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Pro-Israel Influencer Discusses Jewish Identity After Oct. 7, How to Think About US Election as a Progressive Zionist
Lizzy Savetsky and her three children Stella (11), Juliet (10), and Ollie (3). Photo: Abbie Sophia
Every year, millions of Diaspora Jews visit the State of Israel to see family, pray at the Holy sites, and experience life in the world’s only Jewish state. It is an excursion which brings one’s Jewish identity into focus and connects her to the distant past, when the Jewish people escaped bondage in Egypt to found “a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation.”
So it was that on Oct. 6, pro-Israel social media influencer Elizabeth “Lizzy” Savetsky — along with her husband, Ira, three children, and parents — were in the city of Jerusalem at the King David Hotel. They were in “amazing spirits” and there to celebrate Sukkot and Simchat Torah, which would see their youngest son, Ollie, receive his first haircut in accordance with the Orthodox tradition Upsherin. He had just turned three years old.
“I remember the day so well. My youngest daughter does a weekly torah parshah, a little one-minute torah lesson she does every week, and I remember filming it at the hotel and that she was talking about Simchat Torah. Also, I have all these pictures on my phone from Oct. 6. We were all dressed up so nice and really trying to put our best foot forward,” Savetsky told The Algemeiner in a series of interviews this month.
“And there’s nothing like being at the King David Hotel on Friday night before Shabbat or a holiday, because of the energy of all the different Jews coming together to, in this case, bring in both,” Savetsky continued. “Just running into people all over, friends and followers, from across the world made me feel so connected to my people and my land. I had never been more in love with Israel and in love with being a Jewish person. I was feeling so intensely connected to my people and my land.”
The trip was, she explained, a “normal” one like others the family had taken before, and while Israelis were then engaged in a polarizing debate over a series of judicial reforms proposed by the administration of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the state of affairs was not unusual for Israeli politics as Savetsky knew it. Her first introduction to the nation’s tempestuous disputes over its future came in 1995, just months after her 10th birthday, when an extremist assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to protest the Oslo Accords, a series of ambitious agreements which aimed at ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for good.
The peace process ultimately failed at creating a permanent resolution to the conflict, but on Oct. 6, it seemed to many observers that the embers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were flaming out with time. Israel had just three years earlier entered into the Abraham Accords — normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan — and the United States was investing immense energy in brokering what could have a historic normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia that was not preconditioned by the establishment of a Palestinian state.
“And then of course, Oct. 7 happened,” Savetsky told The Algemeiner.
On that morning, Ira Savetsky took the couple’s middle daughter to synagogue while Lizzy remained at the hotel with their eldest daughter, Stella, to finish getting ready for what she knew would be “a long service.” Feeling restive for being delayed by her mother’s morning routine, Stella stepped outside their room and heard “sirens going off” and someone say that a “fire drill” was taking place. She immediately reported the news to her mother.
“I said there are no drills in Israel, and I knew immediately that something was very wrong. And just after she said that, the hotel loud speaker came on and said everyone in the hotel needed to immediately report to the south staircase and into the bomb shelter,” Savetsky recounted. “When we got to the staircase, it was just complete chaos and panic. There was woman behind me in a towel because she had just come out of the shower. Nobody knew what was going on.”
There was an indication of danger that morning, but Ira had refused to believe his own eyes. While walking to synagogue, he thought he saw a rocket being intercepted over Jerusalem, which he deemed an impossibility. Because it was Shabbat, he did not have his smartphone, preventing him from checking for news updates. After being reunited back in the bomb shelter, two Armenian tourists visiting Israel for the first time did have their phones and relayed to Lizzy and Ira “spotty details” of an attack “by land, sea, and air.” Lizzy panicked.
“I was trying to understand what that meant. By land, you mean they came in by foot? There were terrorists in the country by foot?” she told The Algemeiner. “And then, one of the other first reports we heard was that a solider had been kidnapped. That was shocking, and we were enraged hearing that. Little did we know just how horrible the attacks were. By the time that Shabbat ended on the evening of the 7th, we knew a lot more.”
Elizabeth Savetsky was born in August 1985 in Fort Worth Texas, a community she described as pertinaciously “conservative.” However, she embraced the egalitarianism and openness of the progressive movement, which was the basis of her worldview when she arrived on the campus of New York University in the fall of 2003 to study fashion. To this day, she supports abortion rights, gay marriage, and other core tenets of the US Democratic Party.
