People are asking me about coming home a lot, and my daughter and I are talking about and weighing our options every day, as the war here deepens and bigger players around the world begin to circle with threats and gunships. As our house currently has tenants in it, we have had offers from incredibly kind and generous people for places to stay if we do come home. There are not too many good reasons for us to want to stay here, but there are very compelling reasons for us to not want to go home. This post represents my feelings about one of the latter.
This is a hard post to write. But I’ve been trying to be honest about what I’ve been feeling and experiencing the past 2+ weeks, and what I’m expressing here in this post is something that has been a constant. Though I have teased around its edges here and there, I have not yet had the courage to fully confess it.
While I’m sure that it’s quite common for professors on sabbatical to wish they never had to go back to work when it was over (I wouldn’t know how common – this is my first ever sabbatical in 25 years of full-time teaching), as my sabbatical started this past summer I had a few fleeting thoughts about how difficult it would be to come home afterwards and get back into the grind. I really really love teaching, don’t get me wrong. I’m passionate about exposing students to ideas from across space and time and watching them connect with the common humanity of people who wrote stories 3000 years ago, seeing them find empathy and kinship with very different cultural mores and religious ideologies than they’ve ever been exposed to. So it’s not the teaching. And it’s not the academic politics, though those can be difficult, even soul-crushing. Being a professor – at least for me – has always been a full-on full-time job. I know it’s not the same for everyone, but I have always had a hard time finding work-life balance. I spend a lot of time preparing lectures, even when I’m lecturing on the same topics every year; I want to keep them fresh for myself so that they’re fresh for the students. I spend a lot of time answering student emails, sending my own emails to the class to keep everyone on track, making extra office hour appointments. Reading and re-reading essays to make sure that I am giving feedback that will be helpful. And I take on a lot of whatever needs doing in my department. So not being able to stop myself from doing my job full-on is a problem for me, but I think that would be the same for any career path I had followed.
So definitely the work-life balance thing is a reason to not ever want to go back after a sabbatical. On sabbatical – even in a war-zone – the only thing I need to focus on (other than my safety and that of my daughter at the moment) is whatever project I want to work on (I have several on the go, theoretically). And the travel plans around the region here were so much fun to make – all the places I was going to go this year, to make up for so many years of never being able to go anywhere. But another reason, and one I have shared with my son and daughter as they have expressed similar sentiments to me, is that being in a university in Canada can feel like being in some of the worst parts of Canadian culture if you’re a Jew. From what I’m reading in the media, it's not much different for the vast majority of my Jewish colleagues around the world, but at least when I was teaching in the US I was affiliated with Jewish Studies programs every time, so I knew that with my colleagues (whether I personally liked them or not), I was in a safe space. Not that we all agreed on everything – that would be very weird for a group of Jews. Some of my colleagues were not Zionists, some were, and others were as close to indifferent as one could get. But there was a feeling that we all shared a history, a sense of identity, and we could actually talk with each other about antisemitic posters or public lectures or course descriptions, and even do something about them together because there was strength in numbers, there was some weight to being part of a Jewish Studies program. And there was no fear of expressing what we thought about Israel, about the Jewish community, or about anything relating to our identities.
But (at least where I am) in Canada, that is not the case. My colleagues for the most part are not Jewish, though they hold nothing against Jews (as far as I know) and most have treated me well, as a friend and respected peer; I even feel deep kinship and connection with several, who have been writing to me regularly here with messages of love and support. But, as is the case in most universities across the world, the vast majority of faculty members are politically left-leaning, and while I am no exception there, I have definitely felt an underlying status quo antisemitism, certainly in the union rhetoric, but also in the normalizing of concepts like “settler-colonialism” – which is a big part of white guilt in Canada and especially in the academy -- and “apartheid” in casual discussions about Israel. I’ve heard unreflective and ignorant equations between the situation in Israel & Palestine, and the treatment of the indigenous peoples in Canada by the European settlers hundreds of years ago. I’ve seen colleagues’ names on well-meaning but ill-informed petitions about Israel & Palestine. I’ve looked through the resources they use to teach about politics in the region and seen the lack of balance, history, and non-Palestinian voices. I've heard from students about the casual use of "Zionist" as a synonym for "racist" by professors in their classrooms. And there is an unspoken pressure when faculty pause for informal chats in the hallway about any current event that of course whatever the Left would say about it, was what we were all supposed to say. Because I knew that any one of those conversations could easily turn to the subject of Israel and be very uncomfortable for me, talking about politics always makes me tense. When people asked me if I was going to travel for my sabbatical and I would say yes, I’m going to spend most of the year in Israel, I would hastily follow it up with talk about the many archaeological sites and museums here that I would be visiting for my current research projects. That seemed to stave off any assumptions that I was secretly a racist; at least that was my hope.
