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You see an ugly ottoman or a faded armchair; she sees a lost history waiting to be revived
Even when she was a little kid, Ruti Wajnberg knew her grandma’s brown ottoman was ugly. She loved it anyway. Whenever she and her sisters would make the trek from New Jersey to visit their grandmother in Brighton Beach, they would roll around on the mushroom-shaped seat.
“It’s in all my memories of her apartment,” Wajnberg told me at her upholstery studio in Brooklyn. “It was my grandma’s, it’s tied up with my memories of her, and I wish I had it.”
To be clear, the brown would have to go. “I would have ripped that fabric off that stool so fast,” said Wajnberg, 41, a former product manager and software developer who started her reupholstery business Find the Thread two years ago to give new life to old furniture. “It would be so meaningful to me to have it, to watch my kids roll on it; that would bring me to tears.”
As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and the daughter of Jews who were expelled from Communist Poland in 1968, Wajnberg doesn’t have many heirlooms. More than once, her family has been forced to leave everything behind — including, in her grandparents’ cases, the loved ones who perished at the hands of the Nazis.
When Wajnberg’s parents fled Poland as teenagers — her mother’s family to Israel and her father’s to New York via Italy — they could take very little with them. Her mother told her she’d tucked a portrait a friend had painted of her in her suitcase. It was confiscated.
“That always struck me as so sad, that experience of just arriving completely empty-handed,” said Wajnberg, who wrote her undergrad thesis at NYU about her family history. This sense of loss is part of what drew her to saving and reviving furniture imbued with personal meaning.
“I don’t have that line of connection to anything in the past. I don’t have photographs of my great grandparents, anything that belonged to them,” she said. “Possessions carry a lot of stories. They’re a reason to talk about the person and remember them.”
As ugly as the brown ottoman may have been, she wishes she’d had the foresight to ask for it when her grandmother — who was her “bestie” when she was young — died in 2016. “When we go to Brighton Beach, I talk about my grandparents, because I’m in their space,” she said. “But I’m never in their space in my space.”
These days, people come to her with all kinds of projects: thrift finds that need zhuzhing, built-in window seats that require oddly shaped cushions, salvaged church pews that could use dressing up, fabric purchased on vacation that they want to put to use, faded furniture they don’t want to part with, and pieces they inherited.
“Most often I get, ‘This was my grandma’s,’” she said. “That’s my favorite. If it was your grandma’s, I’m in.”
Finding the thread
The first thing Wajnberg ever upholstered, coincidentally, was an ottoman. “I found an upholstery class in the East Village that sadly doesn’t exist anymore, and I signed up for it, having no idea that I would like it. I just wanted a creative outlet,” said Wajnberg, who was working as a product manager at the time. She still has the ottoman she made from scratch. Looking back with a more expert eye, she said, “it’s not very well-made.” But she loved the process. The tactile, physical experience reminded her of the time she spent working in the garden on a kibbutz in Israel, and she craved more of it.
Like many first-generation Americans growing up with immigrant parents, Wajnberg didn’t always imagine this path. “The idea of an artistic life or career was not really presented as an option,” said Wajnberg, the third of four girls. Music was a huge part of her childhood in New Jersey — all the kids played piano and another instrument and sang in choirs — and she always loved making things. But the arts felt more like “a hobby option.”
“My parents understandably had this feeling that nothing that you have is yours, except for your education,” she said. “People can take your stuff and people can take your passport, and the only thing you really have is your brain.”
Wajnberg started college at NYU thinking she’d study journalism, but quickly switched to history, and interned at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. After graduation, she moved to Israel to work on a kibbutz for six months and spend time with her other grandparents in Tel Aviv. She ended up staying for three years, earning an MBA from Reichman University and taking on her first jobs in tech.
When she returned to the States, Wajnberg worked as a product manager and later pivoted to become a software developer. All the while, she kept up her upholstery hobby. After her first son was born, she remembered, she’d often put him to sleep, then head down to the unfinished basement of their building, “and just rip things up and put them back together.” She was taking online courses, watching YouTube videos, and traveling occasionally for courses wherever she could find them.
“I just knew I loved it. But I also liked my job,” she said. “I fantasized about being an upholsterer and I would meet women my age-ish who had their own shop, and it just felt so unattainably cool to me and not really a practical option,” she said. “I really had to work to shed the practicality of what I thought I needed to be doing.”
