Uncategorized
Sophie is 85 and survived the Holocaust. Caroline is 29 and new to NYC. Here’s how they became fast friends.
(New York Jewish Week) – It’s a sunny Wednesday afternoon, and Sophie Turner Zaretsky has laid out a tray of fruit and cookies, eagerly awaiting her friend Caroline Crandell. When Crandell arrives at Zaretsky’s Upper West Side apartment, just a few minutes after their scheduled meeting time of 3 p.m., the two break into smiles and embrace.
The two women have been meeting every few weeks since the fall of 2022. Like any pair of friends, they discuss everything that’s going on in their lives and families, as well as current events and their favorite spots in the city. But unlike most friendships, there’s a 56-year age gap between the two: Zaretsky, a Holocaust survivor and retired radiation oncologist, is 85, while Crandell, a software engineer, is 29.
“We just talk,” Zaretsky told the New York Jewish Week as she poured tea for Crandell and a reporter. “Whatever comes into our head.”
“She knows all about my dating life,” Crandell added. “I get a lot of advice, which is helpful.”
The pair were matched through the “Caring Calls” initiative, a flagship program of the Wechsler Center for Modern Aging at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan on the Upper West Side. The program was created during the pandemic to help seniors combat isolation. It enlists some 130 volunteers to reach out to everyone over 70 who has attended any type of program or event at the JCC in recent years. Most of the check-ins happen over the phone: Volunteers call a few times a year to say hello and offer everything from tech support to grocery shopping assistance.
“We want to be there for our community as folks age,” Susan Lechter, the director of the Wechsler Center, told the New York Jewish Week. “No one should be lonely in this world. If we can make a difference in any way, we want to be there for our community.”
And some of these relationship blossom into something deeper. Seniors can request a “buddy” for regular phone calls; according to the Wechsler Center, there have been 140 “buddy” matches so far.
When Zaretsky first heard from Caring Calls last fall, she had a specific request: She wanted to be matched with a young person as a buddy. “I talk to old people and I’m tired of hearing about all the issues and problems with aging,” Zaretsky quipped. “I have my own issues; I don’t want to hear anybody else’s.”
Given that most of the Caring Calls volunteers are middle-aged or older adults, Lechter knew exactly whom to tap: Crandell, who was living by herself in a fifth-floor walkup on the Upper East Side, having arrived in New York via California during the Omicron wave of January 2022. In order to meet new friends, Crandell had enrolled in intramural soccer at the JCC, and she also had inquired about volunteer opportunities there.
“My family is very far away and I haven’t had any living grandparents for a long time. I didn’t know anyone when I moved here,” Crandell said, explaining her interest in the Caring Calls program. “I think it’s good to have different generations and different perspectives come together.”
Matched by Lechter, the pair first spoke in October of last year and they hit it off immediately. “I think we spoke for like an hour,” Crandell said, recalling how they bonded over their dislike of cooking and exercise. “By the end of the call we said to each other, ‘Let’s not do the call thing. Let’s meet up.’ I came over a few days later and we’ve been getting together every few weeks ever since.”
Turner Zaretsky and Crandell get together every few weeks at Turner Zaretsky’s Upper West Side apartment, pictured here on May 10, 2023. (Julia Gergely)
The particular afternoon of the New York Jewish Week’s visit, Crandell had brought over a new blend of tea to try. Over their beverages, the two women share lipstick and book recommendations, and swap stories about their childhoods — which were, not surprisingly, vastly different from one another’s.
Zaretsky, born Selma Schwarzwald in 1937, had grown up in hiding in Lvov, Poland; she and her mother posed as Catholics in order to avoid deportation to the Belzec killing center. She moved to England with her mother in 1948, when she was 10, and wasn’t told she was Jewish until she was a teenager.
“It was terrible,” she said of moving from Poland to England. “It’s very hard to be a refugee when you don’t know the language. You feel stupid. You don’t have the narrative. I didn’t have the narrative for England and I didn’t have the narrative for being Jewish.”
After attending medical school in England, Zaretsky moved to New York in 1963 for her medical residency at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, and found herself alone in a brand new city. In 1970, she married David Zaretsky.
Though the JCC initiative is the first time either Zaretsky or Crandell have participated in a formal matching program, Zaretsky has a history of “adopting” people who look like they might need it. A number of years ago at a dinner at the United Nations, which she attended in place of her son who often worked with the organization, Zaretsky was seated next to the ambassador from Malta. “He didn’t know people in New York, so being the Jewish mother that I am, I had to introduce him to everyone to make sure he could live a good life here,” she said. They’re still friends to this day, Zaretsky said, and she has been known to advise him on certain geopolitical issues when the General Assembly meets.
