The Congressional Dads Caucus is hosting children’s influencer Rachel Griffin-Accurso, better known as Ms. Rachel, as a featured guest at a reception in Washington on Tuesday, according to an invitation obtained by Jewish Insider. Griffin-Accurso has faced scrutiny and criticism over antisemitic activity and for hosting a pro-Hamas Palestinian journalist on her social media accounts.

Griffin-Accurso is one of 10 “special guests,” including “leaders, advocates, creators, entertainers, and changemakers who are helping redefine fatherhood and caregiving in America,” at the Tuesday reception. 

The reception is co-hosted by the Dads Caucus, founded by Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA), to advocate for policies including childcare affordability and accessibility, paid family leave and the child tax credit, ahead of the group’s Dad Ambassador Awards. The event is co-hosted by Equimundo, which describes itself as a nonprofit focused on promoting gender equality and preventing violence.

Gomez, whose office sent the invitation email to staffers for other Dads Caucus members, did not respond to a request for comment.

Griffin-Accurso faced criticism in early 2026 for liking an Instagram comment reading “Free america from the Jews.” She later apologized and said that the “like” was accidental. But she also engaged with conspiracy theories framing the incident as a set-up.

Griffin-Accurso responded, “ooooooooooohhhhh,” to a comment from an anti-Israel account about the incident asserting, “Spoiler alert: They left the comment themselves.”

She also came under fire for featuring Palestinian journalist Motaz Azaiza in a video on her Instagram account. Azaiza defended the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, and posted a message on Telegram praising Hamas terrorists. He also compared Israeli Cabinet leaders to Adolf Hitler.

Rep. Greg Landsman (D-OH) told JI that inviting Griffin-Accurso to the event was a “bad decision” and he did not plan to attend. Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) also does not plan to attend.

Several other outspoken Jewish and pro-Israel members of the nearly 50-member caucus — which includes prominent moderates like Reps. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) and Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) — did not respond to requests or declined to comment on the invitation.

Caucus membership can often be a largely symbolic gesture and most members of the group would not necessarily have been involved in planning the event or been aware of the guest list.

LOS ANGELES — Yossi Farro stepped onto the helipad, taking in the panoramic view of Los Angeles: the Hollywood sign in front of him, the skyscrapers of downtown L.A. behind him, all of it surrounded by mountains. But he was not there to take in the view, aside from assessing its value as a backdrop for an Instagram video. 

Farro was standing atop a Wilshire Boulevard office building on Tuesday afternoon to wrap tefillin with two budding Jewish entrepreneurs in their 20s, and to record all of it for social media.

“What’s your message to the world?” Farro asked the two men, in a video that was posted to his 43,000 Instagram followers moments after it was recorded. “Be proud,” one said. “Try your best,” said the other, whose father owns the building. 

“Amazing,” Farro said energetically to the camera. “Have an amazing day.”

Farro grew up in New York as a Hasidic Jew, part of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. His long, wispy beard and no-frills outfit — black jacket, loose-fitting white button down shirt, black pants — stood in contrast to the more fashion-forward looks of the men he was visiting that day. 

But while Farro might look more Crown Heights than Beverly Hills, he has the camera-ready comfort that only a 22-year-old who has grown up being influenced by, well, influencers could have. It’s also safe to say his confidence comes at least in part from the Chabad movement, where from the time he was a teenager he was tasked with approaching strangers with a simple question: “Are you Jewish?” 

The goal is to get them to do a mitzvah, which for men usually means wrapping tefillin, the practice of donning a pair of leather black boxes that contain passages from the Torah. It’s an act that Orthodox Jews perform daily.

“Join me as I Wrap the most Powerful Jews in the World,” Farro’s Instagram bio reads. Look through his stories, and you’ll see actors and startup founders and CEOs. When a major elite gathering is happening, expect to find Farro on the sidelines, such as this week’s Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills. 