Then the pandemic hit. Wajnberg had just had her second son and when she returned from leave in the midst of lockdown, she realized she didn’t like working remotely, without the human interactions that were her favorite part of the job. She went down to four days a week so she could work Fridays at the Brooklyn upholstery studio Stitchroom.
“After a couple of weeks, I was just like, ‘This is all I can think about. This is all I want to do,’” she said. She parlayed it into a full-time job as the shop’s head of production. Three years in, she felt ready to open up a shop of her own.
‘Making things’
Wajnberg’s studio is nestled on the third floor of a building with office lofts and artist spaces across from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. A window in the back corner spills natural light onto a small desk and three sewing machines. Up front there’s a large worktable and a couple projects in progress pushed against the sides of the space. On the day I visited, there was a Victorian sofa half-dressed in yellow, green and blue flowers, and a chair waiting to be adorned in gold chenille.
Her apron, hanging by the door, is covered in leaves and flowers, a cheerful mess of reds, yellows, oranges, pinks, and greens. “I, you may have noticed, am a floral gal,” she said.
“They make me smile. They make me happy. They make me feel lighter,” she added. “I just want to be drenched in flowers while I upholster things in flowers.”
The jubilant fabrics and the warmth of Wajnberg’s personality belie what has been, in some ways, a difficult first chapter. “I’ve really only had this business in times of great pain,” Wajnberg said. She started Find the Thread in September 2023, just weeks before the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7. “I have a lot of people there,” she explained, people she loves and worries about in Israel, including all of her family on her mother’s side and friends she made while living there. “It’s painful, regardless of what your political beliefs are.”
“Like many people who come from a lineage of trauma, I have a very busy, anxious mind,” Wajnberg said. “And I really feel centered and calmer when I’m working with my hands.” To offer others the same kind of outlet — and an introduction to upholstery — she’s been giving monthly classes in her studio, teaching participants to make throw pillows or reupholster one of their own dining room chairs.
“People are really craving tactile accomplishment,” she said. At the end of each workshop, when everyone pauses and looks at what they’ve created, “there’s this real sense of pride in the room. Like, ‘I made this, I just made this thing with my hands,’” she said. “It feels so good.”
Reviving and renewing
There’s an armchair that’s been sitting in Linda Ellman’s living room in Brooklyn for decades. It was there when her two daughters were growing up, and it’s there now when her four grandchildren come over after school — the perfect cozy spot to cuddle up and read together. It always conjured up memories of a similar chair that Ellman used to sit in to read with one of her parents or her grandma when she was a kid.
“One of the important things we do with children is we hold them close, we read things to them that help them think about themselves and the world,” Ellman, a retired teacher, told me over the phone. “I’m continuing the tradition. I lived near both my grandparents and they were very much in my life, and these kids are very much in my life.”
When the fabric started falling apart, Ellman considered buying a new chair. But she was attached to the chair she already had and the many years of memories it held. So she decided to reupholster it instead, and a friend referred her to Wajnberg.
After prospective clients reach out for an initial quote, the first step is fabric selection. Wajnberg works primarily with “regular people,” rather than interior designers and other industry professionals, so she often has to guide them to figure out what they want. “I think I’ve gotten really good at pulling other people’s style out of them,” she said.
At first, she’d ask people what they were looking for and bring samples to them. Until she realized most people have no idea. Now they usually come to her studio, so she can observe their reactions closely and pull from her entire library. They may think they want one thing, and ultimately fall in love with something else. Ellman, for instance, was looking for a romantic floral pattern to echo the muted red fabric she’d had, but ended up with a bright jungle print.
“You can always say no later, so this is the moment to push yourself out of your comfort zone and have fun and explore,” said Wajnberg, who sends clients swatches so they can put them in the room, mull it over, solicit opinions, “let their pet play with it and see if they can destroy it,” and “come to a leisurely decision.” And, she said, “if you get home and you want beige, you get beige.”
Judy Mann was looking for green. Her armchair had been fading in the sun. “It was going from this magnificent pattern to kind of grayish nothing,” she told me on Zoom. She turned to Wajnberg, her neighbor, for help. “She’s warm and charming and has a sparkle to her,” said Mann, who is the retired COO of Jewish Funders Network.
