This news text explores the extreme pro-Israel advocacy of Democratic Senator John Fetterman and the influence of a little-known advisor named David 'Dovi' Safier. The article delves into Fetterman's unwavering support for Israel, his isolation from his party, and the role of Safier in shaping his political identity.
to block arms sales to the country. In April of this year, it was 40. Polls show about two-thirds of Democratic voters sympathize with Palestinians more than Israel is.
And even former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel — who grew up spending his summers in the country and whose middle name is Israel — has recently begun callingAnd then there’s Senator John Fetterman. While the rest of his party reluctantly retreats from an ironclad allyship, the Pennsylvania senator has promised to be the “last” Democrat standing with Israel. His political identity is increasingly defined by a blanket defense of the country.
Online, Fetterman frequently mocks critics of Israel. In interviews, he has pushed back on claims that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide. When pro-Palestine protesters came to his home, Fetterman waved an Israeli flag from his roof; asked onabout Israel’s pagers attack in Lebanon, which wounded more than 3,000 people and killed 12, the senator said, “I love it.
” On May 19, Fetterman was the only Democratic senator to vote against a War Powers Resolution intended to stymie the U.S.-Israel war against Iran.
“President Trump has been willing to do what’s right and necessary to produce real peace in the region,” he said when the war began. “God bless the United States, our great military, and Israel,” Fetterman added, as if these elements constitute some kind of geopolitical holy trinity. By Democratic Party standards, Fetterman’s position on Israel is extreme.
There are a multitude of theories as to why: The senator is a contrarian; he enjoys the attention; he has convinced himself that he is indisputably in the right. But people close to Fetterman cite a previously unreported factor too: Behind the scenes, Fetterman is being encouraged and counseled by a little-known man in his late 30s named David “Dovi” Safier.
Safier, a writer of Jewish history and fundraiser for Orthodox causes, has no public background in government or counseling politicians on Capitol Hill. He is not an official staffer or paid outside adviser. A few years ago, he “just kind of appeared” in the senator’s orbit, one former Fetterman staffer remembers. And then, suddenly, he seemed to be everywhere.
Staffers would walk into Fetterman’s office, only to find Safier sitting in the room. When the senator went to Israel in 2025, Safier joined him on the trip; when Fetterman filmedThe two are constantly texting and talking, according to multiple former Fetterman staffers, and Safier has unofficially operated as a top campaign fundraiser and senior adviser.
He has even set up and attended sensitive meetings with foreign officials; in some cases, he is the only person staffing those meetings, I’ve been told. In September 2025, Fetterman and some of his senior staffers gathered at the senator’s office for a meeting with Yechiel Leiter, the Israeli ambassador to the United States. According to one of the staffers in attendance, Safier was inexplicably in the room, too. It was far from a public event.
During the meeting, Fetterman tested out a proposal to force every senator to vote on whether they think Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Throughout, the two politicians gossiped freely.
According to the same staffer, Leiter told Fetterman that he had prodded Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — despite his— to be even more helpful to Israel, asking the Jewish politician if he puts blood in his matzo. Fetterman chuckled, the person in attendance said, not “picking up on the gravity of the insult. ” During a trip to Israel, Fetterman receives a silver-plated beeper from Netanyahu, a reference to the country’s military operation that used fake rigged with explosives.
In conversations with 11 current and former staffers for Fetterman — all of whom requested varying levels of anonymity to speak freely about sensitive matters — a strange picture emerges. The senator has isolated himself from many of his Senate colleagues and members of his own party. There are few who Fetterman seems to trust beyond his dad and brother, who are conservative; Bobby Maggio, his 2022 campaign manager; and now Safier, who has become arguably the senator’s closest confidant.
Fetterman’s dwindling inner circle has, by default, given Safier an unusually large influence. When he is on Capitol Hill, Safier will “hang out and sit in Fetterman’s office all day or walk with him to the floor,” a former staffer says. After their conversations, Fetterman would appear “far more radicalized,” the former staffer remembers. The chatter around the office is usually: “Oh God, Safier is here, and now John’s not gonna go to any of his meetings.
