Two Inward Turns: Canadian Jews Since Multiculturalism, Since October 8, and Since Trump’s Annexationist Threat
David S. Koffman
Credit: Canadian Press
David S. Koffman is the J. Richard Shiff Chair for the Study of Canadian Jewry, an associate professor in the Department of History at York University, and Editor-in-Chief of Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes.
Canadian Jewish life has changed—slowly over the course of my lifetime, dramatically since October 2023, and possibly most strangely, since Donald Trump’s second inauguration.
The 1980s and early 1990s in which I came of age were a kind of golden age for Canadian Jewry. Antisemitism was weak and rarely interrupted daily life. Jews had reached peak levels of social acceptance and visibility—on Bay Street (Toronto’s Wall Street), on Parliament Hill, and at the addresses of Canadian culture. The community boasted a nearly complete institutional landscape, modest intermarriage rates, and high levels of Jewish engagement.
That communal confidence shaped my understanding of what it meant to be both a Canadian Jew and a part of the Jewish people. My baseline sensibility toward the Canadian Jewish future was that we were unremarkably valued citizens, free to live Jewishly unmolested by exclusion by others or coercion from fellow Jews. Yet, curiously, during my undergraduate studies in Montreal, my time in the documentary film world in Toronto, at yeshiva in Jerusalem, and even throughout my graduate school years studying modern Jewish history in New York, I paid scant attention to my Canadianness, let alone my Canadian Jewishness. All that changed about fifteen years ago when I moved back to Toronto, rejoining the family, community, and city of my childhood, and pivoted my scholarly career to focus squarely on the Canadian Jewish experience.
Looking back from 2025, in the wake of so many dramatic changes in recent weeks, months, and years—the apparent collapse of the American project as we knew it; the disorder of the neoliberal global order; the radical gut punch of October 7, 2023 and its devastating aftermaths; and the rise of Trump’s mockingly menacing annexationist rhetoric, and tariff and border aggression—I see that sense of Canadian Jewish stability deeply unsettled, confused, and anxious. (Spoiler: I also see opportunity.)
During the Covid-19 pandemic, I edited a book whose decidedly non-academic, rhetorical opening gambit was: “Has there ever been a better home for the Jews than Canada?” The book project, launched for Canada’s sesquicentennial in 2017, invited 17 scholars to use this question as a point of departure. It was never meant to be answered directly. But the question floated the implication that perhaps, yes, Canada might just be the best place for Jews to live. It was designed to gain attention for Canadian Jewry—the world’s fourth-largest Jewish community (likely to become the third largest, overtaking France within a generation), and one that gets relatively little attention from the global Jewish world.
The book that resulted, No Better Home? Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging, was published in 2021. Had it been conceived after October 2023, it would have been distinctly different. My colleagues’ analyses are still brilliant, but something of the tone of the volume as a whole, its subtext or context, has shifted. It’s now an artifact of a previous historical moment, and the temperament of a Jewish identity forged in the Jewish 1980s which stamped the book has been brought into sharper relief.
Canada itself, of course, has changed over the last 40 or 50 years. We’re now far more ethnically and religiously diverse than we were in the 1970s and ’80s. Our national identity is far less culturally British, and our institutions are no longer quite as dominated by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male elites. We’ve moved beyond old preoccupations with constitutional wrangling and Quebec separatism (though there are now rumblings about Alberta separatism in the air). Where Canadians once saw themselves as a nation with two founding peoples—English Protestants and French Catholics, the “two solitudes”—we now consider our country the product of what the historian Peter Russell calls a story of “incomplete conquest.” Canada now sees itself as a country of four constituencies: Anglophones, Francophones, Indigenous peoples, and a growing, partly absorbed motley crew of ethno-cultural minorities who have retained a good deal of their cultural uniqueness, even as they have partly blended with the other three.