Mann’s armchair project cost around $2,300, including about $800 in labor costs. It was more than she’d intended to pay to replace or refresh her chair, mostly because of the pricey fabric. According to Wajnberg, people often underestimate the cost compared to the now-ubiquitous fast furniture. Reupholstering a simple dining chair might run $100, while a complex sofa might be $4,000 or $5,000. But Ruti “conveys confidence,” Mann said. “So if I was gonna spend this kind of money, I was quite sure it was going to be worthwhile.”
Together, Mann and Wajnberg selected an arresting pattern of colorful, overgrown flowers — “wild meadow free spirit vibes,” as Wajnberg put it on Instagram. It was a departure from the green “tribal” pattern of the original chair but still fit the color scheme. “It ended up being way better than I imagined,” Mann said.
“It’s extraordinarily beautiful, in my opinion,” she said. “I’m always shocked if someone comes in and doesn’t comment about the chair.”
For Mann, Ellman, and others who have a sentimental attachment to the furniture they bring her, Wajnberg has a surprise: She makes them a small pillow out of the original fabric. “Oftentimes it’s the fabric underneath the cushion or somewhere out of the way that reveals the true color,” she said. “I’ll try to find a piece that’s vibrant, which I think is really emotional for people, because sometimes they haven’t seen it that way in so long.”
In the two years since Wajnberg started Find the Thread, she’s reupholstered everything from a settee inherited from a late grandfather’s vintage store to the chairs at Pitt’s, a new Red Hook restaurant by Agi’s Counter chef Jeremy Salamon, to a neighbor’s grandparents’ Torah scroll.
Wajnberg can’t say for sure that this is the final stop on her winding career path, but right now, it feels right. “I feel so much more like I’m part of this humming local economy than I used to when I was making things on the internet that faraway people would use,” she said.
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Palestinian-American to challenge John Fetterman for Senate seat in 2028
(JTA) — Ahmed Moor, a Palestinian-American writer who has worked with anti-Zionists, is the first Democrat to challenge Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman in the 2028 primary.
Fetterman, who has faced sharp criticism from within the Democratic Party for his staunch support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, has yet to announce whether he plans to run in 2028. A defeat or retirement would remove one of the Democratic caucus’s most pro-Israel voices.
Moor, 42, enters the playing field with radically different positions on Israel, and on foreign policy in general, from those Fetterman has promoted. Claiming that the United States “funds wars based on corruption and lies and has turned its back on its own people,” Moor pledged on his campaign website to ensure “this never happens again.”
Moor, born in Gaza, moved as a child to Philadelphia, where he earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He completed a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard. He switched from finance to journalism, reporting in Beirut and Egypt for The Guardian and other outlets, and co-editing the book “After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine.” He also spent many years in Jordan, where he launched a peer-to-peer lending organization, before moving back to Philadelphia in 2021.
“A few years ago my birthplace was turned to rubble in a genocide funded by our tax dollars,” Moor stated, saying that this has occurred “with the support of politicians on both sides of the aisle who can’t find money for transit or removing asbestos from our schools.”
Moor, who has served on the Philadelphia Democratic City Committee, has never held public office. He says he is determined to address corruption, affordability, foreign policy and constitutional authority, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer, which first reported his candidacy.
Moor told the Inquirer that he was “not really running against Fetterman” but instead “running for the rule of law.” He acknowledged that he would face an “uphill battle” against Fetterman, who took office in January 2023.
Fetterman has irked some fellow Democrats by siding with Republicans on numerous issues, especially on Israel. He has also drawn praise from the pro-Israel community and Israel’s leadership. With Democrats securing a Senate majority of at least 54 seats, including two independents who caucus with the party, Democratic leadership will be less dependent on Fetterman’s vote when the new Congress convenes in January.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Northwestern launches civil rights investigation into club that banned pro-Israel group from its food festival
Northwestern University’s Office of Civil Rights is investigating a club that said it canceled its annual “Cultural Food Fest” after students objected to its initial inclusion of a pro-Israel student group.
Spoon University Northwestern, a student-run food magazine, wrote in an email to students that it was calling off its Nov. 6 food festival because of concerns about the participation of Wildcats for Israel, a club housed within Hillel that describes itself as focused on Israeli culture and society.
