S cenes from a dismal time:
Most Sunday mornings since October 7, 2023, Joel Sacke, an eighty-eight-year-old retired accountant, has turned up for what he calls a “very positive” gathering in northwest Toronto, to show his support for Israel. There’s singing and dancing, and Sacke, born in South Africa, likes to bring his Israeli flag. The neighbourhood is heavily Jewish.
On one such Sunday, several pro-Palestinian counter protesters drive by. A young woman leans out of a passenger window and grabs Sacke’s flag. “She opens the car door,” he says, “punches me in the head, kicks me, throws me down.” A video of the incident shows Sacke lying beside a bus. “Next thing I know, people on our side lift me up, drag me to the sidewalk, and sit me down.” His leg is bleeding. An ambulance arrives, then a police cruiser. “I’m strapped down, lying in the ambulance, wondering: What the hell has happened?” According to The Canadian Jewish News, the young woman was arrested and charged with assault and theft (for the flag), ultimately pleading guilty to mischief earlier this month. “It was,” Sacke says, “the first and only occasion where there’s been violence.”
Now meet Clare, in her early thirties, who works in a social service agency, has lived in Israel, attends synagogue, and participates in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. (She, like some of the other sources interviewed for this story, asked that her real name not be published.) Being Jewish, she explains, is “a huge part of my spiritual and emotional life.” She also believes antisemitism is the wrong thing to focus on in this time. “I feel like it actually detracts from the death and destruction and violence in Gaza.” On this point, Clare feels a lot of sympathy for the majority Muslim community her agency serves.
Among co-workers, however, Clare keeps her identity to herself. She recounts an odd exchange with a “highly politicized” gentile acquaintance, who, during one intense conversation about Gaza, began talking about “globalist Jews.” Clare immediately clocked the phrase, even if he didn’t seem to be using it aggressively toward her. “This person is very educated and in tune and reading a lot, and he doesn’t even know when his rhetoric tips into antisemitism.”
These and many other highly localized encounters are playing out against a backdrop marked by the proliferation and even normalization of antisemitic rhetoric and violence. It’s not just Hamas’s deadly rampage through southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 1,269 people and taking 251 hostages. (According to Gaza’s health authority, at least 48,543 Palestinians have been killed during Israel’s year-and-a-half-long siege of Gaza.) This protracted period is bracketed by the rise of the white nationalist right in the US and the electoral success of a neo Nazi–linked political party in Germany.
We can watch the Jew-baiting antics of a superstar rapper as well as the disturbing impunity with which Elon Musk taunts us with Nazi salutes and posts, only to then prevaricate about his motives. Social media is a fire hydrant of hatreds of all flavours, including conspiracy theories about Jewish pharma executives, Jewish space lasers, and cabals of “global elites” plotting at the World Economic Forum. The latter, as it turned out, was a reliable applause line throughout Pierre Poilievre’s leadership race and subsequent campaign.
Antisemitism, of course, is by no means the world’s only hatred. But its resurgence—in Canada and elsewhere—has raised troubling questions, not just about the tenacity of this venerable form of racism but also the insidious ways in which it has reinserted itself into the politics of both the left and the right. For the members of racial or religious minorities in any society, there’s rarely much mystery about the links between verbal hatred, physical violence, and the risk of political persecution.
Yet Jews in Canada and most liberal democracies had come to believe, over decades, that they could live comfortably in societies that had moved past antisemitism. The events of recent years, however, suggest a stirring of something long frozen, the consequences of which are as yet unknown.
I grew up at a time—the late 1960s and ’70s—when antisemitism had greatly receded, at least from public view, in Canada. There were incidents: graffiti, name calling. But they were isolated and easily attributed to adolescent obnoxiousness. I never experienced anything directly as my family was extremely low-key about our identity. Yet my parents had survived the Holocaust in Hungary and both had lost family members, so I always listened closely for signs, particularly in the ways in which people spoke about Jews. I still do.
