I am a son, a father, and a husband. I am a co-worker and neighbour. I am also a Canadian Jew.
I don’t have an order for these labels. Each label is core to my essence as a person.
And here I am living in Canada, a Canadian Jew, a Jewish Canadian, feeling scared.
All four of my grandparents were Jews, who immigrated to Canada from Europe. I will be forever grateful that they came to Canada and that I was born a Canadian citizen.
My maternal grandmother lost her entire family in the Holocaust. She tried to get her parents, her sister and her family into Canada. Family lore is that she went to Canadian government offices so often she was told that she would be put in jail if she came again. My maternal grandfather also lost several siblings in the Holocaust.
Only later in life did I begin to appreciate the trauma my grandmother and her family experienced. But I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand it.
My parents were born and raised in Canada. My dad used to tell me stories of how there were signs on hotels that said ‘No Dogs, No Jews Allowed.’Â And my mom told me how, when she went off to university, someone asked her about the horns on her head (a Jewish antisemitic trope). One of my uncles had to go to Western Canada for medical school because quotas for Jews at McGill University were filled.Â
But those were the 1950s. When I was told those stories in the 1980s, it seemed like ancient history.
As a kid, there were non-Jewish schools and non-Jewish clubs, where Jews simply didn’t go. In my era, Jews were not formally excluded but it was well known that these institutions did not welcome Jews. They allowed in a few “token Jews.” And there were Jewish schools and clubs. So, it felt like “no harm, no foul.”
When I was in (Jewish) high school, the basketball team had pennies thrown at them (being a ‘Cheap Jew’ is another antisemitic trope). And when we were on the Toronto subway, one kid had his ‘Kippah’ (skullcap) removed from his head by another passenger. Yet, neither experience seemed to have a grave impact on my sense of belonging in Canada. It was a baseline level of antisemitism that we grew up with.
But here we are in October 2023, and my thinking has changed. Since Hamas terrorists killed over 1,400 Jews in Israel, I have seen some Canadian citizens cheering these deaths. I have seen police guarding Jewish day schools. And I have seen kids stay away from school out of fear.
Antisemitism is beyond a baseline level. It is blatant, dangerous and threatening.
In recent years, Canada has experienced the highest rates of antisemitism since 1982, when B’nai Brith Canada first started tracking antisemetic incidents.
Yet antisemitism in Canada is politically marginalized. Ottawa has, for example, issued many calls to action to combat racism and hatred while in some cases leaving antisemitism out — a point Irwin Cotler, Canada’s outgoing Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism, noted in a recent interview.
Living in Canada, right now and for the first time, I feel ‘less than.’ I feel, as a Jew, that I am given less consideration than my fellow Canadians when it comes to being protected from hate and racism. I feel that I am being forced to tolerate a level of violence and hurt that is unimaginable, under the label of free speech and democracy.Â
I am grieving. And I am bereft. I have never felt this sad for all Jews, all of Canada and all of humanity.
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