“I only became more liberal, more radicalized, as one does on a college campus. But of course, at the time, there wasn’t protests happening against Israel nor raging antisemitism, and once those two things started to surface I started to do my digging,” she said.
After graduation, Savetsky treaded an unusual path to becoming a pro-Israel activist. She found several jobs in “the fashion PR [public relations] world” and had moderate success with maintaining a blog, a popular form of writing on what was still, in the mid-2000s, a nascent internet. But Americans were reading less, she explained, and she shifted her focus to emerging social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, which allowed her to exhibit her fashion sense and connect with followers who were making celebrities out of everyday people overnight. Her Jewishness and support for Israel were present on her social media pages, but not, she noted, pronounced.
Then in May 2021, Hamas fired 1,700 rockets into Tel Aviv, killing 17 people and wounding hundreds of others. Anti-Zionists seized the opportunity to flood social media with a barrage of posts which, in addition to promoting ancient antisemitic tropes, vowed to lead a movement for Israel’s destruction. To Savetsky’s dismay, many of the influencers leading the charge were progressives and Democrats she had considered “allies.” Their anti-Zionism and classifying Jews as “white colonists” and “oppressors” prompted a convulsive upending of her long-held beliefs and the way she engaged her social media followers.
“It was the first time as a social media influencer that I had seen being demolished online, and I had this realization that there was this secondary war happening in the digital space,” Savetsky said. “We had always seen the demonization of Israel in the legacy media, but this was new for me and I had literally no idea what to do. You know, there was no manual on how to be a social media advocate.”
Savetsky began recording a series of short video clips about Israel, Zionism, and the war — “Stories” — and posting them on Instagram. She lost thousands of followers but gained hundreds of thousands more. Such is her reach today that when The Algemeiner first encountered her at a rally held near George Washington University in May, she was surrounded by a crush of students clamoring for photographs and conversation.
However, fame has complicated Savetsky’s life by widening the circle of people to whom she is accountable. Earlier this month, she announced to her 350,000 followers her intention to vote for former US President Donald Trump in this year’s presidential election, a decision prompted by yet another unprecedented year for America, Israel, and the world. Doing so unleashed volleys of insults as well as accusations of fascism, fraud, and betrayal. Her decision was not, she told The Algemeiner, cavalier. The events of Oct. 7 left a “permanent mark” in her memory, and one of the first things she did after regaining access to her phone on that day was update her followers about the attack, which was a way for Jews who were in Israel to communicate and share news with the Diaspora in real time.
For Savetsky, the Democratic Party’s hesitation both to denounce the anti-Zionist movement’s blaring antisemitism and to support Israel’s latest war with Hamas is an outrage, but that does not mean, she emphasized, that she endorses Trump’s character or is ignorant of his questionable associations. She explained that she did not have a conversion experience but a realignment of her political priorities, of which Israel is “number one.” She remains conflicted about Trump but believes that his policy toward Israel will be superior to anything implemented by a Kamala Harris administration.
“Israel is my priority, and Republicans and I will never align on everything. I am pro-choice, I am pro-gay marriage, I am very much a liberal valued person, but then again, I don’t believe that the Democratic Party is upholding my liberal values either because it has become so extreme,” she told The Algemeiner. “As voters, we have to prioritize what’s most important to us. And right now, I fear for our and my children’s survival as Jews.”
Asked about Trump’s November 2022 dinner with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes and recent news that Donald Trump Jr. was scheduled to appear at an event with Candace Owens — from which Owens was later removed for reasons that may not have been related to her alleged promotion of antisemitism — Savetsky said: “I called all of that out, and this is why I always say that we can’t put our faith in a human being. I don’t know if I can trust any of them, but what choices do we have?”
She added, “This is not a choice that I want to make, but it’s a choice I have to make, because I’m not pleased with a lot of things about either of them. I don’t necessarily like Donald Trump, and I wouldn’t have dinner with the guy. But he’s the better choice.”
