For Lobell, who now runs a digital marketing agency and is an award-winning journalist, becoming Jewish wasn’t so much a destination as a destiny: “I had a Jewish soul,” she states. “It wasn’t really a choice for me. It was my fate.”
Her childhood was marked by trauma and instability – her parents’ divorce, the death of her beloved grandma, bullying at school. She was insecure and anxious, had few friends, and found her Christian upbringing – particularly the views of her other “very Catholic” grandmother –confusing rather than comforting. “It didn’t make sense to me how innocent babies were born in sin, and they had to be baptised,” she says. “I had schoolmates say the same thing – you’re not baptised, you’re going to hell.”
She responded by becoming an atheist, although she now says this was for “surface-level reasons”, rather than a true atheism: “When a friend posed it to me that God didn’t exist, I was like, oh, that makes sense because in the Bible, there’s all these miracles, and then today we don’t have these giant miracles. Why? I said I was an atheist but I innately believed in God. I think that a lot of people do. I just thought because the world was such a messed up place, how can there be a God?”
The Lobells at the Western Wall[Missing Credit]
At the same time, she found herself instinctively drawn towards Jews and Jewish culture, although she knew nothing about the religion. She had close Jewish friends and exclusively Jewish boyfriends. “I think a lot of non-Jewish women are attracted to Jewish men because they’re more sensitive and they’re mama’s boys,” she says. “They’re raised with good values, even if they aren’t religious. The Jewish community at large has a big heart and really great values, and people are drawn to that.
“I was always just more comfortable around Jews. I grew up in a very quiet family, and we didn’t wear our hearts on our sleeves, and we weren’t really real with each other, whereas whenever I met Jewish people, it was the opposite. I wanted to talk about my feelings and I wanted to be real and express myself. Jewish kids always said what was on their minds.”
When, years later, in 2015, she announced she was converting, her mother understood immediately: “‘Oh, that makes perfect sense,’ she said, ‘because you always wanted community.’”
Not all her encounters with Jews were positive. She overheard one teenage boyfriend’s sister calling her a “shiksa”. “She said shiksas are just for practice. That made me feel like I was just a toy to play with. I’m now adamant that people don’t use that horrible word.”
It’s impossible to separate her conversion story from her relationship with her husband, Danny Lobell; she simultaneously fell in love with him and with Judaism. When they met, via a friend, he was an aspiring stand-up comedian, who offered her an internship on his Comical Radio podcast. Before their romance developed, they became friends and flatmates, sharing a rent-controlled New York apartment with a rooster and a chicken, and an unstable neighbour prone to barging in uninvited.
Danny had grown up Orthodox and turned his back on it, scarred by the experience of being kicked of his yeshivah, and angry too. His only concession to religious practice was to go to Friday night dinners. It was at a Chabad Shabbat dinner that Lobell first realised she wasn’t really an atheist. In her book, she writes: “I felt a warmth inside of me that started in my chest and washed over my entire body. I didn’t know if it was the challah, the speech, or the sense of community, but I felt euphoric.”
Despite his religious estrangement, Danny made it very clear to Lobell that if they were going to marry, she would have to convert. But he was also adamant she should not have an Orthodox conversion. “When I discovered that meant my Jewish status wouldn’t be fully recognised, he said, ‘Well, I don’t want to get married anyway,’” recalls Lobell, with a laugh. “Which didn’t help.”
As their relationship developed, Lobell found herself being drawn toward the very religious world Danny had fled. This led to conflict. What stabilised them, unexpectedly, was Shabbat. “Danny said, ‘We have to stop fighting by Shabbat,’” Lobell explains. The enforced pause calmed everything down. “By the time I lit candles, I was like, what were we fighting about again?”
Slowly, during Lobell’s five-year conversion process, Judaism began to re-enter Danny’s life. At first, he resisted. “He wouldn’t come to the conversion class. Then one day, unexpectedly, he showed up – and he exploded. He yelled at the rabbi for five minutes straight. The rabbi listened. Then he responded calmly: ‘If you never want to come back here, I completely understand… but as an adult, you can make your own experiences with Judaism.’”
Kylie Ora Lobell (Credit: Jonah Light)[Missing Credit]
For once, somebody had listened to Danny, and he felt validated. He began to soften in his attitude to Orthodoxy, praying and keeping kosher again. He even gave up his career as a stand-up as it was impossible to sustain without performing on Shabbat. When he sank into depression, and he and Lobell almost split, he asked her directly, “Will you still convert if we’re not together?” Her answer was immediate and certain: “Yes,” she told him.
Danny proposed in the Jerusalem snow, while they were on her first trip to Israel. Soon after her conversion became official, they married in Malibu. For her Hebrew name, Danny advised her to “pick something that will be the new you”. She chose the name Ronit, meaning “happy, joyous singer”, and Ora, which means “light”, legally adding it to her American name too. “When I converted, I went from black and white to colour,” she says. “I still feel that way.”
She calls Judaism a “joyous way to live”, a system which has given her life a structure, rather than restriction, and that helps her cope with anxiety. “God has a plan,” she says. “We don’t know what that plan is, but just keeping going and knowing not everything is in my control gives me breathing room just to live.” She particularly loves the quiet of Shabbat, the escape from the news and technology, because it forces her to turn off her phone and not check it.
But why would anybody in their right mind want to become Jewish at a time of rising antisemitism? Why would someone voluntarily join the most persecuted people in history, when they didn’t have to? “A Holocaust survivor did tell me I was crazy. But October 7 actually led to a surge of converts. It has sparked something in people.”
She has experienced antisemitism both online and offline. “Someone posted a video of a girl in Israel converting. They said it was me. And then [the famous property developer] Mohamed Hadid reposted it and said it was me. Every morning, I was waking up to these horrible messages. But the worst moment happened in an Uber. The driver just said randomly, ‘You know that Jews take children and take their blood and make them into matzah balls?’ He followed it with: ‘Hitler was the Times man of the year, 1939, and he was, you know, a great man.’”
Now a stalwart of her synagogue and local community, Lobell says she has never had any second thoughts about her decision to convert. “I do get angry with God sometimes,” she admits. “But I never have doubts about becoming Jewish.”
Choosing to Be Chosen: From Being an Atheist Non-Jew to Becoming an Orthodox Jew, by Kylie Ora Lobell, is out now
