Earlier this month, Jewish students at Wilfrid Laurier University returned to their residence after Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, to find that the mezuzahs affixed to their doors had been torn off and smashed. In the immediate aftermath, the campus Chabad rabbi joined the university’s dean of students to replace them, with Jewish and non-Jewish students gathering in support to send a unified response to the blatant antisemitism. My The Hub op-ed notes that the incident was yet another reminder of the escalation of harassment, discrimination, and vandalism targeting Jewish students and faculty on Canadian campuses. While repeated surveys and studies have left little doubt about the scale of the problem, not all universities have responded as decisively as Laurier. Indeed, too many have either ignored the issue or been reluctant to address it head-on.
Post Tagged with: "case report"
A Century After Keeping Jewish Students Out, Universities Are Letting Them Be Pushed Out
In 1926, McGill University’s dean of arts, Ira MacKay, urged the university to establish a quota on the admission of Jewish students, writing that “the Jewish people are of no use to us in this country” and that “as a race of men their traditions and practices do not fit in with a high civilization in a very new country.” McGill proceeded to increase admission requirements for Jewish applicants and informally establish quotas for students applying to medicine and law, restrictions that would last for years and be mirrored in other institutions such as the University of Manitoba.
My The Hub op-ed notes the ugliness of naked antisemitism once felt like ancient history in Canada, but as students are heading back to class, new studies and reports have confirmed that a century after open quotas and discrimination, the Jewish experience on campus is once again under threat.
Denial, Hate, and Silence: The Three Responses to Overwhelming Evidence of Canada’s Campus Antisemitism Crisis
One week ago, the release of the Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences (CASE) report provided the most comprehensive national data to date on antisemitism on Canadian university campuses. As I wrote in my post on it, there is a crisis: of the more than 900 Jewish students surveyed, 95.7% experienced or witnessed antisemitism over the previous year, 72% limit what they say in class, 57% avoid wearing Jewish symbols, and roughly one-quarter have considered dropping out. That data is in addition to the more than 1,200 open-ended student accounts that deliver the gut punch: a professor telling a class that “Jews belong in Poland and should go back there,” widespread Holocaust denial, and physical and verbal threats targeting Jewish students. The samples posted below give a sense of the responses.
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