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Jay Ruderman:

Welcome to All About change. Now is a great time to check out my new book about activism, Find Your Fight. You can Find Your Fight wherever you buy books, and you can learn more about it at JRuderman.com.

Abraham Hamra knows the historic plight of the Jewish diaspora better than most. At six years old, he was separated from much of his family, unsure if he’d ever see his grandparents again. He was among the last Jews left in Syria. And just a year after announcing Jews could leave Syria for the US, the Assad regime reversed course and said the remaining Jews were stuck. Abraham and his family were trapped. Eventually, the policy was reversed and Abraham was able to reconnect with his family in the US, and eventually with the rest of his extended family living in Israel.

Now, alongside a successful career as a lawyer, Abraham advocates for Israel on social media and on the streets of New York. He speaks wildly about not letting Jews get bullied anymore, and he lives what he preaches. It’s time to hear some motivation from one of the strongest and loudest Jewish voices in America. Abraham Hamra, thank you so much for being my guest on All About Change. I’m really looking forward to this conversation today.

Abraham Hamra:

Thank you for having me, and I’m looking forward for the conversation as well. I love your podcast.

Jay Ruderman:

Thank you so much. Abraham, I think a lot of my guests worry about how their activism might impact their social and professional lives. How do your colleagues at your law firm feel about your social media presence and activism?

Abraham Hamra:

At my firm, I’ve received nothing but love and support. And I actually had that fear, because I started speaking out four or five years ago, but after October 7th, everything got just heightened extremely. And within the first month after I started speaking out, after October 7th, I started losing a ton of business from my immigration base, which is a diverse base of clientele, so you can understand. And I predicted a loss in business, I didn’t predict it to be that much.

I went to my partner’s office. I wanted to have this conversation with her and just apologize. I knew it was because of me and because of my activism and that now it’s affecting her, it’s going to affect my associates, it’s going to affect my paralegals, and I was honestly starting to panic. I went to my partner to apologize to her and she’s like, “Are you crazy? You’re standing up for what you believe is right. You’re defending yourself and you’re defending us. Our western values matter. Although I’m not Jewish, it matters to me to have the freedoms that we have in America. Keep fighting, keep doing what you’re doing.”

And as a matter of fact, look what our senior associate did. She created a, in a response to a loss of business, this is how my office rallied around me. She created a post that says, “We stand with Israel against anti-Semitism,” and it sat on the cover page of our website in response. I didn’t ask for it, I would’ve never asked them to do that. And honestly, it was just so moving to know, we do have allies, we do have friends.

Now, I know this story isn’t the same for everybody. I’m lucky, thank God, that I own my own business, but I can tell you, my office receives dozens of emails, people calling for me to be fired. But thank God I’m privileged to be one of the owners, so they really can’t do that to me.

Jay Ruderman:

So first of all, congratulations, and I think that you’re working with some special people because maybe not everyone would have that experience. But Abraham, I want to bring up an issue that you are sort of in a unique position in the Jewish community. I mean, there’s this narrative out there that’s all pervasive about Jews being white. And I think there’s this narrative like Jews came, they were kicked out of Europe, we were exterminated in the Holocaust, we came to the land of Israel. I mean, I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding about Jewish connection to land of Israel, but you are someone who was born and grew up in Syria, in the Arab world. You speak Arabic, you understand that culture. What does that do for you in terms of your ability to speak out and challenge the narrative of who Jews are?

Abraham Hamra:

It gives me two advantages. One, I just want to be very clear. I don’t personally believe in white Jews, right? This racial construct may work in America and may work in different cultures, it doesn’t work for us. Me and you are both the same, we both originate from Judea. We both have different diasporic experiences. So, I’m not going to identify myself and my identity with the experience I received as a result of my persecution, right? So, this construct of white Jew is very convenient to fit in the language of the American dictionary, but there is no such thing. To have this darker complexion, I don’t need to have this debate.

