TV: What were some of your favorite viral TikToks?
SS: That is hard. They were all very funny. I think Bama Rush was probably my favorite just because I remember watching my first Bama Rush video on TikTok and I was like, ‘Dad, I have a crazy idea, but I think this would be a really great one Video. ” We did a ‘What’s in your campaign bag?’ instead of “What’s in your rush bag?”
I also think that towards the end of the campaign, the BeReal content was really, really effective in engaging young people. We launched our BeReal on TikTok. We talked about it and used these trendy BeReal sounds. Then we got my dad a real BeReal account and for the whole last week, during the bus tour, he was actually posting on BeReal and the students were responding. It was an incredible opportunity to be able to connect people directly with him and to be able to act on his posts and comments and we would engage with them too.
TV: To shift the conversation a bit, you’re an activist yourself. Can you tell us how you got into activism and what your work looked like before the 2020 elections?
SS: Back in high school, I’ve always been an outspoken person and someone who doesn’t sit on the sidelines, so to speak. I was a member of our political action club, and we hosted our high school’s first non-partisan political action club conference. We brought speakers from both sides. It was really at a time of political polarization, as we see today, right after 2016. My co-president was a Republican and we wanted to bring people together, so we hosted this conference.
And then, I think, the Parkland shoot was where I started stepping out of my bubble and working in the community and engaging with people I’d never met before who were really just a few miles away from my high school. After the Parkland shooting, my friend and I did the National School Walkout on our campus, where pretty much the entire school walked.
We had a ceremony and that really got me into gun violence prevention activism in Philadelphia, working with various local organizations and meeting with grief groups for mothers. This was a very powerful experience for me and helped me open my eyes to everything that, as I said, is happening just a few miles from where I was born. That was probably my biggest launch and leap into the world of activism.
When I arrived on my college campus, I worked with the College Dems to vote [President Joe] biden And I have always been an advocate for the Jewish people and have spoken out against anti-Semitism on my college campus and in my community. This work is also very important to me.
TV: Do you plan to carry this activism into your father’s new government or continue to be an outside activist? How do you see your role developing?