Canadian perceptions of Israel have been shifting too, since at least the Lebanon War of 1982. Starting in the 1970s and ’80s, Canada welcomed more immigrants from the global South, and new Canadian Arab lobbying efforts emerged. The Canadian pro-Palestinian movement grew steadily, gaining traction in academia, grassroots organizing, churches, and solidarity networks. These communities came to Canada later than most Jews had—often a generation or two afterward—and their pressure and potential votes helped solidify Canada’s foreign policy posture as an “honest broker,” one that was (and remains) explicitly supportive of Israel and at the same time, one that hoped to play a role in good-faith efforts at successful negotiations with the Palestinians. That stance once worked for progressive, liberal, and centrist Canadian Zionists who hoped for a two-state solution and thought that the values driving Canada’s domestic and foreign policy should be congruent. But the honest-broker position alarmed Canada’s right-of-center Jews, who were empowered in the same period by Orthodox growth and a large, secular population of Holocaust survivors’ children who saw honest brokerage as fickle equivocation, and therefore fundamentally dangerous to Jewish interests. (Roughly 40% of Canadian Jews identify as Orthodox. Canadian Jews are also disproportionately descended from survivors—about 18%, compared with just 3% or 4% in the US—and this has profoundly shaped our communal psychology.)
This shift in Canadians’ attitude toward Israel-Palestine is significant for Canadian Jews because Zionism was the earliest and stickiest glue uniting Jews across towns, cities, and provinces. Ironically, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jews from across the geography north of the 49th parallel were made into Canadian Jews by their shared commitment not to Canadian Confederation, but to the idea of a Jewish national home elsewhere. In contrast to American Jews at this time, Canadian Jews faced less of a “dual loyalty” problem because Canada, like Belgium or South Africa, was a binational state. Jews in Canada didn’t have to pledge allegiance to a single British ethno-culture in order to be good citizens (though many saw wisdom in doing so). While a survey report published in the Spring 2024 issue of the journal I edit, Canadian Jewish Studies / Études juives canadiennes, shows that most Canadians now report having positive attitudes toward Jews and Judaism, about half of them express negative views of Israel—a gap many Jews see as intrinsically antisemitic, but which non-Jews often insist is not. Disturbingly, these new data suggest that more Canadians openly attest to having explicitly antisemitic attitudes than the total number of Jews in the country. At the same time, Zionism is no longer the sturdiest glue binding together Canadian Jews, but has in fact become a litmus test for intra-Jewish division.
For decades, as networks of solidarity among Black, Indigenous, and other visible minority Canadians—including Arab and most Muslim Canadians—strengthened, Canadian Jewish communal resources increasingly moved away from what was once called “community relations” (and is now called “allyship”). Instead, we invested in vertical alliances: forging strong ties with police chiefs, university presidents, Members of Parliament and Members of Provincial Parliaments, and other officials. This made sense at the time: Jews were entering the highest echelons of power and elite institutions and had more access to these officials. But the focus on vertical alliances came at the expense of horizontal ones—with labor unions, teachers’ federations, municipal councils, churches, temples, mosques, and grassroots organizations. And so, we arrive at today’s condition: Canadian Jews are politically enfranchised but socially estranged; powerful in official circles, but uncertain of our neighbors.
There are additional major changes in Canadian Jewry that have taken place over the past generation and a half.
The first transformation is demographic. Today, a quarter of Jewish Canadians are themselves or are the children of newer Jewish immigrants. We’re about 10% Sephardi now, with significant numbers from Morocco, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, and elsewhere; 6.5% former Soviet, from about a dozen different countries (with Russia and Ukraine at the top); about 6% Israel-born; and a healthy smattering of Jews born in Central Europe, the US, Southern Africa, Latin America, and other regions. We are, in other words, much more of a community of diasporas than we were even two generations ago. This matters not simply because diversity has enriched our Jewish cultural ecology. It’s vital to understand that many of the parents of today’s young Jewish adults—perhaps 50,000 people in a population of around 400,000—came here to rebuild safe, secure, and strong lives after fleeing economic ruin, authoritarian rule, civil war, the collapse of Communism, intifadas, and other forms of violence. The legacy of these difficult pre-migration lives profoundly shapes this sizable portion of Canadian Jews today.
The second transformation is geographic. In the aftermath of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution and concurrent with Toronto’s rise as Canada’s economic powerhouse, the center of Canadian Jewish gravity shifted from Montreal to Toronto. Montreal Jewishness had operated for decades under a “third solitude” model, with Jews navigating the space between Quebecois secularists/French Catholics on one side and Anglo-Protestants on the other. The shift to the more polyglot and multicultural Toronto required Jews to navigate between WASP elites and a wider, more global diversity of non-WASP groups. (About half of Canada’s Jewish population lives in the Greater Toronto Area.) An additional demographic transformation has just appeared, as the rising cost of urban living has prompted signs of geographic disintegration. We are beginning to see a reversal of the 75- to 100-year-long trend toward Jewish population consolidation in just four or five cities.
