← Call Me Back - with Dan Senor
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- [00:00]
Dan Senor
Hi, it's Dan. Over the past couple of years, CallMeBack has grown into something much bigger than we ever expected. A place for clarity, context, and honest conversations at a time when those things can seem hard to find. That's what ARC Media is all about. Building a truly independent voice, which means no one shaping what we say or how we say it. To help support our rapidly expanding operations, we created Inside Call Me Back our Members Only feed, where we answer your questions and bring you into the conversations that typically happen after the cameras stop rolling. If CallMeBack has been meaningful to you and you want to be part of what we're building, I hope you'll join us. Right now we're offering an annual subscription for $60. That's just $5 a month. Your contribution goes a long way in helping us show up when it matters most. You can subscribe@arkmedia.org or through the link in the Show Notes and to our insiders. Thank you. You are listening to an Art Media podcast.
- [01:11]
Jesse Brown
When I say that my world is crumbling, it's not simply about that I found myself under this fire. It's that something essential was broken about the country that I thought that I lived in. It just felt unthinkable that Canada would accept these kinds of narratives and would turn on its Jews. And the sectors of Canada that were turning were very specifically the parts of Canada that were most engaged in anti discrimination and anti racism. And I don't know that I can ever see those people or Canadian society the same way ever again. I don't live in the country that I thought that I lived in.
- [01:55]
Dan Senor
It's 9:30am on Sunday, Sunday, May 3rd here in New York City. It is 4:30pm on Sunday, May 3rd in Israel. Over the past two and a half years, anti Semitic violence and harassment in the United States has surged to unprecedented levels. And the debate over where the line falls between legitimate protest and outright Jew hatred has consumed many aspects of American politics. But as bad as it has been in the United States, it has been measurably, if not demonstrably worse. In other countries around the world, in other diasporas, the uk, France, Australia, and the focus of today's conversation, Canada. Since October 7, Jewish communities across Canada have experienced a pandemic of harassment, vandalism and violence. Jewish schools have been shot at, synagogues have been firebombed. Jewish owned businesses have been targeted. And on university campuses from Halifax to Vancouver and from Montreal to Toronto, Jewish students have been described feeling unsafe, isolated and abandoned by the institutions that were supposed to Protect them. Canada, like Australia and the uk, has long prided itself on its, quote, multiculturalism, its tolerance, its decency. But the events of the past two years have forced a hard question. Was that self image not just too comfortable, but a polite mask that slipped the moment Jews needed it not to? Today we are going to find out what's actually happening to Canadian Jews and what it tells us about the country Canada thought it was. My guest today spent the last year trying to figure out what happened to the Canada he thought he knew. Jesse Brown is the founder, editor and publisher of Canadaland, one of Canada's most important independent media outlets. He recently produced what Is Happening Here, a six part investigative podcast series in which he traveled across Canada speaking with Jews, anti Zionist activists and public figures about how October 7th changed their lives. We'll link to that series in the show notes. Jesse Brown welcome to Call me back Dan.
- [04:03]
Jesse Brown
Thank you for having me and thank you for doing this episode because we hear about the violence in London, the stabbings in London, we hear about this all around the world and we're just heading very obviously towards that in Canada. And thank God, the one metric we haven't hit is like a Bondi beach style massacre. But we're steadily approaching it and, and it's important to talk about this stuff before something like that happens.
- [04:24]
Dan Senor
Absolutely. Which is partly why I wanted to have a conversation with you. And you and I met sometime after Bondi beach and you were saying that you were worried, you were alarmed that Canada could have such an experience. And it just seems like every few days, just last week in London, we had these stabbings. So these kinds of incidents, this pandemic is everywhere, not the US yet, but in many countries, in many diasporas. And Canada in many respects is like a case study or microcosm which has some attributes that are relevant to these other communities and then some elements that are specific to Canada. And I want to get into that. I want to also say, before we dig into this, that as you and I have discussed, I spent a big part of my youth in Canada. I grew up in Toronto. And I should say, or I should disclose that I had a wonderful experience as a Jew. I wasn't a Canadian citizen, but as a Jew living in Canada now, maybe that was specific to Toronto, where my family was living. But the Jewish community did feel under siege, did not feel under threat at all. And it's especially why I'm so shocked by what I'm seeing and hearing. And when I visit Canada now, because it's almost unrecognizable to me. I had issues with Canada when I was younger, which partly led to my wanting to return to the US but they weren't about my Jewish life in Canada. So what you have been focused on is so jarring to me, and I want to dig into it, but I guess tell me about how you would describe yourself. Your life in Toronto, in Canada, up until the night of October 6, 2023,
- [05:55]
Jesse Brown
similar to what you just said. I think I'm a fairly typical Canadian Jew in that being Jewish is not something that mattered much to anyone but me. Like you, I work in public. I host a news podcast. So I don't even think my audience knew I was Jewish. Most of them, it's not something that I was hiding. It just. It was something that I considered as part of my family life, my cultural life, a very small amount of religious practice. I don't think before October 7th, I faced one act of discrimination, and this was a point of pride for me as a Canadian. I felt like here we had achieved almost total integration without assimilation, an almost total sense of belonging. Canadians aren't big on patriotism, but if I was patriotic about anything, it's that we had cracked. We had solved this problem of how people can live together. And when covering Canada, you would see different groups that hadn't achieved that level of integration where there was still discrimination against black people, indigenous people, Muslims. I felt a responsibility like, okay, this is possible to get there. So I covered those issues. But personally, I didn't feel any sense of grievance or racism. That was sort of the Canada that I thought I lived in.
- [07:02]
Dan Senor
And just, again, so we can understand the Canadian Jewish life you were living. Were you part of a Jewish community in Toronto? How much of your identity was that of a Canadian Jew? I'm just trying to get a sense of. Because there are different communities you and I were talking about before we started recording. I mean, I came out of Shabbat yesterday, and the first thing I saw on X was a report from the Toronto Police Department saying they're investigating an incident where clearly visible Jews, quote, unquote, were shot at with some kind of weapon. It's not entirely clear what kind of weapon. At the Bathurst and Lawrence area, which is our listeners who are from Canada, from Toronto know is a very Jewish community, probably more of an Orthodox community. So because the police report says easily identifiable, they were clearly targeted for being Jews. They were easily identifiable as Jews. Where was your Jewish life?
