People gather during a protest to mark the first anniversary of Bashar al-Assad’s fall, in Aleppo, Syria, Dec. 8, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Hassano

Mizrahi Jews don’t fit the simplistic “Jews versus Arabs” narrative. Syrian-born lawyer and influencer Abraham Hamra believes that the Mizrahim in particular could play a unique role in building bridges into the Arab world.

Many Jews have Iraqi, Iranian, Moroccan, Yemeni, Syrian, Egyptian, Tunisian, Libyan, or Kurdish roots. They’re known as “Mizrahi,” meaning “Eastern Jews.” Arabic is often their mother tongue, and they grew up with traditions, food, and music that closely resemble those of other Arab populations.

Abraham Hamra of New York is one of them. The 38-year-old father of four has become known in recent years largely through social media. As a “Mizrahi Jew,” he tries to present this other side of Jewish identity — one that often goes unnoticed not just by the broader non-Jewish public, but by some Jews themselves.

Hamra grew up in Damascus, Syria, and fled to the United States with his family at age nine to escape the Assad regime. He went on to graduate from law school, and spent over a decade practicing litigation before acquiring and consolidating four immigration law practices into one mid-sized immigration boutique.

Hamra regularly speaks by video chat, in his native Arabic, with people from Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, and his home country of Syria. He often seems to build a stronger rapport with people who initially identify as anti-Israel or openly antisemitic than those who don’t have an Arab background can.

“In Arabic, I explain to them that Israel is not the enemy of their respective country — that it’s just decades-old propaganda they’ve been fed. I always ask them: ‘Why do you want to keep sacrificing yourselves for a fabricated Palestinian state? Your countries have only run into problems because of the Palestinian cause.'”

When he’s speaking with people from his home country of Syria, he addresses them first as a Syrian, not as a Jew. “I tell them: you wouldn’t have lost the Golan Heights in the war with Israel if it hadn’t been for the ‘Palestinian cause.’ Please, don’t focus on Palestine — focus on your own country.”

With extremists, though, it’s different, he says. “With extreme ideologues, with dogmatism, with pure hatred, it makes absolutely no difference whether I’m a Mizrahi Jew or an Ashkenazi Jew. These people want to kill all of us. To them, a Jew is a Jew,” Hamra admits bluntly.

Hamra believes he can get his point across more easily to Arab people from the Middle East itself than to Arab counterparts in Europe or the US. “Europe, on the other hand, is already lost. America is starting to lose itself.”

Hamra said that when he entered the fight against antisemitism, he faced discrimination even from other Jews. “The direct, unpolished way I spoke was new. A lot of Ashkenazi-shaped structures saw this aggressive, combative, ‘too Arab’ guy and wanted to keep him away from the panels.”

In response, he “pushed even harder for Mizrahi Jews, using their story to fight antisemitism.” In the end, it paid off. “My fight got me the inclusion. I built my own power and platform to the point where I couldn’t be ignored anymore.”

Today, Hamra is a sought-after speaker at major organizations including the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish National Fund.

While Hamra initially met resistance within the American Jewish community, he says the situation inside Israel itself changed long ago.

“After 1948, a family was reunited after a thousand years of separation and hardship. With Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, two different groups within Judaism met in Israel who, in some cases, hadn’t even known of each other’s existence before. Both sides cared tremendously about their Judaism. But that reunion also brought a lot of differences.”

He says that growing up in Syria, he too was taught that European Jews weren’t “real Jews.” “But you outgrow that once you’re exposed to this group. Reality shows itself, and we realize we have more in common than what separates us.”

Could Mizrahi Jews serve as an unexpected bridge in conversations with Arabs and Arab critics of Israel? “Definitely,” says Hamra. “I think if more Mizrahi Jews tried reaching out to these countries, tried to bring the temperature down, and had a conversation as fellow countrymen — Syrian to Syrian, Iraqi to Iraqi — it could accomplish quite a bit.”

He also argues that the Mizrahi experience — centuries of third-class status followed by persecution and expulsion from Arab countries — makes for an effective counter-argument to the typical “Jews as white colonizers” narrative. Jews from Arab countries simply don’t fit that box, he says, and they demonstrate not only the diversity of the Jewish people but also proof that displacement touched every branch of the global Jewish community.

“I personally don’t believe in the concept of the ‘white Jew.’ That racial categorization might make sense to Americans or Europeans, but not to us as Jews. Ashkenazi and Mizrahi both originally come from Judea — and that’s a message I love passing on to my audience, who obviously can’t file me away so easily as a ‘white colonizer,'” Hamra says.

The author is a journalist and author from Berlin.