Watch this on Rumble: https://rumble.com/v7feib2-who-really-runs-the-world-the-chabad-investigation-part-1-of-9.html
Part 1 — How Did I Miss Chabad?
Opening — The Podcast I Almost Dismissed
Every once in a while, somebody sends me something that immediately makes me think, “Here we go again.” If you have spent any amount of time investigating secret societies, powerful families, banking dynasties, intelligence networks and the people supposedly operating behind governments, you have heard almost every theory imaginable. I certainly have. I have spent years digging through claims about the thirteen Illuminati families, the Black Nobility, the Orsini family, the Breakspear family, the Rothschilds, old European aristocracy, banking networks and organizations that supposedly operate behind the curtain. Some of those investigations led to legitimate history. Others led to exaggeration, assumptions and claims that simply couldn’t be proven.
Then I heard a podcast with two men talking about Chabad-Lubavitch. Their claim wasn’t simply that Chabad was influential. They were talking as though Chabad sat somewhere near the center of global power. Essentially, they were arguing that if you really wanted to understand who runs the world, you needed to understand Chabad. My immediate reaction was almost disbelief. I remember thinking, “Chabad? Seriously?” Because if these guys were even remotely correct, I had a much bigger problem than their claim.
How did I miss it?
Think about that. I had spent years looking into the organizations and families people constantly name when they talk about hidden power. I had followed banking families. I had followed bloodlines. I had studied secret societies. I had investigated the Black Nobility. I had gone down the Orsini and Breakspear roads. I had examined the claims surrounding old aristocratic families and the idea that enormous fortunes operating across generations could exercise influence that ordinary people never see. Yet Chabad had never emerged in my research as the organization supposedly sitting behind all of this.
That didn’t make me believe the podcast. It made me suspicious of the podcast.
If Chabad really possessed anything close to the power these men were describing, there should be evidence. Not memes. Not somebody drawing lines between photographs. Not a chart with fifty names connected by red arrows. There should be documents. There should be relationships that can actually be demonstrated. There should be institutions. There should be government records. There should be statements from Chabad itself explaining what it believes and what it is trying to accomplish. If somebody is going to tell me that a religious movement has extraordinary influence over the world, then I want considerably more than somebody saying it into a microphone.
So instead of believing them, I decided to prove them wrong.
And that is important for everything we’re going to do in this series. I didn’t begin with the conclusion that Chabad runs the world and then start searching for evidence that would support it. I began with the opposite assumption. I thought these guys were probably taking relationships, photographs, Jewish religious teachings and political connections and turning them into something much larger than the evidence justified. I expected that once I actually opened the documents, the whole thing would fall apart.
But something unexpected happened.
The deeper I went, the less comfortable I became simply dismissing the subject. That does not mean I discovered that Chabad runs the world. I want to make that absolutely clear from the beginning. What happened was more interesting than that. I began finding things I genuinely did not know existed, and some of them were sitting in public records the entire time.
I began encountering Chabad in places I hadn’t expected. I began finding documented relationships at levels of government I hadn’t associated with this movement. I discovered that Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, wasn’t simply concerned with preserving Judaism or expanding Chabad communities. There was a much larger vision concerning the world and humanity itself. And once I understood that, I realized I had been asking the wrong first question.
The question wasn’t, “Does Chabad run the world?”
The first question had to be, “What is Chabad actually trying to do?”
Because there is an enormous difference between a worldwide religious mission and worldwide political control. Christianity wants the Gospel carried throughout the world. Islam makes universal religious claims. Political ideologies want their ideas adopted beyond national borders. Corporations operate internationally. NGOs attempt to influence governments. None of those facts, by themselves, mean that any one of those organizations secretly controls the planet.
But if I was going to dismiss these two men on that podcast, I needed to understand what they were pointing toward first.
And that’s where this investigation begins.
I’m not going to ask you to believe that Chabad runs the world. I’m not going to ask you to believe that Chabad doesn’t run the world either. For the next nine episodes, we’re going to do something considerably simpler. We’re going to follow the evidence until it stops.
If something is documented, I’ll show you.
If something is an interpretation, I’ll tell you it’s an interpretation.
If something is merely an allegation, we’ll call it an allegation.
And if something I originally suspected turns out to be wrong, I’m going to tell you that too.
Because after everything I have researched over the years, I realized there was another possibility I hadn’t seriously considered. Maybe I hadn’t missed Chabad because somebody successfully hid it from me. Maybe I missed it because I had been trained to look for power in a completely different way.
And that became the first real question of this investigation:
What if I had been looking in the wrong direction the entire time?
Investigation 1 — I Thought I Already Knew Where to Look
For years, when I wanted to understand power, I thought I knew where to look. Follow the money. Follow the families. Follow the corporations. Follow the banks. Follow the people sitting on boards together, marrying into one another’s families and moving between governments, foundations and private institutions. Eventually, I assumed, if you followed enough connections backward, you would begin seeing the structure behind the structure.
That is what led me into years of research on the families commonly associated with the Illuminati, the Black Nobility, the Rothschild banking dynasty, the Orsini family, the Breakspear line and old European aristocratic networks. The basic theory was always remarkably similar. Governments change. Presidents come and go. Political parties fight with each other. Corporations rise and disappear. But wealth can survive for generations, and families can maintain relationships long after elected officials have left office.
It creates a very attractive model for understanding the world. Picture a pyramid. Ordinary people are near the bottom. Governments, corporations, banks and major institutions are higher up. Above them are increasingly powerful people and organizations. Keep climbing and eventually, according to the theory, you should reach the people who actually control everything underneath them.
I had spent years climbing that imaginary pyramid.
And there is a reason that model is so compelling. Money unquestionably creates influence. Wealth can purchase companies, finance political campaigns, establish foundations, employ lobbyists, acquire media organizations and provide access to people most of us will never meet. Families really do preserve wealth across generations. Powerful people really do know other powerful people. Governments really do interact with banks, corporations, intelligence agencies and private institutions. None of that requires a conspiracy theory. Those relationships exist.
The mistake comes when we automatically assume that because those relationships exist, they must eventually converge on one person, one family or one organization sitting at the top.
I hadn’t really questioned that assumption.
When I investigated an institution, I wanted to know who financed it. When I encountered a billionaire, I wanted to know the family behind the fortune. When I found an organization with political influence, I wanted to know who its major donors were. Then I would follow those donors into corporations, banks, foundations and other organizations. It was always another step upward.
That’s why the Chabad allegation initially made so little sense to me.
Chabad wasn’t where I had been looking.
When people talk about Chabad publicly, they usually aren’t describing an international banking dynasty or secret aristocratic family. You see rabbis. Synagogues. Chabad Houses. Menorah lightings. Jewish students on college campuses. Families celebrating holidays. Religious outreach. From the outside, it doesn’t resemble the type of organization somebody studying global power would automatically place at the top of an investigative list.
So when those two men on the podcast suggested that I should be looking at Chabad, my first instinct was that they had confused proximity to powerful people with possession of power itself. A rabbi standing beside a president doesn’t mean the rabbi controls the president. A wealthy businessman donating to a religious organization doesn’t mean that organization controls the businessman’s company. A religious leader meeting politicians doesn’t prove anything sinister. If photographs and associations were enough, virtually every major religious organization in America could be accused of secretly running the government.
I expected that to be exactly what I would find.
But the podcast had created a problem I couldn’t shake. If I wanted to prove these men wrong, I couldn’t simply laugh at their conclusion. I had to test the method I had been using too. Maybe I had become so accustomed to following money upward that I wasn’t paying enough attention to other ways influence could travel.
That doesn’t mean the families I investigated were decoys. I have no evidence somebody deliberately created stories about the Illuminati, Black Nobility or ancient banking families to keep researchers distracted. Some of those histories deserve investigation on their own merits. But I began wondering whether the endless search for the person “at the top” could itself become a distraction.
What if there isn’t a top in the way I had imagined it?
I wasn’t ready to answer that question yet, and I’m deliberately not going to answer it in Part 1. That’s where I think a lot of investigations go wrong. They encounter something unexpected and immediately replace one grand theory with another. I wasn’t interested in replacing “the thirteen families run everything” with “Chabad runs everything.” That would be the same method with a different name written at the top of the pyramid.
Instead, I needed to start over.
Forget what I thought the structure looked like. Forget who I expected to find. Forget the podcast’s conclusion. Follow the documents and see where they lead.
For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t asking, “Who is at the top?”
I was asking something much more basic:
What if I never knew where to look in the first place?
Investigation 2 — What If I Had Been Looking for Power the Wrong Way?
Once I started questioning where I had been looking, I had to question something even more basic: what do I actually mean when I use the word “power”? For years, I had naturally associated power with money, ownership and authority. Who owns the bank? Who owns the company? Who funds the foundation? Who finances the politician? Who controls the institution? Those are legitimate questions, but I began wondering whether they were only showing me one kind of power.
Suppose an organization doesn’t own the bank but has relationships with the people who run it. Suppose it doesn’t control a government but regularly communicates with people inside that government. Suppose it doesn’t own a media company but can reach influential people through relationships built over decades. Suppose it doesn’t possess enormous centralized wealth but has supporters who do. How would I measure that kind of influence?
I realized my old method could easily miss something like that because I was searching primarily for ownership. If I couldn’t trace an organization upward through enormous pools of money, corporations or inherited fortunes, it didn’t appear especially important on my map. I was looking for whoever possessed the machinery rather than asking who could gain access to the people operating the machinery.
But I also had to be careful here, because this is where an investigation can become dishonest very quickly. Knowing powerful people does not make you powerful in the same way they are. Meeting a president doesn’t mean you control the president. Attending an international conference doesn’t mean you control the organization hosting it. A billionaire donating money to your cause doesn’t mean you control the billionaire. Access, influence and control are not interchangeable words.
That distinction became one of the most important rules of this entire investigation.
If I found a relationship, I would call it a relationship. If I found access, I would call it access. If I could demonstrate influence, I would call it influence. And unless I found evidence that somebody actually possessed the authority or ability to direct what another institution did, I wasn’t going to call it control.
That rule worked both ways. I wasn’t going to inflate the evidence to make Chabad appear more powerful than the documents showed. But I also wasn’t going to dismiss documented relationships simply because they didn’t fit the traditional picture of somebody sitting behind a desk issuing orders. If there was something significant there, I wanted to understand it on its own terms.
This forced me to reconsider another assumption. Maybe influence doesn’t always travel vertically. Maybe it can travel sideways. A religious leader knows a businessman. The businessman knows a politician. The politician knows a diplomat. The diplomat knows people inside another government. None of those relationships proves that anyone controls anyone else. But they raise a different kind of question about how ideas, introductions and influence can move between institutions.
I wasn’t ready to conclude that this was how Chabad operated. At this point, I hadn’t earned that conclusion. I was simply recognizing a weakness in my previous method. If I only searched for the richest family, the largest bank or the organization with the biggest balance sheet, I might completely overlook other forms of influence.
And that meant I had to resist another temptation. I couldn’t simply replace my old pyramid with a new one. It would have been easy to erase one name from the top, write “Chabad” in its place and convince myself I had discovered something profound. I hadn’t. All I had discovered was that my original method might have been too narrow.
So I made myself a rule for everything that followed: don’t decide what Chabad is based on what its critics say, and don’t decide what Chabad is based on what I previously assumed about Jewish organizations. Start with Chabad itself. Find out what this movement is, where it came from, how it understands its mission and why it built a worldwide network in the first place.
Because before I could investigate whether Chabad had power, influence or anything else, I needed to answer the simplest question of the entire series.
What exactly is Chabad?
Investigation 3 — So What Exactly Is Chabad?
Before I could investigate whether Chabad had unusual influence, I had to understand what I was actually looking at. Chabad-Lubavitch is a Hasidic Jewish movement whose roots go back to the late eighteenth century in Eastern Europe. The name “Chabad” comes from three Hebrew words associated with wisdom, understanding and knowledge. “Lubavitch” comes from the town that became the movement’s center for generations. So this wasn’t some organization that suddenly appeared in modern Washington or New York. It came out of a religious tradition more than two centuries old.
The person who matters most for our investigation, however, is Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe. After the previous Rebbe died, Schneerson formally assumed leadership in 1951 from Chabad’s headquarters in Brooklyn, New York. Under his leadership, Chabad developed into an international movement built around something that would become extremely important to this investigation: sending emissaries outward rather than waiting for people to come to them.
Those emissaries are commonly called shluchim. A husband and wife might leave the established Jewish communities of New York and move somewhere with very little organized Jewish religious life. They might establish a Chabad House, synagogue, school, community center or outreach program. Their job is not simply to conduct religious services. They build relationships, teach, organize holidays, provide assistance and create a permanent Chabad presence in the community where they have been sent.
That immediately makes Chabad look different from the type of organization I had spent years investigating. There isn’t simply one giant headquarters operating thousands of branches like a corporation. Chabad developed a decentralized model in which emissaries establish local institutions and are generally expected to build relationships and raise much of their support locally. Brooklyn remains enormously important religiously and organizationally, but the local Chabad House can become deeply embedded in its own community.
And that helped explain something I had seen without ever really thinking about it. Chabad can appear almost ordinary from the outside. You might encounter a rabbi helping Jewish travelers celebrate Passover, students gathering at a Chabad House near a university, a public menorah lighting or a family receiving religious assistance. There is nothing about those activities that automatically tells an outsider, “You are looking at part of an international religious movement.”
That matters because Chabad isn’t secret.
I want to emphasize that now because it would be very easy to turn this investigation into something it isn’t. Chabad publishes its teachings. Its rabbis speak publicly. Its institutions have websites. Its emissaries identify themselves. Its religious literature can be purchased and studied. Its public events can involve thousands of people. Whatever conclusions we eventually reach about its influence, I cannot reasonably tell you that I missed Chabad because Chabad was hiding from me.
The better question is why I never considered it relevant to the type of research I was doing.
Part of the answer was obvious. I had mentally categorized Chabad as a Jewish religious movement. If I were investigating Hasidic Judaism, Jewish theology or Jewish communities, Chabad would have been impossible to overlook. But when I was researching international banking, political influence, aristocratic families or alleged secret societies, why would I stop and investigate a group of Hasidic rabbis?
That assumption began changing when I looked more closely at what Schneerson actually built.
His model wasn’t simply about maintaining existing congregations. It was outward-moving. Send people somewhere. Establish a presence. Build relationships. Stay there. Raise a family there. Become part of the community. Then continue expanding the mission. What looks like thousands of disconnected local religious centers begins to make more sense when you understand that the people operating them share a common religious tradition and trace their mission back to the same movement and, especially, to the leadership of the Rebbe.
But I need to put another guardrail around this. A worldwide missionary network is not evidence of a worldwide control network. Christianity has missionaries throughout the world. The Catholic Church has institutions across continents. Muslims establish mosques and religious organizations internationally. Religious movements spreading their beliefs geographically is neither unusual nor inherently suspicious.
So at this stage, I still had nothing that justified the claim that Chabad “runs the world.”
What I had discovered was something much more basic. I had misunderstood the object I was investigating. Chabad wasn’t simply a Brooklyn synagogue community that happened to have branches elsewhere. Schneerson had helped develop a religious movement designed to send committed representatives outward and establish lasting communities wherever they went.
That explained how Chabad spread.
It did not yet explain why.
And the more I studied that question, the more I realized something else. Chabad had been operating publicly in front of me the entire time. The rabbis weren’t hiding. The institutions weren’t hiding. The teachings weren’t hiding.
So maybe the next question wasn’t, “How did Chabad remain hidden?”
Maybe it was:
Why had I never thought to look at them?
Investigation 4 — Why Had I Barely Encountered Them?
Once I understood what Chabad actually was, another question became harder to ignore. How had I spent so many years researching power structures, wealthy families, political networks, religious movements and international organizations without Chabad ever becoming an important part of my research? They weren’t hiding. They weren’t operating under some secret name. Their institutions were public, their rabbis were public, and their teachings were available for anyone willing to read them.
The simplest answer was also the most uncomfortable one: I hadn’t been looking for them.
I had placed Chabad into a category in my mind long before I ever investigated it. They were Hasidic Jews. Rabbis. Synagogues. Menorahs. Religious schools. Jewish outreach. If I encountered the name Chabad somewhere, I had no reason to stop because nothing about that description appeared relevant to the investigations I was conducting. I was looking for financial structures, inherited wealth, political organizations, intelligence connections and secret societies. A Hasidic religious movement simply didn’t fit the profile.
That taught me something important about research. You can have enormous amounts of information in front of you and still miss something because you’ve already decided which category it belongs in. Once you label something “religion,” you may stop looking for it in politics. Once you label something “charity,” you may stop looking for it in diplomacy. Once you label somebody “a rabbi,” you may never ask who else that rabbi knows. The information hasn’t disappeared. Your own categories determine whether you consider it important.
I began thinking about how often I had probably encountered Chabad without registering the significance of the name. A public menorah lighting wouldn’t have attracted my attention. A Chabad House near a university wouldn’t have attracted my attention. A rabbi appearing with a politician could easily look like ordinary ceremonial politics. Religious leaders stand beside presidents all the time. None of those things individually would have given me a reason to change the direction of an investigation.
And to be clear, none of those things should have.
This is where hindsight can become dangerous. Once you begin investigating an organization, suddenly you start seeing its name everywhere, and there is a temptation to reinterpret every previous encounter as evidence that something enormous had been hiding in plain sight. That’s exactly how people can manufacture a conspiracy after the fact. They collect every photograph, every handshake and every shared event and arrange them as though the connections prove the conclusion.
I didn’t want to do that.
The fact that Chabad had a worldwide network didn’t prove political power. The fact that rabbis knew wealthy people didn’t prove financial control. The fact that political leaders attended Chabad events didn’t prove government influence. And the fact that I hadn’t previously paid attention to any of this certainly didn’t mean somebody had intentionally kept it away from me.
What it meant was that my previous investigations had been organized around a completely different set of questions.
I had spent years asking who owned things. Who financed things. Who inherited fortunes. Who sat above corporations and banks. I hadn’t spent much time asking how a religious movement could build relationships across completely different levels of society. That wasn’t because I had discovered those relationships yet. At this point in the investigation, I was simply realizing that I had never even thought to ask the question.
That distinction matters because I don’t want to rewrite my own history to make this investigation sound more dramatic. I didn’t suddenly discover that all my previous research had been wrong. I didn’t discover that the families and organizations I had studied were meaningless. And I certainly didn’t discover evidence that somebody had deliberately sent researchers like me chasing false trails.
What I discovered was a blind spot.
My research model had trained me to notice certain kinds of power and ignore other possibilities. If somebody owned billions of dollars in assets, I noticed. If a family appeared repeatedly in banking history, I noticed. If an organization operated behind closed doors, I noticed. But a religious movement publicly sending rabbis into communities around the world didn’t trigger the same instinct.
That began to explain how I could have missed Chabad without Chabad ever needing to hide.
And this is where the investigation could finally move beyond my own assumptions. Until now, I had been questioning the podcast, questioning my research method and learning what Chabad actually was. None of that established anything extraordinary. I needed documents capable of moving this investigation from curiosity into evidence.
So I started reading.
And that was when this stopped being an investigation I expected to finish quickly.
Investigation 5 — The First Documents Changed My Attitude
This was the point where my attitude toward the investigation started to change. Up until now, I still expected the podcast claim to collapse once I got past the associations and started reading actual documents. I thought I would find the usual pattern: somebody takes a photograph with a politician, somebody else knows a billionaire, another person attends an international conference, and suddenly the internet turns those relationships into a secret command structure. I had seen that kind of research before, and I expected to see it again.
But I didn’t want material written by people accusing Chabad of running the world. I wanted material from Chabad. I wanted books written by serious historians and scholars of the movement. I wanted the Rebbe’s own teachings. I wanted institutional histories. Eventually, I wanted government records and documents from the institutions themselves. If this investigation was going anywhere, those were the sources that had to take it there.
One of the first things that struck me was how openly Chabad literature talked about mission. I wasn’t reading the language of a small religious community whose primary concern was simply protecting itself from the outside world. I was encountering a movement with an enormous sense of purpose. The physical world mattered. Human action mattered. What people did in ordinary life mattered. And the ultimate destination was redemption.
That by itself wasn’t alarming. Christianity has a worldwide mission and an expectation of Christ’s return. Other religions have their own understanding of history and humanity’s destination. What caught my attention was how practical Chabad’s theology appeared to be. Redemption wasn’t presented merely as something believers sit around waiting for. Human beings had work to do in preparation for it.
Then I began encountering the language of spreading outward.
Chabad teachings repeatedly connected the dissemination of Chassidic teaching with the coming redemption. The movement’s famous idea of spreading the “wellsprings” outward wasn’t simply a slogan for increasing membership. Within the religious worldview itself, spreading these teachings had messianic significance. The mission and the expectation of redemption were connected.
That made the worldwide emissary system I had just studied look different.
Again, different does not mean sinister. A missionary who believes spreading the Gospel prepares people for Jesus is acting from theology. A Chabad emissary who believes his religious work contributes toward redemption is also acting from theology. But if I wanted to understand why this movement had invested generations of effort into establishing a presence around the world, I couldn’t separate the organizational structure from the religious belief motivating it.
Then I found something I hadn’t expected at all.
The vision didn’t stop with Jews.
That was the moment I realized my original understanding of Chabad had been incomplete. I had assumed I was investigating an intensely Jewish movement whose worldwide expansion existed primarily to reach Jewish people scattered throughout the nations. That certainly is an enormous part of Chabad’s mission. But the material pointed toward something broader.
There was a place for the rest of humanity in this vision.
I am deliberately not going to explain that system yet, because we haven’t earned it. We will get into Schneerson’s worldview carefully in Part 2, and later we’re going to examine exactly what he taught concerning non-Jews. I don’t want to take evidence from those episodes and dump it into Part 1 simply because it sounds dramatic.
What mattered at this stage was what happened to my investigation.
I could no longer dismiss Chabad as irrelevant to the question I was asking.
Not because I had found evidence that Chabad controlled governments. I hadn’t. Not because I had uncovered some secret financial empire. I hadn’t. Not because I had discovered an underground organization giving instructions to world leaders. I hadn’t found anything remotely sufficient to make those claims.
What I found was a reason to keep going.
The movement I had assumed was primarily concerned with Jewish religious life possessed a theology of transforming the physical world, a mission of spreading outward and a belief that human activity participates in bringing history toward redemption. And somewhere inside that worldview was also a religious responsibility involving people who weren’t Jewish.
That didn’t prove the podcast.
But it destroyed my easiest reason for dismissing it.
I had gone into the documents expecting them to make this investigation smaller. Instead, they made the question larger.
And for the first time, I stopped asking why two guys on a podcast were talking about Chabad.
I started asking why Chabad was talking about the rest of us.
Investigation 6 — Then I Realized This Wasn’t Just About Judaism
That last discovery forced me to correct another assumption. When I first started looking into Chabad, I naturally thought its mission was about Judaism. Jewish rabbis were being sent around the world to reach Jewish people, strengthen Jewish communities, teach Torah and encourage Jews to observe the commandments. That part was true. What I hadn’t understood was that Schneerson’s vision also assigned a place and a responsibility to the rest of humanity.
And this is where I had to slow down, because it would be very easy to misunderstand what Chabad was saying. Schneerson wasn’t teaching that everybody in the world should become Jewish. In fact, the distinction between Jews and non-Jews remained important. Jews had their covenantal responsibilities, while non-Jews had another set of responsibilities before God. The vision was universal, but it wasn’t a universal conversion campaign.
That distinction changed the investigation.
I had assumed that a Jewish outreach organization operating internationally would naturally be concerned primarily with Jewish people. Find Jewish communities. Send rabbis. Establish Chabad Houses. Strengthen Jewish identity. Viewed that way, the worldwide structure made perfect sense without raising any larger questions about the rest of society.
But Schneerson’s understanding went further.
In the material I was reading, Jews had a responsibility not only for their own religious lives but also for encouraging moral and spiritual order among non-Jews. One scholarly examination of Chabad describes Schneerson’s interpretation as giving Orthodox Jews responsibility for the spiritual condition of society as a whole. That is considerably broader than simply keeping Jewish people observant.
And suddenly I understood why the distinction mattered.
If Chabad’s mission were exclusively Jewish, then its worldwide presence could be understood almost entirely through the Jewish communities it serves. But if the Rebbe believed there was also a religious responsibility toward non-Jews, then the movement’s relationship with the surrounding society became relevant in a completely different way.
I want to be very careful with the word “responsibility,” because this is also where language can get ahead of the evidence. A religion believing it has something important to teach humanity is not unusual. Christians believe the Gospel is for the world. Muslims make claims concerning humanity and God. Religious people routinely believe their moral teachings would make society better. Chabad having a universal dimension doesn’t make it evidence of a secret political project.
But it does mean I could no longer describe the movement simply as Jews ministering to Jews.
Schneerson believed the nations had obligations before God too.
We are going to spend much more time examining exactly what those obligations are later in this series. I’m intentionally not laying out the complete code here. I’m not discussing punishments, courts, government enforcement or religious liberty. Those are separate questions, and mixing them together now would allow the conclusion to outrun the evidence.
At this stage, I needed only to understand the scope of the mission.
And there was another detail that made this particularly interesting. Schneerson’s thinking about non-Jews wasn’t presented as a plan to erase the distinction between religions and peoples. The future he envisioned remained differentiated. Jews remained Jews. Gentiles remained Gentiles. Humanity wasn’t supposed to become one new blended religion. Instead, different peoples could have different obligations while ultimately recognizing the same God and participating in the same redeemed world.
That matters because it cuts against one of the easiest sensational conclusions. I wasn’t finding a plan to convert the entire planet to Chabad Judaism. I was finding something more unusual: a Jewish religious movement that believed Judaism itself contained a universal framework for people who would never become Jews.
That was new to me.
And once I understood that, another part of Schneerson’s worldview started making more sense. The worldwide mission wasn’t merely geographical. It was theological. If redemption ultimately involved the world itself, then the world outside the Jewish community couldn’t simply be irrelevant to the mission.
Again, none of this established political control.
But now I had something I didn’t have when I started.
I had a reason, coming from the movement’s own religious worldview and serious scholarship about it, for why Chabad might concern itself with people, institutions and societies beyond the boundaries of Jewish communal life.
And that changed the question again.
I had started this investigation asking whether Chabad secretly possessed enormous power. Six investigations later, I still couldn’t demonstrate that. But I was beginning to understand that measuring this movement solely by its size, its buildings or the amount of money sitting in a central account might not tell me very much about what it was capable of accomplishing.
Because perhaps I had been looking for the wrong kind of evidence again.
Investigation 7 — Why Couldn’t I Dismiss What I Was Finding?
By this point, I had a problem. I still had not found evidence that Chabad ran the world. I hadn’t found a secret command center, a hidden government or documents showing politicians taking orders from rabbis in Brooklyn. If that was the standard, the podcast claim was nowhere close to proven. But I also couldn’t honestly close the investigation and say there was nothing here.
The reason was simple. The questions were no longer coming from the podcast.
They were coming from the documents.
That is an important distinction. Anybody can make an extraordinary claim and then spend hours connecting unrelated events until the claim appears believable. I wasn’t interested in doing that. What kept me going were things I could trace back to Chabad’s own teachings, serious histories of the movement and records that existed independently of the people making accusations against Chabad.
The first surprise had been the scope of the religious vision. Chabad wasn’t simply trying to preserve a Jewish community against an increasingly secular world. Schneerson’s worldview concerned redemption of the physical world itself. Human action mattered in that process. The spreading of religious teaching mattered. The emissary system made sense within that mission. And most importantly for my investigation, the vision didn’t end at the boundary between Jew and Gentile.
None of those facts was sinister.
But together they meant I had been investigating the movement from the wrong starting point.
I originally thought the question was whether a relatively obscure Hasidic group had somehow accumulated enormous hidden power. Now I was beginning to see why that framing might itself be misleading. Chabad didn’t understand its mission as small. Whatever I eventually concluded about its actual influence, the movement’s own religious purpose was much larger than the picture I had carried in my head when this investigation began.
And that presented me with a choice.
I could stop here and say, “Fine. Chabad has a worldwide religious mission. Lots of religions do.” That would have been a perfectly reasonable conclusion if the evidence stopped there. But I hadn’t yet tested the claims that had brought me into the investigation in the first place. I hadn’t followed the movement outside its religious institutions. I hadn’t examined whether its relationships extended into government. I hadn’t tested whether the universal dimension of Schneerson’s teaching ever moved beyond sermons and religious books.
In other words, I didn’t yet know whether I was looking at theology that remained primarily inside a religious community or theology that had begun interacting with institutions outside it.
That became the dividing line for me.
There is nothing mysterious about a rabbi teaching his congregation what he believes the world should become. There is nothing mysterious about Christians praying for God’s Kingdom to come or Muslims believing society should reflect the will of God. Religious visions of the future are as old as religion itself.
The investigative question begins to change when those ideas leave the sanctuary.
Do religious ideas remain voluntary teachings offered to believers and anyone interested in hearing them? Do they become charitable programs? Educational campaigns? Relationships with civic leaders? Do politicians merely honor the religious community, or do they begin repeating some of its language? Does any of it ever enter official institutions?
At that moment, I didn’t know the answers.
And that’s exactly why I couldn’t dismiss what I was finding.
The evidence had taken me far enough to destroy my original assumption but not far enough to establish the podcast’s conclusion. I was sitting somewhere in the middle, which is probably the most uncomfortable place for an investigator to be. I couldn’t honestly say, “Those guys were right.” But I could no longer say, “Those guys are ridiculous, there’s nothing here.”
So I changed the objective.
I stopped trying to prove the podcast wrong.
I stopped trying to prove it right.
From that point forward, I wanted to know how far the documented trail actually went. And before following it into governments, institutions or anything else, I needed a measuring stick. Otherwise, every photograph could become evidence, every handshake could become influence and every relationship could become control.
If I was going to ask whether Chabad possessed unusual power, I first needed to decide what evidence of power would actually look like.
That became the next investigation.
Investigation 8 — What Would Count as Evidence of Power?
Before going any further, I needed rules. Otherwise this investigation could become exactly the kind of thing I have criticized for years. Find a photograph of a rabbi with a president and call it control. Find a billionaire at a Chabad event and call it financial control. Find somebody connected to the United Nations and suddenly claim Chabad controls the UN. If I allowed myself to reason that way, I could make almost any organization on earth look like it runs the world.
So I needed to separate four words that people constantly mix together: relationship, access, influence and control.
A relationship is the easiest to establish. Two people know each other. They meet. They communicate. They participate in events together. Maybe the relationship lasts for years. That can become important evidence later, but by itself it proves almost nothing about who influences whom.
Access is different. Access means someone can reach people or institutions that most ordinary people cannot. They can arrange meetings. They can enter important rooms. They can communicate directly with officials, executives, diplomats or other decision-makers. Access matters because you cannot influence somebody you can never reach. But access still isn’t control.
Influence requires more.
If I could show that an idea promoted by Chabad was later publicly embraced by a political leader, that would deserve examination. If Chabad advocated something and government officials began supporting it, I would want to know how that happened. If language associated with the movement appeared in official government material, that would be stronger than a photograph. If an organization repeatedly gained opportunities to present its ideas inside important institutions, that would also be evidence worth examining.
But even influence isn’t control.
Control is the strongest claim of all. If somebody tells me Chabad “runs the world,” then photographs, meetings and proclamations aren’t enough. I would need evidence that Chabad could actually direct what governments, banks, corporations or international institutions do. I would need command authority, dependency, coordinated decision-making or some other demonstrable mechanism showing that supposedly independent institutions were actually taking direction from Chabad.
That is an enormously high standard.
And it should be.
The bigger the claim, the stronger the evidence needs to be. If I say a rabbi met a president, a photograph or official record may establish it. If I say the rabbi influenced the president, I need considerably more. If I say the rabbi controlled the president, I need extraordinary evidence showing that control actually existed.
This became especially important because of the subject matter. Chabad is a Jewish religious movement, and there is a long and ugly history of accusations that Jews secretly control governments, banks and society. I wasn’t going to take an old accusation, substitute the word “Chabad” for “Jews” and pretend I had conducted an investigation. If Chabad possessed influence, I wanted evidence specific to Chabad, specific people, specific organizations and specific actions.