- [07:48]
Jesse Brown
It was along that street, Bathurst street, and in Montreal, where I went to school, to McGill and stuck around, which has its own very rich Jewish culture. But the thing about being a Canadian Jew is if you go up Bathurst street, it gets much more visibly Jewish. If you go downtown, where I live, my neighborhood is not Jewish. You know, there are Jews who live there, but it's an integrated existence.
- [08:07]
Dan Senor
And for. I just want our listeners to get a sense of what you're talking about. We're talking about Bathurst Street. It would be like if you were to go kind of from midtown all the way up in Manhattan, all the way up through the Upper west side and even north of that, like, these are the ranges you're talking about which Jews walk comfortably in these neighborhoods. They wouldn't think twice about the possibility of being shot at or stabbed.
- [08:27]
Jesse Brown
Bathurst street has been described as the longest Jewish neighborhood in the world. So half of the Jews in Canada, you know, Jews are like just over 1% of Canada. We're a small minority here.
- [08:35]
Dan Senor
So about a community of about 400,000.
- [08:37]
Jesse Brown
Yeah, not quite, but getting there. And about half of us live in the Greater Toronto area, and Bathurst is like the spine of it. And, you know, there are many Jewish communities along Bathurst street. But. But if you want to find us, you come to my neighborhood. You don't know that I'm Jewish. You wouldn't know that you're supposed to attack me. If you're trying to hurt Jews, if you want to hurt Jews, you go to a synagogue or you go further north on Bathurst and you look for a streiml. You look for a visibly Jewish person to attack. And so it's really been concentrated. It's not just the level of anti Semitism in Canada. It's that it's really hitting. Like, since you and I spoke, three synagogues in Toronto have been sprayed with gunfire, and all of them are on or near Bathurst Street. So this is. It's a highly targeted community.
- [09:19]
Dan Senor
Okay, so in preparation for today's episode, you said something to Ilan, our producer, that he relayed to me, and I want to bring it up because he was so moved by it. And six words. You said, my Diaspora Jewish world is crumbling. So what do you mean by that? And what has this meant for you personally?
- [09:38]
Jesse Brown
Yeah, I think that the Diaspora Jewish culture is crumbling more widely. But I'll answer your question. I hope we could return to that and talk about what it means to be a Diaspora Jew in a wider sense, because it's changing completely. I'll give you my story as it's just one of many, but I think it does tell us something about the wider experience. So, like I said, I'm covering Canada and I'm frequently finding myself covering acts of racism and discrimination.
- [10:00]
Dan Senor
And you're covering it as a journalist?
- [10:01]
Jesse Brown
I'm covering it as a journalist for an audience that is very much not a Jewish audience. There's a small amount of Jews in the audience, and over the years, my audience has sort of formed a sort of a more progressive leaning audience, which, you know, Canada is a more progressive leaning country. So when October 7th happened, you know, I've heard this phrase, the October 8th Jew, and I've been referred to as an October 8th Jew Jew. It was, as the weeks and months went on, the response of other Canadians is what changed my world. So I'm covering the protests here in Canada, and I'm pointing out instances where the protests cross the line from criticism of Israel to a group of protesters who start directing their protest at a Jewish community center instead of a government building. Or a chant that goes further than from the river to the sea. You know, it's from water to water, Palestine is Arab, or, you know, the presence of Hamas imagery. I'm just sort of acting as, like a journalist. Like, well, I'm used to these symbols and signs, and I think somebody's got to point it out when it goes too far. And I'm expecting the audience to respond the same way they always respond when I point out discrimination, which is, we're glad that you're keeping an eye on this, and that's wrong. I used to even get, like, organizers of the protests would make public statements saying, that's not us. We don't stand for that. And show appreciation that it's being pointed out so that they could rein it in. Everything changed after October 7th. My own audience started to respond and the messages would get shared. So I was hearing from a lot of people I'd never heard from before. And there was an anger that this was being pointed out. There was a denial that it was happening. I got used to the beats of this, Dan. So it would be, that's not true. They weren't actually yelling at the jcc. The camera angle is misrepresenting this. Then if you could demonstrate. No, they really were doing this. You would hear, well, maybe they're Jewish. Maybe this is a false flag attack. Maybe this was a Jew trying to distract and paint the protest movement with a bad brush. And then when you could prove that it wasn't a Jew doing it for those reasons, or not a Jew at all, then it would get Uglier. And it would turn to me, there are children being killed in Gaza. Why are you focusing on this? And then it became like an accusation. You're actively trying to distract us from Gaza. Maybe you're getting paid. Maybe you work for the Mossad. So these messages became viral. The backlash against merely covering antisemitism in Canada was a very popular thing to mock, deride, and denounce. It just became kind of an accepted fact that I must be doing this on behalf of my Zionism, which is an interesting thing, because as a journalist and for other reasons, I've just never used that term. So that got kind of painted on me, and it kind of just spiraled from there in a way that I think is familiar to a lot of different Jews in the Diaspora in many ways, in that, you know, you turn to your colleagues for support. And I found that some of the people in my own newsroom agreed with the critics and felt like we shouldn't be covering these things. There are more important things in the world than to cover these things. And you're going too far in the way that you cover these things. So when I say that my world is crumbling, it's not simply about that I found myself under this fire. It's that something essential was broken about the country that I thought that I lived in. That something that I always took for granted. Like you say, it just felt unthinkable that Canada would accept these kinds of narratives and would, you know, not just sort of ignore harm to Jews, but actually turn on its Jews. The sectors of Canada that were turning were very specifically the parts of Canada that were most engaged in anti discrimination and anti racism and pointing out microaggressions and saying things like, we need to defer to black people about what is anti black racism. We need to defer to Muslims. They are the ones who should define this. And the double standards would just pile up in a way that initially just sort of had me sputtering. I was kind of in shock and disbelief at the hypocrisy of it.
- [13:46]
Dan Senor
I just want to cite one statistic here. According to public data, a Jew in Canada is now statistically nine times just. I want our listeners to understand this. A Jew in Canada is now statistically nine times more likely to be a victim of a hate crime than a Jew in the United States. Now, the problem in the United States is alarming. It's vast. It's on the rise, as we've documented repeatedly on this podcast. And yet it is a fraction of what is going on in Canada and what Canadian Jews are dealing with. You spent six months traveling from Halifax to Vancouver interviewing Canadian Jews. Set the scene for us. What does Canada feel like right now and how is it qualitatively different from what. What you believe American Jews are going through?
