Stav Shaffir was a fierce critic of economic inequality even before becoming the youngest woman ever elected to the Israeli Knesset at age 27. The daughter of two accountants, Shaffir spent a year after high school volunteering with underprivileged Israeli children. For her army service, she worked as a military journalist, covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the 2006 Lebanon War. After earning a journalism degree in 2009 from City University in London, where she interned at the British Parliament and participated in a scholarship program engaging in dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis, she returned to Israel and studied at Tel Aviv University while working as a freelance journalist. She helped organize the 2011 Israeli social justice protests and co-founded the Israeli Social Movement in 2012. In 2013 she joined the Knesset as a member of the Labor Party, demanding government transparency and finance reform. She quickly became a member of the Finance Committee and recruited 120 volunteers to look for discrepancies in the national budget. She lobbied for rent stabilization in 2014 when rents had increased by 50% in just seven years. As of 2016 she continues her work in the Knesset.