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In a frenzied media cycle, Identity/Crisis creates better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. Host Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, talks with leading thinkers to unpack current events affecting Jewish communities in North America, Israel, and around the world, revealing the core Jewish values underlying the issues that matter most to you.

Reporting on Antisemitism When No One Wants to Listen Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. I’m recording on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2025, actually recording this episode from New Orleans, Louisiana, which I’m attending as part of the Edward Fine Winter Seminar for college students, where we’re studying issues of Judaism and democracy with about 110 college students from the US and Canada for the duration of this week.

Last week, my colleague Annie Beyer Chafetz, who is the marketing manager for this show, and a member of our production team, shared a clip with me about our show that was produced by Riverside, which is the platform we use to record this podcast. It’s like the podcast equivalent of Spotify wrapped, and it’s called “Top Word,” emphasizing the word that appeared the most in this podcast in 2025:

Antisemitism, antisemitism, antisemitism, antisemitism, antisemitism, antisemitism, antisemitism, antisemitism, antisemitism, antisemitism, antisemitism, antisemitism, antisemitism, antisemitism. 

Okay, I guess this is not so surprising. We’ve done shows just this past year with Yair Rosenberg, Terrence Johnson, Amy Spitalnick, Sarah Hurwitz, Howard Wolfson, Anita Friedman, Abe Foxman, and Danny Dayan.

It wasn’t really on purpose, but a chronicle of the time. Every one of those conversations felt pinned to the news cycle back in 2020. I named this podcast Identity/Crisis with that slash because Jewish identity and crisis tend to be the topics that Jews talk about the most. Needless to say, the antisemitism crisis is all over the discourse these days.

And at the same time, I laughed when I got that clip from Annie, but I also found hearing it to be incredibly depressing. And not just because of the antisemitism itself that precipitates this analytical obsession, but because as I’ve shared before on this show, talking about antisemitism, allowing it to take central stage in the Jewish conversation, all of that seems like a major loss of our ability to shape an aspirational agenda for our people, like a concession to our enemies that grants them a double win. They make us scared, and then they make us talk about being scared all the time. 

But it does work. There’s only so long that those of us who prefer to spend our time on moral aspirations, self-criticism, the challenge of living up to the covenant—there’s only so long we can avoid reckoning with questions of safety and security, which underlie our people’s ability to dream. Sometimes I think that the organizations in the Jewish community that focus exclusively on antisemitism are engaging in a variety of forms of moral avoidance. Sometimes I think that their constant emphasis on our fears makes the situation worse, and yet even I cannot shake the urgency of this conversation.

I see the ways that even when we wanna talk about ideals of democracy, the importance of pluralism and allyship, a moral vision for Israel’s future—even when we want to do that, we are required to reckon with this proliferation of hate, which penetrates and even obfuscates those very issues. 

I also started to notice something else. I sense as well that as you start thinking about or digging deeper into antisemitism, it has a red pill effect. You start seeing things with different clarity, systems of hate, conspiracy theories, and you can no longer see the world as you once saw it, the way you’d continue to see it if you had just taken the blue pill. It’s a strange thing. Antisemitism itself is rooted in conspiracy theories. Once you start looking into it, you can’t help but being drawn into your own conspiracy theories about antisemitism, into the tangled web of social, political, and ideological forces that allow antisemitism to shapeshift in our societies and to sustain itself against the passage of time. 

There’s another thing that happens when you spend a lot of your time on antisemitism, which is to start noticing how uncool it makes you.

Skeptics of antisemitism discourse have a diffidence around them that makes you feel like you’re begging for sympathy when you’re trying to just hold a society accountable. This has been on display all week at the Turning Point Conference in the U.S., watching Ben Shapiro trying to insist that the increasingly publicly antisemitic conservative movement in the United States hold a line on antisemitism that has long blown past. You see the casual dismissal he’s receiving on stage from his former allies, who you might say he helped enable. 

This happens all the time on the anti-Zionist left too. Those who insist they’re trafficking and enabling antisemitism are dismissed as hapless particularists. To fixate on antisemitism is to become what Lazare and Arendt called becoming “conscious pariahs,” to accept your fate on the outside, or worse, to become parvenues, those that try to keep pace with a society that wishes your absence. It’s a quick pathway to a kind of societal pessimism.

As a lifelong liberal, American, and optimist, I feel the tug of these forces on me and I don’t like it. I thought about this, listening, wincing most of the time to Jesse Brown’s podcast, “What is Happening Here — Canadaland Investigates,” a limited series show with seven episodes that tries to explore why and how antisemitism has erupted in Canada with a proliferation of hate crimes against Jews. Nine times more likely to happen in Canada than in the United States. Nine times.

The title, which I first read as “What is happening here?” sounded like a kind of a naive question. I realized maybe sometime in the first episode that it is actually a specific reference to the question. Could it happen here? And in fact it is not a question, but a description: What is happening here. Brown himself is an entrepreneur, a journalist, a media critic, in his original show, Canadaland, maybe a bit of a provocateur. We can explore that. He is not a likely protagonist, it seemed to me, for tackling this issue in this show, and he’s experiencing quite a significant backlash, both from media and progressive circles for doing so. If I believed in trigger warnings, I would tell you that the first episode, simply telling the story of this violence listing events and narrating stories, is almost impossible to listen to.

