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Ugly Hanukkah sweaters brought this Washington power couple together
(JTA) — Years before they were a couple, Shelley Greenspan and Reuben Smith-Vaughan were just two Amazon employees wearing ugly Hanukkah sweaters to a company holiday party.
Both were working in Amazon’s Washington, D.C., office in 2017 when they each donned their sweaters — Greenspan in a hot pink number with a sparkly blue and gold dreidel; Smith-Vaughan with a blue and neon green Star of David emblazoned across his chest — for the annual holiday party. As they remember it, they were the only two attendees in Hanukkah sweaters.
But while they shared their amusement with each other, any sparks remained confined to Greenspan’s sweater.
“It did give her the knowledge that I was Jewish,” Smith-Vaughan said, noting that his ethnicity is not obvious from his name.
“And not someone just Jewish, but proud enough about it to wear a sweater to a holiday party,” Greenspan added.
Five years later, Greenspan is helping to plan Hanukkah gatherings of her own, as the White House liaison to the Jewish community. And she and Smith-Vaughan are married. But the path to both roles was hardly straightforward.
The year after the Amazon Hanukkah party, Greenspan took a job with the State Department and lost touch with her sweater buddy. That lasted until April 2020, when, isolated at home at the start of the pandemic, the pair matched on the dating app Bumble.
The kippah from their wedding included illustrations from D.C. (Emily Blumberg Photography)
For their first date, which happened over Zoom, Smith-Vaughan asked about her cocktail preference in advance, then dropped two small bottles of gin and tonic at her building’s lobby by bike. Back at home, he poured himself a bourbon, and they video-chatted over drinks.
There was an immediate connection, despite their very different Jewish upbringings.
Greenspan, 32, is originally from Miami Beach. She attended a Reform synagogue, a Conservative overnight camp and an Orthodox day school growing up before spending the year after high school in Israel, through Young Judaea’s gap year program. After graduating from the University of Florida, she entered the corporate world and then politics, working on both Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and “Jewish Women for Joe” in the Biden campaign.
Smith-Vaughan, 34, grew up on a coffee farm in Nicaragua, in a Jewish community so tiny “we were taken out of school when someone passed away to make a minyan,” or prayer quorum required for mourners, he recalled.
His bar mitzvah was held at the nearest functioning synagogue, 250 miles away in San Jose, Costa Rica. His father, Arturo Vaughan, serves as the Israeli honorary consulate in Managua, Nicaragua.
A graduate of American University, he is still at Amazon, now the director of Latin America public policy.
“Shelley is the most caring, loving, kind and elegant human being I’ve ever met,” Smith-Vaughan said. “She is kind to a fault, always wanting to help people.”
Their courtship followed the early-pandemic playbook, which Smith-Vaughan said “speeded things up really aggressively.” On their second date, they played tennis outdoors. On their third, he cooked dinner at her apartment, but they remained far away from each other.
By the fourth date, at her apartment, they broached the conversation about whether to date exclusively — or, in the lingo of the moment, whether to “pod” together.
“No one knew how to date during Covid, there was this ‘let’s all figure it out together,’” Greenspan recalled. She added, “There was never any ‘What are you doing tonight?’ because no one ever had any plans then.”
Road trips became a favorite way to spend time. It was after a jaunt to Bar Harbor, Maine, that Greenspan realized she didn’t want to see Smith-Vaughan go home. Meanwhile, he said he knew she was the one when he found out that she always carries a Washington Nationals baseball cap in her bag — he is a major fan.
“Shelley is the most caring, loving, kind and elegant human being I’ve ever met,” Smith-Vaughan said. “She is kind to a fault, always wanting to help people.”
“Reuben is the most honorable person I know,” said Greenspan. “His presence feels like home to me. He’s so optimistic and joyous and positive, his energy is infectious.”
In November 2021, during a Thanksgiving trip to North Carolina, where Smith-Vaughan’s mother lives, he proposed on the tennis court.
While wedding planning can be all-consuming, Greenspan said she had a particularly “absurd” few months when it overlapped with her new job. The position requires someone knowledgeable about Jewish communal life and able to represent the disparate viewpoints held by American Jews to the White House, as well as represent the administration to American Jews.
“I’d be calling rental companies while going into briefings in the White House,” she said.
The couple were married Sept. 18 by Rabbi Aderet Drucker, executive director and community rabbi of the D.C.-based Den Collective, a nondenominational spiritual community organization, at the District’s Salamander Hotel.
