Canadian Jewish professors reported a “sharp erosion of both physical and emotional safety across campuses,” according to an article published this month in the Canadian Journal of Higher Education.
Lilach Marom and Leor Elizur, of Simon Fraser University, and Cary Kogan, of the University of Ottawa, drew on data from 120 Jewish professors in the country, 51 of whom were willing to sit for interviews.
“Only 40% of participants reported feeling ‘somewhat’ or ‘very’ physically safe on campus” after Oct. 7, the scholars write. “Furthermore, 79.2% indicated that they had changed their behavior, such as avoiding certain areas of campus, compared to 35% before Oct. 7.”
There was an even more pronounced decline in emotional safety, per the paper.
“Only 14.2% reported feeling ‘somewhat’ or ‘very’ emotionally safe on campus, and 87.5% said they had experienced distress on campus post-Oct. 7,” the scholars wrote, “up from 40.8% before Oct. 7.”
In 2025, Jews, who make up 1% of Canadians, were targets of 16.7% of all hate crimes and 70.7% of religion-based hate crimes, according to official Canadian data.
‘Unsafe work environment’
The professors who are part of the study aren’t named. One told the researchers that “we had an event on campus where we had a string of graffiti with the upside-down red triangle,” a Hamas symbol, “plastered and a sniper rifle painted on our windows, saying ‘you’re the target.’”
“I declared an unsafe work environment,” that scholar said. “I stayed off campus for two months.”
Another professor said that “during the encampment and even afterwards,” he “saw several instances of the upside-down red triangle symbol of Hamas.”
“I see it not as advocacy for Palestinian human rights but as a process of fear and intimidation towards the Jewish community,” that professor said.
Another professor said that “our building was encircled and blocked so people couldn’t get in” due to that professor’s course, which involved a partnership with an Israeli institution.
“Courses were disrupted, moved online or canceled,” the professor said. “The building manager asked if I wanted a security escort when I left the building.”
Another professor said that “one of my students messaged me saying ‘help me,’” after other students surrounded a small table, “with Jewish things,” where the student was sitting. The others “were just screaming,” the professor said.
“I went to my student, and I hugged her, and she was crying, and a guy with a keffiyeh was running around talking about baby murderers and baby killers, and he yelled at us to go back to Poland,” the professor said.
“Such incidents signal the stigmatization of Jewish collective grief following Oct. 7, which was not seen as worthy of recognition,” the study authors write in the paper.
“Faculty were implicitly treated as guilty by association with Israel, a stance not applied to other diasporic groups connected to states with violent or extremist politics,” they wrote.
One professor, who has “a very Israeli name,” worried about an antisemitic “week of rage” that was coming up.
“What is that going to be like? Can I be on campus? Do I have to worry?” the professor said. “I teach in front of 150 students,” the professor added. “It makes me very nervous.”
Professors who were part of the study said they were less aware of antisemitism training at their schools than about training related to other kinds of hate.
“Overall, most participants described a profound sense of institutional abandonment following Oct. 7,” the authors wrote. “Only 19.2% of participants reported feeling ‘somewhat’ or ‘very’ included in their university overall, and just 23.3% reported feeling ‘somewhat’ or ‘very’ included by leadership.”
‘Nobody said anything’
A professor in the study said that the professor’s campus isn’t a place where Jews would feel comfortable expressing their Jewish identity publicly, and another said that “there’s this assumption that, even though I’m Jewish, I would be anti-Zionist because I’m in the social sciences and humanities.” The latter avoids making “public statements that would disabuse them of that notion to stay under the radar.”
“People were radio silent. Nobody said anything. I felt like nobody cares or gives a damn,” a professor said. “Everybody knows I’m Jewish. Everybody knows that I have family in Israel, and nobody reached out to me, not one single person.”
“There was very little support,” another said. “The odd person, after lots of time, squeaked out, ‘How’s your family?’ But by and large, no one wants to talk about it.”
One professor said that though colleagues were aware that the professor is Jewish, “not
a single colleague acknowledged Oct. 7.”
“I feel like everybody that I’ve advocated for, and worked for, and spoken on behalf of has turned around and stabbed me in the back,” one professor said.
“The thing that struck me the most as antisemitic was the fact that” this academic network “was accepting only Jews who were anti-Zionists, and even if I’m not calling myself a Zionist, I don’t accept that anti-Zionists are the only Jews that they are going to accept,” a professor said. “That, for me, was the moment of reckoning.”
The authors wrote that professors “described feeling unwelcome in campus spaces, encountering unresponsive institutional policies and experiencing indifference, silencing and hostility from colleagues.”
“Oct. 7 presented a moment of awakening, a collapse of the academic cultural membership that many Jewish academics believed they were part of,” they wrote.
The authors think that their findings “underscore the importance of programming on Jewish identity and antisemitism that is credible, nuanced and attentive to the diversity within Jewish communities and identities.”
“Importantly, such spaces must be ones in which Jewish faculty, staff and students feel invited to participate, even when ideas are contested,” they wrote. “Universities play a foundational role in knowledge production. When they fail to lead this work, the vacuum is filled by social media discourses that reproduce misinformation and polarization.”