I’m grateful to Jesse for joining me this week to tell the story of this journey that he’s been on with this show and what it all means for Canadian Jewry. Jesse, thanks for joining me today. I guess I’ll start just by asking you—why did you take this on? Why did you start doing this? It does not seem like reading the career trajectory that you’ve been on, like the obvious thing you were gonna tackle. It’s obviously been risky. What motivated you to start telling this story about the rise of anti-Semitic violence in Canada? 

Jesse: Stubbornness, probably. I have the tendency to kind of not be able to stop myself from scratching the thing you’re not supposed to scratch at, but there was a degree of kind of personal experience and narrative that that went into this; made me feel like I had to.

When I host Canadaland, and you know, you summarized it well, about Canadian news and media criticism, my kind of identity to my listenership is a general listenership. Jewishness is not a big aspect of it and not something that I ever thought was of particular interest to the audience. One thing that has always been a focus of Canadaland as a media criticism outfit is when the media is discriminatory, both because it’s important to document and it’s possible to document. It’s, you know, when you’re doing news analysis, there’s a methodology for looking at, okay, here’s how they talked about these suspects of this crime. If these suspects were white, would they have done it the same way? Let’s do a comparison. And over the years, Canadaland has done a lot of those types of comparisons when it comes to anti-Indigenous racism in Canada, we did a whole series or anti-Black racism, or Islamophobic racism. 

So after October 7th when I started to notice certain double standards in the press coverage. I would point it out, kind of nonchalantly, like it, it was, I’ve been doing this for over a decade at the time, and the response was just very different. The appetite for hearing this was just not there. There was an incredible resistance to accepting that there was anything. In fact, people were adamant that the opposite was true, that the media was incredibly sympathetic to Jews and to Israel and was actively maligning the other side, you know, supposed other side of this conflict.

I have trouble kind of backing away from these. I have a certain attraction towards these. It’s interesting to me as much as it is, as I, I can be pugnacious about it and I wanna fight. I’m also just sort of what’s going on here? What is this response? I found myself kind of getting increasingly embroiled in Twitter arguments and things like that, and it wasn’t fun anymore, and I took a step back from it. 

I mean, a lot of stuff was happening as was happening everywhere with my own staff, and then their feelings of what it means for our company to be targeted as suddenly being accused of being genocidal and Zionist, all these things, and what that meant for their peer groups and their political circles. And there was cancellation attempts for our advertisers and our supporters and subscribers. So we find ourselves embroiled in this, kind of targeted as an organization that needs to be discredited. And it becomes personal and it becomes also a pet threat to the business. 

So I ultimately stepped away from the social media side of it and you know, tried to put the business back on track, and yet this was just continuing in Canada and what we were seeing in Canada was different. The way it was manifesting in Canada was so different. While it might have been wise for me to just put that behind and take a very clear message that this is bad for, for business, and this was not something that the audience really wanted me to dig into, I also have a journalist’s inclination to scratch at, you know, like, this is not going well documented, and what good am I if I don’t keep records? You know, like what’s the essential job of a reporter if you’re not just gonna listen to people when they’re saying, hey, something is happening to me. And that developed into this series. 

Yehuda: There’s something very toxic, I think inadvertently in “This is bad for business for us to talk about this the way that we’re being attacked.” It feels very, this is a bad word. It feels very self-hatey in the sense of like, they’re being mean to me; I should probably just stay quieter about this. Right? So I’m sure that some of the release that came with actually trying to produce a conversation about this is also rooted in some measure of kind of taking back a sense of agency and pride. Did you feel that as you were doing this? 

Jesse: Yeah. And I, I tried not to let it guide me in the, in the wrong way. But there was a sense of defiance and having started an independent news company, the notion of, I’m gonna talk about what I wanna talk—about as the years go by, you have employees, you’re responsible to people. I’m not gonna pretend that I, I’m just sort of just swashbuckling, I don’t care what anyone says. 

When you see significant chunks of your business disappear and you, and you worry about making payroll because of it, you have to care about what your audience thinks and what the world thinks. I found myself asking, lest I just get dug in here and respond just to be defiant: Are they right? Am I losing it or am I losing perspective? And you know, the, the most frequent argument is—how could you be concerned with something so insignificant as these microaggressions here in Canada when there’s a genocide going on, this comparative discourse, there’s journalists being killed by Israel, I, I thought you were supposed to stand up for journalists. 

I don’t think it’s good practice for a journalist to ignore criticism or not, you know, actively try out the critical argument, you know? Let me take this on, let me see this from this perspective and see if I have this all wrong. So it’s, you know, it’s been very difficult. 

