In Memory: Yehuda Bauer (6 April 1926-18 October 2024) 

2024/10/21 Leave a comment

Impressive man and had the pleasure of having a number of conversations with him when I headed the Canadian delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance:

…Yehuda Bauer was born in Prague in 1926 and in 1939 immigrated with his parents to Palestine. In 1960, Bauer received a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the Hebrew University for his dissertation on the Haganah and the Palmach. He began his academic career a year later at the Institute of Contemporary Judaism at the Hebrew University. Between the years 1973-1975 and 1979-1977 he served as the head of the Institute for Contemporary Judaism and in the years. Bauer also founded and headed the Vidal Sasson International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University. Between 1996-2000, Professor Bauer was the head of the International Institute for the Study of the Holocaust at Yad Vashem. He also served on the Yad Vashem Council and was an academic advisor to the International Task Force for Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research (IHRA).

Source: In Memory: Yehuda Bauer (6 April 1926-18 October 2024) 

Filed under Antisemitism, Holocaust Tagged with ,

Geist: A new academic year requires a new approach to combatting antisemitism on campus

2024/09/09 Leave a comment

This one will be the hardest to implement I think. But needed:

…Third, universities must preserve their position as neutral forums for discussion, debate and learning. Often referred to as institutional neutrality, the principle dates back to the 1960s and a University of Chicago report that concluded, “There is no mechanism by which it [the university] can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives.”

In other words, institutional neutrality ensures that faculty members and students are free to express their opinions, but the institution itself should refrain from wading into political matters. That principle was undermined by the University of Windsor’s recent agreement with campus protesters, which included commitments to university advocacy and restrictions on academic partnerships that could undermine academic freedoms.

The proliferation of campus antisemitism may have caught some universities off guard last year. But this year, there are no surprises. Universities must rise to the challenge by prioritizing a safe environment for all students and faculty – one that lives up to their ideals of inclusion and non-discrimination.

Michael Geist holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa’s faculty of law.

Source: A new academic year requires a new approach to combatting antisemitism on campus

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Brest and Levine: D.E.I. Is Not Working on College Campuses. We Need a New Approach.

2024/08/31 Leave a comment

Good thoughtful discussion:

With colleges and universities beginning a new academic year, we can expect more contentious debate over programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Progressives are doubling down on programs that teach students that they are either oppressed peoples or oppressors, while red states are closing campus D.E.I. programs altogether.

For all of the complaints, some of these programs most likely serve the important goal of ensuring that all students are valued and engaged participants in their academic communities. But we fear that many other programs are too ideological, exacerbate the very problems they intend to solve and are incompatible with higher education’s longstanding mission of cultivating critical thinking. We propose an alternative: a pluralist-based approach to D.E.I. that would provide students with the self-confidence, mind-sets and skills to engage with challenging social and political issues.

Like many other universities, our university, Stanford, experienced a rise in antisemitic incidents after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 and Israel’s response. We were appointed to the university’s Subcommittee on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, which was charged with assessing the nature and scope of the problem and making recommendations. The upshot of hearing from over 300 people in 50 listening sessions is that many Jews and Israelis have experienced bias and feel insecure on our campus.

A parallel committee formed to address anti-Muslim, Arab and Palestinian bias reached similar conclusions for those groups.

These findings are discouraging, given that institutions of higher learning have spent several decades and vast sums of money establishing institutional infrastructures to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Discouraging, but not surprising — because our inquiries revealed how exclusionary and counterproductive some of these programs can be.

Our committee was pressed by many of those we interviewed to recommend adding Jews and Israelis to the identities currently recognized by Stanford’s D.E.I. programs so their harms would be treated with the same concern as those of people of color and L.G.B.T.Q.+ people, who are regarded as historically oppressed. This move would be required of many California colleges and universities under a measure moving through the California Legislature. But subsuming new groups into the traditional D.E.I. regime would only reinforce a flawed system.

D.E.I. training originated in the corporate world of the 1960s and migrated to universities in subsequent decades, initially to rectify the underrepresentation of minority groups and then to mitigate the tensions associated with more diverse populations. In recent years, the goals of diversity and inclusion have become the bête noire of the political right, in part to avoid reckoning with our nation’s history of slavery and discrimination in ways that might cause, as some state laws have put it, “discomfort, guilt or anguish.” We do not share this view. We believe that fostering a sense of belonging among students of diverse backgrounds is a precondition for educational success. That said, many D.E.I. training programs actually subvert their institutions’ educational missions.