That also meant Jewish identity itself couldn’t become evidence.
A banker being Jewish tells me nothing about whether Chabad influences him. A politician being Jewish tells me nothing about whether Chabad directs her. A billionaire donating to Jewish causes doesn’t make that person a Chabad operative. Even somebody donating directly to Chabad doesn’t establish that Chabad controls the donor. The connection has to be demonstrated rather than assumed.
The same rule applies in the other direction. If a Christian politician attends a Chabad event, I can’t dismiss the relationship because the politician isn’t Jewish. If a Muslim leader meets a Chabad rabbi, I can’t assume it is meaningless. The question is not ethnicity. The question is what the documented relationship actually does.
I also needed to distinguish religious ambition from political power. If Schneerson believed humanity should recognize God and live according to certain moral principles, that tells me something important about his worldview. It doesn’t tell me he possessed the political ability to make humanity do it. A universal religious vision and a global system of political control are two completely different claims.
So I created a ladder for myself.
At the bottom was presence. Above that came relationships. Then access. Then advocacy. Then measurable influence. Above that would come policy adoption. And only beyond those things could we even begin discussing control.
The investigation would have to climb that ladder with documents.
And there was one more rule that mattered just as much: evidence against the theory had to count too. If I found an institution refusing what Chabad wanted, that mattered. If politicians changed Chabad’s preferred language, that mattered. If an organization had access but couldn’t produce policy adoption, that mattered. If I found decentralized finances where a theory required centralized financial command, that mattered. An investigation that only collects confirming evidence isn’t an investigation.
Now I finally had a standard.
A photograph could establish presence. A meeting could establish a relationship. Repeated meetings could establish access. Advocacy documents could establish intent. Government records could potentially establish influence or adoption. But none of those automatically established control.
And that gave me a way to test the podcast claim without either dismissing it or exaggerating it.
The question was no longer simply whether I could find Chabad around powerful people.
The question was whether the evidence could climb the ladder.
And if it couldn’t, then the claim that Chabad runs the world would fail.
Investigation 9 — What Would Prove the Podcast Wrong?
At this point, I had established a standard for what would count as evidence of power. But there was another rule I needed before going any further. I needed to know what evidence would cause me to reject the original claim. Otherwise, I could spend nine episodes collecting interesting connections while constantly moving the goalposts every time the strongest allegation failed.
Remember what started this. Two men on a podcast were essentially telling me that Chabad sits somewhere near the center of world power. That’s an enormous claim. If I’m going to investigate it fairly, there has to be a point where I am willing to say, “No. The evidence doesn’t support this.”
So what would prove them wrong?
The first possibility was simple. Maybe I would discover that Chabad’s political relationships were mostly ceremonial. Presidents meet religious leaders all the time. Congress honors religious organizations. Politicians attend dinners, light menorahs, speak at churches, visit mosques and issue proclamations recognizing religious communities. If Chabad’s political presence amounted primarily to photographs, holiday ceremonies and honorary statements, then the claim of extraordinary political power would weaken considerably.
Another possibility was that Chabad’s universal religious teachings never meaningfully left the religious world. Schneerson could have believed that humanity had obligations before God while Chabad rabbis simply taught those ideas voluntarily to anyone interested in hearing them. If that was all I found, then I would be looking at missionary religion, not political power.
I also needed to be willing to discover that apparent connections were weaker than they first appeared. An organization can attend an international conference without influencing it. A rabbi can know a billionaire without controlling his money. A religious group can meet government officials without affecting policy. A movement can have thousands of locations around the world while possessing very little influence over the governments of those countries.
If that was what the evidence showed, I needed to say so.
More importantly, I needed to look for resistance.
This is something conspiracy research often fails to do. If an organization supposedly controls government, what happens when government doesn’t give it what it wants? If a politician changes the organization’s preferred language, does that count? If an institution allows an organization to speak but doesn’t adopt its proposal, does that count? If political leaders honor a religious figure while refusing to implement his religious teachings, that is evidence too.
Control should produce results.
Not every time, because no person or organization controls every variable. But if somebody supposedly “runs” an institution, there should eventually be evidence that the institution behaves differently because that authority exists. If I kept finding access without obedience, advocacy without adoption and relationships without command, then the word “control” would become harder and harder to defend.
Money provided another test. If the theory required a massive centralized financial machine, then I should be able to find evidence of one. If instead I found independent local organizations raising their own money, separate donors supporting separate projects and no mechanism through which one central authority controlled the financial resources supposedly directing world events, then that would count against the theory.
The same standard had to apply to the Noahide question that was beginning to emerge from the research. If I eventually found governments actually establishing religious courts, enforcing theological commandments or transferring governmental authority to Chabad, that would be extraordinary evidence. But if I found politicians merely praising universal moral principles while the actual legal system remained unchanged, I couldn’t pretend those were the same thing.
This is where I had to separate something else that people routinely confuse: wanting to influence the world and running the world.
Every serious political movement wants influence. Every missionary religion wants people to accept its teachings. Environmental organizations want environmental policy. Human-rights organizations want human-rights laws. Corporations lobby governments. Churches advocate legislation. Universities try to shape culture. Think tanks write policies they hope politicians will adopt. None of those activities automatically means those organizations secretly control society.
Chabad had to be judged by the same standard.
And there was an even simpler way the podcast could be wrong. Maybe Chabad really did possess unusual access and influence, but the men had exaggerated that influence into control. That possibility became increasingly important to me because the world isn’t divided between “completely irrelevant” and “runs everything.” An organization can be extremely influential without secretly commanding governments.
That middle ground is where evidence often gets lost.
One side sees an unusual relationship and says, “See? They control everything.” The other side sees that control hasn’t been proven and says, “See? There’s nothing here.” Both conclusions can be wrong. There can be something significant between those extremes.
So I established the condition that could ultimately kill the podcast’s claim.
If, after following Chabad from its theology into its institutions, relationships, government contacts and international activities, I found substantial access but no demonstrable command structure, then I would not say Chabad runs the world. Even if the relationships surprised me. Even if the access was greater than I expected. Even if I discovered political influence I hadn’t previously known existed.
Influence would remain influence.
Control would require evidence of control.
That meant this investigation now had something most conspiracy investigations desperately need: a way to fail.
I wasn’t going to keep changing the definition of “runs the world” until whatever I found could be squeezed into it. Either the documents would eventually support that extraordinary claim or they wouldn’t.
