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Who is Siggy Flicker, the ‘Real Housewife’ behind Trump’s Rosh Hashanah message condemning ‘liberal Jews’?
(JTA) — Siggy Flicker, a former Real Housewife of New Jersey, says she often finds herself apologizing when she hangs out with her friend Donald Trump, a fellow reality TV star turned Republican activist.
“We’ll talk about the country and how much we love the country,” Flicker told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency this week. “And I’m always expressing to him, ‘It’s just so upsetting to me, I’m so sorry, Mr. President, for the liberal American Jews.’”
Most of the time, she said, that thought gets shared in private conversations: Flicker, who now lives in Florida and is a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, said she’s dined with the former president and flown on his private plane. But this week, the sentiment exploded into public view after Trump shared a graphic that Flicker made for Rosh Hashanah on his social media platform.
“Just a quick reminder for liberal Jews who voted to destroy America & Israel because you believed false narratives!” said the graphic, which Trump posted on Sunday, near the end of the holiday. “Let’s hope you learned from your mistakes and make better choices moving forward! Happy New Year!”
The post immediately ignited criticism of Trump, who has accused left-leaning American Jews of “great disloyalty” in the past. A range of Jewish organizations condemned the post, which highlighted his record on Israel as president, and some called it “offensive” and “dangerous.”
Flicker, the Israeli-born daughter of Holocaust survivors, dismisses the concerns and says she was proud to see the former president share her work.
“Who cares if they found it offensive,” Flicker told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “The bottom line is Donald Trump is leading in the polls. Donald Trump is not an antisemite. Donald Trump is a lover of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. And at the end of the day, if the liberal Jews are gonna get triggered and they find it offensive, who cares?”
Trump’s post offered new prominence for the role that Flicker is playing in the effort to return him to the White House. With some of his past Jewish advisors, including his own daughter and son-in-law, seemingly keeping their distance from his campaign as he faces four separate indictments, Flicker has emerged as something of an unofficial Jewish ambassador for Trump — espousing views that are far outside the norm for American Jews.
On her Instagram account, she lambasts President Joe Biden, who received a large majority of Jewish votes; warns of the arrival of migrants, an issue with Jewish historical freight; and quotes Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who echoed the antisemitic “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.
There was a time, not long ago, when Flicker said, “I don’t like negative,” and added that she wanted to “bring light” to the cutthroat world of reality TV. Born in Israel in 1967 — her full first name is Sigalit — Flicker is the daughter of Mordecai Paldiel, a Holocaust survivor who served as director of Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nations department for more than 20 years. She has lived in the United States since childhood and, as an adult, crafted a career as a matchmaker and relationship coach.
She was the host of a dating show, “Why Am I Still Single?!” which ran on VH1 for one season starting in 2011. Beginning five years later, she appeared on two seasons of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey.” Formerly a resident of Tenafly, a New Jersey suburb with a large Israeli population, Flicker now lives in Boca Raton, Florida full-time.
She has also written a book on dating and has co-hosted a podcast. Flicker’s second marriage, in 2012, made news because her first husband and the father of her two children served as best man.
It was around the time of her stint on “RHONJ,” starting in early 2016, as she tells it, that she first saw Trump’s appeal. (She was on the show for two seasons before quitting in a move that an anonymous source told Page Six was a response to antisemitic bullying.) She told JTA that she was a Democrat before then but saw Trump, a fellow reality TV star, as a fresh alternative.
“I said to myself, ‘Wow, finally a non-politician who’s a great businessman,” Flicker recalled. “I’m going to give him a try.’”
Seven years later, Flicker is a sworn Trump devotee. She said she and her husband have become personal friends with the former president in recent years, getting to know him through a mutual acquaintance, Alina Habba, who is one of Trump’s attorneys.
Since 2020, Flicker has been the spokeswoman for Jexit, an activist group formed in 2018 to persuade Jews to abandon their historical affinity with the Democratic Party — whose candidates regularly receive a solid majority of Jewish votes. She first got involved in Jexit after meeting its founder, Michelle Terris, and realizing that their sons were friends at Pennsylvania State University.
“She’s really a force and she is a true figurehead for our movement because she’s a legal immigrant,” Terris told JTA.
Jexit — which was loosely inspired by a similar group for Black Americans called Blexit, founded by the Black conservative activist Candace Owens — hosts prayer breakfasts, rallies and is planning an upcoming trip to Israel for a cohort of interfaith leaders. One of its goals is explicitly to promote “Judeo-Christian values,” a concept some critics say subsumes Jewish tradition within a promotion of Christian messages.
“Together we’re gonna make Judeo-Christian values great again,” Flicker said. “We’re not relying on the liberal Jews.”
