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A Jewish producer of ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’ sees his family history in the Oscar-nominated Netflix film
(JTA) — The film producer Daniel Dreifuss has only one surviving photo of a distant relative: his grandfather’s cousin, who fought for Germany in World War I and died in combat two days before the war’s end.
He has a few more photos of his grandfather, who also wore the German uniform in WWI — only to be rounded up by the Nazis two decades later during Kristallnacht and thrown into a concentration camp, as even the Jews who had fought for their country were not safe from its campaign of race extermination.
Dreifuss, who was raised in Brazil after his surviving ancestors fled the war to Uruguay, held up these weathered black-and-white photos to his Zoom camera as he spoke to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from his home in Los Angeles. One shows his grandfather’s cousin in his military uniform, the other shows his grandparents posing together, between the wars.
“Twenty years later, your country, that you just gave your health for and your cousin for and your family for, sends you to a camp,” he said. “It’s a lot of trauma to have to go through in one lifetime.”
These family stories echoed through Dreifuss’ mind when he first read the script for a proposed modern take on “All Quiet on the Western Front,” the classic 1928 novel about the German army’s hellish experiences during World War I. Nearly a century later, author Erich Maria Remarque’s descriptions of trench warfare and of the utter lack of heroism, valor or patriotism felt by its soldier protagonists resonated with Dreifuss.
“I said, ‘I know these people,’” he recalled. “Not because they are some distant relatives that I’ve heard of, but because I am the grandson of one of those kids who were in the film.”
Dreifuss’ parents met at a Jewish youth group in Rio de Janeiro in the 1960s. “My father was my mother’s madrich,” he recalled, using the Hebrew word for a youth group counselor. After they were later married, they moved to Israel partially to avoid Brazil’s military dictatorship and became left-wing political activists. They left Israel just before the Yom Kippur War and relocated to Scotland, where Dreifuss was born, before returning to Brazil to raise him.
Dreifuss had his bar mitzvah in the city of Belo Horizonte before later moving to Rio, which has a much larger Jewish community. “My family was never at all religious, but culturally Jewish,” he said, recalling Passover celebrations and gefilte fish recipes. He did not have many Jewish friends growing up, but his Brazilian friends were interested in Judaism and would attend his family’s Jewish events.
Daniel Dreifuss, a producer of Netflix’s “All Quiet on the Western Front,” holds up a photo of his grandfather Max Dreifuss from 1919, recovering from his German military service in WWI. Max was sent to a concentration camp once the Nazis took power. (Courtesy of Daniel Dreifuss)
This global upbringing is reflected in Dreifuss’ interest in international film. It took a decade for him to mount his remake of “All Quiet,” which was eventually set up with a German production company and released by Netflix this past fall amid another endless military conflict in Europe. No one, he said, wanted to fund a resolutely anti-war film that refused to glorify its combatants, a film that was “never a hero’s journey, not the story of someone who came, you know, beat 1,000 people with their bare hands, triumphs and looks down on top of a hill at the end with some sweeping score.”
But that journey has been validated by the film’s impressive Oscar total, which surprised industry observers. At the nomination ceremony last month, “All Quiet” received nine total nods, the second most of any film this year, including for best picture — which the novel’s original 1930 Hollywood adaptation, directed by Jewish filmmaker Lewis Milestone, won. (This year’s Academy Awards will be held March 12.)
Considering the Nazis had once led a campaign of book burning against the source material and terrorized German movie theaters that showed the original movie adaptation, accusing it of being a “Judenfilm,” Dreifuss sees the new film’s success as a historical victory, too. “I love that my name will be associated with a story that was deemed degenerate by that regime,” he said.
When he was first presented with an early draft of the new “All Quiet” script, in 2013, Dreifuss was coming off of the success of another international historical film he had produced. “No,” a 1980s-set Chilean political drama, starred Gael Garcia Bernal as an ad executive tasked with convincing his country to vote the dictator Augusto Pinochet out of office. The film netted Chile’s first-ever Oscar nomination for international feature film, although Dreifuss himself is not Chilean.