He didn’t get into the actual event, where tickets run into the high five figures. Farro doesn’t currently have a full-time gig; he told Jewish Insider he is inspired by the entrepreneurs he meets. In between brief run-ins with high-powered members of the tribe, he is sleeping at a friend’s place. 

But Farro was spotted around L.A. all week long, spending time at nearby hotels and a Lag Ba’Omer party for Milken attendees. He wrapped tefillin with music executive and entrepreneur Scooter Braun, KIND Snacks founder Daniel Lubetzky and Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures, the largest venture capital firm in L.A. He posted a photo with Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, whom he ran into outside a Beverly Hills hotel. Approaching some of the world’s most influential and successful people does not seem to scare Farro: After Oaktree Capital Management co-founder Howard Marks told Farro he is not Jewish during a run-in at a Beverly Hills Starbucks, Farro Googled him — and learned he was lying. They did not wrap tefillin together, but “we grabbed a picture and ended up bonding over both growing up in New York.”

“I get a little nervous, but never too nervous to ask,” Farro said in an elevator down from the helipad. He was on his way to meet some other people to wrap, before heading to the airport to catch a flight to San Francisco to try to wrap tefillin with Joe Lonsdale, founder of Palantir and founder and managing partner at 8VC. (Farro met Alex Karp, Palantir’s CEO, a couple weeks ago.)

Farro’s tefillin-influencer journey began three years ago, when he was walking in Los Angeles and asked the rapper Lil Dicky to wrap tefillin. (Farro did not know who he was.) Not long after, he ended up doing the same with the actors James Franco and Jeremy Piven. 

His tefillin big break came one year after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks. For months he had been sending DMs on X to Bill Ackman, the hedge fund manager and Harvard alum who became a vocal critic of his alma mater’s handling of antisemitism. Farro got his phone number, and three weeks after making a pitch to wrap tefillin together, Ackman agreed to do it, on the anniversary of the attacks. Farro’s post on X with pictures from their tefillin date has more than 2 million views. 

So how does a young Chabad guy who hasn’t even formally earned his “rabbi” title yet, let alone gotten a job, fly around the country to exclusive gatherings to get high-profile Jews to do a mitzvah that many non-Orthodox Jews know very little about? Persistence, confidence and a very high tolerance for awkwardness. Belief — in himself, and in God — helps too.

“What’s my message? Why am I doing it? Bring godliness to everywhere, spread light, spread faith,” Farro said. “Just remember, wherever you go, wherever you are, there’s always a higher power.”

The leader of a newly launched progressive campus advocacy group affiliated with More Perfect Union, a prominent left-wing media organization, liked social media posts justifying the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and expressed similar sentiments in at least one now-deleted X comment.

Elise Joshi, a Gen Z activist and influencer, is taking the helm of a new campus organization, More Perfect University, that is casting itself as a populist left rival to Turning Point USA, the right-wing advocacy group that has played a key role in pulling younger voters to President Donald Trump and promoting conservative values at colleges and universities across the country.

More Perfect University, which was announced on Wednesday, is the creation of More Perfect Union, founded in 2021 by Faiz Shakir, a senior advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). In a splashy video, Joshi said the new group will extend More Perfect Union’s “fight to campuses,” vowing to equip students “with the tools to unrig our broken economic system” and stressing the “responsibility to speak truth to power falls on us.”

But while Shakir has long been known as a vocal critic of Israel, his own record of commentary on such issues does not appear to have gone as far as Joshi, whose past social media activity has notably sought to excuse the violence perpetrated by Hamas.

In one since-removed X comment from Oct. 7, 2023, for instance, Joshi suggested the Hamas attacks that killed 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages were an act of justified resistance linked to a broader movement including violent efforts to oppose slavery, apartheid and colonialism.

“It seems a lot of people forgot how slavery abolition, South Africa’s apartheid, and every independence movement against colonization was achieved,” Joshi wrote in the post, a screenshot of which was reviewed by Jewish Insider.

