“Every time I say ‘I’m Jewish,’ it feels like I’m confessing to a crime” - Anonymous reddit user

In Part IX, we examined the pulls — the ways people get drawn out of their Jewish identity and into other identities. That’s where the compromise of identity begins. As a person moves further down the asymptote of assimilation, they make trade-off after trade-off, each one a little easier than the last. It is a slow trickle that erodes their identity until it is unrecognizable.

But moving away from an identity is not the same thing as internalizing a phobia or accepting an aversion against it. Something more specific has to happen. Internalized Judeophobia is the product of three things arriving together: a push, a pull, and the activation of an ambient, systemic prejudice against Jews, Judaism, Israel, and Israelis. On their own, none of the three is sufficient. Together, they’re combustible.

We can picture this scenario as a gas leak. The ambient prejudice is the gas, already in the air, already seeping in from a hundred different directions. The push is what turns off the alarm. The pull is the match that ignites the flame. The insidious trick is how benign each step seems on its own.

Each path an individual person might take here is different in its particulars. But those paths all follow the same underlying shape and spine.

First, there is an unmooring from mainstream Jewish identity (the push). Then a landing ground in a new identity (the pull). That new identity offers cover— a kind of myopia about the relevance of Jewish identity in the first place. Then the combustion reaction begins.

Take for instance a student who was bullied at their Jewish day school. Or a person who came to resent their Judaism because of what it cost them — the extra schoolwork, the compromises, the afternoons they could have spent with friends instead. That student is primed.

If they go on to enter a profession saturated with people who have already bought into Judeophobic ideas, they have no internal resistance left to push back with. They are rewarded, instead, for turning on the place and the people from which they came — mentioning, almost casually, that they were part of an institution they always secretly thought was awful. They’ll criticize it freely, often without any real evidence behind their criticism. This will be based in feelings, or “vibes”.

Although they will have perhaps always felt an aversion to their Jewish identity for a plethora of reasons, these people will never have been compelled to rationalize it or to focus on it. The pulls of certain ideologies provide the motivation and the highly refined words to voice that criticism. They move the tension to the foreground and draw it into focus. Suddenly there is a well-established, hateful vocabulary that expresses their unmooring in terms of victimhood. That is ammunition for tokenism to manifest.

Once the gas leak ignites, that internalized Judeophobia manifests in many different ways. Like most things bound up in identity, there isn’t just one thing. It’s a spectrum, a buffet of opinions, actions, and affiliations roughly understood as “self-hatred.”

Specifically, self-hating Jews manifest a mix of negative emotions toward themselves — but because there are grifters and merchants who benefit from hatred of Jews writ large, that self-directed version gets supercharged into something aimed outward. Those are the industrial fans, providing oxygen. The fire becomes an inferno in some circumstances: it moves from limited internal prejudice, self-doubt, self-criticism, and embarrassment, to full-blown conspiracy theories about Jews generally, anti-Zionism, anti-Judaism, and — in the most extreme cases — tokenism.

That spectrum shows up across a number of different verticals: religious anti-Judaism, hatred of Jewish peoplehood and culture, racial antisemitism, xenophobia, general prejudice against Jews, sensationalized narratives, the list goes on. But the pattern underneath is consistent no matter which vertical it surfaces in.

The mild end of the spectrum is the more benign version — still damaging, but quieter. This is the person who has silently absorbed these ideas without ever quite naming them. They were taught, maybe in school, to be wary of the Catholic Church, and without noticing, they’ve grafted that same wariness onto their own Judaism. They’re self-critical. Ask them, and they’ll agree — a little sheepishly — that there’s “a type” among Jews: avarice, elitism, insularity, whatever the particular flavour of resentment happens to be. This would be dispelled with exposure — of course Jews are just like anyone else. Fallible and sometimes tribal and with their own foibles and communal orbits. The harm comes when there is an exceptionalism at play. They heard once upon a time that Jews were God’s chosen people. “Chosen” for what — that is of no matter. The key is that the exceptionalism was germinated decades prior.

This is the throughline — the spine that runs under every point on this spectrum: the double standard. There’s a real irony in Jewish exceptionalism being negatively perceived and then voiced by Jews — in holding Jewish people and institutions to a different standard than everyone else. You see it in the Jew who is sharply critical of Jewish institutions but has nothing to say about the equivalent failures in, say, Muslim or Islamic institutions. You see it in the political obsession — in 2026, as this section is being written — with AIPAC, a Jewish lobbying group in the United States that has become the singular target of coordinated attacks on its credibility.

The double standard is clear: a group of people who do their best to influence policy and direction is somehow held to a standard that isn’t applied even remotely equally anywhere else. AIPAC and the “Israel Lobby” have a fraction of the financial backing and influence that lobbying groups from nations like China and Qatar apply on the US government and its institutions, universities, non-profits, and populace. But still, that is of no matter, and Jews with internalized Judeophobia buy into these narratives with hunger.

It would be easy to write these people off as charlatans. Much energy is wasted on attacking the bad faith approach of opportunists. In reality, these are, in the vast majority of cases, genuinely held beliefs. That is another great trick and insidious charachteristic of internalized Judeophobia.

These are people who have been fed a narrative enough times that it has started to sound like truth.

That is not a unique failure of character; it is how propaganda works on anyone. It is, of course, a failure, but it is not unique — the systemic Judeophobia is sophisticated and organized. It is not a coincidence that a significant but still fringe number of Jews have suddenly awoken to these ideas. There has been a major ramp-up in propaganda. It is documented and it works. That’s why it is done. When an in-group with hateful elements begins to make belonging conditional on saying or believing a certain thing, that belief stops feeling like an opinion and starts feeling like reality.

Alongside the double standard, the most telling symptom of internalized Judeophobia is what we can call the Purity Narrative. The purity narrative can be thought of as an autoimmune response. It is one’s yearning for safety turning against oneself, misguided elements throwing up flares against its own body. Again there is a familiar pattern: everyone else has gotten Judaism wrong, and the dissenting voice is the true follower. The pure one.

They are the person who actually understands the faith, its values, and its real meaning. This is the politician who shows up, passionately, publicly, and unironically to an anti-Israel protest on a Saturday morning. It’s the artist who didn’t pursue the “right” kind of degree according to their disappointed parents, and has since disavowed an entire culture of learning because that’s the only way to make peace with what feels like their a personal failure.