The third transformation is religious. Over the past generation, the Orthodox segment of Canadian Jewry—ranging from Modern Orthodox to various Haredi subgroups—has seen notable growth, not just numerically, but politically, economically, and culturally. Orthodox Jews today are better organized, better funded, and more visible than they were 50 years ago. Their rise has also enriched and complicated the communal landscape, giving greater voice to ideologies and practices that were once peripheral to mainstream Canadian Jewish life.
The fourth transformation is institutional. The Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), founded in 1919 and long the central address for Canadian Jewish political life, collapsed in 2011 after nearly 75 years at the center of Canadian Jewish public life. Its demise was hastened by a combination of internal disputes, controversial governance changes, and financial retraction by the Federation system. Rising in its place was the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), technically independent but effectively an instrument of the Federations. Notably, CIJA's name dropped “Canada” altogether—a telling shift. This transition—from the Congress model to the CIJA model—signaled a profound change: from a community that organized itself from the grassroots up to a community focused on cultivating strategic, top-down relationships with political elites. There’s still no full scholarly accounting of this shift. But its effects are everywhere. Today, Canadian Jews have less internal governance infrastructure and capacity, and they have also lost a forum for internal debate and collective voice. A quiet debate has followed about how effective CJC’s replacement, CIJA, has been and could be in lobbying Canadian elites.
But the biggest change is not one internal to the Jewish experience. It’s an ideological transformation in Canada at large. Multiculturalism, once the ideological baseline of Canadian self-understanding, has quietly retreated. In its place have risen two key ideological and policy frameworks: Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) and Indigenous Reconciliation. (The two are sometimes referred to as one, “DEDI,” Decolonization + EDI.) These frameworks present new challenges for Canadian Jews—challenges far more complicated than multiculturalism ever did.
The Retreat of Multiculturalism and the Rise of EDI and Indigenous Reconciliation
In Canada, the framework of multiculturalism emerged out of the federal government’s response to Quebecers’ push to advance bi-culturalism, itself an outgrowth of Quebec’s protectionist efforts at having their distinct society properly recognized. Multiculturalism sought to turn the begrudged fact of diversity into an asset; a pluralism initiative born of progressive politics (and brought into being under the leadership of Pierre Eliot Trudeau, recent former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s father) and activism by organized communities. It's worth noting that when multiculturalism first took root in Canada in the 1970s, Canadian Jewish organizations were ambivalent about it. The Canadian Jewish Congress initially resisted, preferring to frame Jews as a religious minority, not an ethnic one, and aligning themselves alongside Protestants and Catholics, rather than with, say, Ukrainian or Italian immigrant communities.
Despite this initial reaction to multiculturalism among some Canadian Jews, most came on board quickly and thoroughly. Multiculturalism as ideology and practice became a cornerstone of both Jewish security and pride. Federal support funded Jewish newspapers, archives, museums, and university Jewish Studies programs. This worked for Canadian Jews because it prized cultural pluralism and suited Jews’ need to be both distinct and included. Canadian Jews also took some pride in contrasting Canada's “mosaic” model with the United States’ “melting pot”—believing, rightly or wrongly, that Canada's approach was both more humane, and better for Canadian Jews. During multiculturalism’s heyday, Canadian Jews achieved their greatest successes, enfranchisement, and acceptance, likely more robustly than at any other period of Canadian history.
But multiculturalism had its shortcomings. It helped many ethnic minorities become provisionally white just a generation earlier, but by the early 2000s, it was clear that it had not worked as well for other, newer Canadians. Though immigration had widened massively in the decade or so before multiculturalism, communities of East and South Asians, Caribbeans, and Africans, among others, didn't see as much of multiculturalism’s upside because they hadn't been around long enough to have built the community infrastructure that was needed to take full advantage of its downstream financial flows. In addition, multiculturalism’s tacit approach to racism was to hope that mutual respect would make racism disappear rather than dealing with it head-on, systematically, or through direct policy.