Greenspan and Smith-Vaughan first met at an Amazon holiday party before eventually matching on Bumble years later. (Emily Blumberg Photography)
Their wedding weekend began with a Shabbat dinner at Compass Coffee’s roastery, which is co-owned by a Jewish veteran, and honored the groom’s coffee-farm upbringing.
On Saturday, guests could attend a Nationals game — against the Miami Marlins, the bride’s hometown team. The group was allowed onto the field before the game.
Their custom kippot featured a print of the D.C. skyline in the lining, and the groom and men in the wedding party all wore White House cufflinks with Biden’s signature (available at the White House gift shop). Their custom ketubah features coffee beans, the D.C. skyline and barbed wire, to honor the bride’s Holocaust survivor grandparents.
The reception didn’t only feature toasts and dancing; the bride offered a d’var Torah, and when the groom joined her to thank everyone for coming, he surprised her by singing “Eshet Chayil,” A Woman of Valor, that some Jewish men sing to their wives on Shabbat.
“Reuben has a beautiful voice and doesn’t really sing in public very much,” Greenspan said. “I wasn’t expecting it and it was so meaningful to me, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.”
Then she added, “He still sings it to me every Friday.”
This story is part of JTA’s Mazels series, which profiles unique and noteworthy Jewish life events from births to b’nai mitzvah to weddings and everything in between.
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The post Ugly Hanukkah sweaters brought this Washington power couple together appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Why the Super Bowl antisemitism ad uses a familiar slur
To the editors:
The sticky note cruelly slapped on a high school student’s backpack didn’t have to say “Dirty Jew.”
It could have been any one of dozens of other antisemitic slurs, and believe me, throughout my life and current line of work, I’ve seen and heard them all. At the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate, our Command Center closely tracks the spread of antisemitism online, in all its pernicious forms.
In his piece for the Forward about our new Super Bowl ad, PJ Grisar argues that the ad misses the mark by using “Dirty Jew,” characterizing it as old-fashioned and out of touch with the heavily coded, meme-driven ways students typically express antisemitism today.
We’ve seen all of those slurs gaining traction among younger people that Grisar gave as examples of how kids hate today.
But we didn’t pull “Dirty Jew” out of the history books. In creating the ad, the Blue Square Alliance made a conscious decision to follow the research. Our decisions are based on data, from the one billion social media posts we analyze daily, to our semi-annual 7,000-participant survey on American sentiment toward Jews and antisemitism, to our multi-stage audience testing that is foundational to our creative development.
Here’s the hard data: With nearly 500 million social media impressions since 2023, “Dirty Jew” is a slur that has managed to penetrate all corners of American discourse. Worse yet, its usage online has increased by 174% in the past three years, growing at a significantly higher rate than other slurs. And sadly, the last few years have seen more than a few disturbing and real incidents of the scenario in the ad play out in real life. In U.S. high schools. Right now. Not 1950.
This data-guided approach drove our selection of “Dirty Jew” among all the possible antisemitic slurs as the one to appear on the sticky note. Even though at first glance this phraseology may seem dated, it’s actually timeless and ubiquitous — scarily — and is even outpacing other slurs in frequency of use.
So, whether you’re a Boomer, Millennial or Gen Z, there’s no subtlety to what this ad is showing you: this is antisemitism, pure and simple. And, as Grisar acknowledges in his piece, the challenge of storytelling within a 30-second ad window requires a clear, unambiguous message. In that short time, clarity beats complexity.
It was also important to us to use the high school setting and focus our ad on a younger demographic because that is where we have seen the most concerning trends in antisemitism data. Our most recent survey data shows that Gen Z is three times more likely to witness antisemitism than older generations, and yet nearly twice as likely to say it is not a problem.
At the heart of this campaign is Blue Square Alliance’s dedication to addressing another data point: more than 100 million Americans say they are unengaged in the collective effort to stand up against anti-Jewish hate. We have spent the past few years closely studying this segment, and our surveys show that unengaged Americans often don’t know Jewish Americans, they aren’t familiar with antisemitism (their news feeds and social feeds don’t share the awful stories that we all know too well), and they don’t think antisemitism is a significant problem. Importantly, they don’t feel personal or societal pressure to be an ally.
That’s exactly why we’re using the Super Bowl — a cultural touchstone for the entire country — to raise awareness and model allyship. We test all of our ads, including “Sticky Note” and our earlier ads like “Tony,” specifically with this target audience. What we’re seeing is promising.
Among the unengaged, exposure to our messaging measurably shifts attitudes: viewers become 36% more familiar with recent antisemitic incidents and 41% more likely to see antisemitism as a major problem in the United States. And the impact doesn’t stop at awareness — it moves people to act. After seeing our ads, unengaged viewers are 27% more likely to say they would speak up when they witness antisemitism.
