#1 Unsafe or Uncomfortable?

Summary

What Is Happening Here | Canadaland Investigates

Episode #1: Unsafe or Uncomfortable?

Date: November 17, 2025
Host: Jesse Brown

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Episode Overview

In this powerful debut episode, Jesse Brown examines the alarming rise in antisemitic incidents and hate crimes against Jews in Canada following the October 7th, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel. Framed by the shocking statistic that Jews in Canada are now nine times more likely to be victims of hate crime than their U.S. counterparts, Brown explores whether this represents genuine antisemitism or confusion between anti-Zionism and antisemitism—and what the lived reality for Canadian Jews has become. The episode features firsthand accounts from victims, parents, and community members, as well as critical voices questioning the narrative and meaning of “safety.” The tone is candid, at times confrontational, and deeply human, raising uncomfortable but necessary questions about racism, protest, and belonging in Canadian society.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Stage: The New Reality for Jews in Canada

• Opening Clip: Contrasts Canada’s “values of openness, compassion, respect” (Rabbi Rosenblatt, [00:03]) with a shocking barrage of recorded hate speech and threats faced by Jews post-Oct. 7th.
• Jesse Brown’s Introduction: Personalizes the crisis:

  “Two years ago, my world began to come apart... It all began after I started to cover the sudden rise in anti Semitic speech and incidents in Canada.” (Jesse Brown, [01:24])

2. Skepticism, Denial, and Division within the Discourse

• Brown includes audio from public figures and colleagues, including critics:
  • Dismissal of Antisemitism Claims:

    "There are a lot of Jewish people who say they feel unsafe. That's absurd." (Chris, [04:01])
    “All Zionist organizations do this.” (Prof. Michael Litwack, [04:34])

  • Critique from within the left: Questioning whether Jews are exaggerating discomfort for political reasons or distracting from Palestinian suffering:

    “The exceptionalism leads to this cartoonish narcissism and supremacy of Jewish suffering over all other suffering.” (Avi Lewis, [05:51])

  • Brown challenges this, vowing to seek the truth:

    "Is the situation actually unsafe or is it just uncomfortable?" (Jesse Brown, [08:06])

3. Direct Testimony: Personal Stories of Harassment and Violence

a. Everyday Experiences of Antisemitism

• Panda:

  • 18-year-old student and McDonald’s worker in Toronto. After revealing she is Jewish, a customer responds with, “I love that you're Chinese, but free Palestine?” ([09:44])
  • Impact:

    “Or I mean, if you want to blame someone, blame the people that are in power... But just some girl in the drive through, I don't have anything to do with it.” (Panda, [10:10])

• Sam Ashkenazi (Thornhill, ON):

  • Publicly harassed with his wife and children at the zoo for wearing yarmulkes:

    “‘Go around these disgusting genociders and Palestine occupiers.’ ...They were attacking us because we are Jews.” (Sam Ashkenazi, [12:01])

b. School Climate: Children Targeted

• Chris (mother, Peel Region):

  • Recalls antisemitic taunts and threats directed at her Grade 6 daughter at a public school protest:

    “About 40... started chanting things at her like, ‘Jews are not worthy of living and all Jews should die.’” ([13:19])

  • Impact: Daughter is surveilled for safety, becomes isolated, eventually withdraws from school:

    “She was feeling like she was in jail... it was becoming more and more like she was being punished for the other kids’ behavior.” ([17:45])

  • Emotional Toll:

    "They walked away with. The Jew left the school and they won. And that I have a hard time with." ([21:05])

  • Despite ordeal, her daughter remains free of hate:

    "She feels like [Muslim neighbors] are family. She doesn't hate anyone. And I wish other kids had that." ([21:19])

• Jen & Joel (Vancouver):

  • Their son Jacob, 12, is physically assaulted (“struck... with a bass clarinet peg stand”), given Nazi salute, told “Hitler should have finished you off.” ([23:48])
  • School Response:
    • Emphasizes “learning opportunities” over discipline; family left feeling rights were neglected.

    "Omar's rights are more important than our child's rights to have a safe educational space..." (Joel, [25:11])

c. Hate Crimes, Vandalism, and Physical Attacks

• Brown details a series of assaults and attacks on Jewish individuals and institutions nationwide:
  • Tilda Rohl (Toronto):
    • Assaulted by a man (subsequently convicted) who spat on her and her husband, yelled antisemitic slurs while she walked home from synagogue in a Jewish neighborhood ([28:39])
  • Jewish schools and synagogues:
    • Shooting at a Jewish private school ([22:45]), firebombings, repeated vandalism, and attempted arson described by Rabbi Rosenblatt (Vancouver) ([34:32]).
    • Cases often unsolved; perpetrators sometimes lightly punished or not caught.

