#2 The Purge

Is the much talked about surge of anti-Semitism in Canada real, or is a wave of political

protest getting misclassified?

“Is anti-Zionism being conflated with anti-Semitism?”

What I found was story after story of Canadians being singled out, screamed at, spat on, threatened, even violently assaulted, not for being Zionists, but for being Jews. However, I found other stories as well. Stories about people who are Jewish, yes, but who would not likely have found themselves in the negative situations that they told me about, just because they're Jewish.

These are stories that probably would not have happened if not for these people's opinions, beliefs, and their actions. I'm Jesse Brown, this is a podcast called What Is Happening Here. And today, you'll hear stories that show just how deeply into society this conflict has shaped.

“These stories don't take place at synagogues.”

They happened at bookstores, in schools, and within unions, and inside government. These are not simple stories of people just mining their own business and getting targeted for discrimination. The people you're about to meet are not uncomplicated victims. And different people will have different thoughts about what they have to say.

But what I want you to listen for is what happens next, once they feel targeted or harmed.

Our first story begins with a video.

The first thing we see in the video is an old man with white hair and glasses, wearing a rumpled brown suit and a cardigan, stepping out of a taxi cab onto a Toronto street at night.

“Immediately he looks surprised to see that he has found himself in the middle of a sizable”

pro Palestine protest. He looks a bit lost and curious. One of the protesters notices him, a younger man with a kefia wrapped around his shoulders. He approaches the old man, shame on you, he says to the old man, "You're a genocide support."

The old man looks perplexed and crosses the street away from the protesters and towards the bookstore. As he does, he realizes that the entire encounter has been filmed. He approaches and the cameraman greets him respectfully. I'm recording the protesters scream at you.

There's the CEO of Indigo Books, she is here speaking tonight, and they believe that Indigo is funneling money to the Israel army. I'm a German tourist, I come only to listen to a Louis Penny. The German tourist, who came only to listen to mystery novelist Louis Penny, has no idea that the woman who will be interviewing his beloved author is not just the owner of a chain

of bookstores, but is also the individual who has been associated more than any other Canadian with a genocide of Palestinians. I used to love going to Indigo, and it was a Heather's fix sticker that introduced

me to my first book of poetry, and I was so shocked.

We see you Indigo, we know what you are, and we know what you do, and we will not allow you to continue supporting terror and violence and the killing of children, and we will not be stalked and we will not be silenced, free Palestine. Heather Resman is the CEO of Indigo. She has become a focal point for the pro Palestine movement in Canada.

As far as I can tell, she has been singled out more frequently, in chance, and at demonstrations, than any other Canadian public figure, or even politician. The reason why Heather Resman and her husband Jerry Schwartz are accused by activists of funding the Israeli army through their charity, Hesseg.

to my homeland, Palestine.

“For years, Indigo has been a target of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement.”

Shortly after October 7, 2023, the campaign against Indigo, may national news. On an November evening in the middle of the night, 11 activists, including two academics, vandalize the flagship Indigo bookstore in downtown Toronto. They plastered the windows with dozens of posters of Resman's face, they splattered blood red paint over the windows and the posters.

The text on each picture of Resman's face said, "Funding genocide." The incident was investigated as a hate crime, and denounced by Jewish groups as anti-Semitic. That accusation was quickly dismissed by pro Palestine activists and journalists.

This notion that what these activists had done was anti-Semitic, racist, a hate crime.

Which is of course an absurd allegation. One of the activists charged his Jewish herself. God forbid you put up a poster at a book store, like Heaven's Words. How dare they be words at a book store? They are completely undermining the idea of anti-Semitism by saying that putting posters on a window,

calling out SEO's investments in funding soldiers is an act of anti-Semitism. She's not some kind of racial target, she's a legitimate political target. What none of those people mentioned in their description of the vandalism of the Indigo bookstore is that it took place on the 85th anniversary of Crystal Knocked, the Night of Broken Glass. When thousands of Jewish businesses in Germany and Austria were similarly vandalized,

and those broken, and Jewish blood ran on the sidewalks of Europe. Crystal Knocked is widely regarded as the beginning of the Holocaust. At least 91 Jews were murdered on Crystal Knocked, and immediately afterwards around 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. An angry and divisive debate broke out over the so-called Indigo 11.

