“Candace Owens and all these psychos didn’t come out of nowhere,” says the Israeli-American actress-producer Noa Tishby. “Antisemitic ideas of Jewish power and control, this notion of the global Jew who is suspect no matter what we do: There’s a long history of exploiting this. It’s just now disseminated at the speed of light through social media.”

In the years since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel and the subsequent wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, the L.A.-based Tishby has emerged as a prominent online influencer attempting to counter rising antisemitic and anti-Zionist sentiment. Her brand of hasbara — the Israeli word for explaining the state and its actions to foreigners — is glamorous, conversational and message-disciplined.

Tishby’s efforts have made her a controversial figure both online as well as at political demonstrations, even if she’s often greeted with a drumbeat of effusive accolades from approaching strangers at home, as The Hollywood Reporter witnessed over a recent lunch in Studio City. “I’m called a ‘genocide queen,’” she shrugs. “It’s ridiculous. I’m the one who’s been working toward peace my entire life.”

Tishby, who became an American citizen in 2008, was a successful TV actress in Israel who moved to L.A. in the early 2000s for work, landing roles on shows like Nip/Tuck, Star Trek: Enterprise, Charmed and Big Love. She also was an executive producer on In Treatment after selling HBO the originating Israeli format, BeTipul. She soon turned to activism — and has since stopped pursuing an entertainment career — out of a growing frustration with what she views as ignorance and bias about Israel. “There’s a lot of very strong opinions, and very little knowledge,” she says, asserting that Israel’s Jewishness itself explains why it’s often judged to a different standard than other nations. “No other country is debated as to whether or not it should exist.”

Tishby sees incessant examples of this inconsistency, especially in the media. On May 11, The New York Times published an investigation with the heading “How Israel Turned Eurovision’s Stage Into a Soft Power Tool: Israel’s efforts to influence Eurovision’s vote were broader and started years earlier than previously known.” She says, “This is a perfect example. The framing is nefarious and conspiratorial and the ‘findings’ amount to nothing. Israel is using ‘soft power’? So does every country.”

Much of Tishby’s activity has been highlighting aspects of Jewish culture and history “that have nothing to do with Israel, on purpose” — especially as rates of antisemitic violence have spiked throughout diaspora communities. Her most high-profile project for the past couple years is an online nightly menorah lighting series during Hanukkah featuring the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Gal Gadot, Tiffany Haddish, Pink, Amy Schumer, Mila Kunis and Mayim Bialik. “It’s all very positive and visible and fun and uplifting,” she says. “But I can’t tell you how many no’s I received. People who said, ‘I’m afraid for my family. I’m afraid for my friends. I love this. Good for you for being out there for us. But I can’t do it.’”

Her latest endeavor is a sequence of educational videos, meant to be accessible for children, which range from the religion of Judaism to the history of the Holocaust. “It’s for beginners,” she said. Tishby, who grew up in a secular household, has partnered with the Los Angeles Unified School District — the second largest in the U.S., enrolling more than half a million students — to create materials approved for classrooms and to recognize, for the first time, May’s Jewish American Heritage Month. She sees this as an attempted corrective, pointing to hostile attitudes against Israel, and Jews more broadly, which are now highest among the youngest generations. “They’re getting groomed to be suspicious towards Israel, to be suspicious towards Jews.”

Tishby’s efforts have drawn dissent. Case in point: Dr. Anat Plocker, a professor of Judaic Studies, slammed her in The Nation for “weaponizing antisemitism discourses, equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. This rhetorical sleight of hand allows Israel to act with impunity.”

In December 2025, Tishby was the subject of a paper published by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a U.S. foreign policy think tank which critiques America’s Middle East geopolitical involvements and is funded by the left-wing billionaire George Soros and the right-wing billionaire Charles Koch. Emails from 2011, which were hacked by a pro-Iran group, appeared to show that Tishby’s work on behalf of Act for Israel — an advocacy organization with connections to the Israeli government — may have violated the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act, a law mandating public disclosure of lobbying in America on behalf of a foreign power. (Tishby has aired her own concerns that some anti-Israel student activism at U.S. colleges has been funded by organizations with alleged links to Hamas.)

Tishby, 50, notes that Act for Israel “was dismantled years ago” and that she did subsequently register under FARA when Israel’s foreign minister Yair Lapid appointed her Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism and the Delegitimization of Israel in April 2022. She left the role a year later due to the rightward, authoritarian drift of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling government: “It was more extreme and religious and not representative of women than I would have liked to see,” Tishby says, who describes her own politics as liberal-progressive. “I couldn’t keep quiet on [Netanyahu’s proposed] judicial overhaul and I spoke up against it even though I knew it would cost me my position. I joke that if people do the proper research and find out that I was fired by Bibi” — Netanyahu’s nickname — “it gives me a little bit more street cred with certain crowds.”

Tishby started her current nonprofit advocacy organization, Eighteen, in 2024. It has six staffers, a shoestring budget and, she insists, zero ties to the Israeli government. “I don’t even talk to them,” she says. “I don’t want to say it in a disrespectful way, but I believe that we can all understand that Israel hasn’t done its best work with PR. So, there’s not much that the Israeli government can contribute here [in the U.S.]” She adds, with emphasis, “I’m an American, doing American work.”

Tishby is critical of the Israeli settler movement in the West Bank and, at the same time, believes the categorization of Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocide is a dangerous, distorting and counterproductive falsehood. “I’m an Oslo girl,” she points out, referring to the failed 1990s peace process intended to lead toward a durable two-state solution. “I’m pro-Israeli and I’m pro-Palestinian, and these two things are not mutually exclusive,” she insists. “It’s only our detractors, the people that are trying to put a wedge between us and the world and create problems with Israel, they’re the only ones that are saying that you have to be either/or. I will say it until I’m blue in the face, even if it might annoy people: Being pro-Israeli doesn’t mean that you’re anti-Palestinian. I’m just anti-Hamas and anti-Jihadism. If you want to kill me, I’m against you.”

Up next for Tishby is a planned U.S. college tour. She’s previously traveled with former Israeli hostages to speak across the country at the invitation of campus organizations, encountering strong support at conservative schools like Liberty University and demonstrated against at liberal bastions such as Penn University, one of the Ivies where students held a sustained pro-Palestine encampment. (Penn has since clashed with the Trump administration’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over its investigation into on-campus antisemitism.)

Tishby, who has also sparred with pro-Palestine activists during the Sundance Film Festival, explains that “I would love to go to Columbia, to go to Berkeley — these super-progressive places” this time around. “But they’re never going to have me. They seem to not be interested in hearing dissenting voices.” (Separately, UC Regent Jay Sures — the vice chair of talent agency UTA — recently condemned UCLA’s student government for criticizing a campus event which hosted an Israeli hostage who’d been held by Hamas after the Oct. 7 attack.)

As for Hollywood, Tishby thinks Jews in today’s entertainment business who hold creative leadership positions too often self-censor and self-erase, either out of “an epigenetic fear of being rounded up” or just because they feel the need to prioritize their own career survival in a declining industry. “As much as our haters say that we control the media, the Jews consistently have kept themselves out of [on-screen] storytelling,” she says, pointing to a record that dates to the Jewish founding moguls. “We’re going to be hated anyway, so we may as well be proud.”

Tishby’s mother Yael, an activist within Israel, died on May 8. “She was the embodiment of getting yourself into good trouble, of going full-throttle, of not caring about ruffling feathers,” Tishby says. “I’m proud to be her daughter.”