And teaching about the ancient world from which the Bible emerged, there is also a tension with students. When I first started teaching, especially in the US, it was fairly standard for students to ask me what my religious affiliations were, and it was clear from the way they would ask that they were trying to gauge how seriously to take my expertise on the Bible. I would always tell them that any affiliations I may or may not have, had nothing to do with the subject matter, which was history, so the question wasn’t appropriate. Although the question bothered me at the time, in hindsight I have to admire the sense of discernment with respect to sources of information that underlay their question, even if it was only to be able to say to themselves “oh, she’s Jewish – that’s why she is telling us that the original interpretation of Isaiah 7 has nothing to do with a prediction of Jesus.” And more recently in Canada while teaching about ancient Israel, I have to very carefully set out the historical appropriateness of when it is correct to use "Palestine" as a designation for the region, even as they continue to write "Palestine" when they should write "Canaan," and "Israelis" when they should refer to "Israelites" in their essays about the Bible.
And then there’s just the general wariness that comes with being Other in Canadian society, and the concern on campus of being outed as a Jew and therefore aligned with the evil apartheid regime of ethnic-cleansers who hate Muslims. If I’m walking and talking with a friend or one of my children on university grounds and one of us wants to mention something related to Israel or Judaism, we automatically lower our voices, or even talk in code. We never planned that, it’s just something we all do naturally. We don’t want anyone to hear us and target us as apartheid-loving settler colonialists.
If you're a member of a university in Canada, there is an assumption on the part of all insiders that everyone on campus is concerned with anti-colonialism, human rights, the plight of Palestinians, the suffering of Indigenous people and other minorities in Canada and around the world -- as though these were all related and relatable issues. For my part, a crucial aspect of teaching in the Humanities is the inculcation of empathy for the Other, and I make this a centerpiece of every course that I teach. The problem isn’t the ideology of the Left here; it’s the assumption that being complicit in this ideology is to accept that Jews are white settler-colonialists who have the money and power on the one hand, and the will and desire on the other, to trounce the rights of the “indigenous” peoples whose land they “stole.” If you don’t accept that, or worse, if you try to fight these assumptions (or if you just identify too overtly as a Jew), you’re not a true social justice warrior. You’re part of Them, and by default a racist colonizer.
I know that I share this awareness of being Other by many other minorities on campus, some of whom are more visible than I (including my children, who are racially ambiguous and definitely identify with visible minorities) and therefore more vulnerable. But I also know that universities over the past 10 years have made enormous leaps in terms of rectifying this for BIPOC students, for LGBTQ+ students, and for disabled students. EDI efforts, critical race studies, and other HR resources have blanketed the university from every possible angle, from renaming buildings to implementing mandatory training for staff and faculty, to creating safe community spaces for particular groups, to introducing new academic programs and courses. But none of these efforts include Jews in their definition of minorities. No one willing to stand up and denounce Islamophobia or systemic discrimination against BIPOC students or the continued oppression of Indigenous communities is equally willing to use that soap box to decry the undeniable cold war against Jews that is endemic in the Ivory Tower.
To be categorized as part of the white majority feels like a sick joke to someone who grew up on stories of the Holocaust and who spent years studying modern intellectual history and the casual racializing of Jews as inferior Other that was part and parcel of it. Especially because I have never once felt like part of the white majority. I’m well aware of my privilege, both in terms of how I grew up and in terms of the colour of my skin. I never felt disadvantaged in any real way, and I know that’s a lot more than most Others can say. But I never, ever felt part of the majority. I never felt like every other white Canadian in a university setting. I always felt different, Other.
