulting producer on “Jewish Matchmaking.” Her role was to ensure that Judaism was portrayed authentically. She also worked to help the Orthodox cast members feel more comfortable with their involvement on the show.
“Being Orthodox is who I am, and of course it infused every part of my work,” said Polin-Tarshish, who herself used a matchmaker to find her husband.
Multiple recent depictions of Orthodox Judaism in pop culture — including the Netflix reality show “My Unorthodox Life” — have drawn criticism from Orthodox voices for getting details of Orthodox observance wrong or seeming to encourage people to leave Orthodoxy. Both “My Unorthodox Life” and “Unorthodox,” based on the Deborah Feldman memoir of the same name, depict formerly Orthodox women who left arranged marriages they described as oppressive.
Meanwhile, other depictions of Jews have been panned for botching details. Those include a grieving widow (herself not Jewish, but mourning a Jewish husband) serving hamantaschen at the shiva in the 2014 film “This is Where I Leave You,” and a storyline on the Canadian show “Nurses” about an Orthodox man rejecting a bone graft from a non-Jew.
“So many times we watch shows as Jews and we kind of gnash our teeth, and are like, ‘They got it wrong! They got a basic thing wrong!’” said Polin-Tarshish, who previously produced the first-ever feature-length film by Orthodox women and worked on another reality show about arranged marriages across cultures. “That was my whole job, to make sure that they got it right. And thank God, baruch Hashem, I think we really did.”
Asked if her involvement on “Jewish Matchmaking” has received any pushback, Ben Shalom said she had gotten questions about how she could know whether the showrunners will accurately represent who she is.
Ben Shalom said she was confident in the production based on what she saw on “Indian Matchmaking,” but also because she believed she could pull off the delicate balance needed to represent her own community and make for great entertainment.
“You have to be smart about how you share who you are with the world, and you have to be authentic, and you have to be real, and you have to be true,” she said. “And you have to do that on reality TV with strangers that you’ve just met, and you have to do an interview. So only because I saw it done beautifully before, I knew that I had the ability to do that as well.”
Polin-Tarshish is excited for viewers at home to identify with the cast of “Jewish Matchmaking,” and to even get frustrated by some of the cast members’ actions. But most importantly, she says she is excited to have real, three-dimensional Jewish characters on screen.
“They’re real people in every sense of the word,” Polin-Tarshish said. “There are characters you’re going to love, there are characters you might even love to hate. But that’s life.”
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The post In ‘Jewish Matchmaking,’ a diverse set of Jews experience Orthodox dating practices appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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UK Jewish leaders demand answers after Muslim police group paper calls Zionism a form of hatred
(JTA) — British Jewish groups say they are alarmed about revelations that a fraternal society for Muslim police officers published a policy paper that described Zionism as a form of anti-Muslim hatred and called the Israeli army a “Zionist terrorist group.”
The Board of Deputies of British Jews called the paper posted by the National Association of Muslim Police “disturbing” in its presentation of Jewish identity, history and the nature of antisemitism.
“If this is being circulated among officers, it poses a direct challenge to the integrity of policing and it should be withdrawn immediately,” the group said.
NAMP has distanced itself from the report and, in a statement, rejected any allegation that the group “supports Hamas.”
The 39-page paper titled “From Past Prejudices to Present Policies: Confronting anti-Muslim hatred and Promoting Human Rights,” was written by NAMP’s then-vice president, Khaldoun Kabbani, and published in July 2025. It says “Zionism represents one of the manifestations of anti-Muslim hatred”; likens the war in Gaza to the Holocaust; and disputes facts about Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, including that Israeli children were killed.
The Spectator, a right-wing British newspaper, drew attention to the report in a piece published on Friday that said the report illuminated “the disturbing truth about the National Association of Muslim Police.” The group has a formal affiliation with 16 of 43 police departments in the U.K. and says it represents more than 20,000 officers.
Kabbani, a forensics officer, was briefly the chair of the Scottish Muslim Police Association but planned to move abroad after retiring earlier this year, according to a post by the group on LinkedIn.
The revelation of the NAMP report comes at a time of heightened tension over policing in the U.K., amid both a surge in anti-Jewish crimes and a renewed uproar over a December murder that has fueled allegations of “two-tier policing” that treats some victims differently from others. The Spectator referenced the victim, Henry Nowak, in the column about NAMP.
