Shocking Anti-Semitism at Univ of Toronto Medical School
The findings at the medical school are startling. Unfortunately, they represent what is happening on many campuses in North America.
Ayelet Kuper is a physician and assistant professor at the University of Toronto's (UT) medical school. In response to increasing reports of anti-Semitism at the medical school, Kuper was appointed by the dean of the school to be the first Senior Advisor on Antisemitism. The appointment ran from June 2021-June 2022.
For a year, Kuper collected stories shared with her by Jewish students, staff and faculty, and from the larger community. She gathered public information (from the press and social media) and relevant academic literature.
Kuper recently released a report on her findings titled “Reflections on addressing antisemitism in a Canadian faculty of medicine.”
In truth, Kuper could have written her entire report based on her own personal experiences, which were numerous and shocking. As she writes,
“I personally experienced many instances of antisemitism, including being told that all Jews are liars; that Jews lie to control the university or the faculty or the world, to oppress or hurt others, and/or for other forms of gain; and that antisemitism can't exist because everything Jews say are lies, including any claims to have experienced discrimination.”
More specifically, she says,
”I experienced the now-common strategy among those at [the University of Toronto school of medicine] who have made what I believe to be antisemitic statements to say that any Jew who calls them out is just racist and is lying in order to oppress Palestinians.”
This sentiment, she reports, was explicitly taught to the school’s students by faculty members during an off-campus event.
Yet, what is most telling about Kuper’s report is the universality of her findings. For this reason, her analysis provides a window into the anti-Semitic harassment affecting Jews on campuses across North America.
The findings include;
Victim Blaming & Anti-Semitism
Kuper was often told that the current environment of anti-Semitism at the University of Toronto’s medical school was triggered by the May 2021 war between Gaza terrorists and Israel. She was explicitly informed that the University of Toronto medical school’s “anti-Semitism problem” was due to Israeli government policies.
Kuper rightly calls this out as classic victim-blaming.
In truth, anti-Semitism at the school, like on many other college campuses, was rising for years. Kuper and her Jewish colleagues had noticed hateful attitudes about Jews for at least three years. At UT, these attitudes had been noticed as a problem in 2016. By 2020, the administration created an Anti-Semitism Working Group.
In the years before the Gaza war, Kuper reports that she overheard her colleagues complaining about
"those Jews who think their Holocaust means they know something about oppression."
Yet, as Kuper noted, the 2021 war inaugurated a seminal change in the nature of anti-Semitism at UT’s medical school. This change was also common on many other college campuses across North America.
Reframing Anti-Semitism as Political Activism Against Israel
Kuper notes that the Gaza war masked the growing anti-Semitism at UT’s medical school. The war allowed it to be reframed as “political activism against Israel.” Further, the staff argued that such activism falls under the rubric of academic freedom. Thus, Israel was routinely libeled as an apartheid state and calls went out for the total destruction of the only Jewish country in the world.
“I have many proud Jewish and non-Jewish colleagues and friends who support the existence of an independent Palestine in multiple ways (as I do) without also perpetrating hatred for Jews, “ Kuper writes.
However, at the medical school, she observed what has become a common phenomenon:
”... there are those who not only cross over the line to anti-Jewish hatred but who do so proudly and perhaps sometimes as the primary goal, hiding behind the Palestinian cause all the while.”
Redefining of Zionism
Kuper repeatedly witnessed anti-Semitic Palestinian advocates “appropriating the Jewish term ‘Zionism’ and attempting to redefine it.”
Zionism refers to the belief in Jewish self-determination in the historic homeland of the Jewish people (Israel). It is a normative belief held by the majority of American Jews. In Canada, the vast majority of the Jewish community supports Zionism. As Kuper writes, “calling someone a Zionist in the Canadian context is almost the same as calling them a Jew.”
Yet at UT’s medical school, Kuper reports that there were those that insisted to her and others that:
“[Zionism] means various racist and hateful things, ranging from ‘hating all Muslims’ to ‘wanting to murder all Palestinians.’ Such false definitions are then used to justify hatred of any Jews who "admit" to being Zionists.”
Once they redefined Zionism, Kuper said, students at the medical schools were
“forced to express their beliefs about Israel and/or Zionism prior to being allowed to participate in university activities.”
This made it possible to use Zionism, as redefined by anti-Semites, as a cudgel against those who supported Israel.
Colleagues told Kuper, who was born in Israel, that her refusal to denounce the existence of her place of birth as a Jewish state meant she was inherently racist.
Kuper notes that those same false definitions of Zionism were “used as a smokescreen to deny Jewish concerns that hateful in-person and online statements by [UT’s medical school] faculty members about Zionists are antisemitic.”
Jew-Washing
Throughout history, there has been a common and unfortunate phenomenon of self-identified Jews siding with anti-Semities. They often express anti-Semitic sentiments themselves. For example, a consistent advocate for the anti-Semitic, anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement since 1996 is the organization Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP).
These Jewish voices are used by non-Jewish anti-Semites who claim that what they are saying or doing can’t possibly be anti-Semitic because Jewish people are saying or doing the same thing.
This practice is referred to as “Jew-washing.”
(This is notwithstanding the substantial literature, which Kuper notes, about members of traditionally oppressed groups being made complicit in their own oppression. This includes coming to identify with or attempting to gain favor from members of the group that oppresses them.)
One of the instances of Jew-washing occurred after a talk at the medical school for International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The talk was given by Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemtisim Irwin Cotler. Colter is also a former Canadian federal justice minister, attorney general and professor (emeritus) of law at McGill University.
