How the online knitting world unraveled over Israel and Gaza
Even knitters aren’t exempt from internet wars over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
A pile of yarn. Photo by Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images
By Hannah Feuer August 25, 2025
Online crafting forums where members exchange sock patterns and stitching advice might not seem like the place to argue over allegations of genocide in Gaza. But lately, even knitters have become tangled up in the politics of the Israel–Hamas war.
“Knitting influencer in Israel? Anyone else find this unsettling?” a Reddit user wrote earlier this month in the online forum r/craftsnark, sharing screenshots from a knitter’s Instagram that showed her volunteering on an Israeli farm.
More than 500 commenters piled on, calling the knitter, who goes by @Illanna on Instagram and has 13,500 followers, a “genocide Barbie,” a “disgusting colonizer” and a “heartless ghoul.” She declined to comment to the Forward, citing threatening messages sent to both her and her employer.
While that might seem like a lot of name calling for a community united by its love of yarn, it was hardly the first time tensions over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had boiled over in seemingly unrelated online crafting forums. In a forum about crochet, moderators shut down commenting on a post of crocheted earrings in the pattern of a Palestinian flag due to “political bickering and drama.” In some cases, posts have incorporated antisemitic tropes. In a collage forum, a user shared a piece depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with devil horns and a snake’s tongue, placed alongside images of Palestinian children.
So earlier this month, fed-up Jewish crafting enthusiasts started their own Reddit community, with their own speech moderation rules: In r/JewishCrafts, which now has more than 200 members, discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is explicitly off-limits.
While the space is new, the dynamic is part of a post-Oct. 7 trend. Since the war started, more Jews have been separating themselves from spaces that suddenly feel unwelcoming or antagonistic. In their place, Jewish-led running clubs, gaming forums, and social groups have become “safe spaces” where members can connect over shared hobbies without fear of encountering antisemitism or anti-Israel rhetoric.
“I purposely chose, like, I’m not gonna interact with this at all,” said Deborah Shapiro, a 40-year-old Massachusetts resident and avid knitter who helped launch the Jewish crafts forum. “It’s not safe for my own mental health.”
The Reddit forum is not the only Jewish crafting group to emerge since Oct. 7. Tanya Singer, who leads the Simchat Torah Challenge, started a Facebook group called “Beautifully Jewish,” named after a podcast she used to host at Tablet Magazine. The group now has more than 7,000 members who share photos of their Jewish crafts, including handmade tallit, chuppahs, and challah covers. There, too, political debate is banned.
“It’s just a happy, beautiful space for Jews,” Singer said. “Mostly because they don’t feel like they have a space to go.”
Singer started the group after feeling disheartened by the lack of response she saw from many in the knitting world following Oct. 7. Online vitriol toward Israel, she said, has a way of spilling into real-life spaces, too. She’s second-guessing whether to attend an upcoming sheep and wool festival, unsure of how her presence might be received.
“I don’t want to go and be attacked,” she said. “I love knitting. Why do I want to contaminate it and let people potentially be in my face if I have an Israeli flag sticker on my phone?”
Adrian Marcos, a 27-year-old rabbinical student in Los Angeles, is another Jewish crafter. He’s knitted kippot with yellow ribbons to support the hostages in Gaza and hasn’t faced hostility from his own crafting circles. But he attributed that mostly to his tight-knit community — having distanced himself from progressive political spaces after Oct. 7.
“Once I saw how toxic and antisemitic it was getting, I was like, ‘OK, cool. I’m just not going to go to that rally. I’m not going to join this online group, or I’m going to leave this online group’ — because I don’t feel safe as a Jew,” he said.
For Shapiro, knitting has long been a vehicle for activism. She’s participated in other “craftivist” causes before, including creating pink “pussy hats” for the 2017 Women’s March and a blanket in the pattern of the Ukrainian flag. But lately, she said, the line between political expression and identity feels blurry.
She often knits yarmulkes, but hesitates to share them in general knitting forums — unsure whether they would be met with curiosity or condemnation.
“If I make something that’s for a Jewish ritual, or for a Jewish home, or just like, ‘Hey, I’m Jewish, and I made this,’ is that a political statement?” she asked. “It’s gotten very close, to where it’s becoming very difficult to separate out.”
She hopes the new group will give Jewish crafters a space where they don’t have to worry about whether expressions of Jewish identity will be perceived as political.
“This is another space to celebrate…being Jewish and making crafts, or making Jewish crafts, and how cool that is,” Shapiro said. “But it’s also incredibly sad that we felt the need for that.”