    "Somebody literally walked up with a jug and set fire to a synagogue... we were never able to successfully identify who this individual was." (Rabbi Rosenblatt, [36:12])

d. Statistics and Comparative Risk

• Fact-Check:
  • StatsCan data: Jews are the most targeted minority by police-reported hate crimes in Canada ([27:20]).
  • A Jew in Canada is now “nine times more likely to be a victim of a hate crime than a Jew in the U.S.” ([27:20])
• Brown confronts his own disbelief and that of others—emphasizing that most hate is absorbed by Jews who are visibly Jewish or frequent Jewish spaces ([28:24]).

e. Terrorism Threats

• Multiple foiled plots—11 anti-Jewish terror/threat cases since October 2023 ([41:17]).
• Examples:
  • Planned ISIS-inspired bombing of a synagogue in Ottawa ([40:33]).
  • Canadian man arrested en route to commit mass shooting at Jewish center in New York ([41:17]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“It's about our shared values. Those values of openness, compassion, respect. A country where we say no to racism, to injustice, to hate.”
— Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt ([00:03])

“You just got a taste of the worst of it. All of the hateful voices that you heard a moment ago, all of that happened here in Canada. After October 7th.”
— Jesse Brown ([01:24])

“There is a difference between feeling unsafe and feeling uncomfortable.”
— Chris ([04:12])

“We are just Canadian Jews. We don't have anything to do with that... They saw that myself and my two sons had a kippah on our head... and they decided that that was enough.”
— Sam Ashkenazi ([11:23])

“She was feeling like she was in jail. When she was in school, she couldn't move around freely, couldn't participate, really, in any of the clubs.”
— Chris (mother, Peel Region) ([17:45])

“I wasn't sure what his end goal was. Was he gonna hit us? ... He was looking to demean us, for sure, dehumanize us.”
— Tilda Rohl ([31:15])

“If this was Asian hatred, if this was Indigenous hatred, it would not be tolerated in the slightest. But because of what's going on in the world right now, this is accepted.”
— Joel (Vancouver) ([25:32])

“As far as I'm able to tell, no country in the world since October 7th has had more of its synagogues threatened, vandalized and firebombed than Canada.”
— Jesse Brown ([38:25])

“I see that I'm more likely to choke to death on a marshmallow than to be killed because I'm a Jew.”
— Jesse Brown ([39:04])

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Important Segment Timestamps

• Opening contrasting ideals of Canada / hate audio montage: [00:03]–[01:21]
• Jesse Brown’s personal intro & criticism from peers: [01:24]–[04:12]
• Skepticism about anti-Jewish hate / “unsafe vs. uncomfortable”: [04:12]–[06:16]
• Brown’s guiding questions for the series: [08:06]
• First-hand accounts begin (Panda, Sam Ashkenazi, Chris): [09:08]–[21:39]
• Case summary: school attacks, legal actions, stats: [21:59]–[23:11]
• BC: Jen & Joel’s story: [23:11]–[25:28]
• Brown’s moral clarity returns: [25:51]
• Canadian hate crime statistics, comparison to U.S.: [27:09]–[28:24]
• Stories of physical assaults (Tilda Rohl, summary of other attacks): [28:39]–[34:32]
• Rabbi Rosenblatt: synagogue arson attempt: [34:32]–[36:50]
• String of synagogue attacks, widespread vandalism: [36:50]–[38:25]
• “So what?”—no Canadian Jews murdered, comparison to U.S., terrorism: [39:04]–[41:27]
• Preview of next episode (Zionist identity vs. Jewish identity): [43:13]–[44:21]

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Conclusion & Next Episode Preview

• Brown leans into complexity: while the episode has conveyed significant harm to everyday Jews, he promises to explore stories where individuals are targeted for political support of Israel rather than their Jewish identity.
• Coming up: A sit-down with Indigo CEO Heather Reisman, often publicly linked to Israel, to further probe whether anti-Zionism or antisemitism is truly at play.

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Tone and Takeaways

• The episode is urgent, raw, and at times confrontational—deliberately blurring the line between reporting and advocacy in order to provoke honest reflection.
• Jesse Brown positions himself both as an investigative journalist questioning dogma and as a member of the affected community who is forced to reconsider what it means to report “objectively” on hate.
• The stories, statistics, and counterarguments paint a portrait of a society wrestling uncomfortably with the boundaries between criticism, activism, and discrimination.

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Additional Resources

• Canadian hate crime data and statistics referenced in the episode are linked in the show notes.

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[This summary skips fundraising messages and credits, focusing on the core content.]

Transcript

[Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt]

It's about our shared values. Those values of openness, compassion, respect. A country where we say no to racism, to injustice, to hate.

[Jesse Brown]

Fake fucking Jew. Fuck you. And fuck your mother and your grandmother.

[Sam Ashkenazi]

And your great grandmother.

[Jesse Brown]

Your fucking fake Jew Hitler should have wiped every fucking one of you off the planet.

[Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt]

Hell Hitler.

[Jesse Brown]

But hell Hitler, he's a g. He's a gangster. I wish he made it. All you guys did. Going to kill you by. By one. We start from cost. We went cabing can empty the store. You get many crime here in Canada. You. You genocide.

[Chris]

You Jew. Come back Jew.

[Jesse Brown]

And go back to Europe for the sake. Go back to Europe. The are you from. Go back to Europe.

[Chris]

This.

[Jesse Brown]

Final solution is coming your way. The final solution. You know what the final solution is? We're coming. We're gonna get you for all those dead babies. You fucking pieces of shit. Fuck you and your rights.