“I have found that young people nowadays are so educated and so aware, but they still need a little bit of TLC — at least this one does,” Zaretsky said, nodding towards Crandell. “But I do, too.”
Indeed, former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has described a “loneliness epidemic” that peaked, not surprisingly, at the height of the pandemic. Older adults, disproportionately women, have been especially vulnerable, although a Harvard studying 2021 found that older teens and young adults were the hardest hit by the social isolation brought on by the pandemic.
“I feel like in the society we live in right now, isolation and disjointed community is common,” Crandell said. “Everything’s online, every single person has been affected by technology and feeling pretty isolated, no matter what age. Any opportunity to meet people in person or just connect with someone goes a long way.”
This type of relationship is exactly what the program aims to achieve, said Lechter. “We were determined to create more intergenerational opportunities,” she said. “We’re hoping that it becomes more frequent.”
By the time Crandell needs to head to her soccer game, several hours have passed. “I come thinking I’m just stopping by, but it turns out we have hours of things we need to discuss,” Crandell told the New York Jewish Week. “I always lose track of time.”
Like any good Jewish mother, Zaretsky sends her off with a care package of snacks to take home and a plan for when they’ll meet up again — this coming Friday, for Shabbat dinner.
—
The post Sophie is 85 and survived the Holocaust. Caroline is 29 and new to NYC. Here’s how they became fast friends. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Robert Kraft’s new Super Bowl ad about antisemitism already feels dated
Not content with his team’s victories on the football field, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft has in recent years taken it upon himself to lease the most expensive airtime on American television.
The Pats may be out of the Super Bowl, but ads from Kraft’s Blue Square Alliance Against Antisemitism (formerly the Foundation to Combat Anti-Semitism) are very much in, and have been for a few years. The campaign has given us two previous Super Bowl spots: one in which Martin Luther King Jr.’s speechwriter Clarence B. Jones urged us to speak out against silence and, last year, as a nice counterpoint, one where Snoop Dogg and Tom Brady yelled at each other. These commercials, unlike ones that the Alliance aired outside of major sporting events, each had their weaknesses in messaging.
The first ad, which primarily spotlighted other hatreds, was perhaps too generic for an organization committed to fighting antisemitism, and its slogan, “stand up to Jewish hate,” left some viewers mystified. The second conveyed essentially nothing, reading as a sort of wan, FCC-vetted homage to a sequence in Do the Right Thing.
Enter the newest campaign, set in an American high school. A boy walks down the hall as classmates — one in a “how do you do fellow kids”-style backwards cap — knock into him. Others make indistinct comments as he walks by. As the boy pulls up to his locker to put in his knapsack, we see what his peers were snickering at: a Post-It note tagged to his bag that reads “DIRTY JEW.”
Did a wormhole to the 1950s just open up? Was this an outtake from The Fabelmans or that old Frank Sinatra PSA? This just could be not feel more disconnected from how antisemitism now operates in school hallways.
High school students, as countless watchdog groups can tell you, are far more creative and subtle now with their Jew hatred. And those more insidious strains are the ones we should be alerting people to.
Kids these days prefer edgelord remarks about cooking 6 million pizzas in five years and slurs like “Zio” and baby killer or they tell you to go to the gas chambers. They recycle memes about globalist control and an Aryan society called “Agartha.” At their most dunderheaded, they don’t scrawl “Dirty Jew” — though they sometimes say it — they go to that old standby: the swastika. In 2024, the ADL reported 860 incidents in K-12 schools, and though their metrics for antisemitism are at times controversial, 52% of instances involved a swastika. (If you’re a hater of a certain income, like Ye, you can even have swastikas advertised covertly during the Big Game; Kraft’s crew could have stuck it to him by including one on the sticky.)
I get why they did it like this — you want to make your point in 30 seconds. But if you follow instances of antisemitism in schools or online — and it’s kind of an occupational hazard for me — you know this is not how today’s animus is typically expressed. And that can have a kind of unfortunate ripple effect.
If this was meant for the kids, they will laugh at how alien and out-of-touch it seems. And with that, there’s a risk that antisemitism will seem like a manufactured problem.
What happens next in the commercial holds true to what we teach kids about being an “upstander,” rather than a bystander. Another student covers the offensive sticky note with a blue one, and then, like the legendary King of Denmark with his yellow star — or Van Jones with Kraft’s trademark blue square lapel pin — sticks a blue sticky on his own chest.
