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7 ways to offer support and Jewish strength to friends or loved ones facing cancer
When Shoshana Polakoff, 40, received an unexpected breast cancer diagnosis three years ago, the mother of three young children needed extra support. Her friends, family and Jewish community in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan immediately stepped up.
They organized help with after-school childcare, packed school lunches for her kids and sent her little notes of encouragement while Polakoff endured trying cancer treatments.
“I felt pounds lighter and overwhelmed by the chesed that mobilized so quickly,” said Polakoff, using the Hebrew term for kindness. “And the practical help was such an incredible gift.”
Too often, however, friends and loved ones of cancer patients are at a loss for how to respond when someone close to them is diagnosed with cancer.
“Often they feel just as thrown into this new reality as the woman herself and are not sure what to do next,” said Adina Fleischmann, chief services officer for Sharsheret, the national Jewish breast cancer and ovarian cancer organization.
This is especially the case for young people who might never have had a family member or friend diagnosed with cancer before.
Fleischmann — whose organization offers extensive resources for cancer patients, ranging from emotional support, mental health counseling and education to financial subsidies for women and their families facing breast and ovarian cancer — has some guidance for what to say, how to reach out and what kind of help might be appropriate to provide in the face of a friend or family member’s cancer diagnosis.
It’s all about providing chizuk – Hebrew for strength – to the person facing cancer.
1. Establish the “Kvetching Order”
The “Kvetching Order,” based on a concept called the Ring Theory developed by clinical psychologist Susan Silk, dictates that those close to someone struggling with a cancer diagnosis offer only support to the cancer patient, and any kvetching about their own stress outward.
Thus, the person with cancer is at the center of a circle surrounded by a ring of her or his most intimate friends and loved ones. More distant concentric rings include other friends, acquaintances, more distant family and community members.
Colloquially known as “comfort in, dump out,” the Kvetching Order establishes a flow of support directed toward the person facing cancer.
2. Be clear and specific with offers of help
Support can look and feel different to different people facing cancer; each person’s needs and life circumstances are unique. When younger women are diagnosed with cancer — as often is the case with ovarian or breast cancers, where 50% of new diagnoses are in women under age 63 — patients often need extra help managing their responsibilities as parents and/or career professionals.
“Let the woman guide the journey,” Fleischmann says of the cancer patient. “Follow her lead.”
Sharsheret suggests offering concrete, practical assistance, such as offering to take the patient’s child to after-school activities or helping with homework. Maybe offer to come over to help clean the house, do laundry, or pick up groceries and make dinner for the family.
“But give the woman the feeling of control,” Fleischmann said. “Let her be in control of your support.”
Thus, a concrete suggestion like, “Can I bring you pizza for dinner on Wednesday?” is better than a vague offer of “What can I do to help?”
3. Check in often but don’t expect a response
By all means reach out to the person facing cancer. But if they don’t respond to your phone calls, emails or texts, don’t be put off.
“Sometimes the woman may not have the time or energy to respond,” Fleischmann said. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t continue reaching out. “She will appreciate knowing that you’re thinking of her.”
Polakoff found small gestures particularly meaningful.
“Little things meant a lot,” she said. “Like just a note that said, ‘I’m thinking of you. Have a good Shabbos.’”
4. Leave cancer out of it sometimes and just be with them
Kristen Harvey, who at 23 was faced with an ovarian cancer diagnosis for the second time, said it was important to have friends around her with whom she could talk about the future.
“Just being there was the best thing,” said Harvey, who recently graduated from college and lives in Michigan. “We didn’t need to do anything. I appreciated when people came over and we just hung out and watched a movie.”
Alexis Wilson, a teacher in Jupiter, Florida, said her friendships were essential during her breast cancer treatment. Before starting chemotherapy, her friends threw her a big party to which everyone showed up in different-colored wigs and decorated her yard with signs.
“My friends played a big role,” said Wilson, 39. “I felt like I wasn’t alone.”
5. Continue your support throughout someone’s cancer journey
For some women, “maintenance treatment” can last for many years beyond the active treatments of chemotherapy, radiation or surgery. Women living with metastatic breast cancer, for example, usually continue treatment throughout their lives.
Fleischmann recommends checking in with a woman along every step of her cancer journey: not just the period of active treatment, but also during maintenance treatment, survivorship, and if she is living with metastatic or advanced cancer.
“It’s nice to know my friends and family continued to reach out once I was done with treatment,” Harvey said. “Back to normal doesn’t mean life is ever normal.”
There are often heightened emotional needs around anniversaries of certain cancer diagnoses or treatment dates, Fleischmann said, so marking these dates could be important.
