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When a breast cancer diagnosis knocked me down, a network of Jewish women lifted me up
(JTA) — On the way home from the hospital where I was given my diagnosis of grade 2 invasive lobular breast cancer, I directed my husband, through my tears, to stop at the kosher store.
“I don’t want to see anyone right now,” I said, knowing the inevitability of running into someone we knew in the small Jewish community where we live, “so can you go in?” He pulled into the parking lot. “We need challah,” I reminded him. It was Thursday, after all. The next evening was Shabbat. Time doesn’t stand still for cancer.
My hospital appointment took place two days after the front page of the New York Times declared: “When Should Women Get Regular Mammograms: At 40, U.S. Panel Now Says.” I was 48. Breast cancer has long been the second most common cancer for women, after skin cancer. It is also the most lethal after lung cancer. Statistically, though, most women affected are postmenopausal, so unless there was a specific reason to test early, women were screened regularly from the age of 50. Now, the advice has changed. Breast cancer is rising in younger women. For women in their 40s, the rate of increase between 2015 and 2019 doubled from the previous decade to 2 per cent per year.
Why is this happening? Air pollution? Microplastics? Chemicals in our food? We don’t know.
In the days following my appointment, there was a proliferation of articles about the topic. Importantly, doctors explained that the cancer women are diagnosed with in their 40s tends to be a more aggressive type of cancer. Cancers in premenopausal women grow faster; many breast cancers, like mine, are hormone sensitive. (Got estrogen? Bad luck for you.)
When I posted the news about my diagnosis — on Facebook, because I’m an oversharing type — I was stunned by the number of friends my age, more discreet about their lives, who sent me messages to tell me they had recently gone through the same thing. Everyone had advice. “If you can do a lumpectomy, you’re very lucky. It’s not a major operation, and you’ll preserve your breast.” “Cut it all off! Immediately! Just get rid of all it and you’ll never worry again! Do you want to spend the rest of your life in mammogram scanxiety?” “Ask plastic surgeons for pictures, and pick the cutest new boobs out there. You won’t regret it.” “The radiation burns—that’s something no one ever tells you. Get yourself some Lubriderm and lidocaine, mix into a slurry, slap it on a panty liner, and tuck it in your sports bra.”
I’m not sure why I thought I was immune. Or maybe I didn’t — maybe I just never gave it much thought. Even when I found the lump on my breast, I was dismissive. I went to the doctor, and she asked if anyone in my family had had breast cancer. “Oh, who knows? They were all murdered,” I said blithely. Her eyes bugged. “In the Holocaust,” I added. “Your…mother? Grandmother? Sisters?” “Oh! No, no history of breast cancer in my immediate family.”
Add to that, my mother and sister both tested negative for the BRCA gene mutations, and that’s my Ashkenazi side. The thing is, though, most women who test positive for breast cancer have no family history of it.
But also, I’d done everything right! If you look through the preventative measures, I took all of them. I had three kids by 35, and I breastfed them. I have a healthy, mostly plant-based diet; I walk and cycle everywhere. I’m not a drinker or smoker. I eat so many blueberries!
Several of the articles that have been published in recent days are emphasizing the particular danger for Black women, with good reason: They have twice the mortality rate of white women. But as I did my research, I realized that Jewish women should also be on high alert. We’ve long known that one in forty Ashkenazi women has the BRCA gene mutation, significantly raising the risk of breast cancer (50% of women with the gene mutation will get breast cancer) as well ovarian cancer, which is much harder to detect and far more deadly. So many of my friends who reached out to me to tell me of their breast cancer experiences are Jewish; interestingly, not one has the BRCA mutation. Are these high numbers indicative or anecdotal? Are Jewish women generally more susceptible to breast cancer? This seems to be an important area of future research.
For me, that research will come too late — as did the guidance. For now, I have to accept that this cancer diagnosis is part of my life, that just as I will pick up challah every Thursday, I will wake every morning and take my hormone-blocking Tamoxifen. I will lose sleep every night about which surgery to have until I have the surgery, and then I will lose sleep every night about whether it was fully successful. And there’s plenty more in store for me that isn’t pretty; so it goes.
But here’s a good thing that’s already come out of this diagnosis: When the responses to my Facebook post flooded in, they were not only along the lines of “Refuah shleimah” and “I’ve just been through this too,” but also, “Thank you for sharing! I’m going to book my mammogram right now!”
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Hezbollah rejects US-brokered ceasefire deal struck by Lebanon and Israel
(JTA) — Hezbollah appears to have rejected a ceasefire that the United States brokered between Israel and Lebanon, where the Iranian proxy is based.