However noble the intentions of the ad may be, in a world of Groypers, this is bait. I can already anticipate the memes. I also find it doubtful that blue square pins, available on the campaign’s website and the icon behind Kraft’s organization’s rebrand, will become 2026’s hot Gen Z accessory, the new Labubus.
That the message misses the mark is disappointing because Kraft’s organization previously had some quite powerful non-Super Bowl ads, some of which have won awards. The strongest showed a boy and his father in a truck, with the dad confronting his son about a social media post where he said “Hitler was right.”
The dialogue is on-the-nose, but gets at a real phenomenon: Teens, even if raised right, can still be radicalized by the internet and emboldened by its anonymity. (As in the case of the alleged Jackson synagogue arsonist, we know that radicalization can happen fast.) “You got something you want to say, get out of the truck and say it to their faces” the dad tells his son, and the camera pulls focus to what’s outside their windshield: Jews leaving synagogue. And then, text, a solid statistic of a real phrase circulating on the internet: “‘Hitler was right’ was posted over 70,000 times last year.”
That ad still hits me in the gut, and serves as a bridge for two audiences: parents and their kids.
The Post-It ad doesn’t do that.
It tells reasonable older people what they already know: Overt, unambiguous antisemitism is bad. It tells kids that adults don’t get what they’re dealing with. It tells people on the cusp, or already fully immersed, in conspiracies of Jewish control that Jews have unlimited resources, and a limited understanding of the facts on the ground.
If Kraft is committed to throwing money at a very real problem, he should at least get his money’s worth.
The post Robert Kraft’s new Super Bowl ad about antisemitism already feels dated appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
South Carolina Republican Senate Candidate Floats Antisemitic Conspiracies in Effort to Boost Long-Shot Campaign
Paul Dans, candidate for US Senate, speaks during the Anderson County Republican Party Charlie Kirk Tribute at the Civic Center of Anderson, South Carolina, Sept. 15, 2025. Photo: USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
Paul Dans, a lawyer and Republican candidate for US Senate in South Carolina, has boosted antisemitic conspiracy theories online, suggesting that high-ranking Jews have imported drugs and implemented an extermination campaign against white people.
“The ELITES call us ‘goy cattle’ and sent OxyContin into our communities for a reason. EPSTEIN files confirm WHITE GENOCIDE and WHITE HATE is not a conspiracy but an operation in progress,” Dans posted on X on Monday.
Goy is a term for a gentile, a non-Jew.
Dans, who describes himself as an “America 1st warrior” and a counterweight to entrenched Washington, DC establishment interests, has portrayed himself as an ardent opponent of longstanding US foreign policy. He has been critical of what he calls America’s entanglement in “endless wars” in the Middle East and Ukraine.
”I’m America first and not Israel first, not Ukraine first. We always have to ask what is in the foreign policy interest of the United States citizen. How are we helping the people back home thrive and be safe?” Dans said during an October 2025 interview with South Carolina local news.
Notably, Dans is also a former director of the embattled Heritage Foundation and was the chief architect of Project 2025 — a sprawling political playbook which outlines how to overhaul the federal government to support a conservative policy agenda. The Heritage Foundation has found itself embroiled in mounting controversy in recent months after its president, Kevin Roberts, issued a passionate defense of antisemitic podcaster Tucker Carlson. Carlson had elicited backlash after hosting a chummy interview with the Holocaust-denying, anti-Jewish streamer Nick Fuentes.
Dans also appeared on “The Tucker Carlson Show” in November 2025, in which he and the podcaster criticized US Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) for his steadfast support for Israel, insinuating that Graham focuses more on uplifting Israel than the US.
Dans’ status as the mastermind of Project 2025 indicates that he likely has significant influence and reach within the Republican establishment.
Critics argue that Dans’ comments are part of a broader trend of long-shot political hopefuls using antisemitism to draw attention to their campaigns and galvanize fringe elements of the far right. James Fishback, a hedge fund manager who recently launched a campaign for the Republican nomination in the Florida gubernatorial race, has drawn significant attention by repeatedly invoked anti-Israel conspiracy theories.
Dans still remains a heavy underdog in the primary competition. However, some polls show that he’s gaining ground. An internal poll from the Dans campaign last fall showed the insurgent swelling from 9.2 percent in June 2025 to 22.1 percent in September among voters. Graham still holds a commanding lead with 46.3 percent of the vote, a slight decline from 49.5 percent during the same timeframe.