In researching “No,” Dreifuss said, the film’s team had trouble finding Chileans who would admit to having cast their real-life vote in Pinochet’s favor — even though 40% of the population did so. “We couldn’t find one single person who supported him,” he recalled. “At some point, years later, no one wanted to say, ‘I supported it, I voted, I was on that side.’” He saw a parallel to the history of geopolitics in the run-up to WWII, when many Western countries — including his family’s adopted homeland of Brazil — were initially sympathetic to the Nazis.
When Hollywood studios turned down the proposed remake of “All Quiet,” forcing Dreifuss to turn to European financing, he saw an opportunity to mount the first-ever German adaptation of the property, which would allow the film to open up a “historical perspective” on how the aftermath of WWI led to the rise of the Nazis and the Holocaust.
German filmmaker Edward Berger, who also helmed several episodes of the espionage miniseries “Deutschland 83,” stepped into the director’s chair, and he also has a co-writing credit. German star Daniel Brühl, who has played many historical villains to the Jewish people in films ranging from “7 Days in Entebbe” to “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” took a key supporting role as the lead negotiator for the armistice agreements — the sole figure in the movie trying to find a peaceful resolution for his country. (The historical figure Brühl portrays, Matthias Erzberger, was vilified as a traitor by the German right and assassinated in 1921 by antisemitic nationalist radicals who were precursors to the Nazis.)
Though there are no explicitly Jewish characters in the film, Dreifuss believes it still speaks to the fate that would soon await Europe’s Jews.
“We know what followed in the decade in Germany,” he said. “So we could bring that to the film in subtle ways.”
He pointed to the armistice plotline that foreshadows how the Treaty of Versailles left Germany in a deeply disadvantaged position, creating an opportunity for Hitler’s brand of national populism. There are also scenes in which thoughtless German generals, driven by nationalistic fervor and wounded pride, send entire squadrons to their deaths mere minutes before the armistice is set to take effect. In one sequence, the film’s lead, the soldier Paul (Felix Kammerer), steals a goose from a French farming family of non-combatants and says: “It’s a hatred of the other, of not understanding, of being raised to have an enemy.”
Dreifuss is dipping into a different chapter of world Jewish history with his next project: a Showtime miniseries produced with the co-creators of the Israeli Netflix series “Fauda” that explores CIA operations in the Middle East and is partially set during the Lebanon War in which Israel had a heavy, and oft-criticized, military presence. The series will air this summer.
He has also been pitched a host of WWI and WWII-related projects in the wake of the success of “All Quiet.” But, he joked, “I would love for people to not only think of me as the war guy, or as the dictator guy.”
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He stumbled upon Leonard Bernstein’s stubble on his way to finding a ‘Lost Mozart’
David Israel needed an electric razor, so he borrowed Leonard Bernstein’s.
It was the early ‘90s and Israel was about to make his first trip overseas as a representative of the Bernstein estate at the London Symphony Orchestra. He knew that European outlets had a different voltage and so he phoned up the maestro’s daughter Jamie to ask if he could use the one at the Dakota, where Israel worked as an editor, preparing the definitive scores for Mass, West Side Story and On the Town after Bernstein’s death in 1990.
“I took a red eye, so I’m there in the morning, and I was going to shave,” Israel told me in a video call from his home in Malibu. “All of Lenny’s gray stubble comes falling out into the sink. And I thought, ‘Well, if I get a piece of Scotch tape, I could save this, and we could clone him at some point.’ And so I did.”
Israel, who has composed music for Paul Taylor and Twyla Tharp, knew he had a story to tell about his picaresque early days in the world of classical music. His second novel, The Lost Mozart is a kunstleroman that borrows quite a bit from life and, like the stubbly attempt to revive Leonard Bernstein, is about an effort to bring genius back to life.
The story follows Noah Wideman, like Israel a graduate of the Hartt School of Music in Hartford, Connecticut, who stumbles on a fragment of an unfinished Mozart string quartet. An unprecedented 627th composition from a life that lasted only 35 years.
Together with a crew of older men — a legendary classical music radio announcer, his partner and their collector friend in possession of the titular sketch — Noah works to finish what Amadeus started.
