This past Oct. 7, I stood on my university campus trying to hold a memorial for the victims of the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel two years ago, including Canadians who had been killed. What should have been a moment of remembrance quickly turned into something else.
Hundreds of masked protesters showed up, shouting over us, harassing attendees and promoting denialist claims, including that Hamas treated hostages well, that no civilians were killed or that the attacks were justified resistance.
None of this was meaningfully addressed as antisemitism. Instead, my peers and I were accused online of Islamophobia for acknowledging the attack and condemning terrorism.
That moment was not an anomaly; it reflected a much larger and pervasive problem.
Since Oct. 7, antisemitic incidents have surged globally, including synagogue attacks and threats across North America. Yet in universities, political spaces and public discourse, hostility toward Jews is increasingly tolerated—so long as it is framed as political expression. The issue is not just a failure to act. It is a failure to understand.
Over the past three years as a Jewish-Israeli student at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, I have been targeted repeatedly because of my identity. I have received death threats, been called a “genocidal baby killer” and a “Zio-nazi,” and been told I should have been killed or taken hostage by Hamas. I have faced exclusion and constant online harassment, sometimes from accounts linked to student leadership. For my own safety, I have had to stay in contact with campus security and police.
These experiences are not isolated. They reflect an environment in which hostility toward Jews is becoming normalized when expressed in the “right” language.
Phrases like “Zionism is racism” or “no normalization with Zionists” are often treated as legitimate political positions. But for many Jews, Zionism is not an abstract ideology; it is a core part of our identity. When institutions accept these ideas without question, they create space for discrimination to be reframed as acceptable discourse. The result is that exclusion and harassment are dismissed, rather than addressed.
In my work as a fellow for #EndJewHatred, I have spent the past three years engaging with students, administrators and political leaders on these issues. Across those conversations, one pattern has become clear: Antisemitism is frequently overlooked because Jewish identity itself is widely misunderstood.
Jews are not simply members of a religion. We are an ethno-religious people with shared ancestry, culture and an indigenous connection to the land of Israel. Yet most diversity, equity and inclusion frameworks treat Judaism exclusively as a religion.
That reduction creates a serious blind spot. When Jewish identity is viewed only through a religious lens, attacks on our peoplehood—our ethnicity, our indigeneity, our connection to Israel—are not recognized as discrimination. They fall outside the categories institutions are trained to see.
Zionism sits at the center of this gap. For most Jews, it is the belief in the right to self-determination in our ancestral homeland. It is not inherently a supremacist ideology, but an expression of national and indigenous identity. Still, it is routinely framed as racist or colonial, erasing key aspects of who the Jewish people are. As that framing becomes more accepted, so does the harm it causes.
What I experienced at the Oct. 7 memorial—and McMaster as a whole—is a direct consequence of this dynamic. When rhetoric that targets a core part of Jewish identity is normalized, the line between political expression and discrimination disappears. When that line disappears, so does accountability.
This is not just a campus issue. It reflects a broader institutional failure.
Across universities, governments and international bodies, there is a persistent tendency to apply double standards to Israel and the Jewish people without considering how those narratives intersect with Jewish identity. In Canada, for example, emerging definitions of Anti-Palestinian Racism risk embedding contested political claims, such as defining Zionism as inherently racist, into policy. In doing so, they do not just take a political stance; they risk codifying a misunderstanding of Jewish identity itself.
Institutions have acknowledged rising antisemitism. But acknowledgment is not enough. If institutions fail to engage with Jewish identity in its full complexity, their responses will remain incomplete.
If institutions continue to misunderstand what Jewish identity is—religious, ethnic and indigenous—they will not just fail to combat antisemitism. They will keep enabling it.