They were denounced as racist vandals by some, and celebrated as heroes by others, throughout all of that, had the recent and did not comment. But some months later, she did sit down and speak with me.

“Can you describe to me what has happened to your stores since October 7th?”

So there have been 30 or 40 meaningful events in our stores, things which happened, run the gamut in our Eaton Center store. A couple of people came in and they lit a fire. We've had groups of people come in seemingly as customers, and then lie down on the floor, wrap themselves in white sheets with blood,

and accuse me of being responsible for genocide. We have had people shouting obscenities outside our store, toward me, toward Indigo. A Jewish person might say, "Well, this is obvious, anti-Semitic." The people who support this movement roll their eyes,

this is obviously an attempt to distract from Gaza. This is obviously an attempt to weaponize anti-Semitism. I'd like to delaminate the discussion from the labels just for a moment.

So let's put the anti-Semitism aside for a second.

“I think what's happening to Indigo is wrong.”

I am being accused of doing something that I am not doing. For the purpose of an argument that some people want to make. It's wrong to perpetrate a lie because it causes damage unfairly. We do not fund the military, we do not have any say over the military. That's the fact.

The particular charity that is being questioned is our charity that provides scholarships to people who have completed their military service and have been accepted to university. If you live in Israel and you are of a certain age, military service is mandatory.

When could agree with it or not, that's the law of the land. It is mandatory. There are some number of people who have no family in Israel. It might be because at a younger age they emigrated alone

The military deems them loan soldiers.

“What we are doing is we are contributing education scholarships.”

That's what we do. My job is to try to understand where very divergent people are coming from. And to try to get to the root of the facts of things. To the extent that people think that has to fund the IDF, it does not. It does not.

I don't think that there is any individual in this country who has been targeted, whose face and name has been associated with genocide and baby killing more than you. I think that's true.

You have been seized upon.

We have stores in every area of every province. My face is in all those stores. I think I am a convenient target. Look, it's absurd to accuse a Canadian chief executive of a book company of committing genocide.

“I think it's worth fighting for not allowing lies, pernicious lies, to permeate our society.”

And that matters to me. And I do think that history says pernicious lies against Jewish people, leads to very bad things. Heather Reesman's Hessec Foundation is a separate entity from Indigo Books.

Nevertheless, the campaign against Hessec is called Indigo Kill's Kids.

It's petitioning the Canadian government to revoke Hessec's charitable status on the basis that it is illegal for a Canadian charity to fund foreign militaries. Activists argue that Hessec does this indirectly by providing financial incentives for people to join the Israeli Army. The criminal charges against the so-called Indigo 11 have all been dropped. Two of the people who vandalized the bookstore were elementary school teachers.

As mentioned last episode, elementary schools have been the site of hundreds of anti-Semitic incidents in Canada since October 7, 2023. According to a federal report and human rights complaint, these acts of anti-Jew discrimination came from students and also from teachers and principles. My name is Laurie Allen, and right now I do nothing. I'm an employee teacher. October 7th was the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend.

On that Saturday, we were watching the news on CNN and seeing what was happening. I was with my son, Jeremy, and he was texting friends in Israel at the same time as we were watching the news. And one of the friends he was texting was a boy who had been in the idea of he was older now. He had been in his mid-20s and was in the reserves and he was texting him and others. I'm not going to cry you guys okay, and this particular one said I'm being called out.

“I can't remember if it was either later that day on Saturday or on the Sunday.”

Jeremy got word that he had been killed. I was sitting right beside him and they were texting and talking and then it's just surreal. It's like that person is dead now. So my son was obviously devastated about that and just seeing what was unfolding on the news. I was a middle school teacher, so I was teaching grade seven and eight.

School called VSIE, which is the Victoria School for our ideal education. It's private, like if the pay to go there, it's non-unionized. And my assistant will call him Chad. Chad was a educational assistant. He was there in a supportive role, just to help with classroom behaviors.

What any aid does? You know, if you're having kids having trouble with their work, they could take them aside and help them. We can extra set of hands. When I went back to work on the Tuesday, Chad came up to me and said, "Oh, how was your turkey?" and was just very jovial and happy.

