Over the last year, I chaired the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver’s Antisemitism Task Force. Over that period, we heard and reviewed truly distressing accounts of violence and intimidation targeting the Jews of British Columbia. Visibly Jewish students were surrounded by mobs and screamed at through megaphones. A student had their artwork, a capstone project for graduation, destroyed and defaced with “pro-Palestinian” graffiti. Parents were told by other parents they should not raise concerns about antisemitism endured by their children in school if they did not first condemn Israel’s actions in Gaza. We heard repeatedly about Jewish experiences of social exclusion, justification of anti-Jewish violence, betrayal by trusted institutions, colleagues, and friends, and the erasure of Jewish experience and identity.

These stories were not isolated; they reflected a pattern stretching across the school system, universities, health care, labour unions, arts institutions, and the public service. What we heard was not only interpersonal hostility, but systemic and institutional failure: complaint processes that went nowhere, policies that erased Jewish identity, equity offices with little cultural competency or understanding of historical antisemitism nor the artifice of “antizionism” through which it is so often deployed and a persistent refusal to engage in learning about it, and leadership bodies unwilling to act. It is trite to say antisemitism today thrives not only in overt hate but in bureaucratic indifference and discriminatory application of EDI frameworks.

In nearly every institution, a clear pattern emerged whereby a comparatively tiny minority of antizionist Jews were platformed to falsely suggest they were representative of a Jewish consensus. It appeared clear that the intended effect of this strategy was to marginalize Jewish accounts of antisemitism and to skew Jewish perspectives, while simultaneously projecting an illusion of consultation.

Having obsessively promoted a worldview that all evil runs through a “Zionist” molten core, and that “Zionism” is what stands between humanity and all that is good, the antisemite washes their hands of the burning synagogues and Jewish daycare centers in their neighborhood with a simple liturgical refrain: I only hate Zionists, not Jews. The notion that one may bifurcate these two forms of Jew, as delineated by the non-Jew, is of course one of the oldest stories on earth. Across all these spaces, we saw institutions reproduce this old message: Jewish identity is acceptable only in the forms that fit our desired view of it.

The Old Bargain That Never Protects

To understand today’s crisis of Jewish identity, we must recall the origins of the modern “devil’s bargain” that began with Napoleon, the French Revolution, and the Enlightenment’s promise of universal rights. In theory, the 1789 revolution promised equality. But for Jews, freedom came at a........

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