Noah, a gifted pasticheur, is primed for the task and, due to an early job at ASCAP, where he surreptitiously recorded the music playing at strip clubs that failed to pay their annual licensing fee, his skills as a detective.
Completing the work of one of the greatest musical geniuses is an act of chutzpah, something Israel knows something about. His own lost Mozart moment came shortly after college, when he made a play for the legacy of another great.
He knew Bernstein socially through the dean of the Hartt School, and chose the college in part because he knew the maestro often came to visit. Israel was scheduled to have dinner with him in 1990, but Bernstein died a month earlier. Israel produced a memorial concert and, on March 13, 1991, was at a party where he ran into Bernstein’s former assistant, who ran the publishing arm of his estate.
“We were just chit-chatting in the kitchen after this concert at this party, and he said, ‘What are you going to do when you graduate?’” Israel recalled. “And I said, ‘ I’m going to work for you,’ and that’s how the job came to be.”
Israel immersed himself in Bernstein’s scores and correspondence, in much the same way Noah dives into the Mozart archive. Bernstein was an idol, but Israel reveres Mozart, and picked him as a subject over Bach or Beethoven in part because of how prolific he was.
“The reason why I felt like this was good material for a novel is because by 2023, which is when I was writing the book, it seemed like the only way you could experience new Mozart was through fiction,” Israel said.
Not anymore. In June, just a couple of months before Israel’s pub date, a curator at France’s National Library found a notebook with sketches from the 22-year-old Mozart, who was in Paris to audition as a court musician at Versailles.
There’s more to the story, Israel said, including Wolfgang’s oft-overlooked older sister Maria Anna, a composer and musician in her own right who got top billing in the siblings’ early tours through the courts of Europe.
The sequel, Israel tells me, will feature her as another “lost Mozart,” and draw from Israel’s own time working on Bernstein’s archive, including his impromptu jam session with Yo-Yo Ma.
“It’s one of the funniest scenes in the first few chapters,” Israel promises. He can’t yet say more about what happens at the Dakota. Readers will have to discover those lost movements for themselves.
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Michigan’s Senate race has become a referendum on Israel — and the future of the Democratic Party
Tuesday’s primary contest for an open U.S. Senate seat in Michigan has become a proxy fight over the Gaza war and a referendum on Israel supporters’ influence in Democratic politics. Democratic voters will decide whether to nominate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who is leading in the polls after assailing his opponent as beholden to the campaign fundraising group AIPAC, or Rep. Haley Stevens, a reliable supporter of Israel who has condemned what she called “inflammatory rhetoric” from El-Sayed.
Following a string of primary victories by insurgent Democrats who made condemning Israel central to their campaigns — from New York to New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Colorado — the outcome will become the clearest test yet of whether the vocally anti-Israel progressive movement may come to define the Democratic Party.
Recent polls show El-Sayed with growing momentum, leading Stevens by as much as 16 points.
Michigan, home to one of the country’s largest Arab-American communities, was already a national hot spot for voter pushback on pro-Israel politics as the birthplace of the 2024 “uncommitted” movement that protested President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza by submitting blank ballots in the presidential primary.
It also has an influential Jewish community that has become deeply invested in the race — and with some El-Sayed supporters among them.
Tuesday’s winner will have to prevail in the November general election, and success is not guaranteed: While Democrats are a majority of registered voters in Michigan, Republican President Donald Trump won the state in 2016 and 2024.
With Democrats counting on winning Michigan as they aim to retake the Senate, the questions looming over Tuesday’s primary aren’t just about the party’s direction on Israel — they’re also about whether running against Israel is a winning message in a swing state.
Democrats are facing a difficult path to winning Senate control even as polls show growing dissatisfaction with the Republican agenda.
A look at three possible scenarios shows the high stakes of the race for the Democratic Party and the place of Israel in U.S. politics:
An El-Sayed victory
An Emerson College survey of 700 voters shows El-Sayed leading Stevens by 16 points, despite more than $60 million of outside spending attacking him. AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, has spent $30.6 million backing Stevens, according to recent FEC filings. AIPAC also raised several million dollars for Stevens by directing its donors to online portals that funnel money directly to the candidate’s campaign. All in all, the Michigan contest is AIPAC’s largest investment this election cycle.