So he obviously had a very different experience. And I said, "Well, actually, you know, did you see like what happened on the news?" And he said, "Oh, yeah, yeah, I did." And I said, "Yeah, so it was pretty awful." And Jeremy's found out one of his friends has been killed.

And at that point, it didn't occur to me that anybody would have any other thought,

then, "Wow, what a horrible thing."

“Whether or not you're Jewish, it just seemed like a horrible thing.”

And he immediately just went into this whole thing about, "Oh, I don't support Israel. I don't like a country that has a forced military." And Israel's a colonizer. I don't know, throwing them all in, apartheid. I was just really shocked.

I said, "You know, Chad, nobody really wants to be in the military." And you're really lucky that you live in a country where you don't have to be in the military. It's certainly nobody's dream to do it. And he just kept going on. And it was getting ugly.

And I could just feel like my eyes tearing up. And I can't be here. So I just went for a walk. I said, "I gotta go. Went into the washroom, sat down on the floor. How a little cry."

And went back into my classroom.

And I saw there was a note on my desk. And he said, "Oh, I wrote you something. Can you read it?" So I read it. And it was just an apology saying that he was sorry for being insensitive.

Which I thought was very nice. And then he verbally said to me, "I'm really sorry. My timing is the worst. I'm a big dumb dumb. I just kind of follow it all my other friends say."

And I'm sorry. I was really insensitive. We hugged it out. And I said, "I appreciate that. And I hope this is the end of this."

And we can move along.

So I was hoping, you know, that was sort of the end of it.

[music] Sometime later, he came in 10 minutes early. And we talked a little bit about what the day was going to look like.

“And I'm honestly not sure who brought it up,”

but the or came up at that point. And he was talking about going to these protests. And I said, "Oh, when you go to those protests, do you do that chant they do?" Like from the river to the sea.

And he got all excited and said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, we do that. We do that one." And I said, "Do you know what that means?" And he was like, "What do you mean?" And I said, "Well, do you know what river

and what sea you're talking about?" And he said, "Well, no, I don't know." So I told him. So it's the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. And this is the chant of Hamas,

which is saying from the river to the sea. Palestine won't be free, meaning free of Jews. It's talking about killing all the Jews. And he said, "No, that's not what it means." And when he said, "Well, okay."

“And he told me that the protests were really peaceful,”

and they're fine. And there's lots of Jewish people there too. And I should probably go and see what it's all about. And I said, "No, I don't think I want to do that." And the kids were just about to come in

and are principal, Natalie Miller was out in front of the school. And I just said, "I can't work with him." I said, "You know, my history." She knows that both my parents were Holocaust survivors. My mum was in Auschwitz.

My dad was in Doc Out. I have zero relatives. And I said, "I can't." And so she said, "Okay, don't worry about it." Like, you can go home for the day.

And I said, "Oh, I'm not going home." I already did the hard part from here. But I don't want him in the classroom. So he was put in another classroom. Then we had a meeting principal.

Natalie Miller was there. And our vice principal and myself. And Chad. And then he said he wasn't anti-Semitic. He said he was just an anti-zionist.

He kept going on about his rules. Committing a genocide and all the footage from October 7th was AI-generated and that the military admitted that they were just killing each other. That it was all fake news.

That there were no tunnels. And then I said, "What about? Like, we're the hostages." And he said, "Like, quite hostages." You just have to stop watching social media.

You need to get off social media, Lori, because you just full of fake news and it's all fake. And so at that point, I just said, "I can't be around this." And I said to the principal and the vice principal, "Why do you have somebody working here who's so intoxicated and so stupid?"

Like, I can't. And I laughed and I went into the principal's office. And I sat on the floor and I just cried.

And then got myself together and I went back and taught.

What?

“So after that, Chad was still in the school.”

And it's a really small school. I would see him all the time. One time, the principal asked me, "Are you okay with having him in the school?" And I said, "I understand he's going to be here." All right.

I can put my big girl pants on and that's fine. The way that I found out that I was not going to be teaching grades seven and eight middle school next year was one of my students who was in grade seven, came up to me and she was really upset and she said, "How come you're not teaching us next year?"

And I said, "What? Yeah. I'll be your teacher next year for grade eight." And she said, "No." She'd heard from one of the other teachers.

