I have lived in Canada nearly all my life, but the Canada I know has been vanishing under the impact of a sharp resurgence of antisemitism.
Although I have not personally felt its sting, its echoes are unmistakable, underscoring the unsettling fact that Jews are the primary victims of hate-motivated crimes in Canada.
Newspaper stories and radio and television broadcasts attest to its scope and vitriol.
Robert Brym, a Canadian sociologist, believes that this wave of antisemitism has impacted Jews considerably. As he wrote in a monograph, “Most Canadian Jews feel unsafe and victimized. They perceive a rise in negative attitudes toward Jews in recent months and years. Most doubt the situation will improve.”
He adds that antisemitism and anti-Zionism are intertwined: “The main reason they feel this way is that extreme anti-Israel statements and actions have proliferated … Because support for the existence of a Jewish state in Israel is a central component of their identity, most Jews regard extreme anti-Israel statements and actions as a threat to their existence as Jews.
“Most non-Jewish Canadians do not have negative attitudes toward Jews. However, non-Jewish university students, Quebecois (French Canadians in Quebec), and especially Muslim Canadians tend to have significantly more negative attitudes towards Jews than does the non-Jewish population as a whole.”
In his view, the Canadians most likely to harbor negative opinions of Israel are Muslims, non-Jewish supporters of the left-of-center New Democratic Party, and non-Jewish university students.
Animosity toward Jews is nothing new, being the world’s oldest hatred. But since October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel and killed about 1,200 Israelis and foreigners, sparking Israel’s ferocious military offensive in the Gaza Strip that has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, there has been a tremendous and unprecedented spike in antisemitism.
Sometimes unfolding in the guise of anti-Zionism, this corrosive phenomenon is no less dangerous than the antisemitism expressed by traditional antisemites.
The unvarnished truth is that Canada has never been immune to the virus of antisemitism.
Prior to World War II, when Canada’s elite was of British and French stock, antisemitic restrictions and conventions were common. Universities admitted Jewish students on the basis of quotas. Corporations, banks and schools hardly ever hired Jews. Certain residential neighborhoods were off-limits to Jews. Country clubs kept out Jews.
These barriers were gradually removed by legislation and consent as Canada incrementally acquired the characteristics of a tolerant multicultural society and turned into a beacon of religious and ethnic diversity, fair play and inclusion.
But even as Canada advanced in its treatment of minorities, antisemitism never really disappeared, judging from my own experiences.
During my adolescence and early adulthood, I was periodically the object of slurs from a French Canadian teen, an Irish boy of my age, an Anglo classmate in high school, and the Dutch-born chief executive officer of a company that employed me.
On another occasion, I overheard a telephone conversation during which a Montreal sportswriter of Irish descent referred to a Jewish columnist on another newspaper as a “Jew bastard.”
Being a child of Holocaust survivors from Poland, these incidents were doubly hurtful. But from the late 1960s onwards, I was not troubled by antisemitism. During that golden era, Canadian Jews made tremendous strides in every conceivable field, and the future seemed limitless.
In the past 14 months, however, this picture has darkened in the face of fierce attacks by strident critics of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which has claimed the lives of 45,000 Palestinians, 17,000 of whom were Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters.
In what was surely a disconcerting sign of our times, a Second Cup coffee chain franchisee at the Montreal Jewish General Hospital, identified as Mai Abdulhad, raised her arm in a Nazi salute at a Palestinian demonstration in front of Concordia University and shouted, “The final solution is coming your way, the final solution. You know what the final solution is?”
Shortly afterward, in a social media statement denouncing her rant, Second Cup announced the termination of her franchise at the hospital.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has regularly denounced such vitriol. On December 20, his government announced the creation of a National Forum on Combating Antisemitism. It will meet in Ottawa in February to deal with “a troubling rise in antisemitic incidents, threats, and hate crimes.”
Prior to this announcement, the Conservative Party’s deputy leader, Melissa Lantsman, claimed that Trudeau has failed to protect Canadian Jews.
As she told The National Post, “There is no question that Canada has become a more dangerous place for the Jewish people under the divisiveness of Justin Trudeau that has stoked it. Another day brings another brazen act of antisemitic hate, and it’s well overdue that the government do something or anything to protect Canadians. These lawless mob of lowlifes must be brought to justice.”
The hard, cold statistics tell the story unsparingly.
A report released two months ago by Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism states that there has been a staggering 670 percent increase in antisemitic incidents in Canada since the end of 2023.
A small number of Jewish businesses in Toronto related to Israel have been vandalized or picketed by Palestinian protesters and their supporters. And a Jewish neighborhood in the same city was temporarily besieged by Palestinian demonstrators.