So my ability as a Jew, I say no, absolutely not. As a Jew from a Syria, as a Jew from an Arab country, an Arabized country, I must say, I say absolutely not. We existed in this region, this entire region, whether it’s Syria, Iraq, Jordan, they did not exist until the 1920s, until after the Ottoman Empire fel. A million of us became refugees. We always lived as dhimmis in this area, we’ve always existed here since beginning of Islam. Palestinians accepted us. The entire notion of the Palestinian ideology came from the Hajj Amin al-Husayni in the 1930s. In the 1930s, he was kicked out of Jerusalem by the British, went and collaborated with the Nazis, went over to Iraq, started a coup, replaced the new prime minister with a man named Rashid Ali, it led to The Farhud and the expulsion of 150,000 Iraqi Jews, most of which went to Israel in 1941.

So, as somebody from an Arab country, as a Jew from an Arab country that lived, that I didn’t live, my ancestors lived before 1948 as dhimmis, as third-class citizens subjected to paying jizyas and taxes and having all these restrictions, even though this land we occupied prior to the Arab colonization of it, I say, fine, you believe Palestinians deserve a state. Everybody deserves a state. Syria deserves a state, Lebanon. What about the Jewish minority population of the Arab world? Did we not deserve a state?

Jay Ruderman:

Yeah, I think that there’s so much to unpack of what you’re saying. Your lives as a lawyer and social media activist seemed to have collided recently, with you filing a lawsuit against Al Jazeera for libel.

Clip:

Well, in New York, a Jewish refugee from Syria is taking on Al Jazeera in federal court, accusing the Qatar-backed network of libel and anti-Semitism.

Jay Ruderman:

You’ve spoken a lot about, Jews need to stand up for ourselves, and here you’re doing just that. How’s the past month been for you since filing the lawsuit?

Abraham Hamra:

Absolutely. My mother watches Al Jazeera and other Arabic news channels, right? At home, we speak Arabic, we have Arabic TV. And so my mother was much older, obviously when she came to this country. So ever since I started talking about, there’s this innate fear that exists within her heart about, okay, what’s going to happen to you? Because if you would do this in Syria, this would happen. A news article would be published, like my great uncle was imprisoned in Syria for protesting the Assad regime in Syria, and they had to ship him out. So, she always had this fear.

And so I went to Israel, I went to Italy. I promised my daughter a grand bat mitzvah, and she turned 12 before I was able to gather enough money to throw her this grand bat mitzvah. So instead of doing that, I told her, “Let’s take a family trip. We’ll go to Italy for a few days and then we’ll go to Israel for two weeks, so we’ll see all these sites. We’ll really visit our country at our homeland, Israel.” And she was with it, we took the trip. We went to the Amalfi Coast for a couple days, we went to Israel. We’re vacationing, really, and I’m just showing my kids the sites. I took them to [inaudible 00:08:40], they took them to Nova, all on my dime. I paid through the nose for this stuff between El Al and hotels.

And all of a sudden, I had a meetup, I called for a meetup in Israel with all the content creators that I knew. They came through, we hung out by the Tayelets, we’re enjoying life, drinking, having fun. One of my friends said, “Would you like to get into Gaza?” I said, “Absolutely. What kind of question is that? I’m an activist, I’m speaking about this subject, and given the opportunity, I would love to get into Gaza.” He said, “Let me see if I can try and help facilitate that.” I said, “Thank you.” Texted me, “I can get you into Gaza. You need to get to this area and you’re going to get in.” I said, “Amazing.” I took a cab, man, literally, I took a cab to the location that took us to the border, and we went in into Gaza.

I filmed, I showed truthfully what was going on, and then me and Marwan, who is an Arab Druze influencer, did a Arabic post from the food distribution site, from the food site, the storage site, showing the people, the Arab people at least, there is no starvation. There’s so much food here. This is a lack of management, this is a failure of bureaucracy, if anything. There’s thousands of boxes filled to the rim with food, just sitting there under 110 degrees sun. It was August in Israel in the south.

