Something About Those Jews

The world’s greatest anti-Semite understood the Jews’ unique mission
Photos: Elchanan Kotler, OpenDor Media
Filmmaker Raphael Shore has been documenting the words and actions of anti-Semites for decades, but his latest work, Tragic Awakening, actually pushes Jews to embrace their unique mission. And the ultimate irony is that Hitler, the most vicious anti-Semite of all time, understood that mission all along. That’s why the Jew were “the great disrupters of history” and Matan Torah the greatest disrupting event
“IT happens to be that the one person who had an incredibly deep insight into who the Jewish People are is perhaps the greatest anti-Semite of all time — Adolf Hitler,” says Raphael Shore.
Documentary film-maker Raphael Shore’s latest project sprang from this unsettling realization: that Adolf Hitler identified the Jewish belief in G-d’s plan for humanity as the chief threat to the Nazis. But Shore grappled with how to present the Jews’ unique calling through Hitler’s worldview, due to the lasting wounds left by the Holocaust.
“For years I thought that my approach was too radical to find an audience, and would just anger people rather than move them in a new direction,” he says. “Today, I feel there is an openness that wasn’t there previously.”
Raphael Shore has produced 19 documentaries, with a cumulative viewership of approximately 150 million, prior to beginning work on Tragic Awakening: A New Look at the Oldest Hatred. In style of presentation — interviews with experts interspersed with news clips — Tragic Awakening resembles its predecessors. But in other respects, it represents something completely new in Shore’s oeuvre.
For one, he got help from a completely unexpected source: Rawan Osman, an Arab woman whose own exploration of Middle Eastern anti-Semitism had led her to Judaism.
Raphael quickly conceptualized the film as built around discussion between himself and an interlocutor about anti-Semitism. “Our initial impulse was to try for someone famous like Noa Tishby, a pro-Israel social media influencer, or actress Mayim Bialik,” he tells me. “Rawan Osman, a Syrian-born and Lebanese-raised Muslim, who had developed a considerable media following, virtually dropped from the sky, proving that Hashem is the ultimate filmmaker.”
Her back story from “reformed anti-Semite” to “Arab Zionist” — and now, to full-fledged Jew — provided added power to the narrative.
As she responds to Shore in the course of the film, “So Hitler didn’t want to kill the Jews because they were bad. He wanted to kill them because they were good.”
Wayne Kopping, who has directed most of Shore’s Clarion Project documentaries, put his finger on the difference between Tragic Awakening and Shore’s previous films during a panel discussion following a VIP screening of the documentary, at Jerusalem’s gleaming new Museum of Tolerance last December. While the early documentaries were powerful, even terrifying, they were about “them” — primarily about those who threaten the Jewish People or the West in general. “This one is about us.”
Though the nominal subject of Tragic Awakening is the source of anti-Semitism over the ages, at a deeper level, the documentary is an inquiry into the nature and mission of the Jewish People. And as such it carries a personal “to do” message to audiences in a manner none of the previous films have. Tragic Awakening implicitly — and in numerous places explicitly — pushes Jews to embrace their unique mission.
The ultimate irony is that Shore uses Hitler, the most vicious anti-Semite of all time, to reveal that mission. Hitler, he argues, had deep insight into the true nature of the Jewish People. Only one thing distinguishes his perspective from the traditional Torah view: What we view as our greatest gifts to humanity, Hitler saw as a “wound” inflicted upon mankind, from which the world must be saved.
In a play on the similarity of the words Sinai and sinah (hatred), Chazal teach that with the giving of Torah at Sinai hatred for the recipients of Torah came into the world as well. Hitler was the embodiment of that ancient truth. One song of the Nazi youth groups proclaimed, “We are free from the mountain of Sinai.”
First Exposure
“No Jews Allowed,” read the sign on the door of Raphael (then Rob) Shore’s usual weekend haunt. Though he knew about the Holocaust, that was his first personal contact with anti-Semitism.
“I was shocked to the core,” writes Raphael in the introduction to his new book, Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Jew: Learning to Love the Lessons of Jew Hatred. “Why would anyone hate me for a religion I did not practice or know anything about? I wanted to be like everyone else. And I thought I was — I played hockey, partied, and enjoyed everything my life in suburban Windsor, Ontario, had to offer.”
