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Former Neo-Nazi Leader to
Speak to Jewish Studies Class
L OCA L
JARRAD SAFFREN | JE STAFF
JEFF SCHOEP LED the
National Socialist Movement,
the largest neo-Nazi group in
the United States, from 1994
to 2019.

But he has since been derad-
icalized and now runs Beyond
Barriers, an organization that
works to combat hate. And he
will appear virtually before
a group of Jewish studies
students at Drexel University
on Nov. 18 to talk about it.

Alina Palimaru, an associate
policy researcher with the Rand
Corp., will appear alongside
Schoep. Palimaru creates “real
life practices to de-radicalize
those who have been brain-
washed by racist propaganda,”
according to an event flyer.

Schoep and Palimaru will
discuss “how to get members of
hate groups to build a life away
from extremism,” according to
Henry Israeli, the director of
the Jewish studies program.

The event, sponsored by the
Laurie Wagman Initiative, will
begin at 10 a.m. and run until
noon. It’s open to the public,
Israeli said. Register at bit.ly/
Palimaru. Israeli said he wants to host
the talk because we hear a lot
about antisemitism, but not
about how to reach antisemites.

“Unfortunately, there are
more of them than ever,” he
said. “The internet has facili-
tated that.”
Schoep’s biggest catalyst
for leaving the movement was
talking to Daryl Davis, a Black
musician, and Deeyah Khan,
a Norwegian filmmaker with
Afghan and Pakistani heritage.

Davis and Khan spoke with
Schoep for separate documen-
tary films that came out in
2017. The neo-Nazi participated
in the projects, which were
exposing white supremacy, to
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM get the movement’s message
out, he said.

“Help people see through
the lies,” Schoep explained of
his neo-Nazi logic.

But in talking to Davis and
Khan, Schoep got out of his
white nationalist bubble for the
first time in decades.

Davis told Schoep about
having rocks thrown at him
during a Boy Scout parade as a
child. The filmmaker thought
people were throwing rocks
because they didn’t like the
Boy Scouts. His parents had to
explain that they were doing it
because he was Black.

Schoep has five kids, and he
said the conversation affected
him as a father.

“I was in this movement for
my kids,” he said. “I believed
that at the time.”
Khan, who is also not white,
had similar childhood experi-
ences. She told Schoep about
feeling ugly, hated and “less
than.” The NSM leader was a
central figure in Khan’s film,
“White Right: Meeting the
Enemy,” and, by the end of their
conversations, he felt her pain.

At one point, the cameraman
zoomed in on his eyes as he
started to understand.

“That was truly the begin-
ning of the end,” Schoep said.

After almost a quarter-cen-
tury, Schoep realized he was
tired. Hating does that to you,
he explained.

But the trouble with white
supremacists is that they don’t
view it as hating, Schoep said.

They see it as defending their
own people.

Schoep himself got involved
after learning that his grand-
father fought in Adolf Hitler’s
army in World War II. His
mother, a German immigrant,
wasn’t proud of that, but she
also couldn’t hide it.

Once her son discovered this
part of his heritage, he started
Lean this way.

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Jeff Schoep
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Courtesy of Beyond Barriers
reading about the Nazis. That
was when he learned about
groups like the NSM.

“And once I got involved,
and was getting propagandized
to, I was in this echo chamber,”
Schoep said.

He compared it to a cult.

Everyone around him believed
the same things, produced
fabricated evidence to confirm
such beliefs and then reinforced
them to each other.

Schoep said many neo-Nazis
could never bring themselves
to believe that they supported
the Holocaust. So, they told
each other it was a hoax.

They also told themselves
that they respected other
groups, but just saw “the
superiority of the white race,”
Schoep explained. Neo-Nazis
would say things like “Jews are
super-intelligent but just evil”
or “Asians build things but
don’t invent them.”
“They really do believe it,”
he said. “You can’t get someone
to fight for something they
think is false.”
As he now realizes, they
were saying those things
without ever talking to Jews,
Asians or other groups.

But once a neo-Nazi has a
real conversation with someone
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Est.1988 See Neo-Nazi, Page 26
JEWISH EXPONENT
NOVEMBER 11, 2021
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