Israeli social media star duo wins global competition for influencers

Yehuda and Maya Devir, the Israeli couple who created a hugely popular webcomic series One of Those Days,  won The Most Creative Content Maker Award at the Inflow Global Summit 2019 Awards, a global leading competition for social media influencers, in Istanbul late last month.

The Devirs, both graduates of Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, chose to use Instagram to share their real everyday experiences and even arguments as a couple and as new parents, through cartoons.

Yehuda Devir’s Instagram account currently has over five million followers with millions following the couple on Facebook and YouTube. Even their baby, Ariel, who is only a few months old, is already up to 215,000 Instagram followers. The couple have been interacting with their fans and exhibiting their work at numerous Comic Cons and different art exhibitions around the world, as well as speaking at TEDx Klagenfurt this past June.

As they chronicle the ups and downs of married life and parenting, they seem to have become part of a new trend in family-oriented, child-centered Israel of showing how hard it can be to have it all. In Erez Tadmor’s new film, The Art of Waiting, currently in theaters, showcases the indignities a childless couple undergoing fertility treatments are subjected to.

Comedian and journalist Racheli Rutner has written about her complex feelings about her pregnancy on Facebook, and actress/model Yuval Scharf wrote candidly about her postpartum depression on Instagram. It will be interesting to see how this trend develops and whether it will become socially acceptable in Israel to acknowledge that not everything to do with family and children is a pure blessing.