Cam Higby Journalist Cam Higby was standing outside of Adas Torah synagogue in Pico-Robertson, filming the chaotic scene unraveling outside the synagogue on June 23. As pro-Palestine activists descended upon the Jewish neighborhood to protest an Israeli real estate event, shouting matches ensued and fights broke out. Higby, who isn’t Jewish, was in the middle of it all.
Suddenly, he couldn’t see. His eyes stung profusely. The world went dark. He had been assaulted with bear spray, rendering him temporarily blind. “It was the most terrifying moment in my life,” the 24-year-old said. “Somebody came up to me to help.”
It turned out to be Rabbi Arye Sufrin, head of school at YULA.
“Rabbi Sufrin put water on my face and said, ‘I’ll take you to the hospital,’” Higby said. “I said, ‘Don’t put me in a car. I’ll freak out.’ I didn’t really know if this person was a rabbi. He could have been lying. I couldn’t see. I could have gotten my vision back and seen that this person is wearing a keffiyeh.”
Instead of taking the traumatized journalist to the hospital, Sufrin got a paramedic to assist him.
“This woman told me, ‘Let’s take your camera off. Let me see you. Let’s calm you down,’” Higby said. “I said, ‘Here’s my camera. Please don’t steal it because I just got it.’ She’s like, ‘I’m not going to steal your camera. I won’t hurt you. I’m a Jew.’ I was still skeptical, but it was so interesting how she said, ‘I won’t hurt you. I’m a Jew.’ These people didn’t know who I was. For all they knew, I could have been an Antifa journalist.”
An hour and a half after the bear spray attack, Higby, who works for Today is America and previously hosted “The Wrap Up” at PragerU, could mostly see again. However, one of his friends, David, got hit with the spray as well and needed help.
“David fell down and was in agonizing pain,” he said. “The police told me I had to move him. I said, ‘He has a larger build than me, can I just put water in his face?’ They said no. I had to muster up my strength and move him. I carried him to Pizza Station, and they provided water to us.”
Leading up to the Pico protests, the previous months had also been scary for Higby, who was going to the anti-Israel university encampments at UC Berkeley, UC Irvine and UCLA to record what was happening. At UC Berkeley, a man pulled a gun on a member of Higby’s crew, and then followed Higby and his crew off campus. He was assaulted multiple times at UCLA, where he was once covered with burning hot spaghetti sauce.
Leading up to the Pico protests, the previous months had also been scary for Higby, who was going to the anti-Israel university encampments at UC Berkeley, UC Irvine and UCLA to record what was happening.
“When I was in Pico, I recognized a lot of people from UCLA,” he said. “Many of them had hurt me in the past.”
One common theme, aside from the assaults from the pro-Palestine protestors, was that a Jew would be there to help Higby. After he’d spend all day at the UCLA encampments, an Iranian Jewish woman named Malka would look after him.
“I’d get the crap beaten out of me, and she’d be at UCLA to clean me up and wipe the blood off me,” he said. “She fed me. She’d say, ‘If you need someone to go in with you, let me know.’”
Higby recently moved to Seattle because his girlfriend got a job opportunity there; what he misses about L.A. are his Jewish friends, like Malka.
“I’ve never encountered a group of people that is more loyal and willing to help or defend somebody who is not in their tribe,” he said. “If I was going out in L.A., I knew people in the Jewish community would have my back.”
Higby has a large social media presence – with over 41,000 followers on X – and uses his platform to show he is an ally to the Jewish community and Israel. “What should Israel do to Hezbollah next …” he recently tweeted. Another post reads, “Trust me bro, Israel is no apartheid state.”
During his five years as a professional journalist, Higby has carved out his niche recording protests of all kinds, from a large Roe v. Wade protest to one at the Glendale Unified School District office, where parents were clashing over LGBTQ+ education.
“I feel strongly about a lot of the issues I talk about and document,” Higby said. “What I noticed about the UCLA encampments was that nobody else was out there doing the hard work. ABC7 was there, but they weren’t getting into what I felt was important: showing the violence, the supplies, which they clearly didn’t fund themselves, and the refusal to allow Jewish students onto campus unless they supported the pro-Palestine cause.”
Higby would ask questions about who was funding the food and water stacked to the ceiling, along with other supplies like deodorant and women’s sanitary products.
“There must have been $20,000 worth of stuff that materialized in a couple of days,” he said. “I asked Students for Justice in Palestine who was paying for it, and they attacked me.”
For the past three years, Higby has been making videos about Israel. He posted about it in 2021 and said no one cared; he’d get 1,000 views and 100 likes on his videos about the country.
“I had posted a video about the origins of the word ‘Palestine’ on TikTok in September of 2023 and it got no engagement and fell flat,” he said. “I posted the same exact video on Oct. 7, and it went viral. It’s sad, but no one seemed to care about Israel before Oct. 7.”
In a time when misinformation is proliferating and people don’t know who to trust when it comes to the news, Higby recommends looking at stories from a variety of sources.
“Watch people who are on the ground reporting in an independent way and don’t belong to big networks,” he said. “When I want to find out the truth, I check FOX and CNN and The Hill and NPR. I don’t just look at one of them.”
Even from Seattle, Higby is going to keep reporting on antisemitism, the Jewish community and Israel – and hopes to visit the Jewish state soon.
“I had no pigs in the race when it came to Israel,” he said. “I’m a white, agnostic American. I’m not Christian or Jewish. I’m just a white guy. I saw there were a lot of people on the left and right who don’t like Israel, and I thought, ‘What’s going on here?’ It seems to be the most history-rich place on planet Earth. I started researching and drew my own conclusions. And now, I want to go there.”
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