6. Make sure you have your own support system
If you’re particularly close to the person with cancer, you may experience feelings of being overwhelmed yourself. It’s important to take care of your own emotional well-being and not dismiss it in the face of someone else’s more pressing illness.
“As a caregiver, you can be very easily drained without your own coping mechanisms,” Fleischmann said.
Make sure to take care of yourself physically and emotionally so that you have the capacity to attend to your friend or loved one’s needs.
7. Talk to your healthcare provider and safeguard your own health
Even while supporting a loved one or friend with breast or ovarian cancer, it’s important to safeguard your own health.
The BRCA genetic mutation that causes breast cancer and ovarian cancer is much more common among Ashkenazi Jewish women than in the general U.S. population. About 1 in 40 Ashkenazi Jewish women and men carry the mutation, compared to 1 in 400 in the general population. Ashkenazi Jewish men are also at elevated risk for melanoma and prostate and pancreatic cancer.
“Talk to your healthcare provider,” Fleischmann said. “Those whose family members are facing hereditary breast and ovarian cancer should speak with their doctor or genetic counselor to see how this may affect them, too, and learn about appropriate testing and precautions.”
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The post 7 ways to offer support and Jewish strength to friends or loved ones facing cancer appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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A Historic Moment, and the Covenant Ahead
A general view shows the plenum at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
Over the last few weeks, something truly historic happened in Israel, and many may have missed it.
It had nothing to do with Iran or coalition politics. Instead, it touched the heart of the most sacred contract the Jewish state makes with its citizens: how it treats the families of those who gave their lives for its existence.
The Knesset has passed a series of long overdue legislative amendments that together mark the most significant expansion of support for bereaved IDF families in decades.
One of these reforms ends a painful injustice toward IDF widows and widowers. Survivor pensions will no longer be revoked upon remarriage or reduced through arbitrary caps and exclusions that punished bereaved spouses for trying to rebuild their lives.
The financial impact will be significant, and for many families, life changing. But the moral statement is even greater. Israel has affirmed that love, partnership, and hope should never come at the cost of security for those left behind.
To grasp the weight of this moment, we must look back more than fifty years, to the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War. Thousands of young widows navigated loss in a traumatized nation.
The widow of a fallen soldier was treated with reverence. The actual widow was not.
Many were discouraged, implicitly and explicitly, from remarrying or moving forward. Too often, widows were forced to choose between emotional healing and economic survival.
That injustice helped give rise to the IDF Widows and Orphans Organization, created to ensure that bereaved families would not be forgotten once war faded from public view.
Today, Israel faces such a moment again. Since October 7, more than 900 service members have been killed, leaving over 350 new widows and nearly 900 children, 250 of them under the age of five.
This new legislative package represents a break from the past. It signals that Israel will not ask this generation to carry grief quietly, or to sacrifice a second time in order to survive.
As if this were not historic enough, a second legislative reform passed alongside it is even more financially significant than the remarriage provision alone. This legislation expands not only moral recognition, but the actual material support that bereaved families will receive for decades. Adult orphans are formally recognized for the first time well into adulthood, unlocking monthly payments across age brackets that were previously invisible in law. Widows receive compensation reflecting real loss of earning capacity rather than symbolic recognition. Housing grants are expanded and decoupled from outdated marital conditions. Education, rehabilitation, fertility treatment, childcare, and emotional support are addressed as integrated needs rather than fragmented entitlements.
This is not incremental policy tinkering. It is a billion-shekel commitment that will translate into far more direct aid, far more stability, and far more dignity for thousands of families whose lives were irreversibly altered in service of the country. It corrects injustices that accumulated quietly over generations, often borne by adult orphans who were expected to stand on their own simply because time had passed.
And yet, even as we recognize the significance of this moment, we must acknowledge what remains unfinished. Significant groups, including adult orphans from earlier wars, still stand outside formal frameworks of support. Their loss did not change. Only the calendar did.
History is not only made on battlefields or in war rooms. Sometimes it is made quietly, in committee hearings and plenary votes, when a nation decides what it owes to those who paid the highest price.
Last week, Israel made history, not only by passing laws, but by reaffirming its covenant with the families of the fallen. Now it must complete that covenant, until no widow, no widower, and no orphan is ever left behind.
The author is the Executive Director of IDF Widows and Orphans USA.
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UpScrolled: The New Social Media App for Haters and Antisemites
Henri Philipe Pétain meeting Nazi Germany Chancellor in Montoire, just months after signing an armistice agreement that surrendered more than half of France’s territory to the Nazis. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
There’s a new app on the market that’s promising users a social media experience like none other: a user experience that doesn’t include shadow bans, censorship, or deceptive algorithms. A social media app where you can feel free to say what you want without fear on a litany of topics.
