In the 1940s, there were around 20,000 Jews still living in Lebanon. Just 20 years later, in the span of one generation, that number dropped to around 3,000. Gad Saad is among those statistics—born in Lebanon in 1964 into one of the last Jewish families to remain in the country.
But the nation that was once called the Paris of the Middle East began to turn when he was a child. He remembers being at school one day when a fellow student told the class he wanted to be a Jew killer when he grew up. The rest of the kids laughed. By 1975, Lebanon had descended into a brutal civil war, and Gad remembers death awaiting him every millisecond of the day. He spent his childhood years mindful of which streets had snipers when he went outside to play. But even then his family thought, This will pass. That is until someone showed up at their home to kill them—at which point the Saad family fled to rebuild their life in Canada. Gad went on to become a professor of marketing and evolutionary behavioral sciences at Concordia University in Montreal.
