Students need a personal Iron Dome to deflect the hatred that may come their way

The following is a transcript of a recent speech given by National Post columnist Barbara Kay at an event hosted by the Canadian Antisemitism Education Foundation.

My rhetorical writing standards and style were formed in the 1950s and ’60s, which was a time and place like no other for Jewish self-expression in the diaspora.

Israel was cool, Jewish comedians were cool and overt antisemitism was very uncool. Jews didn’t need safe spaces on campus, because the entire campus was a safe space for everyone. Jews were finally insiders here — and our children even more so. We could speak our minds in untrammeled freedom.

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As it turned out, that golden age of confidence-building was the foundation I needed to continue speaking my mind when “perfect freedom” shrank to what it is today: a narrow channel to be negotiated between sharp rocks and hard places.

To be a Jewish writer rather than a writer who happens to be a Jew, it means, foremost, that you take big ideas very seriously. Our history has taught us that big ideas all too often reveal themselves as conduits for big lies about us. We have been tolerated because of ideas, hated because of ideas and decimated because of ideas.

(We’re still awaiting the big idea that will make us lovable.)

After thousands of years of arguing amongst ourselves — and sometimes pretty aggressively — about whether this or that big idea is good or bad for the Jews, making a case against harmful ideas has become second nature to us. We’ve had our work cut out for us since the pogrom explaining why social Marxism is as bad for the Jews as Soviet Marxism turned out to be.

In 1920, there were 50 independent countries. Today, there are nearly 200. A driving force behind this wave of country-creation was the big idea of self-determination — the concept that groups of people united by ethnicity, language, geography and history should be able to determine their political future. The missions of, first, the League of Nations, and then its successor, the United Nations, were very much tied up in the promotion of national self-determination. Only Israel amongst these numerous new countries — in spite of Zionism ticking every box stipulated for the right to self-determination — has been singled out as illegitimate.

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