The Tikvah Podcast

About 120,000 Jews live in Toronto, a city of about three million residents. Eight out of every ten hate crimes in this city involve what local officials call an “anti-Jewish occurrence.” Then there is Montreal, with its 90,000 Jews and its total population of about 1.8 million. There, in the three months following October 7, 132 hate crimes were directed at Jews, which is ten times the number of total reported hate crimes as during the entire year of 2022. In fact, there has been, across Canada, a 670-percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents since October 7. This is in a nation of about 40 million, of which just 350,000 are Jewish. These data come from a blockbuster article by Terry Glavin, published last week. In Canada, hardly a week goes by, it seems, where synagogues are not vandalized, burned, or shot at. Moreover, the conventions that predominate elite institutions, government, media, and NGOs all hold as an orthodoxy that Israel is a unique evil, guilty of every modern sin. How did liberal, polite C