But I think what bothers me most is the assumption of moral high ground on the part of people who know little to nothing about the Middle East or the history of Israel, but presume to know everything they need in order to pass judgment and be ready to act on it. They never ask me what I think, or why. They never ask for an alternate perspective, or an in-depth discussion. Maybe it’s because they just don’t care – it’s not their field, they’re not interested. And if that’s the case then great, I don’t really care if they care or not. But the silent judgment and self-righteous indignation that accompanies every reference to Israel, as if they know; as though the strength of their convictions are all they need to condemn Israel and to suspect any Jew of being a racist collaborator – that’s what I feel around me at work. And that’s what I’m seeing in the statements of university administrations, of faculty associations, and of the unions; all of whom are supposed to represent me in some way, none of whom do, and none of whom care to.
I carry a consciousness of this with me every day that I’m on campus, every moment. I know many students who do as well. We are all aware of courses and professors that need to be avoided so that we are not made uncomfortable in their presence, or for the students, forced to swallow and regurgitate information that they know is questionable, full of omissions, and unfairly biased. It doesn’t matter if we support Israel or not, no matter how hard the anti-Zionist Left will claim that it does; they can explain all day that anti-Zionism is political, not based in religious or cultural ignorance and hate speech. But the idea that it might be political ignorance and hate speech that starts and begins with the distrust and suspicion of Jews that is part of the cultural landscape in the west wouldn’t even occur to them. They know the politics, they know Israel is a colonial enterprise, they know that Israelis oppress Palestinians, and they know they are on the right political side of moral judgment.
Posters on campus that refer to the Zionist enemy or ethnic cleansing are part of the landscape that I walk through every day. For months last spring, a public panel about why a particular building should be renamed because it was a blight on the university to have a building named after a philanthropist who was known to also donate to Israel (a philanthropist, I might add, who was a Holocaust survivor) was advertised on a poster right outside the bathroom that I use every day when I’m on my way from my office to my classroom. The event was co-sponsored by Students for Justice in Palestine and Ontario Public Interest Research Group, and had photos of the panelists, colleagues of mine from several departments as well as a student I recognized as having dropped one of my classes about a month into the semester. The advertised discussion was set to open with an explanation of why this named donor, “who played a direct role in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians,” should not have his name on the building of the department that he founded. It said “As faculty and students concerned with colonialism and peoples’ sovereignty and human rights, we find the [named] relics on campus offensive and harmful to the Palestinian community and they must be renamed.” I found the poster and its erroneous and inflammatory rhetoric offensive and harmful to myself and the Jewish community on campus. But organizing a panel on that would be an open invitation to hate-mail, vitriol, and security threats that I didn't want or need to have to deal with, especially knowing that any complaints to the university administration would result in being told that campuses are places for free speech. Just like the university accepts the presentations of hatred and vilification of Israel and Zionism in everything from public lectures to Israeli Apartheid Week -- and wouldn't dream of allowing the hatred and vilification of any other group on university grounds to be incited in any way (could you imagine allowing white supremacist groups to spend a week each year distributing pamphlets in the university center and explaining how white people are systemically disadvantaged in society in the name of free speech? or for a better analogy, brochures illuminating the way in which Christians are systematically persecuted in central African countries and encouraging political incitement against Nigerians in Canada?) -- such panels and discussions were par for the course. I comforted myself that though I couldn’t just pull the poster down and throw it away, I would only need to see it until the end of the term, and then I would be away from all of that for a full year.
And this was the status quo before the current war.