Joshi, who at the time was a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, where she emerged as an outspoken youth activist with a sizable following on TikTok, also liked some comments posted on the day of the attack that expressed similar views, other screenshots show — including by one user who had asked, “What did y’all think decolonization meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers.”

In another post liked by Joshi, a user wrote, “Folks start really fighting back and all of a sudden everyone is a pacifist. Real revolution and decolonization is not fun. It is painful and violent.”

It is unclear when Joshi’s post alluding to the Hamas attacks was deleted. She did not respond to a request for comment from JI about her social media activity.

Elsewhere, Joshi, a former executive director of Gen-Z for Change, has summarized her negative views on Israel, reflective of the waning support for the Jewish state seen among younger voters on both sides of the aisle.

“A Jewish state in Palestine requires and has always required the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians so a Jewish majority is possible,” she wrote last June. “It requires a siege on Gaza and apartheid in the West Bank to prevent 5 million+ Palestinians from having equal rights.”

In a follow-up post to X, Joshi added that “Israel’s existence requires the subjugation of the indigenous Palestinian people who have inhabited that land for thousands of years.”

“The status quo is violent, from routine bombing to home demolition. To start and end with condemning Hamas only fuels the widely recognized apartheid state,” she said just two days after the Oct. 7 attacks.

Joshi, who has proudly identified on social media as an “anti-Israel activist,” has not indicated how More Perfect University will approach questions about the Middle East on college campuses, where protests and related forms of student activism have grown quieter in recent months, even amid ongoing war with Iran.

“My top issues are climate and unions, but I see the genocide in Gaza (not ‘conflict in the Middle East’) as a moral issue that’s fundamental to being human,” she said in a May 2024 post, commenting on polling results suggesting the war in Gaza and accompanying campus demonstrations did not rank among the most important concerns of college students. 

“GENOCIDE IS NOT RANK-ABLE,” she argued.

More Perfect Union did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

In a sign of the coalition she is seeking to build as the new leader of More Perfect University, Joshi shared a complimentary social media post from Hasan Piker, a controversial far-left Twitch streamer who has drawn criticism for frequently using antisemitic rhetoric and doubling down on his support for Hamas over Israel.

“Incredibly stoked for this!” Piker enthused in an X post on Wednesday about More Perfect University, which Joshi amplified on her social media accounts.

A useful rule of thumb to live by: Social media isn’t real life. 

But one of the challenges in the brave new world of media is that extremist influencers can often create the perception of influence simply by dominating so much of the online discourse. 

Hasan Piker, a far-left streamer who has been the subject of favorable media profiles despite a laundry list of antisemitic and terror-justifying rhetoric, is a case study in how traditional journalists normalize extremists — and how politicians conclude there’s a marketplace for radical views in the electoral marketplace, even when it’s typically a mirage. 

In part because Democrats have been desperate to find anti-establishment voices that claim to speak for young men, Piker is seen as a popular, edgy podcaster by liberal leaders in both media and politics. (Nevermind the fact that Piker gets only about 36,000 viewers on a typical stream — about 1/25th of the typical nighttime audience of MS NOW, as The Atlantic’s David Frum pointed out.) 

The New Yorker invited Piker to speak at its annual festival, treating the antisemitic streamer as just another one of the many thought leaders in attendance. Leading progressives, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), joined him at rallies and on his show.

And a handful of leading Democratic presidential contenders — most notably California Gov. Gavin Newsom — expressed interest in going on his show. 

This, despite the fact Piker has justified Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attacks, forcefully denied some of the terror group’s atrocities, has called Orthodox Jews “inbred” and claimed America deserved 9/11. 

Any one of those comments on their own would have typically disqualified anyone from playing a part in our political discourse. Yet in the wave of glowing profiles, Piker’s antisemitism and anti-Americanism didn’t even merit a mention. 

