Simone Zimmerman

Simone Rimmon Zimmerman (born November 30, 1990) is a Jewish American activist who is opposed to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip . She is the founder of the lobby group IfNotNow . Zimmerman was the Jewish outreach coordinator for Bernie Sanders for 30 hours in 2016. She was terminated due to her use of what some considered to be inflammatory language on social media. Zimmerman was featured in the 2023 documentary called Israelism . She describes how it feels being a young U.S. -born Jew in an American life of pro-Israel indoctrination and mass mobilization that demands young Jewish Americans to be pro-Israeli even in instances of obvious human rights violations by the Israeli government. She recalls how Abe Foxman branded her as anti-Israel and pushed for Sanders to dismiss her as the outreach co-ordinator, which Sanders did on 14 April 2016 - some hours after hiring her. She says in the documentary: As more and more American Jews are speaking out in support of Palestinian freedom, now they just say instead we're overt anti-semites, we hate all Jewish people or even worse that we're not Jewish at all. Zimmerman studied at the University of California, Berkeley . When she arrived at the university in 2009, she was involved with the pro-Israel advocacy group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and was later the national leader of the anti- occupation group, the J Street U before co-founding IfNotNow. As of July 2019, Zimmerman was the Director of B'Tselem USA , a nonprofit organization that documents human rights violations in the Israel-Palestine conflict . Simone Zimmerman: pro-Israel enthusiast turned anti-Israel radical , last updated 17 May 2016.