There matters remained until his twin brother, Ephraim (Phil) went off to Israel and found himself at Aish HaTorah and wanting to stay. The summer between his junior and senior years at the University of Toronto, Raphael went to Israel to “rescue” his brother. He went armed with a list of philosophical questions, but found that Ephraim had answers for them all. Rather than bringing his brother home, Raphael ended up spending the entire summer at Aish HaTorah.
By the end of the summer, Raphael was committed to keeping mitzvos, but as yet felt no deep emotional connection to what he was doing. He returned home to his senior year in college hoping to develop that connection, and with an “intuition” that the study of anti-Semitism held the key to a much deeper vision of Judaism than that with which he grew up.
His entire senior year was spent on an independent study project on anti-Semitism. He read everything by or about Hitler available in English, including Mein Kampf and Martin Bormann’s Hitler’s Table Talk. Throughout the project, Raphael felt he was guided by a miraculous siyata d’Shmaya.
“Every time I was wrestling with a particular issue, it seemed that the next book I put my hands on contained the answer,” he tells me.
He was seeking the answer to four questions:
1) What was the source of his feeling of affinity every time he met another Jew, the feeling of being part of one family?
2) What was the explanation for the protean, shape-shifting hatred of the Jews over millennia?
3) Why had Jews made such an outsized impact on humanity?
4) How had the Jews alone among ancient peoples been able to survive, preserving their ancient language and laws, over 2,000 years of exile from their land?
He later discovered that the Dalai Lama, leader of Tibetan Buddhism, had been exploring these same questions, especially the survival of the Jewish People, in discussions with Jewish scholars and thinkers over a period of decades, as described in The Jew in the Lotus.
The most shocking discovery for Raphael was that Hitler may have been the evilest man to ever live, but he had a fully worked-out ideology, and that ideology mirrored Chazal in remarkable ways. The Talmud teaches, “From the blessings of that wicked person [Bilaam] you can discern the curses in his heart.”
The findings from that undergraduate study project would percolate for four decades, finally finding their outlet in Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Jew, published last year on October 7.
“This book reveals the inverse: from the curses of Hitler… we can learn about our blessings,” he writes.
In his introduction, he emphasizes that his goal in writing the book was not primarily to provide an intellectual understanding of anti-Semitism, but rather to use such an understanding to reveal what has been concealed from his generation: “How those lessons ideas can [reveal] the mission and purpose of the Jewish People and enhance our lives today.”
That understanding of the Jewish mission, he feels, is also needed by Jews raised in religious homes. Too often, the latter’s thinking about anti-Semitism runs no deeper than rote repetition of the statement, “It is a known halachah, Eisav hates Yaakov.” With respect to those raised without even that statement of Chazal, Raphael quotes Elie Wiesel’s comparison of the modern Jew to a messenger who gets bashed over the head with a hammer and suffers amnesia as a result: He can’t remember the message, or who sent him, or to whom. He can’t even remember he is a messenger.
While those messages are first and foremost of importance for Jews, they are not only for Jews. Anti-Semitism, it turns out is a barometric reading of the moral health of a society. As the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks put it, “The hate that begins with the Jews never ends with the Jews.”
Working for G-d
His senior thesis complete, Raphael packed his bags and headed off for Jerusalem and Aish HaTorah. He spent the next five years learning at Aish and Yeshivas Mir. Eventually, he became the COO of Aish International, dealing with Aish branches around the world. (It was in that context I first came to know him while working on my biography of Rav Noach Weinberg, the founder of Aish and the driving force in Raphael’s life.)
Around a decade after coming to Aish, Raphael developed a multipart course entitled “Why the Jews?” The title derives from the similar title of a work by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, whose central insight was that there has been a consistent de-Judaization in the treatment of anti-Semitism, in general, and the Holocaust, in particular, as if anti-Semitism is merely another form of hatred of the other.
Raphael learned just how far that de-Judaization has gone when his brother-in-law Ken Spiro and Rabbi Motty Berger began teaching the course material at Yad Vashem. A staff member listened to one of the lectures and reported back to his superiors that the material emphasized anti-Semitism as a unique hatred directed at the Jews — unique in its duration over the millennia and unique in its shape-shifting nature. That approach violated Yad Vashem’s efforts to universalize the Holocaust, and Aish was banned from teaching the material at Yad Vashem.
