NEW YORK — Mandana Dayani’s activism, she will be the first to say, has grown out of her own life experience. Forced to chant “death to America” and “death to Israel” as a child, Dayani and her Persian Jewish family fled Iran and came to America as religious refugees, where she has devoted herself to protecting democracy and Western values. “My activism is so easy for me to lean into because I personally fled persecution and I understood what was at stake, and I understood why these privileges and rights were so important,” Dayani told The Times of Israel.
In 2018, Dayani co-founded I Am A Voter, a nonpartisan organization to increase voter registration and voter turnout which garnered over 1 billion unique digital impressions. I Am A Voter — which in recent weeks, merged with the nonpartisan voter registration organization HeadCount — and her other projects, including a podcast titled “The Dissenters,” focused on ways to involve and engage American citizens in their own democracy. Since the Hamas onslaught on Israel on October 7, however, Dayani has turned the focus of her activism and online engagement to the recent antisemitism surge in the United States.
A video she made shortly after the attacks explaining why the Hamas terrorists — who butchered 1,200 people in southern Israel and kidnapped 252 more to the Gaza Strip — are not “freedom fighters” has been shared and viewed online over 50 million times. The strength of Dayani’s online rea.
