The Moment I Realized Jews Are Guests in Canada

A childhood of multicultural harmony gave way to silence, betrayal, and the harsh truth of conditional belonging.

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This is a guest essay by Leigh Hartzman, who moved from Canada to Israel 24 years ago and writes the newsletter, “Becoming Israeli.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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I recently found a photo of my grade-three class in Toronto. We were a perfect snapshot of the 1980s Canadian dream: a multicultural group that truly believed we were building something new.

As a predominantly Jewish suburb, the class was mostly Jewish, with a healthy mix of Chinese, Indian, African-Caribbean, Japanese, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Anglo-White kids, plus two French Canadian teachers. One kids’ father was an Anglican Priest. I remember him picking up his son from the bus stop wearing his priest collar.

These kids learned about Jewish holidays through us. Our Jewish mothers would visit the class during Chanukah, and we fried latkes for everyone. I also remember our Jewish parents insisting that we stop saying the Lord’s Prayer immediately after the national anthem every morning. As a little Jewish girl, I had recited it unknowingly on a daily basis: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come…”

The prayer was removed and no one complained or tried to stop the change. Instead, we all just bowed our heads for a moment of silence that each of us could use however we chose.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Canada was deep in a social experiment. Following the Multiculturalism Act of 1988, the government leaned heavily into the “Mosaic” model. Unlike the American “Melting Pot,” we were told that you didn’t have to give up your culture to be Canadian. You could be Italian-Canadian, Chinese-Canadian, or Jewish-Canadian. We were raised on the beer commercials that told us it didn’t matter where you were from or how you cut your hair; it was what’s inside that counts.

We all believed it at the time. When my Bat Mitzvah came around, my non-Jewish friends were there. In the mandatory two-hour-long VHS video of the affair, you can see them wishing me a “Mazel Tov” into the camera. Even the priest’s son brought me a gift of 36 dollars because his parents learned it was “double chai.”

I used to believe the spirit of what now-deceased American politician Harvey Milk once said: “How can people change their minds about us if they don’t know who we are?” Milk was famously referring to the visibility of the homosexual community, and he was also a Jew, so I’d like to think that he took that optimism from other parts of his identity. He believed that visibility and knowing one another were the cures for prejudice.

But after October 7th, that theory collapsed for me.

Living in Israel, in my naivety, I thought my Canadian childhood friends would be concerned and reach out. I thought they would remember their Jewish friends and have compassion for the shock and pain we were all facing in that moment. I thought they would remember the girls and boys they watched read from the Torah in our synagogues.

Instead, there was silence for a couple of weeks, and then the priest’s son, who I am connected to on Facebook, finally spoke out. He wrote about how Israel is “breaking international law in Gaza.” That we are not abiding by the rules of engagement. He then naively said that he is certain that Hamas can be eradicated without widespread violence and added condescendingly: “We should hold Israel to this standard, every single one of us.”

Again, this past July, the priest’s son praised the Canadian prime minister for stepping up with other global leaders and recognizing a Palestinian state to clean up this “deplorable mess.” His words hit harder than any other anti-Israel post I’ve come across. Why? Because he knew us. It was a betrayal of everything we had shared in that grade three classroom. I felt deceived. I felt lied to.

It just unraveled from there. My Jewish friends in Toronto told me how they were losing friends who “sided with the Palestinians,” as if anyone was forced to take just one side. My relatives were afraid to go downtown because of all the anti-Israel protests. The hate just kept escalating, reaching a peak on the two-year anniversary of October 7th, when a Toronto high school played the Canadian national anthem over the public address system in Arabic “in solidarity.” It was a far cry from my tolerant elementary school days.

For a long time, I wondered how we went from frying latkes together, to this. How did our 1980s mosaic of cultural embracement collapse?

Maybe because the “mosaic” was weak. We celebrated food, dance, and festivals, assuming that sharing a snack would build a deep moral foundation. In reality, we were just living parallel lives. We were polite and tolerated one another, but we didn’t learn to respect each other’s differences and shared humanity.

As the years passed, the “mosaic” became a vacuum. In 2015, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau famously told The New York Times that there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada, and that Canada is the world’s “first post-national state” with no “core identity” or “mainstream.”

Accordingly, different cultural groups began to move further apart. Instead of becoming “Canadian,” new communities were encouraged to maintain their original geopolitical loyalties entirely, leading to a kind of segregated diversity. Their “old-world” conflicts weren’t checked at the border; they were imported and re-enacted on the streets of Toronto and Montreal because there was no overarching “Canadian-ness” to supersede them.

It’s ironic how so many people who have been chanting to “globalize the intifada” for the past two years suddenly got teary-eyed over the Bondi Beach massacre less than three weeks ago. The day after, the priest’s son posted a photo of a menorah on Facebook with this message: “As candles are kindled, may their light bring us all strength and comfort as we face the fallout of the heartbreaking tragedy in Sydney. Chanukah is a festival of resilience, a reminder that even in times of darkness, hope endures, and light prevails.”

There was a jarring confidence in his description. Reading it, I could see the young boy from my grade-three class again: the one who sat quietly while our mothers taught him the mechanics of the miracle. He used the word “us” to claim a stake in the heartbreak, wrapping himself in the warmth of our symbols. This was the version of him I expected from the beginning.

But I see the hollow centre of it now. He is only comfortable claiming “us” when we are victims. He offers his compassion only when we are killed mercilessly in a country that failed to protect us. To him, the Jewish light is beautiful as long as it is a memorial candle. When that same light is used to defend Israel’s borders or fight a war for survival, “resilience” turns into “international law violations.”

An Australian imam recently warned that the “exact same ingredients” for the violence seen in Sydney are present in Canadian cities today. Security experts are now pointing to Canada as the next place a major terror attack will happen.

I wonder if the Chanukah message from the priest’s son’s was motivated by an internal knowing. I wonder if he has finally realized that the evil he spent the last two years defending is finally getting closer to his own front door. The fear we have been living with is now his to carry, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t secretly wish for him to experience the weight of it.

Canada is currently facing its own reckoning, and I watch from a distance with a heavy heart for the community I left behind. But I also watch with a kind of relief: the knowledge that my safety is no longer a political favour to be granted by the Parliament of Canada, the Toronto mayor, or the local police. I cannot think of a reality more frightening than that — to be a guest in your own city, waiting for the optics to be acceptable before someone decides you are worth protecting.

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