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No longer a ‘Real Housewife,’ Orthodox influencer Lizzy Savetsky turns to fighting antisemitism
(New York Jewish Week) — Lizzy Savetsky’s life has been turned upside down and inside out over the past eight months.
The 37-year-old social media influencer, who identifies as “a proud Orthodox Jewish woman,” became practically a household name this summer when she was announced as a cast member for the 14th season of “The Real Housewives of New York.” Having recently relocated from Texas to the Upper East Side, the mom of three kids (Stella, 10, Juliet, 8 and Ollie, 2) was thrust into the spotlight alongside six other New York City-based socialites, including fashion designer (and “Girls” guest star) Jenna Lyons and Israeli real estate agent Erin Lichy.
But then, in mid-November, after just weeks of filming, Savetsky left the show. At the time, she said it was due to antisemitism she experienced in online forums. In the aftermath of her departure, there were unsubstantiated reports that she clashed with other cast members, and that her husband had been heard using a racial slur.
In a recent interview with the New York Jewish Week, Savetsky declined to comment on those reports. Instead, she spoke about something she considers exceedingly more important: using the joy and light of Hanukkah — and, well, her social media reach of 225,000 Instagram followers — to fight antisemitism.
Though she’s no longer associated with the reality juggernaut, Savetsky has emerged as a famous Jewish New Yorker nonetheless. These days, she’s making public appearances to talk about community safety and antisemitism, and she even hosted a Hanukkah party at her home where she lit the menorah alongside Mayor Eric Adams.
This Festival of Lights, Savetsky is the face of the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces’ “Live the Miracle” media campaign. Each night of Hanukkah, a different high-profile Jew lights a candle alongside an Israeli soldier, part of a video campaign intended to stand up against antisemitism while supporting the IDF. Also featured in the videos are stand-up comedian Modi Rosenfeld, Israeli actor and anti-antisemitism ambassador Noa Tishby and rapper Kosha Dillz.
Savetsky and her family lit the candle on the first night of Hanukkah alongside Shahar, a female naval combat sergeant currently serving in the IDF. Savetsky called Shahar “an amazing role model for her daughters” who showed them “you’re never too young or too small to contribute amazing things to the Jewish people.”
“It was really one of the most special experiences that we’ve had as a family,” Savetksy said of meeting Shahar and lighting the candles with her. “From a biblical sense, Hanukkah comes after a very dark time and it’s about bringing light to the darkness. To be able to celebrate this, in this moment, is a profound experience, and to be able to do that with a soldier from the IDF is something that means so much to me and my family and to be able to share that with the world is a really big deal.”
The FIDF campaign is only the latest move by Savetsky to showcase her Jewish pride. Though she calls herself an “accidental activist” — the NYU grad who grew up in Fort Worth first began her fashion blog, “Excessories Expert,” in the 2010s, and her media accounts then were mostly dedicated to fashion and lifestyle content — she has become well known for talking about Jewish traditions and customs, promoting Zionism and her love for the State of Israel and, perhaps most urgently of late, calling on others to help fight the scourge of antisemitism.
“I just saw how necessary it was,” Savetsky said of her shift to calling on others to help fight antisemitism. “I want to do everything I can for my people because I want to ensure a future for my children and their children. So I really made a conscious decision to shift my platform to not only fighting antisemitism, but to also share and educate about Judaism because I think a lot of hate is born out of fear.”
“It’s a privilege to stand in solidarity with these influential Jewish figures who will not let darkness prevail,” said Steve Weil, the chief executive officer of Friends of the IDF. “These are people, who, in the face of social media and all sorts of attacks, are standing up for morality, for dignity, and for these young men and young women who are literally at the front line of humanity.”
“I have always been unapologetic about my support for Israel and calling myself a Zionist,” Savetsky told the New York Jewish Week. “I want to put a face to what that means — it is like a wife and a mother and somebody who’s loving and hard-working.”
And yet, her beliefs and outspokenness have drawn the ire of many, especially when the “Real Housewives” cast was announced. Her Instagram handle proclaiming her a “proud Zionist” drew broadsides from pro-Palestinian activists, while some Jews on social media also criticized her for not dressing modestly despite being part of a Modern Orthodox Jewish community.