Determined not to make Oct. 7 their children’s last memory of Israel, the Savetsky family once again made a pilgrimage to Israel this month. While waiting for their flight at John F. Kennedy International Airport, their second eldest child, Juliet, celebrated her 10th birthday, which the airport staff announced over the intercom at midnight. Seven hours were shaved off the day because of their traveling to a different time-zone, but she did not complain “too much,” Savetsky said. They were all happy to be going back.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Pro-Israel Influencer Discusses Jewish Identity After Oct. 7, How to Think About US Election as a Progressive Zionist first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Meta Boots Anti-Zionist Columbia University Group From Instagram
Pro-Hamas Columbia University students march in front of pro-Israel demonstrators on Oct. 7, 2024, the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Photo: Roy De La Cruz via Reuters Connect
Meta Platforms, Inc. has banned the infamous Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) anti-Zionist student group from its platforms, a decision that the company says is irrevocable.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, CUAD is responsible for spreading pro-Hamas propaganda, assaulting Jewish students, and disrupting academic study at Columbia with unauthorized demonstrations and property destruction. Its behavior, among other factors, drove the Trump administration’s cancellation in March of $400 million in federal contracts and grants awarded to Columbia.
CUAD first reported that Meta shuttered its Instagram account on Monday, denouncing the measure as being part of “a long and concerted effort from corporations and imperial powers to erase the Palestinian people.” Meta later justified the decision to Jewish Insider, explaining that CUAD had forced the company’s hand by ceaselessly transgressing the platform’s terms of use of agreement. Meta forbids groups which advocate violence to operate on Instagram, and CUAD has used its account to call for toppling the Israeli and US governments. Additionally, its Instagram account has been essential for promoting unlawful demonstrations CUAD continues to hold at Columbia University and for sharing resources that have helped its collaborators avoid punishment.
Meta told Jewish Insider that the group won’t be allowed back.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, CUAD’s activities have been described as a threat to the civil rights and security of Jewish Columbia University students.
Last April, CUAD members commandeered a section of campus and, after declaring it a “liberated zone,” lit flares and chanted pro-Hamas and anti-American slogans. When the New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrived to disperse the unlawful gathering, hundreds of CUAD members and their affiliates reportedly amassed around them to prevent the restoration of order. During ensuing clashes with law enforcement, one student screamed “Yes, we’re all Hamas, pig!” while others shouted, “Long live Hamas!” and filmed themselves praising the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the US-designated terrorist group.
In September, during the university’s convocation ceremony, the group distributed a pamphlet which called on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s movement to destroy Israel. Several sections of the document were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose was to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
In February, CUAD committed infrastructural sabotage by flooding the toilets of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) with concrete. Numerous reports indicate the attack may have been the premeditated result of planning sessions which took place many months ago at an event held by Alpha Delta Phi (ADP) — a literary society, according to the Washington Free Beacon. During the event, the Free Beacon reported, ADP distributed literature dedicated to “aspiring revolutionaries” who wish to commit seditious acts.
Following two occupations of administrative buildings at Barnard College, Laura Rosenbury, the school’s president, denounced the group as a paranoid hate-organization.
“They [CUAD] operate in the shadows, hiding behind masks and Instagram posts with Molotov cocktails aimed at Barnard buildings, antisemitic tropes about wealth, influence, and ‘Zionist billionaires,’ and calls for violence and disruption at any cost,” Rosenbury wrote in an op-ed published by The Chronicle of Higher Education. “They claim Columbia University’s name, but the truth is, because their members wear masks, no one really knows whose interests they serve.”
Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Meta Boots Anti-Zionist Columbia University Group From Instagram first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Tlaib Set to Headline Terrorist-Connected Palestinian Event in New Jersey
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) speaking at a press conference at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, March 11, 2025. Photo: Michael Brochstein/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) is set to headline a conference that is also hosting a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an internationally designated terrorist organization, according to documents obtained by The Algemeiner.
The Palestinian American Community Center (PACC) in New Jersey will hold its annual conference, titled “Grounded in Action: Exploring the Power of the Palestinian Diaspora,” from Thursday through Sunday. Wisam Rafeedie, a self-admitted member of the PFLP, will address the conference virtually on the 4th day of the event.
According to PACC’s website, the conference “is a call to recommit ourselves to amplifying and supporting the Palestinian voices and advocates who have long been at the forefront of our struggle.” PACC also calls on members of the Palestinian diaspora “to leverage our unique positions and power” to “push for meaningful action.””
