He used to be a Christian Holocaust scholar. Now he’s a Jew
The most hopeful words I’ve heard about antisemitism came from this Holocaust expert
Stephen D. Smith, former executive director of USC Shoah Foundation, at a 2018 foundation gala in Beverly Hills with Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw. Photo by Getty Images
Senior Columnist Rob Eshman June 22, 2023
After a life spent studying and working with the Jews, Stephen Smith became one.
You would think then that Smith, with his international reputation as a scholar and archivist of the Holocaust, would now be joining the chorus of voices warning us that antisemitism is an existential threat to American Jews.
You would be wrong.
Smith’s journey to Judaism has, if anything, given him insights on how to fight, and beat, antisemitism.
Smith was born and raised in Nottinghamshire, England, the son of devout evangelical Christians. On their first family trip to Israel in 1980, when he was 13, Smith was struck by the sight of Jews praying at the Western Wall.
“I thought, we came here to study the origins of Christianity. When we get here, I see Jewish people praying where Jesus of Nazareth would have come. How come I don’t understand what I’m seeing?”
Ten years later, after studying Christian and Jewish theology in university, Smith considered converting to Judaism.
He contacted an Orthodox rabbi, who struck him as too stringent, and a Reform rabbi, who seemed “too cold.”
“I was having a Goldilocks moment,” he told me.
At the time, Smith decided he could do more to combat antisemitism by remaining Christian.
“This happened to the Jews,” he said of the Holocaust, “but it was not the making of the Jews. This was a product of Western European civilization.” His leverage, he said, came from being part of the majority.
Smith went on to create, with his brother James and their mother Marina, England’s National Holocaust Museum and Centre, which he ran from 1995 until coming to Los Angeles in 2009 to head up the USC Shoah Foundation, founded in 1993 by director Steven Spielberg to preserve videotaped testimony of Holocaust survivors.
There, Smith expanded the distribution of the foundation’s 56,000 Holocaust testimonies to schools around the world, collected testimony from survivors of the Rwandan and other genocides, and pioneered the use of AI and holograms for presenting survivors as if they were alive in museum settings.
The journey to ‘us’
After he stepped down from the USC Shoah Foundation in 2021, Smith traveled to Israel for one of by then many regular visits. This time, at the Western Wall — where he sat five decades before — something shifted.
For the first time in his life, he said, he was no longer a professional “representing six million souls,” fighting antisemitism in their memory.
“I thought, why do I have to sit on the outside looking when I feel a part of this history? Why wouldn’t I want to be a part of this people and its history?”
When his wife Heather Maio-Smith, who is Jewish, returned from her prayers at the women’s section, he turned to her and said, “I’m going to convert to Judaism.”
Maio-Smith looked at her husband in shock. “What, now?”
Later that day, Smith called Rabbi Neal Weinberg, a Conservative Los Angeles rabbi who offers conversion classes, and signed up.
He went through the classes and began studying for conversion with Rabbi Adam Kligfeld of Temple Beth Am, a Conservative Los Angeles synagogue. He also started celebrating Shabbat at home.
What changed for Smith, who now runs an AI company that he and Maio-Smith founded, wasn’t an increase in actual Jewish knowledge.
“I’m not saying I could have taught the conversion course,” he said, “but not far off.”
The change was more subtle, and more striking.
“I changed my pronouns,” he said, “from ‘them’ to ‘us.’”
In the midst of his conversion process, a professor had asked him to contribute a paper to a journal on Jewish ethics.
“I suddenly realized I wasn’t writing about Jewish ethics,” he said. “I was writing about my ethics. I was writing in the first person singular and plural, ‘We have a point of view.’ That was the biggest signal for me; I made a shift to an internal perspective, not an external one.”
That shift informed how he thought about the rise in antisemitism. Smith said being part of the Jewish people actually made him less worried, and less afraid.
‘We have the ability to counter this’
Smith’s optimistic view of the state of Jews circa 2023 does not, he emphasized, lack awareness of what antisemitism is and how it breeds.
“First of all, I don’t have any respect for antisemites,” he said. “Whether they are overt, angry ideological antisemites or whether they are under-the-table quiet types. I don’t respect them enough to waste my time on them.”
The communal impulse to hide or grow defensive, understandable as it is, is exactly the wrong one, he said.
“We need to be out in the world. We need to talk about the values of Judaism. We need to espouse what we have to offer to the world, because it is beautiful. It’s good. It’s old, as in wise and old. We have nothing to fear, and nothing to hide.”
‘No one takes it more seriously than me’
Incorporating the word “we” in his language is no small thing for Smith. It’s the culmination of a journey he began at age 13.
“I have never felt safer,” he said. “I have never felt more protected. I have 16 million new friends who understand the world the same way that I understand it.”
Smith, of all people, cannot be accused of underestimating the dangers.
“If we know one thing about antisemitism,” he said, “it can result in the genocide of Jewish people. We know that as an empirical fact. No one takes it more seriously than me.”
But what Smith found on the inside was a community well-positioned to fend off the threat. American Jews have democracy, civil society, free speech and open society on their side, he pointed out. They have a sympathetic media and education system.
“We have the ability to counter this,” he said, in ways that vulnerable Jewish populations could not. One key is not to circle wagons, “in a high-pitched, defensive way,” but to reach out and form connections, “even to those who we may not trust.”
I heard Smith deliver this message to a Muslim-Jewish dialogue group, NewGround, last May, and he brought it to a Jewish-Christian gathering in Indiana the month before.
There, he spoke to some 300 people on a Thursday evening about the threat of white nationalism and increasing antisemitism.
A white nationalist group, he said, “couldn’t put a group of 300 people together on a Thursday night if it tried, and when they do turn up on a Sunday afternoon in a park, it’s 30 of them.”
Smith, in his quiet but firm English accent, said what I’ve long suspected: There is reason, even in light of the latest bad news, for optimism.
“I think we underestimate how strong we are. I think we underestimate how powerful our community is,” he told me. “We’ll find that we have many, many more allies than we will ever have our enemies. And I’m saying that now as ‘we.’”
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