Uncategorized
Trump Demands $1 Billion From Harvard University Amid Dispute Over Campus Antisemitism
US President Donald Trump speaks to the press before boarding Marine One to depart for Quantico, Virginia, from the South Lawn at the White House in Washington, DC, US, Sept. 30, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ken Cedeno
US President Donald Trump has demanded that Harvard University pay $1 billion to settle the federal government’s claim that it failed to address campus antisemitism and governed the institution in accordance with far-left viewpoints.
“This should be a Criminal, not Civil event, and Harvard will have to live with the consequence of their wrongdoings. In any event, this case will continue until justice is served. Dr. Alan Garber, the President of Harvard, has done a terrible Job of rectifying a very bad situation for his institution, and, more importantly, America, itself,” Trump wrote in a post on the Truth Social media platform. “We are now seeking One Billion Dollars in damages, and want nothing further to do, into the future, with Harvard University.”
The Trump administration canceled some $2.26 billion in federal contracts and grants to Harvard in April, citing its alleged violation of the civil rights of Jewish students during a wave of antisemitic incidents to which, according to Jewish advocacy groups, the university failed to respond with sufficient disciplinary actions and other measures. Trump followed the move by proposing to reform Harvard, as well as all of higher education, based on ideas that date back to the advent of the Reagan Revolution — including the abolition of admissions policies which privilege minority and women applicants and the promotion viewpoint diversity, which aims to amplify conservative voices while attenuating the influence of far-left faculty and administrators.
Trump’s social media post on Tuesday contradicted an earlier report by the New York Times which said that the US president no longer expects Harvard to pay cash to terminate the dispute with his administration and restore the totality of its federal funding. Most of that money, according to The Harvard Crimson, was restored to the university by a federal court ruling in July, but Harvard, which is running its biggest budget deficit since the Covid-19 pandemic, is working to figure out a way to secure the release of the remainder without conceding to Trump’s demands.
“Why hasn’t the Fake News New York Times adjusted its phony article on the corruption and antisemitism which has taken place at Harvard,” Trump posted on Tuesday, criticizing the Times for what he said was a false representation of his position. “They never call for facts, or factchecks, because the Times is a corrupt, unprincipled, and pathetic vehicle of the left. They wrote only negatively about in the last Election, and I won in a landslide.”
Other universities have decided that settling with Trump is preferable to fighting him.
In July, Columbia University agreed to pay over $200 million to settle claims that it exposed Jewish students, faculty, and staff to antisemitic discrimination and harassment. US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said the details of the settlement enacted a “seismic shift in our nation’s fight to hold institutions that accept American taxpayer dollars accountable for antisemitic discrimination and harassment.”
Claiming a generational achievement for the conservative movement, she added that Columbia agreed to “discipline student offenders for severe disruptions of campus operations” and “eliminate race preferences from their hiring and mission practicers, and [diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI] programs that distribute benefits and advantages based on race.”
That same month, Brown University settled for $50 million and pledged to enact a series of reforms put forth by the Trump administration to settle claims involving alleged sex discrimination and antisemitism.
Per the agreement, Brown will provide women athletes locker rooms based on sex, not one’s self-chosen gender identity — a monumental concession by a university that is reputed as one of the most progressive in the country — and adopt the Trump administration’s definition of “male” and “female,” as articulated in a January 2025 executive order issued by Trump. Additionally, Brown has agreed not to “perform gender reassignment surgery or prescribe puberty blockers or hormones to any minor child for the purpose of aligning the child’s appearance with an identity that differs from his or her sex.”
Regarding campus antisemitism, the agreement calls for Brown University to reduce anti-Jewish bias on campus by forging ties with local Jewish Day Schools, launching “renewed partnerships with Israeli academics and national Jewish organizations,” and boosting support for its Judaic Studies program. Brown must also conduct a “climate survey” of Jewish students to collect raw data of their campus experiences.
The Trump administration is fighting on to achieve a similar victory over Harvard, and has, to that end, filed an appeal of the ruling which restored Harvard’s federal funding.
In the decision, US federal judge Allison Burroughs said that the Trump acted unconstitutionally, charging that he had used antisemitism as a “smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.” Burroughs went on to argue that the federal government violated Harvard’s free speech rights under the US Constitution’s First Amendment and that it was the job of courts to “ensure that important research is not improperly subjected to arbitrary and procedurally infirm grant terminations.”
Harvard has told multiple outlets it is “confident that the Court of Appeals will affirm the district court’s opinion.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.