Yehuda: Yeah, I think one of the most admirable things I found in the podcast was you devoted really a full third of the airtime to hearing the positions of those who you are effectively criticizing around the rise of, well, let’s just call it violent anti-Zionism for now, because you’re very careful, especially near the end of the series to make clear that it may not be useful for us, it may not be productive, it may not be accurate to simply collapse anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, but it doesn’t mean anti-Zionism doesn’t have its violent instincts and tendencies or results. So you do actually grant a lot of airtime to a viewpoint, which sounds like interrogating your own biases.

I wanna ask you about the show, kind of a bigger question, which is, you started by saying that you were interested in exploring what you felt to be was media bias, and it feels like when you come to this show, you’ve widened the aperture considerably from simply studying what’s going on in the media to studying a much larger set of phenomenon that’s affecting Canadian life, which is a shift in anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist, or just hate crime behaviors towards Jews. How did that journey take place for you as you were kind of thinking about what this was as a media product? 

Jesse: At some point in conversations about this and coverage of this, it became clear to me that the, the kind of list of assumptions that I thought I was sharing with anybody I might be talking to, things I was taking for granted did not exist anymore, and that something had fundamentally shifted in who Jews were in Canada.

And I think I got that sense on more of like a cellular level than in a way that I could articulate that constantly struggling to point out double standards. If this were a different group, you wouldn’t be saying that in this way. How is it okay to say “go back to Europe?” We understand, “go back to Africa” is just a blatantly bigoted—or anyone, “go back to Italy,” go, you know, we understand that, and it just doesn’t sound the same to people.

So I found like there was something, first of all, undignified about constantly begging for please regard this group with the same set of standards as you do others. Please. Or why aren’t you seeing it that way? At a certain point, you have to recognize they’re not, they don’t see it the same. And sometimes those arguments were made explicit. People would say, you can’t be racist against Jews ’cause you’re not a race, or, you know, you’re not real semites, or, or you’re not the only semites, like just a very strange kind of word play arguments that at first I didn’t really understand what I was dealing with. It felt like just childish. 

And it took some digging to realize there is an ideology at play here that does remove aspects of ethnicity from Jewishness that does seek to recharacterize what Jews are, and to remove from Jews the consideration that you would afford other minorities. That’s explicit. It actually was like a part of the journey of the series is coming to understand—what are these people thinking? What are they talking about here? And to do that it was necessary to sit down with them and say like, tell me what you think. What’s the argument? And take it on their own terms, as much as I could because some of these things are so deeply hateful or ignorant at a time when they’re actually harming people. So I think there are moments where I lose my cool a little bit in those interviews, but I was genuine in my desire to understand what these people think and where they’re coming from. I think we got somewhere with it. 

Yehuda: Yeah. I mean, it is an unusual thing that we as Jews maybe, maybe more than others do respond a little bit to the question of “why are they behaving this way towards us” with curiosity as opposed to simply resistance? There’s something’s a little strange about it. 

Jesse: Yeah. Well, and a lot of Jews, like, “oh, maybe they’re onto something,” you know?

Yehuda: Yeah, that’s right, like, I don’t like myself, or my neighbors. That may be something.

Let’s go back to the foundational assumption here. I think a lot about why American Jews feel so thrown off by antisemitism, partly because the critical mass of American Jews arrived well before the Holocaust felt themselves participating in shaping the very structures, values, ideas of American democracy, oftentimes, quote Brandeis and Horace Kallen and all these folks who actually were architects of the American project and now we feel like a rug has been pulled out from under us. American Jews, I think more than any diaspora have resisted the notion of being a diaspora. It’s really like a homeland. 

Canadian Jews in some ways, feels less surprising, ’cause the community that’s largely built post-Holocaust, a little bit more kind of diaspora skepticism. So on one hand it might mean that Canadian Jews are more ready for the return of antisemitism, like, oh yeah, we knew it was coming this, but there is some, I would say, surprise, that a podcast like yours helps to expose of like, I can’t believe this happened here. What drives that? What drives a Canadian sense of surprise? In what ways was Canada supposed to be immune from this in the way that America was? I’m curious to kind of get behind the very notion of like, wow, I can’t believe this happened. 

Jesse: Well, I think that one concept of Canadians that your listeners and might be familiar with is just the sense that we’re this sort of exemplar of pluralism and acceptance and diversity, which kind of reached its apex under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, that this is the country that sort of figured it out, often in contrast to America, where anti-Black racism is sort of ingrained into the story of the country in a way that—there’s certainly anti-Black racism in Canada, but it’s not this foundational story.

The foundational story, the racism story in Canada is anti-Indigenous racism, which like at no other time, under Trudeau, there was at least optics and lip service paid to the idea that we recognize what’s happening and we’re gonna deal with it through this sort truth and reconciliation process.