Here’s why. A major purpose of higher education is to teach students the skill of critical inquiry, which the philosopher and educator John Dewey described as “the active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it.” Conscientious faculty members teaching about race and gender require their students to critically consider differing views of the status and history of people of color, women and L.G.B.T.Q.+ people. Teaching critical thinking about any topic is challenging and humbling work.

While issues of diversity, equity and inclusion are sometimes addressed in rigorous classroom courses, university-based D.E.I. programs tend to come in two basic forms: online or off-the-shelf trainings that are more suitable for airline safety briefings than exploring the complexities of interracial relations, and ideological workshops that inculcate theories of social justice as if there were no plausible alternatives. The Intergroup Dialogue, developed at the University of Michigan and used on many campuses around the country, “assist[s] participants in exploring issues of power, privilege, conflict and oppression.” The program’s success is measured by students’ acknowledgment of pervasive discrimination and their attribution of inequalities to structural causes, such as deeply rooted government policies.

D.E.I. programs often assign participants to identity categories based on rigid distinctions. In a D.E.I. training program at Stanford a few years ago, Jewish staff members were assigned to a “whiteness accountability” group, and some later complained that they were shot down when they tried to raise concerns about antisemitism. The former D.E.I. director at a Bay Area community college described D.E.I. as based on the premises “that the world is divided into two groups of people: the oppressors and the oppressed.” She was also told by colleagues and campus leaders that “Jews are ‘white oppressors,’” and her task was to “decenter whiteness.”

Rather than correcting stereotypes, diversity training too often reinforces them and breeds resentment, impeding students’ social development. An excessive focus on identity can be just as harmfulas the pretense that identity doesn’t matter. Overall, these programs may undermine the very groups they seek to aid by instilling a victim mind-set and by pitting students against one another.

Research shows that all students feel excluded from academic communities at one point or another, no matter their backgrounds. The Stanford psychologists Geoffrey Cohen and Greg Walton have found that “belonging uncertainty”— the “state of mind in which one suffers from doubts about whether one is fully accepted in a particular environment or ever could be” — can afflict all of us. From our perspective, if one student is excluded, all students’ learning is diminished. Belonging is a foundation for the shared pursuit of knowledge and the preparation of students as citizens and leaders of a diverse society.

American campuses need an alternative to ideological D.E.I. programs. They need programs that foster a sense of belonging and engagement for students of diverse backgrounds, religious beliefs and political views without subverting their schools’ educational missions. Such programs should be based on a pluralistic vision of the university community combined with its commitments to academic freedom and critical inquiry.

An increasing number of educators are coming to this conclusion. Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Stony Brook University, presents a holistic approach to diversity. Conflicting viewpoints must be “brought into conversation with one another in a constructive way — to form a picture that is more complete and reliable than we would have were we to look at only the dominant perspective or only at subaltern perspectives,” he has written. Danielle Allen, a professor of political philosophy, ethics, and public policy at Harvard, champions “confident pluralism,” in which we “honor our own values while making decisions together.” And the philosopher Susan Neiman invokes a tradition of universalism that allows for — indeed requires — empathy with others rather than a competition among sufferings. “If you don’t base solidarity on deep principles that you share, it’s not real solidarity,” she has said. The group Interfaith America, which promotes interfaith cooperation, has developed a comprehensive Bridging the Gap curriculum that offers a practical guide for discourse across differences.

At the core of pluralistic approaches are facilitated conversations among participants with diverse identities, religious beliefs and political ideologies, but without a predetermined list of favored identities or a preconceived framework of power, privilege and oppression. Students are taught the complementary skills of telling stories about their own identities, values and experiences and listening with curiosity and interest to the stories of others, acknowledging differences and looking for commonalities.

Success would be an academic community of equally respected learners who possess critical thinking skills and are actively engaged in navigating challenging questions throughout the curriculum — an approach that teaches students how to think rather than what to think.

Pluralism does not ignore identity or pervasive structural inequalities. Rather, it provides a framework in which identity is construed broadly and understood as a starting point for dialogue, rather than the basis for separation and fragmentation. It commits questions about the causes and persistence of inequalities to the classroom, where they can be examined through the critical, evidence-based methods at the root of a university education. Respecting the diverse perspectives of one’s fellows and adhering to norms such as active listening, humility and generosity enable classroom conversations about contentious social and political issues.