- [14:28]
Jesse Brown
I'll stick to the objective facts here and then we'll talk about the feelings of it, because there are different feelings to it. You know, we hear this phrase a lot. Jews are feeling unsafe. It's true. But I don't like the emphasis on the feelings because Jews are unsafe in Canada. The strict comparison of the StatsCan data of police reported hate crimes with FBI data is where you get the nine times stat from. But Jews are unsafe in that there have been like six or seven mass murder attempts, Bondi beach attempts in Canada. Jews are unsafe in that there's been gunfire and firebombings. I think more synagogues have been vandalized, attacked, or threatened in Canada than any other country. And there are some significant differences in the way that this is happening in Canada than it is elsewhere. Yes, of course there's anti Semitism. There's not a global phenomenon. Since October 7, it's different in Canada. It's different in who the targets are. The movement in Canada has named Jewish summer camps and private Jewish schools. It's so brazen. They're trying to get charitable status revoked from these Jewish children's institutions on the basis of that it's against charity law to fund a foreign army. I don't know that anyone's funding a foreign army from these schools and summer camps, but they're building their argument on.
- [15:39]
Dan Senor
I want to say something about this for a moment because we had talked about on this podcast how the Jewish camps were being targeted. And then a friend of mine last week sent me something about this effort to change the tax status. What you were referring to here.
- [15:51]
Jesse Brown
Yeah.
- [15:51]
Dan Senor
For Canadian Jewish day schools. So for listeners to understand, this would mean then that you couldn't get a charitable tax deduction or benefit if you donate to a Canadian Jewish day school. So obviously the cost of Jewish day schools for many families is cost prohibitive. For day schools, anywhere is cost prohibitive. And if you suddenly remove its charitable status, you know, good luck. Like these day schools will not, many of them won't survive, which is exactly what the intent is of those who are organizing this campaign. Now this I pointed out to my Canadian friend. I was like, you know, the odds of this actually being successful are low. It seems like a very weak case that they're going to but it occurred to me as I was telling him that it doesn't matter. They don't have to actually change the tax status, be successful in their campaign to win. They're just making every Jewish institution controversial. So if you're a Canadian Jewish family, you're sitting there thinking, ugh, do I want to send my kid to this place? I want to send my sister to a safe place that's tranquil and protected and a sort of a quote, unquote happy place. And now you're telling me the school is the subject of this huge controversy and it's being publicly outed and it's the subject of public scrutiny by all these mischief makers. And what do I need it for? And this is all part of. Feels to me like a broader effort to drive Jews underground.
- [17:02]
Jesse Brown
Yeah, I think you've put your finger on it, though I don't discount the possibility they'll be successful because there's a lot of support within government and they have had the charitable status of other Jewish charities revoked.
- [17:10]
Dan Senor
There is support for this within the government?
- [17:12]
Jesse Brown
Oh, yeah. Within the public service.
- [17:14]
Dan Senor
I did not know that.
- [17:15]
Jesse Brown
There's a huge amount of institutional anti Semitism and they have revoked the status of different Jewish charities. This feels ridiculous. Like they're basing it on that some of the people who go to these schools and camps go on to be. To serve in the idf. Well, yeah, because some Jews make aliyah, but, you know, who knows? But you're absolutely right. It's an assault. It's very personal. It's like every place that gets hit in Canada, I know that place, I've been in that place. And the calculation is we're talking about Jewish feelings. There's a lot of Canadian Jews who might be listening or watching right now saying, well, I don't feel this way at all. And it's absolutely true. If you don't go to synagogue, if you don't wear a kippah, if you don't send your kid to Jewish school or Jewish camp, if you're not part of community, if you don't live a Jewish. I don't judge who's more Jewish than anybody else. Be Jewish the way you want to be. But the voices that we're hearing saying, oh, this is all overblown. Nothing's happening. If you actually dig into it, you'll find that they don't have connection to these places. And that is the goal. And it's actually the explicit goal. Because if you talk to anti Zionists, they want to sever Israel from Jewish identity. They want Judaism to exist and they conceive of it as a religion only. So Jewish peoplehood, which has to do with culture, going to eat at the cafe landlord or a Jewish cafe, or going to shop in a Jewish store or going to synagogue, that's where they find us. And that's what they're attacking, the things that actually make us a people in Canada. So that's what's different here. Something else that's different here is just. You'll see. I think I watched the protest footage in the States and I compare it to Canada. The normalcy of Hamas imagery, Hezbollah imagery, military imagery, camouflage smoke bombs, the signage, the inverted red triangle, pictures of guns, chants in Arabic about ethnic cleansing or about killing Jews. This is not an anomaly. You get this. Oh, it's the bad apple argument. It's not the bad apple here. It is present at almost every demonstration in Canada. So a lot of this has to do with the policing. There's almost no enforcement. The police and, you know, campus security as well have taken a tack of de escalation and non confrontation. Let this thing play itself out. And so when you don't confront it and you don't, you know, okay, that sign came up, that's a death threat. Let's move in and make arrests. If you don't stop that. It constantly encourages more extreme messaging. And the only policing that we saw for many months. This is interesting, Dan. The cops would say this is an angry demonstration. They're yelling death threats out, but we're just going to let it play out because no one's getting hurt. It's only when somebody gets hurt that we're going to step in. So when do they step in? If a Jew approaches the protest with a contrary message? Well, yeah, if you've got one Jew approaching an angry crowd of people who have these angry anti Jewish statements, there's going to be violence. So the cops would remove the Jew. And there was even an instance in Montreal where a rabbi was standing on St. Catherine with his family and a protest starts marching by. They weren't trying to be there for the protest, but a protest starts marching by and he starts filming. St. Catherine is a major downtown street in Montreal. He was just out in public with his friends, family, and this anti Zionist protest starts to march past and he starts to film it. Well, a police officer notices that he's wearing a keepa and he orders him and his family to leave. Right. The Jew was made to leave. So that's what we get in Canada because the authorities here are terrified to trample on the free speech rights or they don't want to get in the way of this protest movement. So there's a lot of differences in the way that this is manifesting itself in Canada that I think are worth paying attention to.