So there is a history of antisemitism in Canada that is not widely known or understood, and it’s not that long ago. And you know, my great uncle was interned. There were Jews who came over who were confused with Germans and were imprisoned in camps in Quebec, where Nazi officers had nicer, were also imprisoned, but in nicer accommodations. You know, this happened. There were Jews turned away. You know, “none is too many.” Canada had explicitly anti-Semitic immigration policies that left many Jews to be slaughtered. And then there’s just sort of quotidian stuff that’s not that different than the States, that many law firms wouldn’t take Jews and country clubs and, you know, you could still find deeds in people’s summer homes or cottages that say, you know—they haven’t read their own deeds—if you look at some, I always check when I’m there ’cause people put them up as nice ornamental stuff, the deed to this cottage from, you know, a hundred years ago. Often you’ll find a clause that this cottage is not to be sold to a Jew. 

So those things are part of Canadian history, but they’re really forgotten because I have not, prior to October 7th, really experienced any type of meaningful act of discrimination or antisemitism my entire life. It has been an incredibly accepting society. But there were always hints. You know, growing up in Toronto was one experience. Hoing to university in Montreal and living downtown in an area called the Plateau, it felt very much like when I was walking through the Jewish ghetto in Prague. This had been the kind of intellectual capital and cultural capital of Yiddishkeit, of Canadian Jewish life. And it had been all but abandoned. You know, there were little signs and symbols. There had been 80 synagogues in this neighborhood. There’s one left. You would see a shop that still makes, you know, headstones that was around for like a year or two when I first arrived. 

You just sort of find yourself walking in this almost graveyard of Jewish culture, and I found myself, just in terms of figuring out my own identity, kind of aware in a sense of just how fragile, just how much of a minority we are. The shorthand of this history is that there’s a strain of antisemitism within the Quebec separatist movement, and there was a huge migration of Jews, away from Montreal, it’s more complicated than that, but, but to live there as a young person was to kind of feel like you were in this ghost town of Jewish culture that had a lot of soul to it, that was very different than the way that Jewishness was expressed in Toronto. 

I think I’ve strayed from your question entirely, but the surprise comes from I think just living a very privileged existence, shere Jews have had a very privileged experience that has, that has estranged us from our own history in Canada, our own recent history, we don’t remember it so well. And I think that just to be suddenly reminded of how small we are, for all this talk of Jewish power, to suddenly realize, to see the liberal government estrange its own Jewish members of Parliament who suddenly seemed incredibly powerless. 

There was this sense that there were certain positions around Israel or, or certain positions around anti-racism that the liberal party of Canada would always take. And I take no position as to what positions they should have. I’m just sort of describing, I think, that the relationship between Jews and the liberal party is not the same as Jews in the Democratic party, which itself, I understand is, is changing rapidly, but that, but all of a sudden it just felt like if you thought anyone had your back, think again.

Yehuda: Yeah. So let’s go to the question of the kind of cause of this rise. And we’re gonna just dance through different episodes here. And, and partly I wanna do that ’cause I wanna encourage our listeners to listen to the whole thing through. And I wanna do them the favor of just summarizing episode by episode.

But somewhere around episode four or five, you start playing out the causes of the rise of this phenomenon. And actually it’s interesting given how much you have described this as being a kind of post-October 7th recognition, you don’t actually describe October 7th as a precipitating cause. It may be something that stimulates things that have been percolating for some time or maybe makes things more urgent, it makes them aware, but it doesn’t actually attribute cause to October 7th. 

You list political will, the question, as you just alluded to, to fight this or to even enable it, you talk about police bias and the decision, the not enforced prosecution or even arrest of hate crime, you talk about keeping the peace as a police priority over making arrests. You allude to the question, very tentatively, around Muslims, where according to the sociologist Robert Brym, half of Canadian Muslims express more antisemitic views than the general population, you talk about young people and education.

Do you have a sense, and I, by the way, I’m intellectually very sympathetic to this approach. I find it much more interesting to analyze complex social phenomena by listing a whole variety of forces, as opposed to what usually happens in the world of advocacy, which is you just list the one thing that you’re fighting against and make it the single cause that you’re naming, and you just kind of reverse the dynamic that way.

Do you have a sense of how all of these forces operate in tandem with each other? Do you feel that you have a sense now of, like, a hierarchy of these forces at work? The things we should be thinking about as more of a concern or less of a concern, or even which of the things that you think are actually addressable in the short term and which are just much longer term challenges that the Canadian Jewish community’s gonna have to face?

Jesse: I maybe unsatisfyingly kind of presented to the listeners like, well, this is the cocktail of factors here. I do think that there’s a lot to the argument that Canada embraced the sense of the post-national state, that we have never had as firm as a concept of who we are and what we stand for as America. In fact, the thing that is most unifying is that we’re not Americans. That’s the thing that Canadians are really, really passionate and agree about. 

Yehuda: I hear that very frequently from our Canadian board members, but yeah, go on. 

Jesse: So when you have the rise of post-colonial studies and a discourse coming from academia that holds the colonizer as sort of this kind of figure of evil. And then you’ve got the Prime Minister talking about colonialism, who obviously is conversant in this and is kind of like popularizing these notions. It’s got like, a different resonance than in the states where I feel like there was tension between what’s happening on campuses and a full-throated patriotic—there, there was, I think always like countervailing pressures, I guess. 

