Deborah Lyons, Canada’s recently retired envoy for combatting antisemitism, this week lamented that the effort to shine a light on increasing antisemitism in Canada had left her “despondent and despairing about the fact that it was hard to get people to speak up, to speak with clarity, to speak with conviction about what we were seeing happening here on Canadian soil.”
Jewish communities have long known silence. My The Hub opinion piece notes that at its worst, it has manifested in some communities as synagogue floors covered in sand to mask the sound of feet shuffling during silent prayers or by those hidden during the Holocaust to escape capture by the Nazis. In today’s Canada, silence comes in different ways. Some Jews quietly conceal their identity by refraining from displaying a Star of David or kippah, families remove mezzuzahs from their front doors to avoid telegraphing that it is a Jewish home, and the community avoids widespread promotion of events hosted in community centres due to security concerns.
The silencing of the Jewish community is particularly notable within the education system. That is the inescapable takeaway from a newly released survey on antisemitism in Ontario schools, which shockingly identified hundreds of antisemitic incidents targeting children as young as six years old. Being called “half-human” or swarmed by fellow students with Nazi salutes would leave few children unscathed. But the effects of antisemitism in schools lead to more than just fear and alienation. Like many victims of harassment, bullying or criminal activity, it leads to silence.
And the issue is not limited to students in elementary and high schools. On university campuses, shying away from publicly expressing opinions or keeping the location of Jewish events secret has become an increasingly common practice. In recent months, some faculty have criticized officials seeking to protect Jewish students and dismissed broadly recognized Jewish organizations who express safety fears by suggesting they are not representative of the community.
In the months after the October 7th attacks, the steady rise of antisemitism primarily sparked disbelief: the disbelief among far too many in Canada that rising antisemitism was real alongside the disbelief by many within the Jewish community that antisemitism had returned in a manner unseen since the Holocaust. As evidence has mounted – multiple murders in the United States, vandalism at Canada’s national holocaust memorial, and shootings at Jewish schools and community centres around the world – disbelief today is far harder to maintain.
In response, there have been some notable efforts to address the antisemitism scourge. Both the federal government and some local municipalities have enacted or proposed bubble zone legislation designed to create a safe perimeter around places of worship, schools, hospitals, and other vulnerable institutions. Some universities and governments have adopted much-needed antisemitism guidelines and promised to enforce them more aggressively.
More is required, but those responses appear to have shifted the discourse from disbelief to efforts to silence and thwart initiatives to protect the community. It often starts by insisting that the Jewish community is not only unable to judge what constitutes antisemitism, but that it actively engages in its weaponization. It is hard to think of any other group that is not only denied its own ability to identify harms but is painted as acting nefariously when it does so.
When the issue does break through, the efforts to protect the Jewish community are then silenced by framing them as undermining the rights of others. For example, bubble zone initiatives are frequently characterized by critics as an affront to freedom of expression, despite being carefully drafted and modelled on similar laws that have been upheld by Canadian courts as constitutional.
Similarly, antisemitism guidelines on campus have been derided as chilling freedom of expression. These institutions have long histories of adopting extensive regulations to protect women, visible minorities and Indigenous groups, even going so far as to identify and guard against micro-aggressions. But the same approach seemingly does not apply to the Jewish community, who instead face charges that protecting their rights would come at the expense of the rights of others.
In fact, even political views on the founding of the State of Israel or expressions of support for Zionism, which as former prime minister Justin Trudeau noted “is the belief, at its simplest, that Jewish people, like all peoples, have the right to determine their own future” runs the risk of being labelled as “racist” in today’s educational environment, thereby silencing the perspectives.
As the rise in antisemitism has become too pronounced to ignore, there have been some important efforts to chronicle it and call for action. But what has been missing is an examination of its day-to-day effects, which has placed the safety and well-being of an entire community from grade school to seniors’ homes at risk. Those effects will become less visible if all that is left is the sound of silence.
