Jewish faculty, students face hostility and lack of support

The fallout of the Israel-Hamas war that began on 7 October with Hamas’s attack on Israel is roiling the campuses of Canada’s two most storied universities – McGill in Montréal, Québec, and the University of Toronto (UoT).

On 21 November, the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) announced that in a referendum 78.7% of McGill undergraduates who voted supported the ‘Policy Against Genocide in Palestine’ put forward by the student club Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR), in a voter turnout of 35%.

Among other things, the policy requires the SSMU to demand that McGill’s administration denounce the “genocidal bombing campaign” of the Israeli Defence Force air force, and cut ties with “any corporations, institutions or individuals complicit in genocide, settler-colonialism, apartheid or ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians”.

In an effort to prevent the SSMU from reporting the official results to McGill’s administration, the Québec chapter of B’nai Brith, a transnational organisation devoted to combatting antisemitism and other forms of bigotry, filed an application for an injunction in Québec Superior Court.

The plaintiff asked the court to keep their identity secret because of fears for their personal safety. While they had worked for the ‘No’ side during the referendum campaign, they had received threats. The court agreed to this request.

The plaintiff’s affidavit states: “The atmosphere on [the] McGill campus has become tense and frightening for Jewish students,” some of whom “hide any religious symbols of being Jewish, such as jewellery bearing the Star of David”.

According to Henry Topas, B’nai Brith’s regional director for Québec, no “segment of society is as affected and is subjected to hatred, harassment, intimidation and violence as is the population of our universities. And B’nai Brith Canada has taken the position that we wish to help in any way we can, especially in the legal area”.

Referring to a case B’nai Brith brought against a referendum held last year on a motion that Jewish students considered antisemitic (but was never heard because it ‘timed-out’ when the plaintiff graduated), Topas said B’nai Brith instituted legal action over the allocation of funds through the SSMU.

McGill collects the fees and remits them to the SSMU, “which turns around and funds the SPHR,” said Topas.

‘Agony’ and ‘polarisation’ in medical faculty

The day after the SSMU announced the results of the McGill referendum, 335 miles west, in Toronto, the Canadian city with the largest Jewish population (188,700), Jewish doctors belonging to UoT’s Temerity Faculty of Medicine (TFOM) released an open statement which began by stating: “The Israel Gaza War is causing agony for many TFOM faculty and polarisation in the TFOM.”

After registering their anguish over the suffering and deaths of innocent Israelis and Palestinians and stating their belief in a two-state solution, the doctors write: “On the streets of Toronto and in TFOM itself, the hostile, belligerent position toward Jews who identify with the state of Israel, or who identify as Zionists, is discriminatory.”

Dr Lisa Salamon, who is a practising physician, a lecturer at the TFOM and one of the three members of the Toronto-based Doctors Against Racism and Antisemitism (DARA) who coordinated the public statement, said: “What we’re hearing from learners is that they feel unsafe.

“They feel unsafe because of some of the things they've seen their teachers post on social media. They feel unsafe based on the presence of some of their teachers and other leaders at these pro-Palestinian rallies and some of the words used at these rallies.”

Among the words chanted at rallies in Toronto is the phrase, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, which the Canadian Anti-Defamation League, the Canadian Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs and B’nai Brith consider to be not just antisemitic but to call for the ethnic cleansing of the Jews, including from the land given to them by the United Nations’ Resolution 242 that established the State of Israel in 1948.

“When someone says, ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, I question: where do you see the Jews going?” Yair Szlak, president and CEO of Montreal-based Federation CJA told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on 21 November. “That is hate speech, right, because it is into the sea that they seek to send the Jews,” Szlak stated.

According to Dr Philip Berger, who teaches at TFOM, and another DARA member who facilitated the open statement, DARA has received reports that Jewish “medical students are terrified. I’m not using hyperbolic language”.

Berger said students were frightened of professors who showed little or no empathy in relation to the massacre on 7 October.

