By HENRY SREBRNIK We are now three months past the horrific Hamas attack on Israel, and things get worse, not better, as antisemitic activities have grown since that day.
Indeed, since Oct. 7, we Jews have been witnessing an ongoing political and psychological pogrom. True, there have been no deaths (so far), but we’ve seen the very real threat of mobs advocating violence, and extensive property damage of Jewish-owned businesses and synagogues, all with little forceful reaction from the authorities.
The very day after the carnage, Canadians awoke to the news that the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust had inspired sustained celebrations in its major cities. And they have continued ever since. I’d go so far as to say the Trudeau government has, objectively, been more interested in preventing harm to Gazans than caring about the atrocities against Israelis and their state.
For diaspora Jews, the attacks of Oct. 7 were not distant overseas events and in this country since then they have inspired anti-Semitism, pure and simple, which any Jew can recognize. Even though it happened in Israel, it brought back the centuries-old memories of defenseless Jews being slaughtered in a vicious pogrom by wild anti-Semites.
I think this has shocked, deeply, most Jews, even those completely “secular” and not all that interested in Judaism, Israel or “Zionism.” Jewish parents, especially, now fear for their children in schools and universities. The statements universities are making to Jewish students across the country could not be clearer: We will not protect you, they all but scream. You’re on your own.
But all this has happened before, as we know from Jewish history. Long before Alfred Dreyfus and Theodor Herzl, the 1881 pogroms in tsarist Russia led to an awakening of proto-Zionist activity there, with an emphasis on the land of Israel. There were soon new Jewish settlements in Palestine.
The average Jew in Canada now knows that his or her friend at a university, his co-worker in an office, and the people he or she socializes with, may in fact approve, or at least not disapprove, of what happened that day in Israel. Acquaintances or even close friends may care far more about Israel killing Palestinians in Gaza.
Such people may even believe what we may call “Hamas pogrom denial,” already being spread. Many people have now gone so far in accepting the demonization of Israel and Jews that they see no penalty attached to public expressions of Jew-hatred. Indeed, many academics scream their hatred of Israel and Jews as loud as possible.
One telling example: On Nov. 10, Toronto officers responded to a call at an Indigo bookstore located in the downtown. It had been defaced with red paint splashed on its windows and the sidewalk, and posters plastered to its windows.
The eleven suspects later arrested claimed that Indigo founder Heather Reisman (who is Jewish) was “funding genocide” because of her financial support of the HESEG Foundation for Lone Soldiers, which provides scholarships to foreign nationals who study in Israel after serving in the Israeli armed forces. By this logic, then, most Jewish properties and organizations could be targeted, since the vast majority of Jews are solidly on Israel’s side.
Were these vandals right-wing thugs or people recently arrived from the Middle East? No, those charged were mostly white middle-class professionals. Among them are figures from academia, the legal community, and the public education sector. Four are academics connected to York University (one of them a former chair of the Sociology Department) and a fifth at the University of Toronto; two are elementary school teachers; another a paralegal at a law firm.
Were their students and colleagues dismayed by this behaviour? On the contrary. Some faculty members, staff and students at the university staged a rally in their support. These revelations have triggered discussions about the role and responsibilities of educators, given their influential positions in society.
We now witness continuous large “pro-Palestinian” rallies through our cities, invasions of shopping malls and thoroughfares, including intimidating behaviour against Jewish passersby. One incident that gained wide media coverage was of a masked demonstrator at the Eaton Centre in Toronto Dec. 17 threatening someone in front of police officers that he would “put him six feet deep” with no consequences. The protesters seem to act with impunity and no pushback from the authorities.
“Pro-Hamas protests have been permitted to block traffic, close stores and frighten patrons and owners, and vandalize property. And now we have explicit death threats in front of inert useless cops,” wrote journalist John Robson in the National Post Dec. 20.
Far more scandalous, even shocking, was the decision by the mayor of Canada’s fourth largest city, Calgary, announcing that she would not be attending the annual menorah lighting at  city hall on the first night of Hanukkah.
Jyoti Gondek called it “an event to support Israel” – which, in her mind, “goes against the mission to uphold diversity and inclusion.” Orwell would be proud of such doublespeak. She is good at electoral math, however: Calgary is home to 100,00 Muslims but only 6,000 Jews.
Canada’s Muslim population is nearly 1.8 million, almost five times larger than the Jewish one, as Justin Trudeau, also, is aware. His Liberal government has been missing in action both in defending Israel at the UN and Canadian Jews at home. The RCMP, meanwhile, announced Dec. 16 that it had seen a “concerning trend” of young people being radicalized online, revealing that five youths had been arrested on terror charges over the past six months.
