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Why Jews are flocking to Loop, a new dating app where users do the matchmaking
(New York Jewish Week) — When Lea Herzfeld went on her first date with a guy she met on Loop — a new dating app that relies on its users to do the matchmaking — she wasn’t nervous, for a change.
“I felt more comfortable going into it knowing that he wasn’t a complete stranger,” the 23-year-old Modern Orthodox Murray Hill resident told the New York Jewish Week. Herzfeld and her date had a handful of mutual friends — in fact, five of them suggested, via Loop, that the pair would make a good match.
Herzfeld and her date met up for coffee and walked around Rockefeller Center. And while the connection didn’t go any further, it’s an example of how Loop works: Instead of an algorithm or matching based on proximity, Loop relies upon users’ personal networks to help set them up. This means when a potential couple meets up IRL, they know they have at least one point of connection between them, plus the reassurance that someone they know thought they would make a good couple.
“Loop is bringing traditional Jewish wisdom to the world at large,” Loop co-founder Lian Zucker told the New York Jewish Week, referring to the time-honored Jewish tradition of using matchmakers. “We’re bringing this 1,000-plus year-old tradition and giving it a digital facelift.”
Zucker, 32, her co-founder, Moriya Blumenfeld, 35 — who both live in New York City — and Zucker’s younger brother Adam, 28, who lives in California, launched Loop in May. The app has grown to 13,000 users and has had over 2,100 set-ups, most of which have been in the New York area, according to Zucker.
Though the app isn’t explicitly Jewish — anyone can join — it does have a Jewish concept running through its veins: that of the “shidduch,” the Yiddish word for matchmaking. And within the Jewish community, especially in more observant circles, Loop has swiftly become the dating app of choice for those looking to meet their bashert, the Yiddish word for soul mate.
“A lot of the time you have people who come from religious backgrounds look at a ‘secular’ app like Hinge and immediately say, ‘Oh, that’s not for me. I can’t do that.’ It’s like throwing darts at a wall — even if you set your profile to ‘Jewish,’ that could mean anything,” said a 24-year-old Modern Orthodox man in Manhattan who wished to remain anonymous. “With Loop, if all your frum friends are on it, and your married friends can set you up with people they know or offer a personal connection, it’s a lot easier to want to join and use.”
As it happens, the founders of Loop got together — professionally — by a mutual friend who set them up.
Zucker and Blumenfeld were introduced via a man they both dated, whom they refer to as the “OG Matchmaker.” Zucker met the man in 2020 via Bumble. Their date was over Facetime due to the pandemic, and the two spoke about her career in startups. Zucker said her next idea was for a dating app, but she wanted to work with another founder to get it off the ground.
The OG Matchmaker recalled a Tinder date he had gone on five years earlier with Blumenfeld, who had similar goals and ideas. He connected Zucker and Blumenfeld, and the rest, they say, is history.
“We were essentially match made through these failed romantic connections on two separate dating apps,” Zucker said, who added that the OG Matchmaker has remained a good friend.
It is setups like these that inspired Zucker and Blumenfeld to start Loop. After all, so many successful or promising relationships are the ones made within a person’s own network — either their friends, or friends of friends, or even one more degree outwards.
On Loop, users make a typical dating profile. But unlike other apps, they are not given a slew of random options to swipe through. Instead, users make a “Loop” by connecting with anyone from their contact list who is also on the app. They then have access to those connections’ “Loops” — their friends and contacts — after which they can scroll through their friends’ friends.
If they find someone they are interested in, they can request that the mutual friend set them up for a conversation and take it from there.
Unlike other dating apps, non-singles can also make profiles and participate — because the app relies on set-ups, it encourages both non-singles and singles to set their friends up. The matched-up parties both need to accept the match in order for the conversation to move forward.
That means parents and others in the community can also get involved. “There’s all these parents who want to set people up but don’t really have a modern way of doing it,” Herzfeld said, adding that her father is on the app. “Some will ask for resumes or bios, but a lot of people our age don’t really have those. So sharing your dating profile on an app like this is a better way for them to get involved.”