Savetsky said she and her family received hateful messages and even death threats. Even her husband, plastic surgeon Ira Savetsky, received a letter mailed to his office calling him a “kike” and an “arrogant piece of sh–.”
“I expected to receive negativity. I know that, unfortunately, Israel is a very polarizing topic and I have always been unapologetic about my support for Israel,” she said. “But the amount of hate and the fact that it was coming from all directions — from the far right, from the far left, from so many different groups of people — and the viciousness of it just it really broke my heart.”
The vitriol became overwhelming, Savetsky said. “For the first time I found myself really fearing for my safety and questioning my decision to put myself in this public position,” she said.
Ultimately, after only weeks of filming, Savetsky insists she decided to leave the show because of the antisemitism she faced. “It was definitely not the path for me and for my family,” Savetsky told the New York Jewish Week. “I have no regrets about going through the process because if anything, it shined a light on just how much hate there is out there.”
“I would rather know and understand the reality of it so that I can use my efforts to fight it,” she added. “The fear that I felt from experiencing all the hate I’ve gotten in the past few months really just motivated me to double down and fight even harder.”
Days after her announcement, Page Six, citing “production insiders,” reported that there was more to the story surrounding Savetsky’s departure — including that Savetsky declined to match a non-Jewish cast member up with a Jewish man, and that her husband repeated anti-Black slurs to a producer.
Savetsky declined to comment on these allegations, nor have the rumors been confirmed by Bravo or a named member of the cast. The show is set to air sometime in 2023.
And while she may not be a “Real Housewife,” Savetsky plans to stay in the city. “New York is the center of the universe,” she joked, citing the large and diverse Jewish community as a huge reason why she wanted to raise her kids here. Living on the Upper East Side, Savetsky’s daughters attend a Modern Orthodox day school, and the family is a member of the newly created Altneu congregation, helmed by Rabbi Benjamin Goldschmidt and his wife Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt.
Despite leaving the show, Savetsky has no plans to be silent about antisemitism. Savetsky has gained more than 20,000 followers since the “Real Housewives” cast announcement, and the subsequent antisemitism she faced — as well as the rise in antisemitic incidents, in general — have only inspired her to be more outspoken about her Judaism and Zionism, she said.
“Everything has changed in the past few months — for me, personally, and I believe for the Jewish people and the world,” Savetsky said. “The world is waking up to the reality that antisemitism isn’t just this looming threat, but it’s real and it’s here and I think people are opening their eyes to that.”
She added: “I’ve never felt like my purpose was so clear as I do in this moment to be loud and proud and to stand up for my people.”
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When Assassination Attempts Stop Shocking Us
US President Donald Trump takes questions from media at a press briefing at the White House, following a shooting incident during the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 25, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
The villagers of Chelm once faced a serious problem.
A wooden bridge at the edge of town had a loose plank in the middle. People kept stepping on it, falling through, and breaking their legs. The town elders gathered for an emergency meeting. Some said, “We should put up warning signs!” Others said, “We should add lights along the bridge!”
Then one leader stood up and said, “I have the answer! Let’s build a hospital at the bottom of the bridge!”
This, I fear, is where America stands today.
Just a few days ago, during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C., a gunman rushed past a security checkpoint and opened fire. The President, the First Lady, and members of the Cabinet were evacuated. The suspect, a 31-year-old teacher with an engineering degree, had written a manifesto targeting administration officials, and investigators later found anti-Trump and anti-Christian rhetoric on his social media accounts.
Regardless of where one stands politically, this news should shake our very core. A civilized society cannot become comfortable with such evil acts of violence. And yet, by morning, the conversation had already shifted: More security. Stricter gun laws. Better screening.
All of it sounded like building another hospital at the bottom of the bridge — because while some of these ideas are worthy and necessary, they do not answer the deeper question that should be at the forefront of our minds: How did we arrive at a moment when evil has become so banal that it no longer shocks us?
