<\/p>\n
An Israeli-born celebrity chef says he and his family are under attack in the US as part of a hate campaign targeting him for his Israeli identity and service in the IDF.<\/p>\n
Guy Vaknin, a well-known chef who appeared on Fox\u2019s Hell\u2019s Kitchen and ABC\u2019s Shark Tank, told The celebrity.land<\/i> that anonymous messages have included threats against his young children. One read: \u201cBeautiful child. Did you feel bad when you went to kill the Palestine children? Hope your child doesn\u2019t die like the children you killed in Palestine. You\u2019re done.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vaknin said such threats now arrive \u201cdaily,\u201d accusing him of being singled out for not condemning Israel as it fights Hamas, the terror group that massacred 1,200 people on October 7, 2023.<\/p>\n
The 42-year-old served in the IDF before immigrating to the US two decades ago. Today he owns eight vegan restaurants in New York under his City Roots Hospitality brand. But his success has made him a target.<\/p>\n
Vandals have defaced his restaurants with \u201cFree Gaza\u201d graffiti. On September 4, the group Vegans for Palestine launched a boycott campaign, attacking Vaknin\u2019s IDF service and accusing him of \u201cvegan-washing\u201d Israeli \u201ccrimes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vaknin warned that such campaigns hurt not only him but also his 200 employees. In a statement this week, he condemned the \u201chateful online attacks,\u201d stressing: \u201cOther than my place of birth, which is Israel, I have no connection to the ongoing conflict. My political views have never been shared publicly, and it is unfair and destructive to target our family and livelihood over assumptions.\u201d<\/p>\n
The boycott activists dismissed his call for peace, accusing him of \u201cboth-siding the suffering.\u201d They promoted claims from vegan influencer Sabrina Dahlmann, who alleged he used Arab slurs. Vaknin rejected the accusation, saying he had only shared videos from Israeli friends near the Gaza border whose communities were devastated by Hamas on October 7.<\/p>\n
He said he and Dahlmann had even shared a meal and seemed reconciled until her recent social media posts reignited the campaign. \u201cAs I put the statement out there, all of this blew up. I\u2019m getting threats here, boycotts there. It just became worse \u2014 the mob woke up, I guess,\u201d Vaknin said.<\/p>\n
Neither Dahlmann nor Vegans for Palestine responded to requests for comment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.israelnationalnews.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" An Israeli-born celebrity chef says he and his family are under attack in the US as part of a hate campaign targeting him for his Israeli identity and service in the IDF. Guy Vaknin, a well-known chef who appeared on Fox\u2019s Hell\u2019s Kitchen and ABC\u2019s Shark Tank, told The celebrity.land that anonymous messages have included […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2038498,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25177],"tags":[376725,376724,352027,23170],"class_list":["post-2038497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-celebrities","tag-antisemitism","tag-idf","tag-new-york-post","tag-restaurants"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Jewish-celebrity-chef-targeted-by-hate-campaign-thats-hurting-business.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2038497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2038497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2038497\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2038498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2038497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2038497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2038497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}