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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Khabiv Anything. Thrilled today to have Professor Gil Troy with us, a leading historian of the United States, American presidential historian, and also of Zionism. He's a senior fellow at the jppi, the Jewish People Policy Institute, which is a think tank about Jewish issues of the Jewish people in Jerusalem. He's a distinguished scholar in North American History at McGill University. He's the author of many books, I think eight at last count, on history. Is that right?
- [00:39]
B
No, about 15. But it's okay, about 15.
- [00:42]
A
Well, I think there's eight on my shelf. That means I have more to buy, including about Zionism. He has contributed to the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Hill, the Jewish Journal, Commentary. Did I miss one? It's all good. I missed a few. And he is a sought after historian and teacher. And today we're going to take this time with Gil to dive deeper into the history of Canadian Jewry. We've done an episode on that. Wow, did we get emails? There is an incredible tension in Canadian Jewry that we immediately saw in the responses. And they were really rich in good and interesting and important responses. And, and we're going to keep talking about Canadian jewelry because Canadian Jewry are going through a very difficult time right now. And so we're going to today talk about this moment, this moment of rising anti Semitism, measurable antisemitism, violence, shootings, bombs, arson against synagogues, against schools, what it feels like to be Jewish and Canadian right now, where this all comes from and who the community is, who are Canadian Jews, how they found themselves at this current impasse. Before we get into it, I want to tell you that this week's episode is sponsored by the Feinberg family, who asked me to read this beautiful dedication. Today we honor our mom and grandma, Sandy Danto on her 75th birthday. Inspired by her parents, Regina and Saul Moskowitz, Holocaust survivors from Poland, Sandy has devoted her life to strengthening Israel and supporting the Jewish people. While rooted in the Detroit Jewish community, her impact reaches far and wide, guided by her belief that Jewish strength, learning and unity are essential to our future. She leads with conviction, generosity and deep care for others. We are so proud of the example she sets and the difference she continues to make. We love you and celebrate you today and always. Love Arin, Julie, Noah, Ari and Raya Feinberg. Sandy, happy birthday and thank you to the Feinberg family for that wonderful and very sweet dedication. I'd also love to invite everyone to join our Patreon and subscribe to our substack if you're interested in asking the questions that guide the topics we choose to talk about, especially this topic and many others. That's where those conversations happen. That's where we draw the questions from that we tackle on this podcast. You also get to take part in monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. That's at patreon.com askhaviv anything or khavivgur.substack.com those links are all going to be in the show. Notes Gil, how are you?
- [03:22]
B
Good. First of all, happy birthday, Sandy. And second, I'm thrilled to be in conversation with you because I just have to say I really appreciate you're not just defending Israel and Zionism and the Jewish people. You're defending Western civilization. You're defending liberalism. You're defending American values, Canadian values. And I just want to say, Hakaratha Tov, a little acknowledgment of good that you've really done amazing work.
- [03:40]
A
We do absolutely defend that story of the Anglophone liberal world. So thank you for that. And of course it's shared. I read you your three volume of Herzl Zionist writings. Absolutely indispensable. On my shelf. People need to buy it. These are, you know, a lot of the resources are things that also I've read a lot of the resources on Zionism are things that you have produced over the years. Let's get into Canadian jewelry before we start talking about the history of Canadian jewelry and sort of lead that history into understanding this moment. When people think think of the Jews of North America, they usually think about American Jews because there are 6, 7, 8 million Canadian, excuse me, American Jews and maybe a quarter million to 400,000, depending on who's doing the counting, Canadian Jews. The scale is so, is so different. What makes Canadian Jewish history very different from American Jewish history? We think of them the same, they sound the same. What makes them nevertheless different. And then we'll get into really telling that story of Canadian Jewish history.
- [04:41]
B
Well, to speak personally, I had the tremendous privilege of being hired as a professor of history of American history at McGill University in 1990. And I came up just thinking that I was going to an extension of the United States of America. I learned, for example, that I'm not even supposed to say American history because it's history of the United States of America, because America, North America includes Canada as well, and it was living in Montreal for almost 20 years. I learned a lot about the richness of the community. I learned also about some of the pathologies in Canada. And I think we have to understand the two. And maybe this is the best way to frame it. When I lived in Montreal until 2007, when we came here to Israel in sabbatical and never left. But I've been back and forth a lot and have very strong ties there still. I always talked about the crystal ball. I would say when we were at the federation meetings, when we were at Bronfman Jewish Education center meetings, like the ones that we were part of on Zoom. I said, you don't need to hire some kind of analyst to know what's going to happen to Canada. Canadian Jews in the future, just look south and look at the crystal ball of America, meaning that United States of America, American Jewry, is much more assimilated than Canadian Jews, has much lower levels of education and literacy than Canadian Jews, has far fewer American Jews going to Israel, and is less Zionist than Canadian Jews. And that was a way of saying a compliment to the Canadian Jews about the richness of the identity, the richness of their institutions. And that still holds, unfortunately, today I see a situation of what I call the dueling crystal balls, that while Canadian jury internally is still strong and American Jewry, let's say, has an intermarriage rate of 70%. Canadian Jewry, when I was there, was 16%. Now it's about 30%, 20 to 30%. So you see the strength. But I say to American Jews, look north and you have a crystal ball there. We don't want to see the Europeanization of, of America that we've seen in Canada. And to speak a little controversially, I sometimes call Canada the Europe of North America. And I called Quebec the Ireland of North America. And I'm not saying it in a complimentary way, Canada decided they wanted to be the first post national country that was the previous Prime Minister Trudeau Canada has let in. And I'm all for healthy immigrants, but has led in so many Muslims, many of whom, not all of whom, but many of whom are extremists, that now Canada is about 5% Muslim, up to 2.5 million Muslims. And the studies show that 52% of them hold anti Semitic attitudes. And so what we're seeing is what they called in the Atlantic Monthly the polite pogrom. But it's not the polite pogrom. I call it the not so polite pogrom. Not only because we're seeing Arab street theater coming to Canada, coming to Montreal, coming to McGill, coming to Toronto, but we also see progressives joining in. And unfortunately, the Base support for Israel that you see in the United States of America even today. We're going back over 30 years. 70% of Americans have traditionally supported Israel. Even 20, 30 years ago, only 40% of Canadians supported Israel. And there's always been a certain kind of perfect storm of antisemitism among many Quebecers. And I don't want to overgenerize antisemitism among progressives, antisemitism among elites in Canada that made Canadian Jews, despite their incredibly rich and proud history, a little bit less welcome. And multiculturalism, on the one hand, allowed the internal community to flourish, but also sometimes kept those walls higher than they should have been even before the crisis of 2023.
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A
Let's parse all this out. I want you to say we only
- [08:30]
B
have five hours now, right?
- [08:31]
A
We only have five hours. And at some point we want to talk about the arc of the history. But you know what? If we never get to it, because this is urgent, we'll do it next time. Let's parse all this out. Europeanization. I think I know exactly what you mean, but I want you to say exactly what you mean to make sure that I do You. Europe always had these wild, insane swings of ideology. The fascism and the communism and all that German romanticism about, you know, Third Worldism is a lot of kind of romanticized indigeneity borrowed from this old German discourse of the 19th century. And, and all these, like this European intellectual world that kept producing tyrannies and genocides and, and, and terrible, terrible things. And we've had on here Hussein Abu Bakr Mansour who, who, who hypothesis, his theory of the case of anti Semitism in the Arab world and, and of a lot of the political failure of the Arab world is that in the age of imperialism, the Arab intellectual elites imbibed not Arab ideas, not Muslim ideas, those European ideas and, and produced in Egypt, built on models that are actually German models that led to state failure, like communist regimes in Europe, like fascist regimes in Europe. America was always free of that. I think I feel maybe I'm romanticizing because it was radically individualistic, it was Christian to the end. It's secularizing quickly. But three generations after Europe, maybe five generations in some senses after Europe secularized. And so America always had this cultural protection of this traditional sort of radical individualism born in a religious tradition. You still had full churches on every street corner. And that was a kind of cultural bulwark against that adoption of these radical ideologies. Canada, for some reason, didn't have that protection. Canada wasn't conservative enough in its radical individualism to not fall for those ideologies. That's my sense of it. What is, what does Europeanization mean? And then we'll get to all the rest.
