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This Israeli designer is bringing her Oct. 7-inspired shawl to Manhattan’s Vogue Knitting Live conference
(New York Jewish Week) — Among the 6,000 knitters descending on Times Square this week for a major fiber arts convention is a first-time attendee from Israel who hopes a shawl she made can counteract anti-Israel sentiment in the knitting community.
A mother of seven and a grandmother of two, Liza Rodrig, 48, is something of a handicraft and fashion icon in her own country. She has been on Israeli television, boasts a significant social media following and has even had her work featured on a virtual runway during Tel Aviv’s Fashion Week.
But Rodrig has never before been to Vogue Knitting Live, an extravaganza of fiber arts that features fashion shows, demonstrations, exhibits and a marketplace of luxury yarns and craft tools. She decided to make the trip after Oct. 7, when Hamas attacked southern Israel and plunged Israel into despair.
Armed with knitting needles and a deep belief that the craft “heals and fills the soul,” the Tel Aviv native began developing a new design soon after the attack. “The October 7 Shawl” is made of a cashmere-merino wool blend and mohair, knit into an elongated, triangular form that resembles the State of Israel. The shawl features a Star of David motif — and a seven-color gradient moving from black to to salmon to pink to white.
“I found myself choosing dark colors that slowly lighten — then I realized that this is what I want: to convey the message of what happened in Israel,” Rodrig said. “Oct. 7 — we didn’t think we would be able to get up from it — and how, little by little, optimism returns and therefore the colors become brighter.”
Rodrig will be showing off her design at an open house about Jewish knitting during Vogue Knitting Live as well as in a series of Zoom sessions in which knitters can create their own Oct. 7 shawls together as part of a community. (The events are organized by “Beautifully Jewish,” a monthly podcast on Jewish material culture from Tablet Magazine that this reporter co-hosts.)
Her participation in the trade show is welcome for Jewish knitters who say they have felt isolated and hurt by the reaction to Oct. 7 in what is typically a warm community, one that engages widely on social issues, not just on matters of skeins and stitches.
Liza Rodrig, left, and a model showcase some of Rodrig’s unique designs. (Courtesy)
“I was stunned by the initial lack of support by the knitting community, which historically has been quick to jump on social issues,” said Sue Blumberg of Larchmont, New York. She said some community members posted online “anti-Israel rhetoric without ever acknowledging the atrocities of Oct. 7. … and I was so angry at the growing visibility of antisemitism in what had always been my safe haven, the knitting community.”
Instagram, the visual social network where much knitting conversation takes place, has been rife with fighting and disinformation over the Israel-Hamas war. Hateful comments piled up on posts that ordinarily would have drawn feedback about new patterns and projects. Some Jewish knitters decided to skip major events such as the NY Sheep & Wool Festival in Rhinebeck, New York, out of fear that they would face emotional, verbal or even physical conflict. The dynamic has left lasting scars for some longtime knitters.
“Knitting had been a place I went to to buoy my spirits, lift up my heart. Right now, knitting feels equally fraught, equally painful, and that has been a hard place to find myself,” said Simone Heymann of Portland, Oregon. “It has been hard to feel so unwanted, so hated, amongst people I thought were ‘my people.’”
The division was not an online-only phenomenon. In Brooklyn, Lauren Gottlieb was part of a local knitting group for years and was stunned when members of her unit, all aware she was Jewish, didn’t text or call after Oct. 7.
“We just all watched a pogrom on TV! In 2023! I am not religious at all, don’t believe in God, but I am culturally Jewish — these women were at my son’s very small bar mitzvah but yet nobody thought to ask if I was OK,” she said.
Gottlieb will attend her sixth Vogue Knitting Live this year — this time wearing an indelible mark of Jewish pride. “I will be sure I wear something off-the-shoulder to show off my new ‘We Will Dance Again’ tattoo,” she said, referring to a motto adopted by survivors of the Oct. 7 Nova music festival massacre in Israel. “It’s, to me, the way others wear a Jewish star necklace.”
Now, Rodrig’s scarf could become a shared symbol for the Jewish knitting community. Having struggled as a student with dyslexia, she discovered that her intelligence and creativity knew no bounds in the world of sticks and strings after her mother-in-law taught her to knit 20 years ago. She soon started designing her own knitting patterns and eventually launched Liza Wool, a home-based knitting, sewing, weaving studio and school.
Liza Wool is a partnership between Liza and her husband, entrepreneur Kfir Rodrig. The pair met two years after Liza’s first husband died in a tragic accident, leaving the young widow alone with their daughter. When Liza met Kfir’s mother, the gentle tapping sounds of her knitting needles drew Liza to learn to knit — and from there, her relationship with Kfir, and knitting, took flight. Within a year the two were married and by 2022, Liza’s knitting-lesson business outgrew their living room and into a boho craft oasis in their backyard.
The upgraded space is made up of a series of connected wood-paneled rooms – one for weaving, one for sewing – leading to a homey chalet lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with a wide array of colorful textured yarns. Rodrig’s colorful designs adorn dress forms around the room.
“Everyone who comes to our school feels that they are cut off and are in a kind of village, even though it is in the center of Ramat HaSharon,” Rodrig said, referring to the central Israeli city where the family lives.
She believes her family — the six kids still at home and yellow Labrador Retriever Lucas — who float in and out of the craft spaces contributes to the warm, welcoming vibe because “everyone feels the good atmosphere and all my students are a part of it,” she said.
That space turned into a respite after Oct. 7. With many Israelis turning to crafting to take a break from worry and bad news, Rodrig has had to add another table to accommodate all those who want to knit together.
A post shared by צמר ליזה רודריג -בית ספר למלאכות יד עכשויות (@liza.rodrig.kniting.crochet)
Now, Rodrig is making her first trip to the Big Apple in 21 years, this time with a singular focus on the craft that saved her after the traumatic loss of her first husband. Her big dreams for the convention: meet knitwear design guru Shirley Paden-Bernstein, source new yarns for her shop in Ramat HaSharon and share her shawl with American Jews in need of support.
Though Rodrig’s new design is named The October 7 Shawl, she was thinking about the future when she designed it. Her journey to New York is meant to strengthen the American Jewish knitting community and give its members a way to wrap themselves in comfort.
”I asked for divine guidance on expressing the depth of my feelings,” she said, adding that the resulting design “mirrors the resilience of the Jewish community [and] encapsulates the journey from darkness to light.”
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The post This Israeli designer is bringing her Oct. 7-inspired shawl to Manhattan’s Vogue Knitting Live conference appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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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.
The post Driver Charged for Brooklyn Car Crash Killing Jewish Family Has History of Claiming CIA Follows Her first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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