I sent this piece to the Hamilton Spectator as an Opinion article. They did not publish it.
What’s driving antisemitism in schools?
HARRY SHANNON
Gustavo Rymberg, CEO of the Hamilton Jewish Federation, is right to call out the antisemitic incidents directed at Jewish children in our provincial schools (A call to action on antisemitism in our schools, July 18). All students deserve a safe environment for learning.
Rymberg claims school boards are failing to prevent these incidents and demands that they do more. Yet he did not provide any ideas for what to do. For that, you need to understand why Jewish students are experiencing these events.
Some insight is apparent in the recent report that Rymberg cited which described a survey of Jewish parents. They were asked to describe events reported by their children from October 7, 2023, to early 2025 that they considered antisemitic. Some 60% of cases explicitly referred to Israel. They were most frequent in November 2023. The remaining 40% include such issues as Holocaust denial. Though Rymberg didn’t mention it, they should be addressed in the strengthened mandatory Holocaust teaching in schools announced by the provincial government in November 2023.
What about the 60% of events that refer to Israel? After nearly two years, it is easy to forget that immediately after the horrendous Hamas attack there was a huge worldwide wave of sympathy and support for Israel. But, following the Dahiya doctrine, Israel launched a grossly disproportionate assault on Gaza killing thousands of civilians in a few weeks. Israel went from victim to villain in short order. The peak of reported antisemitic incidents in schools lines up with that.
Of course, just as the babies and children in Gaza who are being killed or starved or are suffering amputations bear no responsibility for Hamas’ actions, so too the Jewish students in Ontario are not to blame for what Israel is doing.
But imagine being a gentile student in an Ontario school taking the class on the Holocaust. You are taught how utterly dreadful it was. You also cannot avoid the news about Gaza, with thousands of Palestinian children being killed or maimed by descendants of Holocaust victims. You see that establishment Jewish organizations don’t criticize what Israel is doing. They even defend the country, condemning people who speak out as antisemites.
What message does this send to our children? Can we really be surprised that, when our students see the children of Gaza punished for what the adults of their community have done, they think it is OK to do the same? Can we really be surprised that, when our students see Israel dropping 2000-pound bombs in civilian areas with little if any pushback from our leaders, they think that picking on the vulnerable is OK?
Of course it’s not OK. But teaching children about the Holocaust won’t deal with it.
I don’t claim to have the answer. Sadly, these incidents may well continue until the situation in the Middle East improves. As Holocaust survivor Ichak Kalderon Adizes recently asked rhetorically in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz: “Is the rising hatred of us worldwide merely rooted in prejudice, or is it a natural human reaction to the images flooding our screens – images that totally unravel the heart?”