The NAMP report has spurred distress for many British Jews who are on edge amid a string of violent incidents targeting Jewish communities. The Campaign Against Antisemitism, a watchdog group, said its polling shows that 83% of British Jews do not think the police are doing enough to protect them — and that the report suggested their concerns were well founded.
“The people responsible for publishing this extremist screed on the official police.uk web domain are unfit to be police officers and must be immediately investigated by their respective forces’ professional standards departments and dismissed,” Steven Silverman, CAM’s director of investigations and enforcement, said in a statement.
“British Jews have long suffered two-tier policing that sees antisemitic crime go unpunished,” he said, adding that CAM would press the British government “ensure a clear message is being sent. This cannot pass with the document being quietly deleted.”
The report was removed from NAMP’s website over the weekend. The group distanced itself from the report in a statement published on Tuesday, saying that it had removed the report “immediately” after learning about its existence and emphasizing that the author was “no longer associated” with NAMP.
“We understand that the publication of this document has affected several communities, and we regret any concern, discomfort, or misunderstanding it may have caused,” the group said.
It added, “NAMP categorically does not ‘defend’ Hamas or any other proscribed organisation. We condemn all forms of terrorism and extremism.”
The document is “deeply troubling,” a spokesperson for the Jewish Leadership Council, which coordinates British Jewish groups, said in a statement.
“This document appears to falsely associate an ideology held by the majority of Jewish people as a threat to Muslims. It also engages in deeply troubling Holocaust inversion and denial of some of the worst atrocities carried out by Hamas on October 7th,” the spokesperson said. “At a time of rising antisemitism including violent attacks on British Jews, this document further threatens community cohesion and police forces should be clear in distancing themselves from it.”
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said it plans to speak with the “relevant” government and police departments to discover the paper’s provenance, how it’s being used and “how to ensure that the valued relationships of trust between British Jews and the police are not being undermined.”
The Metropolitan Police of London, the largest police department in the U.K. and a formal NAMP affiliate, declined to comment on the report. The department has recently stepped up policing in Jewish communities in an effort to stem antisemitic violence.
The post UK Jewish leaders demand answers after Muslim police group paper calls Zionism a form of hatred appeared first on The Forward.
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Jacob Reses, Vance’s Jewish chief of staff, to leave administration
(JTA) — Jacob Reses, the Jewish chief of staff to Vice President JD Vance, is leaving the administration at the end of the summer, a source confirmed to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Thursday.
Reses, who’s been in his role since Vance and President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, is perhaps the closest Jewish official in Vance’s orbit. He has had a close relationship with the vice president since Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign in Ohio.
A source familiar with the matter confirmed NBC News’ initial report that Reses informed Vance of his decision months ago, after his wife became pregnant. Vance said in a statement on Thursday that he will “miss him dearly, but he won’t be far, and I plan to keep his counsel close until our paths cross again.” Reses’ plans for his next role are currently unknown.
Vance has recently drawn the ire of some Jewish Republicans who say that he has refused to confront antisemitism on the right, including from former Fox news host Tucker Carlson. (Carlson’s son is also a Vance staffer.) A New York Magazine profile published in March suggested that Reses was on board with Vance’s approach, and revealed that Reses used his private X account to amplify voices calling on Jews to embrace, rather than resist, the Christian nationalist current surging within the GOP.
Reses has been “by my side for my whole career in public life,” Vance said in a statement.
“I can’t imagine having been on this life-changing journey without him,” Vance said. “From day one of my time as a Senator-elect, I could not have asked for a more loyal and discerning advisor and friend as my chief of staff.”
The personal bond between the two men was on display in January, when Vance took part in Reses’ wedding to Rachel Altman at a synagogue in Rockville, Maryland, delivering a Jewish prayer under the chuppah. Chabad of Princeton University, Reses’ alma mater, posted a photo of the couple with the vice president, celebrating the occasion as an expression of Jewish pride.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DTrUKXEDOQE/?img_index=3
That closeness, and Reses’ reported alignment with Vance’s stance on right-wing antisemitism, have not spared Reses from becoming a target of antisemites. In one instance, a white-nationalist website ran an article about him headlined, “Another Nail in the Coffin — Jew Runs J. D. Vance.”
A Jewish Telegraphic Agency profile published in 2024, when Vance was selected as Trump’s running mate, traced Reses’ Jewish identity and his journey from a Democratic-leaning Jewish teenager in southern New Jersey, whose grandfather escaped the Holocaust in Lithuania, to one of the most influential conservatives in Washington. His trajectory included internships for Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, a political conversion at Princeton and stints at the Heritage Foundation and in the office of Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley.
