Yet the Jewish population of Canada is on 1.4 percent. Anti-Semitism continues to account for more reported hate crimes than any other category, making up 37 per cent of all hate crimes reported in 2023. In 2023, there were 132 reported anti-Semitic hate crimes compared to 65 in 2022.
GlobeandMail (h/t Marvin W) For Jewish Canadians, the number of places we feel unwelcome keeps growing.
The cops delivering the coffee was the image that went ‘round the world. But long before members of the Toronto Police Department handed over the Tim Hortons goodies to pro-Palestinian protesters who have been targeting a highway overpass adjacent to a neighbourhood with a significant Jewish population, many Canadian Jews have felt unsettled, even unsafe.
There are Canadian Jews who feel intimidated, scared. And it’s not just on the Avenue Rd. / 401 overpass in Toronto or the area in Windsor described as “Hebrew Heights.” Canadians who happen to be Jewish are feeling unwelcome in many spaces. Spaces that once welcomed us can now feel hostile. Sometimes it’s school, sometimes work.
Toronto resident Deborah Maes recently reached out to her cellphone provider, Freedom Mobile, to ask about a plan for upcoming international travel, including Israel. The customer service representative interrupted. “I’ve never heard of that country. Oh, you must mean Palestine,” she recounted to me.
At Vancouver’s Science World over the holidays, a child-friendly show began with a land acknowledgment that ended with the words “from the river to the sea” – a phrase which represents the Arab Muslim desire to remove all Jewish people from the land of Israel.
Jewish Canadians express a version of “now I know what it felt like for German Jews in the 1930s.”
It’s not just the in-your-face protests or rhetoric many Jews find demonizing, including Holocaust inversion (portraying Jews or Israelis as modern-day Nazis). It’s being told things like “go back to Poland!” (this happened in Montreal); it’s shots fired at a Montreal Jewish school; arson at a Jewish-owned grocery store in Toronto.
Pro-Hamas protests on a highway overpass in Toronto are sparking backlash with Jewish leaders accusing demonstrators of deliberately targeting a prominent Jewish neighbourhood. Noah Shak, vice-president of countering antisemitism and hate at the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, says the movement of protests out of Toronto’s downtown core and closer to Jewish communities is causing ‘serious concern and fear.’
h/t Marvin W
Richard S says
Germany in the 1930s all over again
In Canada!
Dino says
I will be damned if I ever see these Nazi Inbred discharge cretin and not say or do anything. They are Nazis, they have made that choice!, My ancestors made a choice also , like so many did. Defeat the Nazis .