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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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He was a privileged Jewish kid from NYC’s Upper East Side. Donald Trump was his greatest invention.
American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump
By Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark
Scribner, $32, 528 pages
By the beginning of the new millennium, Roy Cohn, the red-baiting scourge of the McCarthy hearings, lived largely in the pages of U.S. history books, trotted out on occasion to illustrate how America always manages to overcome its worst nativist impulses. But just in case someone never knew or had forgotten about Cohn’s malign influence on U.S. politics, Tony Kushner brought him back as a villain in his brilliant drama of the early 1990s, Angels in America.
Then, in 2016, Donald Trump was elected president and suddenly, Cohn was breaking news again. The very next year, when Trump was furious at then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from an investigation into whether Russia meddled with the election, the president cried out to his advisers, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”
Now, as if in answer to that question, Kai Bird has written a magisterial biography of the notorious lawyer and Trump whisperer that is indispensable reading for anyone who wants to understand the current political moment. Bird, the co-author of American Prometheus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert J. Oppenheimer and inspiration for the Oscar-winning movie, began it in 2022, a couple years before Trump’s re-election. He collaborated with his wife, Susan Goldmark, who did the research for this riveting account of the unseemly, outrageous life of the hustler and con man about whom Trump once said, “If you need somebody to get vicious, hire Roy Cohn.”
Though Cohn has been long gone from public life — he died of AIDS at age 59 in 1986, insisting to the very end that he had succumbed to liver cancer — Bird demonstrates how he practically invented the dark political arts of resentment and division adopted by his former client, protégé and future president of the U.S.
Indeed, over the recent 4th of July weekend — decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union — Trump used Cohn’s divisive, inflammatory rhetoric in back-to-back speeches, including one at Mount Rushmore, branding his political opponents as evil, godless communists.
Bird walks us through Cohn’s life decade by decade. He grew up as an only child in a wealthy Jewish family on the Upper East Side and attended elite private schools, where his boyhood friends included Si Newhouse Jr., heir to the Condé Nast media empire, Gene Pope Jr., who would go on to found the National Enquirer, and, improbably, Al Lowenstein, later a well-known liberal Democratic activist and politician.
After Cohn graduated from Columbia Law School, his father, a judge, pulled strings to get him a job in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, where he made a name for himself as the boy prosecutor who sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair in 1953 for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets. His tactics were highly irregular, including private meetings with the trial judge.
Not long after that, he went to work as chief counsel to Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, using his position to force U.S.-funded libraries abroad to purge 30,000 books on the flimsy pretext that the authors were communists or Soviet sympathizers. He was also a central figure in the so-called Lavender Scare, when hundreds of federal employees thought to be gay lost their jobs because they were deemed a security risk.
By the 1960s, Cohn was back in New York, hanging out at the Stork Club and 21, squiring Barbara Walters around town, and representing mobsters though still living at home with his mother at 1165 Park Avenue. Over the next decade he would be indicted three times by U.S. Attorney Robert Morgenthau Jr. for bribery, perjury, extortion and other white-collar crimes. In each case, he managed to beat the rap though months before his death he was finally disbarred for unethical conduct.
After Cohn’s mother died in 1967, he moved into a stately townhouse on East 68th Street, where he established his law practice and stopped the pretense of dating women though he never publicly came out as gay. Then, in 1973, Cohn met his most consequential client. At the time, Trump was the 27-year-old son of a Queens real estate mogul trying to break into the Manhattan market and living in a rent-controlled studio on East 75th Street with a view of a water tank on an adjacent building.
Cohn advised the family on how to fight a Justice Department lawsuit accusing the real estate company of violating the Fair Housing Act by refusing to rent to Black tenants. Over the course of the litigation, Cohn taught Trump his signature moves: Keep your name in the paper. Never settle. Countersue. Claim victory. Don’t pay the bills.
Cohn also advised Trump on his first major real estate deal in Manhattan — buying the dilapidated Commodore Hotel on East 42nd Street, next to Grand Central Terminal. To get the deal done, Cohn worked his extensive connections to New York’s first Jewish mayor, Abraham Beame, a player in Democratic machine politics and an old friend of Cohn’s father.
For more than a decade, Trump continued to model himself after his mentor, adopting his penchant for personalized license plates and his snarling, scowling demeanor. Bird argues that in the decades since Cohn died, the McCarthyism of the 1950s has morphed into a nativist, America Firster politics that transformed the Republican Party into one of resentments against the old establishment, multiculturalism, globalization and liberal culture — in other words, the MAGA movement of today.
Cohn’s “values, his unethical behavior, and his political mindset have survived and replaced the values of the establishment he so resented,” Bird writes. “Perhaps his life is proof of the ability of one individual to change the arc of history. Certainly, he gave us the narcissistic politics of Donald Trump.”
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Trump wants to remake Washington — Hitler tried to do the same to Berlin
“It was natural that I also followed my passion for architecture. My faith increased that after many years my dreams would become reality. I was firmly convinced that I would win fame as a builder.”
