Antisemitism: Canada's Invisible Hate

On October 14th, Canada’s National War Memorial, one of the country’s most recognizable monuments, was vandalized with anti-Jewish hate. Last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted, “The antisemitic desecration of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is completely unacceptable, and I strongly condemn this hateful act. I urge anyone with information regarding the perpetrator’s identity to contact Ottawa Police.” Despite the high-profile location of the hate crime, this incident has received very little media attention and the suspect remains at large. This silence is all too common in regard to antisemitic incidents in Canada.

 In a year where books about anti-racism continue to top best-seller lists and institutions issue statements pledging to combat discrimination, North America’s most widespread form of hatred is consistently missing from the conversation. The most recent statistics on hate crimes in Canada reveal that there are more hate crimes committed against Jewish people than against any other minority group in Canada, despite Jews accounting for only 1% of the Canadian population. In 2018, for the third year in a row, the majority of all hate crimes in Canada (including race/ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation crimes) were against Jewish people. In the two preceding years, anti-Jewish hate crimes accounted for the second-most among all groups. Year after year, there are more attacks against Jewish people than any other religious group in Canada, and the most recent Statistics Canada report revealed that hate crimes against Jews accounted for more than all other religion-motivated hate crimes combined.

 According to the League of Human Rights’ latest annual audit of antisemitic incidents, 2019 marked the fourth consecutive year in which the number of antisemitic incidents increased in Canada. The League of Human Rights documented 2,207 antisemitic incidents in 2019, amounting to an average of more than six incidents per day. The group has been tracking antisemitic incidents in Canada since 1982, and 2019 marked the second consecutive year that the number of incidents has exceeded 2,000 after 2018 first hit that grim milestone. According to a 2019 Environics Institute survey, one in five Canadian Jews say they were discriminated against in the last five years because of their religion and/or ethnicity, with the highest reported acts of discrimination coming against Jews aged 18-29. This rise of antisemitism is a true cause for concern, yet antisemitic incidents are routinely ignored by Canadian media outlets.

 This upward trend of antisemitism isn’t unique to Canada. According to the latest FBI data, Jewish people are more likely than any other minority group to be the victim of a hate crime in the United States. There were more than 2,100 antisemitic incidents in America in 2019, representing a 12% increase from 2018, and the highest number of antisemitic incidents since the Anti-Defamation League started tracking 40 years ago. Despite anti-Jewish racism ranking highest in American hate crimes, nearly half of Americans stated in a poll released last week that they either have never heard of the term antisemitism or that, while they have heard it, they are unsure what it means. “That nearly half of the American population does not even seem to know what antisemitism is can only increase American Jews’ concern about their own security and well-being,” said David Harris, Director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC). Similar trends have been observed in Europe, including a 27% increase of antisemitic crimes in France from 2018-2019, a 20% increase in Germany from 2017-2018, and a 53% rise in Sweden from 2016-2017. In the United Kingdom, the number of antisemitic incidents has reached record highs for the last four years in a row.

 B’nai Brith Canada documented three major antisemitic incidents in Ontario over the Rosh Hashanah weekend in late September. In an attack filmed and shared on Facebook, a Jewish father and son were sitting in their car outside of a synagogue in Thornhill, Ontario when a pedestrian walking by began shouting, “you’re a piece of sh*t, you’re Jewish,” and “you run the f**king world,” before sticking his hand in the car in an attempt to attack the passengers. Two days later, as Rosh Hashanah was ending, several garage doors in Thornhill (where Canada’s largest concentration of Jewish citizens resides) were defaced with antisemitic graffiti reading “Jews Run the World.” Further east in Ontario, an Ottawa congregation was conducting prayers outside due to the coronavirus when a man drove up to the congregants and yelled, “dirty f**king Jews,” and then spat at them. On the East Coast, antisemitic stickers blaming Jews for creating COVID-19 and controlling the world were placed around Dalhousie University. These blatantly antisemitic and vile attacks all took place over the same weekend, during one of the holiest of Jewish holidays. Not one of these incidents was reported in national Canadian media. The question raised then is why Canada’s most frequent form of hate crime is apparently not worthy of notice by any of the country’s major newspapers or civil rights groups. In an era when activism and allyship on behalf of minority groups dominates headlines and social media, the silence around antisemitism is deafening.