And now that I had established what could prove the podcast wrong, there was only one thing left to do before opening the evidence.
I needed to tell you exactly where this investigation was going.
Investigation 10 — Nine Episodes to Find Out
By this point, I knew this investigation couldn’t be done honestly in one episode. There were too many separate questions, and if I threw everything onto the table at once, connections would begin looking like conclusions before we had actually proven anything. Theology would get mixed with politics. Political access would get confused with control. Religious teachings would get mixed with legislation. And before long, we would have exactly the kind of investigation I was trying to avoid.
So we’re going to take this apart one piece at a time.
This first episode has deliberately stayed at the beginning. I wanted you to understand why I started looking at Chabad, why I initially expected to dismiss the claim, and why the first documents convinced me that the subject deserved a serious investigation. We haven’t tried to prove that Chabad runs anything. We have simply established the rules we’re going to use when we examine the evidence.
The next step is to understand the man at the center of modern Chabad.
Before we start following political relationships, I want to understand Menachem Mendel Schneerson’s worldview. What did the Rebbe actually believe the world was supposed to become? What did redemption mean to him? Why did Chabad send emissaries around the world? Why did he believe human beings could participate in bringing redemption closer? And where did people outside Judaism fit into that vision?
Only after understanding the belief can we fairly examine what happened when those beliefs encountered government.
Then we’re going to Washington.
We’re going to look at presidents, Congress and the language that actually entered official American records. We’re going to distinguish ceremonial recognition from substantive law. We’re going to examine who built those relationships and whether anything we find rises from simple access into actual influence. And when the documents don’t support the stronger claims people make about those events, I’m going to show you that too.
From Washington, the investigation moves into the United Nations.
There we’re going to encounter an organization most people have probably never heard of and ask how a group connected to the Noahide mission obtained formal access within the UN’s NGO system. We’re going to look at what that access actually means, what it doesn’t mean and what the organization itself said it wanted to accomplish. I’m not going to tell you ahead of time where that trail goes, because I want you to encounter the documents in the same order I did.
Then we’re going to follow one of the most important questions in this entire series: did any of these ideas move toward actual legislation?
That’s where the standard becomes much higher. Talking about morality is one thing. Encouraging people voluntarily to follow religious principles is another. Attempting to influence public policy is another step again. And actually getting something enacted into law is something else entirely. We’re going to keep those categories separate even when doing so makes the story less dramatic.
After that, we’re going to examine a phrase that kept appearing in the material: “global ethics.”
I want to know what those words actually mean. I want to know how religious ideas are translated when they enter international environments where Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, governments and NGOs all have to communicate with one another. I want to know whether the language changes because people are finding common moral ground, or whether something more specific remains underneath it. And most importantly, I want the documents to answer that question rather than my suspicions.
Then we reach education.
This is where the investigation becomes much more personal, because there is an enormous difference between an adult voluntarily attending a religious lecture and a child sitting in a classroom. We’re going to look at proposals involving moral education, moments of silence, international educational initiatives and the idea of universal values. Then we’re going to ask the question that matters most: who gets to decide what those universal values are?
Only after doing all of that are we going to open the complete Noahide question.
Not the softened description. Not somebody’s internet interpretation. I want to examine what the religious framework actually teaches and then test it against religious freedom. What happens to Christians? What happens to atheists? What happens to Muslims, Hindus, polytheists, Satanists, agnostics and everybody else? Which principles can exist comfortably within ordinary secular law, and which would become a completely different matter if government attempted to enforce them as theology?
And then, in the final episode, we’re going back to those two men on the podcast.
By then, we’ll finally have enough evidence to ask the question that started everything: Who really runs the world?
Maybe the answer will be Chabad.
Maybe the evidence will show something much less dramatic.
Maybe Chabad will turn out to have extraordinary relationships and influence without anything approaching world control.
Or maybe the entire way I have spent years thinking about power—looking for one family, one organization or one group sitting at the top of a pyramid—will turn out to have been the wrong question from the beginning.
I don’t know where I’m going to land until the evidence gets us there. That’s the point.
For nine episodes, we’re going to keep the categories separate. We’re going to distinguish what somebody believes from what somebody advocates, what somebody advocates from what government adopts, and what government adopts from who actually controls government. We’re going to count evidence that supports the theory, and we’re going to count evidence that works against it.
Because I didn’t start this investigation wanting to convince you that Chabad runs the world.
I started it because two guys on a podcast made a claim I thought I could prove wrong.
Now I want to know whether I can.
Ending — I Went In Trying to Disprove Them
When I started this investigation, I wasn’t looking for Chabad. I wasn’t trying to build a case against Chabad. I wasn’t trying to prove that a Jewish religious movement secretly controls governments, banks or international institutions. Two men on a podcast made a claim that sounded so extreme that my first instinct was to tear it apart.
I thought I could.
After all the years I had spent researching the families, institutions and organizations supposedly operating behind world events, the idea that I had somehow overlooked Chabad seemed almost ridiculous. If this movement possessed anything close to the influence these men were describing, surely I would have encountered it somewhere along the way.
But that assumption turned out to be the first thing that failed.
Not because I discovered that Chabad runs the world. I haven’t. After everything we’ve covered in this first episode, we still haven’t produced evidence that would justify that conclusion. What failed was my assumption that there was nothing worth investigating.
There was.
I discovered a worldwide religious movement that I had largely ignored because I had placed it into the category of Judaism rather than power. I discovered an organizational model built around sending committed emissaries outward and establishing permanent communities. I discovered a theology in which the physical world itself has a purpose, human activity participates in redemption, and spreading religious teaching is connected to bringing that redemption closer.
Then I discovered that the vision didn’t stop with Jews.
That was the point where I knew I couldn’t walk away.
It still didn’t prove political control. It didn’t prove financial control. It didn’t prove anything about the United Nations, Congress, international banking or the people those two men claimed were connected to Chabad. Those questions remained completely open.
But now they were legitimate questions.
And that’s the difference between where I began and where I am tonight.
I began with somebody else’s conclusion. Now I have my own investigation.
From this point forward, I don’t care what those two men believe. I don’t care what Chabad’s harshest critics believe. And I don’t care what defenders of Chabad tell me I should believe. I want the documents. I want Schneerson’s own words. I want Chabad’s own publications. I want government records. I want legislation. I want institutional records. And when somebody makes a claim that those sources don’t support, we’re going to say so.
There is another reason I’m being so careful.
We’re investigating a Jewish religious movement. History gives us plenty of examples of legitimate criticism of institutions turning into accusations against an entire people. I’m not going to do that. Chabad is Chabad. A particular rabbi is a particular rabbi. A donor is a donor. A politician is a politician. Jewish people aren’t collectively responsible for what any Chabad organization, leader or supporter does. Every connection in this series has to be demonstrated rather than assumed.