[Joel]

Fuck you and your free speech.

[Jesse Brown]

All that fucking freedom bullshit. We're gonna get you. Two years ago, my world began to come apart. I lost friends, I lost colleagues. I almost lost my business. Sometimes it felt like I was losing my mind. It all began after I started to cover the sudden rise in anti Semitic speech and incidents in Canada. You just got a taste of the worst of it. All of the hateful voices that you heard a moment ago, all of that happened here in Canada. After October 7th. I started to speak up about it. I named names. It did not go over well. Just to devalue the term anti Semitism, just. It's a crazy thing to make up.

[Tilda Rohl]

Jesse.

[Sam Ashkenazi]

Crazy lie.

[Joel]

The biggest victim of all this, when.

[Chris]

You think about it.

[Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt]

Oh, yeah, he lost his mind, is that it?

[Jesse Brown]

Seems like it, yeah. That was podcaster Rob Russo.

[Tilda Rohl]

Yeah.

[Chris]

So I don't think that we should talk very long about Jesse Brown.

[Jesse Brown]

This is writer and podcaster Nora Loreto.

[Chris]

You know, Jesse Brown can talk whatever the fuck he wants. Like he can do that. But I, as someone who has been fighting and resisting Islamophobia in the Canadian media, and you're fucking talking about anti Semitism killing people in Canada. Are you fucking kidding me?

[Joel]

Then you have the case of Jesse Brown.

[Jesse Brown]

That's journalist Jeremy Appel in conversation with journalist Sri Paradkar.

[Joel]

Talk a lot about what's gone on with his brain over the past six months.

[Chris]

Jesse Brown, again, I can't speculate what's going on in his head, you know, care enough to either. I think for a lot of people like me who fight against oppression, I hope whatever is happening with any particular journalist, I hope it's something that they get help for.

[Jesse Brown]

Most of the people you just heard from are people I know in real life, people who I used to sit down and talk with. But all of a sudden, it seemed like we were in two different worlds. Every week there were new attacks against Jews. And each time that happened, more and more people spoke up to deny that it mattered, to deny that it was even happening.

[Chris]

There are a lot of Jewish people who say they feel unsafe. That's absurd.

[Jesse Brown]

Here, speaking on a Toronto Star podcast, are commentators Samira Mohedian and Christopher Curtis.

[Chris]

There is a difference between feeling unsafe and feeling uncomfortable.

[Jesse Brown]

There have been Jewish students who said, we don't feel safe on campus. And we really don't like these chants. Look, you guys remember the anti Vietnam movement fondly, that in these protest movements there will be excesses and there will be people who have radical opinions. Now here's University of Alberta professor Michael Litwack.

[Chris]

The fantasy of, you know, anti Semitism on campus. Benign Brit statistics that say hate crimes are on the rise because people are saying, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. All Zionist organizations do this.

[Jesse Brown]

Surging hate crime statistics were seen not as evidence the Jews were under attack, but proof that Zionist groups were manipulating data and weaponizing antisemitism. As for antisemitism, people began rejecting the term. They said that something else was happening.

[Chris]

If you speak to the protesters, they say, like, this is anti Zionism. It's not antisemitism.

[Jesse Brown]

That was CBC journalist Jamie Poisson. Here's politician Avi Lewis.

[Joel]

The Israel Lobby Zionist groups are trying to force the narrative that the government of B.C. has some kind of anti Semitism problem, which is very problematic. And it serves to conflate anti Zionism with anti Semitism or criticism of Israel with anti Semitism. We have to distinguish. For people, it's urgent that being made uncomfortable is part of a. Of a democratic society. The cry bully thing, it's the victim, perpetrator. It's the. My suffering blots out the world. My suffering, it triumphs over everything else. My suffering is all that I can see. And the fact that you are not stopping everything you're doing and just checking in with me and my suffering when genocide is being committed in my name, like the exceptionalism leads to this cartoonish narcissism and supremacy of Jewish suffering over all other suffering.

[Jesse Brown]

The best advice that I ever got as a journalist is to practice inversion, to flip things, to try to reverse your perspective and ask yourself tough questions from the other side of the argument. For Example, is Canada really experiencing a sudden crisis of rampant anti Jewish hate? Or is legitimate protest against Israel getting misclassified? And when hate does get directed at Jews, whose fault is that? Is it the fault of a protest movement that was trying to stop a horrific war? Or is it Israel's fault for claiming that its military acts in the name of of Jews everywhere? As for Jewish people, are we just getting it all wrong? Confusing our feelings of discomfort when Israel gets criticized with a true threat to our safety? Are we making it all about us? And in doing so, are we distracting people from the real crisis? A crisis that is far from over? Am I guilty of doing this? Have I lost the plot? I don't think that it's possible to answer that question without first knowing whether what is happening here is real. Is the situation actually unsafe or is it just uncomfortable? Has it gotten bad enough for Jews in Canada that it requires attention and action, even though things are still so much worse in Gaza? And to figure that out, I need to know what is happening here to Jewish people in Canada every day? Has life changed in small ways? Has it changed in big ways? So that's what this is. An attempt to answer those questions. On this series, I am going to get uncomfortable. I'm going to sit down with activists and organizers from the anti Zionist movement. I'm going to have to listen, try to understand what they believe and why they are doing what they're doing. That's later, but today on our first episode, I'm going to try to find out if what's been happening is just anti Zionism or if it is, in fact, antisemitism. I'm just going to talk to everyday people whose lives have been changed since October 7th. I traveled across this country and I listen to their stories and I want you to listen, too. The first stories that you will hear today are about young people and children. I'm Jesse Brown, and this is a podcast in which we find out what is happening here.

