4 | JULY 20 • 2023 

essay

How a Christian Holocaust 
Scholar Became a Jew
A

fter 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 
6 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.

Rob Eshman
Forward.com 

Stephen D. Smith, former executive director of USC Shoah 
Foundation, at a 2018 foundation gala in Beverly Hills, is flanked by 
Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw.

PHOTO BY GETTY IMAGES/FORWARD.COM

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