He said Jewish students who felt threatened were unlikely to go to the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (DEI) office. “I know of at least two DEI leads in the Faculty of Medicine who have issued public statements that would completely inhibit most Jewish learners from seeking their counsel and support,” he said.

Further, said Salamon, the entire DEI structure is not designed to protect Jewish learners. “We are the only minority group that is not allowed to define what is racist toward us,” explained Salamon.

The McGill referendum is on a court-accepted ‘pause’, occasioned by the fact that shortly before the case was to be heard on 22 November the law firm representing the SSMU withdrew from the case. After the SSMU found a new lawyer, he requested a delay so that he could familiarise himself with the case.

The earliest date the court and lawyers for the plaintiff and the respondent could meet was at the end of March. As a quid pro quo for agreeing to delay the case, Topas told University World News, the court ordered a ‘pause’ until it could hear the application for an injunction.

According to the application for an injunction, the referendum is legally faulty on a number of grounds. For example, the SSMU’s constitution says that its “endeavours shall be undertaken with full respect for human dignity . . . and without discrimination on the basis of . . . race, national or ethnic origin, [or] religion”. The SSMU’s constitution also requires it to “act in the best interests of its members as a whole”.

The SSMU’s Equity Policy requires the organisation to “uphold a safer space for all our members”. The SSMU’s antisemitism policy further states that “antisemitism is antithetical to collective liberation; it hurts Jews, and it also undermines, weakens and derails all of our movements for social justice and collective liberation”.

Further, voting in the referendum was originally slated to be from 14 to 24 November. And “for no apparent reason”, the SSMU “shortened the campaign period to end on November 20th.”

Jewish vulnerability

B’nai Brith argues that among the pieces of evidence that demonstrate the antisemitic nature of the pro-Policy Against Genocide in Palestine campaign – and which put it in violation of both McGill’s regulations and the SSMU’s policy on antisemitism – are posters that were circulating on the McGill campus on 8 November to advertise a National Day of Shutdown in support of Gaza planned for the following day.

The application quotes McGill’s president and vice-chancellor Deep Saini’s concerns about the images on the poster which showed students kicking in glass windows.

“Publicising an event through allusions to destruction of property is troubling. Far worse is using an image of people breaking glass to encourage participation in an event planned for November 9th, the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, a series of violent attacks in Nazi Germany that saw mobs smash the windows of synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses,” he said.

During this nationwide Nazi pogrom, 267 synagogues and 7,000 Jewish owned shows were destroyed; 91 Jews were killed.

B’nai Brith has also entered into evidence McGill’s statement that: “This proposed policy stands to further sharpen divisions in our community and render more vulnerable all students who are Jewish, Muslim and-or Arab”.

McGill’s concern that its Jewish students are vulnerable is not an overreaction. According to the Montréal Police, between 7 October (the day Hamas attacked Israel) and 7 November, the city recorded 73 hate crimes against Jews – and 25 against the Arab-Muslim community – as against 72 for all of 2022. According to Statistics Canada, of Greater Montréal’s 4 million people, there are 152,000 Arabs and 23,700 Jews.

In the week before the referendum commenced, two Jewish schools were firebombed and one was shot at; all incidents took place either at night or in the early morning, and no one was injured, and damage was minimal. On the night and morning of 13 and 14 November a third Jewish day school was shot at. On the night and morning of 26 and 27 November a Jewish community centre was firebombed, shortly after Andrew Housefather, a Jewish member of Parliament, posted on X that a meeting he was at had ended.

On 8 November, at Concordia University, Montréal’s other English university, a pro-Palestinian group confronted a peaceful demonstration being held by Jews inside the university’s main building. Yanise Arab, a lecturer in the History Department at Université de Montréal, was caught on camera yelling “Go back to Poland” at the Jewish students. The counter-protest turned violent, and police were called; at least one counter-protester was arrested.

In his statement condemning this incident, Concordia President Graham Carr also revealed that the university was aware of antisemitic posts by a student that violated both the school’s ‘Code of Rights and Policies’ and Canadian law because they “could reasonably be construed as inciting violence” and that “swastikas were discovered in one of our buildings”.