 This year, McGill University began the long-overdue process of addressing anti-Black racism. The new $15 million plan will further the goals of creating a more inclusive and secure university environment for McGill’s Black students and staff. As Action Item #1 in McGill’s plan to address anti-Black racism, the university launched a campus-wide Student Demographic Survey, introduced by Interim Dean of Students Glenn Zabowski in his September 13th What’s New email to all students. “By completing the survey you’re helping McGill plan for the future with your [sic] and your peers’ needs in mind,” wrote Dean Zabowski. Evidently, Jewish students are not included in McGill’s vision of the future. Question 4 of the survey asks students to declare their “Racial and/or Ethnic Identity.” As I have come to expect with census data, I didn’t expect Judaism to be listed as an ethnicity, even though the Jewish identity is ethnoreligious, in that it encompasses ethnic as well as religious components. The Environics Institute Survey of Jews in Canada found that “for most Canadian Jews today, the basis of Jewish identity is less about religion than about culture, ethnicity or a combination of culture, ethnicity and religion.” No problem, I thought, “Judaism” will surely be listed in the survey’s question about religion. As an ardent atheist but proud Jew, I’ve reluctantly grown accustomed to declaring my Jewish heritage in a census’ religion question. As I clicked through questions about parental education attainment, language proficiency, and financial support, I soon reached the end of the survey. Nowhere was there a question about students’ religion. According to the McGill Student Demographic Survey, the minority group targeted with the highest number of hate crimes in Canada does not exist.

 As I stared at the list of options presented in Question 4 of the survey, I did not know which option I was expected to select. My skin is white, but this question was asking for my ethnic identity; and besides, McGill has a long history of viewing Jewish people as distinct from the white majority. In 1926, Dean of Arts Ira Mackay wrote a letter to Sir Arthur Currie, Principal of McGill University, stating, “it appears clear to me that some steps must be taken to limit the increase in the number of Jews attending the University at present.” Shortly thereafter, McGill enforced a quota on the number of Jewish students admitted to the university, which was enforced until the 1960s for the Faculties of Law and Medicine. In a July 21, 1933 letter, Dean Mackay wrote, “the simple obvious truth is that the Jewish people are of no use to us in this country.” My late grandmother could not attend McGill because of the university’s Jewish quota, and was forced to attend Sir George Williams University (now Concordia), which was perceived as more accepting of Jews. My grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, had to change his last name in order to overcome a name that was deemed “too ethnic” for McGill administrators. My mother’s maiden name is a complete fabrication that was created in order for my grandfather to be accepted by the McGill community. Although their skin was white, my grandparents were considered ethnically Jewish for McGill University. Jews are apparently too white to be recognized as a distinct ethnicity in McGill’s Student Demographic Survey, while historically not being white enough through the lens of McGill’s antisemitic legacy.

 A Student Demographic Survey which fails to inquire into students’ religious beliefs and ignores the existence of the most-attacked minority group in Canada is a survey of no standing at all. The survey is all the more insulting and denigrating after the McGill administration had to step in on two separate occasions last year to protect Jewish students on campus. Whereas antisemitism at McGill was historically perpetrated by deans and administrators, the antisemitism that McGill’s Jewish students face today often comes from their fellow students. As I wrote in Quid Novi Vol. 41 No. 6 last year, the McGill Daily labelled Zionism as a “racist ideology,” and then refused to allow two Jewish law students to publish an article describing what being a Zionist meant to them. Deputy Provost Fabrice Labeau had to intervene on the students’ behalf for their piece to be published.  Honest Reporting Canada’s executive director Mike Fegelman said at the time that the Daily’s “censorship of pro-Zionist opinions has racist overtones and xenophobic dimensions.” The university also issued an email to all students later in the academic year after the former Student Society of McGill University (SSMU) president singled out a Jewish council member and pushed for her resignation because she accepted a free educational trip to Israel and the West Bank. The McGill administration did not have to interject in student affairs to protect any other minority groups on campus. “The more we know about our community, the better we can create and support a McGill that works for everyone!” wrote Dean Zabowski when announcing the Student Demographic Survey. How can McGill expect to “create and support” an inclusive campus when the most targeted group in Canada – one that has been subjected to recent antisemitic incidents on campus – is invisible? The McGill Plan to Address Anti-Black Racism is an important step towards building a more inclusive campus for all, but the plan’s Student Demographic Survey harms McGill’s significant Jewish student body by ignoring its existence. I refuse to submit my results for the Student Demographic Survey, and I implore my fellow students to abstain from completing a survey which erases the Jewish identity from campus.

 Due to our unique history of targeted hatred and violence, Jews have long been steadfast allies with other minority groups and routinely sound the alarm against all hate. I am asking for antisemitism, the most frequent form of hatred in Canada, to no longer be minimized and ignored by the Canadian media and McGill University. The number of hate crimes against Jews exceeds those against all other minorities, and this number is simply staggering when considering the miniscule size of Canada’s Jewish population. McGill’s Student Demographic Survey is an initiative stemming from a plan to help minority groups, but in the process it removes the existence of the most targeted minority group in Canada. In his 1986 Nobel Prize lecture, Elie Wiesel said, “Neutrality helps the oppressor never the victim, silence encourages the tormentor never the tormented... there may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time where we fail to protest against injustice.” Hate flourishes in darkness, and the magnitude of antisemitism in Canada requires a blazing bonfire to be illuminated. The dim flicker from Canada’s media and institutions does not suffice.