In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Zohare Jacobi, like many others, found herself online more than ever. What she saw troubled her: “There was so much misinformation,” she said. “And so many young Jews who thought they had to leave Judaism to find spirituality.”
At the time, Jacobi was working a corporate job—“soul-sucking,” in her words—and spending her free time scrolling through social media. She noticed an uptick in spiritual content, especially in the witchcraft and New Age spaces—online communities where crystals, tarot cards, and rituals are shared, bought, and sold, often divorced from their cultural or religious origins. She saw Jewish concepts circulating widely on “WitchTok,” but detached from their Jewish roots, often misrepresented or appropriated by New Age practitioners.
Over time she began researching and posting about these distortions using the handle @jewitches. She unraveled the myth of the “dybbuk box,” a concept popular in New Age circles that was invented by an eBay seller in 2003 and falsely attributed to Jewish tradition. She called out Christian appropriation of the Passover seder as well as Kabbalah, explaining the phenomenon as a product of Christian supersessionism, an ideology that says Christianity has fulfilled and replaced Judaism, inheriting its customs and rituals.
Jacobi’s work under the Jewitches moniker, which started as “hideous Instagram posts” and a few blog entries, has since blossomed into a beloved online community with thousands of followers on Instagram and TikTok, an email newsletter, and a podcast. In February 2025, Jacobi opened Diasporic Magic, a physical storefront in a Los Angeles suburb dedicated to Jewish folk traditions and community-building.
She believes part of what makes Jewitches resonate is that it addresses a real hunger among younger Jews for more spiritually connected forms of Jewish practice.
“Modern Jewish communities for many young Jews feel very devoid of connection,” Jacobi said in a recent interview with New Voices Magazine. “Many young Jews feel a lack, a dearth of spirituality when they walk into a synagogue.”
Many synagogues, she argues, feel modeled after Christian norms and don’t always feel authentically connected to Jewish spiritual tradition.
Indeed, this disconnection partly reflects historical choices within American Judaism itself. Reform Judaism, in particular, consciously adopted Protestant models during its 19th-century origins—incorporating sermons, choral music, and church-like architecture in an effort to fit within the dominant religious culture.
“We also see it a lot with this idea of stripping Jews of their Judaism when we don’t agree with them (…) that’s not how Jewish communities work. We have ways of excommunication, we have ways of guarding our communities. But this sort of free for all of telling people, particularly anti-Zionist Jews, ‘You’re not a real Jew,’ this is full-send borrowing from Christian ideas.”
But Jacobi also sees a more subtle but deeply damaging form of assimilation at play today, one that goes beyond surface-level cultural adoption.
“We are seeing a much more nefarious type of assimilation, and that is the assimilation of ideals and belief systems and morality,” she says. “We see it with the assimilation of alt-right ideas that originate in Western Europe.”
This ideological drift is visible in recent years as segments of Jewish communal leadership and Zionist organizations have engaged in alliances with far-right political figures and movements. In Europe and the U.S., some nationalists that once trafficked in antisemitism now cloak themselves in philosemitism, using support for Israel to launder their image. Likewise, elements of the American pro-Israel lobby have embraced Christian Zionist groups aligned with authoritarian or ultranationalist agendas.
Another place Jacobi sees this ideological assimilation manifest is in the commercialization of Jewish mysticism. Jacobi argues that when Jewish mysticism is commodified for profit, it often replicates the self-centered and transactional ethos of New Age spirituality. The Kabbalah Centre, she says, exemplifies this distortion.
“The reason that the Kabbalah Centre is so reviled by so many Jewish communities is because it’s imitating Christian dynamics in a Jewish space,” she says.
Some of those dynamics have proven outright predatory. In one infamous case, Leah Zonis, an Israeli woman battling breast cancer, became so deeply involved with the Kabbalah Centre in Tel Aviv, attending classes and spiritual pilgrimages. After her condition worsened, the Centre’s director told Zonis and her husband that large donations could bring about healing, and encouraged them to purchase expensive “kabbalah water” as part of the healing regimen.
The couple ultimately gave around $60,000, even borrowing money from family to do so, based on promises that the payments would lead to Leah’s recovery. The Centre’s director was later arrested on suspicion of fraud, according to Israeli media reports.
“Selling ‘holy water’ is not a Jewish practice,” Jacobi notes. “That comes from Christian models.”
By contrast, she says, folk practices offer a more embodied, tangible form of spirituality. She gives the example of one Ashkenazi tradition of making nerot neshamah, or soul candles, by taking thread, winding it around a cemetery while praying, and using it to make wicks for candles burned on Yom Kippur.
“These traditions are beautiful and heart-holding,” she says. “They are tangible. And yet they have mostly fallen to the wayside, been thrown in the pile of ‘garbage superstition.’”
Reviving these embodied folk traditions was part of Jacobi’s goal in opening her brick and mortar shop, Diasporic Magic. This month, the store held its first Rosh Chodesh Shabbat potluck.
“I grew up in the house where Shabbos was the place to be,” at times hosting up to 40 guests, Jacobi says. “So building upon this foundation, we have a space now — and now the question is, how do we build more?”
In addition to selling books, ritual objects, and art connected to Jewish folk practices, Diasporic Magic functions as an emerging community hub. Each week, the store hosts “Stitch & Bitch” gatherings where people bring crafts—knitting, crocheting, journaling—and simply spend time together. Jacobi envisions it as a space where Jewish magic, spirituality, and diasporic identity can be explored without the pressures of institutional Judaism or nationalist frameworks.
“We’re working more and more to host in-person events where magic and space, decentered from nationalism, is the point—is the center of it all,” she says.
It’s an ethos that resonates with the diverse range of visitors the shop has already seen.
“We have people who were raised Orthodox. We have people who only went to synagogue once in their childhood. We have people who are just now reconnecting to their Judaism. And we have non-Jews who are curious and respectful,” Jacobi says.
Jacobi’s work—for Jewitches and Diasporic Magic alike—is ultimately about offering people a way back to their own traditions without shame, gatekeeping, or the distortions of commercialized, institutional spirituality.
“Tradition is a binding thread throughout history,” Jacobi says. “It connects us to our ancestors, communal and biological. It connects us to our spiritual ancestors and all those who came before us, and all those who come after us. And part of that spiritual thread is continuing to hold it and continuing to weave with that same cloth.”
