The Media Line: ‘The Mizrahi Story’: TikTok Bridge To Preserve Personal Middle Eastern Stories

Audio By Carbonatix

Enlarge

‘The Mizrahi Story’: TikTok Bridge To Preserve Personal Middle Eastern Stories

Ciara Shalome noticed a lack of MENA Mizrahi Jewish stories on social media; stressing that labels are imperfect, she seeks dialogue among Jews and Arabs

By Giorgia Valente/The Media Line

The social media project now known as The Mizrahi Story began, its creator says, with an absence. Scrolling through TikTok and Instagram, Ciara Shalome noticed that the most visible “Jewish content” online skewed toward one slice of Jewish life.

“I started to realize that a lot of the Jewish content that I was consuming was heavily Ashkenazi. And if it wasn’t heavily Ashkenazi, it was heavily religious—Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish people talking about their experiences online as Jews, which is fantastic. But I couldn’t relate, and yet they were going viral as though they represent the whole of the Jewish world,” she told The Media Line.

A viral “Jewish food” roundtable, she added, sealed the feeling: “I grew up with Jewish food from the Middle East. All of these people started talking about Ashkenazi Jewish foods. People wrote, ‘I’m so happy to be introduced to Jewish food,’ and I thought: No, you’ve been introduced to one very small part. What about Jews from the Middle East and North Africa? We should be included too.”

That realization set her editorial lane: “I had all of this information in my head about the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa. I started posting to TikTok. My first video was about an Iraqi Jewish businessman and his Muslim business partner who brought Coca-Cola to Iraq,” she recalled.

Very quickly, posting “explainers” gave way to recording oral testimonies—the heart of the project today. Shalome filmed a friend’s mother retelling, in Judeo-Arabic, how Muslim neighbors protected Jewish families during the 1941 Farhud pogrom in Baghdad.

“Repeat it back to me. I won’t add any subtitles. I won’t do any editing. I’ll just post it to TikTok and see if anybody in Iraq sees the video.” The result surprised her: “I had no idea what she was saying. I posted it, and the video got 2 million views in Iraq. Positive, amazing comments—‘Auntie, we love you. Come back to Iraq. I’m so sorry for what happened to the Jews.’”

The moment reframed her audience: “The people who should be watching these stories are people from the Middle East and North Africa who do not have Jewish people in their countries anymore. That should be my audience.”

From that start, Shalome set a boundary: The page would elevate lived stories over political positioning.

“At the end of the day, I try not to focus on Israeli-Palestinian politics. I’ve always wanted my page to be about the humans—their testimonies, their experiences. I like to humanize everybody. If you have a connection to a place and your ancestors lived in that land—whether you are Palestinian, Jewish or an alien from space—I don’t care. You are of that place, and we need to figure out how we can live together in it,” she said.

That human-first frame pairs with a conscious push against a single, monolithic Jewish narrative.

“The Jewish world is a very diverse place. Just because my page is about Mizrahi Jews does not mean I neglect the Ashkenazi experience. I’m very proud to be a Jewish person alongside Ashkenazi Jews. A lot of people around the world do not understand the diversity of the Jewish experience, and that’s what I’m providing,” she added.

Shalome was also frank about the limits of labels—and why she still uses “Mizrahi” in her title and posts.

“There is no perfect term. All of these terms are umbrella terms. Every single term in existence puts people into a box. That is the problem with umbrella terms,” she said. “I do not identify with the term ‘Arab Jew.’ However, I would prefer the term ‘Arabized Jews.’ We were Arabized, but we retained our unique identity as Jewish people.”

In this article, “Mizrahi” refers broadly to Jewish communities with roots in the Middle East and North Africa—among them Iraqi, Yemeni, Moroccan, Tunisian, Libyan, Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, Iranian, Kurdish and Bukharan Jews.

Historically, this term carried a negative, state-imposed connotation in Israel, and some critics frame it as a colonial label that collapses distinct communities. Despite that, many people today still prefer to identify with this connotation, while others label themselves with less-used terms such as Israelis from Arab backgrounds, Sephardi Jews or even Arab Jews.

Her own usage is pragmatic: “If a brand-new term gets invented that I prefer, I will use that one instead. I’m not fixed.”

In Israel’s early decades, Mizrahi families often faced marginalization—from housing in ma’abarot transit camps to unequal opportunity, spurring the activism of the Israeli Black Panthers in the 1970s.