And so we did this video, before I know it, Al Jazeera is running a story. Paid propagandists. “Israel paid this individual, paid these people to…” If I’m remembering it correctly, I don’t remember the exact quotes, but basically alluding to that, Israel paid us to go into Gaza and push Israeli Zionist propaganda. When I saw that, I knew my mother’s reaction, what it was going to be when she saw that, right? The fear in her heart as well is like, oh my God, is this real? I see this Arab news channel just came back, now they’re attacking you here in America. I saw that and I was flabbergasted. I’m like, no, nobody paid me anything. I had to work my butt off to make this money, and it cost me a lot. It wasn’t a, oh, just let’s go take a vacation. It was something I had to work up for, I had to save. I didn’t come from wealth, everything I build, everything I do, I have to work very hard for.

And to see this article about me as this propaganda-ist, as this person that gets paid by a foreign government to go and push their propaganda, it pushed me over the edge. I said, look, I could ignore, I could say, “Screw them, they’re lying,” and make a video and ha-ha, nice… But I’m like, absolutely not. I want to send a message that you cannot come back here and think you’re going to run the same type of things you did to us back in those countries where they run a story and say, “This businessman is doing this,” and a mob comes and lynches this businessman or discriminates against that community or more danger exists.

I said, in those countries, you’re right, we didn’t have right, we couldn’t fight back. The government had your side, we were dhimmis, we were [foreign language 00:11:51], which was the insult we received on the street, a piece of Jew. But not here, not in America. It’s not what my father and my mother came here with four children, restarted their entire life to give us an opportunity in a country that promises you equality, protections, and gets you the right to fight back. And so we’re sitting in this curious time, and I have this opportunity to not stay silent at the face of libel and slander against me. So of course, I wasn’t going to stay silent. I filed the lawsuit telling El Jazeera, “You really think I’m a paid propagandist? You’re a liar. I’m going to prove that you’re a liar, and you’re going to have to pay those damages.” And so, that’s really the inspiration to file the suit.

Jay Ruderman:

I hope you’re successful, because I think that this is happening to us over and over again. There are lies that are perpetrated, there’s no one’s stopping it. [foreign language 00:12:49], and congratulations for taking this step because I think a lot of people may be afraid to take that step.

Abraham Hamra:

No, and I get it. And honestly, and I spoke to an organization about this. I said, “Look, I’m funding this litigation. But forget, a lot of people may not want to take this step. What if they can’t afford it?” Right? Like litigation is expensive, it’s not cheap. And I don’t think we have built enough avenues in which people can come to a fund and say, “Hey, I had an anti-Semitic incident to happen to me. Whether you want to assign it to your lawyers or not to handle, I want to file a lawsuit. Is there a fund available that can cover costs of the attorneys?” Right? This is a practical step in actual fighting antisemitism and actually led me to shift a little bit of my focus from fighting the outside to trying to fix what’s wrong with us on the inside, which is the new initiative I’ve actually just launched last week.

Jay Ruderman:

Can you talk a little bit about it?

Abraham Hamra:

Yeah. I called it BEIT DEBATE, and what I realized is we are never going to, we’re playing this game of whack-a-mole with antisemites. One anti-Semitic comes out, 10 Jewish influencers make a video, organizations send a statement. It used to work five, six years ago, it used to work when the ADL called you an anti-Semitic. Oh my God. You made the donation, you went to the Holocaust Museum. It affected people. Today, it doesn’t work. They don’t care. You’re seeing, they do not care.

So it led me, over Shabbat last week I was just praying. I was in shul and I was thinking, and I’m like, we keep saying a unified nation, a unity, unity. Our unity is our strength, that’s how we’re going to fight back against antisemites. But I looked around, I said, what organization is focusing on the inside? What organization is truly focusing on fostering and creating a strong and connected army of Zion in a nation of Israel? How do we share this agreement so we can learn from one another? Right? I’m not Reform, and somebody may not be Orthodox, but how am I going to know your perspective and how are you going to know my full perspective if we never have this dialogue?

