Canada’s Polite Pogrom

Ted Rosenberg quit teaching geriatric medicine after 30 years because his employer, the University of British Columbia, was too tolerant.

In the days and weeks following the Hamas massacre of innocent Israelis on October 7, 2023, students and colleagues alike in his academic community posted fiery condemnations of and expressions of moral disgust toward … Israel. Rosenberg felt that some of these messages crossed the line into bigotry. One note accused Israel of harvesting the organs of murdered Palestinians. Another, from a medical-school resident, warned of a sinister, unnamed group of people “pulling the strings, who have orchestrated every war to ever happen, the ones who profit off of death and sickness.” “ The way I saw it,” he told me, “that level of demonization put the whole Jewish community at risk.”

He did not resign because of the messages, though; he resigned because the university wouldn’t do anything about them. “ I tried to meet with the dean,” Rosenberg said, “and he said, ‘If you feel you’re being discriminated against, put it through the DEI program.’ So I met with the head of the  diversity, equity, and inclusion program within the faculty, and she refused to acknowledge that anti-Semitism was an issue. They view Jews as white within their DEI framework.” The faculty of medicine’s dean at the time, Dermot Kelleher, referred Rosenberg to UBC’s Equity and Inclusion website. Rosenberg searched the site for the words anti-Semitism and Jew. Neither appeared.

[From the March 2024 issue: The golden age of American Jews is ending]

In his letter of resignation, he wrote, “I have no faith in due process in a faculty that does not even acknowledge the existence or presence of antisemitism/Jew-hatred.” After Rosenberg’s resignation became the subject of media attention, the equity committee of the department of medicine of UBC added a note to its website: “Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia will not be tolerated.”

Hatred against Jews in Canada has spiked to historic levels since October 7. It’s a crisis commonly measured via violence and vandalism. More synagogues in Canada in the past 28 months have been desecrated, burned, shot at, or threatened with bombings than in any other country. Jews in Canada are now statistically more likely to be victims of police-reported hate crimes than any other minority. A Jewish girls’ school in Toronto was shot at on three separate occasions. A Jewish grandmother was stabbed in a kosher supermarket in Ottawa, and a mother in Toronto was assaulted while picking her child up from a Jewish day care. Police have thwarted a half-dozen extremist murder plots since October 7 against Jews by Canadian residents.

These incidents have generated news coverage and sympathetic statements from mayors and members of Parliament, whose proclamations that This is not who we are as Canadians have become commonplace.

Documenting and denouncing shootings and arson attacks are easy. But it’s harder to account for stories like Rosenberg’s, where Jews exit public life without any glass or bones being broken. How many Jewish academics, health-care workers, teachers, and arts-organization employees have left institutions because they no longer feel welcome or protected? Nobody is counting. The diversity statistics collected by these organizations rarely include “Jewish” as a category of self-identification.

Here’s what can be said for sure: 80 percent of Jewish doctors and medical students surveyed by the Jewish Medical Association of Ontario reported experiencing anti-Semitism at work after October 7. In 2024, more than 100 Jewish doctors stopped acknowledging their affiliation with the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine in protest of what they saw as a failure to protect Jewish students and faculty. Almost a third of Ontario’s Jewish doctors say they are considering leaving Canada because of hostile work environments, according to the JMAO survey.

A group of Jewish teachers in British Columbia filed a human-rights complaint against their own union, accusing the BC Teachers’ Federation of ostracizing, bullying, and silencing its Jewish members. A federal report into Ontario’s K–12 schools found nearly 800 anti-Semitic incidents reported in elementary and high schools since 2023, many relating to the conduct of teachers.