The deal reportedly would have allowed Israel to remain in southern Lebanon, where it has established a buffer zone, but not permit any attacks in Beirut unless Hezbollah attacked Israel within its own borders. It would also have required Hezbollah fighters to leave the buffer zone.
A top Hezbollah leader said accepting a demand to leave southern Lebanon would amount to “surrender” for the group.
“What we are concerned about is an end to the aggression, ceasefire and Israel’s withdrawal,” Secretary-General Naim Qassem said in a televised statement on Thursday, the Associated Press reported. “We did not make any commitment to any party to stop resisting as long as there is occupation.”
Dozens of Israeli soldiers have died in the fighting, which Hezbollah is increasingly prosecuting with the use of drones.
The rejection comes as the U.S. House of Representatives voted to rebuke President Donald Trump and his war on Iran on Wednesday, narrowly passing a resolution that limits Trump’s power to continue the war without congressional approval.
Four Republicans voted with Democrats on the bill, in a sign of how opposition to the war, which Trump launched jointly with Israel in February, is crossing party lines ahead of high-stakes midterm elections in the United States.
The bill would not require presidential signoff but is seen as unlikely to substantively change Trump’s handling of the war, which he has insisted does not require congressional approval.
Trump called the vote “meaningless” in a post on Truth Social on Thursday morning.
“Yesterday, in a meaningless vote, the House voted, 4 bad Republicans and all of the Dumocrats, to limit my War Powers, right in the middle of my final negotiations to end the War with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he wrote. “Who would do such an unpatriotic thing.”
The bill now goes to the Senate, where a similar measure has advanced in recent weeks, also with support from a handful of Republicans. It comes at a delicate time, as an uncertain ceasefire struck in early April has now stretched on without a resolution for longer than active hostilities unfolded. Trump has failed to achieve the terms for a deal to permanently end the war that he said he wanted, and this week said he thought the constant negotiations had grown “very boring.” Hezbollah’s apparent rejection of a ceasefire deal is another setback.
Iran has continued to battle during its ceasefire with the United States, though not against Israel: On Wednesday, it struck Kuwait’s main airport, killing one and injuring 60.
Also on Wednesday, Trump confirmed reports that he had called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “f—ing crazy” during a call on Monday in which Trump pressed Netanyahu to strike a ceasefire with Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon. Trump told a New York Post podcast that he was “a little perturbed at his constantly fighting with Lebanon” but that he liked Netanyahu and worked well with him.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Hezbollah rejects US-brokered ceasefire deal struck by Lebanon and Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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A Yiddish favorite is among the top baby names in New York
Each year around this time, the Social Security Administration releases a list of the most popular baby names for the past year. This year, New York state’s list includes the Yiddish name Gitty, as well as five other traditional Ashkenazi names: Chana, Chaya, Rivka, Chaim and Moshe.
According to this interactive list in the Times Union, 43 of every million babies in the U.S. were given the name Gitty in the past six years.
The vast majority of these babies were apparently born in either Yiddish-speaking Hasidic families or in non-Yiddish speaking Haredi families (often referred to as “Yeshivish”) who maintain the tradition of giving their children Biblical and other traditional Jewish names, often after a deceased relative.
Although some people may be surprised to hear a Yiddish name like Gitty making the list, it lines up with the most recent statistics on language use. According to this study, in households with children aged 5 and under, Yiddish ranks as the third most common home language in New York (spoken by roughly 3% of young children), trailing only English and Spanish.
It also makes sense in light of the most recent demographic breakdown of Jewish families in the New York area. According to this 2023 UJA study, Orthodox families represent about 19% of Jewish households (approx. 430,000 individuals, including children) — a group that’s growing rapidly due to higher birth rates and younger average ages, with about two-thirds identifying as Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) and the rest as Modern Orthodox.
The name Gitty is a variant of the name Gitl, which means “good” in Yiddish. Why then are these babies called Gitty instead of Gitl? This is part of a trend that began years ago, when Haredi children’s names adopted a “y” at the end, apparently mimicking the old American tradition of ending children’s names with a “y” (think Tommy instead of Thomas). As a result, Rivka became Rivky; Moshe (or Moishe) became Moishy and Gitl became Gitty.
The post A Yiddish favorite is among the top baby names in New York appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump’s humiliation of Netanyahu marks a sea change in the US-Israel relationship
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s carefully cultivated image as a master of geopolitics is on life support after reports that President Donald Trump on Monday cursed and mocked him in a phone call, calling him “f- – – ing crazy” and ordering him to stand down in Lebanon.
In response, Netanyahu’s opponents and even some of his former allies are accusing him of mortgaging Israel’s sovereignty and reducing the country to strategic dependence on Washington. They’re right. Trump is treating Netanyahu less like the leader of a sovereign ally and more like a subordinate expected to obey instructions.