The exceptionalism here is phenomenally ironic. It is the double standard on full display again. The criticism of Jews and things that are Jewish necessarily relies on the fact that they are different, set apart, or other. But holding Jews to a different standard than everyone else — which is what the critics are doing — only proves the point they’re supposedly rejecting. That’s why the double standard is so damning: it’s the tell. It shows up in celebrity culture, in “as-a-Jew” commentary, and in the quiet dread some Jews in the diaspora describe — the sense that admitting you’re Jewish feels less like a fact and more like a confession.

Underneath that sentiment is the internalized idea that Jews are somehow personally answerable for the actions of a state prosecuting a war, of a settler in the West Bank, of a diaspora billionaire, of even something as simple as a Jewish person who has committed a crime. The fear demands hyper vigilance in order to ensure the avoidance of guilt by association. The group punishment is rocket fuel for tokenism, and it runs on a kind of short-sighted arithmetic: small, immediate social gains purchased by going along with whatever the prevailing narrative happens to be. It bears repeating that none of these mechanics are exotic. They are staple traits of ordinary human psychology, applied to an identity under pressure, in conditions that facilitate a specific outcome. That systemic prejudice and aversion is a key difference maker. Another way of thinking about this idea is that the internalized prejudice of Judeophobia is a Trojan Horse for that hate.

That Trojan Horse breaches the gates and enters the mind. It exploits group dynamics. This is where we see for example a critical mass of celebrities applying the Purity Narrative in pursuit of individual success. The devil’s bargain that they make is a symptom of being exploited. They are not charlatans. They are not malicious or nefarious, it comes from a very human and very Jewish perspective to alleviate suffering, and to provide a safe environment for all.

The “big lie” in this circumstance is the acceptance of the double standard. At some point, these people are unfortunately inoculated to seeing the double standard for what it is. This is the moment that the internalized Judeophobia becomes crystallized. That crystallization moves it from being a belief held by a new identity, to being the identity in and of itself. The pure one. The one who sees the world for what it really is. They believe themselves to be the Cassandras of their day. In reality, they are simply doomsayers predicting the apocalypse. No different than the man with the megaphone in Times Square.

We can easily identify the patterns and markers of internalized Judeophobia with the purity narrative. This is an historic trend with self-hating Jews. It came with othering, with a desperate attempt to survive by going along, and most of all by embracing the other necessary marker - the double standard. Internalization leads to buy in and acceptance that the double standard of Jews and Jewish institutions can be considered fair, honest, and well reasoned. Again, this means ignoring the big lie.

Historically there have been countless examples of Jews who have adopted these external anti-Jewish views. Hellenistic or Roman allies in ancient Judea. Spanish conversos, German socialites, concentration camp capos.

The modern pinnacle of this double standard is of course the treatment of Israel by the world. For Jews with internalized Judeophobia, the self-hate, a unique stance of despising the only Jewish state is the textbook demonstration of this mental sickness.

In the next part of this series, we will conduct the reluctantly necessary exploration of internalized Judeophobia manifesting as anti-Zionism.

“And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you” - Friedrich Nietzsche

In part VIII of this series, we examined some of the most common pushes that act as inciting incidents, priming Jews in the diaspora for the internalization of systemic Judeophobia.

An aversion to Jewish identity driven by a push cannot alone push a Jew to internalize prejudice. In addition to that initial propulsion, there needs to be a landing ground, a target for the mind to set as an imagined harbour for their identity. There is a grander dynamic at play between pushes and pulls, all of which happen within the environment created by systemic Judeophobia. These three forces together are combustible.

In part VIII, we also established that each “push” is motivated by undercurrents of fear, guilt, shame, and insecurity. On the reverse side of this, “pulls” always provide some form of security. There is a perceived safety to allay fears. There is enough distraction to ignore guilt, and there is no external shame. This combines to provide the illusion of security. Optimizing that perceived well being in the short term. This is the trojan horse of the pulls towards Judeophobic identities.

The pulls all tend to be along the asymptote of assimilation, luring identity towards an unreachable goal. Let’s examine the pulls and understand the receiving grounds where Jews who feel ostracized spend their lives.

It is important to note that there is no such thing as a “best” or “supreme” culture, network, or style of living. It is completely natural for Jews to want to participate in all the aspects of life diaspora Jews have available to them. Every culture in the world offers its own wonderful adaptations, new wrinkles, and glorious expressions of human ingenuity, creativity, and thought. Many identities can be moved between freely, at little or no cost — something as mundane as being a fan of an artist or a sport. Those are mutable characteristics. Other parts of identity — core to, and in some way unique to, Jews — can never be fully shed. That is the most salient point, one that cannot simply be abdicated, as we saw in Parts 4, 5, and 6.

There are systems of belief and thinking that do not run contrary to Judaism — dabbling in Buddhism, meditation, and yoga, for example.

There are some value systems, however, that require a cost — a sacrifice or a muting of one’s character and culture. We call this impossible task the asymptote of assimilation.

This is the key difference.

When a Jew moves further along the asymptote of assimilation, they are being pulled out of their identity and into another one. Those newly adopted identities come with varying amounts of Judeophobia baked into their belief system. That is systemic Judeophobia. As parts of this new identity are adopted, they begin to become internalized — even if doing so is illogical or counter to the person’s own well-being.

Humans naturally mimic and go along with social proof. It is a core feature of human socialization. While there are a vast number of potential pulls at play, it is nevertheless worth exploring some of the most common situations:

The illusion of safety in the arms of the left wing.

Many Jews felt like suppressing their Judaism and their tells would eliminate any risk of being unsafe. Most saliently in 2026, we see this pull on the left. This happens in political spaces. This happens in art spaces. This happens in academic spaces.

Within left wing politics, intersectionality and woke ideology seemingly have no room for Jews as a minority group. That means that in the modern iterations of these political belief systems, we have Jews who have been strung along into cults of suicidal empathy that don’t extend to them. For many, this eventually becomes a lifelong version of the sunk cost fallacy: those who find themselves pulled towards ideologies that speak to most of their inclinations and preferences need only sacrifice pride in their Jewish identity. Because they have invested so much of themselves already, they cannot back down or risk losing the “sunk cost.”

