Ms. Rachel, Israeli children deserve your voice — Not a modern blood libel

Ms. Rachel — for anyone who doesn’t have a toddler glued to their hip — is an early-childhood educator and YouTube creator whose slow, gentle, speech-development videos have been nothing short of salvation for millions of exhausted parents.

My special-needs son learned some of his first real words from her. I have listened to her voice at 3 a.m. while praying for strength during long nights of teething and meltdowns. She has been a comfort in my home. And for that, I have genuinely liked her.

Which is why what I’m about to write is complicated, and honestly, painful.

Because I love that Ms. Rachel fights for children.

But I can’t escape the ache that she doesn’t fight for all of them.

When she posts about the suffering of children in Gaza — which she absolutely should, because every innocent child deserves protection — she rarely acknowledges the Israeli children who were murdered, burned alive, executed in front of their parents, or taken hostage by Hamas on October 7.

She doesn’t mention the babies dragged into tunnels. The toddlers orphaned. The ones kept underground for weeks in the dark. The ones strangled by terrorists.

If you position yourself as a universal advocate for children, Israeli children must fall under that umbrella of compassion. And when they don’t, parents like me notice. We shouldn’t have to beg a children’s champion to remember our murdered children. Empathy is not a finite resource. You don’t have to choose.

And yet — painfully — it feels like she has because the precious little lip service she’s given in broad strokes simply doesn’t suffice.

That grief deepened when she recently shared a post criticizing U.S. policy by saying America was cutting SNAP, the program that feeds hungry kids, while “sending billions in weapons to another country to kill other children.”

I am choosing to believe Ms. Rachel did not intend harm.

I am choosing to believe she did not sit down and think, “hmm, let me echo one of the oldest antisemitic lies in history.”

But intention and impact are not the same.

Because when you tell millions of people that Israel is funded specifically “to kill children,” you are doing something far more dangerous than making a political critique. You are inadvertently stepping into the architecture of the blood libel — the medieval accusation that Jews murder children on purpose.

This lie fueled pogroms, expulsions, and massacres for centuries. Jews died because their neighbors believed they killed Christian children with intent.

And now, in 2025, the same story resurfaces — not shouted in a town square, but wrapped in progressive, compassionate  language and delivered as an Instagram post from a beloved children’s educator.

Her post flattened an entire war into a simple, monstrous equation:

Weapons → Israel → killing children.

No mention of the terror attack that launched the war.

No mention of Hamas using civilians as shields.

No mention of Israeli families still burying their dead, or still reeling from the horror of captivity and survival.

When you erase that context, Israel — the place burying murdered children — becomes the place murdering them.

That moral inversion is not just misleading — it is the mechanism by which blood libel operates.

And millions of people saw it.

And the algorithm rewarded it.

And the applause rolled in.

I am not asking Ms. Rachel to defend a government.

I am not asking her to take a political stance.

I am not telling her how to feel about U.S. military aid.

The ask is much simpler, and much more human:

If you say you advocate for children, you must mean all children — including the Israeli ones whose suffering complicates your worldview.

When a public figure speaks about protecting children, and the only children consistently absent from her compassion are ours — the ones murdered, tortured, burned alive, or kidnapped — it is its own kind of heartbreak.

And when that silence is paired with language that echoes the deadliest antisemitic accusation in history, the harm multiplies.

We deserve better.

Our children deserve better.

And so do the children in Gaza — who suffer terribly, not because Israel wants them dead, but because Hamas deliberately hides behind them and dares the world to blame the Jews.

Ms. Rachel has a massive platform and a genuine gift. She can still use it to speak about suffering with nuance, accuracy, and expansive compassion. But that requires remembering that the Israeli children of October 7 are children too.

And they should not have to beg for her voice.