As a result, Israel suddenly looks less like an independent regional power and more like an American client state.
A rupture long in the making
The roots of this humiliation stretch back months, to the beginning of the Iran war itself. In early March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested that the United States entered the war because Israel was preparing to strike Iran and the White House feared that Tehran would retaliate against American forces afterward.
Ever since, American officials, including Trump himself, have disseminated the narrative of the war as a preventive intervention designed partly to manage the consequences of expected Israeli escalation. But as the war has dragged on, becoming exactly the kind of open-ended Middle Eastern entanglement Trump once promised to avoid, the public narrative has instead increasingly become that Netanyahu had talked Trump into a war that backfired, making Trump look foolish.
This week came the payback.
On Monday, Netanyahu publicly threatened major strikes on the Shiite neighborhoods of Beirut if Hezbollah attacks continued. Iran responded by suspending ceasefire talks, apparently gambling that Trump wanted an exit ramp badly enough to restrain Israel rather than risk a wider regional explosion. The gamble worked.
In the Monday call, Trump reportedly ordered Israel to cease fire immediately, demanding to know “what the f – – -” Netanyahu was doing, accusing Israel of causing escalation, and declaring — incorrectly — that he had “kept Netanyahu out of jail,” a reference to his efforts to persuade President Isaac Herzog to pardon Netanyahu in his ongoing corruption trial.
Intentional humiliation
American presidents have pressured Israeli leaders before. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion withdrew from the Sinai peninsula in 1957 under heavy pressure from then-President Dwight Eisenhower after the Suez Crisis. Washington pressured Israel to stop military operations during the 1973 Yom Kippur War and again during the 1982 Lebanon War.
Yet previous confrontations unfolded differently. American presidents pressured Israeli leaders privately while preserving the appearance of mutual respect between allies. Even when Washington prevailed, both governments generally tried to avoid publicly humiliating each other.
This time the humiliation was part of the strategy — a change that bodes ill for Israel’s standing as an independent regional power.
Trump wants Tehran, Beirut, Riyadh, Doha, Cairo, and every other Middle Eastern capital to understand that he controls the pace of escalation, and that Netanyahu obeyed when ordered to stand down.
That public spectacle explains the intensity of the Israeli backlash.
“There has never been an Israeli prime minister who accepted such a humiliating demand,” former military chief and current prime ministerial candidate Gadi Eisenkot wrote on social media. Former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, whose coalition poses a major threat to Netanyahu’s control in upcoming elections, effectively slammed Netanyahu as allowing the U.S. to dictate Israeli military policy, with Bennett accusing Netanyahu of running “a government that has lost control of Israeli sovereignty.”
Even the conservative Jerusalem Post sounded the alarm. Israel had “found itself in the humiliating position of having to seek American approval to defend its own citizens,” the paper argued in an editorial. “The United States is now actively restraining Israel from taking decisive military action.”
Netanyahu’s image in tatters
For years, Netanyahu cultivated an image of himself as uniquely capable of managing Israel’s relationship with the U.S. while preserving Israeli strategic independence. His supporters portrayed him as a geopolitical virtuoso who understood American politics better than any rival and who could navigate complex power dynamics while defending Israeli interests.
Now that image lies in ruins.
Over the last decade, Netanyahu systematically alienated nearly every pillar of Israel’s traditional support structure aside from the American right.
He offended European governments through relentless settlement expansion, confrontations with the European Union, and contempt in response to liberal Western criticism. Europe remains Israel’s largest trading partner, yet Israel now faces the growing possibility of sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and even challenges to its associated nation status with the European Union.
Then came the rupture with the American Democrats.
In 2015, Netanyahu traveled to Washington to campaign openly against then-President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran before a joint session of Congress. Strategically, that marked a turning point. Netanyahu transformed support for Israel from a matter of bipartisan American consensus into an increasingly polarized issue.
Afterward, he tied himself even more tightly to the Republican right, and especially Trump. He cultivated the impression that he exercised unusual influence over Trump himself, encouraging supporters to believe that he had effectively turned the White House into an extension of his own political operation.
That illusion has now collapsed spectacularly.
The final and perhaps most reckless step came when reports emerged that Netanyahu sought Trump’s intervention regarding his corruption trial. Even without confirming those reports’ accuracy, the perception that an Israeli prime minister already dependent on Washington for military and diplomatic backing was now personally dependent on an American president for political survival was devastating.
This week confirmed that dependence now defines the U.S.-Israel relationship. Netanyahu, the supposed master statesman, has maneuvered himself — and Israel — into a strategic cul-de-sac. Now the question is: Is there any way out?
The post Trump’s humiliation of Netanyahu marks a sea change in the US-Israel relationship appeared first on The Forward.