Nonprofit and religious leaders are translating these ideas into an emerging movement. A collaborative of philanthropic funders called New Pluralists is organizing and supporting groups that are putting pluralism into practice. Such efforts face headwinds both from conservatives who are suspicious of all efforts to foster inclusion and from groups that believe they benefit from the current system. And it will require heavy lifting by educators to work together with their students to create the preconditions for authentic critical engagement.

The current system is not good for Jews at Stanford and other universities. It’s not good for Muslims, either. And it’s certainly not good for society as a whole.

Paul Brest is former dean and professor emeritus at Stanford Law School. Emily J. Levine is associate professor of education and history at Stanford.

Source: D.E.I. Is Not Working on College Campuses. We Need a New Approach.

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Ling: We’re terrible at talking about the Israel-Hamas conflict. I tried to figure out why. [the need for criteria]

2024/08/30 Leave a comment

Good on Ling for having these conversations.

The most recent example is that of Capital Pride provides an example of the kinds of questions that need to be raised. How should organizations like Capital Pride assess which issues to promote or protest? What should the criteria be? How should one distinguish between different atrocities and abuses? Why Israel/Hamas and not Chinese repression of Uighurs, killings in the Sudan civil war, Russian war crimes in Ukraine, Uganda’s anti-homosexuality act, etc?

So, to encourage some discussion, here are some initial suggestions of possible criteria:

  • Is the protest and actions primarily about LGBTQ rights?
  • If not, how does a country’s or organization’s human rights abuse compare to other human rights abuse?
  • How divisive will the issue/protest be among LGBTQ communities and more broadly?
  • How does the treatment of LGBTQ differ between parties to a conflict?

These have been written for the Israel/Hamas protests and thus reflect my preferences and biases. But the need for criteria, rather than event and particular group driven protests, would reduce the likelihood that some LGBTQ members and allies would feel excluded:

…At least Fogel was willing to be introspective. I suggested to him that Haaretz — the liberal Israeli paper, a fierce critic of Netanyahu, which has relentlessly covered allegations of Israeli war crimes  — could not publish in Canada without being deluged with complaints and criticism. “I don’t think you’re entirely wrong,” he says. “What passes for the norm in Israel is sometimes seen by the Jewish community here as crossing the line.”

How can we have a serious discourse with all these invisible lines? Fogel gave me a fatalistic answer: “I’m not sure you can.”

It’s a variation of an idea I heard from Toney, and Kaplan-Myrth, and a host of other people in recent months: we’re too far gone, too polarized, too emotional to be able to talk about this crisis. Many say they respect the positions of the other side, and are keen to figure out points of agreement, yet often caricature their ideological opposites as inflexible, radical, impossible to reason with.

Mediating this conflict through the body politic doesn’t necessarily mean striving for compromise or capitulation, and it doesn’t entail a return to an age of elite gatekeepers. But it has to mean engaging in discussion, debate and argument without immediately calling it all off. Enabling genuine discourse doesn’t fuel hate, and may act as a pressure release valve to actually prevent it. At the same time, we can’t accept hateful language, online or in the street, just because the author insists their side has a monopoly on morality and justice.

There’s nothing naive about this idea: It is literally the foundation of our society. It is deeply cynical to say that our ideological opposites must be silenced, boycotted, or shouted down because they are dangerous or immoral.

Polarization is not a thing that other people do to us. It is a thing we do to each other. In the same way, mediation is not something that will be done for us, but something we have to commit to and work on, every day, ourselves.

Source: We’re terrible at talking about the Israel-Hamas conflict. I tried to figure out why.

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Prejudice against Muslims higher than towards any other group in US, poll finds

2024/08/30 Leave a comment

Not too surprising given encampments and other Israel-Gaza protests:

Favourable attitudes towards Muslims among Americans have declined and public prejudice against them remains higher than any other religious, ethnic or racial group, a poll published by The Brookings Institution has found.

Released on Tuesday and conducted between 26 July and 1 August, the University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll (UMDCIP) consists of two tracks, one measuring the change in American public attitudes concerning Islam and Muslims and the second which studied prejudice towards racial, religious and ethnic groups – including Jews and Muslims.

Generally, favourable views of Muslims and Islam increased over the last year. The findings show a drop to 64 percent from 78 percent in comparison to 2022 regarding favourable views of Muslims, and a drop to 48 percent in favourable attitudes towards Islam.

Favourable views of Muslims dropped among both Democrats and Republicans, but the drop was starker among Republicans.