Many blame all sorts of reasons — from political extremism to mental illness, from social media to economic anxiety — and while each of these may contain parts of the truth, none addresses the root of the problem. Because the broken plank is not only political. It is a crisis of the nation’s soul.
Shortly after the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981 at the same Washington Hilton in Washington D.C., the Lubavitcher Rebbe addressed the nation with remarkable clarity. The Rebbe rejected the explanation that crime grows from deprivation and poverty, as some suggested. The Rebbe noted that Reagan’s attacker lacked nothing materially. The real issue, the Rebbe said, was that he lacked education. Not education of the mind alone, but education of the conscience.
A child must grow up knowing that there is “an Eye that sees and an Ear that hears,” that human life is sacred, that actions matter even when no one is watching, and that freedom is not permission to do whatever one wishes, but responsibility to do what is right.
Without that foundation, a society may produce people of dazzling intellectual brilliance, but with almost no goodness to guide it.
Alas, history has already shown us where that road leads. The Nazi era proved that reason alone can rationalize anything, even evil. Germany of the 20th century produced philosophers, scientists, poets, and composers. And yet, it also produced Auschwitz.
In Schindler’s List, there is a haunting scene during the liquidation of the Krakow Ghetto in which a little girl, hiding near a piano, is shot by an SS guard. As her tiny body lies in blood, another guard sits down and begins to play the piano. One guard asks the other, “Is that Bach?” His friend replies, “No. Mozart.” And they continue to discuss the music as if nothing had happened. That was Nazi Germany: murder alongside Mozart.
Elie Wiesel once asked the Lubavitcher Rebbe how he could still believe in God after Auschwitz. The Rebbe responded with a question of his own: “In whom do you expect me to believe after Auschwitz? In man?”
Because without God and the absolute truth of His Bible, morality becomes negotiable. Without grounding ourselves in Divine commandments such as “Do not murder,” even cultured and educated people can descend into evil.
We must act responsibly in the face of real threats, increase security, and pass legislation where needed. But if we truly want to prevent the next attack, we must repair the bridge itself. And that repair begins with teaching our children not only how to think, but how to live. Not only how to succeed, but how to serve. Not only how to respect life, but how to recognize “the Lord your God” Who gives us life and Who commands us to protect it in ourselves and in others.
A few years ago, here in Arizona, I had the privilege of working with Governor Doug Ducey and others to help bring a statewide Moment of Silence to the beginning of the school day. Just one quiet minute in which students can pause and remember that life has purpose, that actions have meaning, and that there is something greater than themselves.
This responsibility belongs to all of us. Adults and children alike must know that kindness is not optional, that words matter, and that every human being — even those who are different from us — is created in the image of God. And the simple moral truths that built our civilization must once again guide the way we live: “Honor thy father and thy mother.” “Love your fellow as yourself.” “Do not stand idly by while your fellow’s blood is being shed.”
Let us repair the bridge. Let us return to God and His guidance, and strengthen the soul of our country. For when a nation strengthens its soul, it not only survives. It rises.
Rabbi Pinchas Allouche is the founding Rabbi of Congregation Beth Tefillah and the founding dean and spiritual leader of the Nishmat Adin High School in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he resides with his wife, Esther, and 10 children.
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The Conspiracy Architecture Doesn’t Need Jews: It Just Prefers Them
A 3D-printed miniature model of Elon Musk and the X logo are seen in this illustration taken Jan. 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
Within hours of the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (WHCD), a comment on The Young Turks’ social media pages offered one theory of the case.
The shooting, the commenter explained, was the work of “the family that owns and brags it founded that country and stole our fed and our way of tying our currency to its value in gold.”
Another, on the same channel, called it “another convincing Mossad-CIA joint charade.”
A sitting president had nearly been shot at a press dinner in Washington. The shooter, a 31-year-old California tutor named Cole Tomas Allen, was already in custody. None of this had any plausible connection to Israel, Jews, or the Federal Reserve. The audience supplied that connection anyway.
At NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism, my colleagues and I collected and annotated 2,000 YouTube comments from 10 major US news outlets in the first 24 hours after the attack — left, center, and right — and compared them to our earlier work on the Charlie Kirk killing in September 2025 and on the saturation of antisemitic conspiracy during last summer’s US-Israeli campaign against Iran.