During the ’80s, two high-profile controversies forced their way into the public consciousness. One involved an Alberta teacher, Jim Keegstra, who fed his students antisemitic propaganda. The other focused on a German immigrant named Ernst Zundel, who published material that trafficked in Holocaust denial. Both were charged—respectively, with hate crimes and knowingly spreading falsehoods. Their cases ended up at the Supreme Court, where they defended themselves using free speech arguments (Keegstra lost, but Zundel eventually won and his conviction was overturned). Zundel’s early court appearances devolved into a farce, with him arriving each day with a hard hat, a bulletproof vest, and a smug smirk.
Jews and Jewish organizations became concerned that the sensational coverage would normalize antisemitism. What happened was just the opposite. Robert Brym, a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Toronto, recalls that his research from that era, published in a paper entitled “The Distribution of Antisemitism in Canada in 1984,” found that 86 percent of Canadians held positive or neutral views about Jews. Besides Quebec, he and co-author Rhonda L. Lenton wrote, “the overall level of anti-semitism is quite modest in Canada as a whole.”
Four decades later, the picture is far less straightforward. When Brym published a far-ranging survey last April, entitled “Jews and Israel 2024: A Survey of Canadian Attitudes and Jewish Perceptions,” he began on a sobering note. “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.” The reason: the proliferation of “extreme anti-Israel statements and actions.” The survey, conducted by Ekos Research and based on 2,857 respondents, found that while most Canadians are accepting of Jews, non-Jewish university students, Quebecers, and Muslim Canadians have “significantly more negative attitudes,” Brym wrote. “My suspicion is that that’s been increasing over time,” he later told me in an interview, “and it’s been exacerbated by the war in Gaza.”
Antisemitism and other hate crimes have indeed surged, but this troubling trend began well before October 7, 2023. Statistics Canada found that police-reported hate crimes jumped 145 percent between 2019 and 2023, with Jews and Muslims by far the most victimized among those targeted for their religion, according to a 2024 analysis by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Since October 7, police in Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal have all seen spikes in antisemitic incidents, from vandalized synagogues and businesses to shots fired at Jewish day schools. Several pro-Palestinian rallies have been held near a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood in Toronto, outside Jewish institutions, or along routes that pass them (e.g., synagogues and a Toronto hospital). At a rally last fall at Concordia University, a masked woman was filmed shouting that the “final solution is coming your way”; she was subsequently identified as a Second Cup franchisee at the Montreal Jewish General Hospital and fired. A Université de Montréal lecturer told Concordia students protesting on behalf of Israel to “go back to Poland.” Also in Montreal, there have been repeated fire bombings of a suburban synagogue, and handbills depicting a Nazi flag and an Israeli flag with a swastika instead of the Star of David appeared in the riding of Liberal MP Anthony Housefather, who is Jewish.
This grim narrative has been complicated enormously by the seemingly endless fight over whether or not harsh criticism of the Benjamin Netanyahu regime’s bloody siege on Gaza—such as the International Criminal Court case accusing Israel of war crimes for blocking humanitarian aid into Gaza—is antisemitic, as his government has alleged.
What’s more, this antisemitic juncture has sparked a fractious debate among Jews over what, precisely, defines antisemitism—as if precision were the right instrument to confront a phenomenon as slippery and shape shifting as the world’s most enduring hatred.
B esides the seminal accusation that the Jews killed Christ, Jew hatred, for centuries, has relied on obsessive repetition and conspiracy theories. Lurid medieval caricatures about Jews killing Christian children and mixing their blood into matzo meal—called blood libel—were later augmented with paranoid fantasies about Jewish domination and divided loyalties. Restrictions on Jewish civic life and worship relegated Jews to ghettos and certain vocations, such as moneylending and tax collection, that engendered both public contempt and an unhealthy dependence on monarchs for protection.
Such unstable arrangements begat more conspiracy theories as well as mob-fuelled campaigns to force conversions or expel Jews outright, as happened in England in the thirteenth century, Spain in the fifteenth century, and Russia, with its waves of treacherous pogroms, in the nineteenth century. With the rise of Nazi Germany, Jews—or, more precisely, “the Jew”—could be accused of inciting global communism as well as controlling the global banking system, the media, and Hollywood.
