The Shanda of an Anti-Jewish ‘Rabbi’

Throughout Jewish history, there have always been Jews who sided with the enemies of their own people.

In the Middle Ages, some Jews converted and collaborated with the Church to persecute Jews, for example, Nicholas Donin and Pablo Christiani.

In the Soviet Union, Jewish communists – often spearheaded by the Yevsektsiya – eagerly helped dismantle Jewish religious and communal life in the name of ideological purity.

During the darkest years of European antisemitism, there were always a few Jews willing to provide cover for those who hated Jews, the convenient “good Jew” who reassured the mob that its hatred was justified.

Jewish history has a word for such people: shanda. A disgrace.

Canada has its own modern example: David Mivasair.

The media routinely describes Mivasair as a “rabbi,” though he has become less a spiritual leader than a full-time anti-Israel activist whose public statements repeatedly cross the line from criticism of Israeli policy into outright hostility toward the Jewish community itself.

Again and again, Mivasair has chosen to side not merely against Israel, but against Jews under attack.

On June 5, 2026, following the attempted arson at Montreal Reform Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom, Mivasair tweeted that this attack against a Jewish house of worship was “not “antisemitism, that it was “opposition to Israel’s ongoing genocide.”

On March 3, 2026, after shots were fired at a Toronto synagogue during the war against Iran, Mivasair did not express solidarity with frightened Canadian Jews. He did not condemn the attack unequivocally. Instead, he suggested Jews themselves may have staged it.

“No one has any idea who did this,” he wrote on X. “Considering the history of false flag staged attacks on Jewish institutions, don’t jump to conclusions.”

Imagine the moral rot required to respond to gunfire at a synagogue by accusing Jews of manufacturing antisemitism.

And this was not an isolated incident.

On August 21, 2024, more than 100 Jewish institutions across Canada received bomb threats. Once again, instead of standing with the targeted community, Mivasair publicly insinuated that Jews themselves may have been responsible.

The pattern is unmistakable: when Jews are attacked, Mivasair’s instinct is not empathy, but suspicion directed at Jews.

Needless to say, there is no indication that any of the people arrested by police in relation with these crimes was Jewish.

Even more grotesque was his response to the murder of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC in May 2025. Rather than unequivocally condemn the killings, Mivasair rationalized them, writing that they were “murdered because they worked in the embassy of a country committing livestreamed genocide.”

That is not peace activism. It is moral depravity.

Civilized people understand that political grievances do not justify murdering diplomats. One need not support every action of the Israeli government to recognize that excusing assassination is abhorrent. Yet Mivasair could not bring himself to say so.

Nor does he merely oppose Israeli policies. He openly calls for the elimination of the Jewish state itself.

“I call for the elimination of Israel,” he declared in May 2024.

Not reform. Not compromise. Elimination.

And still, some insist this has nothing to do with antisemitism.

Mivasair’s hostility is not confined to Israel. He has openly expressed contempt for the organized Jewish community itself. “The Jewish community doesn’t exist,” he wrote in August 2024. “The fearful, genocidal establishment kicked us out long ago and denies our legitimacy.”

This is a familiar phenomenon: the self-appointed excommunicator who denounces virtually every mainstream Jewish institution as morally corrupt while portraying himself as the authentic voice of Jewish ethics.

But Canadian Jews have every right to reject that claim.

Most Jews, in Canada, Israel, and around the world, believe the Jewish people have the same right as every other people to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. Ninety-four percent of Canadian Jews support the existence of the State of Israel.

Most Jews do not believe synagogues deserve gunfire. Most Jews do not explain away bomb threats targeting Jewish schools and community centres. Most Jews do not rationalize the murder of diplomats.

David Mivasair does.

Perhaps most chilling of all are Mivasair’s statements following October 7. In an interview on Let the Quran Speak, he claimed Israel had no right to defend itself because it is a “settler colonial state.” He cast doubt on reports of Hamas sexual violence, saying he did not believe a single woman was raped by Hamas terrorists. He even suggested Israeli hostages were treated well in captivity.

These statements are obscene.

The atrocities of October 7 are documented in horrifying detail: murdered families, burned children, mass torture, sexual violence, kidnappings. To deny or minimize these crimes is to participate in their erasure.

One does not need to support every Israeli military action to understand this. Basic human decency should suffice.

But Mivasair’s role is not to persuade. His role is to provide absolution for those who wish to hate Israel, and increasingly, Jews themselves, while pointing to a rabbi and saying: “See? Even he agrees.”

That is why extremists celebrate him.

And that is why the overwhelming majority of Canadian Jews reject him.

There is a long Jewish tradition of moral argument, dissent, and criticism. Israel itself is proof of that; no democracy argues with itself more intensely. But there is a difference between criticism and collaboration with those who demonize, terrorize, or target Jews.

David Mivasair crossed that line long ago.

He is not courageous. He is not prophetic. And he certainly does not speak for the Jewish community.

He is a shanda.