Simon Deng

Simon Deng is a former slave from South Sudan, human rights activist, public speaker, and licensed lifeguard. Kidnapped and given as a gift to an Arab family at the age of nine during the First Sudanese Civil War, he lived as a chattel slave for two years. He hauled water from the Nile, served the family, and slept with the farm animals, enduring regular beatings and racial abuse. After he escaped and was reunited with his Shilluk people, he eventually made his way to Egypt, where he joined a professional swim team in Cairo. In 1989, he immigrated to the United States and settled in New York City. In 1993, he joined the leadership committee of the American Anti-Slavery Group, a human rights organization co-founded by Dr. Charles Jacobs to advocate for the end of slavery in Sudan and Mauritania. In 1995, he helped organize America’s first abolitionist conference since the Civil War at Columbia University. In 2006 and 2010, he embarked on a “Freedom Walk” between New York City and Washington, D.C., to demand South Sudanese independence from Arab Sudan. Other such walks include one in 2007 between Brussels and The Hauge. Since October 7, 2023, Simon has devoted his free time to repaying the kindness he received from the Jewish community in his early years as an immigrant and public speaker. Himself a victim of jihad slavery and Islamic terrorism, he made it his duty to tell the world that the same atrocities visited upon his African people had been inflicted upon Jews in Israel—from burning women and children alive to the enslavement of captives. Since early 2024, he has partnered with the African Jewish Alliance in staging one-man protests in Washington Square Park and Times Square on behalf of the Israeli hostages, and producing social media videos, such as with Jewish Instagram star Montana Tucker.