The 24-year-old Manhattanite said that, within his Loops, many users he has seen put their “shidduch resumes” — a standard tool in Orthodox dating circles — in their profiles. Potential matchmakers can use the information to start setting them up with others who have the same observance level, life goals and preferred backgrounds.
“All three of us come from a Jewish background and it’s a huge part of our identity,” Zucker said when asked whether Loop had a Jewish origin story. “We knew full well about the tradition of matchmaking and shadchans [matchmakers] in Judaism and the saying that as a matchmaker if you set up three couples successfully, you will go to heaven.”
However, Zucker added that she and her co-founders have learned that matchmaking is prominent in Indian, Persian, Korean and other Asian and South Asian cultures, as well as in other religious communities like Mormons.
”We really believe that Loop has universal appeal,” Zucker said. “We are not building for any type of specific demographic, whether that’s religious or cultural, or for a specific gender orientation, or really anything else.”
Still, it means a lot to them that the app is popular among young Jews. “It’s been our absolute honor — from a very emotional place, too — that it has gotten a lot of early traction in the Jewish community,” she said. “Quite frankly, regardless of which community, none of us expected this kind of explosive traction.”
“There’s this whole nature of setting your friends up,” said Herzfeld, who uses the app as both a matchmaker and for her own matches. “It’s something that I was already doing, and I think it’s like a big part of the Modern Orthodox Jewish world. So it was a no-brainer for me to download it and send it to all the friends of mine who had been saying, “Oh, do you know anyone to set me up?’ It really helps because you see all of your friends in one place that you might have not thought of.”
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The post Why Jews are flocking to Loop, a new dating app where users do the matchmaking appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Pro-Hamas Student Group Launches Legal Offensive Against Universities
Anti-Zionist protesters being arrested at Pomona College on April 5, 2024. They had taken over an administrative building. Photo: Screenshot/Students for Justice in Palestine via Instagram
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has launched a major lawfare offensive apparently aimed at securing a right to break school rules on college campuses and promote anti-Israel hatred, which has contributed to a surge of antisemitic incidents at universities across the US.
On Monday, SJP at the University of Vermont (UVM) filed a federal lawsuit alleging that school officials violated the constitution and perpetrated anti-Palestinian bias by suspending the group for breaking multiple rules, local media reported. Meanwhile, SJP filed a separate civil rights complaint against the University of Georgia (UGA), where some nine students were arrested in April for illegally occupying school property, claiming that its members were victims of “extreme differential treatment.”
The lawsuit against UVM followed SJP’s latest suspension for violating what the university called “the code of student conduct,” a “solicitation and posting policy,” and other offenses. In excerpts of court documents shared by Valley News on Tuesday, the lawyer representing the group, John Franco, said the accusations were false and intended to squelch speech which is critical of Israel.
“In a word, as a state instrumentality, the defendants have invoked state power to muzzle UVMSJP, to delegitimize it, and to give anyone else second thoughts about associating with it,” Franco wrote in the complaint, which is seeking an injunctive reversal of the suspension. Elsewhere he said UVM has “chosen to weaponize procedural permitting issues and the student misconduct process to bully and intimidate UVMSJP and other students, chilling the exercise of their protected First Amendment rights.”
First reported by Athens Politics Nerd, SJP’s civil rights complaint against UGA lodges accusations of racism.
“UGA’s targeted discriminatory investigation of students and student organizations that are made up of mostly Palestinians, Arabs, or Muslim members, perceived to be Palestinian, affiliated with, or advocating in support of Palestinians amounts to a McCarthyist campaign to punish students for their identity and/or expressive activity,” a copy of the complaint shared by Athens says. “There is simply no justification for UGA’s differential treatment of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students.”
