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.

Supermodel Bella Hadid broke her silence on Monday about being featured in a controversial Adidas campaign that referenced the 1972 massacre at the Munich Olympics, where 11 Israelis were murdered by Palestinian terrorists.

“For those of you that do not know my heart, I want to make sure you’re hearing directly from me about my recent campaign with Adidas,” she began by saying in a lengthy statement posted on her Instagram Story. The founder of the Orebella perfume, who is also an avid critic of the state of Israel, added that she “would never knowingly engage with any art or work that is linked to a horrific tragedy of any kind.”

“In advance of the campaign’s release, I had no knowledge of the historical connection to the atrocious events in 1972,” she explained. “I am shocked, I am upset, and I am disappointed in the lack of sensitivity that went into this campaign. Had I been made aware, from the bottom of my heart, I would never have participated. My team should have known, Adidas should have known, and I should have done more research so that I too would have known and understood, and spoken up.”

Earlier this month, Adidas released a new campaign, featuring Hadid, for its iconic SL 72 sneaker. The sneaker was originally released in 1972 and used that year by athletes at the Munich Olympic Games, where the Palestinian terrorist group Black September murdered 11 members of Israel’s Olympic team after taking them hostage.

Hadid has participated in anti-Israel rallies where she chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which calls for the destruction of the Jewish state and for it to be replaced with a Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. She has previously accused Israel of “colonization, ethnic cleansing, military occupation, and apartheid over the Palestinian people.” She has advocated for a “Free Palestine,” and since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, she has repeatedly expressed solidarity with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

After Adidas was criticized for choosing the anti-Israel model as a face of the new campaign, the German sportswear company pulled her from the project. Adidas also issued two apologies regarding the matter — one directed at Hadid herself — and said it would “revise” its campaign. Hadid had not commented on the ordeal until Monday. She said in the statement on her Instagram Story that she “always will speak up for what I believe to be wrong.”

“While everyone’s intentions were to make something positive, and bring people together through art, the collective lack of understanding from all parties undermined the process,” she said of the Adidas campaign. “I do not believe in hate in any form, including antisemitism. That will never waiver, and I stand by that statement to the fullest extent.”

“Connecting the liberation of the Palestinian people to an attack so tragic is something that hurts my heart. Palestine is not synonymous with terrorism, and this campaign unintentionally highlighted an event that does not present who we are,” she continued. The model concluded by saying that she is a “proud Palestinian woman” who “will forever stand by my people of Palestine while continuing to advocate for a world free of antisemitism.”

“Antisemitism has no place in the liberation of the Palestinian people,” she said. “I will always stand for peace over violence, any day. Hate has no place here, and I will forever advocate for not only my people, but every person worldwide.”

Hadid’s sister is fellow model Gigi Hadid, her mother is Dutch former supermodel Yolanda Hadid and her father is Nazareth-born Jordanian real estate developer Mohamed Hadid, who has regularly made anti-Israel comments on social media.

The post Bella Hadid Apologizes for Adidas Campaign’s ‘Lack of Sensitivity’ in Referencing Munich Massacre first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Israel’s men’s swimming team set a new Israeli record in the 4×200m freestyle relay at the 2024 Paris Olympics on Tuesday morning with a time of 7:08.43 and advanced to the finals taking place on Tuesday night.

Their victory is the first time Israel has made it to an Olympic final in the 4×200m freestyle relay and is also Israel’s first swimming final of the Paris Olympics. The Olympic team is comprised of Bar Soloveychik, Eitan Ben Shitrit, Gal Cohen Groumi, and Denis Loktev.

Israel tied with Japan in fifth place in the relay on Tuesday morning. Both countries are advancing to the final, and they will compete against South Korea, Germany, France, Great Britain, the US, Australia, and China.

The post Israeli Men’s Swim Team Makes History at Paris Olympics, Breaks National Record first appeared on Algemeiner.com.