For the better part of two years, I have written about antisemitism on Canadian university campuses from the vantage point of personal experience: a post I never thought I would need to write on the right of Jewish students to feel safe on campus, the normalization of antisemitism at encampments including at my own university, the trepidation that accompanied a new academic year, and the chilling effect on expression that I described to the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. Those accounts, alongside those of many students who shared their experiences, were often downplayed by some as exaggerated or unrepresentative. Yet this week, the release of the Canadian Heritage-backed Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences (CASE) report, conducted through the Office of the former Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism and produced by the Association for Canadian Studies and the Metropolis Institute, puts that claim to rest. The report, for which I served as a member of the advisory board, provides the most comprehensive national data to date on the experiences of Jewish students at Canadian post-secondary institutions. The report makes for difficult reading as it confirms that Canada is facing an antisemitism crisis on campus, with the overwhelming majority of the Jewish students surveyed stating that they had experienced or witnessed at least one instance of antisemitism over the prior year.
The survey itself was conducted in November and December 2025 with participation from about 900 Jewish students and recent graduates. Most of the national coverage focused on the topline results: 95.7% of respondents experienced or witnessed at least one instance of antisemitism over the previous 12 months, 84% view antisemitism as a serious problem on their campus, and 70% say their university does not take antisemitism seriously. Culture Minister Marc Miller called the findings “alarming”. He was right, but a deeper dive into the data reveals how the cumulative effect of a hostile climate changes the way that Jewish students study, speak, and participate.
The effects on daily campus life are unmistakable. Nearly three-quarters of respondents (72%) limit what they say in class about being Jewish and two-thirds (66%) do the same online. A majority (57%) avoid wearing or displaying Jewish symbols due to safety concerns, while students who do wear visible markers of Jewish identity report notably higher exposure to intimidation and physical violence than those who do not. And more than 60% have lost friendships because of antisemitism, 41% avoid certain classes or events altogether, 40% say their academic performance has suffered, and more than seven in ten say the experience has harmed their mental health. Roughly one-quarter have even considered dropping out.
This affects every aspect of campus life as respondents identified online spaces (34%), student organizations and campus events (33%), classrooms and lecture halls (25%), nearby off-campus areas (23%), and even student residences (9%) as sites of antisemitic conduct. Fellow students were the most commonly identified source at 51%, yet the conduct is by no means limited to peers. Faculty members were cited in 18% of incidents and teaching assistants and administrators or staff each accounted for a further 7%. For anyone who cares about the academic mission, the classroom data is particularly troubling: 36% of respondents encountered course content or classroom discussion portraying Jews, Judaism, Israel, or Zionism in an antisemitic or biased manner and 34% said a professor raised those topics in ways unrelated to the course subject. Exposure to Holocaust denial or distortion was encountered often or sometimes by 45% of respondents. And 81% of respondents reported hateful or discriminatory treatment of Zionists as occurring often or occasionally, alongside antisemitic vandalism (71%), discriminatory treatment of Jews (56%), intimidation or threats directed at Jews (54%), and physical violence directed at Jews (22%). The more than 1,200 open-ended accounts of antisemitism are stunning in their breadth and include a student whose friend was chased from a campus building by a group shouting “there’s a Jew…let’s get him” and a professor telling a class that “Jews belong in Poland and need to go back.”
The report devotes an entire section to what it calls “institutional betrayal.” Only one-third of respondents reported the incidents they experienced, and among those who did, 63% were dissatisfied with how the report was handled. The majority of non-reporters (52%) said they did not believe reporting would help, one-quarter did not know how to report, and 16% feared retaliation. Perhaps most indicative of the trust deficit, Jewish students who did report were far more likely to turn to Jewish organizations (62%) than to campus security (40%) or deans and administrators (37%).
The report itself stops short of formal recommendations, concluding instead that academic leadership must take greater responsibility and that the findings should be used immediately by leadership in higher education institutions to examine their policies and practices. The recommendations came separately from the Network of Engaged Canadian Academics (NECA), a non-partisan group of more than 400 Jewish and non-Jewish academics from 54 institutions of which I am a member, which released ten recommendations alongside the report. The list will sound familiar to anyone who has followed this issue: applying existing policies to protect students targeted for any aspect of their Jewish identity including Zionism, institutional neutrality policies that apply across the institution, adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism together with the Canadian Handbook, a centralized and transparent incident reporting system with annual campus climate assessments, and a special advisor on antisemitism on every campus.
What has been missing is not knowledge of what to do, but the will to do it. Indeed, the release carries its own illustration of the problem: the survey was commissioned by former Special Envoy Deborah Lyons before the government eliminated her role, leaving the government to release the most comprehensive evidence yet of a systemic antisemitism problem on campus just months after creating a leadership void that has yet to be filled and a new anti-hate council that has yet to act.
I have been an academic for nearly 30 years, working in an environment where inclusion and safe spaces for all students to be their best were unquestioned priorities. Backed by a supportive University president, dean, and advisor on antisemitism, I still believe that to be the case. But this survey confirms that the vast majority of Jewish students encounter antisemitism on campus. If this were any other group — 95% of Indigenous students reporting discrimination or 70% of BIPOC students reporting mental health harm — this would be viewed as a major crisis requiring immediate action. But when 95% of Jewish students report encountering antisemitism, 70% report harm to their mental health, a majority hide their identity, and students report threats of violence and Holocaust denial, the response from some quarters is to ignore or take issue with the survey data.
The bottom line is that hundreds of Jewish students from campuses across the country report antisemitic conduct on campus that is stunning in scope and harm. Every university president in Canada should be investigating how much of the data reflects their own campus experience and committing to change through the NECA recommendations. Every faculty member should be examining whether the discriminatory conduct occurs in their class. And every faculty and student union should be working to fully protect their Jewish members. Years of willingness to tolerate or excuse the antisemitic reality – a Jewish exception – suggests this is unlikely to happen. But now no one can say they didn’t know what was happening.