[Read: The limits of recognition]

One hundred thirty-five cultural organizations across Canada joined the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel. The Toronto International Film Festival dropped a documentary from its lineup that told the story of an Israeli grandfather’s experience rescuing his family from Hamas on October 7, before an outcry forced its restoration. A Jewish film festival was postponed in Hamilton, Ontario, when the theater hosting the event backed out, citing “safety concerns.” The cartoonist Miriam Libicki was banned from the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival out of  “public safety concerns,” because years earlier, she had written a book about her time serving in the Israeli Defense Forces. (The festival later reversed course and apologized.)

And then there’s Canadian politics.

In 2023, the mayor of Calgary broke with a long-standing local tradition and refused to attend a City Hall Hanukkah-menorah lighting; she said the event had “political intentions” because it “had been repositioned to support Israel.”

The awkward reality is that a main driver of these incidents is a very Canadian aversion to causing offense: The deference of many politicians and institutions to the views of a rapidly growing minority community is too often leading them to reject another minority community. Although relatively few Canadians hold negative views of Jews, opinion polls have found that such views find greater levels of support within the Canadian Muslim community. From 2001 to 2021, the Muslim population of Canada more than tripled, to about 5 percent of the population. Just 4 percent of non-Jewish Canadians agree that Jews are largely to blame for the negative consequences of globalization, but that figure rises to 28 percent among Canadian Muslims, according to a survey conducted by the University of Toronto sociologist Robert Brym. Similarly, only 16 percent of Canadians believe that it is appropriate for opponents of Israel’s policies to boycott Jewish-owned businesses in Canada, but that claim finds support among 41 percent of Canadian Muslims.

Canada is also the birthplace of a new educational framework called APR—Anti-Palestinian racism. APR was developed by the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association, and in 2024 the Toronto District School Board, which serves more than 230,000 students, voted to integrate APR into its wider anti-hate strategy. Although a new policy against racism might sound benign, many Jewish groups argue that in practice, APR can function as a form of discrimination and censorship. For example, a group of Toronto teachers had been given APR training by their union, in which they were told that it would be racist, and therefore forbidden, to ask why Arab countries don’t help Palestinians. To the claim that the phrase From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free carries genocidal implications toward Israel, the APR training suggests responding that “Palestinian chants and poetry exist to give Palestinians hope, and are not for others to define.”

David S. Koffman, a historian at York University and the editor in chief of Canadian Jewish Studies, writes that Canada’s Jews are turning inward. “Our assumptions about safety, trust, acceptance, and solidarity have been punctured,” he observes. As a result, he says, more Jewish parents are enrolling their children in private Jewish day schools, and job applications at Jewish organizations are rising.

Which is not to say that Jewish spaces are safe from external judgment and scorn. An anti-Zionist website called The Maple published lists of the names of Canadian Jews who have served in the IDF, as well as the names of Jewish children’s schools and  summer camps with which they were associated. The author of these lists, Davide Mastracci, wrote that “the complicit segment of Canada’s Jewish population deserves blame for what they do, not who they are.” Weeks after the list was published, five pro-Palestinian groups launched a campaign to revoke the accreditation of 17 Canadian Jewish sleepaway camps. The groups accused the summer camps of supporting “genocide” and called for “a gigantic change.” Then, both synagogues listed by The Maple as complicit Jewish institutions were shot at.

Among my Jewish friends and family, these efforts to intimidate and alienate Jews, to exclude them from civil society and from public life, and to close down private Jewish spaces are discussed with far more concern and frequency than the regular reports of graffiti and name-calling. Five Jewish families pulled their children from the downtown Toronto public school in my neighborhood last year, after a series of controversies. At least four Jewish journalists left the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper, after the paper’s ombud on discrimination and bias wrote a social-media post questioning “who did what” on October 7, and reposted another criticizing North American Jews for “centering their feelings.”

I have a general sense that we’re witnessing a polite pogrom, that Jewish life in my country has forever changed, and that I can no longer take for granted that people like me are represented in Canada’s hospitals, schools, newsrooms, and legislatures. But I don’t know for sure. The data do not exist, and the institutions in question won’t collect them. Perhaps they consider it impolite to ask.