Don’t bring it up. If it comes up, change the subject. If you can’t change the subject, consider an outright denial.
Those are some of the strategies used by Jewish reporters working in the Arab and Muslim Middle East to conceal their religious heritage.
The dangers facing Jewish journalists in the region became evident after this month’s beheading of a dual American-Israeli citizen, Steven Sotloff, by the jihadist group Islamic State or ISIS.
It’s not known whether ISIS was aware that Sotloff was Jewish. Colleagues believe his kidnapping by ISIS-affiliated terrorists in 2013 in Syria was one of opportunity and not a deliberate targeting. James Foley, another journalist kidnapped by ISIS and beheaded last month by the terror group, was Catholic.
However, Sotloff’s family in South Florida, his friends and colleagues — indeed much of the journalistic community — went to great lengths to conceal his family’s deep involvement in the Jewish community and his Israeli citizenship in order to not draw his captors’ attention to a factor that may have exacerbated his ordeal.
The captors of Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal correspondent kidnapped and beheaded by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002, made a point of his Jewishness. In the video showing his execution, they included Pearl saying “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish. I am a Jew” among his final words.
As ethnic and sectarian origins loom large in every encounter, keeping Sotloff’s Jewish identity under wraps made sense, said Stanford University journalism lecturer Janine Zacharia, who has reported in the region for the Washington Post.
“For me, the first question whenever I met anyone in the Arab world was ‘Where are you from?’ and they weren’t asking whether it was the United States or Canada — it was ‘Are you a Muslim or a Jew?’” said Zacharia, who was based in Jerusalem for the Post from 2009 until 2011.
“I would say, ‘I’m from New York or D.C.,’ and if they persisted, I would say ‘My grandfather is from Greece,’ which is true. I didn’t want to say what my religion was,” she said.
Suspicion of Jews is not straightforward, correspondents said. Often it is wrapped into other issues — for instance, being based at Jerusalem, which hundreds of foreign journalists are. Many governments in the region tend to ban entry to correspondents, regardless of religious heritage, who are based in Israel.
When they are allowed in, Jerusalem correspondents traveling to Arab countries try to cover up any Israeli ties: ripping tags out of clothes, leaving Israeli cash with trusted friends in transit cities, shutting down social media accounts.
It’s not just an Israel address that can raise mistrust. First impressions in the region often take into account one’s background and presumed loyalties.
Aaron Schachter, who was based in Lebanon and Jerusalem for the BBC in the last decade, said that in Lebanon, asking one’s background was a natural opening conversational gambit. But when the answer was “Jewish,” he said, there was a patina of suspicion that he called “creepy.”
“In Lebanon it was slightly threatening because everyone pays attention to what you are — Sunni, Shia — and it’s not unusual for someone to call attention to it, but at a point it’s vaguely threatening” for Jews, said Schachter, now an assignment editor for the World, a Public Radio International program.
“I know what you are,” he recalled being told by an interlocutor affiliated with Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based group that repeatedly waged war with Israel. The man drew the conclusion, correctly, that Schachter was Jewish from his first name.
One thing journalists quickly learn is that the Jewish “tells” in the West don’t mean much in the Middle East. Jewish names obvious in the West are not at all so in the region, and stereotypical “Jewish looks” among Westerners are indistinguishable from the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern features that are common throughout the Middle East.
“My name might have been Miriam Leah Goldbergstein, and I wouldn’t have worried,” said Lisa Goldman, who reported for various outlets in Lebanon and then in Cairo during the Arab Spring in 2011.
Goldman said that the educated professionals she encountered were at pains to distinguish between Jews and Zionists.
“People’s minds are very muddled, they talk about the People of the Book, the tolerance that the prophet [Muhammad] had for the Jews, but they are aware most Jews support Israel as an identity issue,” said Goldman, now the director of the Israel-Palestine initiative at the New America Foundation, a think tank.
Jamie Tarabay, a senior staff writer for Al Jazeera who is not Jewish, said the anti-Jewish hostility alarmed her during her reporting in Baghdad for a number of major U.S. outlets.
“All I know is that people who might have been Jewish in Baghdad, you kept it quiet, you did not talk about it,” she said.