Newer Canadians pushed back; some articulated that their communities were actually hurt by multiculturalism since, in practice, some other communities benefitted while they saw fewer gains, thus creating an escalator for some but not all. These newer and less-white minorities wanted to tackle racism and inequality using the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the watershed constitutional transformation Canada had adopted in 1982, as their grounds, rather than the more touchy-feely heritage policies of multiculturalism. In addition, multiculturalism didn't address Indigenous issues.
Today, multiculturalism is largely dead in practice, if not in name. It has been superseded, and, in the minds of its strongest opponents, corrected by the emergence of EDI and Indigenous Reconciliation as the dominant ideological paradigms. Both frameworks center anti-racism and the experiences of historically marginalized and racialized groups—Black Canadians, Indigenous peoples, newer mostly racialized immigrant communities. These paradigms promote a pluralism focused on equity over equality, recognizing the fundamental role that addressing class and poverty needs to play in creating a more equitable society. Fairly or unfairly, proponents of EDI often do not see Jews as “equity-seeking,” since today’s Jewish community does not appear to face systemic barriers to equal access to opportunities in employment, education, or other social benefits.
Equity, not equality, is now the lodestar. The shift is from promoting cultural celebration to remedying systemic disparities, from individual rights to group-based remedies. In that reframing, Jews are often seen as relatively successful, privileged, white-adjacent—and thus outside the scope of EDI’s concern.
Some Jewish leaders have worked hard to integrate Jewish concerns into EDI frameworks, emphasizing that Jewishness is an “othered” category based on something other than “race”; that Jews have their own intramural and intersectional racial diversity (including Ashkenazi Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Black Jews, Latin American Jews, etc.); and/or that persistent antisemitism requires Jews be as cared for as other vulnerable groups are. Other Jews have recoiled from EDI altogether, seeing it as a movement indifferent or even hostile to Jewish concerns, particularly when it comes to Jewish identity attachments to Zionism and Israel.
October 7 and the subsequent war intensified these divides. For many Jews, EDI spaces that had previously been notionally open (though rarely welcoming) suddenly became sites of explicit exclusion. Jewish inclusion in progressive coalitions was revealed to be far more conditional than many had assumed; Jews had been welcomed as white allies, but not welcomed as significantly different or valued in their own right. This is not unlike what Jews in the United States also experienced in regard to DEI programs and in progressive spaces after October 7.
Indigenous Reconciliation, like EDI, challenged the multicultural paradigm that preceded it. However, as a paradigm for intergroup relations, this was a different sort of challenge. Indigenous Reconciliation sorted Canadians into two categories: Indigenous People, including 634 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples (who trace their origins to mixed and marginalized communities of French and First Nations ancestors from their territorial homelands); and Settlers, or peoples not indigenous to what is now Canada. (Some also advocated for a third category between Indigenous and Settler—“Guests”—which includes non-Indigenous people who understand their place in Canada as rooted in settler ancestry, but commit themselves to Indigenous allyship.)
While Indigenous resistance and resurgence has had as long and complex a history as the very real and very deleterious history of colonialism in Canada itself, Reconciliation only emerged as a paradigm for Canadian identity and a widely embraced civic care project for Canadians in the wake of the national Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its 2012 report, which included recommendations for transforming Canadian society to reverse many of the terrible effects of Canada’s colonial past. In contrast to the US where conversation by and about Native Americans is marginalized, Indigenous politics, culture, and inclusion defines the Canadian conversation about race and racism.
Since that time, most non-Haredi Canadian Jews engaged—some a lot, some a little, but always sincerely—with Reconciliation efforts, empathizing in a particularly Jewish way with Indigenous histories of dispossession and oppression. But tensions about the stakes of this engagement were already simmering among Jews even before October 2023. Some, particularly those Canadian Jews whose Jewish identity commitments were fundamentally anchored in Israel and its reputation in the world, presciently worried that Reconciliation’s language of “settler colonialism” could be turned against Zionism—and against Jews. Accepting the simplified moral mathematics of the Indigene-Settler binary made many Canadian Zionists uneasy because many non-Jews began deploying this same binary in conversations about Israel-Palestine at exactly the same time.