” Multiple staffers recall hearing about calls between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Fetterman that Safier listened in on. As Safier’s influence has grown, the senator’s calls with Netanyahu have increased. On the calls, it is either Fetterman alone talking with the foreign leader or just the senator, Safier, and Netanyahu. Safier “would always stick around” when Fetterman chatted with “important dignitaries” from other countries, another former staffer says. Recently, Safier was in attendance for a meeting with the United Arab Emirates ambassador to the United States, according to multiple people with direct knowledge. It’s not odd for a politician to have a “Kitchen Cabinet” of informal advisers — longtime friends, academics, and former colleagues.
But they typically offer “much more structured, occasional advice,” a chief of staff for a current Democratic congressperson told me. Informed of Safier’s close relationship with Fetterman, the chief of staff was stunned.
“It’s definitely concerning,” they said. When asked if they’d ever heard of a similar arrangement — an unpaid adviser sitting in on meetings with diplomats and hanging out with a politician during working hours — the chief of staff said, “Truly, no.” Fetterman’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment or a detailed list of questions about Safier’s role.
The little-known adviser’s growing influence within Fetterman’s office comes at a time when the senator, deeply unpopular among Democrats in his home state, is being wooed by the Republicans to switch parties. He hasthat it is the Democrats who have betrayed their values, while insisting that he would be a poor fit in the Republican Party. Fetterman is in a political no-man’s-land — a disastrous development for a first-term senator.
His staffers are infuriated with their boss’s untenable position in the Senate and his buddy-buddy dynamic with Safier. Fetterman has largely sidetracked other legislative matters, a current staffer said, and is now spending most of his time focusing on Israel. A few people working for Fetterman have even begun to joke that he is the “senator from Tel Aviv” and call Safier “chief” because he has more power than the actual chief of staff.
In his few public interviews, mostly podcasts focused on Jewish life, Safier has said he grew up on Long Island in an Orthodox community.
As a young man, he relocated to a settlement in East Jerusalem — which is illegally occupied by Israel, according to the International Court of Justice — and studied the Talmud at Mir Yeshiva, the largest yeshiva in the world. This background explains Safier’s current public persona: an American Jewish writer who has come back from, and often returns to, the Holy Land. His work mostly appears in an Orthodox magazine calledBut Safier’s broader employment is unclear.
He describes himself publicly only as a “business professional,” and his employers and occupations on political donations forms have been ambiguous: “N/A,” “consultant,” “self-employed. ” “David has never been really forthcoming about what he does,” a person close to Fetterman says.
“It’s always been very like, ‘Oh, I’m in wealth management. ’” On a 2018 donation form, Safier listed his employer as the Wolfson Group, a New York City–based family investments firm. It’s unclear whether Safier is currently employed there, but over the last few years, he’s told some in Fetterman’s office that he works for the company, and his active email address is still linked to the firm. The founder of the firm is Safier’s grandfather Zev Wolfson, a real-estate magnate who died at the age of 84. The Israeli Embassy to the United States, in the 1960s, Wolfson successfully convinced members of Congress to send Phantom jets to Israel; in the 1980s, he was “personally responsible for saving Israel hundreds of millions of dollars in interest payments on US government loans”; in the 1990s, he helped the Israeli military secure Patriot missiles.
Wolfson was especially close with former Hawaii senator Daniel Inouye and former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. But he didn’t “relish the personal attention,” nor did he “put his name on his buildings in the style of Donald J. Trump,” the New Yorksaid in a late 1980s article. When Wolfson died in 2012, he left behind hundreds of millions in assets, according to court records, and the Wolfson Group, which is still run by Safier’s uncles.
Safier’s work with Fetterman seems to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps. In 2023, Bob Pincus, an AIPAC national board member, helped Fetterman’s staff set up a fundraiser in midtown Manhattan with a member of “our broader community,” according to texts I obtained. Safier was a co-host of the event, and it appears he met Fetterman there for the first time.
Afterward, Safier worked his way into the senator’s inner circle. In December 2023, Safier texted a former senior staffer about coordinating additional Fetterman fundraisers and floated the possibility of organizing a trip to Israel.