What we found is a structural shift in how online publics process political violence in real time. It is not, on its surface, what a Jewish reader might expect. It is more troubling than that.
At first glance, what I am about to describe might look like a decline in antisemitism. It is not.
In the Kirk corpus, roughly three in 10 comments performed conventional blame attribution: it was the Left’s fault, the Right’s fault, the media’s fault, Kirk’s own rhetoric. At the WHCD, that figure collapses to one in 20. Conspiracy theories — false flag claims, staged-event narratives, claims that Trump himself or the security state orchestrated the shooting — jump from a marginal six percent to roughly one in four. Within a single news cycle, the question being answered shifted from *who is responsible?* to *did this even happen?*
And it shifted across the entire spectrum.
At CBS, the most-engaged comment in the entire corpus — 1,887 likes — read: “That’s a helluva way to get out of the dinner berating.” The second most-engaged, 1,875 likes: “And the band played on.” A Titanic metaphor, Trump as the doomed captain.
One-word assertions reached the engagement-leading tier without any humor cover at all: “STAGED” at CBS, 659 likes. “Faker than 3 dollar bill BS” at CNN, 1,233 likes.
The same logic ran in the opposite direction at Fox News, where the staging frame was inverted into “MAGA-HOAX” — left-leaning commenters arriving on the Fox thread accused MAGA itself of having staged the attack. Different villain, identical architecture: a manufactured event, a hidden orchestrator, a perpetrator framed as a patsy, security-camera footage read as evidence of staging.
The motives stacked on top of one another — mutually exclusive, but co-existing without friction. Trump staged it to escape being roasted at the dinner. Trump staged it to manufacture sympathy for his $400 million ballroom expansion. Trump staged it to distract from issues like the Iran war, or from his collapsing poll numbers.
This is what a comment section now looks like in the hours after a political-violence event in the United States. Not partisan blame. Not grief. Not even shock. Instead, we see conspiracy as the default register of interpretation, stable across editorial positions.
What does this have to do with Jews?
Six weeks ago, during the US-Israeli campaign against Iran, the same architecture was running through the same comment sections — and the orchestrator slot was filled by Israel, by Mossad, by AIPAC, by “the family that founded that country,” by Trump-as-Israeli-asset. The mechanics were identical. What rotated was the villain.
This is what Jewish readers need to see clearly. The conspiratorial machinery that saturates American comment sections after political violence is not ideologically fixed. It is a template. It takes whatever villain the moment makes available — Israel during Iran coverage, Trump and the CIA at the WHCD, regardless of context, because that audience already carries the frame.
Antisemitism, in other words, has become structurally optional but instantly available. The infrastructure no longer needs a Jewish orchestrator to function. It still has a slot ready for one.
That is why a comparatively low antisemitism rates at most outlets this week is not a reprieve. It is a measurement of which villain the architecture happened to reach for. The infrastructure built up during the Iran coverage has not gone away. It has gone latent. The next event that supplies a Jewish or Israeli connection will reactivate it instantly, because the architecture itself was never dismantled.
One qualifier. Our corpus closed on April 26, before reports surfaced of writings recovered from Allen’s hotel room. What those documents revealed about his motive, they cannot affect the finding here. We are not diagnosing the shooter. We are diagnosing the commentariat.
Two things follow.
For those tracking online antisemitism: monitoring systems calibrated only to antisemitic markers will systematically miss what is actually happening. The threat to Jews is not located only in explicitly antisemitic comments. It is located in the universalization of the conspiratorial template that produces them whenever the conditions are right.
For those thinking about platform governance: we already know how to see this in close to real time. The bottleneck is not technical. It is institutional. Moving from documentation to early warning and intervention is a political choice, not a research problem.
The empty chair after the evacuation was Trump’s. The chair where antisemitism used to sit in this kind of discourse is, at most outlets this week, also empty. Neither absence is permanent.
Dr. Matthias J. Becker is AddressHate Research Scholar at New York University’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism. He is the founder and lead of Decoding Antisemitism, the largest study of online antisemitism conducted in Europe, and now directs its successor project, Decoding Hate, at NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism.