If El-Sayed wins, he would become the first Muslim nominated by a major party for the U.S. Senate and would immediately become one of the most prominent figures on the Democratic left. It would echo the victory of Zohran Mamdani in last year’s mayoral race as the city’s first Muslim mayor and the most prominent democratic socialist in office, with Jews divided between fierce opposition and fiery support.
But the immediate political meaning would be about AIPAC.
The progressive frontrunner has transformed AIPAC’s investment in the race into a centerpiece of his campaign message. Backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, El-Sayed used AIPAC as a political foil and a symbol of everything he says is wrong with Democratic politics: super PAC money, billionaire influence and demands for unconditional support for Israel. A poll of Michigan voters conducted by Data for Progress in April found that 64% of likely Democratic primary voters would be less inclined to support a candidate backed by AIPAC.
At a recent virtual town hall hosted by Progressive Democrats of America, El-Sayed compared his possible victory to David defeating Goliath. “AIPAC, if you’re listening, burn your money, come back and burn it again in the general,” he said. “I’m happy to burn your money for you, and then we can get onto the business of governing and asking whether or not our foreign policy ought to be dictated to us by the interests of a foreign government.”
An El-Sayed win would mark a reversal from AIPAC’s last confrontation with Stevens’ opponents in Michigan. In 2022, Stevens defeated Jewish Rep. Andy Levin by 20 points in a rare incumbent-versus-incumbent House primary after redistricting. Levin argued that the group was trying to punish him for criticizing Israeli policy and supporting Palestinian rights. AIPAC celebrated Levin’s defeat as proof that even a Jewish incumbent could not survive after crossing the organization. (Levin is supporting El-Sayed.)
It would also create immediate questions about how El-Sayed would operate in Washington.
Would he support Sen. Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in American history and one of Stevens’ most powerful allies, as Democratic leader if Democrats win the majority? And would he give Senate progressives new leverage over key votes on Israel?
What if El-Sayed loses the general election?
For Democrats worried about electability, the primary is only the first test.
The winner will face former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, who narrowly lost Michigan’s 2024 Senate election and is now running with a largely unified Republican Party behind him.
Michigan remains one of the country’s key battlegrounds. President Donald Trump carried it in 2016, lost it in 2020 and won it again in 2024. Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a moderate Democrat who was an intelligence analyst in the CIA and served three tours in Iraq, won her race even as Trump carried the state.
Recent polls found Rogers leading El-Sayed by single digits.
Some Michigan Jewish Democrats are already considering whether they could support El-Sayed, vote for the Republican, or leave their ballot blank in November. Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in the state.
Stevens has sharpened those concerns in the final days of the campaign. She accused El-Sayed of blaming “all of your problems on Jewish Americans,” warning that his rhetoric would lead to defeat in the face-off with Rogers. El-Sayed, who has courted Jewish voters without moderating his views on Israel, rejected accusations of antisemitism.
“I love and revere Judaism and the Jewish people,” he said.
A November loss would have consequences far beyond Michigan.
Democrats are already facing an uphill battle for Senate control after the collapse of Graham Platner in the competitive Maine Senate race.
Losing the seat being vacated by Sen. Gary Peters would further divide Democrats. Party leaders would almost certainly blame El-Sayed’s ideology, his vocal opposition to Israel and the progressive groups that elevated him for losing a swing state. AIPAC, meanwhile, would claim vindication despite losing the primary.
Speaking with reporters on Sunday, El-Sayed said he’s confident Democratic voters will rally behind his candidacy as they reckon with what is at stake.
What if Stevens survives?
A Stevens victory would offer a very different lesson.
It would show that experience, establishment support and a strong general-election argument can still overcome anger about AIPAC, even in the state where the uncommitted movement began. Even a narrow victory would preserve AIPAC’s reputation as one of the most effective forces in Democratic primaries.