The Jewish part of their identity is conditional. It is only allowed on the target group’s terms, in the instances where it is not deemed problematic. If Jewish identity threatens the target identity, it cannot be tolerated. This has the effect of deepening the feedback loop, further conditioning entry into “inclusive” spaces.

The loop “pulls” the Jew further and further away from their identity. If the person is unmoored with no Jewish anchor (typically because of a push) then the abandonment or cheapening of their Jewish self is an easy mental move to make. The arithmetic is myopic and in the short term is a low-cost, high-reward move.

This is the typical outcome for all forms of this phenomenon, and it is why constantly recognizing that assimilation is an asymptote is important. The allure of belonging is intoxicating. It seems so easy to continue down the path you’re already on. You have momentum as you’ve started to integrate and begun to be part of this movement that is brand new and exciting.

Political movements are the most common and significant pull in the modern context because they are so alluring and their long-term costs are hidden. Modern politics in the United States and Canada force you into compartments. They define you along a very slim binary axis. Being pulled towards another identity — say, being a socialist, a leftist, an anti-racist, etc. — all of this pulls you out of your Jewish identity.

We can think of many Jewish politicians, for example, who fall down this path — the allure of power in progressive spaces, the sense of belonging, drive them away from their Jewish identity, from the core of it. It makes them compromise it as they yield to the systemic pressures of their targets, of the orthodoxies of their adopted identity. This can also provide fertile ground for the harvesting of tokens.

The pull into artistic spaces.

This pull, for many, goes hand in hand with politics. Arts workers and musicians tend to lean far left. This means progressive spaces carry a bohemian allure, packed with artists and an ideology that promises equal treatment without the work. Oftentimes, the sunk cost of a lifetime pursuing an art form becomes the only thing that matters.

Consider a person who has spent their life working towards a certain profession or discipline, perhaps an architect or a filmmaker. It is totally reasonable for them to look at the risk and reward equation and make the decision to move down the asymptote. The transaction would be to sacrifice decades of toil, social networks, and professional clout in order to — what? Pay homage to a religion they don’t even believe in? They are missing the full picture, but in each small moment, their choice seems clear, as well as completely reasonable and appealing.

The pull into professional spaces.

Conforming to an in-group culture is endemic to human psychology. In some professions there is a reinforcing cycle of opinion and ideology. There are orthodoxies and sets of interlocking opinions that seem inexorably linked. Stapling on Judeophobic tropes, especially around Israel, is frictionless.

Consider the arts-worker orthodoxy, the social-worker orthodoxy, the healthcare-worker and addiction-specialist orthodoxies. Even labour unions, at times, are run by severely Judeophobic people. Each of these has a massive bias and overrepresentation of specific ideologies. It is sensible to sacrifice your own identity in order to be respected in the workplace. For many, the workplace is the only community that they have. If there is a dominant ideology, set of values, or way of thinking about the world, it is only natural to absorb it. These newly adopted professional identities can certainly pull a person away from their Jewish identity.

The academy

Higher education and school systems writ large are currently facing something of a reckoning around their adoption of postmodern thought. In the era of diversity, equity, and inclusion, entire departments are purged of people with politics right-of-centre — or really, anyone who would dissent from progressivism. There is a strict dogma in most humanities departments. Non-political subjects like physics and biology are en route to being captured as well. Taking on the identity of your workplace, and that of an academic who needs to be focused on progressivism and activism, is an immensely attractive pull. There is professional clout at stake, tenure, security, and the allure of acceptance. Universities and colleges are incredibly strong and vast community networks.

So, a Jewish person becomes unmoored from their personal identity and then is pulled towards other identities along the asymptote. There is a mountain of work done on the groupthink that encompasses universities. In Canada, there is the CASE report that outlines, among other horrors, a trend of active antisemitism coming from professors. This is never punished — if anything, it is rewarded.

For students, these pulls are just as present. What’s more, they are formative. Students are vulnerable, they are at university to learn. For most young people in the West, post-secondary education is the time that they are allowed to finally self-actualize. When student groups, clubs, residency associations, and professors’ philosophies are all geared towards a certain ideology, the plasticity of the student mind can quickly internalize Judeophobic tropes, ideas, and thoughts with almost no resistance.

Friend groups.

On the micro scale, this idea translates to peer groups just as much. Social proof is a powerful tool. Many Jews will choose friend groups that are predominantly non-Jewish, and they will not understand or recognize the slights and slings and arrows that are levied upon them.

This opens the door to antisemitic or discriminatory tropes — systemic Judeophobia spread, consciously or not, by their peers. Comments like “Jews are cheap” or “have big noses” eventually get glossed over.

Of course, any kind of discrimination is waved off. Their peers, colleagues, and interlocutors are not prejudiced or racist people. They are predominantly just naive, living in a context of systemic Judeophobia where they have no reason to investigate further into claims about Jews, Jewish people, and the Jewish state. Again, the calculus becomes clear: do you stay silent and accept the claims, or do you risk your personal standing in your community?

Again, this all makes sense because there’s so much good done by all of these movements. The kaleidoscope of activities, ideas, spaces, and movements in the West is incredibly appealing — it’s a prime reason Jews have been able to survive and excel in all these different capacities. Other identities are wonderful, but sometimes they come into conflict with the Jewish identity, and that can be another point at which a decision is forced.

If the Jewish story is not told and the heritage and culture are not held in high esteem, the exchange is often made willingly without the true value of the identity being understood.

This is like a subconscious mental negotiation wherein the Jewish part’s value is completely undervalued. The Judeophobic pull is a Trojan Horse.

More miscellaneous examples.

Like the pushes away from Jewish identity, there are too many examples and circumstances of Jews in the diaspora being pulled into other identities. A few more include:

A person marries into a family that holds antisemitic views.

They ultimately have a decision to make: forgo their family, their in-laws, who may feel extremely passionately about certain issues, Jewish values, or the Jewish state, or risk their relationship — and their children’s relationship — with the in-laws, and acquiesce instead.

The Country Club Member.

In the 20th century this was a much more common occurrence. But as Judeophobia began to morph into anti-Zionism and Jew Hate, it has become less common. For now, Jews are not categorically denied entry into elite society.

Sometimes at the heights of society there are carrots and opportunities too irresistible. Oftentimes, these positions require a sacrifice. This is a less common situation in modern times, but this idea coloured Jewish assimilation throughout history in the West.