- [10:33]
B
Right, okay, so just, I'll define the term and then I'll, I'll try to unpack it. So what I mean by European Europeanization is that post World War II Europe took a turn, traumatized by World War I and World War II and the horrors that European culture and all these powerful ideologies had generated. And this strong sense of nationalism, culminating in German nationalism, had generated the European phenomenon of today. The EU of today is a very different Europe than the kind of Europe you're talking about. It's not a Europe of rich ideologies. It's not a Europe of passion. It's a Europe of, of post traditionalism, of post nationalism, and of a kind of faux universalism. And with that, we've seen a weakening of the national identities and then a welcome again. There are certain Muslim immigrants who come and they just want to live their lives, and that's a great thing. But there are some who come with that toxic hybrid. And I wouldn't just blame the west because it was a hybrid of Western ideologies with jihadist ideologies that became so toxic. And we've seen in Sweden, we've seen in France that they don't have the, the myelin sheath on the, on the spinal cord to resist. So what I'm seeing in Canada right now when I say Europeanization is this spike in, let's call it Islamist immigrants, because I wanted, I don't want to overly generize about Muslim immigrants, but Islamic immigrants coming in to a country that no longer has a strong sense of self. Now, when we talk about the.
- [12:04]
A
I'm sorry, I want to just. We have polling from Britain. I've been dealing with Britain a lot. I've been reading a lot from Britain over the last month because of the violence, the spike in violence there. We have polls of Islamic community, Muslim communities, and the anti Semitic sentiments in those communities. Very, very high. Higher than any other group in Britain probably. I think any other group, I think every other group, including the far right. I think at this point, I, I, if I'm wrong, people will write that in and then I'll, I'll know more, which is great. But one of the fascinating points that these studies have found is that the more you call yourself British, the more you feel British, the more you integrate into British society, the more British people, you know who are not part of the Muslim community. The, the less anti Semitic you are. By a huge margin. By a huge, huge margin. And so integration and a sense of deep British identification is the, is the Muslim community. That's the part of the Muslim community that is not rabidly anti Semitic. And the more cloistered they are, and the more Islamist they are, the more politically Muslim they are in their identity and sense of self, the more likely they are. And in vast number, a majority, just a majority, are more likely to be deeply anti Semitic. And we're not talking anti Israel, we're talking the Jews, good old fashioned system. The Jews did 9, 11. That's what we're talking about. So is that the basic story of Canada? In Canada, there isn't that sense of being Canadian. That kind of integration is a good correlation.
- [13:28]
B
So in Jesse Brown's piece in the Atlantic Monthly, he called it the polit pogrom because his argument was that you have this rabid group of Islamists who are, and progressives who are highly anti Semitic. And the other Canadians are just too polite. And so they're politely not standing up. And in sort of out of respect for this one minority, they're actually sacrificing the basic decency toward a second minority. And I give a slight twist because having looked, for example, in 2017, in 2010, in 2007, in 2000, at Canadian polls showing even then that there was an animus against Israel, 63% of Canadians in 2017 said that BDS is, you know, boycotts are acceptable. That part of the problem is that you also have, well, you have many, many, many decent Canadians. You also have a Canadian elite and a Canadian leadership class CBC. And what we saw, especially in 2023 and 2024, the mayors of Montreal and Toronto who simply were not only not standing up against the harsh Islamists and the harsh progressives because they were too polite, but because they agreed. And so that's part of the reason why it's a different dynamic. And that's why I see what I call the Europeanization. Now, just this week in the National Post, which is center right, like the Wall Street Journal of Canada, they have a headline. Many Canadian Jews have lost their sense of belonging in a country they no longer recognize. And they talk about this sense of vertigo. What happened to Canada? Now, to go a little historically, we have to distinguish between the United States of America and Canada. The story of America is the story you were telling about individualists, about pioneers going out. And even though they needed their covered wagons, they needed to go together. Ultimately, it was about the individual pioneer, the Western idea. And Americans were united by their great ideas, by their great texts like the Declaration of Independence. Canadians were different. Now Canadians. Now I'm really going to get in trouble. Were in a much more colonial situation, right? Because the, the, you know, one of the things about Canada is that the loyalists who survived the American Revolution fled north and Canada remained intertwined with the British Commonwealth deep into the 20th century. You can still find, you know, when I Left Canada in 2007, 2010, I said, you know, Queen Elizabeth's face was on the curr. So Canada, the story that Canadians told wasn't of individual pioneers going, it was about the government settling the lands. So you start with a slightly more collectivistic and slightly less individualistic story. You start with a story which is less about rebelling from the Crown and isn't defined by life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What's the Canadian formula? Peace, order and good government. Now, that is a formula for decency. And the Canada that I knew, the Canada that I love, the Canada that welcomed me, the Canada that gave me a tremendous platform and tremendous satisfaction as a professor of History at McGill University, and American history, I wasn't talking about Jewish stuff then, was a Canada that was decent, a Canada that at that point was sometimes people said dull, I never use that word, but was decent, and was about just giving everybody their own little space. And the multicultural idea then was to say, let the Italians of Montreal be Italian and speak Italian fluently and the Greeks of Montreal be Greek and speak Greek fluently. Let the Jews thrive. And they did. And it's a very important point to. To emphasize how well Jews have done intellectually, ideologically, Jewishly, culturally, personally, financially in Canada, and many still do. So the Europeanization that I'm seeing is that Canada, the decent. And of course, they used to call Toronto, Toronto the good, right, that decency has now, under the pressure of these Islamists and of these progressives, and again, this kind of underlying disdain for Jews in a broader elite society. And then in Quebec, we have this different dynamic of a kind of French Canadian disdain for Jews has led to this perfect storm and has led to the spike in antisemitism and many Canadian Jews saying, wait a minute, what's happened? What's happened to the Canada I knew and loved? What's happened to the Canada that allowed me to thrive?
- [17:49]
A
Okay, let's. Let's get into the history. Who are Canadian Jews? Where do they come from? How did Jews get to Canada? What happens to them over those, I don't know, 150 years that there are Jews in Canada in one way or another.