“There’s been a lot of disappointment expressed in and around Hillel today,” Michael Simon, executive director of Northwestern Hillel, told the Forward on Friday. “What should be an opportunity for connecting across differences and having really positive engagement got turned into a sort of political catfight.”
Students involved with Wildcats for Israel were initially “really excited” to participate in the fest, Simon said.
But amid student backlash, Spoon reversed course and disinvited Wildcats for Israel, Simon said. In a statement posted to Instagram, Spoon cited “the ongoing genocide in Gaza” to explain the group’s removal.
Yet even that exclusion was not enough for some student organizations. Northwestern’s Asian Pacific American Coalition; Alianza, the Latinx student alliance; and the Middle Eastern North African Student Association, issued a joint statement saying that they were withdrawing from the fest because of the original inclusion of Wildcats for Israel.
“A ‘culture’ born from the active land theft and genocide of Palestinians should not be recognized,” the student groups wrote on Instagram.
Spoon then cancelled the event altogether.
Now, Spoon’s status as an officially registered student organization has been frozen while the investigation into allegations of discrimination is being conducted, a Northwestern spokesperson wrote in an email to the Forward.
The investigation comes as Northwestern faces additional obligations to address and report allegations of antisemitism as part of its $75 million settlement with the Trump administration in November 2025. As part of the agreement, the university pledged that its Office of Civil Rights would publish annual reports with data about complaints of antisemitism, including investigative and disciplinary actions taken.
Spoon did not respond to the Forward’s request for comment.
In its email to students, Spoon said Wildcats for Israel was removed because of its status as “a political action group, not a cultural organization.”
Simon pushed back on that characterization of the club. “They’re not engaged in political advocacy or political work, certainly not in their current iteration,” Simon said. “They’re really focused on doing cultural and educational programming, connecting with Israel and with the Israeli people.”
The idea that Wildcats for Israel is considered political, while other student organizations opposing Israel are not, “appears to be a real double standard,” Simon said.
Still, Simon said the cancellation did not prevent Wildcats for Israel from having its own cultural food event — inviting students to the Hillel building on Friday to talk about what had happened over slushies in two flavors popular in Israel, limonana and iced cafe.
“They’re really turning to a place of being in community and supporting one another,” Simon said.
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Israel’s love affair with Trump may be over – with no other suitor in sight
Israelis were among the few groups outside America who genuinely liked Donald Trump, and they had persuaded themselves that the feeling was mutual. Now, as the American president pledges to terminate military assistance and blames Israel’s unpopularity for the Republicans’ electoral humiliation, they are confronting the possibility that their greatest supposed friend may become one of their gravest strategic liabilities.
In a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of 24 countries, 69% of Israelis expressed confidence in Trump to do the right thing in world affairs. Israelis saw a champion where much of the democratic world saw a menace.
Israelis, who tend to be more direct and plainspoken than other Western societies, were less inclined to be scandalized by Trump’s personal shortcomings. But mainly it was policy that made him so popular: Trump moved the American embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and cultivated a conspicuously warm relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, despite his increasing toxicity around the world. Trump opposed Hamas and ultimately joined Israel in attacking the Iranian regime.
Still, warning signs were there – in the displays of U.S. dominance over decisions in the 2025 and 2026 Iran confrontations and in the Election Day announcement last week that Trump plans to terminate roughly $4 billion in annual military assistance to Israel this year.
The announcement threatened a cornerstone of Israeli security planning established under Barack Obama, whose administration negotiated a 10-year, $38 billion assistance agreement extending through 2028.
The precise legal and financial consequences remain uncertain, not least because Congress controls appropriations. But the political significance is unmistakable: The president whom Israelis regarded as their most dependable protector was proposing to dismantle an arrangement that even administrations regarded as unfriendly to Netanyahu had sustained.
Moreover, the aid is far more than a gift. Its greatest value is not financial but geopolitical: the unmistakable message to Israel’s enemies that Washington stands behind it.
As the dismal election results became clear, Vice President JD Vance highlighted a supposed demand among disaffected Republican voters to “change our relationship to Israel,” placing the alliance itself among the issues requiring political reassessment.
In Sunday’s 60 Minutes interview, Trump went further, identifying what he called a “great dislike” for Israel as one factor in the Republican electoral defeat.
