There, she took up activism for affordable housing, the pro-choice movement, and the antiwar movement.[4][6][7] In 1982, news reports of the Sabra and Shatila massacres committed by a Lebanese Phalangist militia with the complicity of the IDF, during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, "horrified" Epstein. Her reaction was to take a different perspective on the Arab–Israeli conflict; she began to express opposition to Israel's military policies. In 2001, she founded a St. Louis chapter of the Women in Black, an anti-war group that originally focused on Israel's occupation.