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B
Before I get to origins, I'm just going to drop two hints, which is that the two most important dates are one, post 1945, the big surge in population after World War II, and to 1976 when Quebec started having its rebellion that led to all these linguistic issues and many Jews went from Montreal to Toronto. But we'll get to that now. A framing Put Jews aside. I'm a young history professor at McGill University. I go to a museum in, in Montreal and they have a short, wonderful cartoon about the origins of Montreal. Now I love going to history museums and I go to the museum in, in Boston and I go to the museum in Philadelphia and I grew up in New York. And you get these beautiful little, again, three minute, five minute videos about Paul Revere rioting and about the Declaration of Independence being signed in Philadelphia and about the ideas, the defining ideas again, life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. And this short little video about the origins of Montreal was about settlement, about searching for gold, about the riches of North America luring many people to Canada. And I think that's a really interesting way in because Canada, as I was arguing, is a much less ideologically driven country. It's a country that's less about these big ideas and much more about living a life. And so, yes, we can go back to the 1700s and find Jewish fur traders. We can go to 1760 and see that when the British take over after what we called growing up, the French and Indian War, as we now call the Seven Years War. And two incredibly important things happen. One is that you now have the establishment of Canada eventually as a country that is going to be very tolerant, is going to be very British in the best sense of the word. And Jews are very quickly, by the 1830s, going to have fundamental rights that they don't have in Europe. You also have in Quebec, the British saying, okay, we're because we're British and because we want to respect their culture, we're not going to wipe them out. And then, and that's why you have, you can call it either the problems or the glories of today's French Canadian identity because they didn't, they respected French Canadian society. So the story basically of Canadian Jews up until the early 1900s is a story of Jews coming here and there mostly for a better life. My own grandfather came to Canada in the early 1920s, came from Europe, from Poland, was part of that amazing story. Of just wanting to get out of the hells of Eastern Europe and had an opportunity to come to Canada. And then he made his way to America because his parents had. And sisters had come in before. But the Montreal that he came into in the 1920s was a Montreal that was vibrant, Montreal that had rich Jewish culture, a Montreal that Mordechai Richelieu would later celebrate. And it was a culture that allowed Jews to thrive. So Jews are thriving individually. They're starting to create some of the major empires, which ultimately is most famous as the Branfin Empire, which has its origins in the move of Eastern European Jews. So on the whole, the shorthand is that Even until the 1920s, 1930s, there's a similarity between American Jews and Canadian Jews in that most of them are fleeing Eastern Europe, coming to the Golden Medina. But the two Medinas, the two countries, they come to have slightly different accents. And of course, in Canada, you also have to learn French.
- [21:46]
A
So a huge spike in Jewish immigration. When there's a spike in Jewish immigration everywhere. The big Ashkenazi migration to Britain, to France, from Eastern Europe, right, which is after 1881, when the tsar is killed and the pogroms begin and they enter Canada. And then Canada enters a period like the United States, like Britain, like most of the world, of slowing immigration, of turning against immigration. And in Canada, there was the very famous line by a Canadian parliamentarian, zero is too many, referring to Jewish immigrants. Tell us about that story. So that Canada is open to Jews. It's just kind of open. It's generally open to everybody. And then Canada begins to close. And that's sort of a lead up into World War II.
- [22:29]
B
So the expression none is too many is basically saying, how many Jews should we accept, given as Hitler rises, given what's going on in the 1930s and parliamentarian says none is too many, and became the title of a very famous book about Canada's failure to save Jews during World War II. Now we know the whole world failed to save Jews during World War II. I want to stop and also acknowledge that Canada in many ways, was ahead of the United States. And you had Canadians volunteering for the raf, for the Royal Air Force, and fighting valiantly in World War II, before December 1941, before America went in, after Pearl Harbor. And so again, a little complexity, a little nuance. But what's interesting about the story is that you have this Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, and there's a fundamental sense of not Toronto the good, not Canada the boring, but Canada the WASPy. This is not a story of French Canadians. This, this is a story of high church Anglos not wanting to bring the Jews in, not wanting to bring the other in, not wanting to bring the immigrants in. And by the way, when we talk about Europeanization in the same way that there's a certain kind of Tikkun, a certain kind of European desire to fix their errors and their sins during the Holocaust, one could almost make an ironic argument that some Canadians unconsciously, more than consciously, are atoning for their sins of being so provincial and, and, and so narrow in the 1930s and 1940s by being overly open to some hostile forces now who are coming in as immigrants. There's a kind of irony of history there. The big story, of course, in, in Canada that people talk about today is much more the what happened with the natives and some of the horror stories of how natives were in. In orphanages and were abused. But what's the connection between the two? It's a story of a Canada, especially outside Quebec, that's very. And again, here I'm being a little GROSS in shorthand, WASPy. And there's no room for the Jew in a WASPy Canada. And so that leads to the high. The closing of the immigration gates. And so the story after World War II is, oh, my goodness, how do we let this happen?
- [24:48]
A
Okay, and then you said that one of the big years is 1945.
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B
1945.
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A
Why is 1945 a big year? What happens in 1945?
- [24:56]
B
So in general, when you come to Montreal, when you come to Toronto and you meet a Canadian Jew with roots like my grandfather would have had had he stayed in their 20s or 30s, with roots in the 1880s, with roots. There's some. I actually know one family that goes back to the 1700s. You go, wow, they're kind of unique. And in some ways, it's funny, growing up in Queens surrounded by what I call Eastern European boat people, when we met children of Holocaust survivor, that was unique in Canada. And sometimes when you meet someone who isn't part of that Holocaust story, it's unique, but they're there. Right? And so there's that long prehistory we're talking about, but starting with 1945, and especially, I think, in the 1950s, you see a welcome of Jews, especially in Toronto and especially in Montreal. And there are differences between Toronto and Montreal we can talk about, but fundamentally, the big surge of the two communities and the big landing is post 1945. And if you ever do an episode on Australian Jewry, there's a lot to talk about about the parallels between Australian Jewish community and the Canadian Jewish community. In some ways, we get stuck comparing Canada and America because of the language and because of North America. But the first time I flew to Australia, I felt like I had flown thousands of miles to visit Montreal. It's quite special in that way. Again, strengths and weaknesses and British culture and richness. And by the way, incredibly high percentages of Jewish day school participation both in Melbourne and Sydney and in Toronto and Montreal. So Post World War II, you get this wave. In fact, again, to be anecdotal, when I was growing up, my best friend and I used to always talk about the fact that all our grandparents had accents, because they all came over on the boat, as if there was one, the boat that could have brought them all from 1880 to 1924. And we said, our kids are going to have grandparents like my parents, like his parents, maybe with New York accents, but not with Eastern European accents. You move to Montreal, as I did, and you marry as I did, Montrealer. And we ended up with grandparents with heavy Eastern European accents, delightful Romanian accents. And that kind of tells the story of the. The power of that community. And so who are these people? Many of them scarred, many of them deeply tied to Israel, many of them with family in Israel. And they come and both in Montreal and in Toronto, to a certain extent, in Vancouver, but really it's Montreal, Toronto. They create empires financially, they create empires culturally, they create empires educationally. And it's true that when I was in Montreal in the 1990s, I looked around, I said, you know what? I know very few Canadian Jews who are involved in corporations, who are leading corporations. There was still a kind of WASPy distancing there, but there were real estate empires, of course, the Braunfund liquor empire that became an industrial empire. There's lawyers, there's doctors, they made it. And the Montreal Jewish community, the Toronto Jewish community in the 50s, 60s, 70s, is a community on the way up and a community less so than the American Jewish community, which isn't as central to the growing culture of Canada, but is thriving. And Canadian Jewry. Montreal Jewry will create people like Irwin Kotler, who is one of the great human rights activists of all time, who defended Mandela and Natan Sharansky and so many others, and continues at the age of 86, to be not just a friend and role model, but an inspiration to us all who understand, as we were talking about earlier, earlier, that liberalism is not about the result, but liberalism is about the process. Liberalism is about making sure that the legal system works, making sure that the political system works, making sure that people are respected. You have people like Ruth Weiss, an immigrant who, who was part of the the Holocaust story, who ultimately becomes one of the great intellectuals and just one just gave the Jefferson lecture in Washington D.C. you have people like David Hartman, who comes from New York but spends eight critical, formative years in Montreal. So intellectually there's a richness there. Mordechai Richler, of course, becomes very famous. And you start seeing a community that while it may not be as integrated, as Americanized as the American community, has a real wealth from within and it's just kind of left alone. Peace, order and good government.
- [29:19]
A
One of the famous aspects of the Montreal community is also the North African immigration. As decolonizations happening, France leaves Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, those Jewish communities flee. They flee the rise of Islamism, they flee the rise of these post colonial Arab states which turn violent against most of their minorities, not just the Jews. And the Jews are running away now. The majority go to Israel, huge numbers go to France. Many of them see in French speaking Quebec, a home. Tell us that story. Is that a significant story? Are they very felt? I know that they're obviously Sephardi synagogues in Montreal and schools in Montreal, but what is their story?