On Thursday, Republican leaders and Trump administration officials sang Reses’ praises in statements shared with JTA.
“Jacob Reses has been an invaluable, loyal, and trusted hand to Vice President Vance and President Trump,” said Matt Brooks, CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition. “As a proud Jewish American, whose own family story carries the weight of our people’s history, Jacob brought both conviction and clarity to one of the most consequential roles in Washington.” Brooks added that the RJC has “no doubt he will continue to play a critical role moving forward.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who’s seen as a possible challenger to Vance for the 2028 presidential nomination, said that Reses served Vance and the entire administration “with distinction,” and that he “understands the moment we’re in and he spent every day fighting to deliver results for the President.”
Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, said he was proud to have Reses “by my side in negotiating some of the toughest deals for the President.”
“Don’t let Jacob fool you — beneath his kind exterior he’s a killer,” Witkoff said. “It’s been a delight to get to know him through the Vice President, and our foreign adventures from Israel to Pakistan have been historic.”
He added, “We haven’t seen the last of him.”
The post Jacob Reses, Vance’s Jewish chief of staff, to leave administration appeared first on The Forward.
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Helen Mirren criticizes Israel at film festival after being called ‘evil Zionist’ in viral video
(JTA) — British actor Helen Mirren criticized Israel at a film festival in Italy, in her first public comments since security footage of a November incident where she was accused by a stranger of being an “evil Zionist b—h” went viral late last month.
“Evil forces are rising everywhere, even in a country like Israel,” Mirren said in an interview with journalists at the Taormina Film Fest in Sicily, according to reports in entertainment media. “How could you possibly repeat the actions of what was done to you as people to other people? Crimes against humanity, it’s called.”
The Academy Award-winning actor, who is 80, is being honored with a lifetime achievement award from the festival on Friday. Her many roles have included playing former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in the 2023 biopic “Golda,” which she premiered in Jerusalem.
Mirren is not Jewish but has a long history of connection to Israel, dating back to 1967, when she traveled with a Jewish boyfriend to work for a month on a kibbutz in the country’s north.
She referenced that period in her comments at Taormina.
“I saw it from the inside and I saw some things that disturbed me from the inside in Israel at that time,” she said, according to Deadline. “I’m talking about six months after the Six Day War.”
Mirren has previously criticized the Israeli government. While promoting “Golda” in early 2023, she said she believed that Meir would be “utterly horrified” by Israel’s current leadership, which she referred to as a “dictatorship.”
But she also spoke favorably about Israel during the promotional events, which shortly preceded the Hamas attack that began the war in Gaza.
“I believe in Israel, in the existence of Israel, and I believe Israel has to go forward into the future, for the rest of eternity,” she told the country’s Channel 12 in August 2023. “I believe in Israel because of the Holocaust.”
During the November incident, the person who accosted Mirren and her husband Taylor Hackford appeared to reference those comments, saying, “She said Israel should last forever because of the Holocaust, and she was very happy that Palestinians’ houses were gone.”
Hackford responded, “F–ck off,” and Mirren did not say anything in the video.
At Taormina, the actor offered a more nuanced characterization of her beliefs while also praising Israel’s creative and intellectual communities.
“I grew up in Europe post-Second World War and the realization in my parents’ generation of what had happened in the Holocaust was so profound, so important,” Mirren said. “Therefore, the creation of Israel was a very important moment, although maybe it was done in completely the wrong way, in the wrong place, I don’t know. But something had to happen after the horror.”
According to Variety, she also said, “The evil is always lurking, waiting to take over, even in a place like Israel. I played Golda Meir and worked in a country that was the idealistic Israel, and I always thought it was a country that would never do wrong, but of course they were doing wrong, even then.”
About the viral video showing her being accosted, Mirren told journalists at the festival she believes she was “attacked by mistake by a man who was maybe a little over passionate or maybe mentally not quite stable.”
She added, “I don’t know whether he read things on the Internet or thought he read something which he hadn’t read, I don’t know.”
Though London’s Metropolitan Police initially said it was possible for an incident to be investigated as an antisemitic hate crime even if the victim is not Jewish, it will not be investigating further, as Mirren and Hackford have decided not to press charges.
The post Helen Mirren criticizes Israel at film festival after being called ‘evil Zionist’ in viral video appeared first on The Forward.