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‘Aliyah Buddies’: How Moving to Israel Helped Me Find My People, My Community, and My New Life
Illustrative: New olim disembark at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport on the first charter aliyah flight after he Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, arriving to begin new lives in Israel. Photo: The Algemeiner
When I made Aliyah to Israel last September, I knew another war with Iran was possible. So, on February 28th, when we all woke up to sirens, I wasn’t shocked. But I was surprised at how quickly ballistic missile attacks became almost a normal, routine part of reality.
Even so, as attacks continued with multiple impacts near where I live in Tel Aviv, I was still so glad that I had moved to Israel. Despite everything going on, I still wish I had done it 10 years ago. Now that I am here, I can’t even remember the fears that held me back for so long.
Part of the reason I feel this way comes from the support and community I have built here in Tel Aviv, largely with olim, and specifically those who were on my Aliyah flight.
Nearly seven months later, a group of us from the flight, organized by Nefesh B’Nefesh, in partnership with the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration, the Jewish Agency for Israel, Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael, and Jewish National Fund-USA, are in touch almost daily in an online chat group.
The group was born out of what I call “the Israel effect,” the phenomenon of people gravitating toward each other, looking for ways to help or get to know new people.
This happens in bomb shelters, at the grocery store, in the street — and it happened on our flight. Pretty immediately, I started talking to another olah who was sitting next to me on the plane. When we landed, we ended up in the airport waiting to complete the process of immigration with several other olim our age. We discussed everything from where we were from to where we were going to live and work, to our reasons for moving across the world and our army processes. Because we were starting a similar chapter of life, the connection was natural.
Eleven of us opened a group chat that day called “Aliyah Buddies.” At first, our questions revolved around finding ulpans and learning how to settle bureaucratic matters like converting our drivers licenses. Even though I had plenty of Israeli relatives on my father’s side of the family who were excited to accompany me to the Interior Ministry or the bank, this group was still a lifeline.
It was a place for us to put all of our worries, our doubts, and our struggles, and to be supported by the other people in the group who were experiencing the same problems. We moved from practical matters to inviting people out to events, planning reunions, asking for help choosing LinkedIn pictures, and giving general life updates. No matter what time of day or what the topic was, there was always somebody willing to help, encourage, or commiserate.
“I love this chat,” one member wrote in the Fall after a fellow group member posted photos of a single friend looking for a relationship. Just recently, a friend in the group chat got engaged and invited us all to her engagement party.
Under missile fire, this feeling is amplified. Shortly after the war’s first sirens, someone posted “Everyone good?” with a heart emoji. That led to everyone checking in from places across the country, then discussing the Home Front Command’s system of early warnings, alerts, and all-clears. In the weeks since, there have been constant check-ins along with photos from shelters, sharing fears and stress as well as more humorous stories about missile alerts interrupting showers.
In a post October 7th world, these connections are more meaningful to me, especially after I, like so many others, went through several friendship losses in the wake of the attacks. Friends who I had known for years unfollowed me or blocked me without so much as a single word. It doesn’t compare to what the State or people of Israel went through, but I definitely lost my spark for months, and felt guilty that I was living a safe, comfortable life in the Diaspora while so many were fighting and losing their lives here in Israel. Now, being here and building new communities like we’ve done in our group chat means everything to me.
Aliyah has shown me, more than anything, how deeply we as Jewish people care for one another — even if we don’t fully know them yet. What I didn’t fully understand before I moved to Israel was the strength of the community here. The sense of camaraderie among immigrants, the way people show up for each other — it makes the challenges of building a life here seem doable.
Anyone considering aliyah should understand that coming to Israel doesn’t solve all of your problems. But I’m finally in the right place, the place that feeds my soul, and where everything comes together. It is exhausting, frustrating and has challenged me in countless ways, but it is more amazing and fulfilling than I could have hoped — and at the end of the day, that’s what counts.
Arielle Gur made Aliyah to Tel Aviv in September 2025 out of love for her family, the country, and the people of Israel.