After October 2023, those fears exploded into the open. The slogan “decolonization is not a metaphor”—already prominent in some activist circles—became yoked to calls for the eradication of Israel. In the more than a year and a half since then, Canadian Jews have found themselves caught in a terrible spot: supporting Indigenous reconciliation within Canada while confronting the weaponization of decolonization rhetoric against their fellow Jews at home and abroad.
Has Everything Changed?
It’s tempting to say October 7 changed everything, and in some ways, it did. The feelings of insecurity, the wondering whether our vertical alliances with political elites will truly protect us, the feelings of abandonment and the questioning of whether our horizontal neighbors actually like us—these all feel shockingly new, especially for Canadian Jews born after World War II. Antisemitic incidents have skyrocketed at staggering rates.
But as a historian, I find myself wary. We know that traumas can feel transformative in the moment, only to see over time that much of the basic structure of life remains as it was. Maurice Blanchot, the French Jewish literary theorist, captured this paradox when he wrote about the Holocaust—a trauma far greater—in his book The Writing of the Disaster: “the disaster changes everything, meanwhile leaving everything intact.”
From my perspective, it’s still too soon to say whether October 7 and its aftermath have fundamentally reordered Jewish life in Canada, despite the very real emergence of a new form of hatred, bigotry, and exclusion that suddenly appears everywhere and seems, at least to most Canadian Jews, to be socially acceptable. Canadian Jews are traumatized, rocked by a tidal wave of fear, anger, and grief. But trauma is not the same thing as structural change. In terms of legislation, policy, socio-economic standing, and much of our embeddedness within Canadian society, most of what was true on October 6, 2023, remains true today in July 2025. While it’s much harder to be an out-and-proud Jew in certain sectors of Canadian society today (humanities departments at universities, social work settings, literary and artistic circles, etc.), Jews are still getting mortgages and jobs; accepted to university; freely associating in public and communal spaces; experiencing fair treatment in courts, elections, and business, as well as on playing fields; and otherwise living their lives.
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What has shifted—and profoundly so—is the social psychology of Canadian Jews. Our assumptions about safety, trust, acceptance, and solidarity have been punctured. Our optimism, though always cautious given the many descendants of Holocaust survivors in our communities and leadership, has given way to new anxieties. The negative consequences of this affective turn are more obvious than the positive ones, but there are some. Synagogue attendance is up. More Jewish parents are enrolling their children in day schools. Job applications at Jewish organizations are rising. Jewish identity content on social media is booming—even if much of it is polarizing and rancorous, it still signals an intensification of internal engagement. Jews care about their communities, their identities, their stories and their destinies more now than they did in the summer of 2023.
My own professional and emotional/psychological posture has shifted too. Like many Jewish Studies professors I know, I have taken on an additional job—a more deliberate, public-facing, and strategic articulation of Jewish history and experience in Canada, and a significant load of steering on a good path my own university’s senior administration, colleagues in various offices, and off-campus parties keenly interested in what happens on campus as we confront antisemitism and anti-Zionism. (I have purposely chosen to focus on de-escalation strategies and paths to deepening learning.) The core of my work as a historian has continued unabated, but layered atop it now is a felt sense of the need for two types of advocacy: the need to have strong relationships with my non-Jewish colleagues and seniors inside my small institutional world, and the need to make our Canadian Jewish story better known, better understood, more resilient, and more connected with both non-Jewish Canadians and non-Canadian Jews outside in the open.
Of course, some Jews have turned away, withdrawn from community life, feeling overwhelmed or abandoned by it. Some have distanced themselves from Israel, finding the binds of identity too fraught or too exposed in the current climate. This is particularly true in liberal Canada, given the wide acceptance of the DEDI ethos. Most Canadian Jews find themselves trapped in the cultural crossfire of left-right political wars in which Jewish safety often seems like a secondary or instrumental concern.
Canadian Jews in the Wake of Trump
The truism of Canadians being different only by virtue of being North Americans who are not American has some profound depth to it. This is because what an American is has changed (and is changing), and Canadians will continue to distinguish themselves from their close neighbors all the more intensely if and when they believe those neighbors to be threats, imperfect allies, bad neighbors, or even enemies. Freud's “narcissism of small differences” (something Jews know all about!) wasn't meant as dismissive, but deeply truthful.