The legal actions come amid National Students for Justice Palestine’s, as well as its affiliate groups’, sustained and unrelenting campaigns to intimidate university officials into boycotting Israel and banning expressions of Zionism from higher education. As The Algemeiner has previously reported, SJP also regularly traffics in hate speech, destroys property, and trumpets its support for terrorist groups such as Hamas and overthrowing the government of the United States.
Last week, the SJP chapter of Pomona College promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories falsely accusing Israel and the US of spreading the Covid-19 virus to commit genocide and maintain “colonial” rule over people of color.
“Pandemics are a tool of the colonizer,” said an SJP pamphlet distributed during a club fair at the school, according to a Jewish students club, Haverim, that acquired a copy the document. “By bomb or by pathogen, these attacks on Palestinian life are man-made, intentional policy choices … The american [sic] state and israeli [sic] settler colony have found a dress rehearsal for more targeted genocides in their construction of today’s eugenicist normalcy wherein everyone is expected to sustain repeated covid infections indefinitely until death.”
Earlier this month, National Students for Justice Palestine (NSJP), which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations, publicly discussed its grand strategy of using the anti-Zionist student movement as a weapon for destroying the US in a now-deleted tweet that was posted to X/Twitter.
“Divestment is not an incrementalist goal. True divestment necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself,” the organization said last week. “It is not possible for imperial spoils to remain so heavily concentrated in the metropole and its high-cultural repositories without the continuous suppression of populations that resist the empire’s expansion; to divest from this is to undermine and eradicate America as we know it.”
In August, on the first day of school, SJP affiliated anti-Zionist students at Cornell University vandalized an administrative building, shattering the glazings of its front doors and graffitiing “Blood is on your hands” and “Israel bombs, Cornell pays” on it. Eleven days earlier, the SJP chapter of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced the beginning of what it described as an “armed rebellion,” claiming a right to use political violence as a tactic for achieving its objective of destroying Zionism, Israel, and capitalism.
“We emphasize our support for the right to resistance, not only in Palestine, but also here in the imperial core,” the group said in a manifesto — which was reportedly crafted with the help of anti-Zionist UNC professors — posted on social media. “We condone all forms of principled action, including armed rebellion, necessary to stop Israel’s genocide and apartheid, and to dismantle imperialism and capitalism more broadly. The oppressors will never grant full liberty to the oppressed; the oppressed must seize liberty with their own hands.”
Columbia University in New York City is still dealing with the legal repercussions of refusing to rein in SJP’s behavior. According to a lawsuit filed February, students linked to SJP beat up five Jewish students in Columbia’s Butler Library. Another attacked a Jewish students with a stick, lacerating his head and breaking his finger, after being asked to return missing persons posters she had stolen. In June, the school settled a lawsuit in which it was accused by a student of neglecting its obligation to foster a safe learning environment amid riotous pro-Hamas protests that were held at the school throughout the final weeks of the academic year.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Pro-Hamas Student Group Launches Legal Offensive Against Universities first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Trump Says Israel ‘Will Not Exist Within Two Years’ if Harris Elected President During Heated Debate
Republican presidential nominee and former US President Donald Trump points towards Democratic presidential nominee and US Vice President Kamala Harris, during a presidential debate hosted by ABC in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, Sept. 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump insisted on Tuesday night that his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris would prove catastrophic for Israel if she were to win the White House in November.
Trump argued during his first presidential debate with Harris, the current US vice president, that she “hates” Israel and that her election would lead to the Jewish state’s swift demise. He also took a jab at Harris for allegedly snubbing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by not attending his address to a joint session of the US Congress in July.
“If she’s president, I believe Israel will not exist within two years from now. She hates Israel,” asserted Trump, who served as US president from 2017-2021.
Trump went on to claim that Harris also “hates” people of Arabic descent and that her foreign policy approach would result in a destructive regional war in the Middle East.
“At the same time, in her own way, she hates the Arab population, because the whole place is going to get blown up. Arabs, Jewish people, Israel, Israel will be gone,” Trump said.
The Republican nominee also took a swipe at the Biden administration’s approach to Iran, arguing that its policies have resulted in empowering and enriching the Islamist regime in Tehran.
