The Exodus Movement
In an effort to encourage Jewish people to abandon the Democratic Party, model Elizabeth Pipko started the Exodus Movement, which accused the political party of having a problem with anti-Semitism.
A Pew Research poll found 87 percent of Jewish voters cast ballots for Democratic candidates in the 2018 midterms, but the Democratic Party and its members have faced repeated criticism for fostering anti-Semitic sentiments. At a recent event, President Donald Trump said Democrats were advancing the “most extreme, anti-Semitic agenda in history.”
The Exodus Movement is a group of Jewish Americans who “reject the hypocrisy, anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism of the rising far left,” according to the website. It claimed progressives and Democrats took Jewish American support for granted, and members were done aligning themselves with “allegedly supportive liberals” who sided with their enemies and disregarded their values and beliefs.
“[The Democrats’] failure to condemn the anti-Semitism—there’s a lot of things that are happening in our country that are proving how divided we are, and I thought it was time to unite people of similar beliefs,” Pipko, the founder and president of Exodus Movement, told Fox News. “Any time you turn on the TV, you’re told that you’re wrong if you disagree with what [the Democrats are] telling you. You’re told that you’re wrong if you’re religious in any way, and I thought it was time to unite those people.”
Before founding Exodus Movement, the 23-year-old served as a campaign staffer for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. However, she didn’t go public with her work for Trump until January of this year, out of fear that it would cost her her career as a model.
Read the full story at Newsweek.
NEW YORK – While many across the world celebrate the holiday of Passover this week, commemorating the Biblical account of God freeing the Jewish people from slavery in ancient Egypt, a new movement encouraging young Jews to exit the Democratic Party is underway.
Model Elizabeth Pipko relaunched her efforts to inspire American Jews to reconsider the Democratic Party because she says its leaders disregard their values and beliefs.
Pipko, who made headlines earlier this year when she faced backlash for announcing her support for President Trump and co-founding Jexodus — now called the Exodus Movement — told Fox News she is doubling down on her efforts to encourage Jews to leave the Democrats in favor of politicians who align with their core beliefs.
Elizabeth Pipko founded the Exodus Movement. (Annie Wermiel/NY Post)
“[The Exodus Movement is] hoping to inspire Jews, and I think all people actually, to vote with their conscience and their beliefs and not with any fears whatsoever,” Pipko told us. “I think the further the Democrats shift to the left, the harder it is for any religious person, I think, to align with them.”
“[The Democrats’] failure to condemn the anti-Semitism — there’s a lot of things that are happening in our country that are proving how divided we are and I thought it was time to unite people of similar beliefs,” she said. “Any time you turn on the TV, you’re told that you’re wrong if you disagree with what [the Democrats are] telling you. You’re told that you’re wrong if you’re religious in any way and I thought it was time to unite those people.”
Pipko, 23, said Trump’s recent recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, reversing more than a half-century of U.S. policy, has definitely helped bolster interest in her organization. But the New York native says it’s actually the Democrats that are the No. 1 driver for people to join Exodus.
“What’s really hitting people is actually the other side. If you look at just 10 years ago, Democrats and Republicans both supported Israel very equally – it was a bi-partisan issue,” Pipko said. “Then all of a sudden we have Donald Trump getting a town named after him in the Golan Heights and we have 20 or almost 20 Democrats [running for president in 2020] and none of them are coming out and saying they want to focus on the Israeli-U.S. relationship.
“Aside from saying [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu is a racist and saying terrible things about Israel, it’s becoming a much more controversial issue than ever before.”
Pipko, who has put her modeling career on hold to focus her efforts on Exodus, recalled the time when she hid her political beliefs from her friends and industry contacts. But after working for the 2016 Trump presidential campaign, where she met her husband, she decided it was time to come clean.
“I think it was just time. I think I spent two years kind of wondering what would have happened if I just announced it? I kind of realized that once I reached a certain age, it’s time to not be scared anymore,” she said.
But it was after Kanye West first spoke out about Trump that Pipko really felt she should come forward.
“[Kanye] came out with his Trump support, not because of anything political, simply because he was tired of living in fear. And I was like, ‘Why would I ever have to live in fear of supporting my president? It doesn’t make any sense.'”
While Pipko said she has received a lot of support from those excited about Exodus, she said those in the modeling industry “distanced themselves” from her shortly after.
“The [response from the] modeling industry was exactly what I expected. A lot of the photographers and people that I had grown super close with kind of blocked me on social media and distanced themselves,” she recalled.
A question the 23-year-old gets a lot is: “Why do you support Trump?”
“I support his support for the State of Israel and moving the embassy [to Jerusalem], something that so many presidents promised to do and they didn’t. I support that he puts our country first, something that is shockingly not heard of apparently with candidates that are running for president in this country.
“I support the way that he shares his views the same way that I share my views. I support the fact that he’s not politically correct and tells it like it is and gets young people excited for their futures in the country…and apart from politics, he also continued on and fought probably every critic…that told him he was never going to do it. He continued on, stayed confident and became probably the most powerful man in the world. So if you can’t get inspiration from that, then that’s a deeper issue.”
