Editors
Sophie Levy
Sophie recently graduated from Barnard College with a B.A. in Art History / Visual Arts and Jewish Studies. She was formerly Literary & Arts Editor at The Current and a Design Board Editor at Quarto Magazine. Her artwork has been featured in collaborations with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Protocols, New Voices, and Chaya Community.
Evan Mateen
Evan is a graduate of Harvard College with a concentration in Government and secondaries in Studio Art and Chinese. In his artwork, he is interested in reappropriating traditional Persian images, texts and motifs in modern visual formats to produce works that convey the duality between cultural memory and current experiences as a first-generation American.
Co-Founding Staff
Jamie Aftalion
Jamie is an undergraduate student at Tulane University studying Linguistics, Computer Science, and World Music. She has composed instrumental pieces in partnership with the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, and enjoys learning about the experiences, languages, and music of world Jewry throughout history. She has also worked to amplify Mizrahi cultural awareness within Jewish social and educational frameworks in Los Angeles.
Kayla Cohen
Kayla is an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. Kayla lived in West Jerusalem on a gap year program between high school and college. She is interested in studying individuals’ self-concepts and the interplay between the self and the other – both within singular and collective identities. She likes people and paradox.
Gabriella Kamran
Gabi is a student at the UCLA School of Law who holds a BA in Gender studies and Communication from UCLA. She likes Jewish thought, feminism, Yehuda Amichai, and drinking coffee in Jerusalem. She does not like ashkenormativity, neoimperialism, or grape juice.
Lauren Neman
Lauren is an undergraduate student at Parsons School of Design studying Strategic Design and Management. She manages ZAMAN’s newsletter and coordinates staff responsibilities. In her contributions to our collective, she aims to shed light on the sociocultural idiosyncrasies of Persian Jewish communities - be they folkloric traditions or tongue-in-cheek jokes.
Kyle Newman
Kyle is a student at the College of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a finalist in the Norman E. Alexander Jewish Student Writing competition. In his spare time, he enjoys studying Judeo-Persian and Kurdish Judeo-Aramaic dialects. His informal research on Persian history spans from ancient times to post-revolutionary Iran.
Jane Rosalyn
Jane is a musician and graduate of Columbia University.
Gabie Yacobi
Gabie is an undergraduate screenwriting student at New York University - Tisch School of the Arts. In her writing for ZAMAN, she aims to examine the nature of Persian Jewish family dynamics and standards of femininity.
Supporting Contributors
Jordan Adelipour
Jordan is a recent Business graduate of Babson College. He has a profound fondness for Japanese culture and Reddit. He has approximate knowledge of many things.
Avva Babaeean
Avva is an artist based in Los Angeles. She studied Fashion Design and Literature at Parsons - The New School for Design and Eugene Lang - The New School for Liberal Arts. She is interested in classical Persian art, literature, music, and the symbolism contained in sacred texts. Her garments, poetry, paintings, and handmade books seek to serve as narrative impressions of the ephemeral.
Daniel Blanchard
Daniel is a teacher and candidate for a PhD in Comparative Literature. He researches racialization in the context of Zionist settler-colonial epistemology and its intersection with the “secular” constitution of the West.
Tzor Edery
Tzor is a multimedia artist based in Jerusalem. A graduate of Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design’s department of Screen-Based Arts, their work centers on the experience of the body, gender, culture, and personal history.
Dotan Moreno
Dotan is an animation filmmaker, illustrator and visual artist living in Haifa. He graduated from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem in 2009. Dotan’s work explores the intersections of Mizrahi-Sephardi Jewish spirituality, male sexuality, and modern conceptions of masculinity in Israeli society.
Leeor Ohayon
Leeor is a British photographer and writer based between London and Berlin. When he’s not busy snapping away, he’s writing about a range of topics pertaining to contemporary and historical Mizrahi life. He holds an M.A. in Human Rights and Democratisation from the University of Hamburg & EIUC, along with a B.A. in International History and Politics from the University of Leeds.
Joshua Taban
Josh is a graduate of the University of Southern California, double majoring in Business Finance and Real Estate Development with a minor in Italian. He also takes interest in twentieth century Iranian history and has a fondness for learning about architecture.
Mirushe Zylali
Mirushe "Mira" Zylali (she/her) is a writer and maker who roots herself in Mizrahi and Balkan Muslim feminisms, musical traditions, and arts. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Religion and Studio Art from Mount Holyoke College in May of 2021. Her love for the global mosaic of Jewish and Muslim peoples knows no bounds, informing her work and future hopes for a just world. Mira is part of the Jewish Media Fellowship through New Voices Magazine.
Nesi Altaras
Nesi is an Istanbuli Jew and an editor of Avlaremoz, a Jewish news platform in Turkish. He recently completed a Master's in Political Science at McGill University, with a special interest in the history of Jews in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. In his free time, he enjoys learning languages and listening to people’s stories.
Kaitlin Banafsheha
Kaitlin is an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying consumer behavior and graphic design. She enjoys working in a range of visual media.
Cengiz Cemaloğlu
Cengiz is an anthropologist and strategy consultant based in Copenhagen. He holds a BA in Social Anthropology and Government from Harvard College with a Secondaries in Philosophy and Chinese. In his free time, he loves thinking, reading, and writing about economic and political systems and their repercussions on mental models and human lives.