Jexit’s programming director, Sofia Manolesco, told JTA that about 5,000 people are on Jexit’s mailing list. In a follow-up email, Terris said that after a “rough calculation,” their membership totals “50+ thousand.” The group has fewer than 10,000 Instagram followers; Flicker has more than 600,000.
The fact that Trump’s Rosh Hashanah post was written by a Jewish woman who works for a Jewish organization does not excuse it, said Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America.
“This is in his name, so it doesn’t matter who wrote it, this is attributed to him,” Soifer said. “It doesn’t matter that Jexit claims to be a Jewish organization.”
Soifer called the post’s claims “inherently antisemitic” and said, “A Jewish person can say offensive and even antisemitic things as well, if they so choose.”
In addition to her stances on Jews and Israel, Flicker holds a variety of conspiracy-driven views that have become increasingly commonplace on the far right. She told JTA that the 2020 election was stolen; that the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was primarily made up of “people dressed as Trump supporters” and was less severe than the destruction resulting from nationwide racial justice protests in 2020; and that Jews and Black people largely supported Trump ahead of the 2016 election until the “deep state” and “radical left” realized they “could not control him.” (She has previously said she was not in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021.) She also referred to Biden repeatedly as the “resident” — a term meant to imply that he is not a legitimate president.
Her organization also repeats falsehoods about the 2020 election. The Jexit website still includes a flier for a 2020 local “Stop the Steal” event in Miami, and Flicker said, “One hundred percent, Jexit believes the 2020 election was stolen.” She also texted JTA a meme that read, “January 6th will be remembered as the day the government set up a staged riot to cover up the fact they certified a fraudulent election.”
Flicker is confident Trump will win next year — “regardless of what the deep state and the radical left do,” she said. She only wishes that most American Jews could see the light.
“It’s the number-one question that I get: ‘How do you feel about your own people funding their own demise?’” she said. “And I’m like, ‘It’s heartbreaking to me.’ But you know what, at this point, you got to wake them up and tell the truth.”
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The post Who is Siggy Flicker, the ‘Real Housewife’ behind Trump’s Rosh Hashanah message condemning ‘liberal Jews’? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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New York was always a lot more Jewish than Toronto could ever be—but the contrast is more obvious now
It’s a commonplace experience of a Diaspora Jew visiting Israel to realize that suddenly, this thing that made you different is actually the least remarkable thing about you.
The character Alexander Portnoy speaks to this in Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint—but I’ve also just lived it when visiting Tel Aviv or Rehovot or wherever. Whether you experience it as being Othered in a bad way or as a point of pride and what makes you special, you get to Israel and lo and behold, no one is surprised that your family doesn’t celebrate Christmas or whatever. Streets are named after Jewish figures, businesses are closed on Jewish holidays, Jewishness is assumed, so distinctiveness requires other sources. Being Jewish isn’t associated with being this way or that—not with being neurotic or good with money—because Jews are everywhere you look. The bimbos and himbos are Jewish, too.
So it took me by surprise, visiting my hometown of New York City over the holiday break, to feel a bit, well, Israel-visit-ish while there. It’s not that everyone is Jewish (nor, for that matter, is everybody Jewish in Israel), but rather that there’s just some crucial difference in population and culture such that it is not a whole thing to be Jewish in post-Oct. 7 New York, not in the way it is in Toronto. Goodness knows that relative to plenty of places, Toronto’s got Jews. But it is, at most, a city with some Jewish areas. We’re Canadian, sure, but one of the city’s many Others.
The streets of Manhattan are not lined with signage admonishing passersby to reflect on Israel’s misdeeds. You can walk for blocks or even days on end and not see a keffiyeh, not because the United States bans free expression but because the interest just isn’t there. The little that remained of post-Oct. 7 signage was more in the hostage-freeing realm than the other sort.
But there isn’t a tremendous amount of pro-Israel this-and-that, either. (I saw maybe one baseball cap expressing support for Israel?) It’s more like, look at all the shiny things you can buy in America, and particularly in Manhattan, so have at it! Shiny things and, uh, MAGA-wear.
But there’s an underlying Jewishness that’s just so much in the air you wouldn’t notice it if it’s part of your everyday life. There are the old standbys (food shops like Zabar’s, etc.) but also newcomers. Breads Bakery is not that new, but it’s newly ubiquitous, and unambiguously, unapologetically Jewish, from the Happy Challahdays signage to the sufganiyot labeled as such. In corporate lobbies and whatnot, no Christmas tree lacks an accompanying menorah. This is not because ‘woke’ or whatever, it’s not a war on Christmas, it’s what the population demands. I heard no shortage of Hebrew.