It's easy to imagine that Canadian Jews will become ever more Canadian alongside their non-Jewish Canadian counterparts, as American Jews will simultaneously have less choice but to live with and conform to American pressures and norms. Jewish history teaches this repeatedly, in good times and rotten ones: so long as we're not identified as internal enemies of the state—pariah neighbors—we Jews will mostly have commonality with the non-Jewish neighborly nationals whose politics (and economic standing) we share.
The recent surge of Canadian civic pride in response to Trump’s tariff blitzes and annexationist threats—the terrifying talk of forcing Canada to become the “51st state”—has also awakened something potent in the national psyche: a rare, unifying clarity that Canada has its own wholly unique needs and challenges. In a matter of weeks this past spring, Canadians rediscovered the value of sovereignty, moderation, and cooperative ethos. As Trump’s rhetoric shakes the foundations of American-Canadian relations, Canadians across the political spectrum are rediscovering a collective sense of purpose: a pride in our sovereignty, a renewed investment in the idea that we are not, and will not be, merely a northern appendage of American disorder.
Canada ran a serious, sober, and fundamentally uneventful electoral process that focused on policy and platform in just 36 days this past March and April. Canadians were deeply engaged in campaign debates, and nearly 70% of the citizenry showed up to vote, the largest turnout rate since 1993. Nobody talked about election fraud; the possibility of refuting certifications, rejecting voters or making it hard for some to get to the ballot boxes; serious bias in reporting; or any of the other shenanigans that have made American elections so scary and anxious to behold from this side of the border. The old markers of Canadian identity—pluralism, civility, and a preference for cooperation over confrontation, particularly in the face of a unifying new national threat—have gained new urgency. The election experience seems to have consolidated Canadians’ commitments to good governance.
Indeed, the recent Canadian federal election was extraordinary and instructive. While Canadians usually split their votes unevenly between five parties who then sometimes need to form formal coalitions in order to govern, voters this spring narrowed the spectrum of issues and interests for the sake of national unity in the face of crisis. Voters who would have typically voted for the New Democratic, Green, or Bloc Quebecois Parties “loaned” their votes to one of the two largest parties, the Liberal and Conservative Parties. The winner, now-Prime Minister Mark Carney of the Liberal Party, is the most centrist leader the party could have possibly chosen, so much so that he could easily have chosen and been chosen to lead the Conservative Party with virtually identical rhetoric and policy goals. In the US, the idea that a major party could call itself the “Progressive Conservative” Party sounds oxymoronic. In Canada, it was the party name of the conservatives who captured approximately 40% of the popular vote from 1942-2003, and governed the country for 17 of those years.
The border/sovereignty drama has also brought an unexpected opportunity for Canadian Jews. Reawakened Canadian nationalism, it seems to me, has created a wider civic space in which Jewish Canadians can reinvest in the national project, not defensively but assertively—affirming that our historical contributions to Canadian pluralism, justice, and culture are essential parts of the country’s fabric, and that antisemitism is as un-Canadian as any other form of group animus, no more, no less. The same civic instincts that served Canadian Jews well under multiculturalism—a faith in institutions, a willingness to work across difference, a belief in law and compromise—are now assets in a national moment that prizes unity against external threats. If Canadian Jewry can align its particular communal needs with this broader surge of civic pride, it can not only shore up its security, but also help shape Canada’s next chapter. It may also be an unexpected call for Canadian Jews to know themselves better as Canadian Jews.
A Vision for (Centrist) Canadian Jewish Revivalism
Despite all of the turbulence, despite the fragmentation and fears, I believe Canadian Jewry holds a profound strength we have yet to fully tap: our deep, longstanding but rarely articulated, almost unconscious commitment to centrism.
Centrism—a politics of moderation, pragmatism, and nuance—has been the defining posture of Canadian Jewish life for generations. It reflects our geographic sprawl, our experience as a minority among minorities, our comfort with compromise, and our historical consciousness of vulnerability. It’s also deeply Canadian: a product of the cold, the wide spaces, the shared reliance on public goods, and the culture of “peace, order, and good government” that we rarely trumpet but intuitively hold dear and value as the cornerstone of our diverse communities’ security.
Centrism here is not about indecision or blandness, as Yair Zivan, Yair Lapid’s diplomatic advisor and author of The Center Must Hold, has so compellingly captured in his description of the centrism that he wants Israelis to champion. It’s a strategic, values-driven orientation: a recognition that minority communities survive and thrive not by retreating into isolation, nor by warring over ideological orthodoxies, but instead by carefully and deliberately cultivating a shared civic space.