So many of my non-academic friends and family members have expressed shock and horror at the responses by universities and by faculty associations. While it is one thing for students to be misinformed and swept up in the general furor of standing up for “the oppressed” however construed, in their minds it was quite another for the “responsible adults” who were supposed to know better, to be trained in discerning fact from fiction and tasked with inculcating some sense of civic ethics and morality in society. I had to confess that I wasn’t at all surprised and yet still profoundly disappointed and disgusted. The ways in which so many colleagues still cling to simple “oppressed vs oppressor” narratives defies explanation. It’s not that I think everyone with a PhD should be able to think, to know better, to weigh evidence and offer sophisticated arguments. It’s more the blindness, the wilful ignorance, the not taking a moment to stop and think about repeating and enforcing the same antisemitic tropes that have persisted for millennia, and the double standard when it comes to holding Israel accountable compared to any other country in the world.
I was teaching in San Diego when the Twin Towers fell on September 11, 2001. In the aftermath, I would hear colleagues on the radio or TV talking about the political and socio-economic forces at play, the dynamics of poverty and helplessness that attracted young men with nothing to lose with promises of rewards in heaven and cash payments to their surviving family members as we all collectively tried to wrap our heads around what had happened, and how such deep hatred could exist in today's world. Academic talking heads spent countless hours dissecting the ideas around radical Islam that would enable and empower the justification of slaughtering thousands of American civilians. Articles and books would take an historical perspective and blame American imperialism for fomenting the conditions in which such hatred could take root and thrive. But they always, without fail, managed to draw a line between understanding how terrorism could be triggered and its motivational forces understood, and justifying the massacre of people going about their days on their own sovereign soil. No one got up on CNN and said that the Americans deserved it. No one cheered on the Palestinians in the West Bank in their celebrations of the death of Americans with parades and the handing out of sweets. No one sang “Glory to the martyrs” on university campuses.
In disgust and disbelief, images of Arabs partying in the aftermath of the 9/11 slaughter were universally and unequivocally condemned. And the violent backlash against Muslims in North America as a result was terrible. Non-Muslims, who knew little to nothing about Islam, didn’t understand that the actions of al-Qaeda needed to be separated from what Islam was all about. Muslim leaders spoke up and quickly condemned the slaughter, taking great pains to emphasize their love for America and to differentiate themselves religiously, culturally, and moralistically from terror-mongers. Journalists and educators followed suit – myself included. I spent a great deal of time in my World Religions class that year and subsequently to introduce Islam and present it differently from the ways in which students had come to understand it, namely in the imagery of airplanes crashing into office buildings while onlookers in the Middle East cheered. I explained the history of Muslim encounters with the West. I talked about all of the great Muslim advancements in medicine, science, philosophy, and mathematics that contributed to the modern world, and the tragedy of imperialist colonialism that turned many Muslim groups toward fundamentalism in the 18th and 19th centuries. I showed them how, like Christianity and like Judaism, Islam can be interpreted in a variety of ways that are influenced by culture and history, giving rise to a myriad of sects and denominations that understand their basic tenets differently. I talked about how no religion today is a monolith that can be reduced to quick facts about culture, beliefs, rituals, or politics.
I am proud of the small contributions that I make toward educating students about Islam, in all of its beauty and diversity, whenever I have the opportunity. But it strikes me now for the first time to stop and wonder; how many non-Jewish (or even Jewish) faculty in universities across the western world do the same for us? No Jewish group has called for the deaths of non-Jews across the world; no one in the name of Judaism has blown themselves up in civilian populations, or attacked non-Jewish people in God’s name or planned and executed the mass murder of thousands in downtown Manhattan. And yet, Israel – and all Jews around the world by extension, no matter how much non- or anti-Zionist Jews might like to think differently – is always blamed for any violence in this region. During 2021, hate crimes against Jews increased across the world, as anti-vax rhetoric mixed with familiar antisemitic tropes to blame the pandemic on the Jews in the same way that the Black Death was blamed on the Jews throughout the Middle Ages. And now 1400 Jews are massacred on a Saturday morning in their homes and cities on their own land, and the Jews are blamed for it. Should we be surprised, when even just in the last 3 years we have seen Kanye West, Elon Musk, and anti-vaxxers all blame the Jews – to widespread support – for the problems of wealthy male celebrities as well as the pandemic-stricken world as a whole?
