Thank you, Madam Chair.

I really am honoured to address the committee. Thank you for inviting me to these very important deliberations on anti-Semitism.

I'll begin with my own personal encounter with one of these encampments at the University of Toronto. I sent you, and I hope you have, the letter that I penned to the administration of the University of Toronto. It was quite a shocking encounter I had. If you'll notice, my letter does not contain one single word about Jews, about Israel, about Gaza—nothing like that. I tried to actually pen a critique to the university about behaviour, general behaviour.

I must add that the only reason I could offer for having had that very shocking, insulting and humiliating encounter was that I was visibly Jewish. That is, I was wearing a yarmulke, or kippah, on my head. I had come from a conference between members of different faiths at the pontifical institute. The level of conversation could not have been more distinct—from the sublime to the obscene, I would say.

That's a bit about my encounter and about what's been going on there. I think what's happening is that many different causes, what people might call “progressive” causes, are being conflated with the situation in Israel and the current conflict. This is nothing new, by the way. This has gone on for decades. I'm showing my age, but I was an undergrad in 1973 at the University of Toronto. The same things were happening, except now I think you would add the toxic ingredient of social media. That's another factor that hopefully you'll take into consideration when you address problems of anti-Semitism.

What's happened now is that anti-Semitism has always operated under different guises—whether it was anti-Judaism, for instance, in its beginnings; whether it was racism, anti-race, which anti-Semitism really culminated in during the Second World War during the Holocaust; or whether it was economics. Marx himself penned a treatise on Jews and money, an obscene treatise that Jews have been suffering from ever since. It cuts across all spectrums: left, right, it doesn't matter. I wouldn't use the term “racism” here. I think it is a unique form of discrimination.

The way I see it, what's happening in the academy and what's happening with these encampments is that anti-Semitism has now taken the form of anti-Israel, anti-Zionism, and it's been legitimized that way. That's not to say that you can't critique a government. You certainly can critique Israel, but the obsessive-compulsive disorder, as you can see, that is solely focused on this particular conflict is for me inexplicable without that dimension. The dimension that distinguishes the State of Israel from all other states is its Jewish dimension. I can't explain this single-minded focus as opposed to far greater humanitarian crises—in the Sudan, for instance, happening now. By orders of magnitude, that gets nothing.

For me, as an academic, this is another form. I think the vice-chair, Mr. Fortin, asked this question at the end of the last session. It certainly is very inextricably tied. I just want the committee to be attuned to what the IHRA definition brings to the fore, that this is another guise of anti-Semitism—not all of it, not all critiques, but I think it explains a lot of what's going on.

Thank you, Madam Chair.