By Jesse Brown
Tuesday, March 24, 2026
Ted Rosenberg quit teaching geriatric medicine after 30
years because his employer, the University of British Columbia, was too
tolerant.
In the days and weeks following the Hamas massacre of
innocent Israelis on October 7, 2023, students and colleagues alike in his
academic community posted fiery condemnations of and expressions of moral
disgust toward … Israel. Rosenberg felt that some of these messages crossed the
line into bigotry. One note accused Israel of harvesting the organs of murdered
Palestinians. Another, from a medical-school resident, warned of a sinister,
unnamed group of people “pulling the strings, who have orchestrated every war
to ever happen, the ones who profit off of death and sickness.” “ The way I saw it,” he told me, “that level of
demonization put the whole Jewish community at risk.”
He did not resign because of the messages, though; he
resigned because the university wouldn’t do anything about them. “ I tried to meet with the dean,” Rosenberg said, “and he said, ‘If you feel you’re being
discriminated against, put it through the DEI program.’ So I met
with the head of the diversity, equity, and inclusion program within the
faculty, and she refused to acknowledge that anti-Semitism was an issue. They
view Jews as white within their DEI framework.” The
faculty of medicine’s dean at the time, Dermot Kelleher,
referred Rosenberg to UBC’s Equity and Inclusion website. Rosenberg searched
the site for the words anti-Semitism and Jew. Neither appeared.
In his letter of resignation, he wrote, “I have no faith
in due process in a faculty that does not even acknowledge the existence or
presence of antisemitism/Jew-hatred.” After Rosenberg’s resignation became the
subject of media attention, the equity committee of the department of medicine
of UBC added a note to its website: “Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia will not be
tolerated.”
***
Hatred against Jews in Canada has spiked to historic
levels since October 7. It’s a crisis commonly measured via violence and
vandalism. More synagogues in Canada in the past 28 months have been
desecrated, burned, shot at, or threatened with bombings than in any other country.
Jews in Canada are now statistically more likely to be victims of
police-reported hate crimes than any other minority. A Jewish girls’ school in
Toronto was shot at on three separate occasions. A Jewish grandmother was
stabbed in a kosher supermarket in Ottawa, and a mother in Toronto was
assaulted while picking her child up from a Jewish day care. Police have
thwarted a half-dozen extremist murder plots since October 7 against Jews by
Canadian residents.
These incidents have generated news coverage and
sympathetic statements from mayors and members of Parliament, whose
proclamations that This is not who we are as Canadians have become
commonplace.
Documenting and denouncing shootings and arson attacks
are easy. But it’s harder to account for stories like Rosenberg’s, where Jews
exit public life without any glass or bones being broken. How many Jewish
academics, health-care workers, teachers, and arts-organization employees have
left institutions because they no longer feel welcome or protected? Nobody is
counting. The diversity statistics collected by these organizations rarely
include “Jewish” as a category of self-identification.
Here’s what can be said for sure: 80 percent of Jewish
doctors and medical students surveyed by the Jewish Medical Association of
Ontario reported experiencing anti-Semitism at work after October 7. In 2024,
more than 100 Jewish doctors stopped acknowledging their affiliation with the
University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine in protest of what they saw
as a failure to protect Jewish students and faculty. Almost a third of
Ontario’s Jewish doctors say they are considering leaving Canada because of
hostile work environments, according to the JMAO survey.
A group of Jewish teachers in British Columbia filed a
human-rights complaint against their own union, accusing the BC Teachers’
Federation of ostracizing, bullying, and silencing its Jewish members. A
federal report into Ontario’s K–12 schools found nearly 800 anti-Semitic
incidents reported in elementary and high schools since 2023, many relating to
the conduct of teachers.
One hundred thirty-five cultural organizations across
Canada joined the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel. The
Toronto International Film Festival dropped
a documentary from its lineup that told the story of an Israeli grandfather’s
experience rescuing his family from Hamas on October 7, before an outcry forced
its restoration. A Jewish film festival was postponed in Hamilton, Ontario,
when the theater hosting the event backed out, citing “safety concerns.” The
cartoonist Miriam Libicki was banned from the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival out
of “public safety concerns,” because years earlier, she had written a book
about her time serving in the Israel Defense Forces. (The festival later
reversed course and apologized.)
