CAMERA Launches Campaign on Campuses to Celebrate Mizrahi Jews

Photo: National Photo Collection of Israel, Government Press Office/Wikimedia Commons

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting (CAMERA) has launched a new campaign on campuses across the US to celebrate Mizrahi Jews and highlight their refugee experience. The campaign is in response to CAMERA’s concern that the story of Mizrahi Jews becoming refugees during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence has gone “largely untold.”

Mizrahi Jews are descendants of local Jewish communities in the Middle East and North Africa from biblical times into the modern era. CAMERA calls the history of their persecution “a new chapter in the history of anti-Jewish persecution.”

“One of our goals at CAMERA on Campus is to educate university students on complex and pertinent issues that are either not normally addressed or may have been discussed with inaccurate information,” said CAMERA on Campus international director Aviva Rosenschein.

“The campaign will focus on the voices of Mizrahi Jews as they share their own and their families’ experiences in online videos and written stories that will be spread widely on social media,” said Hali Spiegal, one of the CAMERA on Campus directors.

The campaign features videos and graphics. Students who interact with the campaign online can win prize money.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.