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Masked protesters gather outside Montreal’s Shaar Hashomayim synagogue, violating court-ordered buffer zone

More than 40 masked people hoisted Palestinian flags while chanting ‘Intifada! Intifada!’

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Social Studies 2024: Phobe Maltz Bovy’s year in nine big vibe-shifts

What happened in the past 12 months? Rather a lot! So to pare it down, I’m limiting this end-of-year recap to things that kept popping up on my own finite radar, with an emphasis on those with relevance to Jewish Canadians. I will not ask whether I missed anything; assume that I have missed—or skipped over—a ton. These are just a handful of the stories about our society I see as relevant going into 2025 and beyond.

Campus protest culture camps out

The encampment trend that took hold at Columbia University and wound up all over the place—including at numerous Canadian schools—became the big story of 2024 for Jewish media and points beyond, the bold, in-your-face sign that the next generation of cultural elites had made Palestine their cause. Or a sign of something else? Not all the student protesters were students; some were professors, others unaffiliated. And the students not on board with the goings-on were very possibly more likely to demonstrate this by going to class than by organizing a counter-demonstration, although the Jewish professor at least temporarily banned by Columbia showed up at the University of Toronto.

Literary world is purging ‘Zionists’

First, a small magazine called Guernica had a meltdown when an Israeli writer, Joanna Chen, wrote an arguably pro-Palestinian essay, but did so while being, you know, Israeli. Chen had refused to serve in the IDF, but she was still too Zionistic for the pages in question. Next up, author Joshua Leifer tried to do a book event for his Tablets Shattered, but a Brooklyn bookstore employee cancelled it just as it was about to start.

Why was this critical-of-Israel book a problem? The interlocutor was going to be a liberal Zionist and one can’t be having that. The books-and-essays world, once a place where Jewish authors once felt reasonably comfortable in North America, now had spreadsheets identifying authors based on indicators of their relationship to Israel.

Searching for signals of antizionism

Look, Diaspora Jews have gone off Israel! No, wait, they’re all-in on Israel, and that’s why they’re buying guns and going to vote for Donald Trump! But then we learned that Jewish Canadians—like our American counterparts—arevirtually unanimous in the belief that Israel should exist as a Jewish state.

(And in similarly shouldn’t-be-surprising news, American Jewish voters overwhelmingly preferred Kamala Harris.)

Tradwives are totally taking over

The concept went from a niche online subculture to mainstream news and just incessant critical coverage. Tradwife this, tradwife that, all to the bafflement of actual traditionalist brides, Jewish and otherwise, if they were even online enough to notice, that is. A tradwife, for the uninitiated, is a social media influencer who posts content wherein she performs being a gender-role-conforming old-school housewife. She’s in something low-cut and she serves her man, but to own the libs, not (allegedly) to titillate straight men of any which politics.

Challah baking has become political

Some baked it to connect with fellow Jews througn established community channels, while others took, shall we say, a different tack.

Yes, 2024 was the year Chatelaine, a Canadian general-interest women’s magazine, published, then quasi-unpublished, an article about baking challah to free Palestine. In an awkward twist, the personal essayist wore an inverted red triangle in the accompanying author photo. This—combined with the content of the essay in question, an essay that didn’t merely criticize Israel’s response to Oct. 7 (which, fair) but erase the fact that Oct. 7 even happened—suggested that maybe it was one of those red triangles. One gesturing at, perhaps, a spot of friendliness towards Hamas.

War of the sexes (cont’d.)

The latest discourse began with the revelation that young men world over are veering to the right, young women to the left. Had women all gone off men? No. But a bunch gestured at plans to do so once Trump won a second go at the U.S. presidency.

And as someone who recently finished writing a book about straight women (to be published by Signal, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada), I have been kept plenty busy.

Reviving the concept of ‘shiksa’

Yes, the Netflix series Nobody Wants This offered a heartwarming rom-com treatment of the extremely adorable scenario of a Jewish man finally being spared the ghastliness that is Jewish women when a bubbly blonde comes his way. Can an ambiguously-Reform rabbi date a woman played by Kirsten Bell? In 2024, anything was possible.

The new death of wokeness

Left-wing illiberalism of the sort that brought us cancel culture is officially passé according to enough big thinkers out there.

Wokeness ain’t actually over yet

There’s also enough evidence to suggest ‘woke’ didn’t go anywhere, but rather transformed and migrated. The transformed bit goes like this: In lieu of a series of current things—individual social-justice concerns that were suddenly the only thing that mattered, only to be displaced by a different one five minutes later—there’s now the omnicause. You can plaster your backpack or coffee shop window or social media bio with a potentially endless set of concerns, as long as they all align, omnicausally speaking.

The migrated one: In a sense, there may have been some geographic migration. Maybe you can’t be cancel-cultured in the States as much as was once the case, but in Canada there are still good old-fashioned campaigns to shut down literary magazines for purity-politics reasons. But when I speak of migration, I mean primarily virtual. Twitter begat X, which in turn begat Bluesky. In layman’s terms, a social media platform that had once been the preferred gathering space of journalists, academics, and sui generis social-media pundits ceased serving that function once Elon Musk took over in October 2022, not all at once but in stages. X, what Twitter is now called, because nigh unusable, a pay-to-play scheme wherein right-wing rage-bait rules the day.

So a bunch of old-Twitter’s so-called power users (dubious honour) migrated, no, fled to a Twitter clone called Bluesky. I wrote a less than rave review of it in the Globe and Mail, which caused the Good folks who love love love Bluesky to anoint me main character. I was even parodied by Canada’s persistent cousin to The Onion with the assumption that the readership understood who they were referring to.