- [20:45]
Dan Senor
You've been talking. When you and I met in New York, you said something to me. You said, what's different in Canada is it has a systemic feel to it. In other words, we look at what's happening in the US and there's a pocket here of it, there's a pocket there. And obviously you're seeing these trends that are emerging all over the place. But it doesn't, at least yet in the US feel like a systemic problem. You said, no, no, no. In Canada, it's systemic. And by the way, Jesse, I hear the same thing from my friends in the uk, in the London Jewish community. It was just in France. I was in France last September, heard the exact same thing from French Jews with our call me back community. We have a large audience in Australia who we're in regular contact with. They say the same thing there. It feels systemic. What do you mean by that?
- [21:28]
Jesse Brown
So I'll describe this in a couple of ways. You heard me kind of allude to it earlier. In Canada, multiculturalism, diversity, pluralism is almost a national religion. And it's one that I feel I have a lot of sympathy and identification with. In the years right before October 7th, we had Justin Trudeau as the Prime Minister and we were having this like national reckoning with the way that indigenous people were treated, which was being declared a genocide, a cultural genocide.
- [21:51]
Dan Senor
And this is your experience with what you would call like our Native Americans. These are the native Canadians.
- [21:57]
Jesse Brown
That's right.
- [21:57]
Dan Senor
Which is a big part of Canadian history. Yes, but the way they were dealt with. Maybe give us a couple. I don't want a huge digression, but just because I don't think many of our listeners are familiar with the history, why it's such a deep seated legacy in Canada.
- [22:11]
Jesse Brown
I mean, it's not that dissimilar than what happened in America. It's a horrible tragedy. I think that there was a form of genocide that was practiced and in Canada. It's almost the original sin of Canada. In the same way that America has had this deep reckoning ongoing with slavery in Canada. It finally became, you know, the residential schools where indigenous kids were stripped from their families and forced to speak English and beaten and sometimes killed in these Catholic run schools. The displacement from lands, starvation of the plains, first Nations There's a long legacy in Canada of really suppressing and oppressing people. And it's with us today in that there are dozens of Indigenous communities that don't have clean drinking water. And pretty much by every measurable metric, they're living lives that are more impoverished and more difficult. It's the legacy of what Canada did. And so this kind of finally became something that Canada at least purported to deal with through the Truth and Reconciliation process, through decolonization. And so these ideas of settler colonialism were kind of rendered mainstream. The Prime Minister himself kind of became the personification of this notion that Canada was evil. And now we're dealing with it, we're not evil anymore. Justin Trudeau is the most kind of virtue presenting figure. He was going to own the sins of the past and correct them. And so this notion really became infused in Canadian institutions, whether it's through, you know, hiring practices or giving land acknowledgments. Basically, Indigenous issues came to the forefront. And this, you know, maybe niche academic concept of the evils of settler colonialism became part of the national narrative. It's sort of where Pierre Trudeau's, you know, diversity and multiculturalism morphed into Justin Trudeau's opposition to settler colonialism. And it's really worth noting an abandonment of any sense of national narrative, of, like, Canada being a good place for any reason. Trudeau referred to Canada as a post national state. So there's really no sense of anything to be proud of. To be a Canadian is to reckon with the evils of the past. So that's the backdrop.
- [24:14]
Dan Senor
And just to give how it manifests itself in daily life in Canada, I think it's important just to provide some examples. So, for instance, we here in the US Kind of joke now. There's kind of an eye roll and a lot of snark when you hear a land acknowledgement if you're attending a graduation ceremony at a university or. Or some kind of, you know, if you're at some kind of event. But it's. There was like a craze of this kind of stuff a few years ago, and it's less and less of it is going on now in the US So much so that when it does happen, people are, you know, there's. It's the subject of mockery. But in Canada, it's like it's not, you know, many public events, they do land acknowledgments before they sing the Canadian
- [24:52]
Jesse Brown
national anthem, pretty much all of them. And anything connected with government, I think that's A good way to situate it down, because Americans are familiar with this culture and like, you know, everything, you know, anti racism and DEI and land acknowledgments. This whole basket of things which gets eye rolls and is thought of as, you know, woke performative stuff in Canada, it's ingrained. It's not just the stuff of campus politics. It's the stuff of Canadian institutional life. My criticism of it is that it's surface level and we need to go much deeper than that, but I don't really care.
- [25:19]
Dan Senor
Well, the other thing that's so foolish about it is it's cheap, very cheap virtue signaling. It doesn't, you know, all these activists engage in land acknowledgments, and that's where their kind of sacrifice to fix this right, this wrong begins and ends. It doesn't require anything of them beyond just some cheap, throwaway rhetoric. That's the irony.
- [25:38]
Jesse Brown
Yeah. It's symbolic. And you know what? I actually think that it was because the ineffectiveness of it was starting to show itself. It's not like we cured the issues over the Trudeau years. You know, like, for all of this performance, there are still huge problems facing indigenous communities in Canada. And I think that's important, too, to recognize, because the notion that we could just sort of cleanse our hands of the blood of the past, it wasn't really working necessarily. And then comes October 7th, and then Canadians see, oh, well, here's a contemporary settler colonizer. Here is not a genocide of the past. This is. People are saying, they said it so many times, it just got accepted as fact, as truth. The mayor of Toronto has said it, here's a genocide happening right now. And I think that a lot of that energy that was frustrated in Canada, where we thought that we could actually solve this problem here in Canada, it just got projected and it's a much easier thing. And this is something that Canadians have been doing forever. Canadians are the first. If you listen to CBC Radio over the years, denouncing the evils of tyrannical regimes.
- [26:38]
Dan Senor
Which is Canada's version of BBC.
- [26:40]
Jesse Brown
Yeah, it's the public broadcaster.
- [26:41]
Dan Senor
Yeah. Or pbs. Yeah.
