YAD MIZRAH (יד מזרח) is the first literary, arts, and culture magazine solely devoted to promoting and celebrating Mizrahi and Sephardic literary culture and work.

Yad Mizrah was founded on an outrageous realization: all modern Jewish literary magazines are typically rooted in and inspired by our Ashkenazi brothers’ and sisters’ literary tradition, history, and culture. No other literary magazines, ones that were rooted in Sephardic and Mizrahi heritage and culture, it seemed, existed.

Our aim is to bring people together for meaningful discussions about Mizrahi and Sephardic life, history, and experience through poetry, fiction and nonfiction, memoir, op-ed, visual art, and more. By spotlighting Sephardic and Mizrahi voices, Yad Mizrah also strives to more accurately reflect today’s diverse Jewish literary landscape on an international scale. 

Submissions are open to all writers of all backgrounds; writers of Mizrahi and Sephardic descent are especially encouraged to submit. 

meet The EDITOR

Maia Zelkha, Founding Editor

Maia Zelkha is an Iraqi-Jewish writer and artist. Her work has been published in the Jewish Book Council, Parabola Magazine, Furrow Magazine, the Times of Israel, Vision Magazine, Judith, and most recently, David Hazony’s anthology Young Zionist Voices, featured on President Herzog’s official list of recommendations for books on Judaism. She is a contributor to Brill’s Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World (EJIW) and has received various accolades for her research on Jewish history, poetry, and literature. Maia lives on a moshav in central Israel.

Our Advisory Board

Sarah Sassoon

Sarah is an Australian born, Iraqi Jewish writer, poet, and educator. She is the author of the award winning picture book, Shoham’s Bangle and This is Not a Cholent. Her poetry micro chapbook, This is Why We Don’t Look Back was awarded the Harbor Review Jewish Women’s Poetry prize. She is an editorial advisor for Distinctions: A Sephardi and Mizrahi Journal. She is also the co-author of the The In-Between, a literary dialogue about identity and belonging published by Verlagshaus Berlin. She lives in Jerusalem with her husband and four boys.

Carol Isaacs

Carol Isaacs is a keyboard player & accordionist in the pop and world music fields, recording and touring worldwide with many international artists including Sinéad O’Connor (Ireland), The Indigo Girls (US), Ahmed Mukhtar (Iraq), Phongsit Khampee (Thailand). She is a founder member of the London Klezmer Quartet (UK).

Also known as award-winning cartoonist The Surreal McCoy (published in the New Yorker, Private Eye, Spectator) Carol drew The Wolf of Baghdad graphic memoir based on her own family’s recollections of life in Iraq and then turned it into a motion comic with music. She also plays Arabic accordion on the soundtrack. The book itself was published by Myriad Editions (UK) in January 2020 and was one of the Guardian’s best graphic novels. She won the inaugural Jewish Children’s Book Awards in 2021 for her story Samira’s Stars based on family memories of Shabbat in Iraq. Carol was also awarded funding by UK Jewish Film to produce two short documentary films, Growing Up Mizrahi (2023) and Torn (2024).

Eliyahu Harkham

Eliyahu Harkham is an Iraqi-Jewish artist based in Los Angeles. He studied under his father, oil painter Jonathan Harkham, and as a fine art student in Rome, Italy. Largely influenced by renaissance and pre-renaissance works, to impressionist and modernist painters such as Tiziano to Giacometti to Cezanne, Harkham incorporates Jewish themes for a majority of his recent works. He currently works and teaches out of his studio, Shamash Fine Arts.

Aurele Tobelem

Aurele Tobelem is a Moroccan-Jewish historian, policy advisor, and cantor based in London. He specialises in Jewish–Muslim relations, colonial memory, and counter-extremism. His writing has appeared in The Jerusalem Post, Quillette, Times of Israel, and Global Arab Network, and he has featured in international outlets including The Telegraph and GB News. Tobelem currently serves as Director of Research at the Forum for Foreign Relations, a British think tank at the forefront of the fight against Islamist extremism.