It wasn’t until March 19, when Third Way President Jon Cowan and Lily Cohen, a press advisor from the center-left think tank, took the initiative to co-write a column for The Wall Street Journal calling out Piker’s antisemitism without any caveats. The decision to call out the crazy — when few in the press or politics had the courage to do so — was a moment that proved that one principled voice in defense of normalcy can break the mirage of those who believe there’s a political marketplace for this garbage. 

The op-ed, headlined “Democrats Are Too Cozy with Hasan Piker,” generated outsized attention, in a way that previous efforts to spotlight Piker’s antisemitism hadn’t. Reporters who once gave Piker a free pass were now asking Democrats whether they agreed with his extremist positions. 

Suddenly, when presented with his indefensible comments, some Democrats started building up enough courage to speak out against him. First, it was Rep. Brad Schneider (D-IL), head of the moderate New Democratic Coalition, who called Piker an “unapologetic antisemite.” Then, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, running for the U.S. Senate in Michigan, told JI that Piker is “somebody who says extremely offensive things in order to generate clicks” — and called on one of her primary opponents, Abdul El-Sayed, to cancel a scheduled rally with him. 

Even left-wing lawmakers and candidates — such as Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner and a progressive Democratic state legislator from Michigan — canceled scheduled appearances with Piker.

By the end of the month, only three of the 14 prospective Democratic presidential candidates that Politico interviewed said they would appear on a livestream with Piker if invited. That marks a sea change from just weeks earlier, when he was being treated as the trendy fad in progressive politics. 

The dynamic is a reminder that the delusions of a social media echo chamber will persist unless they get confronted by political reality. Sometimes that reality is as simple as speaking up against craziness when everyone else is afraid to speak the truth. 

It would be heartening to conclude that this episode is proof that antisemitism can be confronted when good people speak up. 

But this past week also featured Politico publishing a virulently antisemitic cartoon that could have been drawn from the Nazi tabloid Der Sturmer — one that they pulled from their website and apologized for. This is the same publication, owned by Axel Springer, that gave Piker a credulous interview last year making no mention of his extremism. (And last week, it also blatantly misrepresented leading Democrats’ comments on AIPAC to manufacture an anti-Israel narrative.)

It all goes to show that the antisemitic rot fueled by social media is entering into the mainstream. It will take more brave and principled voices like Cowan and Cohen to stem the tide.

The neo-Nazi influencer Nick Fuentes has drawn a sizable online following that has fueled debate over his influence in the Republican Party as it grapples with how to address mounting antisemitism within its ranks, particularly among younger conservatives.

But a new report suggests that his rise may in part be artificially driven by a cluster of anonymous social media accounts largely based in foreign countries, and raises questions about the organic popularity of Fuentes’ movement in the United States as he seeks to grow his political reach to shape the coming midterm elections. 

The report, published on Monday by the Network Contagion Research Institute, a nonprofit watchdog group affiliated with Rutgers University, analyzed a recent sample of Fuentes’ posts on X and found that engagement within the first 30 minutes not only far exceeded his “legitimate reach” but also “routinely” outperformed accounts commanding significantly larger followings, including Elon Musk, who owns the platform.

For the 20 Fuentes posts examined by NCRI in that opening time window, just over 60% of initial amplification came from the same repeat accounts, pointing to a pattern of “behavior highly suggestive of coordination or automation,” the report states.

Nearly all those users were “fully anonymous,” with no real name, location or other identifying markers, according to NCRI, and a majority were “openly” or “functionally single-purpose” accounts dedicated to promoting Fuentes’ extremist positions, which have included Holocaust denial and admiration for Adolf Hitler.

Meanwhile, the report also found, roughly half of the accounts that promoted three of Fuentes’ most viral posts before the assassination of Charlie Kirk — whose death in September left a major vacuum in the conservative youth movement that Fuentes has been seeking to fill — originated from foreign users that were “heavily concentrated” in India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Malaysia and Indonesia, the sites of known content-engagement farms. 