[Panda]

My name is Panda. I live in Toronto right now. I'm a student and I'm also working part time at a McDonald's. I'm 18. I was just working the drive through here and I have a name tag on and my name is obviously pretty unique Panda. So sometimes I get asked questions like, oh, is your name, Is it actually your name? Or like, where'd you get your name from? And this one time I got asked, oh, what's your background? Because I guess, like, it's interesting to see the name Panda. And so I said that I was half Chinese because I thought that was the relevant part because Panda. And then the lady that asked me that, she then asked, what's your other half? And then I told her, oh, I'm Jewish.

[Jesse Brown]

And.

[Panda]

And then she kind of looked at me funny. I think she was probably older than me. She was probably like maybe in her 30s. And she was talking to me like I was a little kid. And she went, I love that you're Chinese, but free Palestine? I didn't respond to that. She just drove off and like that was it. It sort of makes me feel like, okay, in her head that she's, she's like an activist. But there's so many things that China like as a country has also done wrong. And if she's fully ignoring that because she's only set on what's going on in Palestine, it doesn't matter where anyone's from, you shouldn't blame their people on what's going on in the world. Or I mean, if you want to put people, if you want to blame someone, blame the people that are in power that are actually causing the harm. But just some girl in the drive through, I don't have anything to do with it. It's just disappointing to just have a reality check that this is what a lot of people think of Jewish.

[Sam Ashkenazi]

So my name is Sam Ashkenazi, I live in Thornhill, Ontario. So my family and I were visiting the zoo. It was myself, my eight year old son, my five, almost six year old son, the baby which I was holding, and then my wife who was pushing this stroller out of nowhere. This couple, husband and wife. The husband says very loudly to his children, go around these disgusting genociders and Palestine occupiers. And so my wife jumped in right away and said, excuse me, like, what is wrong with you? We're just a family trying to enjoy the park. We are just Canadian Jews. We don't have anything to do with that. Nobody was born there. We have no political connection. I don't vote there. I affect nothing that goes on there. They doubled down, you know, kept on criticizing us. Well, you know, if you're not a genocider, why are you offended? Why is this upsetting you if you're not a genocider? Just very childish playground kind of discussion. When my wife and I criticized them and said, you know, you're saying this in front of not only our children and all the other children, but your own children, like you're teaching them to just walk up to people and curse them out. Then they doubled down again saying that they Were proud of it. Proud of teaching their kids to stand up to genociders and disgusting people like us. The whole thing was very out of the blue, right? My wife and I were not, we don't wear political slogans. I was not wearing an, you know, Israeli Defense Forces insignia logo hoodie. I wasn't even speaking Hebrew literally. Just. They saw that myself and my two sons had a kippah on our head, a yarmulke on our head, and they decided that that was enough for them to start harassing us about, you know, the events going on in the Middle East. My older son, who is 8, he took it pretty hard. He was crying like, I don't really care what this couple believed that they were doing. If they thought they were attacking Zionists, they don't know my politics. I could be the most anti Zionist personality is they were attacking us because we are Jews.

[Chris]