None of these slanders has disappeared, though some re-emerged in other guises, such as dog whistles like “cosmopolitan” and “globalist.” Contemporary right-wing politics has normalized claims about the allegedly hegemonic influence of financier George Soros—a modern version of a trope that traces to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a 1903 Russian work of agitprop that claimed Jews were plotting to control the world. Henry Ford was a big fan.
What people mean by antisemitism changes over time. The term itself emerged in the 1870s in Germany as the brand of a movement whose adherents wanted to reverse the legal rights granted to Jews in the 1850s. A more muted form of antisemitism existed for decades in Canada and the US, often in the form of rules that excluded Jews from social clubs, recreational areas, and universities. Prior to and then during the Second World War, neither Canada nor the US accepted Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. In more recent years, some Jews, particularly those who belong to highly observant communities, have become the targets of brazen harassment and acts of violence, including mass shootings in synagogues in Pittsburgh and San Diego.
How Canadian Jews experience twenty-first-century antisemitism depends on a whole range of variables—religious observance, political allegiances, age, location, family history, and individual sensitivity to antisemitism. Some of us have extremely finely tuned Jewdars, and others are much more willing to attribute random hostility to garden-variety ignorance.
I spoke to a man in his early forties who works in real estate, is moderately observant, and is casually connected to a mainstream Jewish fundraising organization. One of his children attends a Jewish day school, where the issue of physical risk has been a hot topic. “Some [parents] would say: I’m nervous that my kid goes to an identifiably Jewish school with an Israeli flag hanging overhead. Others would say there’s comfort in that. I’m more in the latter camp. I think it is comforting, though when my daughter tells me they have to do these lockdown drills, that is concerning.”
A few Jewish school communities have endured more than just fraught conversation. The Bais Chaya Mushka Girls Elementary School, located in North York, has been the target of overnight gunfire on three occasions, the last incident occurring just before Hanukkah. Police have stepped up their presence at such institutions, augmenting the now-ubiquitous private security hired by synagogues, community centres, daycare centres, and parochial schools.
Several people I interviewed said they have become more circumspect about wearing identifiably Jewish articles of jewellery or clothing in public and also mention intense community conversations about defensive steps—removing Jewish symbols from homes, such as mezuzahs, or small casings containing a pair of Torah passages and affixed to a doorpost. “One of the discussions that comes up a lot is, ‘Do mezuzahs make us vulnerable?’” says a teacher who lives in a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood north of Toronto and belongs to a congregation that opposes the Netanyahu government’s actions. He had noticed antisemitic posters on telephone poles in his neighborhood. He adds that on Jewish Facebook groups, these issues are the subject of intense debate. “Somebody will say, ‘I’m thinking of taking the mezuzah down. I’m scared.’ And then a hundred people will say, ‘No, then they win.’”
For some, fear has prevailed, at least likely in part because of the persistent messaging from high-profile organizations like B’nai B’rith and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. One educator, Sandra, mentions an elderly parent with relatives and friends in Israel who have become obsessed with anxiety about the imminence of something horrific. “They’re afraid of another Holocaust,” she says. “They don’t put it in those words, but I’m sure they’re afraid that it could happen again, that we could all be sent into camps and then gassed.”
Campus life, in particular, has become a fraught zone of conflict and harassment. Sherry, an academic whose field has nothing to do with Jewish topics, explains she has always been open about her religion. “It’s not a secret amongst my peers. It’s just a well-known thing: I don’t work on the High Holidays. I don’t attend events on Friday nights.” But, she adds, since October 7, “it has become increasingly uncomfortable to walk around sharing personal information.”
Sherry’s sense of unease didn’t begin on October 7. Almost a decade ago, she participated in an academic collaboration with an Israeli university. It included a study trip to Tel Aviv with students, only some of whom were Jewish. Some faculty “wrote to me and said, ‘Well, this is horrible. How could you participate in an activity that normalizes a country that we massively disagree with all of the things that they do?’”