“She had said to her, "How would you feel about me being your teacher next year?"”

This was on this to me. So I went to the principal and I said, "What are your plans for me next year?" And she said, "Oh, yeah. Do you want to talk now?" And I, it wasn't really like the perfect time to have a meeting.

I would have liked to be prepared for it and sit down and take notes. But I said, "Okay." So we sat down in front of the school on a bench, very casual. And she said, "Yeah, I'm not sure where to put you next year. I was thinking of grade one.

But I know you don't really like the little kids that much. You know, if I had a magic wand and dippity do or something, I could give you whatever you wanted. What would you teach?" And I said, "Well, this is all news to me that I'm not teaching middle school.

So I don't know. You know, I love art. I don't know. Like I haven't really given it a lot of thought." And then she said, "You know, you just haven't seemed very happy this year."

And first of all, that wasn't true.

I had a really good class and I really enjoyed working. But I said, "I wasn't happy. I'll be honest with you of the fact that what happened with Chad and how nobody's ever really asked me, how I'm doing or, you know, that was a little bit of a kick in the teeth. It almost makes me feel like you're all a little bit mad at me."

She said, "Well, it's just that I don't like to see children being killed." And she said, "Well, neither do I." And just that comment was like, "You don't like to see children being killed." So what do you think? Because I'm Jewish.

I have this, I just said, "No, who does?" So that was kind of the end of that meeting. All I really learned from it was that I'm not teaching middle school. And that she doesn't like to see children being killed. And somehow she thinks maybe I do.

She had told me once, like, "I don't know. I just live on the way little island. I don't really know anything that's going on in this world. And I thought, "Well, how nice for you?" Some of us have a heavier past and do know what's going on in the world,

and do have a stake in it and know the repercussions of where hate can take you. I remember specifically it was a Friday. I heard my phone beep, looked at it, and I got an email from Natalie Miller, and it just said, "Sorry, that I have to do this via email. Telling me that my contract was not being renewed for staffing reasons.

And that she hoped I would pursue my love of art." So that was two weeks before the end of school. And she kind of avoided me for those two weeks.

I never spoke to her about it.

“I think I lost my job because having me there made them feel uncomfortable.”

There was never ever any issues with my teaching. If you were not Jewish, do you think any of this would have happened? No, it would never have happened because I never would have had that discussion with Chad and my connection to what's happening in Israel would have not been the same. Lori Allen has filed a human rights complaint against the Victoria School for ideal education.

She alleges sustained antisemitic discrimination by colleagues and administrators. I asked the school and its principal, Natalie Miller, for their side of the story. None of them got back to me. Now because that private school is not unionized, Lori is advocating for herself with the help of a lawyer. Most teachers in Canada work in the public school system and have large unions to stand up for them

when they feel they have experienced discrimination.

They took a side and they took a side in a way that they had never displayed for any other world conflict before ever.

“They had an opinion and we were all going to know about it.”

This is a Jewish public school teacher from Toronto. She could lose her job for talking with me, so I've agreed to withhold her name. Her troubles began after October 7, 2023 when she began experiencing what she considered to be threatening anti-Semitic incidents at work, from fellow teachers and from students. She reported these incidents to her principal and to her superintendent, but they took no action. Until one day, they did. They took the action of disciplining her.

She had reached out to a parent for help.

And for doing that, the school board accused her of breaking their privacy rules. She lost her job at the school where she had been teaching for almost two decades, and she was transferred elsewhere.

“If ever she needed her union, this was the time.”

But the union representative who she was supposed to go to for help was a teacher who had been posting politically charged messages about the Middle East conflict online. Including one expressing support for a US Air Force servicemen who had set himself on fire in support of Palestine. So imagine being a Jewish person in a school board whose union has put forth such a vicious anti-Israel pro-Palestinian front. Imagine trying to go to one of them who has just tweeted that the endgame of Zionism is genocide,

and lauding the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell and the states lauding it as an act of heroism. They are so deeply enmeshed in this ideology that they can't even see it as wrong as a teacher to applaud someone for killing themselves. So this is a person who is supposed to be representing me who has a legal obligation to represent me. And these are former teachers mind you who are working in the executive. Imagine trying to go to them for support.