For many whose Jewish identity was not a significant part of their life, the pull toward these prestigious institutions was strong, and they happily sacrificed any signs or symbols of their heritage for access. It did not matter that these places clearly were not hospitable to Jews.

In the early days of the reform movement, this was its stated goal. In an enlightened world, Jews wanted to be treated just like everybody else. The degree varies, but the pull of assimilation always seduces unknowing or naive Jews. The siren call is always there.

Romance.

There are young people who are more interested in pursuing romantic partnerships than in exploring their own identity. Each of these is reasonable. And the shortcoming is when they make the exchange and sacrifice something immeasurably valuable — thousands of years of heritage — for something ephemeral.

The consequences of each of these pulls, especially when paired with the pushes, are that they operate as access points for systemic Judeophobia to become internalized. When other worldviews have accepted or incorporated antisemitism, Jew Hate, stereotypes about Jews, then it can easily sink in and access your subconscious.

Anarchy.

The energy of anti-establishment protests is intoxicating. In a world where everyone is struggling to belong, belonging to something else, despite some concessions, is arithmetic that can be relatively easily rationalized.

The umbrella idea is that this exchange, the pull, is done subconsciously. People build their entire lives, not recognizing that this is what is happening to them. It can take literally decades before these micro-Judeophobic messages are amalgamated into internalized Judeophobia.

In the next part of this series, we will put it all together and examine circumstances that demonstrate the explosive nature of how pushes, pulls, and systemic Judeophobia combust into full-on internalized Judeophobia.

We sat down with Eric Lombardi, one of five candidates in the running to be the next leader of the Ontario Liberal Party.

The conversation comes two days days after Prime Minister Mark Carney called off trade negotiations with the United States and moments after Ontario Premier Doug Ford and President Trump traded public jabs online.

During the episode, we discuss the effects of the trade war, and Ontario’s place in it. We talk healthcare, and what Lombardi says needs to change about Ontario’s system.

Finally we get into the rise of antisemitism in Ontario, and what the province’s role ought to be in addressing it.

Thanks for watching and listening

The Toronto political focus has been on Chris Alexander recently. Centrists don’t want him to run, as his candidacy can only improve the chances of an Olivia Chow victory. Yet, there is no compelling reason for Alexander to drop out at this point.

Why? Well, to understand that, like most things, we need to examine the incentives at play.

For Alexander, it is pretty clear that there is no path to victory, so this isn’t about winning. The primary incentive for him to stay in the race seems to be the simple fact that we’re talking about him at all. In other words: no one — myself included, and probably you — had any idea who this guy was before he jumped into the mayoral race. Anyone who did had long forgotten the Harper-era Conservative politician.

That, in itself, is a highly salient and high-value incentive. In the modern era of the brand economy, Alexander is now going to be the focus of the conversation for another few months — and all it cost him was $200, the fee to run for mayor in Toronto.

Baffling as this decision seems, Alexander is not an idiot. To underestimate him, or declare him one, would be a mistake.

This guy was a federal cabinet minister. He is not a fool.

So what are his larger goals? Well, it’s no secret that there’s a lot of turmoil within the federal Conservative Party of Canada. Pierre Poilievre is running out of time as leader — whether that comes before or after another election, no one lasts forever. There is no clear logical successor for Poilievre at this time. Similarly for the Ontario Progressive Conservatives, Doug Ford is coming up on ten years in the job. Eventually he will be doing something else.

For Alexander, this is all upside. He may never get to be relevant in Conservative politics, but building his brand, getting the practice in primetime, it certainly isn’t going to hurt him. This might explain why most of his stances have been about issues that have little or nothing to do with Toronto — he’s not really running for mayor.

Politics in Canada is about name-brand recognition more than anything else, so for the low cost of $200, Alexander is getting publicity and experience in the limelight that is worth tens of thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of dollars.

You don’t have to look any further than that — it becomes clear. Every interview he does, every article posted about him, is exactly what he wants. If he were being ignored, he wouldn’t be doing this — but he’s not being ignored. He’s being rewarded for his decision.

On the other side of the ledger. Why would he be incentivized not to run?

For some moral reason? That’s just not relevant, unfortunately, this is politics.

For the love of Toronto? Chris Alexander doesn’t care about Toronto. He’s from Ajax. Why would he care about Toronto?

Because he hates Olivia Chow? Maybe — but obviously that’s not enough of an incentive. She’s already the mayor. He probably figures that whatever damage she’s doing is either not relevant or not so bad that it compares to the upsides.

Because he loves Brad Bradford? Of course not — Bradford is endorsed by Liberal MPs and MPPs. Bradford, despite what progressives think, is about as centrist as they come. Smart conservatives are rallying behind him because they know that Toronto is never going to be blue.

But if you’re Chris Alexander, all this is academic.

The incentives are clear. Lots of upside, little to no downside. Well worth a three-month experiment.

So if Bradford supporters want to get Alexander to actually back off, what’s it going to take?

Well, you would need either Mark Carney or Pierre Poilievre to offer him something — anything — better than the publicity he is getting now. There is little incentive for them to be spending political capital on Alexander.

At the end of the day, this all comes down to incentives. The more Alexander is attacked by Bradford supporters, the more he’s featured in the media, the more they are playing into the would-be spoiler’s hands.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, Progress Toronto supporters of Olivia Chow will want Alexander to remain centre stage. Every vote for him is a vote Brad Bradford might have gotten.

Anyone who supports Bradford, or who simply doesn’t want Chow to be the mayor, would do best to ignore Alexander completely. There’s no evidence he’s a serious contender — he can only hurt a centrist like Bradford by splitting the vote.

Liberal voters and partisans should keep their powder dry and instead focus on building up Brad Bradford’s prominence if they really would like to see change at city hall.

“My parents decided to move to a more predominantly Jewish area and to enroll me, at the age of 8, in a Jewish day school. They hoped that in a close-knit Jewish community I’d be safe from outsiders and that I would cement my attachment to Judaism.

Instead I became a target for years of emotional and physical bullying that sparked a lifelong struggle to come to terms with my Jewish identity.”