In February 2024, 52 percent of Republicans viewed Muslims favourably, but in July 2024, the figure dropped to 46 percent. For Democrats, the drop went from 83 percent in February to 80 percent in July.

The survey sampled 1,510 American adults with oversamples of 202 Blacks and 200 Hispanics.

Anti-Muslim versus anti-Jewish sentiment

Following Israel’s war on Gaza, there has been a dramatic increase in incidents of hate and prejudice against both Jews and Muslims globally.

Prejudice toward Jews and Judaism is included in the poll for the first time.

Among all respondents, favourable views of Muslims were at 64 percent and 48 percent for Islam while it stood at 86 percent for Jews and 77 percent for Judaism.

“The gap between attitudes toward people and religion is not uncommon and has been consistently found in our previous polling, particularly toward Muslims,” the poll says.

Another key factor is race. While only nine percent of white people view Jews as unfavourable, 37 percent of white people view Muslims as unfavourable. Among Black and Hispanic people, the difference is less stark, with 29 percent of Black people viewing Muslims as unfavourable, and 21 percent for Jews. For Hispanics, 33 percent view Muslims unfavourably, with 22 percent for Jews.

College education, familiarity and personal relationships with Jews and Muslims are significant contributing factors that lead to more favourable views towards both Jews and Muslims, according to the poll.

Generational gap

The poll shows that younger Americans have more favourable views towards Jews than Muslims overall, but there is a generational gap. Americans under 30 still have more favourable opinions of Muslims and Islam than Americans aged 30 and over.

While factors explaining this trend still need probing, the reason for the less favourable views of Jews among young people may be the fact that white people tend to have more favourable views of Jews than non-whites, although the share of white people among younger Americans is smaller.

Prejudice toward Muslims is also higher than other groups when it comes to their perceived contributions to American society, the poll says.

Polling shows that only one-third (37 percent) of Americans believe Muslims strengthen American society, while a majority of Americans say the same about every other ethnic, racial and religious group.

Young Americans (under 30) have identical views of the degree to which Muslims and Jews strengthen American society, but older Americans believe Jews (55 percent) contribute far more to American society than Muslims (32 percent).

The lowest figure is found among older Republican Americans, with only 21 percent believing Muslims contribute to American society.

Source: Prejudice against Muslims higher than towards any other group in US, poll finds

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Non-Jewish community leaders should stand up against antisemitism too

2024/08/27 Leave a comment

More calls to action. How effective these calls are on the ground remains to be seen:

In response to more than 100 Jewish institutions across Canada receiving identical bomb threats, Deborah Lyons, Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism, wrote, “These threats against the Jewish community are intended to intimidate and sow fear. The vast silent majority of Canadians finds the harassment and intimidation of the Jewish community of Canada vile and unacceptable. It is past time to stand up and say NO MORE.” 

While largely silent today, we have seen courageous acts of leadership from the non-Jewish community in the past. In 1947, a broad-based coalition of allies came together to form the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews — an organization whose mission was to push back against antisemitism and religious-based hate. With chapters across Canada, it became the leading forum for dialogue and understanding between Christians and Jews.

In 2004, in the wake of antisemitic incidents in Toronto and Montreal, then-Bank of Montreal President and CEO Tony Comper and his late wife, Elizabeth, formed a coalition called Fighting Antisemitism Together or FAST. It was pointedly made up exclusively of non-Jewish business leaders. The CEOs of Canada’s leading corporations lent their own names and their companies’ names to full page ads that ran in major Canadian newspapers.

The October 7th terrorist attacks by Hamas and the increase in antisemitism have brought back painful memories from the horrors of the Holocaust and millennia of dangerous demonization and discrimination. Today, Canada urgently needs a whole-of-society commitment to denouncing and eradicating antisemitism, and that takes courageous leadership.

Our business leaders need to speak up and push back. The chamber movement can play a critical role through its local chapters across Canada. Our national business organizations should be speaking up too.  

Our university leaders especially need to push back. Every Jewish student needs to feel safe from harassment and violence on and off campus. And all students, and their professors, must demonstrate tolerance for, and even curiosity about, the views and cultures of others. That’s, arguably, the core mission of universities. At the moment, too many of our universities are failing in that regard.

Municipal leaders need to ensure that their police forces have the resources they need to uphold and enforce our laws.

Our provincial political leaders need to follow the lead of Ontario and British Columbia and ensure that teaching curriculums provide facts and context about antisemitism and the Holocaust.

