Reading the Annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents as a Jewish student
Why everyone should take the time to read the Annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents and take seriously what it is telling us.
As it happens, the day B’nai Brith’s Annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents for 2021 was released, I was walking to the grocery store in my IDF t-shirt. It was one of the very few truly warm days we have had this spring in northern Ontario, and as I walked down the street a woman coming towards me looked intently at my t-shirt before shooting me a wary look. I live in a small, remote community where I am one of fewer than 10 Jews (to the best of my knowledge). My immediate assumption was that her reaction to my shirt had more to do with it having a lot of writing in a strange alphabet on it, than it did with it being in support of the IDF. While I take some pride in the way I know that shirt has the power to make people uncomfortable, reactions like that - close scrutiny, double-takes - when I clearly identify myself as a Jewish person and a person supportive of Israel, despite all my self-proclaimed fortitude, make my spidey senses tingle.
This year, for the sixth time in a row, the B’nai Brith recorded more Antisemitic incidents than ever before - 2,799. For comparison, this is a 7.2% increase from 2020, which was, in turn, an 18% increase from 2019. This number, as shocking and unsettling as it is, is also likely an underrepresentation of Antisemitism in Canada because it only includes incidents that were reported to B’nai Brith with accompanying evidence. They have not attempted to estimate or account for all of the encounters with Antisemitism that are not reported to them or for which no form of documentary, video, or audio evidence exists. While the majority of these incidents can be classified as in-person or online harassment, that is not the only way Antisemitism is growing in our society. Since May, there has been an uptick in the number of anti-Israel demonstrations in Canada and the United States, almost all of which incorporate some type of Antisemitic threat to the existence of Jews at home and/or the Jewish state. B’nai Brith reported that the number of violent incidents of Antisemitism increased from nine in 2020 to 75 in 2021. Jews compose merely 1.25% of the population of Canada, but in 2020, we accounted for 61% of hate crimes against religious minorities reported to police. This is at the same time as other religious minorities celebrated a decline in hate crimes against them.
Combating hate and religious intolerance is everyone’s problem. But for the sixth year in a row, we are being reminded that the Jewish community is on the receiving end of this hate a disproportionate percentage of the time.
This is the last time I am reading the Annual Audit as a student (at least for the foreseeable future), and as I prepare to write my final exam tomorrow, marking the end of my journey as a law student, I have been thinking a lot about whether I am leaving my school better than I found it. My campus is far better than many in Ontario. They are yet to successfully ratify a BDS resolution thanks to some active donors, and no one has attempted to ban kosher food on campus like the Students Union at the University of Toronto voted to do. But to be very clear - things have gotten worse, particularly since the start of the pandemic.
Reading the Annual Audit, none of what was reported came as a shock to me, and not only because this is an issue I am deeply concerned with and follow intimately. The staggering increase in Antisemitism is something that Jewish students on Canadian campuses are living daily. It is the force that prompts us to look up our professors, both their scholarship and Twitter activity before enrolling in their classes to first determine whether they believe we are White Supremacist colonialists at best; members of an international cabal at worst. It is the reason we hesitate before adding our peers on social media because we need to first ask ourselves if we are willing to risk losing another friend the next time there is a flare-up of violence in Israel. And it is why we are no longer shocked when concerns around Antisemitism are dismissed by our professors, peers, and university administration as a minor issue.
But what B’nai Brith was unable to capture in their Annual Audit is that being a Jewish student on campus today is being a tree falling in a forest when no one is there to hear it. Actually, it’s being a tree, falling in a forest, where everyone there to hear it has turned their backs and put their fingers in their ears.
For six years in a row, credible, important organizations like B’nai Birth in Canada and the Anti-Defamation League in the United States have been pointing a flashing red arrow at the rise of Antisemitism, and while steps are being taken at higher levels of government to do things like adopting the IHRA working definition of Antisemitism, very little if any of this is trickling down to campuses. This is because, on campus, Antisemitism is yet to overcome the barrier of being regarded as a strictly Jewish problem, something anyone with even a modest knowledge of history should be able to tell you is not the case.
In September, university students across Canada will return to in-person learning, some, like those at my law school, for the first time since the start of the pandemic. For Jewish students, this will mean returning to an environment that is dramatically more hostile towards them than the one they may have abandoned for virtual classes two years ago. It remains unpredictable whether the perceived distance of the internet that emboldened so many to target Jews - blaming us for the pandemic, accusing us of being oppressors, or wielding space lasers - will permeate into face-to-face interactions.
I am not leaving my campus better than I found it. It breaks my heart to admit that, but despite every effort we have made to the contrary, it has been one step forward and two steps back. Perhaps this is merely symptomatic of the larger world around us, but the truth remains the same.
As universities prepare to welcome students back to campus - and for all of the ways that campus has changed since the pre-pandemic days for so many reasons - it would behoove them to read the B’nai Brith’s Annual Audit of Antisemitism. Not only should they take the time to read the report, but also to finally and at long last engage in serious, action-oriented conversations with Jewish students about what can be done to address the rising tide of Antisemitism on campus. It is time to face the numbers, and take seriously the concerns raised by Jewish students when they say that the actions of their professors and peers are endangering their safety in the classroom and on campus.