–Adolf Hitler
“I own buildings. I’m a builder; I know how to build. Nobody can build like I can build.”
–Donald Trump
Adolf Hitler personally drew up architectural plans to remake Berlin into a 1,000-year monument to himself with a three-mile-long “Avenue of Splendors,” on one end an Arch of Triumph that would dwarf the Paris original, and on the other, the domed Hall of the People, which would have been the largest enclosed structure in the world.
Hitler’s grandiose remodeling schemes were suspended in 1943, in order to redirect resources to the war he had begun.
Like Hitler, Donald Trump is also busy designing and creating monuments to himself, including an arch even larger than the one Hitler had planned for Berlin. Unlike Hitler, Trump is proceeding at a fevered pace on completing his legacy projects despite the soaring costs of a war he began.
History is replete with monarchs, emperors, pharaohs and tyrants who sought to immortalize themselves with monuments. In modern times, what sets Trump and Hitler apart is their decision to personally draw up a plan to entirely change the look of a capital city to project their powers.
Hitler began sketching his plans to remake Berlin in the 1920s, years before he came to power. In his postwar book Inside the Third Reich, Hitler architect Albert Speer recalled Hitler showing him two sketches the Nazi leader had already made of his own concept, hoping to recruit the architect to the project. In 1937, the Hitler tasked Speer with making it happen.
Speer started by making a model of the redesigned city, to be renamed Germania. In his book, Speer wrote of Hitler’s glee while inspecting the scaled model.
“He bent down, almost kneeling, his eye an inch or so above the level of the model, in order to have the right perspective, and while looking he spoke with unusual vivacity. These were the rare times when he relinquished his usual stiffness. In no other situation did I see him so lively, so spontaneous, so relaxed,” Speer wrote.
Hitler admired the imperial architectural styles of Rome, Vienna and Paris, but came up with designs for Berlin that were meant to surpass those cities not in elegance, but in expressions of Teutonic power.
The Germania model designed by Speer looks like an elaborate Wagnerian stage set: Visitors disembarking from a new train station would immediately see the 380-foot-tall Arch of Triumph, and as they passed beneath they would follow a wide boulevard lined with about a dozen monumental ministry buildings made of hand-hewn stone, a Soldiers’ Hall with a crypt for the tombs of German field marshals, and, at the terminus of the avenue, the monstrous centerpiece of the whole project — the domed Hall of the People, with enough space to hold 150,000 people.
“He wanted the biggest of everything to glorify his works and magnify his pride,” Speer wrote.
The New Reich Chancellery went up, and some other pieces of Germania were completed. But as Hitler’s regime focused on building concentration camps and death camps, and German invasion forces spread across Europe and the Soviet Union, Hitler had to divert resources to pay for his war crimes.
The Reich suspended work on Germania in 1943. Hitler’s original idea was to complete the transformation in 1950, creating Germania as a new Rome, capital of a vanquished continent. But when the Soviet army entered Berlin, the city had been reduced to ruins. Hitler’s Germania fantasy came to a bloody end on April 30, 1945 when he put a bullet in his head inside the Führerbunker.
Like Hitler, Donald Trump seems to favor classical architectural styles for public buildings, although his love of gaudy glitter – on display inside the White House and at Trump’s own properties — contrasts with Hitler’s preference for a Teutonic austereness.
A few days ago Trump gave the White House press pool a tour of work that he has directed to be done on and around the White House. It reminded me of Speer’s description of Hitler’s glee while inspecting Speer’s model of Germania.
“I’m fixing the country. We’re fixing the White House too. One thing I know how to do is build,” said Trump, who spoke of having columns of the White House repaired, its exterior cleaned, of work on his ballroom and the “military complex” that would be built beneath it. He staged the dog-and-pony show to show off a helipad that was under construction.
“It’s ridiculous the way this place was taken care of. Nobody, including presidents, they didn’t see it. But I see it because I was very good at real estate, like maybe the best in a lot of ways,” said the man who went through multiple bankruptcies and has a history of failed business ventures: Trump University, Trump Steaks, and Trump’s airline, to name only a subset of available examples.
Despite Trump’s boasts, his vanity projects have hit some rough patches. There’s the reflecting pool debacle, a court ruling that his name had to come off the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Some Senate Republicans tried to stop him from spending taxpayer money on his garish ballroom.
But because of a Supreme Court ruling, it looks like the ballroom will go up after all. And Trump is not about to abandon other legacy projects – like his Triumphal Arch, and a National Garden of American Heroes.
Trump’s powers are cracking faster than he can build these monuments to himself. His approval ratings are abysmal. Global respect for America is tanking. Allies who have tried to mollify him are beginning to defy him. Iran has outsmarted him. Former MAGA loyalists like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson have abandoned him. Trump is increasingly looking like an empty shell – a man who has chosen building narcissistic monuments, and corruptly enriching himself and his family, over paying heed to Americans who are suffering because of his self-aggrandizing rule.