Tlaib is scheduled to headline the event’s “Youth Day,” in which she will host a reading and signing for her new children’s book, Mama in Congress, alongside her son Adam Tlaib. According to Harper Collins, the book’s publisher, Mama in Congress will chronicle Tlaib’s journey from Detroit to the halls of the federal government. The book will also detail Tlaib’s supposed efforts in working toward “justice for all” in Congress.
The conference will include several workshops educating attendees on “resistance,” “solidarity,” and “collective struggle.” The event will also feature a session stressing the importance of “centering Palestinian prisoners.”
This is not the first time that Tlaib has come under scrutiny for attending a pro-Palestinian conference tied to terrorists. Last May, Tlaib came under fire for speaking at the “The People’s Conference for Palestine,” which also hosted Rafeedie among other individuals connected to terrorist groups. During that event, Rafeedie praised Hamas, the terrorist group that runs Gaza and murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages on Oct. 7, 2023, as a “resistance” against Israel. He defended and downplayed Hamas’s atrocities, saying that “Zionists lie like they breathe.”
“This is not a struggle between Hamas and Israel. Hamas is part of the resistance of the Palestinian people. The core issue is between the Palestinian people and the project of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing,” Rafeedie said.
Rafeedie also called for the complete destruction of Israel and the replacement of the Jewish state with a “democratic” Palestine.
“There is no longer a place for the two-state solution for any Palestinian. The only solution is one democratic Palestinian state on all Palestinian land, which will end the Zionist project in Palestine,” Rafeedie continued.
Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman elected to the US Congress, has positioned herself as a fierce and outspoken critic of Israel. Since entering office, Tlaib has repeatedly accused the Jewish state of implementing an “apartheid” regime in the West Bank and turning Gaza into an “open-air prison.”
In the year following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, Tlaib has sharpened her condemnations of the Jewish state. In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, she hesitated to release an official statement acknowledging the mass slaughter, abductions, and rapes perpetrated by Hamas. Less than two weeks after the invasion, Tlaib introduced a “ceasefire” resolution between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group. In November 2023, the House of Representatives voted to censure Tlaib over her anti-Israel rhetoric.
The progressive firebrand has also condemned Israel’s defensive military operations in Gaza, accusing the Jewish state of committing a full-scale “genocide” against the civilians of the enclave. She has also peddled the unsubstantiated claim that Israel has purposefully inflicted mass starvation against Palestinian civilians and urged the Biden administration when it was in power to impose an arms embargo on Israel. Simmering with anger over the Biden administration’s support for Israel, she refused to endorse former Vice President Kamala Harris’s failed presidential bid.
Tlaib’s office did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
The post Tlaib Set to Headline Terrorist-Connected Palestinian Event in New Jersey first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Driver Charged for Brooklyn Car Crash Killing Jewish Family Has History of Claiming CIA Follows Her
An overturned auto in a car crash flipped on its roof landing on a mother and her three children, killing two children on March 29, 2025, in Brooklyn, New York. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
A Brooklyn woman who was charged for a car crash on Saturday that killed a Jewish woman and her two young daughters has alleged in the past on social media that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is following her, a claim she also made to first responders after the fatal accident.
Miriam Yarimi, 32, is facing multiple charges, including three counts of second-degree manslaughter, three counts of criminal negligent homicide, and four counts of second-degree assault. Yarimi — a Brooklyn resident and wigmaker who is also a Jewish mother herself – was transported to NYU Langone Hospital in Brooklyn in stable condition. She was then moved to the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital, according to reports.
The car crash killed Natasha Saada, 32, and her daughters – 8-year-old Diana and 6-year-old Deborah. Saada’s son Philip, 4, was injured in the crash and hospitalized at Maimonides Medical Center in Borough Park in critical condition. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrested Yarimi, a single mother who has a young daughter, and she is awaiting arraignment in connection to the crash that took place Saturday afternoon at an intersection on Ocean Parkway off Quentin Road in Midwood. Police said she was driving with a suspended license at the time of the crash.
“This was a horrific tragedy caused by someone who shouldn’t have been on the road,” said Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. “A mother and two young children killed, another child fighting for his life, a family and a neighborhood devastated in an instant. The NYPD sends its condolences to the family of the victims.”
Yarimi, who shares custody of her daughter with her ex-husband, reportedly told first responders with the Jewish-led volunteer ambulance service Hatzalah that she was “possessed” and that she believes the CIA was pursing her.