Though Raphael remained deeply attached to the material on anti-Semitism, it would be almost 30 years before he would be able to devote himself to the subject again.
While serving as COO of Aish International, Raphael worked under the hardest taskmaster in the world, the legendary founder of Aish HaTorah, Rav Noach Weinberg. On Rav Noach’s second yahrtzeit, Raphael spoke of his beloved mentor in the Aish HaTorah beis medrash. He began with a question: Why did Rav Noach so often sit alone in his office, despite having an open-door policy?
Raphael answered that many were too afraid of Reb Noach’s demands on them to seek his company or advice. Indeed, many who went to work in Aish branches did so to flee from Reb Noach constantly breathing down their necks and asking them, “What are you doing for the Jewish People today?”
No one knew of those demands better than Raphael. After eight years as COO, Reb Noach removed him from the position in 2008 because he was dissatisfied with the performance of the branches. Nor did he do much to soften the blow.
“You want a sweet, supportive organization, one that will tell you how great you are?” Reb Noach asked. “You think you’re working for me? You’re not — you’re working for G-d.”
But Reb Noach did point the way forward. He told Raphael to focus on the creation of new content for seminars and the filmmaking in which he was already engaged. Raphael had started producing documentaries on the side, even while serving as COO of Aish International. The first, Relentless: The Struggle for Peace in the Middle East, was produced on a shoestring budget of $50,000. The second, Obsession: Radical Islam’s War on the West, cost ten times as much and was an immediate sensation. Thirty million copies were distributed in newspapers and was featured on CNN and repeatedly shown on Fox News.
Obsession was not only enormously influential on viewers, but also on Raphael himself. Through the film he came into contact with Professor Robert Wistrich, the director of the Hebrew University’s Vidal Sassoon International for the Study of Anti-Semitism, and widely considered the greatest contemporary scholar of the phenomenon. Wistrich served as an academic advisor for Obsession, and he and Raphael found common ground in their belief that Hitler had a fully developed ideology of why the Jews were so dangerous. (See Wistrich’s Hitler’s Apocalypse: Jews and the Nazi Legacy, 1985).
Free from his duties overseeing Aish branches worldwide, Raphael threw himself full-time into creating documentaries. He eventually left Aish altogether and created two separate non-profit organizations: The Clarion Project and OpenDor Media. The former has primarily focused on the threat of radical Islam, whether in the form of the Iranian nuclear program (Iranium) or infiltration of Western countries by those with the long-range goal of imposing sharia, Muslim religious law (The Third Jihad).
Raphael shares what he feels has given the Clarion Project documentaries their power: “I listen.” And particularly to those who express their desire to wipe out the Jewish People, whether it be Hitler or the Iranian mullahs.
OpenDor Media productions are more internally directed toward members of the Jewish community. Their central thrust is to help young Jews identify more closely with Israel, Judaism, and their fellow Jews, whether it is those standing up to campus anti-Semitism (Crossing the Line I and II), or Israeli soldiers recovering from traumatic battlefield injuries (When the Smoke Clears), or the challenges facing a young Ethiopian soldier (Mekonen and Beneath the Helmet).
The Big Bad Jew
Around four years ago, Raphael began to withdraw from his full-time involvement with the Clarion Project and OpenDor Media, while remaining on the board of both nonprofits. The reduced demands on his time allowed him to return to his dream nurtured since his college days 40 years earlier of writing a book on the origins of anti-Semitism.
He emphasizes that the book was not a response to the outbreak worldwide of anti-Semitism in the wake of the Simchas Torah massacre.
“I was already working on the book for two years prior to October 7,” he tells me.
What is true, however, is that the topic has taken on added urgency post-October 7. Accordingly, a new final chapter was added — “Connection in the Face of Jew-Hatred” — filled with stories of dramatic, post-October 7 life changes, both in terms of religious observance and commitment to working on behalf of the Jewish People.
Besides the increased time available, Raphael confides that there is another reason that he held off until recently from writing a book. He did not feel the Jewish community was ready to hear an argument that Hitler was “right” about the nature of the Jews. The wound of the Holocaust was still too raw to think beyond the portrayal of Hitler as a madman and evil incarnate.