My name is Chris. I live outside of Toronto in the Peel region. Everything really started on October 20th of 2023. There was a protest at my daughter's school. It was at a middle school, so a school that's for kids grade 6, 7 and 8. As far as we know. She was the only Jewish student at the school. She was only in grade six, so she was new to the school since September. And it's only, what, a month and a half in. It was during school hours, during lunch on school property. It was student led. So they had signs. They were, you know, wearing keffiyehs. You know, when my daughter saw what was going on, something just gave her the feeling like she wanted to be away from it. And so she, you know, tried to move to an area where they wouldn't, you know, notice her. But unfortunately, there was a student that she had gone to school with since, you know, much younger grades, who knew she was Jewish. And that student pointed her out to the people who were protesting by shouting, she's Jewish. There was a group of students who kind of peeled off from the protest once they realized that my daughter was Jewish and they surrounded her. There were about 40 who surrounded my daughter and started chanting things at her like, Jews are not worthy of living and all Jews should die. I had heard from the principal that there were other things said in Arabic, but I don't know what they were. She had a friend with her. That child realized that there was no one coming. So that child ended up leaving her and running to get the principal. The principal came and got someone to take her inside. I received a phone call from someone in the guidance area who put my daughter on the phone and, you know, had her tell me what had happened. The principal, he was not able to identify any of the students who were involved, but he was there and he saw them. So how could he not identify any students involved? Like, I don't. I don't understand. We heard that the level of speech didn't rise to hate crime or anything like that, which didn't make a whole lot of sense. Because if you're chanting to a Jewish person that all Jews should die, isn't that a threat? I've finally met the principal. I was asking him questions, but when he was showing me where it happened, he made a comment to me that our daughter hadn't exactly hidden that she was Jewish. And my question to him was, well, why do Jews need to hide that they're Jews? She was very reluctant to go to school, but at the same time, we worried that the longer she stayed home, the more she would be anxious about it and she wouldn't return to school. So we encouraged her to return and said, you know, like, we had to tell her that she would be fine. And that's what we thought. We honestly believed that she would be fine. Around the first week in November, she started riding the bus again. The second day at the end of school, when she was walking to the bus, there were five male students who came up around her and her friend, and they blocked her path to get to the bus and were chanting Free Palestine at her, and she had to push past them to board the bus. My sense was that they thought she was fair game. You know, like, if no one is doing anything and there are no consequences. When you chant that all Jews should die at a Jewish student, what does that tell you? As a student? I can only assume that they felt emboldened because they kept doing it. A few days after that, I received a call again from the school advising that there was another incident. While my daughter was outside at lunch, a student came up running behind her and body checked into her and again shouted Free Palestine. At her. I got a text from my daughter asking me to pick her up because she didn't feel safe. And at that point, they decided that they were going to have a teacher assigned to look out for our daughter. Essentially, there would be someone who was responsible to watch her all day. And this was in class and out of class. There just seemed to be no end. She was feeling like she was in jail. When she was in school, she couldn't move around freely, couldn't participate, really in any of the clubs. One day they Had a cultural event and kids were encouraged to bring money to buy food for the cultural event. She couldn't go and buy food. Someone had to go and do it for her. It was becoming more and more like she was being punished for the other kids behavior. She described to me how she wanted to go outside one day and she was feeling like she was, you know, stuck. She didn't want to go outside and be harassed because a lot of the things did happen outside. But at the same time she was just itching not to be inside, not to be different. Another student suggested that she wear her jacket and that she put on a mask and put up her hoodie so she could go outside. She really felt strongly that she didn't want the haters to win. So we had a family trip planned where we would be away from school. Really did her good. So she came back to school excited to be going back. A couple days later we received a call from. Sorry, I need a moment. We received a call from the. From one of the teachers who she had bonded with who was expressing their concern about her mental state because she'd come back from vacation and she was happy. And within a couple of days she was in classroom with her head on her desk, not talking to anybody and just wouldn't engage. And at that point my husband and I decided that she couldn't go back. That that was. She very much is glad she's out of that school now. As time has progressed, we've seen more anxiety come out and so she sees a therapist to help her deal with these things. Kids will be kids. Let's be honest. Kids do stupid things. And I can accept that. I can accept the kids do and say things that they don't understand. But what bothers me is that these kids at the school that she left, they. They believed that this was okay. That's what I think. They, they walked away with. They walked away with. The Jew left the school and they won. And that I have a hard time with. For me, the best thing is that she still doesn't hate. She doesn't hate anyone.

[Panda]

She's.

[Chris]

Our closest neighbors are Muslim and she feels like they're family. She doesn't hate anyone. And I wish other kids had that.

[Jesse Brown]

Well then she's the one who won.

[Chris]

Absolutely agree. Absolutely.

[Jesse Brown]

Chris's story is one of over 800 anti Semitic incidents reported to have taken place inside Canadian public schools since October 7, 2023. She's filed a lawsuit against the Peel Public School Board for discrimination and for failing to protect her daughter. The school board has said as a statement of claim has been filed. PDSB will not be providing any further public comment. According to a federal government report, over 15% of the anti Jewish incidents that took place in Ontario public schools were not cases where students harmed Jews, but cases which were initiated or approved by teachers outside of the Ontario public school system. A Jewish private school was shot at after school hours on two separate occasions. A man named Helder, Antonio de Almeida, age 20, and an unidentified 17 year old were later charged for those shootings. On the other side of the country, in British Columbia, Jewish teachers in the public school system have filed a human rights complaint over dozens of anti Semitic incidents that they say have occurred to students and teachers in that province. Here's one story from the B.C. public School System.

[Jen]

My name is Jen and I live in the Vancouver area and I work in Jewish education.

[Joel]

My name is Joel. I run our family business in manufacturing. Jacob was 12 years old at the time.

[Jen]

This boy that we'll call Omar, he would follow Jacob into the bathroom just to stand there and stare at him, kind of try and intimidate him.

[Jesse Brown]

The names of the children involved in this story have been changed to protect their privacy and safety.

[Jen]

He would say things that were targeted at Jacob. When he said that all Jews and Israelis should die, including you. That was when Jacob came home questioning, how am I responsible for Israel?

[Joel]

The boys were in band class and the teacher had his back turned to the kids. And Omar took a bass clarinet peg stand, which is about 14 to 18 inches in length, stainless steel peg, and struck Jacob on the arm. And I remember that because when he came home, there was a large bruise on his arm. And right after he had struck Jacob, he gave Jacob the Hitler salute and said, I wish Hitler would have finished you off. In this specific case, we have violence against our child. There was zero accountability.