You’ve heard the term “quiet quitting.” I think many Jews will withdraw from various clubs and organizations and we will begin to see, in a sense like in the 1930s, a reversal of assimilation, at least in the social sphere. (Of course none of this applies to Orthodox Jews, who already live this way.)
Women in various feminist organizations may form their own groups or join already existing Jewish women’s groups. There may be an increase in attendance in K-12 Jewish schools. In universities, “progressive” Jewish students will have to opt out of organizations whose members, including people they considered friends, have been marching to the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and similar eliminationist rhetoric, while waving Palestinian flags.
This will mostly affect Jews on the left, who may be supporters of organizations which have become carriers of anti-Semitism, though ostensibly dealing with “human rights,” “social justice,” and even “climate change.”
A perfect example: Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg took part in a demonstration outside the Israeli Embassy in Stockholm on Oct. 22 in which she chanted “crush Zionism” along with hundreds of other anti-Israel protesters. She co-authored an op-ed accusing Israel of perpetrating a genocide against Palestinians in the British newspaper the Guardian Dec. 5.
Israel is now unthinkingly condemned as a genocidal apartheid settler-colonialist state, indeed, the single most malevolent country in the world and the root of all evil.
New York Times Columnist Bret Stephens expressed it well in his Nov. 7 article. “Knowing who our friends aren’t isn’t pleasant, particularly after so many Jews have sought to be personal friends and political allies to people and movements that, as we grieved, turned their backs on us. But it’s also clarifying.”
We confront two wars, one being waged in Gaza, the other here in Canada’s streets, universities, and elsewhere, by antisemites creating havoc. Canada’s Jews feel besieged and isolated.

Ed. note: This article by Henry Srebrnik represents the fifth piece we have published written by him since November 12. Four previous articles are still available to read on our website. (Simply enter “Henry Srebrnik” in the search tool.) This most recent article represents an updated version of an article which was first posted to our website on November 12. We also asked Henry to provide some further biographical information, as many readers have been asking us who he is. You can read a detailed bio of his academic career at the end of this article.
By the way, similar to Henry, we’ve been receiving submissions from other writers whose writings had not previously appeared in our paper, nor on our website. We welcome those submissions. We are proud to serve as a forum for articles that, perhaps for reasons of length, perhaps due to their content, have either been rejected for publication in better known newspapers or websites than ours.

Henry Srebrnik teaches comparative politics and ethnic relations in the Department of Political Science at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown, PEI, Canada and in his research examines the impact of nationalism and ethnically-based political conflict among diaspora peoples.
He obtained BA and MA degrees in political science and history at McGill University, Montreal, and an MA in Contemporary Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA. His PhD in political science, from the University of Birmingham in England, was entitled “The Jewish Communist Movement in Stepney: Ideological Mobilization and Political Victories in an East London Borough, 1935-45.”
He has written three books on the subject of Jewish communities and Communist movements: London Jews and British Communism, 1935-1945 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1995); Jerusalem on the Amur: Birobidzhan and the Canadian Jewish Communist Movement, 1924-1951 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008); and Dreams of Nationhood: American Jewish Communists and the Soviet Birobidzhan Project, 1924-1951 (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010). With Matthew Hoffman, he co-edited  A Vanished Ideology: Essays on the Jewish Communist Movement in the English-speaking World in the Twentieth Century (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2016).
 He also wrote Creating the Chupah: The Zionist Movement and the Drive for Jewish Communal Unity in Canada, 1898-1921 (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011) and co-edited De Facto States: The Quest for Sovereignty (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).
 The book on the Canadian Jewish Communist Movement has quite a bit on Winnipeg, as you’d expect.
 A few articles that include Winnipeg, of the many I’ve written on the Canadian Jewish Communist movement:
 “Birobidzhan on the Prairies: Two Decades of Pro-Soviet Jewish Movements in Winnipeg,” in Daniel Stone, ed., Jewish Radicalism in Winnipeg, 1905-1960 (Jewish Life and Times, Vol. 8) (Winnipeg: Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada, 2003): 172-191.
“Red Star Over Birobidzhan: Canadian Jewish Communists and the ‘Jewish Autonomous Region’ in the Soviet Union,” Labour/Le Travail 44, 1999: 129-147; reprinted in Richard Menkis and Norman Ravvin, eds., The Canadian Jewish Studies Reader (Calgary and Montreal: Red Deer Press and the Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies, 2004): 241-263.