Shortly thereafter, everyone mad at me forgot about this, as actually prominent people arrived on Bluesky and became the source of fury that made what I elicited look like small potatoes (or perhaps I mean smol beans).

The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at pbovy@thecjn.ca, not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai. For more opinions about Jewish culture wars, subscribe to the free Bonjour Chai newsletter on Substack.

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Letter from Jasper: This hanukkiah miraculously survived Alberta’s summer wildfire

Warren Waxer has lived in Jasper, Alta., since 1980. His home, along with 358 others, was destroyed in the wildfire that roared through the town from July 22-24, 2024. Very little survived the intense flames—even his car keys were found melted in the rubble, he told The CJN. But as professional crews scoured the razed house, he writes, they uncovered one treasured object.

Three weeks after the wildfire that swept through Jasper National Park and the townsite, Team Rubicon arrived and got to work. Team Rubicon is a humanitarian group, led by military veterans, that helps clean up after disasters. Wearing hazmat suits and breathing masks, this group safely sifts through the ash and debris—the remains of people’s homes and businesses.

Other than the charred hulks of the furnace, fridge and stove, we couldn’t see much that could be salvaged, and we weren’t far wrong. When you see a couple of shiny metal parallel stripes on the grass where your aluminum ladder once was, you can’t be too hopeful.

The Jasper wildfire of July 2024 destroyed everything in its path, including Warren Waxer’s home.

Each item or partial item that the team recovered would be scrubbed of possible contaminants and was then presented us, the homeowners. We were handed a 35mm camera with the glass lens dripping out the front, shattered bits of marble sculpture, singed bits of pottery, and… wait, what’s that?

Our Hanukkah menorah!

A little worse for wear, listing backwards, missing a couple of nights and the shamash holder, but there it was, proud and defiant. From a fire that destroyed anything made of soft metal, somehow, this menorah lived to celebrate another Hanukkah. 

It had been a bad month realizing that treasured memorabilia and family keepsakes were most likely gone. Looking at the basement that was now filled knee-deep with ash and the charred remains of a two-storey house, it was hard to be optimistic. The fact that the menorah survived has boosted our spirits considerably. It has also boosted the status of this menorah from perfectly serviceable (albeit unremarkable) to treasured family heirloom. Not bad for a small-town menorah.

The menorah that survived the wildfire in Jasper, Alta. (Credit: Warren Waxer)

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Mural of Holocaust Survivors in Italy Completely Painted Over in Antisemitic Vandalism

Before and after photos showing the mural in Milan, Italy, that was painted over by vandals. Photo: Provided

A mural in Milan, Italy, that depicts two Holocaust survivors was recently painted over by vandals, who defaced the artwork last month as well.

The mural, located in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto, was painted by renowned Italian contemporary pop artist and activist aleXsandro Palombo and unveiled on Sept. 28. It shows Italian Senate member for life Liliana Segre and Italian author Sami Modiano, two survivors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during the Holocaust. They are dressed in a striped uniform, worn by concentration camp inmates, underneath bulletproof jackets with yellow Stars of David badges that have the word “Jude” in the center. The badges resemble the ones Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis during World War II. The mural is titled “Anti-Semitism, History Repeating.”

Palombo shared on Dec. 2 that vandals painted over the entire mural with white paint, erasing it completely. He said in a released statement that he felt “profoundly embarrassed” by the vandalism. He described it as “an offense after the offense” and “the best way to hide antisemitism at a time when antisemitism is spreading and someone has also decided to deny honorary citizenship to a woman who survived the Holocaust.”

Palombo was referring to Pinero, a small town near Turin in Italy that recently rejected efforts to grant honorary citizenship to Segre. A public educator on the topic of the Holocaust, Italy’s President Sergio Mattarella named Segre a senator for life in 2018. This past November, the City Council of Pinero rejected a motion to confer honorary citizenship to Segre as a symbol in the fight against antisemitism. The move sparked controversy, especially in light of the fact that it took place not long after Pinero Mayor Luca Salvai displayed a Palestinian flag on the balcony of the town hall.

Palombo’s mural of Segre and Modiano was previously vandalized on Nov. 11. The yellow Stars of David and the faces of the Holocaust survivors were scraped off.

A partial view of the mural in Milan, Italy, before (left) and after it was vandalized. Photo: Piero Fassino via X/Twitter screenshot

Ignazio La Russa, president of the Senate in Italy, denounced the mural’s most recent vandalism in an Italian-language post on X. “A coat of white paint applied by some idiot can erase a mural but not the memory,” he wrote. “In firmly condemning a vile act, we reiterate our strong no to anti-Semitism and extend our sincere solidarity to Senator Liliana Segre and Sami Modiano.”

Italy’s Holocaust memorial museum, the Fondazione Museo della Shoah, said, “These acts not only harm art, but undermine the value of memory, which is fundamental for building a conscious and just society.”

In October, a mural by Palombo that showcased Vlada Patapov — a survivor of the Nova music festival massacre that took place during the Hamas-led terrorist attack in Israel on Oct. 7 last year — was also defaced by vandals.

In November 2023, a month after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, Palombo painted a mural that featured Holocaust victim and teenage diarist Anne Frank next to a girl from the Gaza Strip. At the time, he made a second mural of a boy from Gaza dressed as a Hamas terrorist. The boy is depicted standing next to an adult terrorist and together they point their guns at a young Jewish boy from the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust.

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