And so, the whole idea of BEIT DEBATE is really based after debate midrash. It’s a space for all types of Jews, Zionists, anti-Zion, whatever they want to be. If you’re Jewish, you’re welcome at BEIT DEBATE. And we have debates. We have debates structured on a way of the ancient rules of the Gemara, where there’s two debaters, one person, each person gives five minutes, whatever, there’s a whole debate structure. After the debate ends, it’s a very Jewish structure of the debate.

But after the debate end, you move on to breaking bread portion of the event where you cannot speak about the debate topic, but instead, you’re going to have to start learning about each other’s humanity. Right? Like, what’s your name? What’s your favorite color? Because I bet you, even the one that believes in their anti-Zionist cause, if they come to these events enough and they develop that human connection with a Zionist enough, they’re going to think four times before they come up on a screen and misrepresent what Jews in totality or a majority actually believe. Because now they have personal contacts that’s going to call them out.

Right now, they live in their silo, they live in their bubble. They’ve been to their synagogues that tell them, Tikkun olam is the way we fix the world, and that is our commandment of being Jewish. Nobody has challenged that notion for them. They haven’t heard of a different perspective on that, right? And so all of a sudden the rabbi is like, Tikkun olam means pushing DEI, we need to push inclusion. They’re so worried about including Islamists that they’re offending and hurting and whatever other word they want to use, the Jewish refugees of Arab countries. Are we not the same? Do you not have consideration for us? Do you not include us?

And I’ve challenged many Reform synagogues on this. I’m like, where is your annual day of commemoration for the Jewish refugees of Arab countries? That’s on November 1st. None of them have it, then you can’t expect this poor whatever person who grew up from a young age in the synagogue learning Tikkun olam in a wrong way, and then being applied in the wrong way, not knowing our existence and saying, “You know what? I’m with the Palestinians.” It’s logical that she’s going to go to that decision. If she has a heart, she’d go to that area. But we’re not having these conversations. And I believe in having those conversations with people.

So, that’s really my new initiative. And after I announced it, hundreds of people stepped up and wanted to volunteer for the organization all over the world. Marnie Perlstein in Sydney wants to, we’re discussing opening a chapter over there. I have people in the UK, in Ireland, and this is all grassroots. That’s the initiative, because I believe we need to put more focus, not saying abandon the fight outside. We should continue pushing back on antisemites, but we need to start bringing it back in and seeing, what does our community need? How do we help foster strong united and growing Jewish community in America?

Jay Ruderman:

Well, Abraham, first of all, I want to thank you for your insights and thank you for your activism. I think you play an important role in our country, in our community, and I’m going to wish you to go from strength to strength.

Abraham Hamra:

Amen. Thank you. Thank you so much, and thank you for this podcast and for the interview. I really do appreciate it.

Jay Ruderman:

Thank you for being part of the All About Change community. We aim to spark ideas for personal activism, helping you find your pathway to action beyond awareness. So, thank you for investing your time with us, learning and thinking about how just one person can make the choice to build a community and improve our world.

I believe in the empower of informed people like you to drive real change, and I know that what we explore today will be a tool for you in that effort.

All right, I’ll see you in two weeks for our next conversation, but just one small ask, please hit subscribe and leave us a comment below. It lets us know that you value this content and it supports our mission to widely share these perspectives.

If you’re looking for more inspiration, check out this next video. I chose it for you and I know you’re going to enjoy it. I’m Jay Ruderman. Let’s continue working towards meaningful change together.

Today’s episode was produced by Tani Levitt and Mijon Zulu. To check out more episodes or to learn more about the show, you can visit our website Allaboutchangepodcast.com. If you like our show, spread the word, tell a friend or family member, or leave us a review on your favorite podcasting app. We really appreciate it. All About Change is produced by the Ruderman Family Foundation.