Federal leaders need to communicate clearly that antisemitism is antithetical to Canadian values, and it is an affront to democratic norms and freedoms everywhere. So too do our senior public servants.

Faith leaders from across the spectrum need to use their pulpits to promote unity and understanding across all peoples of faith.

Canada has been deeply enriched by its Jewish community, which has made tremendous contributions to every aspect of our society. Our leading universities, hospitals, and research institutes have also benefitted incredibly from cooperation, collaboration, and people-to-people exchanges with their counterparts in Israel.

Every Jew in Canada should feel safe, protected, proud and unhindered from religious practice, welcomed and supported by their classmates, colleagues and community. Simply put, there is no place in Canada for antisemitism.

The poem First They Came by Pastor Martin Niemöller should be a cautionary note to all minorities in Canada. Where antisemitism flourishes, so too do other forms of hate and intolerance. It threatens not just the Jewish community, but all of us and our social fabric.

As non-Jews, we believe this is no time to be a bystander. It’s time for non-Jewish leaders from all walks of life to speak up and push back against antisemitism as they have in the past. As Tony Comper told the Empire Club two decades ago, “Non-Jews must join the battle against what has been described sadly, but accurately, as the oldest and longest of hatreds.”

All Canadians need to communicate clearly to their Jewish neighbors, classmates, and colleagues that they are not alone: Canadians stand with the Jewish community and have their backs against antisemitism.

Hon. Paul Tellier was Clerk of the Privy Council and president and chief executive officer of CN and Bombardier, Hon. Kevin Lynch was Clerk of the Privy Council and vice chair of BMO Financial Group, Andrew Molson is Chair of AVENIR Global, Paul Deegan is CEO of Deegan Public Strategies

Source: Non-Jewish community leaders should stand up against antisemitism too

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Urback: A mass bomb threat against Jews? Who could have seen that coming?

2024/08/24 Leave a comment

Satirical yet pointed:

…But even then, what would have given someone such a sense of impunity that they would threaten 100 Jewish institutions at once? Was it Winnipeg’s mayor taking downthe city’s menorah, or Moncton’s mayor doing the same? Or Calgary’s mayor skippingthe city’s menorah-lighting ceremony, or Toronto’s mayor declining to attend the Walk with Israel? Was it the empty words offered by Canadian politicians, over and over again, in lieu of action each time a Jewish institution is attacked?

Or maybe these individuals were emboldened by the national indifference this country has shown toward the targeting of Catholic churches, dozens of which have been set ablaze over the course of the last few years? Maybe it was the constant dismissal of the concerns of Jews feeling unsafe in Canada, because, as many have taken to saying now, why should anyone care about hurt feelings here, when people are dying in Gaza?

If only there were warnings, beyond the threats, violence, vandalism, harassment, cultural exclusion, institutional antisemitism, empty words and constant gaslighting. And when – not if – someone gets seriously injured or worse, we’ll wish there had been more signs, too.

Source: A mass bomb threat against Jews? Who could have seen that coming?

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Stephens: What I Want a University President to Say About Campus Protests

2024/08/22 Leave a comment

Essential reading for some of our more “woke” institutions, academics and students. Money quote:

“It was listening to students and faculty whom we had admitted or hired for their intellectual sophistication, their capacity to understand complexity and nuance, reduce their own thinking to a handful of slogans and mantras written for them by others. It was the absence of intellectual humility and its replacement with moral certitudes.:”

…Some of you may have heard the term “institutional neutrality.” It is the belief that universities like ours should avoid taking political positions of any kind, either through investment decisions or political declarations by administrators or by academic boycotts of foreign scholars, except when the interests of the university are directly affected — like when the Supreme Court weighs in on our admissions process.

You may also have heard about the Chicago principles, which make the case for universities to embrace an almost unfettered principle of free expression as “an essential part of the university’s educational mission,” even when the speech is seen by most members of the community as “offensive, unwise, immoral or wrongheaded.”

Our university embraces both institutional neutrality and the Chicago principles. We do so not because they are ends in themselves but because they are necessary ways to cultivate the spirit of inquiry. That spirit cannot be fettered by formal or informal speech codes that might stop us from asking uncomfortable but important questions, or by university policies that preclude fruitful exchanges with scholars from other countries. At our university you will find scholars from Israel, China, Turkey, Russia and other countries whose policies you may not like; we do not hold them responsible for their governments, nor do we ask them to make political declarations as the price of belonging to our community.

