“Jewish students are no less proud even when unsafe and having to hide their Magen Davids under their shirts,” Nati Pressmann, president of the Canadian Union of Jewish Students, told JNS last week.
“All it means is that they are studying on campuses that tolerate antisemitism to a horrific extent,” she said.
With members from 25 college campuses, the union is the elected representative of Jewish students across Canada, aiming to resolve their concerns and fulfill their needs through advocacy efforts.
Every Jewish student has the right to vote on union motions and amendments, as well as on the leadership that represents them provincially and nationally. The group counts 400 members and has partnered with the World Jewish Congress.
“We want to ensure there is a formal body that is democratically elected for Jewish students,” explained Pressmann. “We have members not just from universities within cities that are known to Jewish communities, they are often one of the few Jews at their schools,” she added.
Earlier this summer, the union submitted an amicus curiae brief in support of Israel to the International Criminal Court, which is investigating the Jewish state over allegations of “genocide” in the Gaza Strip.
The union often submits briefs to the House of Commons, and is active in the media to ensure the collective voice of Jewish students is heard.
“A lot of students, including myself, were on social media on Oct. 7 and one minute they’d see a Jewish person sharing what happened and the next day a peer, a colleague or a roommate was posting in celebration and calling it decolonization,” Pressmann explained.
“From the get go, the experience of Jewish students has been to grieve. A lot of us wanted the summer to be a time to reset but the [pro-Hamas] encampments did not let that happen,” she continued.
Pressmann, who attends Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, said university administrations are giving the leaders of these encampments total amnesty, even as students and faculty incite violence in blatantly antisemitic ways.
In response, the union has sent recommendations to Toronto police and the University of Toronto to help probe hate crimes and hold perpetrators accountable.
“We encourage Jewish students to make relationships with their campus security, who are oftentimes the people most able to respond to incidents. Not just protests but vandalism as well,” said Pressmann.
“There are often offenses that could be tried in a court of law on hate speech grounds, but we are not seeing that being brought to attention,” she said.
This laissez-faire attitude extends beyond campuses.
“The Highway 401 overpass is located in a Jewish neighborhood. Protesters were for weeks harassing residents. While they have freedom of speech, they do not have the freedom to enter a Jewish neighborhood, target Jewish people and try to intimidate them,” said Pressmann. “It could have been dealt with way earlier on by the police.”
On campus, Pressmann feels that there is no response or transparency with regard to antisemitism.
“I was going to take a course this year and I searched the professor’s name for due diligence,” she said. “I found out that she had publicly submitted a document, a deputation to the [federal] Justice Committee that I spoke to claiming that Jewish students like myself did not have any knowledge of Jewish history and did not know the difference between uncomfortable truth and antisemitism.
“I dropped the course before I went to the first class and a friend told me that this same professor had said that Hamas is an imperfect organization and that Palestinians have a right to resist and that she encouraged students to look up her brief,” she added.
Professors, Pressmann said, feel empowered to act in such ways due to the lack of consequences.
“I believe it is truly important for there to be data on complaints. It doesn’t mean data disclosing who the perpetrator is, but there needs to be public information on the amount of incidents and the offense, whether it is vandalism, verbal violence or assaults,” she continued.
“We need to be seeing those statistics, that are commonly shared by the government, but we are not seeing that. We need to have a clear picture of what is happening on campuses,” she added.
“It makes me really sad that we are at this point but it’s giving me hope that we are coming together as a community. We are not going to be silent, we will not let this continue and we will be fighting antisemitism in any way that we can,” she said.