And here you sort of have the Prime Minister—like I remember he showed up at an Indigenous march against the government of Canada, and people were like, what are you doing here? Like, are you here protesting yourself? A very strange thing happened where it became part of like just what it is to be a good, thoughtful, caring Canadian with a sense of what this place is, is to understand that we have an evil colonial past, that we recognize the genocide of Indigenous people, cultural genocide, whatnot, and we’re trying to be better and and do better.

Now, where do you fit in, like this, okay, we all accept that. So now what is Israel then? And somehow it became… The actual steps of reconciliation haven’t happened here yet. There are still native people without clean drinking water in Canada. We’re not nearly done, but there was an optical sense that we have owned up to it. We’re in the right place with this and we’re on the right track. But this other country—and I think that people were able to project a lot of our own… you know? ’cause you get to a point, even amongst progressive circles, well, what are we talking about here? Because there’s a land back movement for Indigenous people. But it always—the line stops at like, well, does that mean my house? And it’s, no, no, we’re not talking about giving back personal property. We’re not talking about that. 

So lines that we have to kind of respect here, people don’t have the same sense about Israel. And I think that a lot of the sins that people have internalized as our own sins get cast onto Israel and anyone who has any connection to it. So that’s part of the cocktail. 

The other part that I talk about is the sense of after the G-20 when the cops were over-zealous and locking people up and they overpoliced, and after certain, you know, the, the cops over-respond when it’s protests against business in Canada. So when there was native protests against pipelines, the police response was over-zealous and people’s civil liberties were transgressed upon. Then you find yourself in this situation after that—and also after George Floyd and things like that, where the police don’t want to be seen on social media cracking skulls. 

We saw this with the freedom convoy. They were very hesitant to go and do anything about this. It’s sort of apolitical, ’cause that was, I guess, coming from more of the right wing. They did not want to go in and round everybody up and throw them violently at people looking for a fight into the paddy wagon. And they should have policed better. They should have stopped those people from occupying downtown Ottawa. So that’s a factor that came into play here, where, from the start, the police response, and I think with, yeah, with encouragement from political leaders was like, let this play out. This is not a good look for us to come and crack skulls of peace activists. 

And what I document in this series is—that makes a certain amount of sense. And I’m, I’m a journalist, I have to be an advocate for free expression. I, I don’t like the idea of protests being shut down, but if the police posture is one of deescalation, let this just play out, well, when you’ve got a couple hundred very angry anti-Zionists in a Jewish neighborhood to which they’ve been returning week after week, and then a Jewish resident has had enough and they come and they start to yell pro-Israel things or, or whatever, they start to confront these anti-Zionist protestors, well, deescalation then means removing the Jew. The Jew is escalating the situation, the Jew’s presence is incendiary. 

There’s even a situation where a rabbi who was not causing any trouble in Montreal, was asked by a police officer to move along because he was standing there with a yarmulke. So this is a factor as well that goes into the mix. But spoiler alert, I still want, want everybody to come listen to—because I, you know, the most important thing on the series, I think, is just hearing people say what happened to them. 

But I think that this is where we actually got somewhere why it is more pronounced in Canada. And by “it” I mean that the movement is not focused on politicians, it’s not focused on the Israeli embassy, it’s focused on Jews in a way that it is not in America. 

And the reason for that is, in my opinion, because in America, it makes a certain amount of sense to protest your government because the government is providing vast amounts of political and monetary aid to Israel that Israel arguably needs. So that makes sense. Or it might make sense to people—AIPAC, the funding of politicians, there is a significant amount of money that goes towards funding political candidates. 

Those things are not true in Canada, right? The Canadian government’s impact on Israel is negligible.It doesn’t make that much sense, and even to the degree that it does make sense, you know, Israel is an ally of Canada and whatnot, the protestors have gotten most of what they want. Prime Minister says, no more arms to Israel. Canada has recognized Palestinian statehood. The Palestinian flag has been flown at city halls across Canada. Politicians line up to denounce Israel. The mayor of Toronto calls it a genocide. They essentially are saying the same things that the protestors say, so they’ve kind of neutralized themselves as viable targets. 

And what the Canadian example, I think, shows the world is—once those political targets lose their vibrancy, there’s no one really fighting back, they kind of agree with the protest movement—the protest movement does not say, alright, we’ve gotten what we wanted out of Canada. To the limited extent that Canada is complicit in this, we’ve pretty much gotten all of our demands met. It actually just got larger and the focus shifted and the focus shifted to this, not just Jews, but like this kind of endless hunt for complicity. 

So this CEO of this bookstore has a charity, and the charity, well, they don’t give money to the Israeli army, but they give money to people who used to be in the Israeli army for scholarships. And that’s Public Enemy number one of the anti-Zionist movement. So I think that tells us something, and again, it’s something that’s explicit in the movement itself. When they say our goal is not ceasefire, our goal is not a two-state solution, our goal is to eradicate Zionism from the world, and I start to kind of analyze these clips of people saying Zionism is [00:31:00] embedded in the streets of Toronto. We are going to eradicate it. What does that mean? In Canada, we’re seeing what that means. 