- [30:04]
B
So in the five hour version, in addition to talking about 45 and 76, which we haven't gotten to yet, you would add 56. Because with the Suez Campaign of 1956, that's when many Jews in Morocco, which is French speaking Algeria and others start having greater crisis. I mean, the crisis had started obviously in the early 40s. And by the way, we're about to mark the 85th ANN anniversary of the Farhud, the horrific pogrom in Iraq, which ends what, 2,500 years of rich Jewish life there. So it's growing, but 1956 accelerates the process, but the real story goes to 75. 76. So let's get to the Sparta community. After that critical moment in 1976, it's the 60s, it's the 70s in America and also in Canada, you have not this Premier Trudeau, but you have the right as the original Prime Minister Elliot Trudeau, who talks about having more respect, multiculturalism, and also in the same way that blacks are asserting black power and Jews are asserting Jewish power, you see that French Canadians, who for a long time, and it's important to emphasize, because I will have my criticism of them, but until the 1970s, were disrespected by those same Canadian WASPs, were disrespected by the British born types were disrespected and looked down by the Anglos. The, the stereotype is that in the bank of Montreal, the president and the bank managers were always Anglos, but the bank tellers and the janitors were always Francos. And you have a majority French world there in, in Quebec, which again the British kept out of respect for the cultural integrity of those people that now in the 1970s starts emerging. And in 1976 you have a separatist movement. And that leads to two different stories. One, the rise of Toronto and two, changes in Montreal whereby this early immigration, which started in the 1950s really takes off after 1976. Because Quebec, see, in America we're all obsessed with race. In Israel, we're obsessed with the Palestinians. Israeli and Canada, it's all about language. When I first came to McGill for my McGill interview, and you know, you want to be impressive and you want to pretend that you know everything, they talk about Anglophones, okay, I can figure that out. That means English speakers, Francophones, French speakers, and they talk about allophones. I go, what the hell are they talking about? What's an allophone? An allophone is people like my remaining immigrant in laws who were neither English speakers or French speakers. But what's so fascinating is, especially after 1976, you're defined by your language. So to go to your question after 1976, because Quebec immigration laws, and we should emphasize also we talk about Canada, just like the United States has 50 states and a federal system. When I would lecture about American history to McGill students, they got the power of the federal system and they got the power of states in the 1800s in the way that my American students didn't always get. Because America's become increasingly nationalized and centralized. In Canada, there's a huge difference between living in Ontario and Alberta and Quebec. Those are three provinces for those of us who don't speak Canadian. So in Quebec, because they set the language laws mostly and they set the immigration laws mostly Sephardic Jews, Moroccan Jews start coming in. And when you go to Toronto, on the whole, the community is very much like the community that I grew up with in Queens, which was Eastern Europeans, unlike my Eastern European boat people people, they're post Holocaust Eastern Europeans. In Montreal you have this rich, vibrant, I think the Numbers now about 20% of the community is Sephardi. And what's interesting about the Sephardim, again, I hate to overgeneralize, is that in my experience, most of my Anglo Canadian Montreal friends spoke French, but they didn't speak it as fluently, as easily as my Moroccan Canadian Jewish friends. The that community speaks French and English so fluently and fits in in the same way that the Italians and Greeks do. And so they have come and. And I should say they've been fascinating conversations as the anti Semitism. By the way, this is really interesting post2023 moment. Post October 7th moment until October 7th. It was a interesting conversation in Montreal about bringing in more and more French Jews. Should we compete with Israel? Should we not? Shouldn't everybody decide by themselves? I really haven't heard much of that conversation, unfortunately since October 7th, because things have really gotten that much worse.
- [34:50]
A
Now.
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B
Again, I would argue that I saw the anti Semitism growing in Quebec particularly, and growing up McGill before that, but there really has been a horrific spike. So what you see with the Moroccan community, with the Sparta community, is their own institutions, synagogues, schools. I was actually quite surprised when I came to Canada. I learned the expression the two solitudes, which is the French and the English. And in some ways in the Canadian Jewish community, on one level, there are also two solitudes, although the next generation has done much, much, much better job of breaking it down and of being much more integrated.
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A
Meaning Montreal, Toronto.
- [35:30]
B
Meaning. No, I mean in the Montreal community. Many, many more of my Anglo friends my age had never been at a Moroccan Shabbat dinner. They thought they had. And they would tell me how they were close, they had so many close friends. And then I would ask the question of, well, is there a difference or similarity? When you say it's Shabbat, I mean just slight differences. And many of their kids have. So the younger generation is a little more integrated. The younger generation of Anglo Jews speaks French much better than their parents or certainly their grandparents. And as I said, the Sephardic Jews speak. But also there are more institutions that bring them together. But still it's sometimes quite surprising how separate they are. Now, the other story is Toronto. Montreal is the center of Canadian Jewry. And again, it's one of the great centers of intellectual and Jewish intellectual life and Jewish communal life. There's a rich Yiddish culture there. There are Jewish day schools to this day. There's Bialik, which is. Which teaches Hebrew, English, French and English in their curriculum. Remarkable. So, so, so. But Starting in the 1970s, Canadian Jews in Montreal especially, because so many of them are not been. Have not been in Montreal for a hundred years, but know exactly where their passports are because they're Holocaust children or Holocaust survivors themselves, they see what's happening. And I'M sorry to say they can smell the anti Semitism in some of the French nationalism, not all, but some of the French nationalists. And so they flee to Toronto. I have a good friend who was a Quebec legislator for many years. And the first time I visited Toronto, I said, I'm not going to use names on purpose. I said, this is amazing. I was just in Toronto. The bank of Montreal that I mentioned, its tower is now in the heart of Toronto. Montreal in the 90s and the 2000s was a bit of a sleepy regional capital like Denver. It wasn't the center, it wasn't the New York it had been in the 1950s, 60s, 70s. And my friend said, yeah, well, Toronto, Toronto is the city that Rene Levesque built. Rene Levesque is the great Canadian separatist. Their George Washington, to a certain extent, overplayed a little bit. And so what he's basically saying is that starting in the 1970s and 80s, it wasn't only the Jews who left, but much of the capital, many others. And by the way, if we want to talk about anti Semitism, let's point out that that is a really good case study, textbook example of that. When the Jews felt uncomfortable for good reason and left Montreal went down and Toronto went up. And my friends in Toronto are going to be frustrated with the first part of this episode. So now let me go a little bit into the extraordinary community of Toronto. The 50% of Jews go to Jewish day school there, intermarriage rate around 22%. They had a 10 year period in the Federation, just the Federation alone, where they raised a billion dollars. And it's not about the money, it's about each of those dollars, reflecting a real sense of commitment, a real sense of connectedness. And Toronto from the 1970s, certainly 80s, 90s changed. My Montreal friends grew up in a world where they talked about Toronto. Not the good, but Toronto the boring Toronto the provincial Toronto the narrow. I always get in trouble with my proud Montreal Quebec wife because when I come back from Toronto and I see the vitality of the Jewish community and I see the vitality of the theater scene and I see the vitality of the restaurant scene, I go, wow, it's a really fun city. And then I have to be quiet. Toronto really emerged both Jewishly and more broadly until the last couple of years.