But it would say more about Stevens and her personality. She first entered Congress in the 2018 Democratic wave, capturing a Republican-held suburban district. She then survived redistricting and defeated Levin in the bruising 2022 primary.
Stevens has the backing of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Schumer and much of Michigan’s Democratic establishment. And she leads Rogers in a November matchup.
By Wednesday morning, Democrats will know who won Michigan. It may take until November or even longer to know whether Tuesday’s vote marked the beginning of a new era in Democratic politics or another chapter in the party’s divide over Israel. Nonetheless, Democratic leaders still have to reunite a coalition fractured over Gaza and manage a growing progressive wing in the House.
The fight extends down the ballot
The Senate contest is not the only Michigan race testing the strength of the progressive left.
In Detroit’s 13th Congressional District, state Rep. Donavan McKinney, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is challenging incumbent Rep. Shri Thanedar with the support of Justice Democrats. The group, which helped launch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of the Squad, made McKinney its first congressional endorsement in four years.
In Michigan’s 7th District, former climate activist William Lawrence is running against two centrist Democrats in the primary, making an end to all U.S. military aid to Israel a key part of his campaign. The seat was previously held by Slotkin.
On a state level, Abbas Alawieh, one of the leaders of the uncommitted movement in Michigan, is running for a seat in the state legislature in a Dearborn-area district with a large Arab and Muslim population. In a sign of his growing profile, Alawieh recently met with former Vice President Kamala Harris.
AIPAC and the debate over Israel is also spilling into a neighboring state Senate race. Pro-Israel donors are spending heavily to back Justin Onwenu against former State Rep. Abraham Aiyash, an outspoken critic of Israel’s war in Gaza.
It has also reached the University of Michigan’s Board of Regents. Michigan Democrats nominated Amir Makled, an attorney who represented pro-Palestinian protesters, after he defeated incumbent Regent Jordan Acker at the party convention. Makled faces scrutiny for past Hezbollah praise and antisemitic posts. Republican regent candidates Lena Epstein and Michael Schostak, both Jewish, have campaigned on antisemitism and campus safety. That race will be decided in November.
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Suspected arson gutted Montreal’s trendiest kosher restaurant. The city’s Jews say they saw it coming
Howard Szalavetz’s phone buzzed around 3:15 a.m. Saturday, startling him awake. It was news no landlord wants: a retail building he owned was on fire. Nöam, the kosher restaurant that anchors it, was burning.
He threw on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and hopped into his daughter’s Ford Bronco. The drive was only five minutes, but each one felt like an eternity. Police and fire crews had cordoned off several blocks around Montreal’s Décarie Boulevard, forcing him to abandon the car and run the rest of the way on foot. Eventually, they let him through.
“It was insane,” he recalled in an interview Sunday. “There were 80 firemen.” The building he’s owned since 1987 — home to a car wash, an auto repair garage, and Nöam — was engulfed. The restaurant’s section, a wood-frame extension, “went up pretty quickly.”
By the time the fire was under control around 8 a.m., the restaurant was gutted top to bottom. The car wash and auto repair suffered less damage and plan to reopen this week.
Video of the fire that burned down Noam, a popular Kosher restaurant in Montreal pic.twitter.com/gVvvTVvcRQ
— Benyamin Cohen (@benyamincohen) August 2, 2026
Szalavetz and police were able to pull footage from a security camera mounted to the exterior of the auto repair shop. In it, a figure appears on the restaurant’s wood deck, bends down and lights a fire with what looks like a can of accelerant. The man’s face wasn’t hidden, but the footage was too poor in quality to make out much more.
When nearby shops that were closed over the weekend reopen Monday, investigators hope to gather additional footage. Szalavetz said a camera damaged in the Nöam fire might also contain more information.
Szalavetz’s father survived three concentration camps and lost much of his family in the Holocaust. He died in 2021. “Thankfully he didn’t see this,” Szalavetz said, “because this is how Europe started.”
