Amanda Yee goes by “Radio Free Amanda” on X, where she has nearly 85,000 followers and self-identifies as a “journalist and editor.”
On Saturday, she posted that she and colleagues received “a tip” on Friday that U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) “would be having Shabbat dinner with his daughter at her apartment.”
“So we picketed outside of her building to let Chuck know: Ceasefire now! Free Palestine,” Yee wrote. “Not a moment of peace for genocide supporters.”
The antisemitic protesters chanted “From the river to the sea” and called Schumer a liar and a supporter of genocide, according to video footage posted by Yee.
Her post drew extensive criticism.
“Stalking and harassing a Jewish man during Shabbat dinner with his daughter in the name of ‘freeing Palestine’ is just another example of Jew-haters that claim anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism proving themselves wrong,” wrote Hen Mazzig, a pro-Israel activist with more than 190,000 followers.
“Let’s do the reverse thought-experiment,” wrote historian and professor Sara Yael Hirschhorn. “A church dinner, a Ramadan iftar, a Diwali feast—is it appropriate to picket the sacred and private ritual meal of another faith, or only of Jews? And surely spoiling Schumer’s Shabbat will solve the Israel-Palestine conflict.”
David May, research manager and a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, suggested, “They heard about the militaristic Friday night song Jews sing: Eshet Chayil” (the song “Woman of Valor”).
“They found out where a Jewish senator was going to be spending time with his family on the Jewish day of rest, so they just couldn’t resist gathering in support of the terrorists who are holding 130 Israeli hostages at gunpoint in the tunnels of Gaza,” added Joel Petlin, superintendent of the Kiryas Joel School District.