“Iran was broke under Donald Trump,” Trump said. “Now, Iran has three-hundred billion dollars, because they took off all the sanctions that I had. Iran had no money for Hamas or Hezbollah or any of the 28 different spheres of terror.”
Trump was referring to his decision as president to withdraw from the controversial 2015 nuclear deal with Iran and reimpose harsh economic sanctions on he regime. The Biden administration sought unsuccessfully to renegotiate the nuclear accord and has offered certain sanctions waivers, which according to critics benefit Tehran and allow it to spend more money on supporting terrorism.
US intelligence agencies have long labeled Iran as the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism. Supporters of Trump’s policies toward Iran argued in part that they gave the regime less resources to give to its terrorist proxies across the Middle East, including Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Critics countered that the nuclear deal was a better path to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and that Washington should work to prevent escalation with Tehran.
“They had no money for terror. They were broke. Now, they’re a rich nation. And now, what they’re doing,” Trump continued.
The former president urged the audience to “look at what’s happening to the Houthis and Yemen. Look at what’s going on in the Middle East.”
Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militia, a US-designated terrorist organization, began disrupting global trade with its attacks on shipping in the busy Red Sea corridor after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, arguing its aggression was a show of support for Palestinians in Gaza. The Iran-backed movement has also said it will target all ships heading to Israeli ports, even if they do not pass through the Red Sea, and claimed responsibility for attempted drone and missile strikes targeting Israel.
Harris on Tuesday night emphatically denied Trump’s assertion that she harbors animosity toward the Jewish state. She argued that the former president was attempting to distract from his own “weak” foreign policy record.
Harris echoed her previous comments on the ongoing war in Gaza, insisting that “Israel has a right to defend itself” and that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.”
She added that the war in Gaza must “end immediately” and repeated calls for Israel to strike a ceasefire and hostage deal with the Hamas terrorist group. The Democratic nominee also underscored the need for a “two-state solution” to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The post Trump Says Israel ‘Will Not Exist Within Two Years’ if Harris Elected President During Heated Debate first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israeli TV Stars Call for Immediate Release of Hamas Hostages in New Video Message
Gabriel (played by Michael Aloni) and Rochel (played by Yuval Scharf) in “The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem.” Photo: Yes Studios.
Some of the biggest Israeli television stars are calling for the immediate release of the 101 individuals still held hostage by Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip for almost a year now following the Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel.
Actors from “Fauda,” “Shtisel,” “The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem,” “Night Therapy,” “On The Spectrum,” and other popular shows in Israel pleaded for the safe return of the hostages in a video message released on Tuesday by Israel’s Yes TV.
“When we shoot a show, we know the script, we know what the story is, who is against who and we know how the story will end,” they said in the video, with each person stating a different part of the message. “But now, this isn’t a show. These are real people, and their time is running out. This pain is impossible to bear. There’s no air.”
“If they don’t come back, then who are we? Who?” many of them asked. “What does it say about us?”
“How will we look our children in the eyes?” asked Noa Koller, the star and creator of “Rehearsals,” who is also a mother of two. “Our grandchildren?” added “Shtisel” star Sasson Gabay, who is a grandfather.
“There are people alive there,” the actors said repeatedly. “These are their lives, and our lives — all of our lives. We have to bring all of them home, now, now,” they said again and again.
The video also featured “Beauty Queen of Jerusalem” stars Yuval Scharf and Hila Saada, “Fauda” and “The Lesson” star Doron Ben-David, “Fauda” and “Night Therapy” actor Yaakov Zada Daniel, “On the Spectrum” and “Bloody Murray” actress Neomi Levov, Israeli film star Yael Abecassis, “Fire Dance” star Yehuda Levi, “Berlin Blues” actress Shirah Naor, comedian Tom Yaar, comedian and actor Yuval Semo, and others.
The post Israeli TV Stars Call for Immediate Release of Hamas Hostages in New Video Message first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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