- [26:43]
Jesse Brown
Very, you know, moral reproach for any, you know, perception of tyranny or human rights abuse elsewhere, but a real discomfort with actually looking at what's happening here in Canada. So this is my feeling about why. One of the reasons why it's so systemic, but there's another more practical reason why it's systemic in Canada. And I think that has to do with recognizing a certain rational Target in America, if you are against Israel, if that's where you've landed, that Israel needs to be opposed and you're an American, it's very clear who you should be protesting because the American government does support Israel. Your politicians may have taken money from aipac and Israel really does rely on political and financial support and military support. So that's where you take your protest movement in Canada. Our politicians neutralize themselves very quickly as targets. They, the Canadian government recognized Palestine, cut off arms to Israel, denunciations of Israel, up and down levels of government. It would almost be like if you're an anti Zionist, would you go protest Mamdani. It just doesn't make sense. And so the protest movement doesn't therefore say okay, our goals have been met, let's move on and let's start sticking up for Iranians because they have a tyrannical situation that they could. No, no, it moves on in this endless hunt for complicity among civil society. So what is the biggest target, one of them in Canada of the protest movement is a, a book chain called Indigo. They're protesting bookstores. Why has the protest movement targeted bookstores and throwing blood red paint and calling the bookstore owner genocidal? Because she has a charity that funds scholarships for former IDF soldiers.
- [28:24]
Dan Senor
And Indigo is like the Barnes and Noble or it's the biggest bookstore chain in Canada.
- [28:28]
Jesse Brown
It's the big book chain in Canada and they go and they have die ins where they, they've lit fires in the bookstore. The image of fires in a Jewish owned bookstore brings up certain memories. By the way, you can buy anti Israel, pro Palestine literature. They're not banning any books at this bookstore.
- [28:43]
Dan Senor
By the way, the woman who leads this bookstore chain is Heather Reisman who is, let's just call it what it is. She and her husband are also among the biggest Jewish philanthropists in Canada. Maybe they fund some programs in Israel, but they are also some of the biggest supporters of Canadian Jewish life and
- [29:01]
Jesse Brown
cultural life outside of the Jewish world in Canada as well.
- [29:04]
Dan Senor
Right? Exactly. Important.
- [29:05]
Jesse Brown
She has been singled out I think more than any other individual in Canada as a genocide heir. This is the target that explains a lot of it. And this tells you something about anti Zionism outside of Canadian context. It's voracious, it moves on from the political world. And you can see online there's this constant search for maybe your brother in law, you must be a Zionist and we're going to find it. And the truth is that the Jewish community is so small that if you go looking for conspiracy if you go looking for connections, you'll find plenty. We all went to the same schools, we all go to the same camps. There's not a lot of us.
- [29:37]
Dan Senor
Yeah. Okay, now I want to talk about the role. This is an uncomfortable part of the conversation, but we need to go there. The Muslim population in Canada, which has been growing considerably over the last, I guess, decade plus, by my lights, when I was growing up in Canada, did not have this kind of growth. But right now the Muslim population in Canada outnumbers Jews by roughly 5 to 1, which is obviously exponentially higher than the ratio between Muslims and Jews that coexist in the United States. And, and my first question is, how has that impacted the nature of the violence and the harassment against Jews?
- [30:14]
Jesse Brown
I mean, it's an obvious factor that Canada does everything to ignore. And it is uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable for all the reasons. I mean, I have similarly considered Muslim integration into Canada to be a point of pride in Canada. And I've had, I've had bitter fights with various conservative pundits in Canada who, you know, after 911 were kind of up in high dudgeon about Islamism. And I said, you know what, this may be true elsewhere, but it hasn't happened here. We haven't had terrorist attacks in Canada. And I was very skeptical and damning and not kind to people who I felt were trying to get me to blame and fear my neighbor. I work with Muslims, I'm friends with Muslims, and I know that there was this horrible phase of systemic Islamophobia after 9 11. So having said all of that, yes, we have tripled our Muslim population in Canada in like a 20 year period. And now Muslims outnumber Jews 5 to 1. Where these Muslims have come from include mass migration from Syria, from Pakistan, from countries that just as an objective fact, have a curriculum and a religious culture that includes Jew hatred. And they're coming into a Canada that is no longer telling a cogent story to newcomers about like, welcome to Canada, you're very welcome here. We're glad to have you here. Here's how things work here. That doesn't happen anymore. And so, yeah, if you look at the names of the people who have been convicted or charged with anti Semitic hate crime in Canada, and it's hard to get these names. The police don't often release them and when the police release them, the media often don't publish them intentionally.
- [31:47]
Dan Senor
Let's stay on that for one moment because if you look at the hate crime data in Canada, you can get the macro data and it shows, for instance, in 2025 that the numbers of incidents, I think in 2025 alone is like close to 7,000 incidents of antisemitism, again, against the population. That's just, as you said, just shy of 400,000. And those numbers are double, triple what they were just a few years ago. A friend of mine in Canada who's in government, who's in the opposition, a full disclosure, said, I was talking to them about this topic and they said, yeah, good luck finding the names. When these crimes occur, they will announce, the authorities will announce that there's been this hate crime. But if you want to find out the name of the person who committed the crime, good luck. There's something going on. Can you speak to that? Because I think it gets to this issue of where much of the violence and harassment is being perpetrated from.
- [32:40]
Jesse Brown
It's very hard. And as a journalist, I'm keeping a spreadsheet of it. If anyone wants it, email me@jesseanadaland.com because this is the information that people want to absorb. Obscure. And I understand we don't want to bring scorn on the vast majority of Canadian Muslims who are not this way, but we have a problem and we're not going to solve it unless we can describe it. So, you know, my parents went to a demonstration. They weren't there because they support the war on Gaza. They were there to call for the hostages to be released. And it was the first really big demonstration in Canada, on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, the capital. And they arrested two teenagers. And we just found out these teenagers, this wasn't like a theoretical plot. These teenagers had a plan to detonate three pressure cooker bombs. They had bought thousands of ball bearings, acetone oxidizer. They were going to. One of them was going to kill himself, and they were, they were trying to kill as many Jews as possible.
- [33:31]
Dan Senor
At the demonstration.
- [33:32]
Jesse Brown
At the demonstration, I find out that my parents were targets of a murder plot along with thousands of other Jews. Now, I know because there were some reports reporting about the father of one of those kids, talking about his online radicalization and the name of the father was a Muslim name. But we have laws in Canada that protect the names of minors who are accused of crimes. So that's one way in which the names were just completely obscured. But even in instances where we have the names, and it's not just that they happen to be Muslim, of the seven mass murder attempts in Canada, I think three of them have been connected to isis. So we've had people with making the video with their axe and machete out, having driven to a Jewish neighborhood and thank God the police stopped them right before it happens. This is an Islamism, jihadism problem that is not being dealt with as such in Canada. It is still conceived of. You'll actually hear when I will report about the connections between the anti Zionist movement and the anti Semitic surge of violence. People will say, well, how do we know this isn't white neo Nazis? You haven't proven that. This isn't coming from the right. You know, we're being asked to deny what is just so obviously true. And it's really, it's people who are fighting us. You shouldn't be protecting yourself. We're angry with you for trying to protect yourself.