Matt Hanson
Matt is a writer based in Istanbul. He produces weekly and monthly features from across Turkey, Europe, the Middle East and the U.S., covering art, books, history, travel, and food. His work has been translated into Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew and Ladino, for El Amaneser, the last publication in the world entirely in the endangered Judeo-Spanish dialect.
Marcus Mubarack
Marcus is an Assyrian / Sephardi tattoo artist and illustrator from Brazil. His work explores decolonization, orientalism, identity, and folk art at the intersection of Jewish, Arab, and Latin American experience. Follow him on Instagram: @mubarack.mar
Tannaz Sassooni
Born in Tehran to a Jewish family, Tannaz is a Los Angeles-based food writer who’s written for Lucky Peach, Thrillist, the Mash-Up Americans, LAist, and Shofar. She’s interested in exploring Los Angeles’ global culinary landscape and interviewing mothers and grandmothers from Iran for a regional Iranian Jewish cookbook. Follow Tannaz on Instagram: @tannazsassooni.
Maya Yadid
Maya is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. Her works combine ceramic and mixed materials, archival research, social interventions and food. Yadid explores ideas of collective and subjective memory, through her personal history as a third generation Jewish-Israeli of Yemenite and Turkish descent who immigrated to the U.S.. Find her on Instagram @mayayadid
Esther Amini
Esther is a writer, painter, and psychoanalytic psychotherapist based in New York City. Her short stories have appeared in Elle, Lilith, Tablet, The Jewish Week, Barnard Magazine, Washburn University’s Inscape Literary Journal, and Proximity. She was named one of Aspen Words’ two best emerging memoirists and awarded its Emerging Writer Fellowship in 2016 on the basis of her debut memoir Concealed. Her pieces have been performed by Jewish Women’s Theatre in Los Angeles and in Manhattan.
Gilad Bar
Gilad is a graphic designer and illustrator based in Jaffa. Having grown up in Israel with reduced exposure to his family’s pre-aliyah Persian culture, Bar set out to learn more about southwestern-Asian aesthetics and their modernization upon studying design as a young adult. Follow him on Instagram: @gilad__bar.
Itay Davidyan
Itay is a freelance photographer and visual anthropologist based in Tel Aviv-Yafo. He received degrees in photography studies and phototherapy studies from Hadassah College Jerusalem and the Musrara School of Art, respectively.
Tom Haviv
Tom is a writer, multimedia artist, and organizer based in Brooklyn and born in Israel. A Flag of No Nation is his debut book of poetry. He is the creator of the Hamsa Flag, a project designed to stimulate conversation about the future of Israel | Palestine, Mizrahi/Sephardi culture, and Jewish/Muslim solidarity. Tom is also the co-founder of Ayin Press and the author of a children's book called Woven.
Phillip Neman
Phillip is a junior at the University of California, Santa Barbara studying Chemistry and Visual Art. In his free time, he enjoys reading, playing tennis, and painting.
Michelle Shofet
Michelle is the co-founder of Nocturnal Medicine–an art and design studio that creates experiences, spaces & media for working through the social & emotional challenges of radical environmental change. Her research interests include themes of abject landscapes, cultural memory and identity politics. She earned a Master’s in Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and approaches her research through the lens of the built environment. Michelle is based in New York City.
Michael Zalta
Michael is a queer Syrian-American Jewish playwright, researcher, and arts facilitator. He is a graduate of NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study where he created a concentration in Media Theory, Arab Cultural Studies, Playwriting, and Human Rights practice.
Eyal Asolin
Eyal is a born Yerushalmi, chef, food writer, and the owner of the food studio Aso. He hosts meals in his home in Musrara, Jerusalem, all of which revolve around the wonderful produce sold at the Damascus Gate shuk. He invites, and would even love for you to share a response to his writing, to add upon it, to amend it, to challenge it. Follow him on Instagram @eyal_asolin
Mika Benesh
Mika is an interdisciplinary Ashkenazi-Mizrahi artist working on Gadigal land in Sydney, Australia. Shaped by their experience of diaspora and the recovery of personal and communal history, Mika’s work unearths and reframes both family and cultural narratives, exploring loss of culture, intergenerational trauma, and the politics of place through drawing, jewelry, printmaking, photography, and textiles.
Shany Dvora
Shany is a Tel Aviv-based graphic designer, typographer, and artist. Find her on Instagram @shanydvora.
C. L. K.
C. is a recent graduate of the University of Oxford’s Masters program in Migration Studies, where they focused on the replenishment of the Jewish diaspora among Jewish youth. They are the founder of Veranenu, a community for musical Kabbalat Shabbat services in London.
Alan Niku
Alan is a writer, filmmaker, teacher, and musician who reads too much. After watching Back to the Future, he unsuccessfully attempted to build a time machine. Studying history was the next best thing.
Ruben Shimonov
Ruben is a Jewish educator and community builder living in New York City, by way of Seattle and Uzbekistan. He serves as the Director of the Sephardi-Mizrahi Q Network, the Vice-President of Education & Community Engagement on the American Sephardic Federation’s Young Leadership Board, and the Director of Educational Programming for the Muslim-Jewish Solidarity Committee. His calligraphy has been featured in various exhibitions across New York City.
Ryan Zohar
Ryan is a graduate student in Near East Studies and Library & Information Science at New York University and Long Island University. He writes about Middle-Eastern Jewish intellectual history, the politics of Mizrahiut in Israel/Palestine, and Iraqi-Jewish cultural production.