“There is no organic explanation for this pattern,” the report notes, calling such activity “consistent with outsourced engagement infrastructure. These geographies describe the same low-cost amplification clusters and engagement farms that foreign actors often use to manufacture virality, distort platform metrics and manipulate recommendation systems.” 

The report argues that such alleged “manufactured engagement” artificially helped elevate Fuentes as a subject of heightened mainstream media interest in the wake of Kirk’s assassination, in addition to a friendly interview with Tucker Carlson weeks later, allowing “him to appear active, relevant and in position when a replacement narrative became available inside the broader MAGA ecosystem.”

Fuentes’ “manipulated reach is not accidental,” the report states, citing hundreds of instances from his show in which he has issued “real-time commands” to share his posts on social media — directives that the NCRI says run afoul of X’s content moderation policies prohibiting “orchestrated amplification.”

“Taken together,” the report concludes, “the evidence points to a deliberate, foreign-influenced campaign — relying on anonymous and possibly automated accounts — to artificially inflate Nick Fuentes’s reach, gaming the platform’s algorithm in a systematic effort to elevate his influence far beyond what genuine grassroots support could achieve.”

Major New York Jewish groups criticized former Assemblyman Michael Blake, who is running in the Democratic primary against Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), for featuring a clip of an influencer who supported the shooting of two Israeli Embassy employees at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington in his campaign launch video.

Blake’s video features a short clip from a social media video posted by Guy Christensen, an anti-Israel activist, accusing Torres of “investing in genocide,” one of the first clips in the video. 

Christensen praised the alleged D.C. shooter, Elias Rodriguez, urging his followers to support Rodriguez and describing his “act of resistance” as “justified” and to respond with “greater resistance and escalation” in the face of a potential crackdown against the anti-Israel movement.

“I do not condemn the elimination of those two Zionist officials,” Christensen said on social media at the time of the shooting. “[Rodriguez] is not a terrorist. He’s a resistance fighter. And the fact is that the fight against Israel’s war machine, against their genocide machine, against their criminality, includes their foreign diplomats in this country and internationally.”

Christensen was expelled from The Ohio State University for the video, which was taken down by TikTok.

In a statement, the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York condemned Blake’s video, both for featuring Christensen and for its use of other antisemitic tropes.

“Hurling a bus load of antisemitic tropes and platforming bigots who cheer antisemitic violence in a launch video is not the pro-humanity flex one thinks it is. In the backdrop of rising hate, this only deepens division, further inflames an already inflammatory climate in New York, and makes us all less safe,” the group said in a statement.

The Anti-Defamation League of New York and New Jersey focused its criticism specifically on the Christensen clip.

“No matter what your views are on the candidates or the issues, we can all agree that Michael Blake’s platforming of anti-Zionist influencer Guy Christensen should be roundly condemned,” the group said. “Christensen is an activist who regularly touts Hamas and promotes antisemitic ideas, and he defended the shooter that left two dead at the Jewish Museum this past spring.”

UJA-Federation of New York said in a statement, “We strongly condemn any use of antisemitic vitriol and those who promote it to attack opponents.”

“Regardless of beliefs, actively platforming Guy Christensen, who regularly shares antisemitic ideas and pro-Hamas rhetoric — in addition to defending the heinous antisemitic shooting in Washington, DC, this spring — is absolutely unacceptable,” UJA continued.

Blake apologized in a statement, issued late Monday after a group of local rabbis also joined the chorus of criticism.

“I unequivocally denounce the murder and celebration of the two young Israeli embassy staffers, as stated in my May 22nd, 2025 post on X, and I apologize for any pain our campaign video caused any member of the Jewish community by including someone who condoned this horrific event,” Blake said. “Just as I would for anyone targeted for the color of their skin, faith, or identity, I stand firmly against all acts of hate and violence. I am focused on the Cost of Living and Affordability crisis impacting all of the district, where Ritchie Torres’ actions have failed, along with continuing to address Antisemitism, Anti-Muslim hate, Housing and Immigration. We deserve better than Ritchie Torres.”