24 | MARCH 14 • 2024 
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efore an audience 
of more than 500 at 
Temple Beth El in 
Bloomfield Township on Feb. 
29, facilitated by the Jewish 
Federation of Detroit, Israeli 
social media influencer, author 
and activist Hen Mazzig said 
the Jewish community needs 
to be 10 times prouder to be 
Jewish than those who hate us 
for being Jewish, and the way to 
win over online misinformation 

that is fueling the hatred is to 
share accurate content about 
Israel’s war against Hamas. 
With more than 100 million 
interactions from followers of 
the digital content he creates, 
Mazzig is the founder of the Tel 
Aviv Institute, a social media 
outlet providing resources, data 
and proven strategies to fight 
online Jew-hatred. 
Giving an example of how 
inaccurate news coverage 
endangers global Jewry, Mazzig 
pointed to the torching of 
Tunisia’s oldest standing syna-
gogue in late October 2023 fol-
lowing an inaccurate New York 
Times report that Israeli rockets 
struck the Al-Shifa Hospital in 
Gaza. In truth, an errant Hamas 
rocket that was fired toward 
Israel caused the destruction 
and deaths of several civilians.
Mazzig’s family has Tunisian 
roots as well as Iraqi. There, 
they lived for centuries before 
being forcibly driven out along 
with nearly 1 million other Jews 
in the 1940s and 1950s. It is the 
story of these Jews — thrown 
out and then absorbed into 
Israeli culture — that is only 
gaining notoriety recently as 
Jews grapple with Jewish and 
Israeli identity.
Mazzig ruminated on this 
history, his Mizrachi identity, 
and the hatred today’s Jews are 
up against with the JN in an 
interview a few days before the 
event at Temple Beth El. 
“There is a repeated lie that 
Israel is a white settler colonial 
project,
” Mazzig said. “Since 
Oct. 7, every part of Jewish 
identity has been seen as a sin-
ister lie. It is an age-old attempt 
to dehumanize Jews. When you 
say that Jews have no land, no 
history and no unique culture, 
and everything that we have 
left is either a lie or stolen, we 
are being dehumanized. These 
age-old tropes that were applied 

to Jews is now being applied to 
Israel and it is sticking very well 
with impressionable minds.
” 
In the streets of Baghdad, 
Mazzig’s grandmother faced 
“horrific” violence during the 
farhud of 1941where Jews were 
massacred in the streets just as 
they were on Oct. 7. In 1951, 
Iraq issued an edict forcing 
Jewish citizens to relinquish 
their Iraqi citizenship, forcing 
them to flee, leaving every per-
sonal item behind. Many emi-
grated to Israel. 
“My grandmother speaks of 
this beautiful red dress she used 
to have and wishes to see and 
wear again,
” said Mazzig. “To 
me, that is a very personal part 
of my story. So, the only thing 
my grandmother came to Israel 
with was her history and her 
identity.
” 
Mazzig loves to talk about his 
Mizrachi family’s rich culture 
and also enjoys learning about 
Ashkenazi culture, which is 
often conveyed to the general 
public through “bagels and 
stand-up comics,
” he said. “But 
what the Ashkenazi Jew needs 
to claim,
” he said, “is that their 
story has every bit to do with 
Israel because no matter where 
they can trace their family 
roots, all Jews are indigenous 
to Israel. 
“The Jewish story is not a 
small pool that only has room 
for a few swimmers,
” Mazzig 
explained. “There is room for 
all of us. The more we tell our 
stories out loud, the better 
understanding our younger 
generations have of Jewish his-
tory to Israel and our connec-
tion to the Middle East. A lot 
of people are so misinformed 
and think that Israel was settled 
by white Europeans. I, a person 
with brown skin, gets called a 
white supremacist settler on 
social media, and it is really dis-
heartening.
” 

Israeli social 
media influencer 
talks about 
his Mizrachi 
heritage, Oct. 7 
and dealing with 
misinformation.

One-on-One 
with 

Hen Mazzig

STACY GITTLEMAN 
CONTRIBUTING WRITER

OUR COMMUNITY

Hen 
Mazzig