Yehuda: I think by the way, it’s happening in America too. I think it’s not at all surprising that a week or two weeks after the election of the first anti-Zionist mayor in New York City, the next major protest, well, it can’t be at City Hall anymore. Mayor Adams is gone. So it takes place at Park East Synagogue on the Upper East side—

Jesse: Like clockwork.

Yehuda: With excuse that, oh there’s, there’s an Israel event.

Yeah, ’cause I said, oh, you know, we’re not seeing in America the same demonstrations at synagogues that we’re seeing in Canada, and as soon as Mamdani was mayor, they moved to the synagogue. It was totally unsurprising. 

Yehuda: Couldn’t have scripted that. So let’s talk about literally the most sensitive issue and in the whole series I saw the way you were tiptoeing around the whole kind of Muslim question in all of this, increasingly significant minority in Canada, an object of conservative and right wing talking points literally all over the world, the force that’s driving antisemitism and unpatriotic sentiment in Western countries is the force of immigration, especially from the Arab and Muslim world. 

You acknowledge the ways that this has had incredibly dangerous consequences since 9/11 for Muslim communities with the rise of anti-Muslim bigotry. And at the same time, you seed some amount of skepticism, which is one that I share that when every somebody says “anti-Semitic,” they have to say in the same sentence, “Islamophobic and anti-Muslim rhetoric” as though these are necessarily the same things, when in fact some of what is driving antisemitic and certainly anti-Zionist rhetoric is overrepresented from the Muslim community itself.

So I’m curious if you could talk a little bit about your own thinking around how to even talk about that question and how we can talk about that more publicly in order to acknowledge that this has to be considered a force at work here without necessarily it translating into the political consequences that the right wants it to be.

Jesse: Yeah, I’ll do my best. And the tiptoeing is not, you know, at this point I’ve been called every name under the book. So it’s not that I’m so concerned, people will call me whatever they kind of predetermined, they’re gonna call—

Yehuda: No, you wanna get it right. 

Jesse: I wanna get it right. Because it’s true that Muslims were hurt. And you know, it’s true that when the denunciation of Islamism became. A little bit unhinged after 9/11, even to the extent that, you know, I agree with it. I don’t like fundamentalist manifestations of any religion, and certainly Islamism to the extent that we’re talking about a violent jihadism, I’m happy to say that I don’t, I don’t support those principles at all.

But when the discourse became one in which it was just sort of constantly, constantly, almost to the point of obsession that this was a threat—regular Muslim people who had nothing to do with that suffered terribly. So we should be careful. And I have kind of gone to battle over the years with commentators in Canada who have really had in their crosshairs the Muslim community in various ways, because in Canada for a very long time, we did not have any Islamist violence. We had an incredibly successful integration of Muslim neighbors with whom I often feel a lot more in common than kind of old stock Canadians. The experience of Muslim colleagues and Muslim friends, I see a lot of the Jewish experience in it, and I’ve always been very resistant to a lot of that discourse, to a lot of the blame.

But a journalist has to deal with facts. And yes, you look at the arrests when it comes to the incidents of Jewish schools being shot at and synagogues being firebombed, and then actually just multiple mass murder attempts. Like real threats where people were in possession of explosives, in possession of weapons, and were going to do terrible harm. It’s not exclusively Muslim, but there is an overrepresentation of Muslims in in anti-Jewish violence in Canada. 

And then you look at Professor Brym’s attitudinal surveys and finds, that, yes, 48% of Canadian Muslims expressed at least moderate anti-Semitic sentiments. So what are we to do with this as a good, immigration-loving, Canadian Jew? Like it really is a fundamental aspect of what I do feel patriotic about as a Canadian. You gotta acknowledge what is true about this, but make important distinctions. These sentiments are not behavior. There’s probably a lot of overlap, but at a time when there’s a lot of galvanizing anti-Israel feeling that does cross over to anti-Jewish feeling, you know, what you’re gonna hear in a survey about people’s opinions about Jews, I don’t like the fact that 48% of my Muslim neighbors are sympathetic to antisemitic ideas, but that doesn’t mean that they’re taking to the streets and that they’re… that 48% of that population is out to get Jews. 

There has been a tripling of almost a tripling of the Muslim population in Canada in about a 20, 25 year period and a larger crisis in Canada, not Muslim specific is that immigration needs to be met with social services, housing opportunities, naturalization. It’s interesting ’cause a lot of the actual immigrants who are coming over are not the ones who are participating in anti-Jewish bigotry. It’s their kids and their kids are finding themselves in an economic, you know, landscape where the Canadian dream is not available to them. This is a dangerous thing, you know, sedentary, angry youth who have been taught that Canada is an evil country and that, you know, it’s a bad mix of factors. 