— Aaron Hamburger, Tablet Magazinne, 2019

In Part VII we connected the well-documented phenomenon of internalized homophobia to Jewish self-hatred via the concept of internalized Judeophobia. This can be traced to a person who, for entirely legitimate reasons, has internalized the systemic Judeophobia that surrounds them. In exactly the same way a religious gay man might exhibit extreme homophobic sentiment as a defence mechanism, we observe the same behaviour in Jews around the world.

This section looks at some common circumstances and scenarios in which Jews are pushed out of Jewish spaces, or away from their Jewish identity — sometimes as victims, sometimes as purposeful pariahs. In each and every case, the person with internalized Judeophobia is experiencing one or more of fear, shame, and guilt, and in every circumstance, some meaningful degree of insecurity.

Many of these experiences end up coupled with a pull, or mixed together with one or more other pushes. They are all experiential, and very real. Any Jew reading this knows a person who fits one of these archetypes. They can often see moments in their own lives where, had they had less strength of self, they might have gone down a similar path. That familiarity is no coincidence — the resonance is the proof.

This list is by no means comprehensive. It is expected to expand as discovery and research begin to unearth more and more cases. Each of these examples is rooted in the North American context, so there is a degree of tunnel vision that needs to be applied. Nevertheless, each of these situations is dynamic, and these are mere archetypes that describe individual experiences that make up the whole.

The throughline is that these typically all happen within childhood, early adolescence, and sometimes even young adulthood. They are all formative experiences, and they all have the possibility to cascade outward and ultimately lead to internalized Judeophobia. Saliently, these insertion points do not typically come from places of malice. That is why those who end up with internalized Judeophobia should be understood as victims.

The child taught to hide their Jewish identity for their safety.

The first scenario is a child traumatized by their Jewishness through fear passed down from a parent. Especially in high-anxiety, fearful households, parents or mentors will tell children to hide their Jewish identity. This is usually a well-meaning directive — an effort to keep the child safe.

As the parents are themselves insecure and afraid on behalf of their child, they tell the child that under no circumstances should they reveal anything that might out them as Jewish. There are the classic directives: don’t talk about the Jewish holidays. Do not wear a kippah. Do not disclose any markers of Jewish identity, like a Magen David or a necklace with Hebrew writing.

The key trouble is that a child cannot easily tell the difference between hiding for safety and hiding because something is wrong. They rarely have that sophistication. So when a parent says “we don’t talk about being Jewish,” the child begins to internalize it. They don’t know why it’s bad. They just know that it’s bad. This is the initial entrance point for many Jews. This push is dominated by fear of their own identity. Especially in situations where no supplemental Jewish experiences are created, children will begin to develop a conditioned aversion to Judaism.

A young person ostracized or bullied by their own local Jewish community.

Imagine a child who, like many other thirteen-year-olds, doesn’t fit in. They might lack the social skills, have a learning disability, or be slightly neurodivergent. For any number of reasons, the young person might be the subject of bullying through their formative years. This happens in every social setting, and in every culture. In a Jewish context, this kid might attend a day school, or a public school with a high concentration of Jewish students. In those contexts, when a tween is a social outcast and gets bullied, they can feel like there is something wrong with them specifically.

A healthy person can understand that bullies are simply a fact of life, best ignored and pitied. A more resilient, mature kid might be able to weather the storm of adolescence.

But that isn’t the case for everyone — some young people are prone to feeling like victims. Justly so. But someone with a fear of taking personal accountability — an external locus of control — can arrive at a different conclusion. They can see something is wrong, but it cannot be typical teenage life. Something is wrong, but they reason, or are counselled by parents, that there isn’t anything wrong with them. They can then make the logical jump that there must be something wrong with everyone else.

From there, the jump is to draw the pattern, and the common thread amongst the bullies or the “mean girls” is apparent: They’re all Jews. The push comes in this circumstance because the individual has created a false dichotomy in their mind. We are all Jews, and that is the common thread. One common fallacious exit strategy is to determine that the others are the bad Jews. The victim of the bullying, as a defence mechanism, believes they could not possibly be responsible for their mistreatment, and so it has to be rationalized. Humans crave an explanation, so they invent ones — in this case, they are virtuous and victimized. Their oppressors are the bad Jews.

This seeds one of the most common and egregious sources of tokens as well. These are the people who say they grew up in Jewish spaces and know what it’s “really like” on the inside — when in reality, they are almost always translating their own personal traumas and shortcomings into a verdict on the whole community.

Abuse and harm within religious life.

As with any religion — especially those with strong patriarchal structures, which Judaism can oftentimes be — there is real potential for harm within cloistered populations. This can manifest in many different ways. Orthodox and Conservative Judaism especially can, like any religion, provide ample opportunities for negative experience. That association might be with strict or abusive parents, with controlling husbands, or with camp counsellors who became violent or inappropriate with kids. All of these can be the insertion point for complex personal issues that get tied back to Judaism writ large.

Sometimes children can be ostracized or told there is something wrong with them because they might not be convinced that they want to be religious or observant. Many women might feel like they cannot self-actualize because of the religion’s structure. Men who want to pursue a career might feel pigeonholed by Judaism, or might not want to go through a life of Torah.

LGBTQ+ individuals can be completely ostracized by their synagogues. Some rabbis will not perform gay marriages, and many will not perform interfaith marriages. For some, the “sin” of loving a person who isn’t Jewish might be reason enough to leave religious life entirely. That exit can have deep-seated consequences for one’s relationship to their faith, culture, and identity.

Men in particular may feel that because Judaism didn’t make space for them, there is something wrong with Judaism writ large. As with the bullied kid in the previous example, the biggest danger here is the false dichotomy that comes with thinking: “something can’t be wrong with me, so something must be wrong with them.” This becomes the insertion point. Once the ball gets rolling, it compounds on itself, and the human mind begins to detect all sorts of patterns that “prove” that mainstream Judaism is problematic.

The black sheep of the family.

In a similar vein to the child who is bullied, these children are caught up specifically within family dynamics. The black sheep is also sometimes called the alternative kid, or explained away as middle child syndrome — though of course, it is not isolated to middle children.

Jewish families oftentimes demand academic rigour at home. This is a product of the cultural carrots and sticks that exist within particularly elite Jewish societies. Many may roll their eyes when a parent jokes that there has to be a doctor or lawyer in the family. But for many kids and young people, this is a serious pressure. It sets the bar impossibly high.