- [39:11]
A
All right, let's get into this moment. Before we do, let's define one term that you've used many, many times and so have I. Antisemitism. Anti Semitism in Quebec, anti Semitism that We've seen now antisemitism that often has expression as anti Israel sentiment, delegitimization of Israel sentiment, not criticism of Israel sentiment, which, you know, who isn't a fan of that? But that was meant sarcastically. Hold the emails. But, but very seriously, actually, obviously there's the argument made by so many people who want to justify protests outside of synagogues is that, you know, the people who conflate criticism of Israel with hatred of Jews are actually, which Jews sometimes do, are actually. Nobody seriously conflates criticism of Israel with. They conflate obsessive criticism of Israel that can't possibly see any other crime on earth and the formation of mass movements around Israel and the definitional sense that the role that Israel plays in progressive politics, which China doesn't play, and no other issue, no other civilizational space, no other crime, no other war, nothing, nothing plays except Israel. And yes, that is already a prejudice and it's structurally identical to the way obsession about Jews, the role it played in European society in the past and in a great many Muslim societies today. So there's so much to say. But nevertheless, when you use the word, what is it that you mean by the word? And then we'll get into this moment and I specifically want to bring forward a poll and, and talk about what Canadians actually think and what Canadians actually think, by the way, non Jewish Canadians, about the state of the Jews, the condition of the Jews, because it turns out quite a few Canadians are worried for the Jews who are not Jews. So what do you mean by antisemitism?
- [41:11]
B
It's interesting you used this word, obsessed and obsession, and that's the word that I added to my vocab, my, to my definition of antisemitism after October 7th. What I saw on October 7th, and obviously we can see it throughout history, is that antisemitism is a targeting of the Jew or Jewish institutions or Jewish phenomena like the Jewish state in an obsessive way. And I sometimes distinguish between antisemitism, which is the theory, so my lovely historian colleagues wouldn't hurt a fly, but they buy into the anti Semitism conspiracy and they buy into the anti Semitism rhetoric and that encourages the actual Jew hatred. So I recently came out with a booklet with the jppi, the Jewish People Policy Institute, and it's the essential guide to Zionism, Anti Zionism, Anti Semitism and Jew hatred. So I tend to use anti Semitism to mean the broader theory, the broader phenomenon. But I hate the fact that it sounds unscientific and Jew hatred is, I Call it an ugly term for an ugly phenomenon. And Jew hatred is the actual action now. So it's very simple. It's. And, and I, by the way, I have a very hard time. There's a whole other conversation with the IRA definition, the IHRA definition, because I don't know anybody who can quote it. And if you can't quote a definition, it doesn't help. So anti Semitism is. Is you.
- [42:30]
A
You mean because it's pages so long. Right?
- [42:32]
B
We need. You're asking me for. So.
- [42:34]
A
So that's how the definition is.
- [42:36]
B
It's an obsession with the Jew Jewish institutions, the Jewish state, Jewish phenomenon as a key to all the world's problems and an acting out of that which often expresses itself through the violence of Jew hatred. Now, when we talk about this anti Semitism, anti Zionism thing, I have to say I have less and less patience for it. It's not on me to distinguish between anti Semitism and anti Zionism. It's on them. My feminist friends don't sit around saying, you know what, those misogynists, they're really good at heart. Why don't we figure out a way to make them feel a little more comfortable? My African American friends don't sit around and say, you know, those KKK guys, they really look good in white, and I love NASCAR racing. Maybe we should figure out a way to make them feel comfortable. If you truly, truly are an anti Zionist, but you're not anti Semitic, the burden of proof isn't on me, and it's not on us. And it's not on you for all the good work you do. It's on them. And why? Because they are the ones who keep on conflating the term. They are the ones who keep merging the files. And you've said it already, and you've said it repeatedly in your episodes ideologically. Go to Hajid Amin Al Husseini. Go to the origins of the Muslim Brotherhood. Go to the Hamas charter. Go to the plo, which gave out Mein Kampf in its training camps again and again. The Palestinian national movement. Notice I don't say the Palestinians, I say the Palestinian national movement. And anti Zionists and progressive anti Zionists have ideologically targeted the Jews and the Jewish state. And if in the Middle Ages, the Jew was the target du jour, today it is the Jewish state. So that's ideologically and as we say in Hebrew, befall. Actually, tactically, as you pointed out, when something happens in Israel, and I hate Israelis and I hate what happens in Israel, and yet I attack A Jewish kid with a kippah on his, or on his head, or I attack a Jewish day school, or I attack a Jewish synagogue, as is happening in Toronto, as is happening in Montreal. That shows that they have conflated the two terms. They have merged the files. So I call that in this book, the Tells of the Bigot. The Bigot shows how obsessed they are. The Bigot shows how they keep on merging the two. But at the same time, it's important to point out how central Zionism is to Jewish identity and how central Judaism is to Zionist identity. And I will make no apologies for that. But that's all of the conversation.
- [44:58]
A
Okay, so that was a valuable clearing of the, of the table so we can, we can talk about the rest. I want to, I want to lay out. There was the Brim polling and there were many, many other polls, and I collected some of them together. These are simple Google searches. Go to your favorite AI, make sure to ask for links. Check those links so the AI isn't hallucinating. And here's, here's what people will find. First of all, most non Jewish Canadians, the overwhelming majority, I think it was 83% in the brim polling, have positive attitudes toward Jews. They say Jews, great people, no problem with Jews. Or that's what they tell pollsters. Maybe that's what they know they're supposed to say. Maybe that's Canadian politeness. 83% positive attitudes towards Jews. A great many, by the way, of the rest are, you know, didn't answer, don't knows. The negative attitude toward Jews are a small minority and they correlate strongly also with racist sentiments generally. In other words, if you're the average Canadian who says bad things about Jews, you're quite likely to say bad things about blacks, bad things about Muslims, bad things about immigrants, bad things generally about minorities and other groups of people. So that's the general Canadian story. And yet we have unbelievable spikes of antisemitic incidents, whether it's harassment, vandalism, violence, outright violence, shootings at schools and community centers and synagogues, bombings or attempted bombings are huge numbers of spikes, baby. Canada recorded 6,800 incidents in 2025. That it. Now that's includes online harassment. Okay, so it's, it's, it's all the things that, that have, that they have evidence for, that people have sent them, that they have, that they've gone online and seen it, or the violence in the streets. But the point isn't the number, the hard number, maybe it's many more than that. People don't necessarily report every time they're, you know, people come after them with anti Semitic claims online. But it's up 10% from 2024. 2024 is up 145% from 2022. And there's data from, that's from the Jewish community from NE Brit, there's data from the police. The jews are about 1% of the Canadian population. They are by far the most targeted religious group in Canada. Discernible religious group. In 2024, 1% of the population accounted for 70% of what police classify as religion motivated hate crimes. And nationally that's 70% for 1% of the population. When a lot of Canadian progressive politicians are willing to talk about anti Semitic attacks after the shootings at schools, they have a hard time not doing so. Then they have this maddening tendency to say anti Semitism is wrong and so is Islamophobia. And the problem with that a is that you just said anti Semitism is not wrong. What you just said is, you know, violence happens, hatred happens. If you can't say antisemitism without saying Islamophobia, you are not talking about antisemitism. You are refusing to talk about. You are in fact minimizing antisemitism. It works the other way too. If there's some massacre by a horrible evil racist of Muslims at some mosque, you don't then get to say there's also anti Semitism in Canada. That is a minimizing of the crime and that is done to Jews. Not routinely, almost always in progressive spaces, almost in every case. Well, it also doesn't fit the data if 70% of religion motivated hate crimes. By the way, In Toronto in 2025, the Toronto Police Department said that that was 82% of religion motivated hate crimes are target Jews. Meaning there's much less space for the much larger Muslim community to be targeted for hate crimes. Jews are overwhelmingly the target of hate crimes in Canada. Don't you dare talk about anti Semitism while also adding other attacks on other minorities as a way of not actually talking about anti Semitism but pretending there isn't in fact a problem here because everybody's heard that is, that is. Okay, then I'm sorry, this is a tiny bit of a soapbox. And then I'm gonna.