Trump certainly has a point. A 2026 Pew survey found that 60% of Americans viewed Israel unfavorably, up from 42% in 2022, including 57% of Republicans under 50. Gallup found that, for the first time in its 25-year tracking, Americans were no longer more sympathetic to Israelis than Palestinians: 36% favored Israelis, compared with 41% for Palestinians. The longstanding bipartisan consensus is unraveling. Among younger Americans, the situation is even worse.
Whether the reason is a global propaganda campaign against Zionism, social media manipulation, Netanyahu and his noxious far-right allies, or Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank are almost beside the point – the collapse in Western and U.S. opinion is undeniable.
Trump also asserted that “those countries that we’ve protected” from Iran – meaning Israel – “wouldn’t exist” without the U.S. and “are going to pay us back any and all costs that we’ve had for the war,” which was another major surprise and mystery that caught Israelis off-guard.
Whether this implies a demand that Israel reimburse the United States, and for precisely what, remains unclear. What is clear is that Trump has begun discussing a relationship Israelis considered existential in the language of electoral liabilities and financial transactions.
Writing in Maariv on Monday, veteran Washington correspondent Shlomo Shamir reported that senior Washington commentators described Netanyahu as having become effectively persona non grata in Trump’s inner circle – and that Trump’s seeming affinity for Netanyahu was “more a media relationship than a genuine friendship.”
The change in atmosphere in Israel has been extraordinary.
On Monday, Israeli television seemed preoccupied with little beyond the coalition negotiations following Israel’s election and the growing fear that the country might lose its most important international relationship.
Appearing on Channel 13, I argued that another Netanyahu government would have faced economic sanctions from Europe and even serious discussion of an American weapons embargo. This provoked very little disagreement.
“Netanyahu put all his chips on Trump, and it’s falling apart,” observed anchor Daniel Zilberstein. “It wasn’t only him, but the entire system,” replied Omri Rolls, an expert in monitoring and countering anti-Israel propaganda. “We put all our attention on the United States. Europe, we’ve completely given up on. All over the world, important elements are simply not on Israel’s agenda.”
The alarm was loud and clear this week across the Israeli political and diplomatic establishment.
Tovah Herzl, a former Israeli diplomat who served in Washington as liaison to Congress, captured the predicament in the title of her article in Maariv: “Netanyahu Bet on Trump — and Israel Could Lose Far More Than Money.”
“Israelis are unaware of the depth of the hole into which the country has fallen,” wrote Yedidia Stern, a leading expert on Israel-U.S. relations, in Ynet. “The hourglass has been turned over: we have two years to regain the legitimacy that has been lost” before a Democrat potentially wins the White House.
Ashley Perry, a former senior Israeli government adviser, wrote in The Jerusalem Post that Israel must urgently start arguing its case – “consistently demonstrating what Americans gain” in intelligence cooperation, joint defense development, investment, trade and Israeli contributions to scientific and technological progress.
Beyond all that, there is a general understanding that Israel will need some real policy changes – for example, cracking down on Jewish extremists in the West Bank. And it will need to court the U.S. Democrats and the Europeans once more – as it did decades ago.
There is a grim lesson at play, and it has more to do with morality than ethics.
Israelis are people badly traumatized by the conflicts that implacable enemies have forced on them. Over the decades, however, they took some pride nonetheless in what they believed was a moral high ground. It’s safe to say this has eroded, at least somewhat.
In a reflection of that erosion, one of Trump’s greatest attractions to Israelis – sadly enough – was his indifference to Palestinian human rights, an issue that had long complicated Israel’s relations with more conventional Western leaders. Trump was clearly untroubled by the West Bank occupation, the expansion of settlements or the absence of a credible political horizon for millions of Palestinians. In February 2025, he even proposed removing Gaza’s Palestinian population in its entirety and placing the territory under American control, a scheme whose breathtaking implications seemed scarcely to concern him.
Many Israelis overlooked the dark aspects of such absurdities, seeing only evidence of exceptional friendship. They overlooked the possibility that a president so utterly uninterested in Palestinian rights might also prove indifferent to Israeli interests whenever they ceased to coincide with his own.
They celebrated his willingness to discard diplomatic conventions – or even basic human decency – when it worked in their favor. They are discovering now that sometimes cliches are true: What goes around comes around.
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