Months after the talk, a secret letter of complaint about the talk was leaked to the public. The letter was signed by medical school and other faculty members – including Jewish ones.
It asserted that the documented historical examples of anti-Semitism Cotler mentioned in his talk were not anti-Semitic.
The letter also claimed that Cotler’s purpose in bringing these examples of anti-Semitism was to oppress non-Jews, particularly Palestinians.
In response, over 300 Jewish faculty members issued an open letter detailing the anti-Semitism contained in the letter and denounced:
"the moral cover of a number of Jewish signatories to tell Jews what is antisemitic and what is not, thereby stripping Jews of their last line of existential defence."
Jews Operate a Secret Cabal to Control the World
The above-leaked letter referred to Jews and their supporters on campus as racist "special interest groups." Kuper notes that these groups were given this label for “standing up to anti-Semitism the previous year. It thereby invoked the age-old canard of Jews as a secret cabal operating behind the scenes in non-Jewish institutions.”
Kuper says that the longstanding myth of "Jewish power" was the most oft-cited anti-Semitic trope she heard at the medical school.
One of the many examples of “Jewish power” that Kuper routinely heard was the accusation that Jews controlled the hiring and promotions of the medical school’s faculty as well as the residency matches. She also noted a pervasive belief (which she heard repeated many times) among faculty and students that anyone who angers "the Jews" will have their career destroyed by "the Jews."
Kuper found out that if she or other Jews stood up for themselves (since no one else would), it was used to justify the “powerful cabal” trope. Hence, it just made the anti-Semitism worse.
She further saw that those who committed anti-Semitic acts were pitied and supported because everyone knew that when they were publicly found out, they would be punished and harmed by "the powerful Jews."
DEI and Microaggressions: Sensitivity for Everyone Except the Jews
Kuper personally heard many times what she termed “microaggressions” against Jews. They came from those she described as “otherwise lovely and reflexive people” at the medical school and its affiliated hospitals.
These “microaggressions” included berating Jews for:
Being pushy
Being demanding
Being in charge
Having (or wanting) lots of money
Only looking out for other Jews
She pointedly says that not once were these sentiments called out or even noticed by non-Jewish “allies.” Kuper then notes:
“This is incongruent with how [UT’s medical school] learners and faculty are routinely taught to speak out on behalf of all equity-deserving groups, though to my knowledge never with Jews as the pedagogical example.”
Jews Are White and Privileged
Critical Race Theory (CRT) has overrun every academic department in today’s universities, from the arts and literature to science and even medicine.
CRT posits that society is a power binary, divided according to race: whites are the oppressors (and hence have privilege) and non-whites are the oppressed and have no privilege. It further asserts that anyone who has “power” or has achieved success in society is “white.” Thus, “whiteness” does not depend on skin color. It also does not depend on whether or not a person or group has experienced oppression.
CRT views Jews as both white and privileged. Although the Jewish people have a horrific history of oppression, their current success in society garners them the label of “privileged.”
Heaping further negativity on Jews, Critical Race theorists maintain that the historical persecution of Jews means that they unfairly enjoy heightened privilege because of their “false victimhood” status.
Historically Jews have grown accustomed to being the brunt of discrimination, yet the special place of outrage reserved for Jews within the framework of Critical Race Theory came has come as a shock to many Jews who aligned themselves with the social justice movement.
Critical Race Theory's Hypocritical Anti-Semitism
Even though it appears from her analysis that Kuper accepts certain principles of Critical Race Theory, Kuper does not condone CRT’s hypocrisy in refusing to recognize its discrimination against Jews.
Kuper writes about a common phenomenon facing Jews at UT’s medical school and universities in North America and in society at large. The anti-Semitic belief that Jews have disproportionate power, she notes, points to “an inability to accept Jews as victims of discrimination because of an inaccurate but pervasive belief in Jewish whiteness.”
As Kuper writes,
“Several years ago, when I taught and debriefed anti-oppression training for medical students, I learned that white-passing Jewish students were being told by their peers that their pale skin means that they aren't allowed to claim to have any experience of oppression.
Kuper reports that Jews were silenced even in settings where white students with intersectional identities (such as being part of the LGBTQIA+ community or merely female) were encouraged to talk about the discrimination they had experienced due to those identities.
One faculty member even told Kuper that Jews shouldn’t be allowed to speak on their own behalf about anti-Semitism. According to this colleague, they also shouldn't be subject to protection from discrimination outlined in the Ontario Human Rights Code. The colleague explained to her that this was because what Jews call anti-Semitism isn't real. Thus, it wouldn't make sense to allow Jews to speak about the impact of something that doesn’t really exist.
Denying Intergenerational Holocaust Trauma
Many Canadian Jews are children or grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, as is Kuper. Yet, Jewish faculty members and students at UT’s medical school are routinely silenced when they tried to speak about their own personal and family histories of oppression, particularly in Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity-related spaces.
For years, non-indigenous colleagues (acting as allies to indigenous people) berated Kuper for invoking the concept of intergenerational Holocaust trauma. They further lectured her that Jews are "appropriating" the term.
What Past Anti-Semitism Tells Us About the Future
Kuper’s report details the rampant anti-Semitism at just one school at just one North American university. Her observations are all the more shocking since they occurred at a medical school.
They also came with a warning. As Kuper writes,
“The history of the countries that have comprised the Jewish diaspora – whether in 20th century Europe or in any century over the last two millennia – teaches us that antisemitism can easily spiral out of control.”