The following day, at a rally on the steps of McGill’s Arts Building, a pro-Palestinian female student who said she was at the Concordia ‘altercation’ was filmed, telling the crowd: “We terrified them yesterday. . . We will be loud. We will make them afraid.”

Referendums against Israel

In a statement provided to University World News on 23 November, McGill’s officer of communications and external relations said, “If the proposed policy is adopted, our view is that the SSMU will be in breach of its own constitution; consequently, the SSMU will have violated its memorandum of agreement with McGill. We have written to the president of the SSMU to outline the consequences of adopting the policy.”

Whether McGill’s words are a veiled reference to the fact that it collects the SSMU’s funds is unclear.

For Topas, who told University World News that “McGill has made several statements over recent weeks threatening this and threatening that but has not taken any actions against the unruly child [SPHR] of the SSMU”, one solution to the ongoing threats to Jews represented by the SPHR, which has sponsored 10 referendums against Israel in a decade, would be for the university to collect the student fees and distribute the money as it sees fit.

It is perhaps telling, he added, that Israel is the only country to have had referendums launched against it. There has been none against China for its ethnocide against the Uyghurs, most of whom, it is worth noting, are Muslim coreligionists of the SPHR, he said.

On 23 November, a day after DARA released the open statement signed by 555 physicians at the TFOM, Judea Pearl, the Israeli-American professor of computer science and statistics and director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at UCLA, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, posted on X: “I’m proud of my Honorary Alma Mater, U of Toronto. We, at UCLA, are following Toronto’s footsteps.”

According to Pearl, the father of Daniel Pearl, the journalist murdered in 2002 by Islamist militants in Pakistan, and recipient in 2007 of an honorary PhD from UoT, the 555 Jewish physicians at TFOM were the first such group to publicly confront antisemitism in the medical faculties after the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel; the UCLA Faculty Against Terror open statement by 357 professors was made public a day later.

The TFOM faculty statement published on 22 November was not, however, the first coordinated by DARA. As reported in these pages on 14 January 2023, an open letter signed by 300 Jewish physicians was published last January, occasioned by a letter signed by 45 faculty members, including several Jewish doctors, criticising UoT for having Professor Irwin Cotler deliver the January 2022 speech on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

In addition to having been a Liberal member of parliament, minister of justice and attorney general of Canada, as well as being Nelson Mandela’s Canadian counsel, in January 2022 Cotler was Canada’s special envoy on preserving Holocaust remembrance and combatting antisemitism.

The letter opposing Cotler charged that by using the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism in his speech, Cotler was undermining UofT’s own efforts to define antisemitism.

Further, the letter argued that Cotler “reinforced anti-Palestinian racism in a way that is consistent with a broader pattern of silencing erasure of Palestinian voices” because he focused on antisemitism.

The letter defending Cotler, which was addressed to Dean of TFOM Trevor Young, noted, among other points, that UofT had not “banned or prohibited the use, teaching or discussion of the IHRA working definition” and that the definition has been adopted by Canada and dozens of countries, and, as Cotler knew, the government of the province of Ontario.

Further, the letter stated that Cotler’s defence of Jews did not equal “anti-Palestinian racism”; indeed, the notion that it does merely perpetuates “an antisemitic tradition of accusing Jews who defend themselves as erasing the voices and suppressing the lives of others”.

The characterisation of Holocaust remembrance as anti-Palestinian, Young was told, “trivialise and demean the torment and industrial murder of Jews in the Holocaust”.

In a statement issued to University World News, about the situation on campus today, Philippe DeVos, director of media relations wrote that UoT “condemns antisemitism and is committed to fighting it” and that it was implementing the recommendations of the University’s Antisemitism Working Group that were struck following the Cotler imbroglio.