The radical idea upon which Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Jew is based is that Jewish thought and Hitler’s Weltanschauung are mirror images of one another. Hitler did not deny what admiring gentiles have called the “gifts of the Jews.” He simply viewed those gifts — among them “equality before the law, both divine and human; the sanctity of life and the human person, individual conscience and personal redemption — as evils that would destroy mankind” (Paul Johnson, History of the Jews).
Hitler was a thoroughgoing Social Darwinist, and believed that “survival of the fittest” should apply to human affairs no less than to the animal kingdom. The only commandment, in his view, was strengthening the species, and that required constant warfare. “Mankind has grown great in struggle, and only in eternal piece does it perish,” he wrote in Mein Kampf.
The premier Nazi ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, attributed to the Jews “the human concept.” The humanitarian dogmas of an all-embracing love and the equality of all human beings before G-d became, in his view, “the protector of all things inferior, crippled, or rotten.”
By contrast, a nation like Nazi Germany, based on the central idea of honor and duty, would not preserve the decadents and criminal, but would eliminate them. The Nazis killed 70,000 mentally defective Germans before they began their extermination of the Jews.
Not surprisingly, Hitler also hated Christianity, which he blamed for the spread of dangerous Jewish ideals to much of humanity. “We don’t need no stinkin’ Christian virtue,” sang Nazi youth.
But there was one great difference between the Jews and all those who drew on the ethics of Sinai, in the Nazis’ view. Christianity “is not a natural religion for Germans,” Hitler wrote, not part of their spiritual DNA. But for the Jews, humanitarian ideas are part of their spiritual DNA.
“They act in accordance with the Talmud, even when they know nothing of it, for it’s not the Talmud that made the Jews, but the Jews that made the Talmud,” wrote Rosenberg.
Though Hitler had plans to deal with the Church in due course, they did not require killing every Christian. But the Jews were different because of their racial characteristics, which made them “super-spreaders.” Any Jews left alive could restart the race and infect mankind with their ideas. As such, Jews had to be eliminated entirely. Already in his first published political document in 1919, Hitler expounded his ultimate goal as dictating the “elimination of the Jews altogether.”
Eliminating every single Jew, rather than winning the war, was Hitler’s supreme goal. As he told the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem at their first meeting in 1941, “The struggle for world domination will be fought entirely between the Germans and the Jews. All else is façade and illusion.”
That explains why thousands of train cars, which could have been used to transport retreating German soldiers to relative safety so they could continue fighting, were diverted to Auschwitz in 1944.
Hitler, wrote Hermann Rausching, a former Nazi, drew his strength from “the strong desire of the masses everywhere to throw off the burdens of higher humanity,” and to return to the pre-Sinai state of being primitive barbarians. The Jews, then, were for Hitler “the great disrupters of history” and the giving of the law at Sinai the great disrupting event.
Interestingly, many philo-Semites view the matter similarly. Bishop Edward Flannery put it succinctly: “It was Judaism that brought the concept of a G-d-given universal moral law into the world. The Jew carries the burden of G-d in history, and for this he has never been forgiven.”
Another Catholic theologian, Jacques Maritain, pointed to the Jews as an irritant “to be found at the very heart of the world’s structure, stimulating it, moving it. Like an alien body, like an activating ferment injected into the mass, it gives the world no peace…. [A]s long as the world has not G-d, it stimulates the movement of history…. It is the vocation of Israel that the world hates.”
In short, the world recognizes — even if most contemporary Jews do not — that the Jewish People have been chosen to bring awareness of G-d to humanity, and hates us for it.
The Jew necessarily cannot accept the status quo, but is always driven to perfect the world. For Judaism, writes the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “faith is cognitive dissonance, the discord between the world that is and the world as it ought to be.” Even totally secularized Jews share that drive to perfect the world — sometimes to mankind’s detriment, as in the case of Karl Marx.
At least part of the disproportionate success of Jews in all forms of intellectual endeavor — a phenomenon thoroughly documented in The Big Bad Jew — is that drive to change the world. And that results in standing apart from the mass of mankind and rethinking matters in a new fashion. As Thomas Cahill puts it in The Gifts of the Jews, “Without the Jews, we would see the world through different eyes, hear with different ears, even feel with different feelings… we would think with a different mind. And we would set a different course for our lives.”