- [34:50]
Dan Senor
Jesse. It seems to me that there's a big difference between, again, I'm worried about what's happening in the US but certainly over the last year and even before then, but especially over the last year, when I talk to university presidents or various leaders at college campuses where there was a big problem and there's not as much of a problem now, they say, look, the activists, the anti Israel, anti Semitic activists, they don't feel empowered the way they used to. They don't feel coddled the way they used to. And so that's contributed to the downtick, if you will, in many parts of this country. And it feels like there's something else going on in Canada. And the second big distinction is the language and the symbolism and the messaging used, which is, it seems like in Canada it's not just the keffiyeh and kind of soft association with Hamas or Hezbollah or whomever. It's real, like ownership of these terror organizations and real identification, proud association with them.
- [35:44]
Jesse Brown
That's correct. It's explicit. You know, the keffiyehyeh, as you see here, are often wrapped around people's faces to obscure their face. People are cosplaying, they wear Hamas headbands And they're not just doing this on campus. There's a weekly protest that comes to a Jewish neighborhood. They drive in from Muslim neighborhoods and from other neighborhoods. There's also white progressives who join them and they demonstrate where Jews live and they march into the residential neighborhoods and the police follow them to prevent violence. But it looks like they kind of have police protection when they come into these neighborhoods. What finally got a police response was when one of them came with these images of Jews as demonic hook nosed creatures naked in a cave. It looked like it was something out of Der Sturmer. So that, okay, that's racist. Everything else was sort of looked at as a political message that was acceptable. The embrace of jihadism, it's become something that has become exoticized in the kind of campus white progressive world is now echoing this stuff, glorification of martyrs. You'll hear explicit Natalie Knighton, an academic out west praising the Hamas attacks and still teaching in universities. So something that you would see, I think, on the fringes in America, because it's gotten no resistance here, has been given full voice in Canada, almost full cover.
- [37:01]
Dan Senor
I mean, they've been given cover.
- [37:03]
Jesse Brown
Yeah.
- [37:03]
Dan Senor
So you mentioned this Canadian academic, these progressive Canadians, not Muslim, just your regular progressive Canadian people who would have called themselves human rights advocates. And you're seeing them actively embrace the language and framework of groups like Hamas. Maybe this is a statement, a question of the obvious, but has anyone tried to point out the complete hypocrisy of this embrace?
- [37:28]
Jesse Brown
I'm doing my best. I'm not alone in that. But it is. I think it's a futile. Those people are never coming back. They didn't get into these ideas through a process of reason. So they're not gonna be reasoned out of them. The only thing to do is to point that out to people who are still, I guess, in the movable middle, who are horrified by images out of Israel and as good Canadians, as good anti racists. They feel like they're being, you know, it's clear who's good and who's bad here. The point really needs to be made to mainstream Canada, that an embrace of jihadism, of religious fundamentalism, is not compatible with your progressive, anti racist Canadian values. And there's a tremendous hesitation to say that even if people believe it because the slightest whiff of even concern for your Jewish neighbor comes at a social cost, it will result in you being flamed in the comments on your own Facebook posts by your own friends. There's a battle for kind of what is acceptable discourse in Canada.
- [38:26]
Dan Senor
I think it's important to point out that you've rejected the conflation of Zionism with Judaism. And you've said that anti Zionism is not necessarily anti Semitism. You and I probably disagree on that, but that's a conversation for another day. Do you still see a distinction there between anti Zionism and anti Semitism? I know you did before, but given everything you're saying in this conversation, everything you've been reporting on, everything you saw firsthand through your reporting for your Canada Land series, has your thinking evolved on that?
- [38:53]
Jesse Brown
It's only evolved further in this Direction. And I want to convince you of this cuz it's so important. It's so important. I'm done trying to convince people. Actually Zionism isn't what you think it is. It's actually not a bad thing at all. It's just self determined. What do I care if these people are Zionists? I'm done trying to convince people that the phrase anti Zionism is a code word for anti Semitism and that every anti Zionist is secretly a Jew hater. Because there's a lot of people out there who are, who are embracing the term anti Zionism who kind of know into themselves. I don't think I have anything against Jews. I believe very strongly that the way forward on this is to focus on the term anti Zionism itself and accept it on their terms. Don't tell people, it doesn't mean you don't mean what you say. You mean, you actually mean that you hate Jews. Anti Zionism is a hatred of Israel. It's against Israel, okay? And anti Zionists, by their own description, they say they want to dismantle Israel, which is a more technical way of saying you want to destroy it. Which kind of takes you off the scent of, well, how do you dismantle Zionism without, I don't know, ethnically cleansing an entire people. By their own description, they want an end to a sovereign nation. It's a hate movement. So we have to deal with anti Zionism for what it is. Which is the same way you would deal with people who say, you don't hear this with other countries. You don't hear people say Putin is a tyrant, therefore Russia does not have a right to exist. And therefore the Russian people are legitimate targets. And any Russian living here in North America, if they say the slightest word of association or fealty, not for the Russian government or the Russian war, but just for Russia, for being Russian, they too are a legitimate target. We understand that that's an abhorrent point of view. If people have the same, you know, the People's Republic of China is accused of genocide against the Uyghurs. If we were to say China doesn't have a right to exist and there was a Chinese Canadian person, that has implications for them. If you unleash this torrent of hatred against China as a whole, we need to make that same. We need to make understood people have lost the plot here because this whole conversation about is it racist or is it political, obscures the fact that it is unto itself a corrosive, hateful, violent movement that can be denounced. And it's a racist movement in that same way. If you don't want there to be a Japan anymore, you're racist against Japanese people. If you don't want there to be in Israel anymore, yeah, maybe you're racist against whatever ethnicity we can attribute to Israeli. Maybe it doesn't cover every Jew in the world.