There are approximately 335,200 Jews in Canada, at 1.4% of the total population. There are 1,775,715 Muslims in Canada, at 4.9% of the total population. And yet hate crimes against Jews are consistently the highest numbers among all religion-related hate crimes in Canada; Jews are the second-most targeted group overall year after year, behind Blacks, who account for 4.3% of Canada’s population.
As the war threatens to worsen, as Iranian-backed groups around the Middle East amp up their rhetoric and China and Russia circle the wagons, people in the western world continue to celebrate the “resistance fighters” who taught Israel a lesson. They continue to amplify the hate-filled conspiracy rhetoric of terrorist groups calling for the death of Jews everywhere. And all those western citizens – journalists, pundits, politicians, and university professors alike, all those who know that they are on the right side of historical morality, who know that the Palestinians Hamas claims to represent are really freedom fighters struggling against the perennial oppressors, continue to campaign against Israel in favor of a terrorist regime that regularly executes homosexuals, honor-kills women, and tyrannizes their population. These same people will cry out and rally against Islamophobia, Transphobia, against those who would oppose same-sex marriage, abortion rights, and misogyny. And then they’ll cheer on the planned torture and massacre of 1400 Jewish people in their homes on a Saturday morning, and even justify it, before turning around and lamenting the destruction of Gaza City –- from whence rockets are still being fired on civilian populations in Israel as I write this -– and the displacement and suffering of the Palestinian civilian population. There is not a second’s reflection in blaming Israel for this, even while their own political officials defend Israel’s right to defend itself from ongoing and continuous attacks by rooting out the Hamas army that insists on hiding within these civilian populations; an army that for 15 years has oppressed the population of Gaza over which it has had exclusive rule. But it’s Israel’s fault. It was Israel's fault when Egypt ruled Gaza; it was Israel's fault when Israel ruled Gaza; and it's Israel's fault while Hamas rules Gaza.
And such blame of course is only "political" -– it’s not the Jews who are to blame, it’s Israel. And yet, when this same movement of “resistance fighters” calls for the death of Jews around the world, how many pundits are calling for sensitive discernment? How many university professors are carefully explaining that “Jews” are not a monolith, that not all Jews are Zionists? (And even so, when they call for the death of Jews, do you think the killers are going to pause and ask the Jew if she supports Israel or not, before plunging the dagger into her?) Or more to the point, that opposing Zionism means opposing the idea that Jews should be able to live in their ancestral homeland? That Hamas’ chant of “from the river to the sea” is an explicit and overt call for the genocide of Jews, and not one confined to the particular geographical area of Israel when the chant is accompanied by calls for “rage” and violence against Jews around the world?
No matter how you feel about the modern state of Israel as a political entity, it should be clear to everyone that anti-Zionism -- denying the Jewish people a right to govern themselves in their ancestral homeland after 2000 years of displacement -- is an insipid, virulent form of the same antisemitic disease that has infected the west for as long as it has been the west. Disguising it as politics has only made it more acceptable, and therefore more dangerous. It means that while we can dismiss anti-vax conspiracy theories with expressions of shock and revulsion that anyone in this day and age could still blame the Jews so ignorantly, at the same time we can both turn a blind eye to the persecution (rape, torture, forced incarceration, work camps, arbitrary massacres, etc.) of Muslims in Myanmar or China going on RIGHT NOW and instead focus our attention and our outcry on Israel's bombing of Gaza in the aftermath of the worst mass slaughter of Jews in 90 years.
As much as I didn’t want to go back to work before October 7, I dread even being back in Canada now. The media is consistently hostile, one-sided, and myopic. The government took longer than any other political entity in the free world to decide that Israel probably wasn't responsible for blasting a hospital in Gaza (not that anyone on the international stage seems to be in the least bit concerned what Canada has to say). It is certainly not a government that I feel represents me or my interests. And with the bands of marching SJP-supporting students waving flags in support of what Hamas did at my place of work as they chant calls for my death, I am concerned for my safety, and that of my daughter, when we do return to campus. If not for our physical safety, certainly for the safety of our mental health. As dangerous as it may be for us to remain here, we are not ready to come home to all of that. We feel safer here, where we know who our friends are, and those who hate us do so openly.