For every doctor in the family lineage, there is a kid who doesn’t have that same knack for science, or whose intelligence means they’re not going to be as academically gifted as a sibling or peer. That peer might have qualified on a scholarship to day school, or to university. Comparison is the thief of joy, and for some, no matter what they do, the pressures of Jewish life — around work, salary expectations, academic achievement, or good behaviour — never let up. Even something as simple as learning their bar mitzvah portion can bring upon a young person a profound feeling of being the black sheep.

Again, this is oftentimes derived from parenting, but it can just as easily come from peers. This can all contribute to a repulsion that drives the push away from Judaism.

Judaism being inexorably linked to bereavement and trauma.

For kids forced to prematurely experience life-cycle events inside a synagogue — the death of a parent, a grandparent, a close friend — Judaism can become associated with trauma. If Judaism is the religious container for that grief, a child can come to feel that the religion itself is a source of negativity.

This, like in earlier circumstances, creates a conditioned aversion towards Jewish ritual, prayer, and spaces. When Kaddish and prayer become associated with a dying parent, or a kippah becomes a reminder of a shiva, it can become a deeply traumatizing association.

Jewish institutions have rightfully gone to great lengths to educate their children on Jewish oppression, antisemitism, and the Holocaust. Jewish trauma can be easily transmitted across generations in the silent lessons taught through stories and recalled experiences — that existing as a Jew is dangerous. For many, this is more than enough to act as a push. This begs the question and suggests that the entire polity of Judaism is guilty by association.

Then there are children and families who only associate synagogue and Judaism with bereavement. If they only attend once a year for Yahrtzeit, or for Yizkor, the shul, the key religious third space, becomes associated with negativity.

These can work in concert. Bereavement already primes an individual, and then every time they are back in a synagogue, they’re learning about the Holocaust and its horrors. Hebrew schools spend an inordinate amount of time dwelling on the worst parts of the Jewish experience. This has the potential to become a conditioned aversion. A great many people are pushed away in this fashion, coming to associate Judaism itself with negativity, trauma, and fear.

Embarrassment at one’s own and others’ “Jewish qualities.”

Visible religious symbols drawing hate, immigrant customs, particular foods, and so on. Oftentimes, whether in adulthood or childhood, Jewish qualities bear a cost due to systemic Judeophobia. This can be as simple as the discrimination that comes to Orthodox Jews in their black hats, an Eastern European accent, or a lack of awareness around North American customs.

For many Jews further along the asymptote of assimilation, this can provide a real threat. An association with anything different can shatter the illusion. That could be a Jewish outfit or hairstyle. That could be a person’s parents speaking Yiddish instead of English. That could be a failure to moderate the noise level of a conversation on public transit. Any of these can trigger a significant aversion in a person who does not want to be associated with any of these qualities. They do not want to be represented by “those people.”

Through each of these scenarios, the pushes can continue — all of them, in their own way, are earned. At face value they are reasonable egress points. Each, however, is overcomable with the proper lessons — whether those come from parents, faith leaders, teachers, or peers. Jews writ large need to learn to understand their identity and experience inside the notion of Jewish peoplehood. Armed with that framing, they can learn to fight back against these pushes.

Like any group or tribe, there will always be benefits and downsides to belonging. Each of these is a salient risk that needs to be monitored by Jewish institutions if they want to fight against the internalization of systemic Judeophobia. This is particularly important because pushes can be controlled from within the Jewish ecosystem. Pulls out of Jewish identity are much harder to monitor and control. In the next segment, we will explore some of the many situations that can tempt Jews to start heading down the asymptote of assimilation.

Looking back on his tenure as federal MP, it is reasonable to say that Nate Erskine-Smith was never really a big-L Liberal. Instead he was a Trudeau-era Liberal, and that era is over.

When you look at what he says and stands for, Erskine-Smith has always been a New Democrat wearing a red shirt. He wanted to win and hold office, so he ran for the Liberals during the most progressive Liberal era in Canadian history.

The hyper-progressive wing of the federal Liberal Party is slowly being eradicated, and Nate is another casualty of this purge.

Nate saw the writing on the wall and rightly positioned an exit from federal politics as wanting to make a difference in Ontario. This was a crafty solution that would work well for both him and the party. A diplomatic and sophisticated political move. Everyone gets through the breakup with their dignity intact.

So having been kicked out of cabinet and told he was not the future of the federal Liberals, Nate decided to go forth and announce his backup plan — leading the Ontario Liberal Party. There is a vacuum at the top of the OLP, and Nate assumed that his reputation would carry him to the leadership.

Unfortunately for Nate, that never got off the ground. Erskine-Smith could not even win the provincial Liberal nomination in Scarborough Southwest. This was highly significant — the riding neighbours the one where he was the federal incumbent — and he lost it to Ahsanul Hafiz. There is lots of controversy around this particular nomination, and Nate did appeal the result. His appeal was dismissed though, and instead of maintaining his commitment to helping the people of Ontario, Nate decided that he would no longer pursue life in provincial politics. At the first sign of resistance, he backed off. For whatever reason, Erskine-Smith was not interested in standing up for his beliefs.

Now here is where your spidey senses should be going off, because Nate said he was resigning from his position as federal MP to run in provincial politics.

He didn’t end up going into provincial politics — but he still resigned. Why? Well, the obvious answer was that it wasn’t actually a mutual breakup at all. In actuality, he was dismissed by Carney and the federal Liberals.

Now to his credit, NES has in the past drifted from his party, taking the rare step of voting against the Liberals on many files over the course of his tenure as an MP. As Andrew Coyne points out in his book, The Crisis of Canadian Democracy, dissent is not something prime ministers and federal party leaders abide by. But still, why would someone abdicate a federal position and then a month later decide he wanted to be a city councillor?

My suspicion is that Nate wants to be in charge. He wants power, and when he realized he couldn’t influence the federal party, he sought the provincial Liberal Party leadership nomination. Being premier of Ontario was his backup plan.

When he realized he couldn’t influence the OLP, he went one step further down to his backup backup plan: running for city councillor in Beaches-East York.

Now, I think Nate is doing this because he thinks that the best path to power is to become the mayor of Toronto in 2030. If he sits on council, he will instantly become one of the most likely candidates to come in and be Olivia Chow’s progressive successor. NES’s affiliation has always been fluid — sliding between big-L Liberal and the New Democrats, whether philosophically or in his voting record.