It made no difference that the trip had nothing to do with Israeli policies. The university’s human resources department did little to support her. When incidents like this occur, she says, universities and senior HR officials tread carefully in communicating with those being shamed or targeted. “They don’t want to have been the one who sent the message and said, ‘Oh, we support you, we’re here for you.’”
Social media harassment of some Jewish academics—for example, at the University of Toronto’s medical faculty—has gone well past the parameters of impassioned debate about Israel’s actions in Gaza. Indeed, last fall, the Jewish Medical Association of Ontario held a press conference to call attention to mounting antisemitism within the profession. “Many of our members have been doxxed and subjected to targeted harassment simply for being Jewish,” association president Lisa Salamon told a news conference in December.
Yet those encounters have also involved provocations, perhaps most notoriously by Columbia University assistant professor Shai Davidai, an Israeli who was temporarily suspended for “repeatedly harassing and intimidating” pro-Palestinian protesters. He headlined a pro-Israel rally at U of T last fall and noted that during the Nazi regime, book burnings were led by student groups. “It started in the universities.” No such incidents have occurred at Canadian universities.
Other Jewish academics, including the growing contingent who are outspokenly pro-Palestinian and were active in last year’s protests, have perspectives that could scarcely be more at odds with Davidai’s. Among them is Melissa Levin, who has taught for years at U of T. She lives in a heavily Jewish suburb north of Toronto she refers to as “the shtetl” and describes herself as observant. Born in South Africa, she recalls that antisemitism was “just under the surface” during the apartheid years, and consequently, her community kept to itself and remained hypervigilant. “There was always this undercurrent, the sense that you were never secure,” she recalls. “We always had valid passports, for instance, because there was always the threat that you would potentially have to leave.”
While Levin was raised in an anxious community, she brought her anti-apartheid activism—Levin worked with the African National Congress—to the fights that have raged on campus. “My Canadian experience doesn’t feel foreign to me,” she says, explaining that she and other Jewish faculty who have condemned Israel’s actions have come under enormous pressure from university administrators to stay silent or face professional consequences. The trauma of the Holocaust, Levin argues, is so “deeply embedded” that it can prevent people from seeing parallels between apartheid South Africa and Israel’s actions in the occupied territories. She mentions the highly contentious campaigns to market real estate in the West Bank to North American investors—hosted at some Montreal and Toronto synagogues. “It’s deeply anti-Jewish to dispossess other people of their land and then use a shul as a venue to sell it.”
For some, memories of earlier experiences with antisemitism inform their current outlooks. Gila Martow, a city councillor and former Tory member of provincial parliament representing a heavily Jewish ward in Vaughan, a city north of Toronto, made a name for herself in the Ontario legislature by taking hard-line positions against BDS—the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement targeting Israel, which many mainstream Jewish organizations accuse of being antisemitic. “After that,” Martow recalls, “I put a sign on my door saying ‘Jewish representative.’” She eschews the term “antisemitism” in favour of the phrase “Jew hatred,” and she expresses little patience for Jews and Jewish groups involved in the pro-Palestinian movement.
Indeed, many Jews on the pro-Palestinian side of this political chasm have come in for harsh accusations from Jewish groups on the pro-Israeli right, such as being called out on social media as a “kapo”—a gutting allusion to the Jewish concentration-camp inmates assigned to supervise and mete out violent punishments to other prisoners. “It’s become so normalized that we get called that,” says Deborah Cowen, a professor of geography and planning and one of the founders of the Jewish Faculty Network, a pan-Canadian group that has been outspoken in its support of social justice for Palestinians.
“I’m a German Jew,” she says. “My family left in the late 1930s. I have documents that have swastikas all over them.” Cowen pulls her grandfather’s yellowing identification card out of a folder in her desk and holds it up to the laptop camera. “You know, I’m sometimes thankful that my grandparents are not alive any longer. When I try to understand the casualness of those kinds of claims and insults, and people denying our Judaism because they don’t like what we’re saying, to me, that is profoundly antisemitic.”