The Nöam fire is the latest in a rapid drumbeat of attacks on Jewish targets in Canada. Last week, in Toronto, a gunman fired at the windows of one branch of Kiva’s Bagel Bar, a Jewish-owned bakery chain, about an hour after vandals had shattered the glass front of another location. In June, a man smashed a window at Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom, a Reform congregation in Montreal, and tried to start a fire inside.
That same month, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney acknowledged that two-thirds of all religion-motivated hate crimes in Canada are directed at Jews. “Canada’s civic compact,” he said, “is failing Jewish Canadians.” B’nai Brith Canada recorded 27 violent antisemitic incidents in the first six months of 2026 — nearly triple the count for all of 2025.
Deborah Lipstadt, the noted Holocaust historian and former U.S. special envoy to combat antisemitism during the Biden administration, said the Nöam fire was “utterly predictable.” Carney, she said, “does not have the chutzpah” to stand up and declare, without qualification, that antisemitism has no place in Canada.
“If this is not a wake-up call, I don’t know,” Lipstadt said. “Do more people have to die for it to be a wake-up call? How much more do you need? Spare me your pious sympathies and sincere regrets.”
A vigil and a crowdfunding campaign
By Saturday, Szalavetz said he’d fielded some 150 calls — more, he said, than he gets on his birthday. Montreal is home to an estimated 90,000 Jews, but Szalavetz said it still has the feel of a “shtetl,” and word traveled fast: a vigil drew a crowd outside the burned restaurant Saturday night, and the community plans on launching an online crowdfunding campaign to raise money for the two owners and roughly 30 employees, since insurance can’t cover the full scope of the loss.
Brothers-in-law Meir Azerad and Ynon Cohen opened Nöam in August 2024, transforming what had been little more than a car wash’s waiting room into a polished, sit-down kosher restaurant. They named it for Cohen’s brother, Noam, who had died years earlier and had dreamed of opening a restaurant of his own.
They turned out wood-fired pizzas at 1,000 degrees, two minutes a pie. Expanding the menu to include Mediterranean and Italian, Nöam grew to a following that surprised even its owners, and had a waitlist most weeknights. The partners had just spent a year renovating a second floor to keep up with demand.
Among the social media posts circulating Saturday morning was one from Francine Goldberg, a lifelong Montrealer, that quickly went viral. The fire broke out on Shabbat — the one day, she wrote, “we are forbidden to kindle a flame. Somebody kindled it for us.”
Politicians were quick to respond. Anthony Housefather, a Jewish member of Parliament who represents the area, demanded the fire be investigated as a hate crime. Police say they have not yet established a motive.
The Mamdani angle
But for many Montreal Jews, official statements have started to feel beside the point. Goldberg calls them “the typical Hallmark pleasantries: ‘Oh, it’s horrible, and it should never happen.’”
Goldberg, who works at a medical clinic in downtown Montreal, said she’s received more hate mail this year than at any point in her life. She doesn’t think Carney is an antisemite — just a politician counting votes. “There are far more of them than there are of us,” she said. Jews make up approximately 1% of the Canadian population.
Jesse Brown, a Canadian Jewish journalist who has tracked the country’s antisemitism surge since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in Israel, the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust, sees the same pattern from a different angle.
When Carney announced a new council to combat hate this summer, Brown called it “disingenuous” — the council had already existed for months, under a different name, and included members with histories of anti-Israel advocacy. More pointedly, Brown said, Carney has refused to name the actual cause. “This is happening because of this global movement against Israel,” he said. “Jews in Canada are being targeted in the name of targeting Israel.” Naming antisemitism, he argued, is easy. Naming anti-Zionism as its engine is the part no Canadian politician has been willing to do.
Goldberg sees this dynamic playing out beyond Canada’s borders. In New York, Zohran Mamdani was elected the city’s first Muslim mayor in January and recently to called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a war criminal” and “the architect of a horrific genocide.” His win in the U.S. city with the largest population of Jews has been widely read as evidence that anti-Zionist politics can win elections across the country.
In the months since his election, antisemitic hate crimes in New York have climbed sharply: NYPD data show Jews, roughly 10% of the city’s population, were targets in 55% of all confirmed hate crimes in the first half of 2026, with anti-Jewish incidents up 182% year-over-year in January alone.