- [49:08]
B
It's important what you're saying.
- [49:10]
A
There's a 2025 Leger poll in which many Canadians see anti Semitic and Islamophobic behavior. The poll asked both because I guess you gotta as becoming more frequent. 45% of Canadians said Yeah, that, that anti Semitic attacks and Islamophobic attacks are becoming more frequent. Most Canadians, 60% still view Canada as safe for Jews. And then I want to narrow it down. There is a negative attitudes towards Jews. Now let's get into the anti Semitism. There is a concentration in specific subgroups that the polling shows. Quebec, especially Montreal and Quebec City, among political conservatives, the political right. People with no Jewish acquaintances tend to have less good attitudes toward Jews. Younger people tend to have higher rates of anti Jewish sentiment, not anti Israel. Anti Jewish, specifically males tend to have higher rates of anti Jewish sentiment. And university students will tend to have higher antisemitic views in addition to anti Israel views. But separate from Israel, just about local Jews will tend to have higher anti Semitic views than the general population. And then we get to the Muslim community in Canada and here the disparities are huge, stark and very, very bright. And you can't pretend it isn't there. This is true in the BRIM polling and in all polling that check this, Muslims in Canada hold significantly more negative attitudes towards Jews, I'm reading. And Israel, but also Jews independently of Israel, than the general non Jewish population. BRIM describes this as by far the strongest among the groups surveyed. Here's two examples and then I'll hand the baton over to you. Nearly half of Canadian Muslims, this is something you referenced way back at the beginning. 40 to 50% in different polling and different ranges and different ways of asking the question, consistently 40 to 50% agree that in the BRIM polling quote, Jews are the cause of all the negatives involved in globalization. They were asked, are Jews the cause of all the negatives involved in globalization? 40, 50% say yes. And in the general population it's 4 to 5%. It's tenfold. It is half of Canadian Muslims and it has nothing to do with Israel. It's about Jews and economic problems and dislocation and globalization. Then obviously among you know, when they asked, is Zionism racism? Is Israel an apartheid state? Are suicide bombings against Israeli civilians justified? Huge numbers among the Muslim community, higher numbers than anti Jewish sentiment in the general population, but nevertheless still below 20% if I'm not mistaken. And then they asked specifically about boycotting Jewish owned businesses in Canada over Jewish communal support. Jewish communal support for Israel. So there's the connection. Jews support Israel. Can we boycott their businesses? 16% of Canadians say yes. That I assume is where the progressive linkage happens. 41% of Canadian Muslims say yes. What are you going to do? What are we going to do? Pretend it's not happening. Are we going to talk about it as if it's not there? Last time I talked about Muslim anti Semitism in the UK I got a lot of people on Twitter, on email, telling me, what, are you trying to drive Islamophobia and divide our country? We're already dealing with this great divide. Those sentiments are driving the great divide. That is not something that noticing those sentiments is doing. And the violence against the Jews, when you have arson, when you have actual shootings and it's overnight shootings, kids were not in the school. In one of the cases, the next morning they find bullet holes in the school. Okay. But also there were attacks on synagogues, on Shabbat, when there were people in the buildings. When you have the violence and the police release the names and the police go out of their way in Canada not to release the names, as far as I can tell, they're Muslim names. So when do we talk about this? I'm going to stop with the rant. I. I'm really scared for Canadian Jews. Not because there's a problem. There's a problem. Immigrants came with attitudes from their home countries. By the way, Muslims in Canada have much lower rates of antisemitism than the countries they came from. Canada did very good things to massively lower their antisemitism rate to merely 50%. So silver lining. I'm just saying, you bring people in and they come in and, you know, the more they integrate into Canada, the less that anti Semitism will be. Because of that gap in opinions, I assume. I hope we see that happening in the uk presumably it'll be the same phenomenon, but only if you can see it. Only if you can tackle it. So how bad is it? Walk us up to October 7th and then from October 7th. How bad actually is it? And forgive me for the speech, people came to hear you.
- [54:11]
B
Now, first of all, I just want to sit with it for a second because it's devastating. I did a cross country tour of Canada in February 2025 and I kept on saying, this is not the Canada I left and the Canada that I loved. And a professor at University of Ottawa, professor of women's studies, very much to the left, but Jewish said every Canadian Jewish professor has a story. Every Canadian Jewish student has a story. And she didn't mean a good story. It is stunning to see how pervasive it is. It is stunning to see how deep it runs. Fortunately, so far it has not been Bondi Beach. Fortunately, it's been attacks on buildings and not on people so much, but we saw a stabbing in a, in a, in a Loblaws, which is one of the Canadian, iconic Canadian supermarkets in Ottawa. And there's a kind of growing threat and a growing terror that is simply unacceptable. And the inability of people to call it out, I agree with you. Is very problematic. And the degree to which it reflects institutional rot. You saw this, by the way, in the New York Times, and you spoke so eloquently about that. I think it was last episode or two episodes ago. We're seeing institutional rot. We're seeing ideological confusion. We're seeing social dysfunction, and we're seeing psychological distress. And this is a. This is. I call this isis. Actually, the ideological, social, institutional and psychological distress and dysfunction is what anti Semitism is about. It is a warning sign to Canada. Now, there's some good news in their hills, right? You're talking about that there still are most Canadians who are decent. And again, if we go to Jesse Brown's argument about the polite pogrom, he would argue that it's just they're being too decent to the haters as well. I'm going to nuance that. But he also has a devastating line, and he talks about one person who resigned, I think from his hospital, a Jew. And he says he did not resign because of the anti Semitic messages, though. He resigned because the university wouldn't do anything about them. And I think that's the real issue. When we talk about fighting antisemitism, we have to go in two different directions. We have to go to the Jewish community, which we'll get to. But within the broader community, there have to be two different framings. One, this is not just an assault on the Jews, as I said earlier, this is an assault on fundamental Canadian values. This is an assault on the fundamental Canadian character. This is a fundamental assault on Canadian decency. And the degree to which so many Jews. I ask the question. People talk about anti Semitism all the time. I'm in Miami, I'm in Atlanta, I'm in New York. I say, has your threat level changed? And most Jews basically say no. If they're on a campus, they might say yes, but very, very rarely, especially in the last year, when I speak to most Montreal Jews and most Toronto Jews, not all, I'm surprised at how many of them say yes. My threat level has changed because, for example, for months after Oct. 7, as many Toronto Jews walked to Tishul, to the synagogue on Saturday at the Key Bridge, which many of them had to pass, there were people yelling and screaming at them. That's not A pogrom. I wouldn't even call it a pogrom. It's just not Canadian. And so the first thing that has to happen is, right, education is part of it, but it's a much broader thing. It has to be seen as and has to be framed as the Jewish, not just the