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When he stepped out of his home in Petah Tikvah to get ice cream on a random day in 2002, Hen Mazzig didn’t expect any surprises. 

But for the 12-year-old growing up in Israel during the second intifada, it suddenly became a life-changing, death-defying experience. Moments before he entered the ice cream shop, a suicide bomber detonated an explosive inside, killing two and injuring 30. It was the fifth fatal suicide attack in Israel in a week. Mazzig ran back home. 

Now 34, Mazzig is a social media influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers and the senior fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute, a nonprofit he co-founded that helps people worldwide produce online content that defends Israel and combats antisemitism. Mazzig approaches his work with a personal commitment to promoting peace. 

“Both Israelis and Palestinians deserve safety, freedom, and dignity,” a post pinned to the top of his X profile reads. “That’s not hate speech. Opposing any part of this sentence is.”

Both Israelis and Palestinians deserve safety, freedom, and dignity.

That’s not hate speech.

Opposing any part of this sentence is.

— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) January 12, 2024

Mazzig was a scholar in residence last weekend at San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El. His appearances included two talks on Sunday, starting with a presentation for around 150 teens and parents about navigating hostile online spaces. Later in the afternoon, he spoke in the main sanctuary to 350 people about what inspired him to become a speaker, activist and author. His book, “The Wrong Kind of Jew: A Mizrahi Manifesto,” was published in 2022 by Wicked Son. 

Emanu-El Assistant Rabbi Noah Westreich, who moderated the afternoon talk, asked Mazzig how his childhood experiences might have influenced his work as an advocate for Israel.

After the terrifying 2002 bombing, “I ran back home, my mom was crying, she hugged me, she said, ‘You’re alive. You’re alive,” Mazzig told the audience. “And I think that was the moment that … my whole perspective about this conflict and about Israel has changed in a way that I wanted to make a difference.”

After serving in the Israel Defense Forces for almost five years as an openly gay commander and as a humanitarian officer in the West Bank, Mazzig started a consulting business at age 26 to advise tech companies and startups about their social media strategies. One of his clients was the Ghanaian government.

A few years later, Mazzig decided to shut his business and combine his social media expertise with his Israel advocacy work, something he did on U.S. college campuses after his military service.

The same year, Mazzig co-founded the Tel Aviv Institute in partnership with Ron Katz, who has a Ph.D. in rhetoric from UC Berkeley and is described on the institute’s website as an expert on “propaganda and persuasion.” 

On Oct. 7, 2023, the stakes for Mazzig’s work became more clear. He describes feeling a sudden call to action.

“I was seeing the Hamas videos coming out, Arabic accounts from Gaza putting out a lot of information. I was seeing people in English starting to celebrate it and saying, ‘This is a time that Palestine is speaking up… and we are finally free,’” Mazzig, who also speaks Arabic, told the audience. “And all of this together, in that moment when I was on X, I realized that this was far greater than anything I could imagine, and I had to do everything I can to help fight what was going on on social media.”

Since then, he has been able to reach more people through his social media profiles, such as Instagram, where he has 313,000 followers, and X (formerly Twitter), where he has 233,000 followers. He continues to make guest appearances on news shows.

“You can criticize Israel in a way that is not antisemitic, but so often we are hearing from non-Jews telling us that we don’t allow them to criticize Israel or that [they] feel silenced when we call out antisemitism,” Mazzig said at Emanu-El. “But if you feel silenced when Jews are calling out antisemitism, that’s because you are an antisemite.”

Besides calling out antisemitic rhetoric, Mazzig shares posts with context on current events. On Tuesday, he posted slides on Instagram about the Hezbollah members whose pagers were sabotaged, causing them to explode.

In the Q&A portion of the Emanu-El talk, many attendees asked Mazzig for advice on how to speak out against hateful and extreme rhetoric in their communities, including academic and LGBTQ spaces. Some said the hate comes from their friend groups, whose posts they see directly on their social media feeds.

He underscored his advice with a general invitation. “Everything I post on social media, this is officially potentially yours to copy and post it as your own,” Mazzig said. “Everything I put out there… it’s for you to use. … Plagiarize me, please.”

In an interview with J., Mazzig reflected on how his values align with those of many Bay Area Jews.

“I think many of them are passionate about Israel and committed to the safety of Israel, and they really value their Jewish identity,” Mazzig said. “And they’re also very proud of standing up for justice and equality, and for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, which is something I’m very committed to.”

Following the Democratic National Convention in August, Mazzig published an opinion piece in Jewish News, an online British publication, titled “I’m a proud Israeli Jew. Of course a Palestinian should have spoken at the DNC.” He elaborated in subsequent emails with J. Mazzig said he sees potential within the Palestinian community to uplift those who promote peace, condemn violence and represent a broad spectrum of Palestinian voices and experiences. 

Asked which speaker he would have recommended to the DNC, he named Hamza Howidy, a peace activist from Gaza currently living in exile, and Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Palestinian American activist, blogger and Palestinian rights advocate. Alkhatib is a 20-year Bay Area resident from Gaza who currently serves as a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. 

Emanu-El Senior Rabbi Ryan Bauer said Mazzig’s commitment to promoting peace aligns well with the liberal Zionist philosophy held by many in his Reform congregation. Yet he’s seen such beliefs drowned out by polarizing discourse over the past 11 months.

“At Emanu-El, we believe in Israel and a Palestinian state too, that is crystal clear,” Bauer said. “You can be pro-Israel and pro-Palestine at the same time. … We are anti-Hamas. And we’re living in a moment where there are not many spaces that can hold that nuance.”

The Zeff family sponsored Mazzig’s weekend at Emanu-El, which Bauer felt would be helpful for families to counter the spike in antisemitism since Oct. 7.

“We realized that we were sitting in a different moment,” Bauer told J. “And if we really wanted to address how our families and our communities are being impacted, it’s actually in the social media space.”