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Canadian Universities Risk Silencing Debate Over Israel
The University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada.
When I sat before the governance committee of my student union last month, I came with one clear recommendation: do not adopt the proposed Anti-Palestinian Racism (APR) definition that was being considered at the school.
My objection was not to the idea that every Palestinian student deserves protection from harassment or discrimination. Everybody does. The problem was how the definition blurs politics with discrimination, punishes ordinary criticism, and weakens academic freedom. I urged the committee to reject a definition that, as drafted, risks codifying political narratives into policing tools. Hopefully, they will take my position seriously when they issue their ruling.
Unlike the internationally recognized International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which was created to clarify and address antisemitism without restricting legitimate debate about Israel, APR is fundamentally different.
While IHRA identifies antisemitism and provides examples to guide interpretation, APR functions as a prescriptive framework that risks ending debate by labeling broad narratives as inherently bigoted. IHRA, by contrast, identifies specific antisemitic tropes, such as Holocaust inversion, without restricting legitimate discussion of Israeli policies.
This dynamic is visible on campuses across Canada.
Activists have advanced APR-style motions into governance bodies, claiming they address a gap in how campuses handle incidents related to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In practice, however, these definitions transform legitimate discussion into potential infractions and shield political entities from scrutiny. They also present a single, politicized framing of the “Nakba” as an unquestionable truth — and treat any attempt to acknowledge the role of surrounding Arab states or the choices of Palestinian leadership to seek Israel’s elimination in 1948 as an act of racism.
This approach effectively labels Israel as solely responsible for the 1948 war, which is inaccurate, because it was five surrounding Arab states and the Palestinian population that launched the war. Israel was prepared to accept a Palestinian state, as ordered by the UN.
The APR definition makes balanced historical debate impossible.
A central conceptual problem here is the treatment of “narratives” as if they were objective facts. The motion’s language reads: “dehumanize Palestinians or their narratives.”
Narratives are how communities make sense of history and identity; they are powerful and meaningful, but they are also contested, partial, and shaped by memory and ideology. Freezing a narrative into policy shuts off debate when universities should encourage questioning, not punish it.
The consequences of accepting the definition are grave. The APR definition conflates collective identity with collective responsibility, making it risky to criticize political groups or organizations for fear of being labelled racist. The motion would make discussion of terrorist organizations effectively off-limits. That shuts down honest debate about security, human rights, and political accountability, and the wording appears deliberately crafted to misrepresent what the IHRA working definition actually does.
In fact, Students for Justice in Palestine, the group largely responsible for pushing this movement on campus, has been responsible for harassing and attacking Jewish individuals and events at universities. Letting this group dictate codified political narratives is dangerous and irresponsible.
So what should campus communities do instead?
First, institutions must protect students from harassment while also safeguarding free inquiry. Existing anti-discrimination procedures already regulate speech in ways that maintain responsible discourse: they address harassment or conduct that creates a hostile environment, without broadly policing disagreement with collective narratives.
Secondly, defend academic freedom. Universities are laboratories of thought; they must tolerate uncomfortable, even offensive, ideas when they are part of honest inquiry. A definition that protects students by preventing harassment must do so without impeding academic freedom. The IHRA working definition is a non-binding tool to apply antisemitism policies without restricting debate; APR, by contrast, acts as a prescriptive framework that risks silencing discourse.
At a deeper level, this debate reflects a wider trend in Canada, where freedom of expression is increasingly being seen as under threat. The idea that speech can be restricted whenever it disrupts a preferred political narrative is dangerous. As free expression comes under threat, we must do more to protect it and keep open dialogue central to Canadian society.
The APR debate is not a trivial matter. It is a test of whether campuses can protect and preserve the necessary work of democratic debate and freedom of expression. If we get that balance right, universities can remain places where identities are respected and ideas are fearlessly examined. If we get it wrong, we risk turning our campuses into echo chambers where the very thing we claim to defend, free thought, is the first casualty.
Adam Katz is a 2025-2026 CAMERA on Campus fellow and a second-year political science and history student at the University of Manitoba.
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University of Michigan will have a leader who defended pro-Palestinian protesters in court
A civil rights attorney who defended pro-Palestinian protesters in court and made social media posts viewed as pro-Hezbollah and antisemitic, has won his bid for the University of Michigan Board of Regents.
Michigan is one of a few states in which voters play a direct role in choosing university overseers. As a regent, Amir Makled (D) will help oversee expenditures at the university where his clients, the student protesters, were arrested. The position is unpaid and carries an eight-year term. Democrat Paul Brown won the other seat up for election, maintaining the board’s 6-2 Democratic majority.
Makled beat out Republican challenger Lena Epstein, who is Jewish and previously identified as a “Jewish Messianic believer of Christ,” but recanted the statement and later said she was “100% Jewish.” Mainstream Judaism does not accept Messianic Jews because they believe in the divinity of Christ and try to convert Jews to Jesus.
Epstein told the Forward in an April interview that the Democrats had handed her an opportunity to win the seat by endorsing Makled, who was facing intense scrutiny. In one of his controversial posts, Makled called Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah a “martyr” after he was killed by Israeli strikes in 2024. He lost an endorsement from Service Employees International Union for the posts and later deleted them.
In the regents race, voters picked up to two of six candidates, with the top two winning. Makled received 25.6% of the vote while Brown received 27.2%. Epstein received 22.2% while her fellow Republican Michael Schostak received 22.6%.
Makled’s election comes as part of a wave of Democratic Party wins, including in Michigan, which elected as Senator Abdul El-Sayed (D), who also faced severe backlash for statements related to Israel and Gaza and for appearing alongside streamer Hasan Piker, who has been accused of antisemitic rhetoric.
