The Canary Has Learned to Breathe the Air

Whenever my relatives from Montreal visit me in Brooklyn, the conversation turns to the same question: how can I bear to live in New York? They know that more than half of the hate crimes recorded in the city last year targeted Jews, who make up about a tenth of its population, and they look at my life with the alarm of people who have noticed something I seem to have missed. I know that look. It is the one I wear every time I visit them.

I was born in Montreal, and much of my family is still there. When I go home, I find a Jewish community living with conditions none of us would once have accepted, and a family that barely registers them. Each of us sees the other’s danger clearly. Neither of us sees our own. I have been thinking about that blindness all week, as France counted the damage from its worst riots in years.

The riots, which began as protests over the cost of living, were not aimed at Jews. But French Jews were not surprised by them. They have sent their children to school past armed police and soldiers since 2015, and since 2016 the number of antisemitic acts recorded in France has nearly quadrupled. For a decade, the state managed that violence rather than ending it, and a country that learns to live with disorder aimed at one community should not be shocked when disorder becomes general. As a French Jewish journalist put it this week, “What happens first to the Jew, happens afterward to the entire country.”

Jews have long been told that we are the canary in the coal mine. The metaphor assumes the canary reacts, that the bird falters when the air turns bad and that someone is watching when it does. But what happens when the canary learns to breathe the air?

Scientists have a name for that kind of adjustment. In 1995, the fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly described “shifting baseline syndrome”: each generation accepts the depleted ocean it inherits as normal and measures decline only from there. Diaspora Jewish life now runs on a shifting baseline of its own. We measure each new indignity against last year rather than against the life we once took for granted, so every year looks only slightly worse than the one before.

Congregation Beth Tikvah, in suburban Montreal, has been firebombed twice, in November 2023 and again in December 2024. Both attacks came after October 7, 2023, as did the bullet holes found at two Montreal Jewish schools and the Molotov cocktail thrown at a Westmount synagogue this June. By mid-July this year, Canada had recorded nearly three times as many violent antisemitic incidents as in all of 2025. Each attack brought its round of condemnations, and each was absorbed. When I raise them, I hear the same answer in Montreal that I hear in New York: it will pass.

A friend recently sent me a message I have not stopped thinking about. Her daughter had left for two weeks of hospital work in Toronto. A few days later, my friend walked into her daughter’s room and found the Star of David she never takes off lying on the dresser. Her daughter had removed it before leaving and said nothing. Before the trip, she had asked her mother one question: did she look Jewish? So far, the rotation has gone well. Nothing has happened to her. That is precisely the point. No one forced her to take it off. No one had to.

Try a simple test. Describe to the person you were ten years ago the life you lead today: the guard at the synagogue door, the security briefing before a community event, the quiet calculation over whether your son should wear his kippah on the subway. Your earlier self would have answered immediately: never, and if it ever comes to that, I will leave. Most of us now live that life. Few of us can name the moment we crossed the line.

My family knows how this story can end. My father salim Argalgi A’H was born a Jew in Beirut in 1938. My mother’s family comes from Egypt, and my husband’s from Syria. Together, those countries were once home to well over 100,000 Jews. Today their Jewish communities could fit in a single room. The end came through war, expulsion, confiscation and, in Syria, decades in which Jews were forbidden to leave. But it was preceded by years in which each new restriction seemed survivable and each adjustment seemed sensible. My families did not teach me to run. They taught me to notice, because noticing keeps every other choice open. Some French Jews are making their choice now: aliyah from France this year is running more than 30 percent ahead of last year’s pace.

Here in America, we have learned to praise ourselves for resilience: the synagogue that reopens after an attack, the parade that marches on behind barricades, the students who keep showing up. That courage is real. But resilience is also the name we give a canary that has learned to breathe bad air. A community can become so good at absorbing blows that it forgets it was ever supposed to stop them.

So fix your baseline before it moves again. Write it down in specifics: what you wear, where you pray, what you say out loud at work. When one of those lines is crossed, refuse to call it temporary, and refuse to call your adjustment resilience. Demand that police and prosecutors treat an attack on a Jewish institution as an attack on public order, not as a communal problem to be managed with one more guard. And when family in Paris or Montreal says they are worried about you, listen. Distance may be giving them the clarity that familiarity has taken from you.