But necessary isn’t sufficient. If all we accomplish by adopting the Chicago principles is that everyone gets to speak and nobody bothers to listen, those principles will have fallen short. If we embrace institutional neutrality at the topmost level while remaining indifferent to the one-sided politicization of classrooms, departments and administrative offices, we will have done little to advance the pedagogical benefits of neutrality, which is intended to broaden your exposure to the widest variety of views and ideas.

And if we permit protests that inhibit the speech of others, or set up no-go zones for Jewish students, or make it difficult to study in the library or pay attention in class, we may have upheld the right to speak in the abstract while stripping it of its underlying purpose. The point of free speech is to open discussion, not to shut it down. It’s to engage with our opponents, not to shut them out. It’s to introduce fresh perspectives, not to declare every perspective but our own to be beyond the moral pale.

I’d like to add a personal note as a Jew. Many people objected to last year’s protests, with their chants of “from the river to the sea,” as antisemitic. I find that calling for the elimination of Israel — indeed, of any state — is inherently repugnant, since it would almost inevitably entail an almost unimaginable level of violence, dispossession and destruction.

But antisemitism is not what I found chiefly offensive about the protests. I accept that most of the protesters are not antisemitic, or at least don’t think of themselves that way.

What bothered me, rather, was watching members of our community turn off their critical faculties. It was listening to students and faculty whom we had admitted or hired for their intellectual sophistication, their capacity to understand complexity and nuance, reduce their own thinking to a handful of slogans and mantras written for them by others. It was the absence of intellectual humility and its replacement with moral certitudes. It was the substitution of serious political thought with propaganda. It was the refusal to engage with difference and criticism in any way except denunciation and moral bullying.

In short, the way in which these protests unfolded was an insult to the spirit of inquiry that this university has an institutional responsibility to protect and champion. So does this mean we will brook no form of protest? Of course not. But we do expect that protests, so long as they happen on our campus, on our property, conform with the aims of education as we see them.

That means, at a minimum, that we will enforce clearly established “time, place and manner” restrictions, so that the rights of those who protest are never allowed to impinge on the rights of those who don’t. It also means we will invest in serious programming about the Mideast conflict, including by inviting Israeli and Palestinian scholars to campus and hosting moderated debates where you can cheer your own political side but must at least listen to the other. Our goal is never to make you think one way or the other. It’s to make you think, period.

The spirit of protest will always have a place here, as it must in every free society. Our job is to harness it to the task of inquiry so that knowledge may continue to grow, and human life may be enriched.

Source: What I Want a University President to Say About Campus Protests


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Deborah Lipstadt slams progressive definition of antisemitism

2024/08/14 Leave a comment

Of note:

Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy for monitoring antisemitism, defended a controversial definition of antisemitism Wednesday and slammed a progressive alternative as having been endorsed by “some renowned antisemites.”

In a conversation with reporters at the State Department, Lipstadt said that International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, which describes anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism, represented the best language for addressing antisemitism overseas because foreign governments are most familiar with it.

“You need a definition,” Lipstadt said.

How the federal government should define antisemitism in relation to Israel has been a contentious topic since the Trump administration, and even more so as President Joe Biden has sought to make combating antisemitism a cornerstone of his administration.

The release of the landmark national strategy to counter antisemitism last year was delayed for several weeks amid a frantic lobbying campaign between proponents of the IHRA definition, including most major American Jewish groups, and critics who say that it has a chilling effect on legitimate criticism of Israel.

The White House ultimately mentioned in the strategy both the IHRA definition and the Nexus Document, which is meant to complement the IHRA definition and soften some of its positions on Israel. But Lipstadt said on Wednesday that Nexus was not appropriate for international use.

“You say ‘Nexus’ to most Europeans, they have no idea what you’re talking about,” Lipstadt said. “It’s not applicable.”

Jonathan Jacoby, who founded the task force behind Nexus, said that he hoped the group could work with Lipstadt to raise its profile internationally. “Nexus has only been used in the U.S. context, but the principles apply whenever and wherever issues related to Israel and antisemitism intersect,” he said.

Endorsed by ‘renowned antisemites,’ Lipstadt claims

But Lipstadt, a Holocaust historian, reserved her harshest criticism for the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which was released in 2021 as an alternative to IHRAand alluded to, but not mentioned, in the White House strategy.

“A group of academics signed it, including some renowned antisemites like Richard Falk,” Lipstadt said. “So I don’t know that I’d want to go with that definition of antisemitism.”