So, naturally, it has become a cesspool of antisemitism, anti-Zionism, racism, and conspiracy theories.
This new app is called “UpScrolled” and became one of the top downloaded apps in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia in the last week of January 2026.
Let’s take an in-depth look at the origins of UpScrolled, what it claims to do, and its development since becoming one of the fastest-growing social media platforms of 2026.
What is UpScrolled?
UpScrolled is the brainchild of Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian developer Issam Hijazi, who has a background in working for top tech companies.
According to Hijazi, he had the idea to develop a new social media app after allegedly noticing that certain pro-Palestinian posts were being shadow-banned and censored on social media.
Two of UpScrolled’s key partners are Tech For Palestine and Watermelon Pictures, organizations that are at the forefront of crafting the pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel narrative online.
Tech For Palestine was one of the groups associated with the mass editing of Israel-related entries on Wikipedia, spreading misinformation and passing it off as established fact. Watermelon Pictures is a film production and distribution company that focuses on spreading Palestinian-related content online and in theaters. It has been involved in such films as The Voice of Hind Rajab, All That’s Left of You, and Palestine 36.
Oscar-nominated The Voice of Hind Rajab uses real audio from a child’s final pleas — raw, devastating truth.
But it dramatizes the rest, blurring fact and fiction, and leaving out context. Viewers stop watching a story, and believe they’re seeing the truth. Moral judgments are… pic.twitter.com/udzCbxy6vA
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) January 25, 2026
UpScrolled was launched in June 2025 but only really took off in January 2026, largely thanks to the acquisition of a majority stake in the TikTok video app by an American venture.
Some users became annoyed with TikTok due to lags and other issues that developed soon after the ownership change, while others alleged that the word “Epstein” was being erased from direct messages, alleging a possible censorship issue with the app’s new owners.
Anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian activists noted that one of TikTok’s new major stakeholders was Larry Ellison, a pro-Israel businessman, and claimed that he would clamp down on pro-Palestinian speech on the app.
The combination of technical issues, claims about censorship, and baseless allegations of TikTok silencing pro-Palestinian voices led to the rise of social media users downloading UpScrolled. Its rapid growth was a result of the pro-Palestinian nature of the app’s development as well as the attractiveness of what it claims to stand for: No censorship and no outside interests influencing what users see on the app.
All of the worst people you know are flocking to the new anti-American propaganda platform UpScrolled.
Odds it turns into a psychosis-inducing echo chamber for terror-supporting lunatics seem pretty high. https://t.co/xVfpTL2Nhb pic.twitter.com/B3XWQoTLnF
— Israel War Room (@IsraelWarRoom) January 26, 2026
What Issam Hijazi and fans of the new app claim sets UpScrolled apart from other social media platforms is no censorship, no shadow banning (users don’t see what you post), no billionaires dictating what you see, and no deceptive algorithms.
Sounds like a libertarian’s dream, where you can say the craziest things you want with no consequences on the platform.
Of course, there’s more than meets the eye. Behind the claim of “no censorship” lies a list of items that are not allowed on the app. This includes such no-brainers as child exploitation, violence, sexual content, and self-harm.
Even a “free speech” app needs some parameters in order not to turn into a den of darkness and illegality.
But here’s where things get interesting.
UpScrolled was created as a pro-Palestinian alternative to traditional social media platforms. Many of its most vocal supporters are pro-Palestinian activists who see the app as a means of airing their anti-Israel views, some of which are downright supportive of terror groups and anti-Israel violence.
What happens when the “free speech” app being touted by the anti-Israel online community as a grand marketplace for like-minded individuals has to face its own rules and regulations?
It’s one thing to claim that there are certain regulations on the site. It’s another thing to actually enforce them.
— UpScrolled (@realUpScrolled) January 29, 2026
UpScrolled’s Platforming of Hate
Given the app’s selling points, it is no wonder that in the one week that it has topped the charts for app downloads, UpScrolled has become a veritable free-for-all of anti-Israel and antisemitic posts.
Some of these posts celebrate Hamas and its slaughter of October 7, 2023, a direct contravention of the regulation that forbids support for violent and terrorist groups.
Other posts compare Israel to the Nazis, claim that Israel controls the United States government, and justify violence against Israelis.
It’s not only UpScrolled’s users that are anti-Israel and deny the Jewish State’s right to exist — the app, itself, refuses to let you identify your geographic location as Israel, only giving you the option of “Occupied territories of Palestine.”
