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.
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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.
TMU Picks Damage Control Over Fixing the Damage: Behind Its Shameful Response to the Devastating Benotto Report on Campus Antisemitism
Last fall, two incidents at Toronto Metropolitan University attracted national attention: the September 2025 disruption by the group Students for Justice in Palestine at TMU of a Democracy Forum event featuring federal AI minister Evan Solomon that ended in an arrest, and the November 2025 storming of an off-campus event hosted by Students Supporting Israel that left the speaker hospitalized. TMU responded to mounting concern by retaining retired Ontario Court of Appeal justice Mary Lou Benotto to conduct a review of the incidents, assess the university’s policies and their application, and make recommendations for reforms. Her report, which the University released in redacted form last week, should spark two shockwaves. The first comes from the findings, which describe a campus with recurring antisemitism and the harassment of Jewish students and faculty with ineffective and inconsistent institutional response. The second comes from the university’s response to the report itself. TMU, despite having commissioned the review, now appears determined to delay and ultimately reject its recommendations. Indeed, rather than address the damage that leaves Jewish students and faculty feeling unsafe and subjected to routine harassment and discrimination, the university has opted for damage control that shamefully fails to respond to its antisemitism crisis.
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