Becoming the mayor makes sense here, he does have a path. Freed from the yoke of Carney and the Liberals, he is joining team Chow and the NDP. This is probably where he’s always belonged, and his next stop will be with the New Democrats — either provincially once Marit Stiles moves on, or in the next federal election under Avi Lewis.

So — the conclusion is simple: Nate Erskine-Smith clearly wants power and isn’t happy settling for less.

Similar to what’s happened with Mike Layton in University-Rosedale, he is elbowing out progressive candidates who have been exclusively committed to municipal politics.

They all deserve mention, but I want to conclude by talking about three of those candidates. Jennie Worden, James Dann, and Natalie Johnson.

Jennie Worden has run in Beaches-East York in the past. She finished second to incumbent councillor turned mayoral candidate Brad Bradford. She was, until yesterday, likely to be endorsed by Progress Toronto. They will now have to abandon Worden and all the work she has done for the progressive left.

James Dann is a city worker with 25 years' experience in parks and planning. He has a lifetime of commitment and a track record of service in Beaches-East York. Like each of these candidates, he has put his life on hold and campaigned to represent the ward municipally.

Natalie Johnson is a reporter with CTV News. Having spent twenty years covering city hall, she understands its machinations and is positioning herself as a common-sense candidate who wants the basics of the city and the ward to work. With Erskine-Smith in the race, she is likely the only one who has a chance to beat him.

I don’t live in the ward, but for me, it would be impossible to support Nate Erskine-Smith at this juncture. He is, in my estimation, parachuting into this race for personal gain.

At the end of the day, the choice will be made by the residents of Beaches-East York. It is up to them if they are comfortable being Nate Erskine-Smith’s “other woman.” Realistically, Beaches-East York — even if he says he loves you — you know deep down, he doesn’t.

Nate will move on when a better opportunity comes up.

The Nate Erskine-Smith timeline

Human beings have spent the better part of history attempting to break free from the yoke of hereditary rule. The majority of revolutions in history have been focused on taking power away from a few royal families. Emperors, dictators, and kings. Progressivism has been at the forefront of this fight.

The irony abounds then, when it comes to former Toronto city councillor Mike Layton. When asked about running for the federal NDP just 17 days ago, Mike Layton said: “My family and my work…remain my focus right now.”

Well, in a sense, today Layton put his money where his mouth was and backed that statement up: he’s looking to spend more time with his stepmother at City Hall come October 26th.

Layton is the son of late federal NDP leader Jack Layton. Jack’s widow, of course, is Toronto mayor Olivia Chow. So, this is a true family affair. Mike Layton has held public office in great part because of who his father was. He stepped aside four years ago, and now he wants to reclaim his job at the family office.

It may be lost on partisan supporters of Layton, but there is a strange hypocrisy at play here with the ideals that underpin modern Canadian progressivism. Nepotism and progressivism ought to be like oil and water. Revolutions happened exactly because power was centralized among a special few born into noble houses without merit.

Today, with fears about Trump undermining democracy in the United States, the “No Kings” protest has emerged as the buzzword and gold standard for progressive protest movements. Like anything American, this has overflowed across the border and has popped up in Canada with tremendous support from leftists.

The irony of “No Kings” (in case no one has paid with cash lately) is that Canada has an actual hereditary king. His name is Charles. He is on our new coins, and his mother Elizabeth is still on the $20 bill. New citizens swear an oath to him. Yes, in 2026. But that nepotism is at least ceremonial.

More practically speaking, the hereditary rule of fathers, mothers, and sons abounds within Canada, an extremely progressive place. All this despite it being antithetical to the very ideals that progressivism seems to espouse. It is extremely hard to square the circle that is diversity, equity, and inclusion when one matrimonial home and their progeny get to rule Toronto.

You can hardly support equality of opportunity or equality of outcome while also voting for someone because of who their dad was. This is a core contradiction that hits at the heart of the most basic tenets that drive the NDP and the left wing writ large.

This paradox extends far beyond the 416. Just this past spring, the NDP nominated Avi Lewis as their federal leader. Lewis, of course, is the son of Stephen Lewis, former leader of the provincial NDP. He is also the grandson of David Lewis, former leader of the federal NDP in the 1970s.

If the NDP is looking for the best person for the job, it is technically possible that Lewis, Layton, and Chow are the most fit. But what are the chances really that the prominent sons of prominent politicians are constantly being tapped for leadership?

This at some point needs to be acknowledged as rank favouritism and nepotism. Despite all the hullabaloo about the NDP convention’s equity cards and diversity statements, they still managed to pick a rich white guy who comes from a political dynasty and attended one of the most expensive private schools in the country as their avatar. The dissonance is difficult to comprehend.

In their defence, the NDP does not have a monopoly on the matter of nepotism. Of course, the most prominent example in recent years is that of recent Liberal prime minister, Justin Trudeau. Trudeau was a schoolteacher who just so happened to be the son of the most famous Canadian prime minister in living memory. The last Liberal prime minister before Trudeau was Paul Martin — who was himself the son of a federal cabinet minister (Paul Martin Senior). The result: in a country of 40 million people, Canadians are frequently governed and/or represented by the exact same power families. While there are valid criticisms that may be lobbed at Mark Carney, nepotism is not one.

While the trend is particularly noteworthy on the left, the Conservatives in Ontario do have their own dynasty — the Fords. Doug Sr. was an MPP, Doug Ford is, of course, the current premier, and his brother Rob was the mayor of Toronto.

They are all “conservatives,” yes, in theory — but remember that in Ontario they aren’t simply that — they are “Progressive Conservatives.”

While most egregious on the left, nepotism might be the one matter that Canadians seem to agree on. To be clear, Canadians say they don’t want nepotism, but they will vote for it. The more progressive they are, the more comfortable they are with hereditary rule.

The “Divine right of Kings: Ford, Layton, & Trudeau.”

Organizations like the NDP and Progress Toronto will tell you that “diversity is our strength” and then turn around and endorse Mike Layton.

Layton is the focus of this article, but he is just another in a long series of people who have no problem telling other people to “earn it” while conveniently ignoring the fact they’ve caught a special updraft. The result of this kind of nepotism is not victimless. Many would-be leaders are cut back in service of these pseudo-royal families. Layton’s decision is locking out several other hard-working Canadians from realistically participating in municipal politics. This time around, the political casualties will be many Toronto progressives. People who believed they could dare challenge the king for his throne.