DeVos’ email quotes UoT’s president Meric Gertler’s December 2022 letter to the university governors: “Antisemitism subverts and demeans our entire community, not just those who are targeted. The University of Toronto must respond as a community.”

DeVos continued: “The President also highlighted that the Temerity Faculty of Medicine has gone further than any faculty of medicine in Canada in addressing antisemitism. The Faulty knows that more needs to be done – across society and in health care – and is actively working to strengthen its faculty and student education programs, including working with hospital partners to help train physician-faculty on how to confront racist microaggressions, including antisemitism, in healthcare settings.”

Part of the university’s response was the hiring of Dr Shari Golberg as the new assistant director for faith and anti-racism in the Institutional Equity Office, announced on 27 November, the day before I drafted this article.

When Dr Steve Samuel, a member of DARA, was asked if anything substantial had changed since last year when both he and Berger said Jewish medical students were too frightened to sign the letter defending Cotler, he answered: “No”.

Samuel added: “We’ve had several meetings with them [that is, the administration]. But in the last year there have not been any actions or disciplining of anyone. Things are now occurring, not at the level of the university or even the faculty, but at the level of the individual hospitals. The postings that are just outrageous directly affect patient care and the interactions between physicians.

“Nothing has come out of the Faculty of Medicine itself.”

Berger’s answer to the same question was equally dismissive.

“What’s coming is mostly fluff. They meet with half-a-dozen Jewish students every two weeks. They have counselling available. They recognise Jewish holidays and they have Kosher food available. But none of it directly confronts anti-Zionism and other forms of antisemitism, like the use the word ‘genocide’.”

Fallout from social media posts

There have been two seemingly antisemitic publicised postings allegedly by doctors affiliated with TFOM. The first, apparently by Dr Christian Zaarour, led to him being placed on voluntary paid administrative leave while his case was investigated.

Zaarour is an anaesthetist and an assistant professor at the TFOM. On 17 November, HonestReportingCanada (HRC), an online, grassroots organisation dedicated to fair and accurate coverage of the Middle East and Israel as they relate to Canada, posted a screenshot on X of an Instagram posting by Zaarout in which he said, “We consider Israel to be absolute evil. There is nothing worse than Israel. If Israel and the devil fight each other, we will stand with the devil.”

HRC asked: “Why would any #Jewish person feel comfortable getting treatment or being taught by him?”

The second case involved a doctor who heads a division of a Toronto area hospital. Screenshots of previous posts, now scrubbed, confirm that the doctor wrote in part: “Yesterday, we joined over 250k Canadians who are marching for peace, marching for a ceasefire and marching to end geno$ide.” As Samuel noted, the use of the ‘$’ in place of a ‘c’ is “a double trope”. By using the $, the post makes both the accusation of genocide and the age-old accusation that Jews use money to control the world.

Lack of support

Each of the doctors told me that while some non-Jewish colleagues, including Muslims, have checked in to see how they were doing, they have been disappointed at the general lack of support from non-Jewish colleagues.

Referring to her Twitter and Facebook pages, Salamon said that aside from posts by her Jewish friends: “Nothing by anybody else. No reply. I thought to myself, does everybody live under a rock, like, are people not watching the news?”

At TFOM and at her hospital, she wondered: “All these social justice colleagues of ours actually don’t care about us. They don’t care about our people. And they’re just finding excuses. And their response, once Israel fought back, has been just atrocious.”

Berger, Samuel and Salamon each told me that they and the doctors they know are committed to providing the best patient care they can. But each is realistic about what the sundering of collegial relationships means. Berger knows of two senior physicians who are now on stress leave because of tensions within the campus and hospitals.

Salamon said she has heard of patients refusing to be seen by Jewish physicians. She knows of relationships between colleagues that have been broken.

“I think most people will remain professional with their colleagues, despite knowing their beliefs. But the hospital has definitely become a place where I think some of my Jewish colleagues just feel very uncomfortable and very unsafe.”

University World News contacted SPHR and the SSMU on 23 November asking for comment on the allegations in this article but neither organisation has responded.