The Toronto contingent of the union of the teachers even on a daily basis, sometimes several times a day, a putting out anti-Israel rhetoric. They're reposting memes, and frankly some of the most racist anti-Semitic shit I have ever seen. And they're not getting called on at, they're not being stopped, they're not.

“So like there's that that's why Heavenly Onnie, that the people who are representing me and the people who I'm supposed to turn to with this specific kind of problem are not going to back me up.”

This teacher's fight to get her old job back is ongoing. Over 700 parents and children at her old school have signed a petition calling for her to be reinstated. Meanwhile, anonymous pro Palestine activists discovered the name of the school that she's been transferred to. They identified her publicly as a Zionist and called for her to be removed from her new school as well. Her union has taken no action in her defense in response to that campaign.

Outside of their unions, Canadian workers are supposed to have representation through the NDP, the new Democratic Party, which of the mainstream political parties in Canada, is the furthest to the left and the most pro labor. They are also the governing party in the province of British Columbia as they were on October 7, 2023. They too have faced allegations of anti-Semitism. The most noteworthy of which came from their own minister. Salina Robinson, I'm the former MLA for Coquitlamalardville and a former cabinet minister for both John Harkin and David Eby.

Salina Robinson was the NDP's minister of post-secondary education, including universities. She was also the party's liaison with a local Jewish community and she was the only outwardly Jewish member of that government. All of that soon changed. Natalie Knight, an instructor at Langera, which is a community college here in British Columbia. On October the 8th or 9th went out and celebrated the massacre of October the 7th.

Amazing, brilliant offensive raised on October 7th.

And I was asked by media what I thought about that. I said that that behavior was reprehensible that we have somebody teaching our children who celebrates the massacre of people. Didn't make it about Israel, didn't make it about Gaza, just anyone who celebrates the massacre of anyone. It's reprehensible behavior.

So I think I just became a target.

Sleena Sleena, you can hide, you're committing genocide. No other MLA was named.

“So was I targeted because I was a minister for post-secondary education because I was outspoken?”

Okay, maybe. Was I targeted because I'm an outju? Well, maybe. And on January and 2024, I was on a panel discussion talking about the rising anti-Semitism. This is the last person to speak and you've got condensed for time and spoke about the rise in anti-Semitism, particularly on campus.

The data that is 18 to 34 year olds that have no idea about the Holocaust. They don't even think it happened. They don't even understand that Israel and as part of my explaining why we're seeing so much anti-Semitism among young people, talked about people not knowing their history and that Israel, it had been and I quote. "I'm happy piece of land with nothing on it. There were several hundred thousand people, but other than that, it didn't produce any economy.

It couldn't grow things. It didn't have anything on it. And that it was the folks who were displaced that came and the people who had been living there for generations and together they worked hard. And they had their own battles, right?

“They were absolutely in elegant words that got clipped and went wild on social media.”

Sean O'er, who posted the clip Thursday, says it has garnered more than 1.8 million impressions.

And I've been noticing Selena Robinson's Twitter presence for some time now. The BC Muslim Association released a statement requesting that Robinson publicly recognized that she is engaged in a pattern of Islamophobia and anti-Palestine racism. The National Council of Canadian Muslims calling for her immediate resignation. I apologize several times. My apologies were not accepted. It just created a shitstorm. I don't think it was an apology.

Apologies are when somebody takes accountability. This provincial faculty union says Robinson's apology is not enough. She's not fit to serve as minister any longer. You know, like my office was targeted. I received death threats that were credible. And David E. B. decided that I needed to be fired from Cabinet.

She needs to focus on this work in community to repair that damage.

“And that's what she's going to be focused on going forward rather than on a Cabinet role.”

Did this happen because you're Jewish? Yes. I absolutely believe this happened because I'm Jewish. I have had half a dozen colleagues at least who have either minimized the Holocaust in their speeches, who have called Jews Zionists in a derogatory way, who have minimized the experience of those who were slaughtered on October 7th.

And many faux paws by government where they have hurt the Jewish community in real ways. And in each and every one of those instances, the task was to apologize to the Jewish community to make a man's to reach out to the Jewish community to learn.

And it's always been acceptable.

It's always been acceptable to the party. Except when the Jew steps in a pile of poop. You know the response that many would have to that. Even accepting that sounds like you were treated differently. But you were not treated differently because you're Jewish.