L ike with all diasporic peoples, there is no such thing as “the” Jewish community. While there are common roots, the plural is a more accurate construction, one that accounts for the wide range of experiences and ways of being that count as Jewishness in the modern world.
The same might be said for antisemitism: beyond explicit and incontrovertible acts—Kristallnacht, signs that read “No Jews or dogs allowed,” the fire bombings of synagogues—the variations are as malleable as language itself and also depend on the way antisemitic speech is experienced: with alarm, equanimity, fatalism, ignorance, and on and on. Some scholars have sought to characterize antisemitism simply—as hostility toward Jews qua Jews. This construction, however, doesn’t account for the coded yet threatening language that adheres so readily to racist speech. Brian Klug, an Oxford philosopher and founder of the Jewish Forum for Justice and Human Rights, offers an almost literary rendition of antisemitism: “the process,” he writes, “of turning Jews into ‘Jews.’”
To my eye, however, David Feldman’s observation, in a 2022 op-ed in the Guardian, strikes as the most complete. A professor of history, Feldman is director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at the University of London. Antisemitism, he writes, “is best conceived of as a reservoir of stereotypes and narratives, which accumulate over time, and from which people draw with ease, whether they intend to or not.” The debate about what it is or isn’t, he has trenchantly written elsewhere, “cannot be resolved empirically.”
The past decade, however, has seen an effort to do just that. In 2016, as antisemitic violence swept across Europe—in one shocking episode, a Jewish teacher was attacked with a machete in Marseille—the thirty-one member states of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance met in Bucharest to adopt a non–legally binding definition of antisemitism. “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews,” it states. “Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
In the nine years since, the IHRA’s attempt to formally pin down antisemitism has ignited broad debate. Jewish organizations, governments, and even the state of Israel have weighed in.
While the IHRA states that its definition doesn’t preclude criticism of Israel (“criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic”), seven of the eleven examples of antisemitism provided refer specifically to Israel—a signal, critics like Feldman say, that definition is vulnerable to misuse by pro-Israeli organizations seeking to discredit legitimate criticism of the state and its policies. Some of the antisemitism described by the IHRA is clear cut, like Holocaust denial. Yet the document’s wording also effectively discourages debate over Israel’s human rights violations in the occupied territories. One way it does this is by asserting that holding Israel to a double standard amounts to antisemitism. But critics of Israel (including Israelis) should be able to call out a government—which describes itself as the only democracy in the Middle East while restricting basic freedoms to Palestinians—without being accused of racial hatred.
Proponents of the IHRA definition, however, insist it plays a crucial role at a time marked by full-throated attacks on Israel, Israelis, and Israeli institutions. “The first step to combatting antisemitism is defining it,” Deborah Lyons, then prime minister Justin Trudeau’s special envoy on antisemitism, wrote in the foreword to a 2024 Government of Canada handbook on the IHRA’s working definition, which she describes as the “most authoritative, comprehensive, and representative definition of antisemitism in the world today.” Canada isn’t alone in feeling this way. The definition has been adopted by numerous multilateral organizations, forty-three countries, and a growing contingent of governments and institutions, such as universities.
Critics express grave reservations, cautioning that the IHRA definition is becoming codified in law (last May, the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights mandated its use to help identify antisemitic incidents on American campuses). In a paper last August, “Defending Jews from the Definition of Antisemitism,” Itamar Mann and Lihi Yona, a pair of Israeli law professors at the University of Haifa, argued that by defining racial hostility too broadly, “IHRA-type rules” risk becoming less effective at fighting actual antisemitism. More, such rules impede Jews from exercising their religious freedom to criticize or disassociate themselves from Israel—a disputatious tradition as old as Zionism itself. (When Theodor Herzl, the journalist considered to be the founder of political Zionism, began advancing the idea in the 1890s, many Jews strenuously opposed it, including on religious grounds; well over a century later, Jewish anti-Zionism remains a potent force.)
