When Antisemitism Becomes ‘Political Discomfort’
In May 2025, the Canadian Jewish News published an op-ed I wrote in response to a letter signed by forty academics who invoked their Jewish identity to demand the resignation of then-Quebec Higher Education Minister Pascale Déry. The Quebec government had launched an investigation following confidential reports of antisemitism at Montreal’s Vanier and Dawson Colleges. The signatories of the letter dismissed the investigation as an unjustified witch hunt and an attack on academic freedom.
At the heart of their argument was the claim that Jewish students who reported feeling targeted were not experiencing actual antisemitism. Rather, they were – supposedly – experiencing political discomfort because confronted with uncomfortable truths: that the creation of the Jewish state was a crime and that Zionists are engaged in an ongoing genocide against the region’s legitimate inhabitants.
The distinction between genuine harm and mere political discomfort has become a central tenet of the ideological orthodoxy that now dominates many educational institutions, cultural organizations, and segments of the legacy media. It has also increasingly shaped the politics of the New Democratic Party of Canada, which once briefly attempted to reposition itself toward the political centre in anticipation of governing. The era of noble leaders of the party such as Jack Layton and Thomas Mulcair now appears increasingly distant.
The claim that Jews who support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state—fully 91 percent of Canadian Jews, according to a comprehensive 2024 survey—are experiencing political discomfort rather than genuine antisemitism is largely immune to good-faith debate because it is not fundamentally advanced in good faith. It begins by treating as settled fact allegations that originate within activist networks and NGOs whose assumptions mirror those of the very actors now citing them as authoritative evidence. This circularity—where ideological assertions acquire the status of institutional fact through repetition and mutual validation—is a familiar feature of political radicalism.
Indeed, this is precisely how antisemitism has often functioned throughout history. Libels are directed at Jews and repeated until they acquire the status of common knowledge. The accompanying moral certainty is so intense that many decent people choose silence rather than risk becoming targets themselves. As Walter Russell Mead observed in his insightful history of the forces shaping American-Israeli relations, “reason and evidence are not the wings on which prejudice storms the abyss.”
Perhaps the most effective response is to adopt the language of this argument and apply it elsewhere, exposing the assumptions on which it rests:
“It is important to probe the difference between the religious discomfort experienced by mainstream Jews when confronted with facts about their blasphemousness and genuine harm.
It is indeed discomfiting for unrepentant Jews to hear that they are collectively guilty of deicide; that they use the blood of Christian children to bake Passover matzah; that they participate in a conspiracy for global domination; or that they are descendants of apes and swine.”
And so on. You get the idea.
The absurdity of this situation is evident. The lesson is straightforward: when demonstrably false accusations against Jews are reclassified as mere truth-telling that Jews find uncomfortable, antisemitism has simply acquired a new vocabulary.