- [41:22]
Dan Senor
You know, Shaul Kellner, who's a professor at Vanderbilt University, who we had on a couple months ago, he made a version of the point you're making, which is he said we shouldn't get bogged down in these distinctions and in the kind of the nomenclature. If there is a movement that is targeting Jews and resulting in the harassment of Jews and violence against Jews and discrimination against Jews, that is a problem that needs to be addressed. Whether you call it anti Zionism, anti Semitism, legitimate, illegitimate criticism of Israel, it doesn't matter. It all has the same effect, was his point. The effect is Jews are being targeted. So, okay, what's your plan for that?
- [41:59]
Jesse Brown
Absolutely. And I'll go one step further because yes, it's certainly anti Semitic in that the people that it's hurting are Jews. Right? But is it an anti Semitic philosophy or movement? I don't care. It's. It's hurting Jews. It needs to be fought for that reason. But I'll go one step further. I'm not so interested in going hat in hand, begging people to care about Jews. I want people to understand that anti Zionism is not a philosophy, is not a movement that ends with the Jews. Right. You know, the phrase what begins with the Jews doesn't. But we're seeing that play out in Canada. It's already spread the gunfire that's been sprayed upon synagogues. An Iranian gym of a prominent anti regime protester was also sprayed with gunfire. And then the US Embassy was sprayed with gunfire. And if you listen to the chants of the Canadian anti Zionist movement, they say we are here to root out Zionism from the streets of Toronto. It does not end with a ceasefire. It doesn't end with Israel. Zionism is becoming this kind of stand in for all of the supposed evils of Western imperialism and their ambitions. Go far. Burn it all down does not just apply to Zionism or Israel. This is a threat to every Canadian who actually believes in, you know, to whatever extent this country is about Western values and is about. Those are the institutions that are in the crosshairs. They hate American imperialism and that's become synonymous with Zionism and that's what they want to destroy.
- [43:17]
Dan Senor
How would you describe the intra Jewish discourse in the Canadian Jewish community.
- [43:21]
Jesse Brown
Difficult. You know, as I said, there's a lot of Jews who say like, oh, this is. There are some of the loudest voices saying that this message that I'm carrying is overblown, that they haven't experienced any of this themselves. The leader of the, of one of the three federal parties in Canada, the one that's furthest to the left, the New Democratic Party, the new leader, Avi Lewis, and he's the husband of Naomi Klein. And he represents a lot of anti Zionist Jews in Canada. Not a huge amount. They get overrepresented. But he is the leader of a federal party. And he described early on when Jews in the British Columbia NDP party were complaining about antisemitism at work and Jewish students were complaining about anti Semitism on campus. He attacked the Jews and said they're cartoonish narcissists for asking for attention when Gazans are being killed. He mocked them. He mocked them for saying that racism was a problem. He called them Jewish supremacists. There is a very angry voice against Jews within Judaism. And then there's a lot of, a lot of Jews in Canada who I think it hasn't happened to them yet. So they're not convinced that it is happening. But an Orthodox dad was beaten savagely in front of his kids in Montreal because he looks Jewish. Jewish grandmother was stabbed in a kosher supermarket in Ottawa because she was in a kosher supermarket and visibly Jewish. So you have to really throw a lot of other Jews under the bus to pretend that this is not a thing. I think that the mainstream Jewish world in Canada knows that this is happening and is finally starting to get off of our back heel and a sense of betrayal and hurt and starting to actually figure out a message and a way to push back. So I'll generalize to that extent. I think we're done with the victimization and we're moving on to taking a stand. But there's a very telling statistic. I'm sorry to bring up statistics, but there's a really revealing statistic about how the discourse has shifted in Canada, Daniel, and that is that only 51% of Canadian Jews call themselves Zionists. And that number has been falling, falling, falling for years. But the same study shows that something like 85% of Jews feel a connection to Israel, feel that Israel should exist, and are therefore, by I think a classical definition of the term, they are Zionists. But what has changed is they are no longer willing to call themselves Zionists. So this anti Zionist ambition amongst Jewish, anti Zionists to separate Jews from their connection to Israel is not working. We still feel overwhelmingly connected. All that it's achieving is it's bullying us into being like crypto Zionists. It's bullying Jews into hiding. They're afraid of using the word because to use the word is social suicide. And Dan, I think you've got some Jews who don't use the term because they know that it comes at such a huge social cost. But this is how I feel about the term myself actually is and why I'm no longer sputtering with explanations. Well, all Zionism means is self determination. And you know, language does evolve and change and there's so few of us that I do think that the majority is winning on this term. So, you know, I never called myself a Zionist before October 7th, not because I disagree with the ideology necessarily, but because to me, Zionism was a movement to establish a state of Israel. I don't call myself a Dreyfusard or an abolitionist either because these are successful movements. You don't have to be a Zionist because Israel is so this importance the Jews feel to reclaim the term Zionism. I'm much more interested in Jewish lives than this word. And I do think that the term itself is under fire not just from the pressures of anti Zionists, but because there's a battle within Israel between secular Israel and religious Israel for, you know, between maybe the kibbutzniks and the settlers of the west bank over what Zionism actually means. So to me, it's not mission critical that that term be preserved. What's mission critical is that people need to understand that Jews should not be scapegoated or blamed and the Jewish state should not be held to just a vicious double standard that no other country is held to.
- [47:19]
Dan Senor
I want to ask you about some other data. Based on official numbers, there have been a few thousand Canadian Jews that have made aliyah to Israel between 2023 and 2025. But at the same time, I think if data's accurate, more than 10,000 Israelis have moved to Canada now. Some of those are pursuing work permits. It's like a temporary thing where they come to work for some period of time. There are a lot of Canadian companies that have operations in Israel, particularly in the tech side. And then there are some that are seeking longer term residency. Given everything we're talking about, I am surprised by that. What do you think is going on?
- [47:54]
Jesse Brown
It's very interesting to me because in Canada I'll hear people say, do you Think it's time to leave? Do we need to go to Israel? And you look at the data and actually the patterns are the opposite. There are more Israelis coming here than Canadians going to Israel. I think that must tell you something about Israelis and their desire to get out. And that's very concerning for me because I care very much about the future of that state and my family there and the whole project. But for all of these problems in Canada, it's still considered a more attractive place. And some of them are coming here for good. And Dan, I got to tell you, I would not want to be a Jew with an Israeli accent in Canada right now. I mean, we had a member of Parliament say after she learned that Israelis were speaking at a university, that they should be denied visas and they should be interrogated for their war crimes just for being Israeli. Right. Like the way in which a Canadian Jew can blend in if they want to and pass is going to be a lot more difficult for Israelis. So the fact that they want to come live here is kind of shocking to me.