And it was that new perspective, the Jewish insistence that man possesses a divine soul, and is not just another animal engaged in a constant fight for survival — kill or be killed — that caused Hitler to loathe the Jews, and to view them as the ultimate enemy, which must be wiped out entirely.
Unique People, Unique Hatred
After completing the manuscript of Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Jew, Raphael sent it to a number of readers for feedback. One of those was his longtime mentor Rabbi Shalom Schwartz, who had headed the Aish Toronto branch back when Raphael returned from his summer in Israel, and with whom Raphael and a group of friends and housemates had learned his senior year in college. As it turned out, Schwartz had saved Raphael’s college thesis on anti-Semitism for more than 40 years, and had used the material in his own teaching.
Now, after October 7, he asked Raphael whether he intended to make a film based on the book. The latter replied that he did not have the energy for the fundraising burden that would go with such a project. Rabbi Schwartz, however, would not let go of the idea. He was convinced that the events of October 7 and the frightening anti-Semitism that broke out worldwide in their wake were a wakeup call for Jews around the world.
Jews were supposed to receive the message: No, you are not like everybody else: you have a special mission. And when you forget that mission, the peoples of the world will remind you that you are not one of them. As Rav Chaim of Volozhin famously stated: “When the Jew does not make Kiddush [i.e., sanctify himself], the gentile makes Havdalah [i.e., reminds him of his difference].”
In addition, Schwartz had founded an organization called Aseret to bring knowledge of the Ten Commandments to the broader secular and traditional Jewish population. He was fully aligned with the transformative, or disruptive, if you will, impact of the Giving of the Torah upon the entire world, and of the Jews mission to bring knowledge of the values of the Torah to as wide and audience as possible.
He would not take no for an answer, and committed to raising the funding for the production and distribution of a documentary based on The Big Bad Jew. When he succeeded in raising the hundreds of thousands of dollars necessary, Raphael was eager to proceed with the project.
In order to maximize the impact of the film on viewers, the initial rollout of the film took place in nearly 100 relatively small screenings, followed by panel discussions with one or more of the film’s principals. In addition, another 300,000 or so people have viewed it on Newsmax, a conservative platform, and Daystream, a Christian platform.
The reaction has been powerful, particularly in the smaller groups. Raphael describes to me a woman who approached him after a screening in Naples, Florida.
“I’m the daughter of Holocaust survivors,” she told him. “I’ve been struggling my entire life with the question: Why the Jews? I feel you have lifted a heavy burden from me.”
Another woman added, “I was always angry at G-d [for the Holocaust]. Now, I can understand.”
Gentiles too have grasped and clarified the message: “They hate you because you are the Chosen People.”
In Tragic Awakening, Raphael Shore begins his discussion with Rawan Osman by offering three possible explanations for anti-Semitism. The first is simply that there is something rotten about the Jews that is rediscovered in every generation. Rawan quickly dismisses that one as not making sense. The second explanation is that the there is nothing particular about the Jews; anti-Semitism is simply another form of racism.
But as Raphael notes in the movie, along with many others, anti-Semitism is not like other prejudices.
“It has unique characteristics applied to no other group or cause,” says renowned journalist Melanie Phillips.
Among those unique characteristics is that it is thousands of years old, and is always ready to flare up in intensity to pogroms, crusades, and eventually genocide. From the very beginning of Jewish history, there have been repeated attempts to either destroy Jewish religion completely or to kill every Jew.
“As we say in the Pesach Haggadah, in every generation, they’ve come to annihilate us,” says Rabbi Shalom Schwartz in the film.
True, Jew-hatred does not always reach maximum intensity. The most lethal forms denote “societies in deep trouble,” according to Phillips. The late Rabbi Sacks noted the connection between anti-Semitism and the widespread feeling among certain groups “that the world is spinning out of control.” The unhealthier the society the more likely are people to look for a scapegoat, and when they do to alight upon the Jews.
“The fact that anti-Semitism is rising in America says nothing about the Jews, argues Bari Weiss. “It says everything about America.”
Another unique characteristic of Jew hatred, adds Weiss, is that it is a “shape-shifting conspiracy theory.” The far-right view Jews as leftists and the far-left as being on the right.
“The Jew is seen as the symbol of whatever a particular civilization defines as the most loathsome qualities,” Yossi Klein Halevi tells a group of students.
