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This young American couple had Scotland’s first-ever queer Jewish wedding
(JTA) — Han Smith and Jennifer Andreacchi recently made international news for becoming the first queer couple to have a Jewish wedding in Scotland. But at the time they met, they had never been to Scotland, and they didn’t yet identify as queer — or Jewish.
Smith, 26, grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and has a Jewish father but wasn’t raised Jewish.
“I was content with that until a few years ago, when I began feeling like I wanted to reclaim something that had been lost,” said Smith, who uses they/them pronouns.
Andreacchi, 25, who is from Randolph, New Jersey, only discovered in 2018 that her father had one Jewish grandparent, when she did a DNA test.
The couple first met in the spring of 2015, when they both attended a New Jersey reception for admitted students of the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.
After noticing each other — mostly because they both asked the most questions out of everyone there — they exchanged numbers and began a friendly text connection over the summer.
When Andreacchi realized she might be queer, she chose Smith to come out to first, “as it can often be easier to tell a stranger than someone close to you,” she said. Smith confided they were feeling the same way.
Since Andreacchi was only 17 then and Smith 18, “we encouraged each other,” Andreacchi said. “It was nice to have someone going through coming out at the same time.”
“With Jen, I’m brave in a way that helps me know more about myself in the world,” said Smith. (Fern Photography)
They became part of the same friend group once they arrived at school, and it wasn’t long before they were dating.
“We started off a tad codependent, but we’ve managed to grow together, and have pushed each other and challenged each other to be our best selves,” said Andreacchi.
That included spending their junior year abroad at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, “which was a really transformative experience for both of us,” Smith said. It also made them want to pursue moving abroad after graduation.
Smith took a class in modern Jewish history their senior year, which raised all kinds of questions about their ancestors (they knew their family surname had changed, but not from what). “It really started my journey and my approaching Judaism from a different angle,” they said.
The couple moved to Dublin after graduating in 2019. The next spring, they celebrated their first Passover together, while in lockdown.
The pandemic gave them a lot of time to talk and think, and during this time, “we began talking about Jewish identity, what it meant to us and what it could mean,” Smith said. They became more sure of their Judaism; at the same time, the couple determined that they wanted to keep living abroad. Andreacchi decided to pursue a master’s degree at St. Andrews, while Smith started a doctoral program in counseling and psychology at the University of Edinburgh, which brought them back to Scotland. Andreacchi now works in publicity for a publishing house.
While Andreacchi was supportive of Smith’s investigation of Judaism, when it came to herself, “I was intimidated by it for a while,” she said. “I wasn’t 100% sure what right I had to claim it.”
Guests danced a traditional Scottish jig called a ceilidh as well as the Jewish hora. (Fern Photography)
But in Edinburgh, they found a welcoming Jewish community, where, they said, many of the younger community members are queer. (In addition to Sukkat Shalom, the liberal community in Edinburgh, there is an Orthodox synagogue as well as Chabad. Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital city of about 500,000, is about 50 miles away from the much larger Glasgow, home to the fourth-biggest Jewish community in the United Kingdom and a queer-friendly, Yiddish-speaking, anarchist-run cafe.)
“We’ve found an amazing Jewish community here,” Andreacchi said. “The Edinburgh liberal community has really embraced us.”
When they began wedding planning, a Jewish wedding wasn’t on the table, as neither even knew yet that they would convert. But because they planned their wedding so far in advance, when they realized they could complete conversion beforehand, they set their sights on a Jewish ceremony. Both studied for their conversion under the supervision of Rabbi Mark Solomon, a London-based rabbi who serves Edinburgh’s Sukkat Shalom.
“He’s created a very safe and inclusive community,” Smith said.
“He has a very open-minded approach to what God is and the role of tradition, and he’s changed the gendered pronouns,” Andreacchi added.
They proposed to each other at Edinburgh Castle by reading letters to each other and exchanging rings in May 2021. Their conversions took place in September 2022.
When they began wedding planning, they had no idea they would be the first Jewish LGBT couple to marry in Scotland. But as word got out, community leaders wondered and then confirmed that, indeed, they would be the first.
The news of their wedding — which took place on Oct. 30, 2022 at St. Andrews, officiated by Solomon — was widely covered in the U.K. press. (Marriage for LGBT couples has been legal in Scotland since 2014.)
“There was a lot of excitement about us and our wedding that we didn’t anticipate,” Andreacchi said.
In Edinburgh, the couple found a welcoming Jewish community, where, they said, many of the younger community members are queer. (Fern Photography)
Andreacchi wore a forest green and gold velvet fantasy literature-inspired dress she found on TikTok, while Smith wore pants, a bowtie and suspenders, along with a scarf with the Mitchell tartan on it, because “while we were making history as Americans and not Scottish citizens, it was nice to feel like I was tying a piece of my ancestry together,” they said, referring to their mother’s roots in Scotland and Ireland.
The morning of their wedding, together with their wedding party, the couple decorated their chuppah together.