- [48:51]
Dan Senor
Yeah, I'm skeptical that many of them will stay over time for a variety of reasons, not the least of which, which you're describing here. But I guess maybe this is where I'll wrap up. Based on everything you've found and everything you've been investigating, is Jewish life in Canada permanently changed? Or can you see a version of this that gets better?
- [49:10]
Jesse Brown
Look, I hope things will get better. I think they can. But it is forever changed. It's forever changed on both sides. I think that it's horrifying to watch my neighbors, my non Jewish fellow Canadians, people I know, open the door in their brain to this infectious poison of antisemitism. And it really is like a mental disorder. Once people start indulging in the conspiracy theories, looking for Jewish plots everywhere, looking for these connections, it overtakes them. They have a daily appetite for more fuel. They want to see ridiculous, you know, oh, they're training dogs to rape. They're training sharks. Smart people getting sucked into ridiculous, absurd ideas. And I don't know how you come back from that. I think that it's psychologically very difficult to admit that you were wrong if you've gone that far over. So I don't know that those people are going to change anytime soon. And then from a Jewish perspective, I don't know that I can ever see those people or Canadian society the same way ever again. Like I said at the beginning of this conversation, I don't live in the country that I thought that I lived in. And I think you can try to reclaim, as Jews did after the Holocaust, a sense of love for your neighbor and belonging in diaspora societies. But you're doing it with a new knowledge. It's not so new. I was taught as a kid, you know, sure, they're your friends, but, you know, Holocaust survivors would teach that, you know, when the chips are down, do you think they'll have your back? And that's such an unpleasant, cynical message that a lot of young Jews chose to believe that that was no longer true. That was just sort of the trauma informed point of view of an older generation that experienced horrible things. And now we're seeing like, you know, if you see that they won't defend you when there's a protest with horrible signs, would they defend you after there's a Bondi beach massacre? Would they say, okay, now we've had enough, and I think we know that a lot of people will not. They're not coming back from that. But I want to say this very much. I hope you'll bear with me for a minute here, because this is such a litany of grievances and negativities. But I have no desire to leave this question of, when are you going to. Okay, it sounds really bad. When are you moving to Israel? The belonging that we had achieved here, and maybe it's been damaged and maybe it never was exactly what we thought it was, but that was hard won by generations of Jews. My home is in Canada. I am a Diaspora Jew. That is my whole identity, not just as a Jewish, but as a Canadian, is rooted in being a Diaspora Jew. So I listen to your show and I love it. And it's almost an escape to getting myself involved in these historical changes in Israel and how is it going to play out. But there's another history being written right now in the Diaspora. My Jewish capital is New York and Montreal, right? These worlds exist for me in a very important way. I studied the great Rebbe Leonard Cohen. I'm a disciple. I was there for the destruction of the first Temple, Ben's Delicatessen. And I watched the desecration of the Second Temple when Celine Dion's husband bought Schwartz's in Montreal. So I'm kidding around a bit, but this is a whole universe that I live in where the important figures might be Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, they might be Joy Ramon or the Beastie Boys, Jewish comedy and Jewish food and Jewish culture. That is my Judaism, and that is the Judaism. Those are the worlds that have crumbled. When I Talk about the Diaspora world crumbling because the worlds of music, of progressive culture and politics have turned on us in such an alarming way that it's hard for Diaspora Jews who come out of these traditions to know who we are anymore or where we stand. But the mission, as I see it, is to fight for who we are and where we live and what we stand for, and not just our place and the status, but the values that we, we brought to those worlds, the contributions that we made to those worlds. So I think that in opposition to anti Zionism and trying to find a voice and the common ground with non Jews that feels lost right now, that is the mission. You know, that's. That's where I arrive in this podcast. What is happening here that I hope people will listen to. That's what I'm trying to talk about as I am going on campuses and talking to groups of people like, do you really want to pursue this path of division and hate against a group that, like, I think are a big part of not just our own Diaspora Jewish life, but the contributions we've made to pop culture itself? You know, like, it's wild, Dan, to see for all this talk of Jewish media power, you know, you see like Sarah Silverman or Amy Schumer just get obliterated if they say the slightest thing. Jerry Seinfeld, you've got to be Seinfeld level. And he's still very careful and measured in what he says. But you've got to be that level to say anything because it's just become so unpleasant. Popular to be Jewish. Jews are once again very out of fashion.
- [53:40]
Dan Senor
Yeah.
- [53:40]
Jesse Brown
Can I accept that? I don't think I can.
- [53:43]
Dan Senor
So we will post to your six part series. Again, as I mentioned in the show notes, I think it's for those who want a deeper dive. I highly recommend it and I know this is a brutal time, but I'm grateful that you've really stuck your neck out here just speaking out and covering this story in a way that I think is probably not great for you or your media company professionally. I know it's not what you ever imagined you would be doing prior to October 7th, but we are where we are and I look forward to having you back on. And Jesse, I should add, if our listeners are interested in hearing more from you and learning more about your work, you will be speaking in New York City at the JCC on the Upper west side during Shavuot. On the night of learning. On the first night of Shavuot, the Tikkun, It's a terrific event by the way way at the jcc. So we'll link to that in the show notes and I know I will want to be following and hearing more from you. So I encourage folks who are in town for the CHAG to go see him speak.
- [54:39]
Jesse Brown
Thank you so much Dan.
- [54:49]
Dan Senor
That's our show for today. If you value the Call Me Back podcast and you want to support our mission, please subscribe to our weekly members only show Inside Call Me Back. Inside Call Me Back is where Nadavayal, Amit Segal and I respond to challenging questions from listeners and have the conversations that typically occur after the cameras stop rolling. To subscribe, please follow the link in the show notes or you can go to arkmedia.org that's ark media.org call me back is produced and edited by Lon Benatar, Arc Media's Executive Producer. Producer is Adam James Levin Areddy. Our Production Manager is Brittany Cohn. Our Community Manager is Ava Weiner. Our music was composed by Yuval Semo Sound and video editing by Liquid Audio. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor. Sa.