Insulting language has been hurled at Jews. Jewish schools in Montreal and Toronto have been subjected to drive-by shootings and arson attacks. Jewish institutions from Halifax to Victoria have received bomb threats. Synagogues in Quebec and British Columbia have been firebombed.
One synagogue in Toronto, Kehillat Shaarei Torah, has been vandalized seven times since last spring. And in December, for the third time in seven months, gunshots struck Bais Chaya Mushka Girls Elementary School in Toronto during the dead of night.
Meanwhile, in Montreal on December 18, arsonists set fire to Congregation Beth Tikvah, causing minor damage. This attack was described by the Jewish Community Council as “deeply disturbing and a stark reminder of the persistence of antisemitic hatred.”
Irwin Cotler, the former Canadian justice minister, a human rights lawyer and the founder of the Montreal-based Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, contends that the Beth Tikvah firebombing was not a one-off event. He described it as “part of a pattern of an exponential rise in hate crimes and incendiary hate speech incentivized by a culture of impunity in the absence of accountability.”
What is necessary now, he said, is a strategic response from all levels of government around the “4Ps: Prevention of the crime to begin with. Protection of the target. Prosecution of the perpetrators. Partnerships among federal, provincial and municipal authorities.”
Anthony Housefather, a Liberal Party member of parliament who had his Bar Mitzvah at Beth Tikvah and who serves as Trudeau’s special advisor on Jewish community relations, urged Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante to demand stricter law enforcement so that Jews in Montreal are better protected.
The problem facing Jews transcends the fear of outright violence.
Jewish doctors and health care workers in Toronto have reported an increase in the incidence of antisemitism. “Many of our members have been doxxed and subjected to targeted harassment simply for being Jewish,” the president of the Jewish Medical Association, Dr. Lisa Salamon, said earlier this month.
Serena Lee-Segal, an occupational therapist, told The Toronto Star that her union has not assisted her. This is not surprising. The Ontario Public Service Employees Union has adopted a pro-Palestinian position.
Amid this upsurge of anti-Jewish bile, Canadian universities from York University to the University of British Columbia have been slapped with class-action suits accusing them of failing to protect Jewish students from antisemitism.
The trouble appears to have begun at York University, where woke ideology runs rampant. Shortly after October 7, York’s student unions praised Hamas’ atrocity as a “justified and necessary” act of resistance against “settler colonialism, genocide, and apartheid.”
This controversial statement elicited support from a number of professors, some of whom demanded the enforcement of a problematic definition of “anti-Palestinian racism.” As it is defined, Zionism is denounced as “a settler colonial project and ethno-religious ideology in service of a system of Western imperialism that upholds global white supremacy.”
Under this definition, which has been embraced by some academics and university student unions, Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish homeland is questioned or rejected.
The journalist Terry Glavin correctly points out that this skewed definition of racism renders “the most fundamental defence of Israel’s existence as racist.” Yet astonishingly enough, he notes, the Toronto District School Board has voted to incorporate “Anti-Palestinian Racism” within its overall anti-discrimination strategy.
Its position has been endorsed by the New Democratic Party, lauded by a Liberal Party member of parliament, Jenica Atwin, and championed by Amira Elghawaby, Trudeau’s special representative charged with combating Islamophobia.
Glavin points out that almost none of the antisemitic verbal or physical assaults have been committed by white supremacists or antisemites of the radical right-wing variety, but rather by “self-described progressives.”
He identifies them as Arabs, and, often, “recent immigrants who are operating inside an ideological framework of ‘settler colonialism,’ which casts Canada, the United States, Australia, and, most of all, Israel, as irredeemably illegitimate constructs of imperialism, capitalism, genocide, and racism. It’s an ideology that has found a comfortable home in Trudeau’s Canada.”
He goes on to say that the anti-Zionist strain of antisemitism has become “a well-established radical-chic feature of the Canadian political scene. It is reinforced by intersectional alliances that rely on anti-Zionism as both an alibi for antisemitism and a marker of progressive bona fides.”
The current atmosphere prevailing in Canada is a source of anguish to Gad Saad, who, until recently, was a Concordia University marketing professor. Claiming that universities in Montreal have degenerated into “cesspools of antisemitism,” he took an unpaid leave to join Northwood University in Michigan.
The presence of antisemitism at universities is a complex and complicated problem. Universities have attempted to clamp down on hate speech and harassment, but at the same time, they have tried to ensure that campuses are receptive to free speech and unfettered debate.
“Striking that balance has proved very difficult,” James Turk, the director of the Centre for Free Expression at Toronto Metropolitan University, told The Globe and Mail.
Unless a proper balance can be struck, Canada will degenerate into wokism and will not be the country it should be.