This is not about better or worse; I am describing the world as it is. Not to suggest anyone up and move (not a trivial thing, even for dual citizens) in either direction. And the thing I experience when I walk out the door in Toronto, where the fact that I’m Jewish is this whole thing, one that is interpreted by some as a prompt for theses on geo-politics that I simply don’t have, is not one in New York, where Jewish is among many unremarkable ways to be. So, Phoebe, you’re Jewish, what’s that about? In New York, no one thinks to start that conversation. Fine not no one, it depends the environment, but it wouldn’t be nearly as regular an occurrence.
Whereas a man in Zabar’s told me that he went to school with the store’s founder, what would have been about 70 years ago. Why did he tell me this? Because it’s what you do while you wait for lox, you tell the person standing next to you your life story. Torontonians would never. We’re too busy not talking to people to whom we haven’t been formally introduced, or, I guess, sorting out the Middle East by leaving what are, in effect, passive-aggressive notes. On the plus side, we can buy our groceries without anyone chatting with us, if we’re not feeling it that day.
Mainly, though, I did not experience public space as a demand to form a coherent position on Middle East politics. This is not because the city lacks anyone who ponders such things (Columbia University is located in Manhattan) but because there’s a level of Jewish presence—or, even in Manhattan, American conservatism—that acts as a buffer against the flags-flyers-keffiyehs blanketing of public space. It struck me the moment I was back in Toronto just how visible the conflict is, including—if less so, in Roncesvalles Village—the pro-Israel side of things.
While I was there, I kept thinking: what are the authors of the anthology On Being Jewish Now, clustered as they are in the part of NYC I come from, experiencing? Or rather, how would they react to so much as five minutes anywhere other than the Upper East or West Sides? Places where a kind of secular-ish cultural Jewishness is so entrenched that you don’t ever really think you’re alone in believing, for example, that Israelis are human beings and not evil abstractions. It started to make sense why so many of the tensions they describe occurred online. I suppose that’s how it goes in areas where you can go to the local coffee shop and forget all that stuff.
The thing one says about Israel is that its existence makes Jews elsewhere safer, even ones who have no interest in packing up and moving there. Can the same be said of New York? Unclear. All I can say with confidence is that I spent what would amount to a zillion Canadian dollars over the course of a few days on the excellent pastries from Breads Bakery.
The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at pbovy@thecjn.ca, not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai. For more opinions about Jewish culture wars, subscribe to the free Bonjour Chai newsletter on Substack.
The post New York was always a lot more Jewish than Toronto could ever be—but the contrast is more obvious now appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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‘F—k the Jews’: Car in Australia Vandalized With Antisemitic Graffiti in Latest Incident Against Jewish Community
Car in New South Wales, Australia graffitied with antisemitic message. Photo: Screenshot
The state of New South Wales in Australia has seen its latest antisemitic hate crime involving the destruction of property.
“F—k the Jews” was graffitied on a car that was parked in the Queens Park suburb of Sydney, the state capital, between 7 am Sunday and 5:45 am Monday, according to police. Since being discovered, the incident has prompted responses from national leaders and Jewish civil rights groups.
“There is no tolerance for antisemitism in Australia from my government, nor should there be tolerance from anyone else,” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said during a press conference on Monday. “Antisemitism is a scourge, and any event such as this targeting people because of who they are is not the Australian values that I hold dear and the Australian values that are held dear by, overwhelmingly, Australians.”
The New South Wales (NSW) Jewish Board of Deputies added, “We are appalled and saddened at the antisemitic graffiti which was daubed on a private vehicle in Queens Park this morning. It is unacceptable that Jewish Australians and Australians of all backgrounds have had to wake up yet again and see messages of hate prominently displayed in their neighborhoods.”
The group continued, “We cannot allow ourselves to become desensitized to acts of Jew-hatred and allow illegal conduct such as this to become normalized.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, antisemitic hatred in Australia, especially New South Wales, driven both by a wave of “old” antisemitism and a “new” iteration of it fueled by anti-Zionism, is rising. Last month, the home of a prominent Jewish Australian, Lesli Berger, was vandalized with antisemitic graffiti, with the perpetrators spray-painting a swastika on the perimeter wall of the property. Next to the infamous Nazi symbol were the spray-painted words “Jordan Gayter,” believed to be a misspelling of the German phrase for “Juden Gatter,” or “Jewish Gate.”
Berger explained to a local outlet, J-Wire, that he does not believe the crime directly targeted him, noting that the high population of Jewish residents in his neighborhood, the Bellevue Hill section of the city of Sydney, is common knowledge.
“It’s clear this was a hate crime targeting the Jewish area, although not me personally,” he said. “The perpetrators likely understood this is a predominantly Jewish area. It’s highly unlikely that anyone would specifically identify my home — it was more opportunistic.”
Justice has so far been elusive, he added, noting that local police discontinued their investigation of the incident after a forensic analysis of the area near the crime and the perusing of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras failed to yield new evidence that could help with identifying and capturing a suspect. While Berger did not condemn law enforcement’s pausing the criminal inquiry, he stressed the importance of addressing antisemitic hate crimes in the area, a growing problem in Australia in recent years.