In April 2024, Safier reached out to the former senior staffer again: “Got a call from the Israeli PM’s office … The PM wanted to setup a call with the Senator to thank him for his support . ” Fetterman and Netanyahu spoke to each other a day later. Safier also began to show up to events.
In May 2024, he was in the crowd as Fetterman gave a commencement speech at Yeshiva University. Some staff remember the summer of 2024 as a turning point. That June, Fetterman made a two-day excursion to Israel. During his trip, he.
He seemed refreshed by the experience.
“It was the trip of my life,” the senator later told a journalist at After Fetterman returned, several people close to the senator noticed Safier popping up at the office with increasing frequency. One says it became common to see Safier waiting “outside John’s office” to speak.
“He became part of our conversations,” the former staffer says. “It got to the point where there was weight in what he said and what he wanted. ” The extent of the access surprised staff. So did Safier’s mode of transport: He occasionally flew down from New York on a private jet owned by Reuven Moskowitz, staff were told.
Moskowitz, a wealthy lawyer and technology entrepreneur, sometimes hung out at the office, too. Both Safier and Moskowitz were donors and supporters of former New York City mayor Eric Adams. Multiple former staffers told me they did not personally dislike Safier. In their interactions, he was often chatty and jovial. They describe him as friendly, if awkward — wholesome and funny, with a childlike energy. But they were still perturbed that he had come out of nowhere politically and flattered his way into Fetterman’s inner circle.
And his praise of their boss could be strange. In his new role, Safier has taken to often publicly lauding the senator on X. “Nobody on either side of the aisle says it quite like” Fetterman, a.k.a. the “Secretary of Trolling,” Safier posted recently. Last year, he tweetedat the invitation of a nonprofit called Relief Resources .
The New York City–based Jewish mental-health nonprofit said it wanted to invite Fetterman because of his “leadership in mental health awareness and legislative advocacy. ” One of Relief Resources’ board members is a man named Daniel Wolfson, which is the name of Zev Wolfson’s son and Safier’s uncle. Safier was heavily involved in setting up the trip, according to multiple people with direct knowledge. Safier traveled with Fetterman for most of his four days in Israel, according to four former and current staff members. Moskowitz was there too. The senator seemed to. He again met with Netanyahu, who presented him with a silver-plated “beeper” in celebration of Israel’s attack on Lebanon.
That meeting was. A separate meeting in Tel Aviv with right-wing billionaire Miriam Adelson, confirmed to me by four people close to Fetterman, was not disclosed. , who said, “Fetterman’s doing fine.
It’s the party that needs a checkup”). But since the story came out, Fetterman has become much warier about “leakers” on staff and is suspicious of many of his aides.
“He completely isolated himself from the party and anyone that he thought was a progressive,” a former staffer tells me.that asked Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, to pardon Netanyahu over charges in his corruption case. According to five current and former staffers, the letter wasn’t drafted by anyone in the senator’s office. Two say Safier passed it along to Fetterman to be signed on Senate letterhead. By early this year, many on Fetterman’s staff were incredulous and exhausted. In private, their boss was acting like a Republican, they say. In January 2026, Fetterman sent to a group chat with staffers a screenshot of an article headline about how the average working family spends nearly $4,000 annually on health care.
“How should it cost? Free? ” he complained in the text, which I obtained.
“I don’t understand what affordability it is. ” The same month, after the Epstein files were released, Fetterman texted a staffer, “Epstein was a nothing burger. Worst pics I’ve seen were from Clinton lol. ” When Alex Pretti was killed by ICE in Minneapolis, Fetterman was consumed with grievances about how Democrats were hypocrites for defending Pretti’s right to legally carry a firearm: “Kyle Rittenhouse brought a gun to a protest.
He was roundly condemned for that. Why are now democrats defending the nurse it was legal to carry. Both legal weapons. Square that,” he texted.among Pennsylvania Democrats has dropped 108 points since 2023, from plus 68 to minus 40, according to CNN.
It’s a massive swing, and Fetterman has had trouble adjusting. Last summer, Fetterman called a rare meeting with senior staff to ruminate about his political future. The presidency still intrigued him , but it had been a bruising few months. He floated something more realistic: vice-president on the Democratic Party’s 2028 presidential ticket.
