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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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Drunk with power, Donald Trump follows the dictates of Athenian commanders — and a certain Jewish philosopher
The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.
This phrase has been invoked by political pundits and leaders, including the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, over the past few days as the world was plunged into Donald Trump’s fever dream of the conquest of Greenland. Yet what they neglected to mention is the quotation’s source and context in which it was uttered.
But both are crucial if we are to fully appreciate the troubling relevance of the phrase and the somber light the German-Jewish thinker Leo Strauss cast on it.
The phrase first crops up in the History of the Peloponnesian War, the ancient Athenian historian Thucydides’ account of one of the most consequential events in the history of the West. In the midst of their war against Sparta, an Athenian fleet lands on the small island of Melos, which they have been ordered to annex or annihilate. The dialogue that follows is entirely the creation of Thucydides, who strips away what he believed were the pleasant fictions we tell to blind ourselves to the reality of human nature.
Despite the Melian delegation’s appeals, the Athenian commanders are unmoved. “Nature always compels men to rule over anyone they can control,” they tell the Melians.“We did not make this law…but we will take it as we found it and leave it to posterity forever, because we know that you would do the same if you had our power as would anyone else.”
Yet the Athenians are tragically blind to the corollary: Human beings will always resist and rebel against those who try to invade them. When the Melians refused to submit, the Athenians were as good as their word; upon breaching the city walls, they slaughtered the men and sold the women and children into slavery. Shortly later, full of their conviction that might makes right, the Athenians decide to invade Sicily — an act of hubris which leads to a catastrophic defeat and a fate like the one they meted out to the Melians.
These world-altering events bring us to Leo Strauss, the man who Harold Bloom once described as a “political philosopher and Hebraic sage.” Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in 1899, by the 1930’s Strauss had won the reputation as a brilliant and not always orthodox political theorist. With the rise of Nazism, Bloom had the means and foresight to quit his native country in 1937. He became something of an itinerant intellectual, finding a series of academic appointments at Columbia University, University of Chicago, and the New School while writing many of his best-known books, including Natural Right and History and Thoughts on Machiavelli.
Over time, Strauss also became known as the éminence grise of neo-conservatism, the hawkish postwar ideology that viewed foreign policy through the harsh lens of political realism and has been credited with influencing the Bush Administration’s cataclysmic decision to invade Iraq. For his critics, it hardly helped that Strauss was influenced by the writings of the Nazi-adjacent and antisemitic legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who favored strong executive authority and believed that the politics of a nation and policies of the state must respond to the distinction between friend and enemy.
An advocate of “reading between the lines,” Strauss basically sets the traditional interpretation of Thucydides and the significance of the Melian dialogue on its head. Most students of Thucydides believe he sides with Pericles, the Athenian leader who, in his famous funeral oration, declares his city as the school for all of Greece. And why not? Thanks to its openness to ideas and debate, Athens excelled in the arts and sciences. No less important, thanks to its sense of civic responsibility, the city’s citizen army excelled in military prowess and power.
That this shining example of democracy should, at the end of a two-decade war, have been defeated and occupied by brutish if not barbaric Sparta marks one of history’s great tragedies. And yet, Strauss suggests we misunderstand the nature of the tragedy. The Periclean vision is inspiring, he allows, but it was also the reason why Athens lost the war. Strauss claims that Thucydides knew this as well. Just like his contemporary Plato, the ancient historian instead thought the best of all models was the closed society of Sparta rather than the open society of Athens.
By “best,” what Strauss meant is that cities like Sparta are best positioned to maintain the endurance and stability of the state and those who look to it for their security. In turn, this requires such states to embrace what he called the “Athenian thesis” which boils down to the claim made by the Athenian commander at Melos: The strong, indifferent to justice or moderation, do what they can while the weak suffer what is meted out to them. After all, Athens was itself an expanding empire that absorbed other cities into its alliance whether they wished to join or not.
Of course, we have no idea what Strauss would have thought about Donald Trump’s efforts to slap tariffs on islands inhabited only by penguins and annex other islands inhabited by people who have made clear they have no desire to become American. But I suspect that Strauss would remind us that the relentless pursuit of power and property is not unique to narcissistic sociopaths. Instead, states are almost always and necessarily driven by the will to expand. And therein lies the true tragedy.
The post Drunk with power, Donald Trump follows the dictates of Athenian commanders — and a certain Jewish philosopher appeared first on The Forward.
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120th anniversary of the Forverts advice column “Bintel Brief”
מזל־טובֿ! דעם 20סטן יאַנואַר 2026 איז געוואָרן 120 יאָר זינט דער גרינדונג פֿון „אַ בינטל בריוו“ — דער עצות־רובריק פֿונעם פֿאָרווערטס. די רובריק איז פֿאַרלייגט געוואָרן פֿונעם גרינדער און לאַנגיאָריקן שעף־רעדאַקטאָר אַב קאַהאַן אין 1906.
כּדי אָפּצומערקן דעם יום־טובֿ ברענגען מיר אײַך צוויי זאַכן:
• ערשטנס, אַן אַרטיקל וועגן אַ טשיקאַווען בריוו וואָס איז אָנגעקומען אין דער פֿאָרווערטס־רעדאַקציע אין יאַנואַר 1949, פֿון אַ לייענער וועמעס זון האָט חתונה געהאַט מיט אַ קריסטלעכער פֿרוי
• צווייטנס, אַ פֿאָרווערטס־ווידעאָ אויף ייִדיש וועגן דער געשיכטע פֿון „אַ בינטל בריוו“, מיטן געוועזענעם פֿאָרווערטס־רעדאַקטאָר באָריס סאַנדלער און דער פֿאָרווערטס־אַרכיוויסטקע חנה פּאָלאַק.
The post 120th anniversary of the Forverts advice column “Bintel Brief” appeared first on The Forward.
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Report: Khamenei Moved to Underground Bunker in Tehran
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks in a televised message, after the ceasefire between Iran and Israel, in Tehran, Iran, June 26, 2025. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
i24 News – Amid tense expectation of US strike on key assets of the Islamic regime, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was moved into a special underground bunker in Tehran, the Iran International website reported on Saturday.
The report further added that the supreme leader’s third son Masoud Khamenei has taken over day-to-day management of the leader’s office, functioning as the de facto main channel for coordination vis-à-vis the executive branches of the government and the security forces.
The report describes Khamenei’s hideout as a “fortified site with interconnected tunnels.”
On Thursday US President Donald Trump said that a “massive” naval force was heading toward Iran.
“We have a lot of ships going that direction just in case. We have a big flotilla going in that direction. And we’ll see what happens,” Trump told reporters.
“We have an armada. We have a massive fleet heading in that direction, and maybe we won’t have to use it. We’ll see,” Trump added.
The USS Abraham Lincoln, along with three destroyers, was spotted making its way to the Middle East from Asia, according to ship-tracking data.