Read the full article at Fox News.
WASHINGTON — At 23, Elizabeth Pipko has branded herself on social media as a onetime figure skater, a part-time poet and a former Trump campaign aide, an Instagramista whose feed spotlights her Mar-a-Lago wedding and racy swimsuit and lingerie modeling shots.
But when President Trump latched onto Ms. Pipko’s concept of a “Jexodus” — a fledging, and some would say crass, effort by Republicans to woo Jews away from the Democratic Party — even Democratic leaders found themselves defensively responding to a young woman they did not know existed a month ago.
The rise of Ms. Pipko and the notion of a Jexodus — there is no evidence that any such thing is occurring — is an object lesson in how an idea can migrate from a no-name messenger to the broad body politic, through the organ of Fox News and the megaphone of the president’s Twitter account.
“We left Egypt, and now we’re leaving the Democratic Party,” Ms. Pipko declared last week on “Fox & Friends,” the president’s favorite television program, prompting a flurry of tweets about Jexodus from Mr. Trump, and an angry retort from Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the House Democratic leader.
About that exodus: Some 79 percent of Jews voted for Democrats in last year’s midterm elections, according to exit polling data, up from the 71 percent who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and the 69 percent who voted for Barack Obama in 2012. And Jews take a dim view of Mr. Trump, according to a 2018 Gallup poll that found that just 26 percent of Jews approved of the president’s performance, the lowest of any major religious group.
And about that name, Jexodus. “Obviously, it’s a play on Exodus,” Ms. Pipko said on Fox. (There was, of course, an Exodus in the Bible. It involved Jews. So why the J? Is the next step renaming Passover as “Jassover”?)
“The Exodus is the most important master class in redemption in human history, and it is the ground for why we care about all those who are oppressed by slavery,” said Rabbi Jonah Pesner, the director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. “To crush that redemptive narrative into the crucible of partisan politics, I find very troubling.”
The Palestinian-American writer Yousef Munayyer took a lighter view. “Jexodus,” he said, reminded him of “a bad Weird Al Yankovic parody” of Bob Marley: “Movement of Jah people.”
Jexodus may have gotten the hint on the name. On Thursday, its leaders announced that they were rebranding it “the Exodus Movement,” an initiative of Red Sea Rising, incorporated by Ms. Pipko as a tax-exempt “social welfare” organization. On Wednesday afternoon, the Jexodus.org website was taken down; a new one, TheExodusMovement.com, went live on Thursday.
But on the mission, Ms. Pipko said she was undeterred. “We’re obviously super-realistic and aware that overwhelmingly, the Jewish people have supported Democrats over the years,” Ms. Pipko said in an interview, though she added, “I love a challenge.”
In a strategy memo shared with The New York Times, she wrote that she intended to use “extensive microtargeting” to find “persuadable Jews” in eight states — Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Michigan and Minnesota — where Jews make up more than 2 percent of the vote in a total of 31 House districts.
The effort comes at a fraught moment for Israel supporters in the Democratic Party. Two freshman Democrats — Representatives Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan — embrace the boycott-Israel movement and have been fending off charges of anti-Semitism for weeks. The Republican National Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee have streamed out a barrage of news releases accusing Democrats of anti-Semitism or coddling anti-Semites.
Exodus Movement’s Founder & President Elizabeth Pipko joined One America News to discuss the launch of our organization.
A New Initiative Run By Elizabeth Pipko Committed To Rejecting The Hypocrisy, Anti-Americanism And Anti-Semitism Of The Far-Left
NEW YORK, NY: Due to overwhelming initial support, Red Sea Rising, a newly-formed 501(c)(4) nonprofit, announces the launch of The Exodus Movement, a grassroots platform for Americans who believe in standing up for their Jewish identity and that our connection to Judaism makes us better Americans. It is the movement for those who understand the importance of staunchly supporting the Jewish State and the people of Israel.
The Exodus Movement was formed in the wake of progressives moving away from their support of the Jewish people and their beliefs. This can be seen in their support for disastrous policies such as the Iran deal, their promotion of anti-Semitic causes like BDS and their unwillingness to confront the threat of radical Islamic terrorism head-on.
The Exodus Movement is run by Elizabeth Pipko, a model, athlete and published author from New York City who previously served on Donald J. Trump’s successful 2016 presidential campaign.
Per Pipko, “Jewish voters have seen an increased animosity towards them in the last decade from progressives and liberals, starting with President Obama and continuing today with extremists such as Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib. There has been an unwillingness by many liberals to condemn clearly anti-Semitic comments being made by some in their ranks, leaving Jewish voters feeling unmoored. The Exodus Movement aims to show Jews that they don’t need to hitch their wagon to people who won’t advocate for the issues they hold near and dear.”
For more information on The Exodus Movement, go to TheExodusMovement.com and TheRedSeaRising.com.