October 22, 2024

We want a new kind of Jewish community leadership

We were raised in Jewish communities in Montreal, Toronto, and London. We went to Jewish day schools, to Jewish summer camps, and celebrated our bar and bat mitzvahs at some of the largest reform and conservative synagogues in the country. We strapped on rollerblades to join the UJA's Walk for Israel and saved our quarters to drop into the Jewish National Fund tzedakah box.

Our Jewish identities were shaped in community, but also by the lessons of centuries of Jewish persecution and vivid stories of pogroms and the Shoah — stories that came directly from our grandparents or greatgrandparents. We learned to recognize the signs of fanaticism and fascism, and of dehumanization. The stories on which we were raised called us to join broader movements for human rights, for social and economic justice.

These stories also inform our shared conviction that the subjugation of Palestinians is a moral catastrophe. And we are part of a growing movement of progressive Canadian Jews that feel the same. We are not an insignificant minority as some would make us out to be. We are a substantial force within the Jewish community, representing the long history of Jewish involvement in social justice movements — from the Bund, to Jewish civil rights activists, to Jews who helped build Canada’s labour movement. The fight for justice, equality, and human rights is a central tenet of modern Jewish identity.

We have been let down again and again by our communal leadership and we have had enough.

For decades, many of Canada’s leading Jewish communal institutions — from the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs to B’nai Brith to various UJA Federations and synagogues — have refused to criticize Israel, even as settlements have expanded, and the cruelties of the occupation metastasized. Too often, they have given legitimacy to Israel’s current far-right government to continue its descent into violent extremism, while working overtime to alienate a generation of progressive Jews who are bearing witness to Israeli atrocities in their Instagram stories every day.

In the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, we were devastated to see the massacres of Israeli civilians be justified and the violence be minimized. We were hurt. We are hurt.

But the hurt does not give permission to turn a blind eye to Israel’s disproportionate and brutal response. As Israeli daily Haaretz has reported, this includes levelling whole neighbourhoods and cities killing thousands of children, purposefully targeting civilians, destroying civilian infrastructure, and displacing ninety per cent of the population. Some of our key institutions stand by while Israel sanctions settler pogroms and imprisons Palestinian children without charge.

Let us be clear: we see and understand the emboldened antisemitism — the bomb threats, the smashed windows, the conspiracies and hate speech. And we resolutely reject the notion that individual Jews are responsible for the actions of the State.

In this climate, many Jews have found comfort in the vocal role being taken by leading Jewish community organizations. But by defending Israel no matter what red line it crosses, and by too often casting criticism of Israel as antisemitic, our leadership makes it harder to fight the real cases and causes of antisemitism.

So while some of our leadership expend energy railing against campus protests, they are silent as powerful forces on the right pedal Holocaust revisionism and Trump trades in conspiracies of Jewish power.

Some of our leadership now raise questions about Muslim immigration, legitimating troubling sentiments we are beginning to hear about non-white newcomers. It’s a bitter pill to swallow having grown up in the shadow of Canada’s reprehensible “None is Too Many” policy restricting Jewish immigration.

We want real leadership. Leadership that will work with interfaith and interracial representatives to tackle, yes, antisemitism, but also the anti-Muslim, antiArab, and anti-Palestinian racism that has also exploded since October 7. Leadership that, yes, condemns attacks on Jews, but also confronts the reality of Israel’s occupation and calls for an immediate end to the atrocities in Gaza.

We dream of a more democratic and morally grounded leadership that plays a role in a Canada that fights for what is right and just.

Rather than retreating into a siege mentality, we should be embracing the spirit of Tikkun olam — repairing the world — and ensuring that our advocacy for Jewish safety does not come at the expense of the rights and freedoms of others.

We want leadership that condemns attacks on Jews, but also confronts the reality of Israel’s occupation and calls for an immediate end to the atrocities in Gaza.

From the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper.