Julius Dein, a renowned magician and social media star, lost hundreds of thousands of followers across platforms over the last 6 months, and it began with a picture of the Israeli flag.
“I got a bit of a shock when I posted the Israel flag, to be honest with you,” Dein, 30, told the JC. It was several days after October 7, during which time he’d been turning over in his mind how to address the conflict on social media.
“I kind of thought for a day or two, what position do I want to take, given that I’m not a politician? I'm known for a bit of entrepreneurship but predominantly magic, that’s what I've built my audience from. So I thought to myself, do I post? What do I post?”
Dein, a former JFS boy with an Israeli grandmother and a Hebrew-speaking mum, eventually came to a conclusion: “I have to post something because I have to stand up for my Jewish heritage. I have an audience and an influence, so I have a duty to post something.”
Photo: Julius Dein Management
And post he did. On October 12, Dein shared a picture of the Israeli flag overlaid on a closed fist, captioning the photo: “I stand with Israel. There is no argument for terrorism and antisemitism. Love and strength to everyone affected on both sides.”
When he came back from the gym about an hour later, there were 25,000 comments on the post. The most liked comment said: “Unfollow Julius Dein.”
“It had 10,000 likes in an hour, which is pretty crazy by any social media metric,” Dein said. And the masses obeyed the comment, and Dein’s follower count on Instagram dropped by over 100,000 in an hour.
“You know, people build an entire career off having 50,000 followers on Instagram,” he said. “So I was pretty shocked.”
As a social media veteran, it takes a lot to shock Dein. His was the most viewed Facebook page globally for 2021-2022 with 50 billion views, and he boasts on average over 100 million daily views across the internet. On Facebook, he has 43 million followers; on TikTok, 11.8 million; and YouTube, over 9 million. He had 6.7 million on Instagram pre-October 7; now he has 6.4.
Especially after he posted a video doing magic tricks for IDF soldiers in Israel (garnering 164 million views, no less) back in 2020, seeing “Free Palestine” comments – alongside far more insulting ones – comes as no real surprise.
“I’m a little bit desensitised to it,” he said.
But the follower fallout after October 7 was different, and it wasn’t just on Instagram. On October 9, Dein posted a video to TikTok saying he’d “lost 20,000 followers in the last 24 hours, but I don’t care – if you’re going to hate, if you’re going to support terrorism, then I don’t want you as a follower.”
And his DMs were something else entirely: “I had a message a second pretty much for the next 24 hours. A message every second, if not more. Every time I refreshed my DMs, I would have, like, 500 new messages.”
While a huge portion of the messages were hateful, even violent, Dein received “a mountain of support” from the Israeli and Jewish community “thanking me for standing up at a time when it’s really needed,” he said.
“And that made me really feel like it was the right decision, even though it was quite scary and jarring and a bit jaw-dropping. Ultimately, I felt like it was the right decision to do even though I was losing hundreds of thousands of followers across Facebook and Instagram.”
Photo: Julius Dein Management
But the loss likely won’t make much of a dent for the captivating Jewish magician, who has simultaneously made a name for himself as an entrepreneur: an angel investor in more than 25 companies, including everything from tech platforms to a mushroom coffee business to a tattoo skincare brand, Dein also runs his own social media agency JD Studios and is a co-founder of EVOLVE Media agency (EMG) in North London. He is currently in the process of establishing The Magic Academy, an online site where burgeoning magicians can learn his famous tricks and, leaning into his more philanthropic side, recently established a foundation to build schools in Uganda.
Dein recently established a foundation to build schools in Uganda. (Photo: Julius Dein Management)
“Being Jewish has definitely pushed me and inspired me to take that entrepreneurial leap,” Dein said. "I'm proud to be part of a community of very smart and moral people.”
And he won’t stop speaking up about his heritage any time soon, no matter how many followers he loses in the process.