Falk, a retired Princeton professor and longtime critic of Israel, has been embroiled in several controversies involving allegations of antisemitism and conspiracy theories, including posting a cartoon on his blog that featured a dog wearing a yarmulke while urinating on Lady Justice. 

Falk, who is Jewish, has consistently denied that he is antisemitic.

The Jerusalem Declaration was drafted by a group of mostly Jewish academics and has been signed by more than 300 other scholars.

Source: Deborah Lipstadt slams progressive definition of antisemitism

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‘What is it about the make-up of our society?’ Deborah Lyons on antisemitism in Canada

2024/08/10 Leave a comment

Of interest:

What have the last 10 months been like in your role?

It has been intense, extremely difficult, with the many challenges that, frankly, we hear about every day. It has been disappointing, in part because I don’t feel that the rise in antisemitism is getting the attention or response from leadership across the country, at all levels, that it should be getting, and that’s been very disappointing. And it’s been quite troubling, because as much as I’ve worked in conflict zones before and difficult environments, to be here, in my own country and to experience the horrific rise, unprecedented rise, of antisemitism in Canada and the lack of a real response to it, causes me to worry about the future of our country.

It’s been, on the one hand, a very meaningful period. But, on the other hand, it’s been, in some ways, very discouraging and concerning about where are we headed. But, frankly, I wouldn’t have wanted to have missed it, because it’s important.

What would you like to see done? 

A lot more. A lot more of leaders at all levels — federal, provincial and municipal, local level — speaking up, speaking out, condemning, clearly, antisemitism. This is not a hard thing to do when you see hatred happening on the streets, in schools, at universities, in the business environment. When you see protests that maybe intended to be peaceful, but truly do get out of hand, with hateful slogans and chants and actually threatening slogans and chants. You really need leaders, community leaders, political leaders, business leaders, faith leaders, academic leaders, standing up and clearly speaking out against this surge of ugliness that seems to have taken over our country.

I would like to see a situation where the fullness of the legal system is being applied, where we have police well-trained on hate crimes, which I think we’re seeing now in some of the major centres across the country, where we’re recording well and fully the incidents that are happening and ensuring that we’re getting a strong sense of this new level of intimidation and fear that has been created in the last year. And that we are making sure that we have our educators, our teachers and our security, our police, well trained to recognize antisemitism and to respond to it.

Do you fear that there is any risk of allegations of antisemitism stifling legitimate political speech?

I’m less worried about that, and more worried about the level of hatred that is growing and where that could take us. Now, having said that, I am a huge supporter of freedom of expression, of academic freedom, freedom of speech.

One of the things we’re working on right now is the fulsome definition of antisemitism that has been developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, that Canada has endorsed. And we’re going to be coming out with a guidebook, a handbook on explaining that definition and trying to demonstrate to people, criticize whatever you want to criticize, criticize Israel, criticize any government in the world. You want to criticize them? That’s what we want, in terms of democracy. We want freedom of expression. We want the boundaries of knowledge to be pushed. But there has to be an understanding of where that is treading into, either hateful speech or a demonstration of a particularly threatening bias.

I want to emphasize my concern about protecting freedom of expression, and, particularly, academic freedom, but, at the same time, we have to have a clear moral clarity about what we consider to be hateful speech or hateful incidents.

What does a day in your job look like?

It probably starts off around seven in the morning with a review of the latest crises or catastrophe or incidents, either from the mainstream media or from social media. It then goes through many, many meetings or calls with people across the country, because this is not an Ottawa-centric job, even though I am based out of Ottawa. So I’m travelling across the country a lot. We meet with provincial government people on a regular basis. We meet with federal ministers. So the whole (equity, diversity and inclusion) program is one that we’re looking at. We work with law enforcement on training on antisemitism for police officers across the country. We’re looking at the fullness of the legislation to make sure that it is adequate in addressing hate crimes. We’re looking at the data-collection process, so I’m often engaged with StatCan and others on, are we collecting the right data? Are we getting a good, comprehensive picture so we can have honest conversations about what is really happening there, and provide that to the political leaders?

We’re doing work on social media. (On Tuesday) we were spending some time with social media research companies to identify what is happening in terms of hate crimes throughout that platform. We’re doing work with the universities, of course, so we’re preparing right now for the return to campus in September. So I’m spending time with Universities Canada and specific universities on how they’re going to be working to ensure that the year ahead in the university environment is a more constructive and calmer one.