For the seven blessings, they assigned seven siblings, friends and cousins to expound upon themes that are important to the couple. Smashing the glass on the carpet took three attempts.
In addition to the hora, their reception included Scottish dances called ceilidh (pronounced “keely”).
“For a lot of my life, I wasn’t visible to other people, I felt a little small,” Andreacchi said. “Han was one of the first people who not only really saw me but radically accepted me and loved me and encouraged me to follow dreams I didn’t know were possible.”
Smith added, “With Jen, I’m brave in a way that helps me know more about myself in the world.”
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The post This young American couple had Scotland’s first-ever queer Jewish wedding appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Forverts podcast, episode 8: Subway stories
דער פֿאָרווערטס האָט שוין אַרויסגעלאָזט דעם אַכטן קאַפּיטל פֿונעם ייִדישן פּאָדקאַסט, Yiddish With Rukhl. דאָס מאָל איז די טעמע „די אונטערבאַן“.
אין דעם קאַפּיטל וועט איר הערן צוויי אַרטיקלען: משהלע אַלפֿאָנסאָס פּערזענלעכן עסיי „און אַלץ צוליב אַ יאַרמלקע!“ וואָס איר קענט אַליין לייענען דאָ, און אַ צווייטן אַרטיקל פֿון שׂרה־רחל שעכטער, „זכרונות פֿון אַן אונטערבאַן־פּאַסאַזשיר“, וואָס איר קענט לייענען דאָ.
צו הערן דעם פּאָדקאַסט, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
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New York City Police Investigate Antisemitic Subway Assault
New York City Police Department (NYPD) vehicles are seen in Brooklyn, New York, United States. Photo: Kyle Mazza via Reuters Connect
The New York City Police Department (NYPD) is investigating an antisemitic incident in which an African American male assaulted a Jewish public transit commuter on the subway, according to local reports.
The victim, Jeremy Garrett, told an ABC affiliate that he was reading a psalm on Monday morning when the assailant struck him on the head, knocking off his kippah in the process. Garrett later received treatment at a local hospital, WABC-TV reported.
“I thought the window of the subway fell on me,” Garrett recalled. “We tussled a bit, I was trying to hold him on the train, and then the doors closed, and they opened the doors again, and he ran off … it’s horrible because it happened on Purim, you know, right before the holiday.”
Garret added, “I still want justice, but I do forgive the man … They keep coming for us. We still keep living, so we’re not going to stop.”
New York City has seen similar incidents in recent months. In January, a woman was punched in the face while riding the New York City subway for wearing a hat that said “F—k Antisemitism,” according to a local report.
“F—k Jews,” the suspect, described as a “Black man in his 40s,” allegedly said to her before striking the blow, the New York Daily News reported, citing local law enforcement.
The victim then “fled” the railcar at the 116th St. – Columbia University subway station in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, while the assailant remained on board, the News added. She was reportedly not seriously injured, as medics did not treat her following the incident’s being reported to law enforcement.
Just last month, a 17-year-old student who attended the Renaissance Charter School in the Jackson Heights section of the Queens borough called on his classmates to “rise up and kill the Jews.”
Antisemitic hate crimes in New York City have seen a dramatic rise in recent years. The latest NYPD hate crime statistics show a 182 percent increase in January 2026, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first month in office, compared to the same period last year.
Mamdani, a far-left democratic socialist who has made anti-Israel activism a cornerstone of his political career, has repeatedly accused Israel of “apartheid” and refused to recognize its right to exist as a Jewish state.
Such positions have raised alarm bells among not only New York’s Jewish community but also Israeli business owners and investors, who fear a hostile climate under Mamdani’s leadership.
Jews were targeted in the majority (54 percent) of all hate crimes perpetrated in New York City in 2024, according to other data issued by the NYPD.
A recent report released in December by the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism noted that figure rose to a staggering 62 percent in the first quarter of 2025, despite Jewish New Yorkers comprising a small minority of the city’s population.
As The Algemeiner has previously reported, antisemitism in New York City has eroded the quality of life of the city’s Orthodox Jewish community, which is the target in many antisemitic incidents.
In just eight days between the end of October and the beginning of November 2024, three Hasidim, including children, were brutally assaulted in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. In one instance, an Orthodox man was accosted by two assailants, one masked, who “chased and beat him” after he refused to surrender his cellphone in compliance with what appeared to have been an attempted robbery. In another incident, an African American male smacked a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was commuting to school on his bike in the heavily Jewish neighborhood. Less than a week earlier, an assailant slashed a visibly Jewish man in the face as he was walking in Brooklyn.
In 2025, New Yorkers have seen organized antisemitic harassment. In November, hundreds of people amassed outside a prominent New York City synagogue and clamored for violence against Jews.