Also last month, someone graffitied “Kill Israel” on the garage door of a home in the Woollahra section of Sydney, an incident described by NSW Jewish Board of Deputies leader David Ossip as continuing a “sustained campaign of intimidation, harassment, and terror against the Jewish community.”
Antisemitism across the country quadrupled to record levels between 2023-2024, with Australian Jews experiencing more than 2,000 antisemitic incidents between October 2023 and September 2024, according to a report published by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), an organization which advocates upholding the civil rights of the country’s some 120,000 Jewish citizens.
In the aftermath of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7, a total of 2,062 anti-Jewish incidents were recorded in Australia, far more than the 495 documented in the previous 12-month period and the most since the ECAJ began tracking such data in 1990.
Notably, the total did not include antisemitic statements made on social media. However, it did include dozens of assaults and hundreds of incidents of property destruction and hate speech. Physical assaults recorded by the group jumped from 11 in 2023 to 65 in 2024. The level of antisemitism for the past year was six times the average of the preceding 10 years.
“Whilst the number of reported antisemitic incidents has fluctuated from year to year previously, there has never been anything like an annual increase of this magnitude,” ECAJ research director Julie Nathan said in a statement accompanying the report. “If anything, the raw numbers understate the seriousness of the surge in antisemitism that has occurred. There have been many new forms and expressions of anti-Jewish racism that would once have been considered alien to Australia but which have become commonplace.”
Additionally, the number of attacks on Jews — digital, political, and physical — has skyrocketed in Australia since Hamas’s atrocities last Oct. 7. In just the first seven and a half weeks after the onslaught, antisemitic activity in Australia increased by a staggering 591 percent, according to a tally of incidents by the ECAJ.
In one notorious episode in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack, hundreds of pro-Hamas protesters gathered outside the Sydney Opera House chanting “gas the Jews,” “f—k the Jews,” and other epithets.
This explosion of hate has also included vandalism and threats of gun violence, as well as incidents such as a brutal attack on a Jewish man in a park in Sydney. ECAJ’s report detailed other similar incidents. For example, a male assailant repeatedly punched a Jewish man while screaming “dirty rotten Jew c—t”; a group of young men jumped a Jewish boy, whom they called a “dirty Jew”; and pro-Hamas protesters “spat on, threatened, and kicked” an elderly Jewish woman during a demonstration held to raise awareness of antisemitism.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post ‘F—k the Jews’: Car in Australia Vandalized With Antisemitic Graffiti in Latest Incident Against Jewish Community first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Paris Basketball Fan Group Vows to Boycott Upcoming Game With Israel Due to Hamas War
The Eiffel Tower in Paris is lit up in the colors of the Israeli flag. Photo: Reuters/Benoit Tessier
A historic fan group of the French professional basketball club Paris Basketball announced last week their decision to boycott the team’s upcoming Euroleague game against Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv because of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in the Middle East.
Maccabi Tel Aviv and Paris Basketball are set to compete in the 22nd round of the EuroLeague at the Adidas Arena Porte de la Chapelle in Paris on Jan. 16. The fan group KOP Parisii, which has nearly 200 members, said it is still unaware of the security measures that will be taken for the game nor the number of Maccabi supporters who will travel to Paris to attend the showdown. Nevertheless, the group and its board have “decided not to make this match a usual match and especially not to act as if nothing has happened,” they said in an English and French language press release last week.
“We will not animate the KOP stand for this match. There will be no drums, no chants, no tarpaulins,” KOP Parisii added. “We do not wish to politicize the KOP or create divisions in our ranks. But there are some things that go further than a simple basketball game … Our values and the values of humanity in general. Today, KOP Parisii has nearly 200 members, and unlike previous years, our voice counts. We thank you for your understanding.”
Paris Basketball is currently tied for third place in the EuroLeague while Tel Aviv is currently in 16th place.
This was not the first time that French athletes and sports fans used the realm of athletics to protest against Israel.
In mid-December, supporters of Nanterre 92 — a professional basketball club from the French city of Nanterre — interrupted a Basketball Champions League game in France against Israel’s Hapoel Holon by running onto the court while carrying Palestinian flags.
In November, fans of the Paris Saint-Germain soccer team unveiled a massive “Free Palestine” banner before kick-off of the team’s UEFA Champions League game against Atletico Madrid. It took place eight days before France competed against Israel in Paris in a UEFA Nations League game, which pro-Palestinian activists pressured officials to cancel because of Israel’s participation.
The post Paris Basketball Fan Group Vows to Boycott Upcoming Game With Israel Due to Hamas War first appeared on Algemeiner.com.