“The Jews are condemned in one place for being rich and in another for being poor; condemned in one place for assimilating and in another for not assimilating,” Douglas Murray points out.
And today that hatred has morphed into condemnation of the Jewish state. “Today, you can’t hate anyone for their race. It’s not on. And therefore, today Jews are hated for their nation-state,” argued the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Rawan Osman sums it up: “It seems as if the Jews cannot get it right. Whatever you do you are hated.” But she adds, “I don’t think it is merely scapegoating of the Jews. It’s really something about the Jews.”
And Raphael Shore is quick to agree: “It’s really counterintuitive to think that a people has been hated for so long and for so many reasons, and it is not something about them, but just simple racism. The third reason is that they hate us because we’re Jewish. There is something unique about Jews that they really hate.”
And with that, he pivots to Hitler: “The conventional wisdom is that Hitler was an irrational madman. I think that’s a mistake. He was certainly evil, there’s no question. But that doesn’t mean he did not have compelling reasons to explain his hatred of Jews.”
In Raphael’s telling, Hitler was moved by fear, even more than by hatred. He never viewed the Jews as a physical threat. Rather, he feared Jewish values as destructive of mankind, and he looked at history and so how many civilizations tried to wipe out the Jewish People. Even those that ruled the world are no longer here, but the Jews still exist. He concluded that it was necessary to take care of the problem one and for all by killing them all.
A leading Nazi paraphrased his message as follows: “I shall hold up against those commandments [i.e., the Ten Commandments] the tablets of a new law. And history will recognize our movement as the great battle for liberation from the curse of Mount Sinai.”
The Nazis saw the covenant at Sinai as a “curse” because of how it defines a mission and imposes responsibilities. In the words of Rabbi Schwartz, “Each of the Ten Commandments is a guide for people to understand the relationship between freedom and responsibility.
“G-d says at Sinai, ‘You are accepting a mission to bring light into the world. You will be hated for it. Although it will influence the world over the course of time, and the world will be elevated with these ideas… the world is going to protest.’ That resistance is called anti-Semitism.”
There is plenty of footage of that hatred in Tragic Awakening. In one shot, a “normal-looking” college student, not of Middle Eastern appearance, says openly into the camera, “They [i.e., the Jews] should all be exterminated. And their kids, their mothers. Just like Hitler did.”
That hatred always exists, and rises to the surface whenever we try to assimilate, to remind us, in Rabbi Schwartz’s words, “No, you’re not a Frenchman. No, you’re not an American. You are a Jew…. The meaning of anti-Semitism is a wake-up call. It is to remind us that we have something unique to give to the world.”
And the reminders of that mission — to be a light to the nations — are there as well. After 2,000 years of exile, Jews have returned to the Land, which, in the words of the Kuzari, is the natural soil for the flowering of the Jewish People. That land lay desolate for all that period of exile, and no other independent state was ever established in Eretz Yisrael. With the return of the Jews, however, it has blossomed. Israel is the only country in the world that had more trees at the end of the 20th century than at the beginning.
But the Jews’ return to the land heralds much more than new forest cover, Rabbi Schwartz emphasizes: “We came back not just to find a safe haven from anti-Semitism. We came back for a purpose.”
In the words of Elie Wiesel, “The mission of the Jewish People is not to make the world more Jewish, but to make the world more human.”
The defining battle of the 21st century is which will prevail, intoned Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “the will to power, with its violence, terror, missiles, and bombs, or the will to life, with its hospitals, schools, freedoms, and rights.” Not by accident are Jews ridiculed by the perpetrators of October 7 for their love of life.
Rawan Osman leaves no doubt as to which side she has chosen: “The Jew represents G-d, morality, equality, responsibility, freedom, accountability. The values of Sinai are designed to bring balance to the world.”
In the poignant concluding scene, Rawan is seen lighting the Shabbos licht, as she intones in a voiceover, “The Jewish People are the people of light. I want to make sure that my future is part of that light.”
“Of course, I hated Jews”
Rawan Osman took time to speak with me about her upbringing and her remarkable journey.
Tell us a little bit about your background.
I was born in Damascus and raised in Lebanon. My father was a Sunni Muslim from Syria, and my mother a Shiite Muslim from Lebanon’s Beka’a Valley. Neither were particularly religious.
