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‘Only in America’: Algemeiner ‘J100’ Pick Elizabeth Pipko Discusses New Role With Republican National Committee
Author, model, and Algemeiner J100 selection Elizabeth Pipko. Photo: Sylvain Von K.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) has hired author and model Elizabeth Pipko, whom The Algemeiner selected for its 2023 list of the top 100 people positively influencing Jewish life, as its newest spokesperson.
Pipko, who worked for former US President Donald Trump’s long-shot bid for the White House in 2016, revealed the news on a New York City area radio show last Monday. With the position, she will continue an unplanned career in US politics that has drawn opprobrium from critics who continue to scorn both her modeling career and her support for one of the most controversial American political figures in recent memory.
“‘Swimsuit model joins RNC’ is what I’ve been reading in the press lately,” Pipko told The Algemeiner during an interview on Monday. “Apparently, the fact that I have modeled in a swimsuit supersedes any degrees I’ve earned, any books I’ve written, any advocacy work I’ve done, or any charitable work or anything else I will ever do.”
Born in 1995, Elizabeth “Liz” Pipko is the descendant of Russian Jews who emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States in the 1980s to escape antisemitism and an authoritarian government which reinforced its authority by terrorizing its own citizens.
Her parents used their fresh start in the US to give their children a better life. They kept a young Elizabeth busy studying foreign languages — she learned four, including Mandarin — and violin. In middle school, Pipko was elected captain of the math team, and she went on to earn degrees from Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. The opportunities the US accorded Pipko’s family made her fervently patriotic, she told The Algemeiner.
“I’m the daughter of immigrants who came here with $90 in their pockets, and it’s humbling that I’ve been offered this kind of job just one generation removed from their arrival here,” Pipko explained. “It’s significant because it represents, to me and hopefully to other people, what’s possible only in the United States of America. My dad used to tell me stories about how he would walk home instead of taking the subway so that he could afford dinner. Regardless of where people are politically, they should celebrate America’s unique ability to lift people up.”
As recounted in her 2020 memoir, titled Finding My Place: My Parents’ American Dream Come True, becoming a political operative for Trump — as well as being associated with the Republican Party in general — has blocked Pipko from joining the “glitterati” of high fashion, a circle to which she believes she would have likely been admitted with open arms had she chosen to promote the politics of the progressive left. She regrets nothing, however, and believes the fate of the Jewish people in America, as well as that of the US-Israel relationship, hangs on the outcome of this year’s presidential election — which, she hopes, will be a victory for Trump.
“The answer in November is another Trump administration and not another Biden administration,” she said. “We can right now make a direct comparison between how President Biden and President Trump treated Israel and responded to rising antisemitism. There is one president who after two decades of broken promises moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, who recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, who brokered the Abraham Accords and extended protections of Title VI [of the Civil Rights Act] to include antisemitism. Under the current administration, there has been nothing but chaos abroad and rising antisemitism here at home.”
Beyond her political work, Pipko has been active fighting antisemitism, encouraging support for Israel, and promoting Holocaust education. Last year, she launched a new project, “Lest People Forget,” a digital museum designed to allow individuals anywhere to contribute materials in order to help preserve the history of the Holocaust.
For Pipko, a strong America is good for the wellbeing of the Jewish people. When asked to identify the biggest problems facing the US today, she cited declining faith in the country’s principles and ideological polarization as obstacles to a new American Century.
“These days, I reflect on President Ronald Reagan’s warning that freedom is never more than a generation away from extinction,” Pipko said. “When I was a child, my parents told me every second they could about the magnitude of the American experiment and what it continues to mean to the world. Our chances of overcoming the threats we face today and handing down to future generations the America we know and love would be greatly increased by renewed pride in what he have here. Too many of us don’t appreciate it.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post ‘Only in America’: Algemeiner ‘J100’ Pick Elizabeth Pipko Discusses New Role With Republican National Committee first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Vancouver police raid a home linked to the director of Samidoun—which is now a terrorist entity in Canada
Vancouver police arrested and released one person at the home of Charlotte Kates, director of the terror group Samidoun, in a dramatic raid on Nov. 14. The raid was conducted […]
The post Vancouver police raid a home linked to the director of Samidoun—which is now a terrorist entity in Canada appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Trump Won A Majority of Votes In Heavily-Jewish New York City Precincts, Election Data Claims
Republican presidential candidate and former US President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the Forum River Center in Rome, Georgia, US, March 9, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Alyssa Pointer
President-elect Donald Trump won an overwhelming majority of the votes in New York City (NYC) precincts that were at least a quarter Jewish, according to a data analysis by the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), a prominent Washington DC-based political group.
RJC presented data on Friday affirming the notion that Trump won a higher proportion of the NYC Jewish vote than in previous elections, potentially signaling an ideological shift in the traditionally-liberal voting bloc. According to RJC data, Trump received the “overwhelming” majority of votes in precincts with a Jewish population of at least 25%.
Trump’s 2024 performance among Jews in NYC seems to mark a substantial improvement over the 2020 and 2016 elections, contests in which the president-elect struggled to make inroads among Jewish voters.
Voting data from the 2024 election also indicate that there was a significant shift among Jewish voters in Pennsylvania. President-elect Trump also enjoyed greater success in heavily-Jewish enclaves of deep-blue cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles, according to data compiled by the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners and the Los Angeles Times, respectively.