Israel played a major role in the rhetoric surrounding Michigan’s midterms. But voters, including 60% of Jewish voters that voted for El-Sayed according to early exit polls, favored sharp critics of the Jewish state to candidates in support of it.
The post University of Michigan will have a leader who defended pro-Palestinian protesters in court appeared first on The Forward.
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This grandson of Holocaust survivors is headed to Congress. The ADL has concerns about his antisemitism record.
The election of Daniel Biss, a Jewish critic of Israel, to an Illinois congressional seat Tuesday has sparked a public feud between the Anti-Defamation League and the liberal Zionist group J Street over whether the ADL remains a credible voice in the fight against antisemitism.
After Biss, the former Jewish mayor of Evanston, Ill., won his seat Tuesday night, the ADL Midwest took to social media to express “serious concerns” about Biss’ “approach to antisemitism.”
J Street, which had endorsed Biss, hit back, noting that Biss is the grandson of Holocaust survivors and calling the ADL’s statement “a shanda,” the Yiddish word for disgrace.
“It is hard to read this statement without wondering how far the ADL has drifted from the organization it once was – a gold standard in our community for standing up against bigotry, hatred and discrimination,” J street wrote on X.
Biss, who speaks Hebrew and spent childhood summers in Israel, was elected with 75% of the vote in a district where 11% of the electorate is Jewish.
“It saddens me to watch the ADL, once a preeminent civil rights organization, devolve into an entity that traffics in fear, intimidation and extremism,” Biss wrote in a statement to the Forward. “This kind of rhetoric does nothing to keep the Jewish people safe—in fact, it undermines that very cause.”
The ADL has long faced scrutiny from critics who view the watchdog group as labeling too broad a swath of Israel criticism as antisemitic, while less forcefully condemning antisemitism when it comes from the political right.
“Our statement speaks for itself,” an ADL spokesperson wrote in an email to the Forward.
In its statement, the ADL pointed to a specific set of concerns involving Biss’ record as mayor of Evanston, Illinois, the college town home to Northwestern University.
Biss did not provide Evanston police support that Northwestern requested after reported “antisemitic conduct” at the Gaza war encampment on campus in April 2024, the ADL said, “raising serious questions about whether the safety, dignity, and equal access of Jewish students were treated with the urgency they required.”
Biss has defended his decision not to dispatch police to the encampment, writing in response to a congressional inquiry that forcibly clearing the protest would have gone against police department advice and suppressed “constitutionally protected speech.”
The ADL also said that Biss “dismissed scrutiny of his response as a politically motivated attack fueled by AIPAC, rather than substantively addressing the concerns raised by Jewish students and community members.”
Biss made opposition to AIPAC a central theme of his primary campaign for Congress after the hardline pro-Israel lobbying group spent millions opposing him and supporting another candidate, state Sen. Laura Fine.
In an interview with the Forward in March, Biss said it was “absurd” that AIPAC opposes imposing any conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel. “And then try to enforce it with millions of dollars of dark money, is certainly bad for democracy and bad for our politics here in America,” Biss added.
At the same time, Biss faced pressure to his left on Israel in the primary, defeating Kat Abughazaleh, a Palestinian-American who has characterized Israel’s conduct in Gaza as a genocide. Biss, who has described himself as a progressive Zionist, declined to use the word genocide, despite repeated calls from Abughazaleh to do so.
In a March op-ed in The Nation, Biss wrote that he believed he was one of AIPAC’s top targets partly because “I’m the grandson of Holocaust survivors. My mother is Israeli. My extended family lives in Israel. AIPAC knew that they couldn’t dismiss me as anti-Israel or antisemitic.”
The ADL also criticized Biss for supporting the repeal of an anti-BDS law, which bars Illinois from investing public pension funds in companies that boycott Israel. That position, the ADL said, “raises additional concerns about his willingness to stand against efforts to isolate and delegitimize the Jewish state.”
In an April Substack post explaining his position, Biss said that he personally opposes the global movement to boycott Israel, but he does not believe the government should “stop people from using their economic agency to advocate for their values.”
Biss will succeed Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a Jewish lawmaker who represented the district for nearly three decades and was also an outspoken critic of AIPAC.
The post This grandson of Holocaust survivors is headed to Congress. The ADL has concerns about his antisemitism record. appeared first on The Forward.
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At the Vatican, two elderly men — one Jewish, one Catholic — exchange gifts and mutual admiration
On Wednesday, two senior citizens, Robert Zimmerman, 85, a Jew originally from Minnesota, and Robert Prevost, 71, a Catholic of Chicago, had a brief meeting at the younger man’s office in central Italy.
Sources on the scene report that Zimmerman was in town for business and Prevost, who goes professionally by Leo, had recently cited Zimmerman’s work in the preface to a book about nuclear disarmament.
Both men dressed in uniform, looking a bit Spy Vs. Spy, with Zimmerman in a black hoodie and Prevost in white with a small white skull cap. The confab was brief, a bulletin from Prevost’s workplace reported, consisting of “greetings and a few lighthearted exchanges.”
Prevost gifted Zimmerman with prayer beads, and Zimmerman presented Prevost with a copy of his memoir, published under his pen name, Bob Dylan.
While Zimmerman was raised in a Jewish home, he had, for a time in the late 1970s to early 1980s, converted to born-again Christianity, confounding many.
The post At the Vatican, two elderly men — one Jewish, one Catholic — exchange gifts and mutual admiration appeared first on The Forward.