“Almost all of us had our jaws on the floor, like, ‘Are you out of your fucking mind? You don’t do your job, you can’t raise any money, and your entire party hates you,’” a person who was in the room says. People with direct knowledge don’t buy the rumor that Fetterman might switch parties or outright quit his job.
He’d instantly become much less interesting to Fox News if he were no longer a self-hating Democrat, and he’d lose his unique sway in the Senate if he stopped being an unpredictable vote. Barring another health scare, people close to Fetterman think he intends to stick it out through the end of his term in 2029. A former senior staffer told me they expect Safier to keep his informal advisory role during that time, too.
Earlier this year, the senator asked that Safier have access to his schedule. And a few weeks ago, Safier accompanied Fetterman on a series of fundraisers in New Jersey and New York City, according to multiple people with direct knowledge. Becoming an actual full-time staffer would mean an entirely different workload for Safier with significantly more scrutiny; it “blows the whole thing up,” the former senior staffer says.
Safier seems to want a job more like that of his grandfather Zev Wolfson, whose pro-Israel lobbying efforts in Congress were “entirely under the radar, without any fanfare or publicity,” according to the Jerusalem. Those efforts were also incredibly successful.
“He’s getting what he wants,” the senior staffer says of Safier. “John will go where he wants, when he wants. ”Cathy Tie married a gene-editing outlaw and got barred from China. So she threw herself a 30th birthday party at Carnegie Hall.
The NAACP wants athletes and fans to boycott schools in states decimating Black representation. It could hit the South in the heart and the wallet. Starting in the fall of 2027, Harvard undergrads will be competing for a limited number of available A grades in each of their classes. Forget policy goals or even boosting his party.
The president wants his ballroom, his vengeance slush fund, and lots of payback. Don Jr. and Eric’s gold Trump phone is nine months overdue and the American flag logo only has 11 stripes. But hey, it turns on! The U.S. and Israel reportedly planned on reinstalling former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after decapitating the regime.
Yes, that guy. Jeff Bezos denied any involvement, but told CNBC that the film was a “very wise business decision” for Amazon. Here’s what the numbers say. The president took down several Republican foes in last night’s primaries.
But there was also good news for Democrats in November. As law enforcement recovered a manifesto associated with the suspects, the FBI said of the pair, “They didn’t discriminate on who they hated. ”From disappointment to annoyance to pointed silence to calling Paxton a felon, here’s how congressional Republicans reacted to Trump’s announcement. Roughly 8,000 employees will be laid off and another 7,000 reassigned as Meta tries to keep pace in the AI race.
The ballroom is somehow both a generous present from Trump to American taxpayers and a necessary security project we must pay for. Democrats could benefit from something new to say on health care policy, and free primary care would help a lot of people, too.
“In spite of repressive aspects of the Saudi regime,” accepting up to $200 million from the kingdom was not a difficult decision, says Peter Gelb. New York
Democratic Senator John Fetterman Pro-Israel Advocacy Little-Known Advisor David 'Dovi' Safier Israel Gaza War Powers Resolution War Against Iran Chuck Schumer Silver-Plated Beeper Political Identity
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Pelosi intervenes in Democratic race to succeed herFormer Speaker Nancy Pelosi backed Connie Chan in the race to succeed her, calling the San Francisco supervisor ready to bring clarity to Congress.
Read more »
Senator Warren Questions OCC Head on Approval of ‘Ineligible’ Crypto Trust ChartersElizabeth Warren is questioning the legality of the OCC, under Jonathan Gould, approving or conditionally approving trust charter applications for several crypto companies.
Read more »
South Carolina Redistricting Plan: Favor Republicans; No Democratic WinPresident Donald Trump's redistricting plan reshapes the state's only Democratic-held U.S. House district to Republicans' advantage, ensuring little to no gain for Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections.
Read more »
WATCH: Dem senator snaps after Acting AG Blanche accuses him of 'obviously lying' in heated exchangeActing AG Blanche and Sen. Van Hollen clash over whether a pardoned Jan. 6 rioter promised child abuse victims money from a DOJ restitution fund.
Read more »