Yeah. All of these things mixed together. What I found really heartening from Professor Brym’s research is that one Jewish friend or positive experience with a Jewish person was enough to alter the data, that Muslims who had that one experience did not demonstrate anti-Semitic attitudes any greater than the general Canadian population. So for me, what that affirmed is that we just have to keep talking to each other. And, and it’s hard ’cause there’s so few of us Jews in Canada, but most of the people who hate us have never met one of us. And I, I don’t like that burden that, oh, so my job is to go and make nice to you, you know? 

Yehuda: No, it’s a terrible burden. If I’ve proved that I’m human, you’re not gonna dislike me. I mean, that’s what it kind of comes down to. 

Jesse: Yeah. You know, so somebody told me that, that all of this antisemitism, antisemitism, like you, we, we, we can have a laugh at that montage you played earlier. I share, I don’t know if I’m projecting this on to you, but there’s a certain amount of embarrassment. There’s better things to talk about. 

Yehuda: Yeah. 

Jesse: And yeah, somebody said to me that, you know, antisemitism is not the study of Jews. It’s the study of antisemites. That’s who we’re really talking about here. It’s, like, it’s our cross to bear. It’s our burden to understand it, you know?

Yehuda: Literally. Yeah. 

Jesse: But it’s not our thing, you know, it’s, it’s… it’s y’all’s thing, you know? 

Yehuda: Yeah. Well, so then that flips the other side of the uncomfortable conversation, which is, and I think you kind of underplay this a little bit. Maybe that’s an ideological choice, maybe it’s not, but I can’t help listening to this podcast and thinking that the permission structure that makes this all possible is Jews actually. Not that I blame Jews for this. I never blame Jews for violence against Jews. That’s crazy. 

But the permission structure that’s granted by virulently anti-Israel Jews in alliances together with virulently anti-Israel non-Jews enables the apologetics that you characterize at the opening of the episode of, this is not real; other forms of bias are much worse. There is justification for this level of criticism of Israel that makes Jews kind of an open target because of their open support for Israel. That too feels like a very uncomfortable piece of this discussion.

What do we make of the ways that Jews sit? Not as merely the object of this scorn, but as kind of the middleman, right, between those who hate us for completely unjustifiable reasons. And the language that emerges that turns that into justifiable reasons or, or at least gives permission for it. 

Jesse: I don’t know, but it’s really hard. And the moment where I lose my temper the most on the show is talking to this guy I have known for years, David Meslin, who’s an anti-Zionist Jew. I don’t like a lot of the rhetoric of Jew against Jew. I don’t like calling people capos or self hating. I don’t, I really resist a lot of this. It feels like it just flipping the Good-Jew/Bad-Jew and I respect the fact that there’s such a small group of Jews who are like explicitly anti-Zionists. That minority status is not what makes them wrong, right? As a Jew, I would never discount an opinion just because it’s an unpopular opinion. You know, we are the people of minority opinions.

And yet, yes, I think that you’re onto something that the amount of permission that a very small group of very overly represented Jews have to launder opinions to make it permissible. It’s incredibly destructive and ultimately I think I see eye to eye with a scholar I interview on the show, Adam Louis Klein, I’m sure a lot of your listeners will have read that. We have to stop this endless debate about was it antisemitism or not? Something happens. Can we call it antisemitism? As if the only way for it to be bad is if it’s antisemitism. 

Maybe it’s not, maybe it’s not always antisemitism. Maybe some of these people, what they hate is Israel; what they want to abolish is Israel. How did that become okay? We don’t have that same conversation. You can virulently oppose Putin and his regime. To hate Russia and Russians and to wish that it is wiped off the map—we have no trouble understanding that is, first of all, hateful, ot’s a hateful position, and, and I, I don’t think that it’s possible to hate a country without there being an ethnic aspect, without it being a certain kind of racism. 

I think that there’s two words that I almost wish we could have these debates without, which is Zionism and antisemitism. It never occurred to me this question of am I a Zionist? I never self-identified as one before October 7th, and I’ve been asked, am I one or accused of being one? And ultimately I thought, well, why would I, it’s not like a stubborn defiance, like, like where I’m trying to hide something, but I never, I’m not a Suffragette, you know, I’m not a Dryfusard. I’m not, you know?It’s only because that’s being imposed upon me that I’m gonna have to explore that or wrestle with it. 

So I think that a problem has been that the permission structure has, in many ways, been one that is constructed by Jews ourselves, not exclusively anti-Zionist Jews, because we have created it was a lot of work to make antisemitism bad. You know, antisemitism was invented as, yeah, as, as good, as a, you know, as, as a thing people were, oh, I’m not that kind of a Jew hater. I’m a new kind, I’m, I’m a scientific Jew hater. I’m an antisemite. 

It took a long time and a lot of work for Jews to use really soft power and reason and documentation, journalism and comedy and every soft power tool we had to impress upon the world that there is no acceptable antisemitism. And that tool was sort of robbed from us instantly by kind of flipping it around that, okay, here’s a different way of heaping scorn upon Jews. It’s not because you’re a Jew so you can’t call it antisemitism. And I think that we’ve been caught flatfooted on that. We kind of have to catch up to that.