[Jen]

There was talk of sort of reconciliation circles as one way of dealing with the problem. So we were also told many times, this is not where we look for disciplinary action. This is a chance for education, which we got tired of hearing. You know, they kept saying, we can't remove Omar from the school. He has a right to his education. It was sort of like, this is an opportunity for us all to grow, blah, blah, blah.

[Joel]

The superintendent had refused to engage us and to deal, to deal with this directly.

[Jen]

So they don't expel kids anymore unless they have the permission of that family. Therefore, you know, we've done all we can. We've talked to him. We're making this a learning opportunity.

[Joel]

Omar's rights are more important than our child's rights to have a safe educational space that's free from being beaten with a metal rod or being told that they should die.

[Jen]

I think it would have been taken very seriously if it was anything other than Jew hatred.

[Joel]

If this was Asian hatred, if this was indigenous hatred, it would not be tolerated in the slightest. But because of what is going on in the world right now, this is accepted. We're not in Israel.

[Jesse Brown]

The stories that you've heard so far, I don't know how they landed for you, but for me they changed everything. Something that had become morally blurry for me cleared up instantly. Before I heard these stories, I was swayed by the admonishments, the argument that it was wrong to center myself to center Jews in what's happening in the world right now. I didn't want to be a cry bully. I mean, was I really suffering so badly from Internet comments that I couldn't just turn the other cheek and leave more space in the conversation for the real victims? But imagine telling a Jewish child to just suck it up and absorb the kind of abuse that you've just heard about. Why would they do that? What would it accomplish to accept racism like that? Would absorbing hate here somehow help the cause of Palestinians in Gaza? Hearing these stories made that whole argument fall apart for me and return my thinking to a kind of moral clarity that I was taught as a child. We must speak up about racism. And I haven't had a second thought about raising these issues ever since.

[Chris]

The fantasy of benign Brit statistics that say hate crimes are on the rise because people are saying from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. All Zionist organizations do this.

[Jesse Brown]

Statistics Canada is not a Zionist organization. It's not a Jewish organization. It's a part of the federal government. And its hate crime data does not come from Jewish people reporting discomfort about slogans. It comes from the police, from police forces across the country who report incidents against any minority when they cross the line and qualify as hate crimes. Last year in Canada, according to StatsCan, there were more police reported hate crimes against Jews than against any other minority. And comparing StatsCan data to FBI data, last year a Jew in Canada was nine times more likely to be a victim of a hate crime than a Jew in the United States. And it is not just anti Israel activists who find that statistic hard to believe. I had trouble believing it. Nothing like that a hate crime has ever happened to me. But then I realized, why would it? If someone were out looking for a Jew to harm they'd walk right by me. That is not true for everyone.

[Tilda Rohl]

So my name is Tilda Rohl. I'm a lawyer in the city of Toronto. I am a proud mom. I have three lovely kids. I have a lovely husband. On January 6, 2024, I was walking home from synagogue. I go to Chabad Flamingo, which is in Von. I was with my husband Malcolm, and two very close friends, and we were walking towards my house. So this is a fairly Jewish neighborhood. It was on the Sabbath. We were wearing nice clothes. The men were wearing hats. We were fairly visible as Jews. We were on this pavement here on Westbound. And as we were walking, we saw someone that was cycling at a very fast speed. He was a pretty big guy. I didn't realize at the time that it was an E bike, but it had very big tires. And normally you're polite and you stay on the road, or alternatively you'll ring a bell or you'll do some motion to make sure that those people aren't hitting. This person did not do that. He saw us. He was on the street, and instead of avoiding us, he mounted the sidewalk and he barreled towards us. So we moved to the right and he went down the street very, very quickly. But initially we thought he was just an inconsiderate rider. I turned around and noticed that he was coming back. And I thought to myself, this isn't over. He's looking for something and it's not going to be good. I said to the group, there will be no engagement. Because the last thing I wanted to do was engage with someone who we didn't know and escalate the situation. And I was quite worried. So this individual stops in the middle of the street here on Miranda, and he starts saying terrible things. I do remember him saying, hitler should have killed you all. I remember him saying, we should all go to the gas chamber. Hitler was right. I mean, it was just a litany of anti Semitic remarks. I wasn't sure what his end goal was. Was he gonna hit us? Was he looking to a fight? I wasn't clear. He was looking to demean us, for sure, dehumanize us. It happened very quickly. He was so angry. I could see the anger. I could see the irrationality. Then I remember hearing him really guttural. The gob, it was pretty big. Landed on my jacket and in my hair. It sprayed my husband, who was right beside me. There were other people stopping. So what happened is they had already called 91 1. He was a very nice bystander, said to us, I know where he lives. And then I said to the group, we're done. This is going to be reported. We all went to my house, the police came, we gave statements and we charged him with assault. And he was charged that day. We were targeted for being Jewish. And the last year and a half has been just so difficult. There's so many things happening that are just so scary. And so I have to say I am very sad. I'm still very angry. I was very unsettled for about six months. I changed my behaviors, how I walked, how I dealt with things, what I brought with me. I had a safety plan. But for this to happen around the corner from my house and around the corner from synagogue, there was no way I was going to let this stand. Not a chance.

