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Jay Ruderman:

Welcome to All About Change. Now is a great time to check out my new book about activism, Find Your Fight. You can Find Your Fight wherever you buy books, and you can learn more about it at jayruderman.com. Nearly two years after October 7th, the Jewish world is still reeling. Hamas still holds nearly 50 hostages and tunnels beneath Gaza, of whom 20 are thought to be alive. As long as those people, whether from Israel or not, and dead or alive are in tunnels, Jews across the world cannot feel stable or at ease, even as years pass and other issues take center stage. In this time, many have demonized Jews in Israel, ignoring the pain that comes with knowing your community members are hostages. Today’s guest, Lizzy Savetsky, is a long-time activist and social media influencer who turned her activism and social media presence towards Israel after October 7th and has been a staple of pro-Israel media since.

At first, this change in content cost Lizzy tens of thousands of followers and management, only for her following to balloon with her strong commitment to her values. I wrote in my book Find Your Fight that every activist has to find your no, and Lizzy’s no was letting go of her connection to Israel. Today, Lizzy and I will talk about her Israel activism and the costs and unseen benefits of finding your no. Lizzy Savetsky, thank you so much for being my guest in All About Change.

Lizzy Savetsky:

Thank you so much for having me, it’s great to be here.

Jay Ruderman:

I have followed your work for a long time and this is a podcast about activism, so I want to talk about you as a person and how you got your start in activism and why activism is important to you. In the intro, I talked to our listeners about how your activism predates October 7th and is not only about anti-Semitism. You’ve spoken widely about living sober, you’ve supported Jewish women who’ve suffered miscarriages with Nechama Comfort. Have you always had an activist heart, or do you think that you were driven to activism as you moved on through life?

Lizzy Savetsky:

I think that I was definitely born to be an activist. It’s not something that I really could see until I looked at hindsight. I have always been obsessed with justice and obsessed with speaking up for what was right. I think part of it was I grew up in Fort Worth, Texas as a Jewish girl, and I knew that that made me different, growing up in the Bible Belt, but I felt empowered by that and I felt like, in a weird way, an ambassador for the Jewish people. It gave me this sense of responsibility to speak up, not necessarily in defense of my people. I give a lot of credit to my parents, because I think a lot of parents probably would’ve looked at their high school freshman child and said, “Okay, very nice. You’re passionate about something, let’s get back to business as usual,” but my parents really nurtured and cultivated that fire that I had, and it’s been such a huge, huge part of my driving force in life.

I think understanding that I could make a difference with my voice at such a young age, from my teenage years, is something that very much paved the way for the work I do today. Obviously, the lens through which I do my activism has changed, but the heart and the passion has always been there.

Jay Ruderman:

You’ve become a celebrity for a few years now, and you get a lot of attention, especially post October 7th. Can you talk about the tangible changes in your personal life and in your social media life and how that’s impacted you and your family? Especially, as we’re recording this, a very prominent activist was just assassinated. How does all of this affect you personally and how do you deal with it?

Lizzy Savetsky:

Thank you so much for asking that. I think, a lot of times… I’m not complaining at all about my position, I feel very unbelievably grateful to get to do this work, this is such a gift, but I do think, a lot of times, people forget that I am a human being like anyone else, deeply flawed and somebody who feels very deeply, deeply sensitive by nature. It’s definitely been a journey for me to learn how to put the mission and the message above my feelings and my fears, because when I focus on the mission and the message, I don’t really care if you don’t like me or if you have something negative to say to me. I’ve been able to really develop a thicker skin. Things still penetrate it, but emotionally, you have to really be strong, but it helps to know that you’re focused on something that’s so much bigger than you.

In terms of the reality of my daily life, when I started on social media, I never thought that I would be going in this direction or that I would be on the receiving end of death threats on a daily basis. That is my reality. It never occurred to me to not post my children. I didn’t have a huge, huge following, and I was always posting them, I was always forthcoming about my life, so there’s had to be a lot of things that I’ve had to rethink and be more cautious about in the recent years. Up until this really awful murder of this activist that just happened, I’ve been really, really good at compartmentalizing my fear mechanism, because I think if I start to think about all the threats and all the people who hate me and all the people who want to silence me, then I wouldn’t be able to wake up every day and do what I do and get out there. I’m not only very unapologetic online, but I’m out there in the streets.

