“Pizza Girl” Caroline D’Amore Steps Up for the Jewish Community

On October 19, just days after the horrific massacre in Israel, Caroline D’Amore was feeling fired up. She’d just gotten off the phone with two different Jewish friends who called her crying and saying they’d lost friends because of their pro-Israel posts on social media.

Caroline, an Italian-American pizza sauce maker – who has a large following and typically looks picture perfect in her posts – didn’t care what she looked like in that moment. She knew she had to speak up.

In a spur of the moment video she posted, she said: “I am a Malibu Italian with zero agenda. I have friends on both sides of this Middle East conflict and friends who are currently there giving me details. The one thing I can say is that I’m not highly educated on the long history. I’m doing my best to learn. But the undeniable facts are this: I am not seeing Israeli soldiers marching young girls through the streets, pulling them by their hair after they’ve just been raped. I’m not seeing Israeli soldiers spitting on the bodies of young women that they just killed. I am not seeing Jewish people ripping off the posters of baby hostages. I am not seeing groups of Jewish people marching in the streets, saying death to an entire community. So as somebody on the outside, I can tell you that is freaking terrifying and I am so scared… I can also tell you I was scared to send my daughter to school, and that wasn’t because of Jewish people.”

 

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A post shared by Caroline D'Amore (@carolinedamore)

Caroline went on to stick up for the Jewish community, saying, “If you’re one of these people ripping off posters and spewing hate, you need to take a really good look at yourself and ask yourself, why would you ever do that? Free the Palestinians does not mean torture Jewish people.”

To her over 100,000 followers, the pink-haired influencer wrote alongside her video, “I want both the Palestinian people and Israelis to find peace and safety immediately and I truly hope that happens but those spewing these hateful things at innocent people need serious mental help and I don’t know how you got to this point.”

The Reaction to Caroline’s Post

The support from the Jewish community came swiftly, with the post earning more than 102,000 likes and thousands of positive comments from Jews. Since Caroline posted that video, she’s received countless loving messages, posted more pro-Jewish videos and been invited to speak to family members of hostages and attend Jewish events, like galas and Shabbat dinners.

“It gets me every time that a mother DMs me and tells me that my video made her cry because it felt like the first time someone not Jewish got it, or cared, or thought about them as humans,” she told Jewlish.

At the same time, Caroline has lost followers and received a fair share of hate, just like her Jewish friends are experiencing right now. Her simple question is: Why?

“All of a sudden, I’m hearing about Jewish people being scared,” she said. “I was like this can’t be, I thought it was such an obvious statement I was making and I thought everybody would feel the same way. I was super confused that that wasn’t the case.”

Since her post seemed like it would be common sense – who wouldn’t stick up for Jewish people? – Caroline didn’t think it’d be controversial or go viral.

“I never thought my post would matter,” she said. “Then seeing how much it mattered makes me feel like I have a responsibility to continue to speak out for all these people.”

Caroline’s Backstory

Caroline is an entrepreneur and a single mom to her 8-year-old daughter. She lives in Malibu, where she grew up helping her father run his pizza store. Her grandparents immigrated from Italy, and her father became a widower when Caroline was only 5 years old. She and her three siblings helped her father with his pizza shop, which features pizza made with imported water from Italy.

“My dad had no choice but to take us to catering jobs, sometimes on school nights,” she said. “We’d have shirts that say, ‘Pizza Kids,’ and we’d be on the sets of TV shows like ‘90210’ serving food.”

The value of hard work was instilled in Caroline at a young age. Her father grew up without a lot of money in Boston, and he came to California, where he was able to open the shop in Malibu and four additional locations.

“He wasn’t given anything in his life ever,” Caroline said. “He watched his wife die and had four little kids and had to take care of them all by himself. He wasn’t educated or experienced in anything else. He just hated the pizza in California and wondered why it tasted bad and wanted to change it.”

Seeing her father’s hard-working spirit, Caroline was inspired to start her own business, Pizza Girl, which sells organic, sugar-free, pizza sauce with the highest quality and healthiest ingredients. It’s kosher certified by the OU.

When Caroline became a single mother, she was appalled by the taste and ingredients in regular pizza sauce. She was busy, like other moms, but she didn’t want to feed her daughter such unhealthy food.

“There were so many added sugars and bad oils and preservatives,” she said. “I thought, ‘Why can’t we do better than this?’”

The higher-end sauces weren’t organic, or, as Caroline said, “They forgot to make them taste good. There was no marketing towards millennial moms, who buy pizza sauce all the time. It was all old-world, like Ragu or Newman’s, or there would just be a grandma on the jar. Where was I represented in the sauce aisle?”

The entrepreneur has done well for herself, getting into 2,000 stores across the country and coming out with the Pizza Girl Pizza Grill, a portable countertop pizza grill. In the wake of her pro-Jewish video, her popularity has only grown among the Jewish community, who is now commenting enthusiastically on her posts that they are ordering her sauce for the first time.

“While I’ve lost quite a few friends, I’ve made quite a few more,” she said. “I am not a people pleaser and I don’t need everybody to like me. I feel like what I’m doing is aligned with my heart, and that’s the most important thing.”

As a mother, Caroline can relate to the pain that the Jewish community, and the families of hostages, are going through.

“Without a doubt, being a mother has been a huge factor here,” she said. “People are already upset about those who were kidnapped and harmed, and then to see those ignorant college kids taking down a poster of a little baby and calling him a colonizer or an oppressor… all babies are innocent. I would never take down a poster of a Palestinian baby, or any baby. Every time I think we are moving on from this, something crazy and appalling happens, and I have to say something about it.”

Caroline is going to keep on using her large platform to spread positive messages and stand up for the Jewish community. She’s interviewing a student at Columbia University who feels threatened by antisemitism on campus and an ex-radicalized Muslim who is now speaking out on behalf of Israel.

“It’s important to continue to amplify all these different stories of the world so people stop having this one-track mind,” she said. “I’m just wired like this. I teach my daughter: if you see someone being bullied at school, it’s your responsibility to stand up for them and help them and protect them. If I tell her to do that, then I need to do it too.”