Goldberg sees that rhetoric traveling regardless of the border. “That has a trickle-down effect on Montrealers,” she said. She’s watched a segment of the city’s progressive activists argue that Montreal’s own mayor should “follow Mamdani” and formally declare that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Her worry isn’t that Israeli policy is off-limits for criticism — she says she criticizes the Netanyahu government herself — but that mainstreaming anti-Zionism as just another respectable political position is what’s fueling the rise in antisemitism she’s living through.
Goldberg said that people keep telling her to consider moving to Israel. She isn’t interested. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “It’s exactly what they would want, so I’m not going to clarify their mission.” That doesn’t mean the fear isn’t real, she added: “It’s very, very dark. It’s dark times for us.”
‘A lot of gaslighting’
Brown pointed to a pattern that predates the fire at Nöam. Last August, an Orthodox man was beaten in a Montreal park in front of his three children; his attacker tore the kippah from his head and threw it to the ground. Quebec prosecutors ultimately determined it wasn’t a hate crime — the attacker was found not criminally responsible due to mental illness.
When pro-Palestinian protesters marched down Toronto’s “hospital row” in February 2024 and mobbed Mount Sinai Hospital, organizers said the hospital hadn’t been targeted; it just happened to be along the route. Brown calls this a recurring dynamic. “There’s a lot of gaslighting that occurs,” he said.
He expects something similar will happen with the Nöam investigation: police have video of the fire being set, but Canadian hate-crime charges require proof of motive that’s notoriously hard to establish. More likely, he said, if the suspect is charged with arson alone “then people who want to deny what is happening will say, well, ‘We have no proof that was antisemitism.’”
There’s already a template for how that skepticism plays out. In December 2024, a man threw a Molotov cocktail into Montreal’s Beth Tikvah synagogue; windows were smashed the same night at a nearby Jewish federation office. The man who pleaded guilty to three of six arson-related charges, Mohamed Ilyes Akodad, testified this summer that he’d been paid $15,000 through an anonymous contact on Signal to firebomb two buildings and torch a car, and that he didn’t know one of them was a synagogue. Prosecutors are seeking a two-year sentence; his lawyer is asking for a suspended sentence and home confinement. A judge is expected to rule Sept. 10.
Rabbi Lisa Grushcow of Montreal’s Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom, which experienced its own firebomb attack this June, has seen the pattern up close. “At this point, none of it feels surprising,” she said, “and that in itself is quite sobering.” Protective coatings on the synagogue’s windows kept the firebomb from getting through, and police apprehended the suspect that night. It could have been far worse, she said, “but we can’t just say ‘This is not who we are,’ because clearly this is who our society is right now.”
Still, she pointed to what happened the day after her synagogue was attacked: so many families showed up for a scheduled service that the congregation had to run two instead of one. She saw the same instinct play out in Toronto, where customers lined up outside Kiva’s Bagel the morning after the shootings there. “It shouldn’t take resilience to live as a Jew,” she said. But if the choice is between resilience and retreat, her community has made its decision: “We’re not going to give up or move away.”
Lipstadt’s message to Jews was also one of resilience, not despair. Asked whether Canadian Jews should consider leaving the country, she declined to answer directly. “That’s not my place,” she said. But she was unequivocal that Jews would endure. “We have survived worse,” she said. What worries her isn’t whether Jews will survive — it’s whether the societies around them will. “Will democratic society, writ very large, be okay?” she said. “I’m not so sure.”
Nöam’s owners Azerad and Cohen have said little publicly since the fire. Szalavetz described them as “very camera shy,” agreeing only reluctantly to a brief interview with a local reporter after Szalavetz pushed them to speak. “The world needs to know,” he told them. For now, what’s certain is the plan: rebuild in the same spot and reopen “bigger, better, newer” than before, said Szalavetz. He estimates that could take six months to a year. In the meantime, he said, he’s working on finding them a temporary home so the restaurant can remain open.
“Coming back is the goal,” Szalavetz said. “It’s my goal as a proud Jew. You’re not going to take us down.”
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