The same standard applies to power.
A meeting isn’t control. A photograph isn’t control. A donation isn’t control. A proclamation isn’t control. Even influence isn’t necessarily control. If we’re eventually going to use words as enormous as “runs the world,” the evidence had better be enormous too.
And maybe that’s ultimately where these two men will be proven wrong.
Maybe we’ll discover an influential religious movement whose importance has been exaggerated into a theory of world control. Maybe we’ll find political relationships that are real but ordinary. Maybe we’ll find ambitious religious ideas that never became government policy. Maybe we’ll reach the end of this series and discover that the evidence simply cannot cross the distance between influence and control.
If that’s where the documents lead, that’s what I’m going to tell you.
But there’s another possibility I have to allow now.
Maybe I’m going to find things I never expected to find.
That’s already happened once.
So I’m not laughing at the podcast anymore. I’m also not believing it. I’m doing something much harder than either of those things.
I’m investigating it.
And before we follow Chabad into Washington, before we examine presidents, Congress, international organizations, legislation, education or anything else, we need to understand the man whose vision shaped the modern movement.
What did Menachem Mendel Schneerson actually want for the world?
That’s where Part 2 begins.
Bibliography
- Glinter, Ezra. Menachem Mendel Schneerson: Becoming the Messiah. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024.
- Loewenthal, Naftali. Hasidism Beyond Modernity: Essays in Habad Thought and History. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2020.
- Rubin, Eli. Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2025.
- Schneerson, Menachem M. Likkutei Sichot: An Anthology of Talks. Bamidbar. Brooklyn, NY: Kehot Publication Society.
- Touger, Malka. Excuse Me, Are You Jewish? Stories of Chabad-Lubavitch. Brooklyn, NY: Sichos in English.
- Wexler, Philip, with Eli Rubin and Michael Wexler. Social Vision: The Lubavitcher Rebbe’s Transformative Paradigm for the World. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2019.
- Lubavitch Foundation of Great Britain. Challenge: An Encounter with Lubavitch-Chabad. London: Lubavitch Foundation of Great Britain, 1970.
Endnotes
- Eli Rubin, Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2025). Rubin traces Chabad’s development from its eighteenth-century origins through Menachem Mendel Schneerson and is particularly useful for understanding the movement’s theology of divine presence within the physical world, human participation in redemption, and the messianic importance attached to spreading Chassidic teaching.
- Naftali Loewenthal, Hasidism Beyond Modernity: Essays in Habad Thought and History (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2020). Loewenthal examines Chabad’s development from an inward Hasidic movement into an outward-facing movement concerned with Jewish society and, under Schneerson, humanity more broadly.
- Ezra Glinter, Menachem Mendel Schneerson: Becoming the Messiah (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024). Glinter provides biographical and historical context for Schneerson’s leadership beginning in 1951 and the subsequent expansion of the Chabad-Lubavitch emissary network.
- Menachem M. Schneerson, Likkutei Sichot: An Anthology of Talks, Bamidbar (Brooklyn, NY: Kehot Publication Society). Schneerson’s talks repeatedly connect the dissemination of Chassidic teachings, individual religious service, refinement of the physical world, and the coming of the ultimate redemption through Moshiach.
- Rubin, Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity. Rubin explains the Chabad concept commonly expressed as dirah betachtonim, the divine purpose of making the physical or “lower” world a dwelling place for God. This theological framework is important for understanding why transformation of ordinary physical existence occupies such a central position in Chabad thought.
- Schneerson, Likkutei Sichot. Schneerson presents human religious activity not merely as preparation for a distant future but as activity contributing toward the refinement of the world and hastening redemption. The spreading of Chassidic teaching is consequently given explicit messianic significance.
- Lubavitch Foundation of Great Britain, Challenge: An Encounter with Lubavitch-Chabad (London: Lubavitch Foundation of Great Britain, 1970). This early English-language presentation of Lubavitch describes an outward-looking movement with international aspirations and repeatedly connects the spread of Chassidic teaching with preparation for Moshiach.
- Malka Touger, Excuse Me, Are You Jewish? Stories of Chabad-Lubavitch (Brooklyn, NY: Sichos in English). Touger’s accounts illustrate the practical operation of shlichus: emissaries establishing religious and communal activity in locations far removed from Chabad’s Brooklyn headquarters and developing enduring local relationships.
- Glinter, Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Glinter describes the decentralized financial character of the emissary system. Although new emissaries could receive initial assistance and direction, local operations were generally expected to develop their own fundraising relationships and become financially sustainable rather than functioning as conventional centrally financed corporate branches.
- Loewenthal, Hasidism Beyond Modernity. Loewenthal identifies a major development in Schneerson’s interpretation of Jewish responsibility toward non-Jews. He describes Schneerson as assigning Jews an active responsibility to encourage Gentiles toward the universal commandments traditionally associated with the descendants of Noah.
- Loewenthal, Hasidism Beyond Modernity. Loewenthal notes that Schneerson’s approach did not require Gentiles to convert to Judaism. The envisioned future remained differentiated: Jews retained their specifically Jewish commandments while non-Jews possessed their own obligations before God.
- Rubin, Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity. Rubin characterizes Schneerson’s project as possessing “a Jewish vision for all humanity,” placing Chabad’s universal dimension within a shared messianic destination rather than reducing it to Jewish communal preservation alone.
- Philip Wexler, with Eli Rubin and Michael Wexler, Social Vision: The Lubavitcher Rebbe’s Transformative Paradigm for the World (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2019). The authors examine the social dimensions of Schneerson’s thought and the movement from mystical concepts toward ideas concerning education, society, science, public life, and the transformation of the world.
- Rubin, Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity. Schneerson’s engagement with modern science, technology, communications, and new media provides additional context for understanding why Chabad’s outward mission should not be interpreted simply as preservation of an isolated traditional community.
- The distinction used throughout this episode between presence, relationship, access, influence, policy adoption, and control is an analytical framework for this investigation rather than terminology attributed to Schneerson or Chabad. It is intended to prevent documented associations from being presented as evidence of control without an additional evidentiary basis.
- Likewise, nothing in the sources cited for Part 1 establishes that Chabad secretly controls governments, international banking, the United Nations, or other global institutions. Those are separate empirical claims requiring separate evidence. Part 1 establishes the history, worldwide missionary structure, universal dimension, and messianic worldview that justified continuing the investigation; it does not establish the podcast’s ultimate allegation.
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