Economist Paul Krugman just released a video titled Der Untergang, and subtitled “How badly will Trump punish America?” Der Untergang, German for “downfall,” is the title of a 2004 movie about Hitler’s last days in the Führerbunker. Krugman says that Trump’s obsession with his vanity projects is an indication that Trump knows his powers are rapidly vanishing, and that Trump is becoming perilously desperate.
“In many ways he is behaving like somebody who knows that his days of supreme power are about to end,” Krugman said.
Krugman argues that Trump is showing a deranged proclivity to tear things down rather than preserve them, as evidenced by his demolition of the beloved East Wing. And now Trump is threatening to raze the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, simply because he can’t get his name on it.
History has shown how perilous things can become when a despot finds himself backed into a corner. As we approach the mid-term elections, we should all worry about the wreckage Trump is capable of wreaking while watching his powers vanish. Trump’s downfall, whenever and however it may come, must not also be America’s.
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John Galliano bows out of Met exhibition as backlash over antisemitism mounts
(JTA) — John Galliano withdrew from a planned exhibition of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in response to a rapidly escalating controversy over the museum’s decision to honor the fashion designer despite his history of antisemitic and racist remarks.
Galliano said Monday that, after discussions with the Met and others involved in the exhibition, he had decided that it was best for the show not to take place “at this time.” He said he remained accountable for the pain caused by his past words, particularly to Jews and Asians, and recognized that an exhibition honoring his work could be painful for some. The Met said it agreed with his decision.
The reversal came less than a month after the Met announced that Galliano would be the subject of its spring 2027 Costume Institute exhibition, a rare honor that would have made him only the third living designer to receive a solo show there. The exhibition was to open in conjunction with the Met Gala, one of New York’s biggest annual cultural and celebrity events.
Opposition to the exhibition appeared to mount steadily in recent weeks. Early public pushback came from Dana Thomas, Galliano’s biographer, who wrote in an Aug. 6 New York Times guest essay that the Met had made a serious error in choosing to honor him. The criticism then broadened, with Jewish leaders, museum donors and New York politicians publicly urging the museum to reconsider.
Those criticizing the exhibition were New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin, who called the decision deeply painful for Jewish New Yorkers. Prominent Met donor Alice Tisch described the planned exhibition as a “whitewash,” according to the Times.
The reversal is also a setback for Anna Wintour, Condé Nast’s chief content officer and the driving force behind the Met Gala. She had championed Galliano for decades and was among the Met figures most closely associated with bringing the exhibition to the museum.
The controversy was complicated by the fact that some prominent rabbis had actually met with Galliano before the exhibition was announced and had come away believing that his repentance was sincere, as JTA reported earlier this month.
Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said Galliano had shown the contrition necessary to earn his return to the fashion world. Rabbi Joshua Davidson of Congregation Emanu-El, a Reform synagogue in New York, likewise said he was convinced by Galliano’s statements of remorse and his efforts to educate himself about Judaism and the Holocaust. Neither rabbi endorsed the Met’s decision to honor Galliano, however. Rather, both told the museum that if it proceeded, it had a responsibility to make Galliano’s antisemitic conduct and the lessons of his repentance an explicit part of the exhibition.
That distinction was reflected in the Met’s original plans. Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s curator, said in announcing the exhibition that it would address Galliano’s antisemitic and anti-Asian conduct, as well as his firing from Dior, a hate speech conviction in France and his subsequent treatment for addiction and public acknowledgment of his actions.
Galliano, among the most celebrated designers in the world, was fired by Christian Dior in 2011 after a video surfaced showing him praising Hitler and making antisemitic remarks in a tirade in a Paris cafe, and directing an anti-Asian slur at the partner of a Jewish woman. A French court convicted him of making public insults based on race, religion and ethnicity.
After entering treatment for substance abuse, he embarked on a process of rehabilitation and eventually returned to the fashion industry. Abraham Foxman, then national director of the Anti-Defamation League, met privately with Galliano repeatedly; in 2013 the ADL said that Galliano had demonstrated “true contrition.”
After the initial announcement of the exhibition, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the ADL, noted that the organization had “long since accepted his apology,” but added that he understood “why some Jews may question the decision to include Galliano’s work in an exhibit given the massive spike in antisemitism in recent years.”
In a statement Monday, Greenblatt appeared to take a harder line in welcoming Galliano’s withdrawal.
“With antisemitism at crisis levels, the Met honoring John Galliano at this moment was misguided, and even Galliano ultimately recognized what the Met should have done from the start,” Greenblatt wrote on X. “This was the wrong move at the wrong moment. Timing matters.”
Galliano’s withdrawal leaves the Met without a planned spring 2027 Costume Institute exhibition. The museum said information about a replacement exhibition and the 2027 Met Gala will be announced later.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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