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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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Greta Thunberg Released From Custody After Arrest at UK Anti-Israel Protest
Swedish activist Greta Thunberg speaks to a police officer during a pro-Palestinian protest as she holds a sign that says she supports prisoners linked to Palestine Action, an organization which the British government has proscribed as a terrorist group, in London, Britain, Dec. 23, 2025. Photo: Prisoners for Palestine/Handout via REUTERS
Swedish activist Greta Thunberg was released from custody after being arrested on Tuesday in London at an anti-Israel protest, police said.
UK-based campaign group Prisoners for Palestine said Thunberg was earlier arrested under the Terrorism Act for holding a sign that said “I support the Palestine Action prisoners. I oppose genocide.” The British government has proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist group.
City of London Police said Thunberg had been bailed until March.
Police said earlier two other people had been arrested for throwing red paint at a building. A spokesperson said 22-year-old woman later attended the scene and was arrested for displaying a placard in support of a proscribed organization.
Prisoners for Palestine, which supports some detained activists who have gone on hunger strike, said the building had been targeted because it was used by an insurance firm which they said provided services to the British arm of Israeli defense firm Elbit Systems.
The insurance company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Thunberg, 22, became prominent after staging weekly climate protests in front of the Swedish parliament in 2018.
Last year, she was cleared of a public order offense in Britain as a judge ruled police had no power to arrest her and others at a protest in London the year before.
She was detained along with 478 people and expelled by Israel in October after joining an activist convoy of vessels, the Global Sumud Flotilla, that attempted to breach Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Israel has consistently denied genocide allegations, noting it has targeted Hamas terrorists with its military campaign and taken measures to try and avoid civilian casualties.
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When Famine Vanished: How the Media Repeated a Claim, and Never Reckoned With Its Collapse
Trucks carrying humanitarian aid and fuel line up at the crossing into the Gaza Strip at the Rafah border on the Egypt side, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, in Rafah, Egypt, October 17, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
CNN delivered the update quietly and inaccurately, with much less gravity than it once used to amplify the warning.
“Gaza no longer in famine,” read a CNN post, citing a UN-backed hunger monitor.
Reuters and the Associated Press followed with similar headlines.
What is striking is not that the unreliable IPC, which has been criticized in the past for faulty methodology, revised its assessment.
What’s really upsetting is that much of the press treated the reversal as a weather update, not as a reckoning.
Only months earlier, these same institutions helped cement a very different narrative.
In late July 2025, UN agencies issued a high-profile warning that key indicators in Gaza exceeded famine thresholds, citing IPC data and describing hundreds of thousands facing famine-like conditions. The IPC alert itself stated that famine thresholds had been reached for food consumption in most of Gaza and for acute malnutrition in Gaza City.
In August 2025, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) announced that famine was confirmed for the first time in Gaza, again anchored to IPC assessments.
Those claims ricocheted through global media coverage with little visible skepticism about methodology, access constraints, or incentives baked into a wartime information environment.
The result was a widely accepted narrative that Israel was causing famine, a narrative that shaped diplomatic pressure and public outrage long before the data could be stress tested.
Now the IPC’s latest assessment says no area has ever been in famine, attributing improvements to increased humanitarian and commercial food deliveries after the ceasefire, while warning that the situation remains fragile and could deteriorate again if access is disrupted or fighting resumes.
IPC’s latest fraudulent Gaza report implies 1,700+ starvation deaths this December 2025—even TODAY we should see 57 such deaths! But even Hamas reports only 475 total starvation deaths for the ENTIRE WAR. The math exposes how detached from reality all these models are. 1/ pic.twitter.com/wOvIohWTt2
— Aizenberg (@Aizenberg55) December 19, 2025
The AP at least gestured to the whiplash, noting that months earlier, the IPC said famine was occurring in Gaza City and was likely to spread without a ceasefire and an end to restrictions.