And our work to cultivate allies extends far beyond the television screen. We complement our social media, outdoor and audio campaigns with on-the-ground bridge-building to strengthen connections with Americans across communities and reach those who have not yet been meaningfully involved in this issue. Over the past year, we’ve expanded our programs to bring more people into the conversation, like our partnership with UNCF and Hillel International, now on a 14-stop “Unity Dinner” tour, to connect Black and Jewish students on campuses nationwide. And last fall, we joined with the Appeal of Conscience Foundation to launch “Stand Up Sunday,” an interfaith effort that mobilized hundreds of thousands of congregants across the nation to reject antisemitism and all faith-based hate.
Our founder, Robert Kraft, created the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate in 2019 because he recognized that reversing the rise in antisemitism would require both awareness and empathy.
With “Sticky Note,” we’re showing what it means to be an upstander and giving Americans a clear, accessible way to step off the sidelines. We won’t simply win over the unengaged through displays of toughness and bravado alone, as some people have suggested. To reach the unengaged majority, you have to meet them where they are — not where we, as a deeply committed Jewish community, already stand.
The post Why the Super Bowl antisemitism ad uses a familiar slur appeared first on The Forward.
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Amid Iran Standoff, Witkoff and Kushner Pose Aboard USS Abraham Lincoln Aircraft Carrier
Steve Witkoff (R) aboard the aircraft carrier Lincoln. Photo via i24 / social media used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law
i24 News – Special US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner visited on Saturday the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier.
The duo, who led the US in the indirect nuclear talks with Iran on Friday, visited the aircraft carrier at the invitation of US Central Command chief, Adm. Brad Cooper.
The carrier arrived in the region last week as part of a US “armada” amid rising tensions with the Islamic regime of Iran. It is stationed in the Arabian Sea.
The visit came hours after US President Donald Trump stated that while the talks went well, “But I think Iran looks like they want to make a deal very badly, as they should. Last time, they decided maybe not to do it, but I think they probably feel differently. We’ll see what the deal is. It’ll be different than last time. And we have a big armada. We have a big fleet heading in that direction. It’ll be there pretty soon. So we’ll see how that works out.”
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Pentagon Says It Will Cut Academic Ties With Harvard University
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth arrives to administer the oath to U.S. Army National Guard soldiers during a re-enlistment ceremony at the base of the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 6, 2026. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth said on Friday his department was ending professional military education, fellowships, and certificate programs with Harvard University, marking the Trump administration’s latest escalation against the school.
President Donald Trump’s administration has cracked down on top US universities, including Harvard, over a range of issues such as pro-Palestinian protests against US ally Israel’s assault on Gaza, diversity programs, transgender policies and climate initiatives.
“Starting now and beginning in the 2026-27 school year, I am discontinuing all graduate level Professional Military Education (PME), all fellowships and certificate programs between Harvard University and the War Department for active duty service members,” Hegseth, who himself holds a master’s degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, said on X.
The policy will apply to service members enrolling in future programs while those currently enrolled will be allowed to finish their courses, Hegseth said.
He also added that the Pentagon will evaluate similar relationships with other universities in the coming weeks.
Rights advocates have raised free speech, academic freedom and due process concerns over the government’s actions against universities.
A Harvard spokesperson directed Reuters to a page on the history of the university’s ties with the US military that says Harvard has played a “significant role” in America’s military traditions since the nation’s founding.
TRUMP-HARVARD TENSIONS CONTINUE
The university has previously sued the Trump administration over the government’s attempt to freeze federal funding.
Hegseth accused Harvard of “hate America activism,” also calling the university antisemitic in a reference to pro-Palestinian protests.
Protesters, including some Jewish groups, say the government wrongly equates criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza with antisemitism and advocacy for Palestinian rights with support for extremism.
Harvard has condemned discrimination on campus. Its antisemitism and Islamophobia task forces found last year that Jews and Muslims faced bigotry after the start of Israel’s war in Gaza following an October 2023 Hamas attack.
Trump’s attempts to freeze federal funds for Harvard have faced legal resistance and the two sides have failed to reach a deal thus far.
Trump said this week his administration was seeking $1 billion from Harvard to settle probes into school policies.
Some Ivy League schools have reached agreements with the Trump administration and accepted certain government demands. Columbia University has agreed to pay more than $220 million to the government while Brown University has agreed to pay $50 million to support local workforce development.