Trump’s increased success among Jewish voters in the Big Apple comes amid simmering anger over surging antisemitism across the country.
In the year following the Hamas slaughter of roughly 1200 people throughout southern Israel, college campuses have become embroiled in an unrelenting onslaught of protests opposing the Jewish state. Moreover, many Jews have expressed dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, suggesting that the president has not been a firm ally of the Jewish state.
Over the past year, NYC has been ravaged with raucous, often-violent anti-Israel demonstrations and an unrelenting spate of antisemitic hate crimes.
Columbia University, one of the most prestigious higher education institutions in the world, became a poster-child for the anti-Israel campus movement, erecting encampments and holding protests calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. Many NYC public schools came embroiled in scandal after teachers presented students with lesson plans that accused Israel of committing “apartheid” and “genocide” against the Palestinians.
Though most national Democrats continue to express support for Israel’s right to defend itself from Hamas terrorists, some figures in the party have, over the past year, adopted a more adversarial posture toward the Jewish state, often citing the humanitarian situation in Gaza as a key reason.
High-profile Democrats such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (MA) have suggested that Israel has perpetrated a “genocide” against Palestinians in Hamas-ruled Gaza, where Israel has been waging a military campaign targeting terrorists since the Oct. 7 atrocities. Earlier this year, a group of dozens of Democratic lawmakers, including former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), sent a letter to US President Joe Biden, urging him to “reconsider” approving offensive arms shipments to Israel.
Over the course of his campaign, Trump repeatedly touted his support for the Jewish state during his singular term in office. While courting Jewish voters, Trump has boasted about his administration’s work in fostering the Abraham Accords, promising to resume efforts to strengthen them once he retains office in January.
Trump also recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a strategic region on Israel’s northern border previously controlled by Syria, and also moved the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, recognizing the city as the Jewish state’s capital.
The post Trump Won A Majority of Votes In Heavily-Jewish New York City Precincts, Election Data Claims first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Attempted Robbery of Jewish Man in Brooklyn Puts Orthodox Community on Edge
Screenshot of masked men who attempted to rob Jewish man in Crown Heights, Brooklyn on Thursday. Photo: Screenshot
The Jewish community in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York was the target of another attack on Thursday evening, as three men attempted to rob a Hasidic man after stalking him through the neighborhood.
Footage of the incident was shared on X/Twitter by Yaacov Behrman, liaison of Chabad Headquarters and founder of the Jewish Future Alliance (JFA) nonprofit. It shows the men, whose faces were concealed by hoods and ski masks, chasing the man into the street and through the neighborhood after attempting to accost him.
No arrests have been made.
“He doesn’t give in easily, and I don’t think they got anything,” Behrman tweeted. “The Jewish Future Alliance is deeply concerned not only about the increase in crime but also the fact that, once again, the perpetrators were wearing masks. We need to reinstate mask laws.”
The explosion of an antisemitic hate crime spree in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn has set the Orthodox Jewish community on edge in recent weeks.
Last Tuesday, two men beat a middle-aged Hasidic man after he refused to surrender his cell phone in compliance with what appears to have been an attempted robbery. According to multiple accounts, the assailants were two Black teenagers.
That incident was the third time in eight days that an Orthodox resident of Crown Heights was targeted for violence and humiliation. Before then, an African American male smacked a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was commuting to school on his bike in the heavily neighborhood, which is heavily Jewish, and less than a week earlier, an assailant slashed a visibly Jewish man in the face.
Most recently, a masked man was caught on video approaching a visibly Jewish father walking with his two sons and grabbing one of the children in broad daylight. He was unable to secure possession of the child, whose father fought back immediately and did not let go of his son. Police later identified the man as Stephan Stowe, 28 — a suspect gang member with an extensive criminal history which includes 33 prior arrests — and charged arrested him attempted kidnapping and endangering the welfare of a child.
In each case, the suspect was allegedly a Black male, a pattern of conduct which continues to strain Black-Jewish relations across the Five Boroughs.
Black-on-Jewish crime is a social issue which has been studied before. In 2022, a report published by Americans Against Antisemitism (AAA) showed that Orthodox Jews were the minority group most victimized by hate crimes in New York City and that 69 percent of their assailants were African American. Seventy-seven percent of the incidents took place taking in predominantly Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Of all assaults that prompted criminal proceedings, just two resulted in convictions.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” AAA founder and former New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D) told The Algemeiner. “Shouldn’t there be a plan for how we’re going to deal with it? What’s the answer? Education? We’ve been educating everybody forever for God’s sake, and things are just getting worse.”
The problem has become acute in recent years. In July 2023, for example, a 22-year-old Israeli Yeshiva student, who was identifiably Orthodox and visiting New York City for the summer holiday, was stabbed with a screwdriver by one of two men who attacked him after asking whether he was Jewish and had any money. The other punched him in the face. Earlier that year, 10- and 12-year-olds were attacked on Albany Avenue by four African American teens.
According to a report issued in August by New York state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, antisemitic incidents accounted for a striking 65 percent of all felony hate crimes in New York City last year. The report added that throughout the state, nearly 44 percent of all recorded hate crime incidents and 88 percent of religious-based hate crimes targeted Jewish victims.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Attempted Robbery of Jewish Man in Brooklyn Puts Orthodox Community on Edge first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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