This wasn't antisemitism. This wasn't Zionism. Well, it's just code. It's a bullshit argument that holds no water. When 94 to 97% of Jews are Zionists.

I mean, you know, there are people in my life who are Canadian Italians or they're Italian Canadians. They love Italy, they cheer for Italy, soccer teams. They are very proud of Italy. When we criticize the Italian government, we don't tell these people that they don't deserve to have a home base or where their grandparents or where their ancestors from.

We don't shame them, humiliate them, call them names. We don't do that. But yet somehow for Jews, it's okay. David Ebe, the premier of British Columbia, initially denied Selena Robinson's allegation that his government has an antisemitism problem.

But after political pressure mounted, he acknowledged the issue. And promised that his politicians would take anti-racism training. Back when she was BC's minister of post-secondary education, one of Robinson's challenges was to address an ongoing crisis at the University of British Columbia's medical school, where almost 300 Jewish doctors signed a letter to the

Once again, some of the alleged incidents were coming from other faculty members.

“One UBC professor of Family Medicine posted online that reports of Hamas raping”

Jews on October 7th were all fake. She shared a post titled Christ in the Rubble, the Rubble of Gaza, an apparent callback to the age-old idea of Jews as Christ killers. Dr. Ted Rosenberg was one of the Jewish professors who was disturbed by these posts. He'd been a professor of medicine for 30 years.

He wanted his dean to do something about his colleagues' public statements, which he believed were very clearly hateful. He signed the letter demanding that the school take action. He said that he wanted an opportunity to make the case that those posts were not merely anti-zionist, but were in fact anti-Semitic.

What he found was that this argument would be impossible to make. Because according to UBC medical schools, diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, anti-Semitism did not exist. I went on the website and when I typed in the word Jew, it didn't exist and then I typed in the word Jewish.

None of those words came up. According to UBC, there's no problem. Jews are not different. And I met with the head of the diversity, equity, inclusion program within the faculty medicine,

“trying to implore her and the dean that you need to recognize that Jews are risk,”

anti-Semitism is real, and they refuse to acknowledge that anti-Semitism was an issue. If you Jews is white within this DEI framework, Jews are white and privileged. And we're so all Jews are, if there's ironest, they support settler colonialism and therefore they're the apex predator. You know, a presser within that ideology.

What are the practical implications for the omission of Jewishness, anti-Semitism, Jews not being a category? There was no way you could complain.

You know, you basically had to suck it up.

Like if you were to say, if someone came up to the students and said, you know, you're killing Palestinian. You're supporting murder. You're supporting genocide. If you don't recognize that there's such a thing called anti-Semitism.

“And even putting aside the anti-Semitism, we're talking swastik anti-Semitism.”

There's nothing in the DEI search engine at UBC. This has the word anti-Semitism, Jew Jewish. Doesn't exist. The dean would not recognize it. So if someone came along and said, you Jews killed Christ.

You know, classical anti-Semitism and go back to Poland or whatever. They would have just said, it's harassment. But not racial, ethnic, religious harassment. Just harassment isn't individual. That was their position.

Dr. Rosenberg resigned from UBC in protest. Eight months later, the Equity Committee of the Department of Medicine of the University of British Columbia added a note to their website, which said, anti-Semitism will not be tolerated. There have been responses to your resignation that this is not anti-Semitism,

that this is anti-Semitism. That these are people who are participating in legitimate and urgent political speech. And have nothing against you as a Jew or against Jews. And this isn't about you, this is about what's happening in the Middle East. So why don't we deal with that?

First of all, there's nothing wrong with criticizing the state of Israel.

Nothing. I criticize the state of Israel. I criticize the government of Israel. 75% is really population or marching against the government before the war broke out. So I have no problem with somebody leveling complaints about the state of Israel

or Israeli government policies. But what we're talking about is when people start to say that Israel is illegitimate. Israel is a country like the other 190 countries in the UN, whatever they are, the number that is existed for decades. Like other countries that are newer countries and if it only existed for decades.

So when you say that Israel is illegitimate and does not have the right to exist, then you're crossing into the territory of anti-Semitism. When you demonize the state in the most odious extreme terminology that is anti-Semitism. And when you use a double standard against Israel that you do not use, you hold them up to standard that you do not hold for any other country in the world.