It does appear that Canada is one of the countries that is actually actively tackling antisemitism, openly, overtly, dramatically, intensely. We’ve seen a huge increase in antisemitism in many parts of the world. I think that we’re seen as a country that is really trying to address it; we’re not having the success I’d like to see us have, but we are at least pushing and actively struggling to try to get to a much healthier place.

Do you see any different textures to antisemitism in your travels and conversations across the country?

I guess I would say that what we’re seeing is a mix of motivations that seem to be driving antisemitism. Some of it comes from the far right, maybe, some of it, maybe, from the far left. Some of it from people who are confusing Canada’s foreign policy, and what they are expressing here in the country is an anti-Jewish hatred, which is completely, I think, all mixed up together.

One of the things, again, as somebody who’s travelled a lot internationally, is, why is Canada having this unprecedented surge in antisemitism right now? What is it about the make-up of our society? What is it about our push for diversity and inclusivity? And what is it about our demographics? What is it about our country that is seeing such a level that has actually caused other countries, to say ‘What’s going on in Canada? We wouldn’t have expected this from Canada.’

I don’t think the faith community has stepped up. I don’t think we’ve seen the non-Jewish, non-Muslim faith communities step up to say, ‘Wait a minute. This is unacceptable in Canada. We don’t endorse this level of hatred and  animosity toward one another. This is unacceptable. This is not who we are as children of God.’

Anthony Housefather, the Liberal MP, was appointed early last month as special adviser on Jewish community relations and antisemitism. Are you stepping on each other’s toes?

I’d say we’re dancing together rather than treading on each other’s toes. Anthony has a very particular role and it’s very important and it’s complementary to my role. We work very closely together, I know him very well. I work very closely, though, with all members of Parliament. Frankly, I can do with more people working actively on this file and I know how committed Anthony is. We’re in touch somewhere between daily and weekly.

Does it make your job easier or more challenging when there are different offices? There’s you, there’s Housefather, there’s Amira Elghawaby on the Islamophobia file. Under former prime minister Stephen Harper, it was the one office of religious freedom.

We talk about that from time to time. I think it was actually prescient, really forward thinking on the part of the present government to have put in place the special envoys and special representatives such as my counterpart, Amira (Elghawaby). No one knew that things were going to get this bad in Canada. It turned out to be prescient, because there is just so much specific work that we have to do, and hopefully we can get that done in spite of the fraught environment that everyone is working in right now and since October 7.

I think the configuration we have right now is actually one that we need for the time right now, because I think there’s very specific work that needs to be done to deal with Islamophobia, to deal with anti-Muslim hate. And there’s no question that there is a huge amount of work that we have to do to combat antisemitism here in Canada. And I don’t know if you would get that done with the same intensity if you were part of a larger, more general approach.

Is there anything specific you’d like to see that might lower the temperature when class returns at universities?

We want to try to see the administrations provide the students, and particularly working with the faculty, who could be playing a much larger role here, in creating safe spaces for debate, for argument, for learning from one another. For exchanging of views, that type of thing, so that the students have the opportunity to challenge the boundaries and come up with new knowledge and come up with new ways of understanding one another and communication.

And then, certainly, I would say that one of the big concerns that we’re seeing, not just at universities, but frankly in work environments generally, the whole EDI (Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) philosophy and approach often does not include antisemitism at all. In fact, it dismisses it almost. And what we found was that many students who were having issues on the campuses after October were going to and we’re told to ‘go to student services, the EDI counsellors are so good,’ and we’re not getting any real responses. And we’ve spoken to university administrations about that, and we’re hoping that we’re going to see some improvements there, where the EDI and student services offices will actually take more seriously the concerns of Jewish students who went to them to seek recourse or support or solace or whatever.

How optimistic are you about the future of your work?

We’re still in the middle of a very challenging time. I think we thought that we would have been in a better place by now. We’re not. So that’s concerning. But I think that you can feel the momentum building, more people coming on stream to be supportive, to be engaged, members of the non-Jewish population who are stepping up.

I don’t even know if I’d use the word optimist or pessimist. I would just say, I think we’re all very determined to come out of this. I’m hoping in a better place than we’ve been, not even the same as we were before, because I think this experience has taught us so much that we have no choice but to find a way to have a better Canada out of this. Because, if we don’t, that alternative is unacceptable.

Source: ‘What is it about the make-up of our society?’ Deborah Lyons on antisemitism in Canada

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