She has made similar claims about the CIA many times on Instagram, a former customer of hers told The Algemeiner on Tuesday. The source, who wishes to remain anonymous, purchased a wig from Yarimi several years ago and has been following her on social media for a number of years. Yarimi has 16,000 followers on Instagram and screenshots of her since-deleted posts, obtained by The Algemeiner, confirm she previously believed that the CIA is tracking her.
“It’s very convenient to plead insanity. But it’s not new. She is actually insane. This is [an] old topic,” the former client told The Algemeiner. “She thinks that she’s been followed by CIA for a long, long time already. She truly believes that CIA is spying on her … But only people who follow her [on social media] and know her for a long time would know this. She’s sick.”
In one since-deleted Instagram post, Yarimi wrote in part about the CIA: “They have control of EVERYONE here in this world BESIDES ME … when I went to Miami, it all clicked … once they knew that I knew, they followed me around the hotel, dressed up as young parents with a doona [stroller] and disco outfits like I was stupid and didn’t know who they were … if anything they stuck out like glue.”
“It was the government, blackjack, and the CIA who manipulated everyone and took control of everyone’s mind but because I was the catalyst and the sacrificial lamb so they did their best to break me,” she wrote in a separate post that has also been deleted. “They experimented (abused) me and that’s when they cloned my daughter and I so when I die, they could reinsert me into the crowd and make me into another person.”
Yarimi previously had a highlight on her Instagram page where she talked about demons and the CIA, but it has since been deleted, her former customer told The Algemeiner. Yarimi also wrote on her Instagram Story once that she believes Hollywood is trying to clone people to look like her.
“Why do you think most of the girls in Hollywood have similar features to me like Rita Ora & Jane the Virgin etc,” Yarimi once wrote on Instagram, as seen in a screenshot shared with The Algemeiner. “Wake up, this is not just happening in Hollywood. This is happening right here in the Jewish community in Brooklyn.”
Not long after she uploaded the Instagram posts, Yarimi was admitted to a psychiatric ward and when she returned to social media, she spoke about the experience, the source told The Algemeiner.
“After the above posts she was locked up for two weeks in a psych ward. She’s very public. She went live when paramedics broke into her house and took her. She came back online two weeks later and spoke about her psych ward experience,” Yarimi’s follower said. “And it was saved in her [Instagram] highlights as well … It was horrible.”
The Algemeiner has seen a copy of Yarimi’s Instagram video that shows police drag her out of bed after she refused their orders to get up by herself. In the clip, three police officers are seen in her bedroom and a fourth is standing by the doorway.
Another longtime Instagram follower of Yamini’s described her as “delusional” when speaking to The Algemeiner, and confirmed that Yamini has spoken online repeatedly in the past about how she believes the CIA is tracking her.
In December 2024, Yarimi won a $2 million settlement from the city of New York after she filed a lawsuit claiming that former NYPD Officer George Mastrokostas repeatedly raped her for several years after falsely arresting her.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD Deputy Chief Richie Taylor attended the funeral for Saada and her daughters on Sunday in Brooklyn before their bodies were flown to Israel for burial. Saada is survived by her husband, Sidney Saada, her sons Philip and Jacob, her parents and three siblings. Adams called the crash “a tragic accident of a Shakespearean proportion.”
“A mother going for a simple stroll on a sunny day was struck and killed. As we pray for their families and this entire community, the city mourns this loss,” he added.
Police said Yarimi was driving a blue Audi A3 sedan when she rear-ended a 2023 silver Toyota Camry with TLC plates that was carrying four passengers – a mother and three children. NYPD Commissioner Tisch said the force of the crash caused the Toyota Camry to be pushed aside, while the Audi moved forward, crashing into Saada and her children as they were crossing the street before the car overturned. Saada and her two daughters were pronounced dead at the scene. The driver of the Toyota Camry, a 62-year-old man, was hospitalized in stable condition. The four passengers inside his car sustained minor injuries and were also hospitalized, according to Tisch.
Yarimi’s car had 99 parking and camera violations between August 2023 and March 2025, including 21 speed camera tickets and five red light tickets, Eyewitness News ABC 7 reported, citing a website that tracks vehicle violations using city data. She had nearly $10,500 in fines and a car with the same license plate as Yarimi’s still has $1,345 in unpaid fines, the news outlet also revealed.
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