Episode: 36 — "I'm a Libyan Jew" · Full Episode #36
Date: 10 November 2020 (Season 4)
Language: English
Corinne Elgai (also spelled Karin) is a Jewish Libyan fashion stylist, mother, and entrepreneur based in New York City, where she has lived for thirteen years. She was born and raised in Israel to a family of Libyan Jewish origin — both sides of her family came from Tripoli. Her appearance on Damiri is historically significant: she is the first Jewish Libyan to appear on the show, and one of very few public testimonies from the Libyan Jewish diaspora in Arabic-language media.
At the time of recording, she was in the process of opening two establishments in New York: "Mini Recs," a karaoke bar, and "Juice Box Heroes," a non-alcoholic bar whose kitchen would serve Libyan family recipes passed down through generations.
Corinne's great-aunt, known as Aunt Tony, served as King Idris's personal cook. When anti-Jewish violence erupted in 1967, in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, the Jewish community in Tripoli faced immediate danger. King Idris personally intervened for the family. He sent a car to collect them. At the airport, the family was hidden behind green curtains inside a hangar — separated from the public, shielded from the violence outside — and evacuated to Italy, and from Italy to Israel.
The family never forgot the act. Aunt Tony named her son's middle name Idris — a quiet, permanent marker of gratitude toward the king who saved them when the state around him was turning hostile.
See: King Idris Rescue
Corinne's grandfather owned a store in Tripoli. He had an Italian mistress — a detail Corinne relayed without judgement, as a fact of Tripoli's cosmopolitan texture. When the anti-Jewish violence of 1967 was imminent, this woman came to the grandfather and warned him: the store would be burned. He did not go to work that day. The store was torched, as she had predicted. Her warning saved his life. A personal relationship across ethnic and religious lines became, in one moment, the difference between life and death.
Adam Benkato, a linguist and scholar of Libyan languages, sent Corinne a piece of 1960s wrapping paper he had found. It bore the Elgai family name — evidence of the family's presence in Tripoli's commercial life before the expulsion. When Corinne held the paper, she said it smelled like her grandmother. She had never been to Tripoli. She had no firsthand memories of the city. But through this piece of paper — through the name, the era, the scent — she was connected to a place that existed for her only in inherited memory.
See: The Wrapping Paper
Corinne was raised in Israel, where military service is compulsory. She chose not to serve. During the intake evaluation, she deliberately gave all wrong answers to secure an exemption. She did not frame this as a political manifesto. She simply did not want to serve in the military, and she found a way not to.
Corinne's husband, who is not Libyan, once told her: "You're not Libyan." The statement triggered a deep crisis of identity. Her entire sense of self was bound to a country she had never visited, a culture she had only experienced through family, food, and fragments. The challenge came from the person closest to her and struck at the foundation of how she understood herself. The tension it exposed — belonging to a place one has never been, carrying an identity that others do not recognise — runs through the entire episode.
See: You Are Not Libyan
The karaoke bar's kitchen was not incidental. Corinne described it as a deliberate act of preservation — Libyan family recipes served in New York, connecting a scattered diaspora through taste. This connects to a broader pattern visible across the Jewish Libyan experience: when language fades and geography is lost, food is often the last cultural carrier.
She also raised the issue of "Arab salad" versus "Israeli salad" — the same dish, renamed across a political boundary. The renaming is a small act, but it illustrates how food becomes a site of cultural contestation. What one community calls its own, another community has rebranded.
Corinne described a growing movement of Libyan Jews and Libyan Muslims reconnecting through Instagram. One message she received came from a woman named Sarah, who wrote: "My grandmother was raised by a Jewish family and remembers nothing but kindness." These individual acts of memory — transmitted across generations and now surfacing through social media — represent a counter-narrative to the political rupture that separated the communities in 1967.
Libya's Jewish community numbered approximately 38,000 in 1948. By 1970, virtually none remained. The departures occurred in waves: after the 1945 Tripoli pogrom, after the creation of Israel in 1948, and — most dramatically — after the 1967 war. The community that left carried its culture, food, music, and memory into Israel, Italy, and beyond, but was largely absorbed into broader Mizrahi and Sephardic categories that erased the specifically Libyan character of their identity.
Corinne's episode is a rare public articulation of this experience in a Libyan cultural space. She speaks not as a representative of a political position but as a daughter and granddaughter trying to understand where she comes from.
"It smelled like my grandmother." — on holding 1960s wrapping paper from Tripoli bearing her family name (EP 36)