As Shalome put it: “There were many unfair policies. The transit camps called ma’abarot. The Yemenite babies affair.”

Today, she added, mixed families are part of the everyday landscape: “You see Israeli society now, and everybody you walk past is either half Ashkenazi and half Mizrahi or fully Mizrahi,” she said.

On the ground, The Mizrahi Story runs on introductions, patience and tea. Shalome interviews in people’s homes, mostly via community referrals. “I interview everybody myself—whether that’s in Israel, New York, England. This page is not my full-time job—it’s my hobby,” she noted.

Shalome sometimes visits Israel and has relatives there but remains careful about that vantage point.

“I don’t live the everyday reality of Israel. I’m coming at this from an outsider perspective, which I want to state. I can only speak from my own experience,” she said.

The recent visit was designed to actively trace Mizrahi heritage—from the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center to markets in Jerusalem.

“You walk around the markets and see the Iranian Jewish guy, third generation, selling Persian food. The guy whose parents are from Iraq selling Iraqi food. It’s everywhere you turn, and I often wonder the background story behind each one of them,” she added.

Beyond markets and museums, Shalome emphasized the influence of Mizrahi heritage in today’s Israel—language, food and music woven into daily life.

“The way that Israelis use Arabic. I see Israeli people saying words like ahlan that can either come from Mizrahi Jews or Palestinian citizens of Israel. You meet Ashkenazi Israelis and they love Mizrahi food. A lot of the Israeli music is, quote unquote, ‘Mizrahi music’—Omer Adam, Eden Ben-Zaken. They are part of the fabric of Israel, and they are heavily influenced by their heritage in the Middle East and North Africa,” she said.

Those affinities, she argued, could also be the basis for bridge-building.

“The Palestinian citizens of Israel and the Mizrahi Jews, in my opinion, could be very amazing bridge-builders.”

In practice, she tried to model that in small ways: “I would ask [Palestinian taxi drivers], can I play some music? And I would play Egyptian music familiar to both of us. I would try to communicate in very basic and broken Arabic to show them that we share a lot in common,” she said.

But she also named the obstacle that defines the present. “Everybody’s terrified of each other, but nobody speaks. It’s a confusing space, and it’s a confusing land. I realized, wow, we really could be the gap—and we’re not. And extremists on both sides have ruined that for us,” she said, reflecting on the climate after Oct. 7.

Even so, she noted “pockets of society where people do speak to each other,” reminders that conversation still happens below the surface glare.

Her Instagram page has gained broad support from a vast audience, but friction sometimes occurs.

“Lots of people in the Arab world cannot relate to the idea that I have any sort of family in Israel and why I may visit in the first place. But 99% of everybody who comes across my page are filled with gratitude, very happy to have found it, genuinely curious. I love it when someone asks a cringeworthy or ignorant question—I’m in a prime position to educate somebody now,” she said.

She has also received criticism from within the Jewish and Israeli audience.

“On the other side, a lot of Jewish people do not like the fact that I am a little bit more left in my opinions or I tend to be less polarized in the way I talk. But then lots of Jewish people love that, because they can relate to it,” she said.

For now, The Mizrahi Story is a self-funded operation. “To be totally blunt, I will not be able to carry on if I don’t get funding.” She worries about platform fragility too. “If Instagram is deleted tomorrow, I have nowhere to go,” she said.

If support arrived, the roadmap is ready. “Ideally, I would love to make a documentary, an online database—an archive filled with hundreds upon hundreds of testimonies whenever I can collect them all over the globe. I’m in a very good position since I have a good 10 years left before it starts to become an emergency to get these testimonies because of aging voices,” she said.

Part of Shalome’s outlook comes from her family’s trajectory and own experience—Baghdadi Jews in India—and the fact that, in living memory, they thrived.

“It’s very common in the Jewish world to be from a family of refugees. But for me, some of my family went to India, and in India, they thrived. They lived in a Muslim area and loved their life. Maybe naively, I see things a lot more positively. I don’t have the fight-or-flight mechanism in my body about being a Jew, because in living memory, my family has not experienced that,” she said.

The Mizrahi Story is making a public record out of private, kitchen-table memory. It was born in response to an online conversation that felt too narrow; it has evolved into a project that preserves voices—Baghdad to Sana’a, Fez to Tehran—in their own words.