This centrist impulse has structured Canadian Jewish life in ways large and small. It animated the old Canadian Jewish Congress, which invested tremendous energy in building broad consensuses around hate speech laws, anti-discrimination policies, and support for pluralistic democracy. The centrist impulse continues today, even if it is less visible, in the way our communities organize themselves around education, philanthropy, and cultural production.
There are challenges to Canadian Jewish centrism, of course. While Canadian Jews are hardly unified, they are not radically polarized. Polarization—as a cultural process with political outcomes—is certainly a danger, and Jews are not immune to its most deleterious effects (see: Jews in Israel and in the US). Remember that the words “liberal” and “conservative” are adjectives. For two centuries, these adjectives modified or characterized people’s attitudes toward capital-L Liberalism. Those who wanted the liberal order and liberal values to expand were “liberal” because they wanted Liberalism to be applied liberally (i.e., generously) in policy. Those who wanted to preserve the core elements of Liberalism and worried that if it expanded too quickly it would lose its core values were “conservative” because they preferred to conserve Liberalism’s most essential elements. But centrism is straight up the middle of Liberalism. It is, inherently, the least divisive and the most inclusive form of non-illiberalism.
As enervating and agitating as the last few years have been for Canadian Jews—strict Covid-19 lockdowns, a post-October 2023 reality, Trump-reactionism—I see opportunity for greater Canadian Jewish self-possession. We need to study ourselves more deeply: our peculiar histories, internal diversities, governance protocols, national and regional specificities, and communal allocations strategies. We need more and better data on what we believe, how we’re changing, and where we stand vis-à-vis our neighbors. We need bespoke Canadian Jewish curricula in our day schools and public schools. Our rabbis need to forge ties with religious leaders in their cities and neighborhoods to do better with our municipal politics. We need a state-of-the-art Canadian Jewish Museum with public-facing educational programming. We need national and local initiatives that cultivate pride in who we are, not just in terms of our ongoing and deep commitments to our religious lives, the Holocaust, and Israel, but intimately tied to our Canadianness: pride in Canadian Jewish cultural production, political activism, intellectual achievements, and social contributions.
I’ve been thrilled to see investments in new Jewish leadership development in Canada for leaders who understand both Jewish particularity and Canadian pluralism—leaders who can navigate the complexities of Reconciliation and EDI, who can forge alliances without abandoning Jewish specificity, who can counter antisemitism without succumbing to bitterness or siege mentalities. The vertical alliances we’ve effectively maintained remain vitally important, but we’d be wise to build horizontal alliances anew; to reinvest in municipal politics, to show up for and engage with non-Jewish cultural and social organizations, and to forge ties with other religious and ethnic communities. We need to be the good neighbors to others that we want them to be for us, despite our (sometimes unwarranted) anxiety that we’re not wanted. We must also ensure that our Canadian turn inward helps guide our Jewish turn inward. The extent to which we see our Jewish values and vulnerabilities in terms relatable to other Canadians will speak to the community we’d like see thrive here in the decades to come.
We’d be wise to reclaim Canadian pride—not in a jingoistic way, but in a way that asserts that Canadian values of pluralism, democracy, and mutual responsibility are good for geese and gander, and that Jews have helped make those values better. As Canadians we might insist on building a polity that honors both individual rights and collective responsibilities, both minority protections and civic unity. We’d be wise, in other words, to leverage our inherited strengths—our pragmatism, our flexibility, our cautious optimism—and turn them into active strategies for renewal.
If we succeed in creating a Canadian Jewish future rooted in knowledge, pride, solidarity, pragmatism, and hope, we will not only strengthen Canadian Jewry in the process of strengthening the Canada we want. We will offer a model to the wider world of how a small, diverse, vulnerable but venerable community can thrive in a time of dislocation, distrust, and change. Indeed, this vision, should something like it take hold, might also serve as a beacon for other Jewries worldwide—communities that might turn both inward to find pride and outward to find common cause with a simple, caring, and sober centrist political and social culture; fed up with polarization, weaponization, and the prioritization of anything other than we who want to get on with living good lives.