Yehuda: Yeah, and this I found compelling both about Adam Louis Klein’s take and also, uh, Shaul Kelner’s, a professor at Vanderbilt who wrote a piece on this for our journal Sources, not only to stop to think about anti-Zionism in relationship exclusively to anti-Semitism, to treat it as its own hate, but also to stop thinking about it as the inverse Zionism.

Jesse: That’s right. 

Yehuda: Like it’s not Zionism versus anti-Zionism. Look, Hillel and Shammai were debating the legitimacy of these two viewpoints. They’re not the same and they don’t fully correlate. 

Let me conclude with this: You’ve been generous with your time. The first episode was incredibly surprising because I know about the rise of antisemitism in Canada. I know about the rise of anti-Jewish hate. Hearing the stories was just incredibly arresting, just really overwhelming. 

But really the most surprising thing in the whole thing, and I’m sorry for the spoiler alert as well, is, after a whole show that’s really about Canada, the last voice you bring on the show is Ali Abu Awwad, a nonviolent Palestinian activist who has worked together with Jews for decades to try to advance nonviolent values and ideologies and he says we should globalize the solution, which is nonviolence. You bring him on admiringly to kind of hold him up as the kind of ambassador for ideas that neutralize the absolutism of anti-Zionism as the way to bring peace for Israelis and Palestinians. You use him to illustrate that. anti-Zionism doesn’t seem to actually really care about the Palestinians, in some ways. It is really much more about focusing its ire on Westerners.

And I found it kind of interesting, almost confessional that you were maybe retrieving some Zionism for yourself at the end of this show and that the show ends in Israel/Palestine and doesn’t end on Bathurst. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what that means, why it was important for you to recenter this back in a hopeful vision for Israelis and Palestinians for the future as opposed to maybe a hopeful solution for all of Canadians.

Jesse: My oppositional defiance disorder, like, is not limited to me being oppositional to other people. 

Yehuda: It’s your own podcast. 

Jesse: Yeah, my own rules. Because the rule of the series was like, in defiance of these people saying, how could you be so selfishly concerned and centering your own experience when there’s a genocide going on, when the bigger story is, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And the series is an act of defiance to say, you know what it, it’s okay for me to care about my own community. It’s okay for me to care about my neighbors. It’s okay for me to document what’s happening outside my own door. And I spend the series doing that. 

And yet lingering is, are you turtling and ignoring that there is a larger story, not just larger in terms of the death count or, or, or the political ramifications, but that it is driving what is happening outside of your door. And I knew that that was the lingering concern. And it’s very frustrating when you, when you have anti-Zionists on and, and you, like they, they want to fight with you about Israel’s evils or perceived evils and like, oh, you’re entitled to your feelings about that. That’s not what you’re here to talk about. I just wanna talk about how this is impacting your neighbor. 

So having spent, you know, months and months working on this series about Bathurst Street, ultimately it was kind of serendipitous that I was given the opportunity to speak to this guy. And I was hesitant as to what place this had, ’cause I don’t want, oh, and by the way, at the end, let’s solve the Middle East.

But what that conversation revealed to me, and I think was so crucial for the listener to hear, is just what you said, that if all of this is based on the concept that my ideological enemy or the bad guy of this series is the pro-Palestine cause, and that this is all an exercise in vilifying or, you know, people say, oh, you, you, you, you object when we resist this way, you object when we resist that way, you just don’t like us resisting. And that there’s just no daylight between anti-Zionism and pro-Palestinianism. 

To hear this voice speak very directly to that anti-Zionist protestor and say: It doesn’t help me for you to hate Jews. It doesn’t help us. It actually perpetuates things. It’s actually making it worse. I felt like that probably is going to speak to the people that I most want to reach in a way that maybe nothing else on the show is, is gonna resonate sadly, because I, I think that people have closed the door to caring about Jews, but in a way that is often infantilizing, the Palestinian is held up as sort of the victim of the war—well, here’s a Palestinian who has to live with the ramifications of this divisiveness that is spreading like poisonously, that, that is a really hungry beast that really wants everybody to fight and keep fighting. And here he is saying, well, the more you do this, the more we’ll keep dying. I think that was just urgently necessary for people to hear. 

Yehuda: Yeah, and I appreciate it personally because I am really eager as a liberal Jew, as a Zionist to be able to raise my voice in opposing the corrosive consequences of occupation, the dehumanization of Palestinians, the absence of a conversation about peace in Israeli society, the emerging racism in Israeli society. These are really morally urgent issues. 

And you know, one thing that holds it down is the state of Israel’s leadership. And the other thing that feels like it holds it down and the diaspora is exactly what you’re talking about, which is a kind of very selfish claiming of that agenda by a discourse and a movement that is actually doing real harm to Jews, and I think that you kind of craft the space for that to be possible. 

Jesse, thanks so much for being on the show today. Folks, please go listen to this podcast, “What is Happening Here.” Thanks so much. 

Jesse: Thank you for this conversation.