The great French poet, essayist, translator, and art critic, Charles Baudelaire, famously said, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
Ken Ammi, an Argentinian-American Jewish Christian philosopher, added to that bit of wisdom by saying, “The second greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he is the good guy.”
The devil has been let loose in Canada, and the Canadians — tolerant, polite, friendly, empathetic Canadians — can’t believe evil stalks the land.
Jesse Brown, editor and publisher of Canadaland, wrote a viral piece in The Atlantic this week about how antisemitism in Canada has grabbed hold of most segments of Canadian society, and people, including the government, aren’t doing very much about it.
“More synagogues in Canada in the past 28 months have been desecrated, burned, shot at, or threatened with bombings than in any other country,” notes Brown. “These incidents have generated news coverage and sympathetic statements from mayors and members of Parliament, whose proclamations that This is not who we are as Canadians have become commonplace,” he adds.
It’s what Brown calls a “polite pogrom.” Since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Jews in Israel, the surge of antisemitic attacks against Jews and the shocking response of Canadian institutions to Jew hate have led many Jewish citizens of Canada to withdraw from public life or think of leaving the country.
Canada has a deserved reputation for tolerance. They are practitioners of “both-siderism,” claiming to acknowledge the legitimacy of any argument, even if that argument is unreasonable.
Such is the case with Canada after the October 7 attacks. The explosion of antisemitic hate directed at Canadian Jews is without precedent in Canada. Rather than address the hate with concrete action, political, cultural, and religious leaders in Canada could only offer sympathetic words and the “This isn’t us” bromide.
Except that it is you, Canada. And your tolerance for hate is driving your Jewish friends and neighbors into hiding.
Documenting and denouncing shootings and arson attacks are easy. But it’s harder to account for stories like Rosenberg’s, where Jews exit public life without any glass or bones being broken. How many Jewish academics, health-care workers, teachers, and arts-organization employees have left institutions because they no longer feel welcome or protected? Nobody is counting. The diversity statistics collected by these organizations rarely include “Jewish” as a category of self-identification.
Here’s what can be said for sure: 80 percent of Jewish doctors and medical students surveyed by the Jewish Medical Association of Ontario reported experiencing anti-Semitism at work after October 7. In 2024, more than 100 Jewish doctors stopped acknowledging their affiliation with the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine in protest of what they saw as a failure to protect Jewish students and faculty. Almost a third of Ontario’s Jewish doctors say they are considering leaving Canada because of hostile work environments, according to the JMAO survey.
“The awkward reality is that a main driver of these incidents is a very Canadian aversion to causing offense,” Brown writes. “The deference of many politicians and institutions to the views of a rapidly growing minority community is too often leading them to reject another minority community.”
The “rapidly growing minority community” is the 5% of Canadians who identify as Muslims. The Muslim population of Canada tripled between 2001 and 2021. Canadian Muslims account for most of the anti-Jewish sentiment expressed in Canadian polls.
The Canadian ethos demands that Muslims’ Jew-hate be recognized and tolerated as legitimate. Of course, Canadians tell themselves that Muslims don’t really hate the Jews. They hate “Zionism.” They hate Israel. And that has given institutions in Canada carte blanche to express their own antisemitic attitudes and legitimize Jew hate.
“Sometimes the most dangerous warning signs are the ones polite societies convince themselves not to see,” write the editors of The Free Press.
What “polite society” in Canada isn’t seeing is that its Jewish friends and neighbors are withdrawing from society and basically going into hiding.
Among my Jewish friends and family, these efforts to intimidate and alienate Jews, to exclude them from civil society and from public life, and to close down private Jewish spaces are discussed with far more concern and frequency than the regular reports of graffiti and name-calling. Five Jewish families pulled their children from the downtown Toronto public school in my neighborhood last year, after a series of controversies. At least four Jewish journalists left the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper, after the paper’s ombud on discrimination and bias wrote a social-media post questioning “who did what” on October 7, and reposted another criticizing North American Jews for “centering their feelings.”
I have a general sense that we’re witnessing a polite pogrom, that Jewish life in my country has forever changed, and that I can no longer take for granted that people like me are represented in Canada’s hospitals, schools, newsrooms, and legislatures. But I don’t know for sure. The data do not exist, and the institutions in question won’t collect them. Perhaps they consider it impolite to ask.
We see this in most other liberal democracies as well. It’s a disbelief that hatred of Jews is a problem. “How can antisemitism be a problem for us?” these liberal democracies ask. “We’re tolerant of all points of view and don’t hate anyone. Except Israel, of course,” they add as an afterthought.
“Of course, the devil doesn’t exist,” we tell ourselves. “That’s a bedtime story we tell children to make them behave well.”
The devil smiles broadly, knowing that those who profess to be good, decent souls are his best allies.
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