I lead rallies, I am at events all the time. I like to be with people, I like to be with my community, and I would never want to have to give that up, sacrifice that, because of safety concerns. Unfortunately, that’s something I’m now having to think about, and it really sucks, for lack of a better word, to feel like your life could be in danger simply for speaking up for what you believe in. We’ve really started to take, over the past couple of years, really, the most intense precautions that we can in terms of what we do when we receive the threats. We go through all the processes, we’ve reported everything to the NYPD that’s local, and we have an entire file with the FBI. It’s something that I’m always thinking about, and one of the most common questions I get is if I have personal security full-time. I can’t believe I’m in that situation, that that is something people are constantly asking me about. It’s heartbreaking, but if we want to keep making change in a real way, we have to think about how to do it safely.

Jay Ruderman:

One of the things I talk about in my book is finding your no, and you made a decision in your activism that giving up on Israel was not going to be an option for you. Instead, you doubled down on your support for Israel. By the way, there are a lot of people who are Jews or non-Jews who may support Israel, who would be like, “This is too intense for me. I can’t deal with this. My friends, my colleagues, world leaders are turning against Israel. In a diaspora mentality, I want to protect myself. I want to put my head down. I’ll even criticize Israel, because I think it’ll help me fit in.”

Lizzy Savetsky:

See way too much of that.

Jay Ruderman:

You took the opposite approach. You doubled down, you’re like, “No, this is not the right way.” That took a lot of moral fortitude. What would be your advice to others about when to say, “Screw it, this is what I believe in. I’m not giving up on what I believe in”?

Lizzy Savetsky:

When I talk about Israel, I’m talking about my poor identity. Israel isn’t a place to me, it is a part of me. I cannot, as a Jewish person, be separated from the land of Israel, so I think anytime that your core identity is up for question, how can you not do everything that you can to fight for it? As a Jewish person, when I talk about Israel… So much of my fight comes from the fact that I am an observant Jew, it’s my north star, and I need that in order to keep me on the path that I believe I was put here to do this work. When I think about Israel, God said to Abraham, at the beginning of our story of the Jewish people, of actually of all of Judeo-Christian… All of us in the world, all Christians, all Jews.

God said to Abraham, “Go forth to the land that I will show you where I will make you a great nation and you shall be a blessing,” so we have in one breath from God telling Abraham that, “You’ll go to the land of Israel where I will make you, the Jewish people, a great nation, and you will be a blessing to the world.” Meaning that the people, the place, and the purpose are all one. All one, all in the same moment. When I think about fighting for Israel, I’m fighting for my very existence as a Jewish person in this world, for my ancestors, for my children, for everything that I am. If you’re going to question that, I’m going to fight until the very end to spread the truth about it. This is who I am, it was never even a decision for me.

It was just, “This is me and I’m going to fight for myself and for my family.” I think you have to have that level of passion, especially in a case like this, because we are so small in number, and I wish that every Jewish person really understood intrinsically how critical Israel is to our identity. That’s why I do what I do, because it’s less about convincing the world and more about empowering my own people to see the truth, to see how critical this is, and to mobilize them and activate them, at least to a small degree of what I feel.

Jay Ruderman:

Because you moved into a new lane of Israel advocacy recently, winning a spot in the World Zionist Congress with Aish Ha’am, and this should give you a great opportunity to advocate for Israel from America. What are you excited to do at the World Zionist Congress that you haven’t yet been able to do?

Lizzy Savetsky:

The World Zionist Congress is… I knew a lot about the history of it before I ever thought that I would be on a slate and running, and now I am very honored and humbled to have a seat in the congress, but it was founded before we had the modern state of Israel, by Theodore Herzl, in the 1890s. It was founded to be the body for the Jewish people, because we did not have a state, and we were, across the globe, experiencing a lot of the same things that we needed to address, and also establish a state, which we ultimately, thank God, did. The World Zionist Congress still exists, even though we have the state of Israel, because there are still so many things that we need to address as the Jewish people, and it goes beyond the state of Israel. We’re talking about fighting anti-Semitism, Jewish unity, Jewish education in the diaspora.

That, to me, is one of my number one causes that I care about, that I was passionate about getting involved with this, because of Jewish education. Particularly for secular Jews outside of Israel, to have some sense of understanding and identity, because my fear is, although anti-Semitism and the recent surge of it has activated a lot of Jews, has helped us in a very, very unfortunate way to understand who we are and has made us want to get more involved in our community, there is a huge education piece that is lacking, and I think, as important as it is to fight anti-Semitism, it’s more important to know who we are, so that we can know what we’re fighting for. That was the piece that I was most passionate about in getting involved with the Aish Ha’am [inaudible 00:14:35], because that is their number one cause. This congress is such an amazing institution, because it’s Jewish voices from across the globe addressing the most pressing issues, and we all have different points of view.