And then there’s Canadian politics.
In 2023, the mayor of Calgary broke with a long-standing
local tradition and refused to attend a City Hall Hanukkah-menorah lighting;
she said the event had “political intentions” because it “had been repositioned
to support Israel.”
The awkward reality is that a main driver of these
incidents is a very Canadian aversion to causing offense: The deference of many
politicians and institutions to the views of a rapidly growing minority
community is too often leading them to reject another minority community.
Although relatively few Canadians hold negative views of Jews, opinion polls
have found that such views find greater levels of support within the Canadian
Muslim community. From 2001 to 2021, the Muslim population of Canada more than
tripled, to about 5 percent of the population. Just 4 percent of non-Jewish
Canadians agree that Jews are largely to blame for the negative consequences of
globalization, but that figure rises to 28 percent among Canadian Muslims,
according to a survey
conducted by the University of Toronto sociologist Robert Brym. Similarly, only
16 percent of Canadians believe that it is appropriate for opponents of
Israel’s policies to boycott Jewish-owned businesses in Canada, but that claim
finds support among 41 percent of Canadian Muslims.
Canada is also the birthplace of a new educational
framework called APR—Anti-Palestinian racism. APR was developed by the Arab
Canadian Lawyers Association, and in 2024 the Toronto District School Board,
which serves more than 230,000 students, voted to integrate APR into its wider
anti-hate strategy. Although a new policy against racism might sound benign,
many Jewish groups argue that in practice, APR can function as a form of
discrimination and censorship. For example, a group of Toronto teachers had been
given APR training by their union, in which they were told that it would be
racist, and therefore forbidden, to ask why Arab countries don’t help
Palestinians. To the claim that the phrase From the river to the sea,
Palestine will be free carries genocidal implications toward Israel, the
APR training suggests
responding that “Palestinian chants and poetry exist to give Palestinians hope,
and are not for others to define.”
David S. Koffman, a historian at York University and the
editor in chief of Canadian Jewish Studies, writes
that Canada’s Jews are turning inward. “Our assumptions about safety, trust,
acceptance, and solidarity have been punctured,” he observes. As a result, he
says, more Jewish parents are enrolling their children in private Jewish day
schools, and job applications at Jewish organizations are rising.
Which is not to say that Jewish spaces are safe from
external judgment and scorn. An anti-Zionist website called The Maple published
lists of the names of Canadian Jews who have served in the IDF, as well as the
names of Jewish children’s schools and summer camps with which they were
associated. The author of these lists, Davide Mastracci, wrote that “the
complicit segment of Canada’s Jewish population deserves blame for what they
do, not who they are.” Weeks after the list was published, five pro-Palestinian
groups launched a campaign to revoke the accreditation of 17 Canadian Jewish
sleepaway camps. The groups accused the summer camps of supporting “genocide”
and called for “a gigantic change.” Then, both synagogues listed by The
Maple as complicit Jewish institutions were shot at.
Among my Jewish friends and family, these efforts to
intimidate and alienate Jews, to exclude them from civil society and from
public life, and to close down private Jewish spaces are discussed with far
more concern and frequency than the regular reports of graffiti and
name-calling. Five Jewish families pulled their children from the downtown
Toronto public school in my neighborhood last year, after a series of
controversies. At least four Jewish journalists left the Toronto Star,
Canada’s largest newspaper, after the paper’s ombud on discrimination and bias
wrote a social-media post questioning “who did what” on October 7, and reposted
another criticizing North American Jews for “centering their feelings.”
I have a general sense that we’re witnessing a polite pogrom, that Jewish life in my country has forever changed, and that I can no longer take for granted that people like me are represented in Canada’s hospitals, schools, newsrooms, and legislatures. But I don’t know for sure. The data do not exist, and the institutions in question won’t collect them. Perhaps they consider it impolite to ask.
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