The challenge, then, is to craft a definition that both protects free speech and meaningfully combats anti-Jewish hatred—because failing to do so serves neither cause. Feldman and a few hundred other Jewish academics from around the world (including several Canadians) have signed onto an alternative, dubbed the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which begins with a far simpler definition—“Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish)”—and goes on to set out a detailed account of how antisemitism has been expressed in the past.
Unlike the IHRA definition, the JDA provides illustrative examples of statements about Israel and Palestine that are antisemitic (e.g., holding Jews responsible for Israel’s actions) and not antisemitic (e.g., criticizing or opposing Zionism). As Feldman says, “It opens up a critical space for debate.”
Outside the ramparts of academe, however, there’s precious little evidence the IHRA definition has staunched the recent torrent of antisemitism, from Elon Musk’s Nazi salute to highly suggestive protest gestures, such as the hurling of red paint on Indigo’s window on the morning of November 10, 2023, the day after the anniversary of Kristallnacht. Nor has it helped mend or even merely reduce the appalling sectarian divisions fissuring Canada’s vital public institutions, including schools, universities, and hospitals.
What has changed is public opinion, including among Jews. As Brym found in his 2024 survey, the number of Jewish respondents who described themselves as very or somewhat emotionally attached to Israel shrank from 77 percent to 70 percent between 2018 and 2024. The reason? “[T]he Israel-Hamas war and the rightward drift of Israeli government policy.”
L ate last October, the Toronto Star ran a guest editorial under the headline “We are progressive Jews who have been let down by our community leaders.” The co-authors, Bailey Greenspon, Jonathan Sas, and Sam Hersh, are colleagues, in their thirties, and active in both Jewish life and social movements. All grew up in tight-knit Jewish communities, learned about the history of Jewish persecution, and found themselves keenly aware of “emboldened antisemitism.” But they felt pushed away by the rigid, pro-Israel stance that major Jewish organizations took in response to the events in Gaza.
“Many Jews have found comfort in the vocal role being taken by leading Jewish community organizations,” they wrote. “But by defending Israel no matter what red line it crosses, and by too often casting criticism of Israel as antisemitic, our leadership makes it harder to fight the real cases and causes of antisemitism.”
When I reached out to them for an interview, they were a bit wary and wanted to meet with me by Zoom first. Sas recalled his first year on campus at U of T in 2004, during Israel Apartheid Week (a yearly event highlighting what organizers describe as Israel’s apartheid system against Palestinians), “and feeling sick to my stomach about it, feeling like it was an attack, and feeling scared, although I was certainly never actually in any peril.” His initial response soon pivoted: “Every core thing I had been taught crumbled very quickly through any interrogation, and I just realized that people who were critical of Israel I mostly shared values with.”
The three friends, however, didn’t waver on a core point, which was their need to call out the enormous suffering inflicted on Gazans by Israel’s occupation. Hersh, who lives in Ottawa, actively protested the invasion, both in person and on social media. “That activism comes with a certain price,” he says evenly. A former University of Ottawa antisemitism adviser compared Hersh, in a post on X, to a notorious Second World War Jewish collaborator. “That’s a pretty despicable comparison—people trying to make you feel like you don’t belong because of your opinion,” Hersh says.
In the face of renewed evidence of the sheer tenacity of antisemitism, a question for this era is what happens when the accusation becomes a rhetorical cudgel to be used against enemies, real and perceived? Vigilance is important, but what about the boy who cried wolf?
I asked Feldman if he thought any good at all could come from what’s happened in the past year and a half. “No,” he said without pausing. “What I would say is that there’s nothing positive, and that what the year since October 7th has been marked by is our divisions—among Jews, and divisions between Jews and non-Jews. And these gulfs are becoming wider.”
Note, March 19, 2025: A previous version of this piece described David Feldman as an antisemitism scholar. It has since been updated to include his academic affiliation.
