Raihaana Adira grew up thinking Islam was a branch of Judaism. As a child in Canada, she spent afternoons with her grandfather as he flipped between Al Jazeera and CNN, teaching her about the prophets and telling her that Jews were “our cousins.”
That early lesson stayed with her. Today, she is an Ismaili Shia Muslim and a proud Zionist, and in a candid conversation with Sam Halpern, she explains how she got there. At McGill University, sorority sisters told her she made them uncomfortable because she was “antisemitic,” though no one could say what she had done. Wanting to find out for herself, she went on exchange to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the summer of 2023. There, she saw women in hijab in the classrooms and found that no one cared what she was.
Six weeks after she flew home, October 7 happened, and her classmates began calling Hamas heroic while she was still trying to find out whether her friends had been at the Nova festival.
The interview gets most powerful when Adira describes being caught between two communities. She says she was told on campus that “the only good Muslim is a dead one,” then walked into a bathroom to find “kill all Jews” written on the stall. She remembers the day she felt most alone: a staff member at her own Hillel told her they could not support her because of what “her people” had done.
She takes Halpern through the morning she found an effigy of Benjamin Netanyahu, dressed in striped pajamas like a concentration camp prisoner, hanging from her campus gates. When her friends took it down, she says, police warned that they could be charged with mischief. Most personal of all, Adira lost her father to murder when she was 16. That loss, she says, is why she cannot understand people who celebrate killing, whether on October 7 or after the death of Charlie Kirk. It is also why she hopes one day to build a support network for teenagers who have lost a parent to war, terror, or violence.
Adira also takes on the hard questions about her own community. She talks openly about antisemitism among Canadian Muslims, and about the moment she was turned away from a campus mosque for being a Zionist. She explains why she calls herself “a Canadian Muslim, not a Muslim Canadian,” drawing on the story of her grandparents, refugees expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin who ran a convenience store and a pork sausage shop while keeping their faith at home.
She is now back in Israel with the Ophir Foundation, and she has a cheeky new project in the works: a video series offering Israel “recommendations to improve its apartheid,” starting with the observation that a country trying to erase Arab culture would not put Arabic on every street sign.