So there's only one student anti apartheid week at every university in the West.

There's nothing against the treatment of the weekers in China or the Rohingya in Myanmar

or the treatment of Bahais in Iran or LGBT in no other country in the world. Is protested and demonized and said not to exist, including North Korea. When you have feel that way, the Israel has no right to exist. Well, almost 50% of the Jews in the world live in that country where they to go. Most of the rest of the Jews in the world support the state of Israel and would consider themselves

"science" and you're saying that they too are evil.

“So that's why I say if you hate Israel and you hate Zionism,”

you hate the majority of Jews around the world.

Dr. Rosenberg is now retired from academia and focused on his medical practice. Selena Robinson is done with politics. Laurie Allen is still unemployed as a teacher. I know just from talking to people over the past couple of years that since October 7th, 2023, other Jewish teachers and students have left the public school system.

More Jewish doctors have left public universities and hospitals. I know several Jews who have left newsrooms and I know Jews who have left their unions. But I don't know how many. As a journalist, I would rather be sharing data with you than anecdotes. But the data does not exist.

“None of the diversity statistics collected by those industries or institutions count Jews as a category.”

I've heard a number of Jewish people say that anti-Zionism is just a word that Jew haters use

to disguise their anti-Semitism. That anti-Zionists are people who have always hated Jews

and have just figured out a socially acceptable way to express that hatred. I know that it's true that there are some people who have always hated Jews and always will. But I have trouble believing that all of the millions of people around the world who have taken to the streets in support of Palestine are Jew haters. I know some of these people.

Some of them are Jews and the idea that they were all just hiding away their hatred towards Jews until October 7th it just doesn't seem credible. I want to know what they think is happening here.

“Do they even know about the kinds of stories that you've heard so far?”

Do they accept them? Do they accept that what is happening to Jews in North America is real? Do they see any connection between the kind of rhetoric found at their demonstrations and the impacts on their Jewish neighbors? And if so, does that matter to them? I'm going to stop talking about anti-Zionists and I'm going to start talking to them. People are dying by the tens of thousands, women, children, babies like this is not the time to walk on eggshells.

This is not the time to build bridges. I would be honored and proud if my daughter were to grow up to become part of the resistance. There are people out there that have made it their mission to expose what they call anti-Semitism and they do deliberately misrepresent what we say and what we're about. Everything I was taught about Israel as a child was exaggeration, distortion or a complete flat out line. So at this point, Israel have a right to exist?

I don't know. This series was made possible by the generous support of the Bissel family foundation, George Berger, Dan Dubo, Gideon Hayden, Daniel Klass, Norman Levine, Nanette Oken, Leslie Scanlin, Marjorie Skolnik, and Lee Zentner. Thanks to them and many others, we've finished making these episodes. But now they need to be heard by many more people.

We think that the stories and voices that you heard on this podcast have the power to make people reconsider their words and their actions. To think about how their neighbors are being harmed and to change the course that we are all currently on. We want what is happening here to reach an audience of younger listeners and not just Jewish ones. We want to take its message to platforms like TikTok and YouTube, where many people are otherwise being served a constant stream of divisive and hateful content about Jews.

Lastly, we want to take this series to universities and colleges across the country for town hall discussions about how to make campuses safe again for Jews. To do any of that, we need financial support. Those who donate to this project will receive a tax deductible donation receipt through our project partner, the Canadian Jewish News,

Contributing is easy.

“Just email me personally at [email protected].”

I spell my name, [email protected].

I will take you through it.

“What is happening here is a co-production of Canada land pod casts and the Canadian Jewish News.”

This episode was written and reported by me, jessie Brown.

Research and story editing by Kate Minsky.

“Original music by so-called sound design, mixing and mastering by Caleb Thompson.”

Editorial input from Michael Freeman.

We've put links to statistics and sources cited in today's episode in the show notes. Thank you to Stephen Marsh, Jonathan Rothman, Mark Musselman, and the entire team here at Canada land for their input and their support. The next episode of what is happening here will be available next week, wherever you get your podcasts. To become a Canada land supporter, go to Canadaland.com/join. Thank you for listening.