Those who keep their eyes open while walking around the streets of Tel Aviv might stumble upon pieces of street art with a powerful message—”protect your Jewish magic” or “Jewish joy is resistance” or “we will dance again”—in bold letters pasted on the walls. The artist behind the work is Morgane Koresh, 40, better known by his Instagram handle Yiddish Feminist.
After moving to Israel from Paris in 2009, Koresh began working in street art about four years ago. Most of his early work dealt with feminist issues and queer identity, but since October 7, he has shifted to work focused on Jewish identity.
With pink hair and a matching pink jumpsuit, Koresh is often read as feminine, but he clarified that he identifies an non-binary and prefers masculine pronouns. “When people ask my children why they refer to me as masculine, they simply answer that it’s how I prefer. Kids don’t make a big deal out of these things. Adults sometimes do,” he said.
The handle “Yiddish Feminist” was inspired by his grandmother. “She was my first feminist inspiration, and her mother tongue was Yiddish,” Koresh said. “I also tried to learn Yiddish but didn’t really succeed. I grew up in a family of Holocaust survivors, and Jewish identity was always significant in our home. In 1990s Paris, there was a certain illusion that antisemitism was behind us. Most of my friends weren’t Jewish. In hindsight, I remember people telling me it was better to hide the Star of David when outside the house. But the feeling was that we could live together. Today, I wouldn’t want to raise my children in France.”
Unlike many French Jews, Koresh didn’t visit Israel often growing up. “The first time I came to visit was in 2008, and a year later, I came via a program for aliyah organized by the Jewish Agency, where I studied Hebrew and realized that I really wanted to live here,” he said. “What I loved about it, and this might seem strange to those who grew up here, is that suddenly you don’t have to wonder who’s Jewish and who's not. I was amazed that there was a Jewish taxi driver, a Jewish police officer, a Jewish teacher. It was a completely different experience.”
Koresh began creating street art about four years ago, when he and a friend co-founded a feminist artists collective that produced politically charged street art addressing local feminist issues. Later, he started creating independently, with works primarily focused on identity, gender, and LGBTQ+ struggles. In France, he studied fashion design, and in Israel, he earns a living painting murals by commission, working as a tattoo artist, and selling jewelry.
His works after October 7 took a significant turn. “October 7 hit me in several waves. The first wave was dealing with the massacre and the sheer terror itself, with the disaster as everyone in the country felt it,” he said. “The second shock was the sense of betrayal from my feminist friends and partners around the world. I’m very connected, and I’ve always had many ties with activists from all over the world—and suddenly, people who until yesterday were happy to be my partners, all at once turned their backs on me and treated me as if I were the devil. They justified murder, rape, and the holding of women, men, and children hostage in tunnels.”
“The third shock was witnessing the rapid and insane rise in antisemitic incidents in the diaspora, especially in Western countries. All of a sudden, the world started hating Jews again, and as someone who grew up most of his life in the diaspora, it really affected me,” Koresh said.
His first reaction to the wave of antisemitism and lack of global solidarity was anger. “My first street art piece after October 7 was the message, ‘On October 7, you chose antisemitism over feminism.’ It was a message primarily directed against my feminist ‘partners’ who I felt had betrayed me. But deep down, I’m a happy and positive person, and I couldn’t stay in that place of anger. So slowly, I shifted the focus to fostering pride in being Jewish and Israeli, in nurturing this very unique identity. Since then, most of my messages have focused on unapologetic Jewish empowerment.”
Inspiration comes to Koresh from all sorts of sources—the news, holiday traditions, things he reads, conversations he has with people. “Sometimes I ask people if it’s okay to take a sentence of theirs and put it on the streets,” he said.
“I started creating street art primarily for myself,” Koresh said. “Artists are engaged in putting their will and soul into the material world—and that’s the meaning of writing and painting on the street. But over time and through the reactions, I realized that it’s also important. One of the reasons I write in English, rather than in French, my mother tongue, or Hebrew, is the desire to communicate with the Jewish world in a broader sense. I was 23 when I moved to Israel, so deep down, I still feel like a diaspora Jew.”
