She Lost 50,000 Followers for Refusing to Stay Quiet

Aja Mayrock did not set out to become a historian of the Jewish diaspora. She's a poet, author, and content creator who spent years delivering Sabbath dinners to Holocaust survivors living below the poverty line in Brooklyn – and never once mentioned on social media that she was Jewish.

She spent much of her twenties being what she calls a self-hating Jew, distancing herself from her own identity to fit into progressive circles that, it turned out, only wanted her there if she stayed quiet.

In 2021, during a round of fighting in Israel, she found out just how quiet they expected her to be. She hadn't posted anything about Israel or her own Judaism. Every one of those friends stopped speaking to her anyway.

Then came October 7th. Aja was at Columbia getting her MBA when the protests began, and the loudest claim she heard, over and over, was that Jews are white colonizers of the Middle East. When she posted about what had happened, she lost 50,000 followers overnight from a single Instagram story.

She knew the colonizer claim wasn't true. She just didn't yet know how to prove it.

So she started traveling to document Jewish communities most people don't know exist. The digital series she created, Jews Around the World, has taken her to Tunisia, India, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Singapore, Japan, Uzbekistan, Colombia, and beyond.

One of her earliest stops was Djerba, an island off the coast of Tunisia where a Jewish community has lived for 2,500 years. While she was there, a group of Muslim Tunisian teenagers told her that the Jews of Djerba were colonizers. Aja was struck by the strangeness of the claim. The Jews of Djerba are dark skinned and indigenous looking, shaped by the same land and history as their neighbors. The very teenagers repeating this accusation looked, in her words, just like the people they were accusing, people who speak the same language, share the same features, and have lived on that island since long before the word colonizer meant anything at all.

Aja already believed that antisemitism functions like a mind virus, something that does not require evidence, does not respond to history or geography, and simply mutates to wherever it is needed. What she saw in Djerba reinforced that theory in a way she hadn't expected. She was watching people hold a belief while looking directly at the proof against it. The belief did not bend. The facts did not matter.

I asked her why she keeps making the series anyway, if the people most committed to these narratives cannot be reached by anything she films. She told me she is not naive about that. There will always be a portion of any audience she can never change. But she has also seen the opposite happen.

When she posted her video on the Jews of Tunisia, one of the first comments came from Mohamed Hadid, who wrote simply that he loved it. Her own reaction was mixed. "I was like, I'm doing something right and I'm doing something wrong," she told me.

But the deeper reason she keeps going has less to do with the people she may never convince, and more to do with the ones she grew up as. Aja told me that for most of her life, the only version of Jewish identity she was ever handed was the trauma, the Holocaust, the history of persecution, without the joy, the vitality, or the pride that should sit right alongside it.

"We need to bring the light and the joy narrative back to the Jewish story," she told me. She believes that gap is part of why so many young American Jews, herself included, drifted from their own identity long before October 7th ever forced the question. Jews Around the World is her attempt to close that gap, to hand the next generation something sturdier to stand on than grief alone, so that the next student confronted on a campus quad with the word colonizer already knows, in their bones, exactly why it isn't true.