[Jesse Brown]

In May of 2025, a 36 year old named Kenneth Jiwan Gobin was sentenced to a year in jail for assaulting Tilda Roll. The Statistics Canada data on police reported anti Semitic hate crimes in Canada does not include information telling us how many of these incidents involved physical assault. But we do know about several instances of violence from court decisions and from News reports. An 18 year old woman named Hisa Abed was sentenced to 12 months probation for assaulting an 88 year old Jewish man at a Toronto rally. At an earlier rally In Toronto, a 56 year old Jewish woman was punched in the face. She didn't see who did it. A woman picking up her kid from a Jewish daycare in Toronto was assaulted by a stranger in November 2024. Police never found him. In August of 2025, an Orthodox Jewish man in Montreal was severely beaten by a stranger in a park in broad daylight in front of his small children. After the beating, the stranger picks the kippah up off the head of the Jewish father and flings it to the ground. Several onlookers can be seen in the video. Nobody intervenes. The police arrested a 23 year old named Sergio Yanez Preciado three days later for that assault. Then in September of 2025, a man walked into the only supermarket in Ottawa that sells kosher meat and he stabbed a Jewish grandmother in the back. Police arrested Joseph Rook of Cornwall, Ontario after his many anti Israel and anti Jewish social media posts were discovered. They charged him with hate motivated crimes. As I said, most Jews are like me. We blend in. That means that the hate is focused on the Jews who do not blend in. Orthodox and Hasidic Jews. It's absorbed by Jewish spaces, grocery stores, community centers, schools and synagogues.

[Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt]

I am Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt I am the rabbi here at the Shar E Tzedek Synagogue in Vancouver, British Columbia. I had actually left the synagogue, gone home and I got a call from a member of the synagogue. He said someone tried to light the synagogue on fire. Services ended around 9:30pm People go outside, they chat. It's a nice summer evening. But what we learned after the fact, based mostly from the video evidence, was that someone wearing a surgical mask and a baseball hat had taken a milk jug full of propane or butane or just simple gasoline, we don't know, but poured it on the front door and flames erupted, probably 30ft high, seen by residents across the street. And you can even see along here around the door frame. You can see it's a wooden door frame and you can see there's still some scorch marks along the copper of the metal doors and as well along a little bit of the door frame. Obviously the flames penetrated through here and as we go to the other side of the door, we chose to clean this off. Mostly we thought really wasn't worth memorializing in the synagogue, but you can see there's a little bit of that still remains here. But this is a wooden frame building and there were people in this building literally moments before really could have ended much worse. Thank God the assailant was not an expert and we didn't sustain any significant physical damage and we didn't see sustain.

[Jesse Brown]

Any loss of life.

[Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt]

But the idea that. And you can hear we're on Oak street. This is one of the main arteries of Vancouver. This is never without cars. Somebody literally was so brazen as to walk across the street. We are blocks from the children's hospital, not far from Vancouver City Hall. This is pretty much a central location as you can get. And somebody literally walked up with a jug and set fire to a synagogue. We were never able to successfully identify who this individual was.

[Jesse Brown]

That was Vancouver. In Montreal, the Beth Tikva synagogue was firebombed twice since October 7th. A 19 year old named Mohammed Ilyas Akodad was later charged for those attacks. A 42 year old man named Waysouddin Akbari was convicted for threatening to bomb every synagogue in Toronto. According to court documents, he made the threats in a car dealership in Newmarket while he was waiting for an oil change. Before I go, he said to a Pakistani salesman, I want you to remember my name and remember my face because the next time you see it I'll be on the news. He continued telling the salesman, I know when I'm going to die. I'M going to plant a bomb in every synagogue in Toronto and blow them up to kill as many Jews as possible. I'll make sure those attacks are filmed and posted online so the world can see what I've done.

[Sam Ashkenazi]

Really?

[Jesse Brown]

The salesman asked. Yes, I'm serious, akodad said. He was sentenced to six months of house arrest. One synagogue in Toronto, Khilat Sharai Tora, was hit again and again. Kelly Azikowicz is a member of that synagogue.

[Chris]

It's a very small synagogue. It's been vandalized, targeted seven times. The windows have been smashed a couple of times. There was a couple who dumped a dead raccoon in the parking lot.

[Jesse Brown]

A man named Amir Arvahi Azhar was later arrested and charged with 29 criminal counts for breaking windows and starting fires at five different Toronto synagogues, including Kelly's. After that arrest, a different assailant climbed a security fence and smashed windows at Kahilat Sharai Torah. That one synagogue has now been hit 10 times. As far as I'm able to tell, no country in the world since October 7th has had more of its synagogues threatened, vandalized and firebombed than Canada. But so what? As you'll hear argued later in this series, synagogues are just buildings and a gob of spit is not a bullet. How many people have been killed? I think that's really important. Has anyone killed us yet? Are any of us dead? And there is good data. And when I look at the numbers in aggregate, I see that I'm more likely to choke to death on a marshmallow than to be killed because I'm a Jew. If you look at where the actual violence is in our society, what the actual risks are to our physical safety, it's not anti Semitism. All of these stories so far, as troubling as they are, they luckily don't rise to the same level of anti Jewish violence that we've seen elsewhere. After all, in America, three Jews have been murdered in the name of Palestine since October 7th. Here again is politician Avi Lewis.