“The Jewish community is filled with anxiety and trepidation. We know that it’s open season,” Rabbi Mark Schneier, president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, said in a statement to NY1 in February. “We’ve encountered these kinds of threats for the last 2,500 years, but if anything, there’s never been a greater time to be alive as a Jew than today.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Gavin Newsom just confirmed the demise of the Democratic party’s support for Israel
“Let no American imagine that Zionism is inconsistent with patriotism,” said Louis Brandeis, American Jewish leader and Supreme Court justice, in 1915. “To be good Americans, we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews, we must become Zionists.”
For much of the next century, most American Jews stacked their liberalism on top of their patriotism on top of their Zionism. They overwhelmingly voted for the Democratic Party, and overwhelmingly supported both Israel and the United States-Israel alliance.
In recent years, however, many have found it increasingly difficult to deny is that support for Israel is, at present, hard to square with liberalism. And a statement this week by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the probable 2028 Democratic candidate for president, made clear exactly how profoundly that shift has changed the Democratic party.
Israel is discussed by some “appropriately as sort of an apartheid state,” Newsom said on a podcast, adding that the U.S. would likely have no choice but to reconsider its military aid to the Jewish state.
Given that Newsom is broadly a centrist, his words made a clear statement: Politicians understand that uncritical support for Israel is no longer compatible with the Democratic mainstream. Democratic voters are pushing politicians to, if not abandon Israel entirely, then at least condition their support for it. And the future of American Jews and the Democratic Party is now not only up to Democratic politicians who decide how much to give Israel and under what conditions.
It is also up to American Jews, who have to decide whether those politicians, in doing so, are moving away from their values, or bringing them back into alignment.
Shifting sympathies
A Gallup poll released last month found that Americans’ sympathies now lie more with Palestinians than with Israelis. Up until last year, the opposite had held true. For Democrats, whose sympathies already “flipped strongly” — per Gallup — to Palestinians in 2025, the difference is more stark: 65% said they sympathize more with Palestinians, while just 17% say they sympathize more with Israelis.
Those tempted to write the change off as the result of a party captured by a young far-left should consider that, last year, Pew found that 66% of Democrats over the age of 50 have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from just 43% in 2022. (For those ages 18 to 49, the number was 71%.) A full 73% of Democrats over 50 said they had “none at all” or “not too much” confidence in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
I have no doubt that some will say that the change is because people don’t understand the complexity of the situation in the Middle East; because they have forgotten the lessons of history; or because the Democratic Party is comfortable embracing antisemitism.
These claims ignore a simpler explanation: That the voters who are registered with the one major U.S. political party that still claims to care about liberalism, democracy, and human rights watched as Israel, by its own admission, killed some 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza.
They saw Israel’s leaders make it next to impossible for civilians in the Strip to receive necessary food and humanitarian aid. They see settler violence rising in the West Bank, including against American citizens, amid increased talk of annexation. They hear Netanyhau continue to insist that there can be no Palestinian state, and understand that the alternative he foresees is not one state with equal rights, but either a future of endless wars, or an undemocratic state in which Palestinians live under Israeli control without the rights of citizens.
In that context, many voters see that unflinching support for Israel is no longer in line with the values that drew them to their party. And since they cannot change Israel, they are trying to change their party.
No more cognitive dissonance
Democratic voters, in insisting that their politicians not walk in lockstep with Israel, are insisting that the party break its cognitive dissonance around Israel. Which means that the future of American Jews in the Democratic Party depends not only on how sensitively Democratic politicians navigate criticizing and checking Israel without elevating antisemitism. It also depends on whether American Jews are willing to admit this dissonance to ourselves.
For some, this is not an open question. There are American Jews who have no relationship to Israel, or whose relationship is an overwhelmingly critical one. Per last year’s Jewish Federations of North America National Survey, a combined 32% of American Jews aged 18-34 identify as either anti-Zionist or non-Zionist.
(Only 7% of American Jews overall consider themselves to be anti-Zionist, and just 8% say non-Zionist,. But most don’t subscribe to the label “Zionist,” either, with just 37% describing themselves as such).
In 2021, one poll of American Jews found that a quarter deemed Israel an apartheid state, well before Newsom likened it to one.
There’s also the reality that the vast majority of American Jews do not name Israel as their top issue when they go to the voting booth, and that the Republican Party is undergoing its own schism over Israel.
Still, that same JFNA poll found that most American Jews — 71% — do say that they feel emotionally attached to Israel. And 60% say that Israel makes them proud to be Jewish, even as 69% say that they “sometimes find it hard to support the actions taken by Israel or its government.”
What this means: For many American Jewish Democrats, encouraging politicians to break with Israel — or accepting that break is already in process — is likely more emotionally challenging than it is for American Democrats generally.
What Newsom’s comments show is that this is an emotional problem American Jewish voters will need to face sooner rather than later. Democratic voters are forcing Democratic politicians to resolve a disconnect, and they want it resolved quickly. The year is no longer 1915. Democratic American Jews are going to need to decide what it means to be “good Americans and better Jews.” If it can no longer involve being both liberal and staunchly pro-Israel, we will need to decide which of those items we find most important.
The post Gavin Newsom just confirmed the demise of the Democratic party’s support for Israel appeared first on The Forward.