"Immediately terminate Pitt's chapter of Hillel" https://t.co/vaJebATe71

This weekend I went to my daughter’s dance recital at the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre in downtown Toronto. It’s a building I know reasonably well, from fitness classes and such over the years—but I hadn’t been inside since Oct. 7.

Previous visits, I can’t remember thinking much about the fact that this is a JCC, or what used to be called the Young Men’s Hebrew Association. In my hometown of New York, it’s commonplace for general-interest community centres to be Jewish—most famously the 92nd Street Y—and the intricacies of what that all means, what defines the space and such, are simply not on my radar, at least not until the recent culture wars arrived. But it seems normal and unconcerning to me that non-Jews would also avail themselves of a nice swimming pool or whatever, regardless of the founding principles, or where the funding comes from.

This time around, I had, as the millennials once said, all the feels. Maybe not feels so much as a hyper-awareness of what it meant that this was a Jewish space. I wasn’t surprised to see more security than in the past, but suddenly everything struck me as a whole thing. There’s an Israeli flag displayed. There are hostage photos up. There’s a long message up about how things are tense and you shouldn’t… I think it was one of those don’t abuse our staff and visitors signs, like one now sees in coffee shops and libraries and such, unrelated to anything specific to Jews........

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