[Joel]

The notion students feel unsafe. How about having bombs drop on your head and eliminate your entire building and your family and be and have starvation used as a weapon of war? That's unsafe. Okay, so let's get these words in perspective.

[Jesse Brown]

What if they're right after all? And once again, the death count here is zero. Not a single Jew in Canada has been killed for being Jewish since Oct. 7. But that is not because it hasn't been tried.

[Chris]

Two Ottawa teens charged with ISIS related terrorism offenses were planning to place a bomb here. One of the boys was in possession.

[Tilda Rohl]

Of tatp, a homemade explosive. Their goal, to kill as many Jews as possible. Arrests related to violent extremism and terrorism.

[Chris]

In Canada have increased by around 500%.

[Tilda Rohl]

Since Hamas attacked Israel 13 months ago.

[Jesse Brown]

A father in son living in Toronto right now face terror related charges. Both also facing weapon charges for the possession of an axe and machete. We're going to begin with some breaking news and it is most disturbing and frightening.

[Chris]

A 20 year old Toronto man is facing charges in Canada and the U.S. he's accused of trying to cross the border to carry out a mass shooting.

[Tilda Rohl]

In a Jewish center in New York.

[Joel]

Quoting now.

[Jesse Brown]

New York is perfect to target Jews.

[Sam Ashkenazi]

Because it has the largest Jewish Jewish population in America. He allegedly added, we are going to.

[Jesse Brown]

New York to slaughter them. In total, since October 7, 2023, police have thwarted 11 Anti Semitic or Islamist terror plots from Canada. Today I tried to find out if reports of rampant antisemitism in Canada are misleading. What I found were people. Not Zionist political groups, but Jewish people. And you heard what they had to say. I found more people and more stories, too many to fit on this podcast that were just like the ones that you just heard. But it would not be true to tell you that these stories were the only kinds of stories I found. I also found stories where people were singled out not for being Jewish, but for supporting Israel. So what are we to make of those stories? I guess the question is who exactly is this all happening to? Is it just happening to Jews who are being harmed simply for being who they are? Or is it also happening to Zionists who are not being targeted for their ethnicity, but because of what they believe, because of who they support, because of what they have done? There is no individual in Canada who has been more associated with genocide in Gaza than Heather Reisman. She is the CEO of the national bookstore chain Indigo. On the next episode of what is Happening Here, I go to her house to ask her about that.

[Chris]

We're proud of the things that we fund in Israel.

[Jesse Brown]

I want to find out, are Zionists suffering from antisemitism here in Canada or are they the ones who are causing it? That's on our next episode and here's some of what is to come on this series after that.

[Panda]

Israelis are worse than the devil.

[Chris]

One physician said that publicly. And this is a person who treats Jewish patients.

[Jesse Brown]

The first thing this person says to me is, are you Jewish? I've never had that kind of experience with a doctor. Yes, I would like to see more protests outside of Jewish institutions.

[Joel]

If you're going to come out here to celebrate a genocide, we are going to come out here to express our opposition.

[Jesse Brown]

No Jews have been harmed. No Jews are under threat as Jews. Libo is not meant to be debated.

[Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt]

It'S just meant to be repeated.

[Panda]

It come to our attention that there.

[Tilda Rohl]

Is an exhibitor at the festival making.

[Jen]

Comics about their past in the idf and this exhibitor has been banned from this festival and all further festivals and we apologize.

[Jesse Brown]

The Jewish community in Toronto has so much blood on their hands. I think that has consequences. As you may already feel this is at times going to be difficult, but it is happening here. Thank you for listening. This episode was made possible by the generous support of George Berger, Dan DeBeau, Daniel Klaas, Marjorie Skolnik and Lee Zetner. This series is not yet fully funded. I want to be able to complete it. We also want to bring it to campuses across Canada for town hall conversations about how this conflict has created fear and harm in our university and college communities, and to talk about how everyone can work together to restore safety. To do any of that, we need financial support. Funders may be eligible to receive tax deductible donation receipts through our project partner, the Canadian Jewish News, a registered journalism organization with the CRA. Contributing is easy. Just email me [e-mail] and I'll take you through the process. What is Happening Here is a co production of Canadaland Podcasts and the Canadian Jewish News. This episode was written and reported by me, Jesse Brown, Research and story editing by Kate Minsky Original music by so called sound Design, mixing and mastering by Caleb Thompson Editorial input from Michael Freeman. Thank you to Stephen Marsh, Jonathan Rothman, Mark Musselman and the entire Canadaland team for their input and their support. We've put links to statistics and sources cited in today's episode in the show notes. The next episode of what Is Happening Here is available right now wherever you get your podcasts. To become a Canadaland supporter, go to canadaland. Com. Join. Thank you for listening.