He said he felt the need to communicate to diaspora Jewry that Israel supports them, just as they support Israel. “That it’s a relationship that works both ways, that I see what they’re going through there and I identify with it, and that’s why I chose to create in English,” he explained. “I want to build bridges between Jews in Israel and around the world, and that’s something very meaningful to me. I’m very moved by the reactions, and recently, I was invited to appear on podcasts for Jewish communities in several places around the world.”
Koresh’s current work focuses on messages he sees as unifying, rather than targeting the pro-feminist or LGBTQ community specifically. “I wanted to speak to everyone, and I see that among the people who share my messages, there are those who are very distant from me in their views,” he said. “That was a choice I made deliberately. But it’s also important for me not to blur my queer identity and the queer perspective from which I create.”
“For me, it’s a statement that you can be queer and Zionist,” he said. “Art is a struggle for the right to a complex identity. I feel that abroad, it’s very difficult for queer Jews, especially from Generation Z. They have a hard time in their Jewish communities because they’re queer, and they have a hard time in the queer community because they’re Jewish. There’s this feeling that you have to give up one of the identities, and that’s messed up. Being a minority within a minority is hard.”
In Israel, he said, being part of the LGBTQ community has its own challenges. “Even straight Israelis who live here sometimes make me feel like I don’t belong,” he said. “When I ask to be addressed using masculine pronouns, they immediately label me—ah, you’re one of those. The polarization exists here too.”
“But I’m not giving up,” he continued. “I’m not willing to associate social justice with ideas like the intifada. I insist on creating queer visibility and saying that there’s a queer community here that is also Jewish and Israeli.” He insisted that such behavior isn’t “pinkwashing”—a term often applied to Israel used to accuse an entity of covering up injustice with claims of LGBTQ-friendliness.
“We’re not the government,” he said. “This is our existence.”
Most of Koresh’s works are texts written in black letters on a rectangular white background, sometimes alongside drawings he creates at home on paper and pastes on the street. “This is a technique we used back in the collective days, and we didn’t invent it,” he explained. “We adopted it from a feminist group in France that we were in contact with, and they taught us how to do it. It’s nice because it’s very quick to do, and it’s also effective—the black letters stand out against the white background.”
“I draw everything by hand,” he said. “For me, it’s an important part of the process. I feel the physical need to write, to create. After that, I cut out the unnecessary parts. Usually, I walk around with a few of these messages rolled up in my bag and some glue, and as soon as I find a suitable spot or opportunity, I just take them out and paste them.” Surprisingly, the works usually endure for a long time, sometimes staying up for almost a year, unless the municipality or someone else removes them.
Koresh has two children, aged 5 and 8. “Sometimes they come to help me paste, and they get really excited to spread the glue with the brushes,” he said. “Sometimes they walk around the street and spot my works, saying ‘Mom, this is yours!’”
Of course, pasting art in public spaces is illegal. “But it’s not really stealing either, and the messages are important, so I feel it’s a balanced action,” Koresh said. “One time a police officer saw me pasting and said, ‘Don’t do this again,' but he didn’t tell me to remove it. In another case, we did a large piece about the kidnapped soldiers on the wall of Dizengoff Center. The security guard understood what we were doing but said he couldn’t allow us to continue without permission. When he called management and we explained, they told us that for the kidnapped soldiers, we had permission.”
In the past, Koresh tried to hide his face and identity because he wanted his art to speak for itself, but he was inspired to share his identity after followers on Instagram told him his work made them feel less alone. “That’s why I started making videos on Instagram, including videos where I tell a story every day about one of the victims from October 7,” he said.
Whenever he travels abroad, he tries to create a few pieces in the country he’s visiting as well. "A few months ago, we were on a family trip in Iceland, and I created a piece in Reykjavik about queer identity,” he said. “I was excited when someone messaged me saying that through that piece, they found their way to my Instagram and were exposed to a different perspective on the conflict and the situation here in Israel. I know that photos of my works also circulate on the internet and go viral, and I hope they have an impact.”
This article was translated from Hebrew by Paul Weissfelner.