Alongside the usual anti-Israel rhetoric that you can (unfortunately) find on most social media apps, UpScrolled has seen a deluge of antisemitic, racist, and neo-Nazi posts.
These include vile caricatures of Jewish people, posts celebrating Adolf Hitler, Holocaust denial, and posts blaming Jews and African-Americans for the ills of society.
Screenshot
While the app’s developers claim that they are intent on removing content that “clearly violates our guidelines,” it appears that they are in no rush to tackle the whirlwind of Hamas support and antisemitic content that has enveloped UpScrolled.
At the moment, UpScrolled is growing its user base. While it seems that mainstream organizations and personalities have yet to open accounts (aside from a few notable exceptions, such as a number of European sports teams), the usual suspects have fled there.
Currently, the usership of UpScrolled seems to be largely made up of anti-Israel activists, advocates for far-left politics, a smattering of normal social media users (foodies, travelogues, etc), and bots.
If more non-political users join the app, then perhaps the platform’s proliferating hate will be diluted. However, as it currently stands, UpScrolled has become a den of hatred and vulgarity. If it continues this way, it will ultimately have a limited user base, serving as an echo chamber for those who are okay with whitewashing Hamas, Nazi symbols, and blaming all of society’s problems on racial and religious minorities.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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Tucker Carlson to interview Mike Huckabee, U.S. Ambassador to Israel
(JTA) — Right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson and Mike Huckabee, the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, said they will conduct an interview after Carlson published a video from the Middle East that included harsh criticism of Huckabee.
The planned sit-down, hashed out over social media, comes as Carlson has troubled the Jewish world and fractured the conservative movement by using his influential podcast to increasingly entertain antisemites and conspiracy theories about Israel. He has reserved his particular ire for “Christian Zionists,” of which Huckabee, a Baptist minister who aligns himself with the pro-Israel hard right, is a leading figurehead.
“Instead of talking ABOUT me, why don’t you come talk TO me?” the ambassador, and Carlson’s former Fox News colleague, wrote on X early Thursday in response to a Carlson video filmed in Israel and Jordan that purports to reveal how Israel treats Christians and declares that “Huckabee fails Jerusalem’s Christians.”
Huckabee added, “You seem to be generating a lot of heat about the Middle East. Why be afraid of the light?”
When Carlson agreed to an interview an hour later (“I’d love to”), Huckabee responded, “Look forward to the conversation[.]”
Huckabee, a key evangelical Trump ally and stalwart Israel backer, is reaching out to Carlson at a notable moment. Carlson has recently emerged both as the right’s harshest Israel critic and as the source of its larger divide over antisemitism, particularly since his friendly interview last fall with avowed white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
Many conservative leaders, including Sen. Ted Cruz (who’s faced harsh grilling from Carlson over his own support for Israel) and Orthodox Jewish pundit Ben Shapiro, have called on the GOP to distance itself from Carlson. Yet he maintains good relationships with President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, and has sway over right-wing powerbrokers such as the Heritage Foundation and Turning Point USA. He has also forged close ties with Qatar.
Carlson’s latest video, framed around the treatment of Christians in Israel, calls for American Christians — long a key pro-Israel constituency — to stop supporting Israel. He also accuses Huckabee of ignoring such concerns.
“Why not go ahead and talk to Christians and find out their side of the story?” Carlson muses. “Why aren’t American Christian leaders like Mike Huckabee or Ted Cruz, people who invoke the Christian Bible to justify what they’re doing, why haven’t they done this?”
Huckabee has in fact spoken out against what he says is persecution of Christians in Israel since his appointment.
Carlson then interviews the Anglican archbishop of Jerusalem, who suggests that Christian Zionism is “a trap” for Jews “because they’re all supposed to convert to Christianity or die.” Much of Carlson’s report focuses on the treatment of Palestinian Christians by Israelis, including settlers who have raided Christian villages in the occupied West Bank. He also mentions Israeli military strikes on Christian holy sites and a Christian hospital in Gaza. (Palestinian Christians remain a minority in the heavily Muslim territories, and the brunt of Israeli attacks have fallen on Muslim residents and sites.)
“It’s a story of Christians being oppressed in Jerusalem by a government that American Christians pay for,” Carlson says. His report is heavily sympathetic to Jordan, where he claims Christians live more freely than in Israel.
If the interview goes through, Huckabee would be the first sitting member of the Trump administration to appear on Carlson’s show since the controversy over his Fuentes interview. He has visited the White House multiple times so far this year.
The post Tucker Carlson to interview Mike Huckabee, U.S. Ambassador to Israel appeared first on The Forward.