Jewish community, but the broader Canadian community has to frame it as an assault on Canadian values. Now, let me illustrate that in two different ways. One of the smaller but important political parties is a party called the ndp, the New Democratic Party. And it just had its convention and its leader. Its new leader is a rare phenomenon in Canada. An anti Zionist Canadian Jew named Bobby Lewis. When he was elected and he was on stage, there was only one flag waving behind him. And it wasn't the Canadian flag, it was the Palestinian flag. And then you may have seen that there was this little piece that went viral because they had given out identity cards, gender identity cards and color identity cards to different people. And many of the speakers, instead of speaking to substance, started quibbling about, well, I was disrespected because a white male got to speak before me and he claimed to be a white male who was trans, but he actually wasn't trans. And it became this sort of farce of identity politics. What's my point? That short two minute clip and that failure to have a Canadian flag did more reputational damage to the NDP than 32 beautiful articles and podcasts you and I could create and write. It showed a kind of assault on basic Canadianness. The more we mobilize a broader conversation about what is Canada going to be? And it's true about the United States of America, it's true about England, and it's true about France. What's, what kind of country do you want to have? The more we quote Natan Sharansky, who kind of understood anti Semitism, the Gulag, as almost a natural state, well, he said, it makes sense that when I'm in the Soviet gulag, in the Soviet prison camp, they're going to use anti Semitism because they're a dictatorship. And so anti Semitism is one of the tools of the haters. But then Natan Sharansky is freed and he comes to America and he comes to Canada and he hears it at York University, at McGill University, at Harvard, there's anti Semitism. He goes, how could there be? It doesn't make sense because anti Semitism is the tool, the dictator. And that's why I think we have to start understanding anti Semitism as the reflection of isis, institutional Problems, social dysfunction, ideological rot and psychological distress. The psychological distress of the anti Semites, I would never want to trade souls with them. And of course, they pass on distress as well. So the first thing we have to do is we have to frame it as a Canadian problem. And the second thing we have to do is reach out to fellow Canadians. I've paid taxes in Israel, Canada and the United States, so I can say we wherever is convenient for the purpose of this conversation. In the, in 2022. I'm sorry, in 2002, during the worst days of the second intifada, long before 2023, 2002, a woman by the name of Elizabeth Komper talks to some of her friends. She lives in Toronto and they Jewish women. She's a non Jewish woman. Tell her about this growing anti Semitism they're experiencing then connected to the anti Israelism then. And when her husband Tony, who is a major CEO of a large corporation, is shaving one day, knowing that that's the best way to hold him hostage, she starts talking to Tony and says, we've got to do something about it. And they created this organization called FAST Fight Antisemitism Today. And what FAST did was tap into BMO bank of Montreal, which I've mentioned, Bell Atlantic, the big phone company. They tapped into the elite of elites of Canadian society and said, this is not okay. This is an assault on us. And so in the same way that we have to frame it as a Canadian issue, we also have to mobilize forces within Canada. And I'm sorry to say that we've seen that in the Conservative Party there has been a very strong, not just pro Israel stance, but anti anti Semitism stance. But in the Liberal Party there hasn't been enough. And I don't want Conservatives attacking Liberals. I want Liberals attacking Liberals and saying what's going on here? And so that would be my two big pushes. And we have to start speaking to Prime Minister Carney and others saying, whatever you think about Israel and your Israel policy, we're not going to talk about that. That's a separate issue. We're not here to lobby about that. We're here to lobby for basic Canadian values. What kind of a country is it when Canadian Jews report in the National Post? Not just that they're afraid, but their identity has been shaken because they grew up in Toronto. The good they grew up in Canada. The decent they worship in the church, as they should, of peace, order and good government.
- [62:21]
A
Our last conversation on Canada, and this is, you know, not going to be the last. And so there'll be more. So keep writing in those suggestions, people. Last conversation on Canada with Casey. He critiqued the Canadian Jewish community's leadership institutions. I know just enough about the Canadian Jewish community to know that this is not a single group. It's not one organization. They're competing organizations. They're people of many different views and opinions and strategies, and they're holding different conferences and they have different. And also that some of them work very hard and communicate constantly with police and with Canadian politicians and leaders. And also that they're small and that just as a voting base, they're not going to draw the attention of the politician, like the half of the Muslim community that expresses these anti Semitic opinions in the polls. And so all the limitations. Casey is nevertheless very, very critical of them. He thinks that largely they set out this time, this. I hope I'm representing him correctly. If not, I apologize, Casey, but there was this critique. It wasn't, it wasn't the main issue. It wasn't what he talked about, but it was part of the critique. I got emails that agreed. You know, I got some responses from Canadian Jewish organizations that said, we're actually working very hard. We're being very effective. This isn't fair. He doesn't necessarily. He's. He, he does his. His activism, but he doesn't know exactly what's happening in every organization and in every city and in every province and in every locality. And so it was not representative. I respect that. But for every email I got saying they're doing the work, I got at least 10 saying, we're, we're out here, we're alone. We're now in American communities. This also happens because these are big societies and communal institutions are basically gigantic charities, and they're not, you know, representative government, and they don't reach every Jew. And so, of course, even if they're doing everything right, a lot of Jews are going to feel completely alone in this moment and in this violence. And it's, you know, there's only so many times you can find bullet holes in the morning in your synagogue and not be afraid to go to your synagogue. And that fear is deep and real. And it's in the nature of terrorism that very little terrorism can produce a profound psychological effect. And so a lot of Jews are feeling under siege. And at the same time, certainly Jews who are most connected to the community, most likely to be going to a synagogue, they're the ones feeling under siege. And then they're always the, you know, NDP ties are always going to roll out. What are you talking about? I got 60 Jews on this, on this letter that say we're not feeling under siege. Yeah, you probably also don't go to synagogue all that much statistically. Don't. Now bring me the one who does. The Jews feel under siege. I want to get your take on the community. I love the Canadian Jewish community. I've had given talks. I've visited Vancouver and Toronto, and some of these organizations do absolutely remarkable work on. On Holocaust memory, on. On tolerance education, work with schools, work with police departments. I know some of these people. I know they're wonderful, fantastic people, doing a lot. They're also a tiny minority that doesn't. Isn't able to drive the agenda of Canadian politics, no matter how much it wants to, even if they. Even if they wanted to. What's your take? What's your take on the position of the community and on the leadership of the community, the institutions?