Did you ever meet any Jews growing up?
I never met any Jews until I was in my mid-twenties and living in France. But, of course, I hated Jews. I was told that the Jews are evil. That they hate everybody, and they would do anything to achieve their goals. All the media sent the same message. The Jews are our enemies. I was told that the Holocaust was a big lie. I never imagined that one day I would end up in Auschwitz, honoring the memory of Jews.
When did you meet a Jew for the first time?
I moved to France to study wine-making in my twenties, and rented an apartment in what turned out to be the Jewish quarter of Strasbourg. My first day in Strasbourg, I went to the local grocery, and as I approached the checkout counter, I saw a group of Jewish men, with sidelocks [peyos]. They were the first Jews I had ever seen in person. That sight caused a panic attack. I dropped my bags, fled from the store, rushed across the street to my apartment building, and ran up the three flights of stairs to my apartment, quickly locking the door behind me.
Only after a few hours, did I summon up the courage to return to the store and retrieve my groceries. The Jewish owner asked me where I was from. I told him Lebanon, and he nodded. That man converted me from an enemy to an ally through kindness. Still, I wondered if perhaps the Israelis were somehow different from the Jews I now lived among.
How did living among Jews change your attitudes?
I began asking, “Why is the Jew my enemy?” And finding no answer, I concluded that tens of thousands of Arabs had senselessly lost their lives for no reason other than their inability to accept Jews in the land of Israel.
In my thirties, I returned to Europe to study in Germany. My motivation was political: I wanted to solve the Middle East problem.
First, I studied Islam to understand why the war against the Jews had become a religious war. And then I began academic studies in Judaism, in an effort to unravel the mystery of anti-Semitism.
But my Jewish studies did not remain purely academic. I realized that the entire concept of “universal morality” came from the Ten Commandments. I was increasingly drawn to Judaism, which was quite a surprise to me.
With the influx of hundreds of thousands of Muslims into Germany, in the wake of the Syrian civil war, I felt an urgency to do something to combat anti-Semitism in the Arab world. First, I visited concentration camps in Germany, and then was part of the first Muslim March of the Living, sponsored by Sharaka, an Israeli NGO formed in the wake of the Abraham Accords to bring Muslims to the death camps.
How did October 7 affect you?
It came as a total shock. Of course, I was aware of the extent of anti-Semitism in the Arab world. But I’d never imagined seeing what we witnessed after October 7. I could not believe my eyes, I could not believe my ears, what was happening, even in the West. Witnessing highly educated people justifying what happened seared me. Liberal, progressive minds, feminists sided with Hamas. On what planet is the brutal violation of women justifiable?
I felt that the world is crazier every day. I felt compelled to do something. To speak up. So, I started a social media channel called Arabs Ask, designed to explain Israel and Judaism to Arabic speakers. In addition to Arabs Ask, I have more than 130,000 followers on various social media outlets.
OpenDor Media began sponsoring Arabs Ask. I met Raphael Shore met for the first time at a Sharaka event in New York. He invited me to visit Israel. I hesitated. Because of Lebanon’s non-fraternization laws, if I came to Israel, it would mean that I could never again visit family and friends in Lebanon.
Nevertheless, I came. I felt a calling to go to Israel and Jerusalem. When I stood at the Kosel for the first time, I was totally overwhelmed. The tears flowed, but the only word that came to my mind was: Hineini. I was asking Hashem to show me what I have to do now.
I had already started studies toward conversion with my rabbi in Germany. But now I felt that my conversion was no longer a private matter, that Hashem showed me the light of Judaism so that I could share it with others. OpenDor Media and Rabbi Shore did not want me to reveal my intent to convert out of a fear that I would lose my credibility. But for me, integrity and truth are more important than any strategic concerns.
When Rabbi Shore asked me to participate in the making of Tragic Awakening, however, I felt that Hashem given me a hint of where I should be directing my efforts and talents.
My resolve to become actively involved in fighting anti-Semitism was greatly reinforced on that trip by a visit to the destroyed communities in the Gaza Envelope. The feeling of death I saw there reminded me of what I had seen in Nazi concentration and death camps. Humanity promised itself, “Never again.” But what I was seeing did not look like “never again” to me.
(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1066)
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