Jewish Influencers Open Up About Mental Health Challenges

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In recent episodes of our podcast, The Future of Jewish, two notable influencers in the Jewish world — Jamie Geller and Miriam Anzovin — spoke about the not-often-discussed mental health challenges associated with being an “influencer.”

“There are lots and lots of studies about what social media does to those who consume it,” Geller said, “but not enough about what it does to those who create it. And the content creators are suffering so much themselves with their relevancy, feeling legitimate, their mental health … and I hated that place.”

Geller, a food-focused influencer who founded Kosher Network International and published eight cookbooks, said that the demands of social media caused her content to evolve from simply offering recipes, to increasingly sharing intimate moments of her personal life. Ultimately, this created a dynamic in which “the experience didn’t matter if I didn’t ‘story’ it, and the person I met didn’t exist if I didn’t put them on my social media.”

It became so bad, Geller said, that she started not bringing her phone to certain places. But even then, the mental health effects were taking their toll, making her “literally” feel “worthless” and “nothing” and even “less than nothing” when she shared content that did not live up to her expectations of how it would perform with her audiences. “It’s a crazy place to be,” she said.

Geller went on to say that many content creators become “hungry” for the “power and influence” they seemingly wield, saying:

Geller said she went into depression for “a good year or two” with “no self-worth” and “no self-confidence” which “affects your relationships and your moods … Obviously no one knows what they’re getting into.”

Such was the case for Miriam Anzovin, whose Jewish hot-take videos on TikTok suddenly went viral in December 2021, catapulting her to a certain level of celebrity in the Jewish world. With it came “deep hatred,” “misogyny” and “sexual comments” directed at her. “People telling me I’m going to burn in hell for being a woman learning Talmud and the things I talk about in modern language…”

Anzovin also said there is an expectation of “always having to be ‘on’ in some way, shape, or form … I can’t say that I’ve slept very well in the past five months. I can’t say that I’ve always been okay with the rate and pace of production.”

“And I haven’t really gone ‘viral’ in the sense of ‘viral worldwide interest,’” she added. “It’s within the Jewish community worldwide, and certainly within Israel and America, but even on that scale it is overwhelming.”

Anzovin told a story about getting food poisoning just before this past Passover and “editing from the floor of my bathroom in order to get these videos out in time … I was really sick, and I did not have time to stop.”

Meanwhile, Geller said that the Covid-19 pandemic was a “wakeup call” for career changes, especially among women. To that end, she recently joined Aish as its Chief Media & Marketing Officer, becoming the first woman to serve on the organization’s executive management team.

“I said, ‘I have to be doing something different. I cannot stay on this train,” Geller recalled. “I won’t make it, I don’t want it, and I don’t actually feel like I’m having an impact on the world in the way that I want to for the Jewish community, and for the world.”

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