Reuters likewise framed the change as a shift from earlier IPC findings, while stressing continued emergency-level needs. But what was largely missing was the one ingredient journalism owes the public when an apocalyptic claim collapses or is materially revised: responsibility.
No media outlet interrogated the underlying assumptions when famine warnings were treated as settled fact. None explained what changed in the inputs and thresholds. None revisited the earlier certainty with the same prominence as the original alarm.
This matters because narratives do not stay on paper.
In the United States, the ADL has reported that anger at Israel during the war has been a driving force behind antisemitism, underscoring how the information ecosystem around Gaza can translate into real-world hostility toward Jews. When famine claims are amplified uncritically, they do not just inform. They inflame.
The new UN-backed update does not erase Gaza’s suffering, and it does not vindicate anyone’s politics. It does, however, expose a core media failure: outsourcing verification to a single authoritative label, and then moving on when the label changes.
If famine was once a front-page certainty, the correction cannot be a footnote.
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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US Heritage Foundation Think Tank Staff Quit Amid Antisemitism Controversy
The Heritage Foundation’s logo is displayed during the 2025 Joseph Story Distinguished Lecture in Washington, DC, US, Oct. 22, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kylie Cooper
Over a dozen employees have left jobs at the Heritage Foundation or were fired in recent days, according to the influential right-wing US think tank, as it grapples with allegations from former supporters that it has aligned itself with those accused of antisemitism.
In a statement about the resignations and firings on Monday, Heritage Foundation chief advancement officer Andy Olivastro said a handful of staff had chosen “disruption” and “disloyalty.”
He said the think tank “has always welcomed debate, but alignment on mission and loyalty to the institution are non-negotiable.”
The foundation has been caught in a firestorm of accusations and counter-accusations that began when former Fox News host Tucker Carlson interviewed Nick Fuentes, a self-described Christian nationalist, in October. The interview focused on their mutual opposition to US support of Israel, a view at odds with that of many conservatives.
Some supporters of the foundation have said it should distance itself from Carlson, characterizing the journalist’s views as antisemitic. But Kevin Roberts, the foundation president, has continued to personally back Carlson, who he says is a friend. Carlson strongly rejects accusations of antisemitism.
One of those who resigned this week was Josh Blackman, a law professor who contributed to Project 2025, a right-wing policy initiative overseen by the Heritage Foundation. In a letter posted online, he blamed Roberts for making Heritage‘s brand “toxic.”
“You aligned the Heritage Foundation with the rising tide of antisemitism on the right,” said Blackman, who edited the group’s Guide to the Constitution publication.
In an Oct. 30 video defending Carlson, Roberts said a “venomous coalition” was attacking the prominent podcaster over his interview with Fuentes. Roberts said conservatives should feel no obligation to support any foreign government no matter how great the pressure from “the globalist class.”
He later apologized for his use of the term “venomous coalition,” which he said Jewish colleagues understood to be an antisemitic trope.
Speaking at a November staff townhall meeting, Roberts said his intention was not to endorse Fuentes, who he called “an evil person,” but to “convert” some of his audience of several million people.
Advancing American Freedom said on Monday the three former leaders of Heritage‘s legal, economic, and data teams had joined the conservative advocacy group, along with 10 of their staff. The group led by former Vice President Mike Pence is critical of US President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.
Three Heritage Foundation board trustees have also resigned since November.
Chief US Circuit Judge William Pryor, a conservative jurist who contributed to Heritage‘s 800-page Guide to the Constitution, said in an interview he did not attend a promotional event for the book due to Roberts’ “totally inappropriate” language in the Oct. 30 video.
For some remaining Heritage employees, recent staff departures were driven by Republican Party jockeying rather than antisemitism or Israel.
“These resignations have a lot more to do with 2028 than it does with anything else,” Heritage fellow Robby Starbuck posted online. “One group wants a return to the Pence/Ryan GOP and the rest want to MAGA with @KevinRobertsTX.”