- [65:49]
B
So first, I would say to my Canadian Jewish leadership friends, take the compliment. The Canadian Jewish community is a much more centralized, much more organized community. So in the same way that I will give them acknowledgement of some of the strengths, when there's a problem and there's a big problem, as you pointed out, they're going to get the complaints, and sometimes it's reasonable and sometimes not. I'll go into more detail. My biggest frustration with the approach to anti Semitism, both in Canada and in other countries, has been this phrase that I detest called hardening the target. The amount of money that has been invested in hardening the target, which means hiring police and making our synagogues into walled communities. And you go to the Montreal Federation and you have to go through a machine that's as elaborate as a machine you'll go through to get onto the airplane at Ben Gurion Airport. I mean, A, it breaks my heart that that money is going there, but B, it shows a kind of not getting to the problem and a hunkering down. I spoke at. I think I mentioned the name, the synagogue, the leading synagogue in Montreal, the Charmayim. And I said, you know, instead of hardening the target, why don't we broaden the target? The charshimayim is at the base of a hill called Churchill Street. Called Churchill. Why is it called Churchill? Because across the street from the Charshimayim are two other churches. I said, why don't we, as a community, and I've said this in other places, too, go to our Catholic and Protestant peers and say to them, you know, I'll make you A deal. We'll patrol on Sunday to protect you when you need it, and you'll patrol on Saturday and Shabbat when we need it. And they'll say, oh, we don't need it. And I'll say, okay, now we can start the conversation. And it goes back to my broader point about making this a real. This has to be. This has to. This is not going to be solved until it's seen as a Canadian issue rather than a Jewish issue. And it's not going to be solved if we start burrowing behind bigger and bigger walls at the same time. I totally understand and respect every principal, every rabbi, every president of the synagogue, every community, every federation leader has to worry, most importantly about avoiding a Bondi beach, God forbid, about avoiding bloodshed. So it's a problem. There's a cultural issue that we Americans have with our Canadian brothers and sisters back in the day, in 2000, 2001, 2002, when I first came out of the closet from behind, my clean name is Gil Troy, and said, I am a Zionist and started talking about Zionism. Then I was told by the Canadian leadership then, you know, anger doesn't work. We did a poll, and Canadians don't like anger. And so don't be so angry and don't use words like terrorism and Yasser Arafat when they were killing people on the streets, you grew up. They were blowing up bombs, they were blowing up cafes and buses with bombs and suicide bombs. And I'm not supposed to be angry. And I said, I'm a historian, but I don't know much. But I can't think of in history one movement that didn't succeed without some righteous anger. And Elie Wiesel actually came at the time without really knowing much about the Canadian Jewish community, although maybe he'd been prepared or just had that Elie Wiesel genius. And he got up and he said, you know, sometimes when you're against a threat like terrorism, anger is the rational response. And I think Canadian decency, I think the Canadian Jewish establishment has long feared that. And as you point out, because of the centralization of the organization, often the leaders are often the fundraisers. And so, yes, we know that yelling and screaming and raising money to reinforce concrete is going to get more money than Jewish education on one hand. But on the other hand, they're not. They're not really primed and raised to be the kind of angry activists that maybe Casey is and that I was back in the day when I was in Canada, and anger sometimes is important. So I do see there's a kind of cultural issue, which is their Canadianness, let's say, and also their Canadian Jewishness. Why? Because it worked. And I see this in America, too, when students say to me, oh, you know, why don't we reach out to the anti Zionists? And why don't we reach out to the pro Palestinians? And by the way, I'm happy to speak to anybody who's willing to talk to me about this, but I said, if they celebrated October 7th, where do we. Where's the common conversation? But what's the great skill of American Jews? What's the great skill of Canadian Jews? We've been raised to fit in. We've been raised to be accepted. And it drives us crazy that we're not popular. So one of the things we have to do is we have to pivot and we start raising tough Jews. We have to start talking. I hate the word resilience because it's become the cliche. We have to start teaching students that when a bully comes after you, you don't run to the teacher. Even in Jewish day school, you hit him back or hurt back, because there are female bullies too. We have to start having an ideological change. And part of it also is lean into the great strength of Canadian Jewry. What's the great strength of Canadian Jewry? I've talked about it. The institutions, the education, the synagogues, the identity. So let's double down on identity. Let's make sure I call this Pilates. The stronger the core is, the more we're proud, the more we're confident, the more we're tough and righteously angry when necessary. But the more we're also celebrating Israel and celebrating Zionism and celebrating Jerusalem, the better off we will be. And I have a proof of this little experiment. And now I'm going to sound like an obnoxious, spoiled, boasting father, but it just happens to be a fact that my son, Yoni, Yoni Choi, was recruited by the Montreal Federation because they understood the need to raise a new generation who were young and proud and free and not scarred by anti Semitism. And they turn to an Israeli with Canadian roots. My son, and he's there working with the Hillels. And what he has done more and more is he says he evaluates every program based on just one thing. Does it advance a positive Jewish Zionist agenda? And so, for example, at McGill University, on the second anniversary of October 7th this past year, there were 70 Jews and non Jews, professors and students who gathered for vigil in memory of what happened on October 7 and to show their righteous anger against it. And one pro Palestinian burned an Israeli flag. And in fact this time, and it didn't happen two years ago, the McGill police came in and removed that young man from being a hooligan and being a vandal. Yoni's press release didn't mention the anti Semite and only mentioned the 70. So sometimes it's the story we tell. So there's a tension here. On the one hand we have to fight back anti Semitism just enough so that we don't feel like victims and we push back, but not so much that they hijack the agenda. Jean Paul Sartre said and they have to have some French to bring in
- [72:33]
A
the just to make them respect us.
- [72:35]
B
Jean Paul Sartre said, the anti Semite makes the Jewish. In Canada we have a perfect laboratory because we have such amazing institutions to show that the Jew makes the Jew and the Zionist makes the Jew and the Jews make the Zionism and our Zionism. And this is a Zionism that you've articulated so beautifully is not an anti anti Semitism or an anti anti Zionism. It's a positive, proud, strong identity Zionism which is resilient enough and open enough to be critical and self critical, but also can distinguish between true enemies and thoughtful critics. But more important focuses on the positive. And so are there ways in which I wish the Canadian Jewish community was stronger and angrier? Yes. But do I see that it's somewhere in their program, you know, to. I think part of the problem also has been that for decades there was a lot of denial. We all talk about the Canadian Jewish leadership. I haven't heard enough about Canadian lawyers mobilizing. I haven't heard enough about Canadian politicians, sorry, Jewish Canadian Jews turning to their colleagues and mobilizing Canadian Jews and turning to the politicians. I think that it's easy to say, oh, these leaders of federation and these rabbis who are so busy with so many other things should also do that. But I'd like to see more prominent Canadians, more wealthy Canadian Canadian Jews leveraging both their whatever power and money they have and most important their contact. They have to be willing to have the difficult conversations and turn to their friends and say, you know what? Look at that National Post headline. My people are under siege. It's time to help. Not for my sake, but for Canada's sake. And so it's very easy to pick on the prominent leaders. I think we also have to look at, especially lawyers I think could be doing more to really lean into because by the way we should also point out when we talk about the difference between us and Canada. Canada has hate legislation. Canada has. And I don't always believe in it. Right. So I wouldn't be the perfect lawyer for this. But Canada has a much more elaborate infrastructure for fighting hate and fighting hate speech. Let's use it, let's lean into it, let's turn to our experts, but let's not just make it about the Jewish community and the Jewish leaders. Let's make it a broader fight.
- [74:49]
A
Gil Troy, thank you so much for joining me. I wanted just two quick comments as we sign off. One, to the people who will write to me to say that this kind of conversation is not encouraging harmony in Canadian society. Please include in your email everything I got wrong and links to those polls that show other numbers and links to other events and links to. I know that there are also parts of the Muslim community that come out openly and explicitly against antisemitism and join the Jewish community in its fights. That half or silent is not helpful to your case. Please write me why I'm wrong. I am eager to learn. This is not the last episode. There will be more. Don't write me to say I'm just wrong. That's not useful to me and it's a waste of your time. And the second point is Canadian Jewish institutions are incredible in many ways. And my one big experience with them was this process that we were both involved in in the Federation's decision to write a new history curriculum for Montreal Jewish kids in their Jewish day schools. And I learned many things about the Montreal community. This curriculum, by the way, now exists. It's published, it's available. You have to go to the Federation if you're a Jewish day school somewhere in, I don't know, San Diego or Broward county, and you have to ask for it. It's some nominal fee for it. They don't want. They want people to use it and they want people to be in contact with them when they use it. But I urge Jewish communities to go to the Montreal Federation and get this curriculum. It's a curriculum of what Jewish kids should know about their own history. You and I were both part of a kind of advisory process on this. They went to many, many people, including the educators in Montreal. I learned that the Montreal community is incredibly diverse, from a very Yeshivish Orthodox day school through modern Orthodox all the way to Bundist, secularist, you know, formerly socialist kind of day school, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, and the whole diversity of the Jewish people. And this is a federation that, you know what, our kids reach the college campus and they hear people screaming at them about their own story, and we haven't taught them their story enough. And so we're going to get this done. And two years ago, they started this process, and now they have a curriculum. There are some initiatives like this in the American Jewish community, which is much more than 10 times bigger than the Canadian Jewish community and much more than 20 times richer than the American Jewish, than the Canadian Jewish community, and has a fraction of what the Canadian Jewish community has already produced on this score of teaching our kids to face this moment. And so my very narrow experience with Canadian Jewry has been that they face a greater threat. They are smaller and weaker and less able to affect their society at large because they're a smaller minority. But they've already done more. And, you know, that, to me, is incredible. It's possible that the gospel will come from the north for what American jewelry faces.
- [77:46]
B
Amen.
- [77:47]
A
Brother Gil, thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you.
- [77:50]
B
Thanks for the work.
- [77:51]
A
We'll talk more about this great.