Like many people during the pandemic, Asher Lovy became addicted to TikTok. After watching numerous videos on the social media platform, he asked his organization’s social media manager to start an account of their own.
Today Lovy’s group, Za’akah, has around 9,000 followers on the platform — a paltry amount compared to its most popular accounts, whose followers number in the millions. But it’s a transformative amount for Za’akah, a support group for survivors of sexual abuse in Jewish community.
Thanks to TikTok, Lovy says, the group has reached survivors much younger than its typical cohort, people who need immediate help leaving or fighting abuse instead of trying to confront it decades after the fact.
That includes raising awareness of abuse cases on the platform itself, like “Our Unique Family,” in which a Houston-area man posing as a chasidic Jew paraded his nine adopted children, whom he was allegedly abusing, for the camera.
“Everything that Za’akah is now, the fact that we’ve become an organization that people now are aware of that gets mentioned in the same sentence as other major organizations when it comes to survivor advocacy, is all because of that initial TikTok,” Lovy said in an interview.
After the Supreme Court earlier this week upheld a law that would ban the Chinese-owned app over national security concerns, users were scrambling to secure their online platforms in the event of its extinction.
While newly-inaugurated Pres. Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20 delaying the ban, its future in the US remains uncertain if it’s not sold to a different owner.
Za’akah said the ban would drastically limit its ability to serve abuse survivors.
“The algorithm served our videos to exactly the people who needed us and allowed us to easily build a community on TikTok of survivors and people who supported them without having to pay for promotion,” the group said. “Sadly, that’s all about to end.”
Jewish content on TikTok, both of the serious and less serious variety, has proliferated since the app’s launch in 2016 — from centenarian Holocaust survivor Lily Ebert to the Miami Boys Choir, to a 1945 diary written by a New York Jewish teenage girl.
Each has found new or renewed life thanks to the video platform’s unique and powerful algorithm, which can power videos to virality even when their creators lack built-in audiences of their own.
Miriam Ezagui, a popular TikToker whose content focusing on Jewish parenting and promoting a religiously observant lifestyle has garnered her more than 2.3 million followers, said she would pivot her focus to YouTube. But she has mixed feelings about doing so.
“TikTok was the first platform that I ever started posting on,” she said. “I definitely have a lot of sentimental feelings toward the app. It’s sometimes also a love-hate relationship.”
Za’akah is trying to grow its presence on Instagram and YouTube. “It’s going to hurt us in terms of how we pick up a newer audience.”
Jessica Lucie Plummer, a Jewish content creator whose TikTok account has more than 18,000 followers, told her audience she would pivot to Instagram — where she currently has fewer than 700 followers.
Jewish creators on TikTok said their tentative goodbyes this week, with Miriam Anzovin signing off with her catchphrase, “Shalom, friends. Let’s find each other in the TikTok diaspora.”
“I wanted to inspire others to be connected to their Judaism and show that Orthodox Jews are also just people,” Sophia Hunt, another popular Jewish creator who goes by the handle Sophiathejew, posted in her farewell message to 430,000 followers.
She credited TikTok with helping her launch her own modesty-focused clothing line.
It hasn’t all been positivity on the app. Among the many trends that have gone viral on TikTok are anti-Semitism, including a reappraisal of Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America,” and conspiracy theories about wealthy Jews being behind everything from the Los Angeles wildfires to the TikTok ban itself.
“We all know it’s happening because of Israel, which controls the United States government via aggressive lobbying,” Candace Owens said about the ban, playing a clip of Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli discussing his efforts to lobby TikTok to curb “anti-Semitism” on the app.
The company’s top lobbyist in Israel resigned last year over alleged anti-Israel bias on the app, even as two Jewish billionaires, Arthur Dantchik and Jeffrey Yass, own stakes in parent company ByteDance.
The bill to ban the app last year was supported by JFNA, who along with the ADL have criticized TikTok for the proliferation of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel content.
But Jewish creators on TikTok aren’t so sure a ban would meaningfully address such issues.
Ezagui’s own approach to combating anti-Semitism on TikTok, she said, was to counterbalance it with positive content about Judaism — and hundreds of thousands of non-Jews are turning in.
“I am a firm believer in that there’s no quote, unquote, ‘cure’ to anti-Semitism. And I don’t think anything’s going to change in the world that we live in, whether a social media app is here or not.”
Lost Tribe, a Jewish digital outreach effort to reach young people, summed up the mood of many a Jewish creator with its own TikTok about the looming ban on Jan. 17.
“I think we’re going to do what we’ve done for generations as Jewish people overall,” the group said, “which is persevere, find ways to stay connected and communicate.”