“The Mizrahi Story”: TikTok Bridge To Preserve Personal Middle Eastern Stories

Ciara Shalome noticed a lack of MENA Mizrahi Jewish stories on social media; stressing that labels are imperfect, she seeks dialogue among Jews and Arabs

By Giorgia Valente/The Media Line

The social media project now known as The Mizrahi Story began, its creator says, with an absence. Scrolling through TikTok and Instagram, Ciara Shalome noticed that the most visible “Jewish content” online skewed toward one slice of Jewish life.

“I started to realize that a lot of the Jewish content that I was consuming was heavily Ashkenazi. And if it wasn’t heavily Ashkenazi, it was heavily religious—Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish people talking about their experiences online as Jews, which is fantastic. But I couldn’t relate, and yet they were going viral as though they represent the whole of the Jewish world,” she told The Media Line.

A viral “Jewish food” roundtable, she added, sealed the feeling: “I grew up with Jewish food from the Middle East. All of these people started talking about Ashkenazi Jewish foods. People wrote, ‘I’m so happy to be introduced to Jewish food,’ and I thought: No, you’ve been introduced to one very small part. What about Jews from the Middle East and North Africa? We should be included too.”

That realization set her editorial lane: “I had all of this information in my head about the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa. I started posting to TikTok. My first video was about an Iraqi Jewish businessman and his Muslim business partner who brought Coca-Cola to Iraq,” she recalled.

Very quickly, posting “explainers” gave way to recording oral testimonies—the heart of the project today. Shalome filmed a friend’s mother retelling, in Judeo-Arabic, how Muslim neighbors protected Jewish families during the 1941 Farhud pogrom in Baghdad.

“Repeat it back to me. I won’t add any subtitles. I won’t do any editing. I’ll just post it to TikTok and see if anybody in Iraq sees the video.” The result surprised her: “I had no idea what she was saying. I posted it, and the video got 2 million views in Iraq. Positive, amazing comments—‘Auntie, we love you. Come back to Iraq. I’m so sorry for what happened to the Jews.’”

The moment reframed her audience: “The people who should be watching these stories are people from the Middle East and North Africa who do not have Jewish people in their countries anymore. That should be my audience.”

From that start, Shalome set a boundary: The page would elevate lived stories over political positioning.

“At the end of the day, I try not to focus on Israeli-Palestinian politics. I’ve always wanted my page to be about the humans—their testimonies, their experiences. I like to humanize everybody. If you have a connection to a place and your ancestors lived in that land—whether you are Palestinian, Jewish or an alien from space—I don’t care. You are of that place, and we need to figure out how we can live together in it,” she said.

That human-first frame pairs with a conscious push against a single, monolithic Jewish narrative.

“The Jewish world is a very diverse place. Just because my page is about Mizrahi Jews does not mean I neglect the Ashkenazi experience. I’m very proud to be a Jewish person alongside Ashkenazi Jews. A lot of people around the world do not understand the diversity of the Jewish experience, and that’s what I’m providing,” she added.

Shalome was also frank about the limits of labels—and why she still uses “Mizrahi” in her title and posts.

“There is no perfect term. All of these terms are umbrella terms. Every single term in existence puts people into a box. That is the problem with umbrella terms,” she said. “I do not identify with the term ‘Arab Jew.’ However, I would prefer the term ‘Arabized Jews.’ We were Arabized, but we retained our unique identity as Jewish people.”

In this article, “Mizrahi” refers broadly to Jewish communities with roots in the Middle East and North Africa—among them Iraqi, Yemeni, Moroccan, Tunisian, Libyan, Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, Iranian, Kurdish and Bukharan Jews.

Historically, this term carried a negative, state-imposed connotation in Israel, and some critics frame it as a colonial label that collapses distinct communities. Despite that, many people today still prefer to identify with this connotation, while others label themselves with less-used terms such as Israelis from Arab backgrounds, Sephardi Jews or even Arab Jews.

Her own usage is pragmatic: “If a brand-new term gets invented that I prefer, I will use that one instead. I’m not fixed.”

In Israel’s early decades, Mizrahi families often faced marginalization—from housing in ma’abarot transit camps to unequal opportunity, spurring the activism of the Israeli Black Panthers in the 1970s.

As Shalome put it: “There were many unfair policies. The transit camps called ma’abarot. The Yemenite babies affair.”

Today, she added, mixed families are part of the everyday landscape: “You see Israeli society now, and everybody you walk past is either half Ashkenazi and half Mizrahi or fully Mizrahi,” she said.