We’re one great big dysfunctional family, so for us to be meeting for the first time this October in Jerusalem all together in one room and getting down to business has never been more important in our modern history as the Jewish people to collaborate and to form coalitions and to actually start. We have a lot of power, there’s $1 billion a year that world Zionist Congress has to allocate. That’s a huge amount of money that we have to do good work with, and to be a part of that, I pinch myself. I can’t believe little Lizzy from Fort Worth, Texas has a seat at Theodore Herzl’s table. It’s pretty special and I don’t take the responsibility lightly.

Jay Ruderman:

Looking back on your career as an activist, not just the past few years, which has been horrific, but what do you think your impact is? Are you satisfied with your impact, and where do you think you’re going from here? What are your dreams going forward as an activist?

Lizzy Savetsky:

I never even really considered myself to be an activist, I guess it’s just a label that I now have used about the work I do. I just am a person with a passionate heart who feels a responsibility to speak up. I guess that makes me an activist. When I think about my impact, I think about doing my part with the gifts that God gave me to spread a message of truth, of love, and to fight hate anywhere I see it. But more than that, what I’ve realized is the most fulfilling is seeing how my activism activates others.

I think that that has been my greatest success, because it shouldn’t just be about my voice or what I could do, but it should be about the mission itself, and the best way to accomplish a mission is with an army. When I see other people get activated and empowered by the work that I’m doing, there’s no greater feeling in the world. When people tell me these small actions that they do, small or big, arranging rallies in their own cities or campaigns at their schools in the spiritual sense, organizing [foreign language 00:17:24], people that have never really had any organized connection to their religion, to Judaism. All of these things to me, if I had any role in that, then what more could I ask for with the work that I do? That, to me, is the biggest success.

Where do I hope to go? I don’t really sit around and think about a five-year plan or a 10-year plan, and unfortunately, the world is in a very bleak place. My city, New York City, I think we have a long road ahead of us and a great fight ahead of us. My goal is to just keep going and to keep building this army of people who feel like I do, who are not willing to sit back and accept the status quo, to accept hate and violence becoming normalized, and to forge ahead. That’s really my goal. I don’t have any specific frame that I see that in. People ask me all the time if I would go into politics, it’s not off the table for me. If I felt like I could make a bigger difference than what I’m making now by subjecting myself to that and my family, then I would, but it’s not something I dreamt about or sit around thinking about, because it’s never to me been about power, it’s always been about change.

I don’t need to have fame or power or money. Those things don’t define success for me in the real way at all, but seeing change, seeing my work make change within other people, within the world, that is success.

Jay Ruderman:

Lizzy, this is the first time we met and I want to thank you. I really have a lot of admiration for how you go about fearlessly your advocacy.

Lizzy Savetsky:

Thank you.

Jay Ruderman:

I want you to take care of yourself. Seriously, really, be careful.

Lizzy Savetsky:

Thank you.

Jay Ruderman:

I wish you to go from strength to strength, I really appreciate this conversation.

Lizzy Savetsky:

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it, I appreciate this work and this platform.

Jay Ruderman:

Thank you for being part of the All About Change community. We aim to spark ideas for personal activism, helping you find your pathway to action beyond awareness, so thank you for investing your time with us, learning and thinking about how just one person can make the choice to build a community and improve our world. I believe in the empower of informed people like you to drive real change, and I know that what we explore today will be a tool for you in that effort. All right, I’ll see you in two weeks for our next conversation, but just one small ask, please hit subscribe and leave us a comment below. It lets us know that you value this content and it supports our mission to widely share these perspectives. If you’re looking for more inspiration, check out this next video. I chose it for you and I know you’re going to enjoy it. I’m Jay Ruderman, let’s continue working towards meaningful change together.

Today’s episode was produced by Tani Levitt and Mijon Zulu. To check out more episodes or to learn more about the show, you can visit our website Allaboutchangepodcast.com. If you like our show, spread the word, tell a friend or family member, or leave us a review on your favorite podcasting app. We really appreciate it. All About Change is produced by the Ruderman Family Foundation.