On the ground, The Mizrahi Story runs on introductions, patience and tea. Shalome interviews in people’s homes, mostly via community referrals. “I interview everybody myself—whether that’s in Israel, New York, England. This page is not my full-time job—it’s my hobby,” she noted.

Shalome sometimes visits Israel and has relatives there but remains careful about that vantage point.

“I don’t live the everyday reality of Israel. I’m coming at this from an outsider perspective, which I want to state. I can only speak from my own experience,” she said.

The recent visit was designed to actively trace Mizrahi heritage—from the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center to markets in Jerusalem.

“You walk around the markets and see the Iranian Jewish guy, third generation, selling Persian food. The guy whose parents are from Iraq selling Iraqi food. It’s everywhere you turn, and I often wonder the background story behind each one of them,” she added.

Beyond markets and museums, Shalome emphasized the influence of Mizrahi heritage in today’s Israel—language, food and music woven into daily life.

“The way that Israelis use Arabic. I see Israeli people saying words like ahlan that can either come from Mizrahi Jews or Palestinian citizens of Israel. You meet Ashkenazi Israelis and they love Mizrahi food. A lot of the Israeli music is, quote unquote, ‘Mizrahi music’—Omer Adam, Eden Ben-Zaken. They are part of the fabric of Israel, and they are heavily influenced by their heritage in the Middle East and North Africa,” she said.

Those affinities, she argued, could also be the basis for bridge-building.

“The Palestinian citizens of Israel and the Mizrahi Jews, in my opinion, could be very amazing bridge-builders.”

In practice, she tried to model that in small ways: “I would ask [Palestinian taxi drivers], can I play some music? And I would play Egyptian music familiar to both of us. I would try to communicate in very basic and broken Arabic to show them that we share a lot in common,” she said.

But she also named the obstacle that defines the present. “Everybody’s terrified of each other, but nobody speaks. It’s a confusing space, and it’s a confusing land. I realized, wow, we really could be the gap—and we’re not. And extremists on both sides have ruined that for us,” she said, reflecting on the climate after Oct. 7.

Even so, she noted “pockets of society where people do speak to each other,” reminders that conversation still happens below the surface glare.

Her Instagram page has gained broad support from a vast audience, but friction sometimes occurs.

“Lots of people in the Arab world cannot relate to the idea that I have any sort of family in Israel and why I may visit in the first place. But 99% of everybody who comes across my page are filled with gratitude, very happy to have found it, genuinely curious. I love it when someone asks a cringeworthy or ignorant question—I’m in a prime position to educate somebody now,” she said.

She has also received criticism from within the Jewish and Israeli audience.

“On the other side, a lot of Jewish people do not like the fact that I am a little bit more left in my opinions or I tend to be less polarized in the way I talk. But then lots of Jewish people love that, because they can relate to it,” she said.

For now, The Mizrahi Story is a self-funded operation. “To be totally blunt, I will not be able to carry on if I don’t get funding.” She worries about platform fragility too. “If Instagram is deleted tomorrow, I have nowhere to go,” she said.

If support arrived, the roadmap is ready. “Ideally, I would love to make a documentary, an online database—an archive filled with hundreds upon hundreds of testimonies whenever I can collect them all over the globe. I’m in a very good position since I have a good 10 years left before it starts to become an emergency to get these testimonies because of aging voices,” she said.

Part of Shalome’s outlook comes from her family’s trajectory and own experience—Baghdadi Jews in India—and the fact that, in living memory, they thrived.

“It’s very common in the Jewish world to be from a family of refugees. But for me, some of my family went to India, and in India, they thrived. They lived in a Muslim area and loved their life. Maybe naively, I see things a lot more positively. I don’t have the fight-or-flight mechanism in my body about being a Jew, because in living memory, my family has not experienced that,” she said.

The Mizrahi Story is making a public record out of private, kitchen-table memory. It was born in response to an online conversation that felt too narrow; it has evolved into a project that preserves voices—Baghdad to Sana’a, Fez to Tehran—in their own words.

On a final note, Shalome reflected on what makes her who she is: “I believe that I am who I am today because I know where I came from. I know what my ancestors went through for me to be alive—what culture and heritage and language they were part of,” she said.

“Who am I to pretend that I am just 100% British and that is it? We all have multiple layers, and my page shows just that,” she concluded.