Layton is running in University-Rosedale, Ward 11 in downtown Toronto. He is challenging incumbent Diane Saxe and eliminating young progressives including Diana Yoon and Gabe Blanc.

Yoon has a grassroots campaign, buoyed by years of service raising money for local housing. Yet progressive nepotism is ostensibly blocking her path, all for the sin of not being born into a political dynasty. The Toronto Sun reported that Layton asked her to step aside after Yoon had been campaigning for months — she registered officially to run on May 20th.

Gabe Blanc for his part has a strong air game — but his candidacy is essentially being told by the establishment progressives to go sit at the kids’ table. Progressive royalty like Layton needs to be accommodated. If gatekeeping young progressives from holding elected office is the price, then so be it.

Other progressive candidates include cycling advocate Keenan Courtis, community health advocate Dana Fisher, arts leader Terri Hawkes, and artist Alice Li. Each of them is worse off due to the Layton candidacy. On the one hand, that’s politics. On the other hand, it’s a cruel reality check for many who believed affecting change was simply an equation of effort and ideas.

On that matter we must acknowledge the role that the mayor plays here. We can reasonably infer that Olivia Chow endorses all of this — she would need to provide her blessing to her stepson before Layton jumped in. The NDP, CUPE, Progress Toronto, and all their supporters will have no choice but to fall in line with an endorsement.

With Yoon, Blanc, and co ostensibly dispatched, Layton is still not quite a shoo-in to win. To restore the Chow-Layton city hall paradigm, he is still going to have to face off against incumbent progressive Diane Saxe.

Saxe has now been put into an extremely tough position vis-à-vis her relationship with the mayor. She is a downtown progressive and has by all accounts been supportive of all Chow endeavours. Now her boss’s stepson has shown up to the family office and is threatening to take her job. This could have some wacky political implications, as Saxe may be forced to seek new allies and buddy up to mayoral challenger Brad Bradford. If Saxe is spurned enough to retaliate, Bradford would do well to accept the political refugee.

Bradford, funnily enough, is also the son of an MP. The key difference, though — and it is enough to exempt him from this trend — is that Brad Bradford was actually in politics before his mother was. After serving on council, he encouraged his mother, Valerie Bradford, to serve in public office. Eventually she became a Liberal MP for Kitchener-South Hespeler.

With regard to Toronto, the fallout from the Layton decision could provide real political risk for Olivia Chow. Supporters will brush off the friction in the name of the coalition, but Yoon, Blanc, and Saxe supporters have to be pretty unhappy with this development. They would be within their rights to ask: why is the mayor okay with her stepson entering the race at the eleventh hour and spoiling all the work these progressive campaigns have done over three months and more.

Ultimately, Canadians, but especially progressives, will have to reckon with a pretty basic question. Can progressives be progressive if they are constantly nominating the same few (usually white and male) political families? Can a progressive Canada be a democratic and equitable place while the sons and wives of politicians keep ascending to public office at the expense of grassroots candidates?

If Lewis, Chow, Trudeau, Ford, and now Layton are any indication, that reckoning does not seem to be coming any time soon.

In other words, until something changes, we can understand that when progressives say “No Kings” they really mean “No Kings... unless it’s my King.”

I have approximately 16,308 days left on Earth according to Statistics Canada’s average male life expectancy. I’ve lived 44% of the time I’m likely to get.

It’s a strange thing to see your life in terms of a number that only goes down.

I’m pretty healthy, a former competitive athlete, don’t really drink, and workout frequently, so the real number is hopefully higher, but doing the math is still a sobering experience.

While “what I wish I knew” articles like this often feel like narcissistic navel gazing, I tend to still like them for three specific reasons.

1. I spent a large part of my 20s throwing darts at the wall hoping something would stick. I wish I had enjoyed it more and felt better about myself in the process.

2. When you are starting out, you feel like everyone knows some secret you don’t, and the proxy for that is the size of their bank account relative to yours. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

3. I believe the value of experience is to use it for the benefit of others, and since I’ve done a lot of random and stupid stuff, maybe someone, somewhere can learn something from my mistakes.

Since I did one of these a few years ago, this is incremental and additive. Five things that have become more crystallized since.

What You Must Subject Yourself To Is a Function of How Much Cushion You Have

Whenever someone reaches out for career advice, I often ask how much of an emergency fund they have. This is a personal and intrusive question, but it’s the most important thing that matters for career optionality other than your skills and reputation.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t spend money and enjoy yourself when you are young. I believe in that more now than I ever did. What I’d suggest is you work as hard as you can to build a cushion of at least a year’s savings. Worried about getting fired? It will help you sleep. Want to try something new? You can. Something big breaks? You can cover it.

When I was 27, I spent a lot of money on a one-bedroom shoebox in midtown Toronto. I could easily have gotten something less nice and saved more. I wanted to be in a cool, new condo with a gym and near nice restaurants but worked in consulting, so I was never there. You don’t realize how much a choice like that shapes every decision that comes after it until you’ve made it. If you want optionality, keep your housing and transportation costs as low as you can stand until you’re ready to give it up.

Your Success Is the Inverse of Taking Injustices Personally

There have been many situations over the last 10 years where the work world has not been fun. Stuff happens at work. It’s a feature, not a bug. It’s going to happen to you more than once too.

Jeff Bezos once said you should aim to enjoy 50% of your job. I think I’m doing much better than that.

When difficult injustices happened to my younger self though, my first instinct was to leave. New company, new manager, new industry. In retrospect that wasn’t always the right call. When you’re subject to any form of professional injustice, take a step back and ask what you want from your current situation and whether it’s aligned to where you’re trying to go longer term. If it is, the question becomes how to make the situation work until enough data or a genuinely better opportunity arrives to make leaving an option you can’t ignore.

The part nobody tells you is what leaving costs. Every restart buys you a year or more of relearning who matters, how decisions really get made, and where the bodies are buried, along with questions about your ability to hold down a job. I’ve made this mistake and would rather you didn’t.

The Higher You Go, the Trade Between Growth, Comp and What You Give Up Can Converge

If you want to become more senior, make more money, and accumulate more professional relevance, you’re going to have to give up other parts of your life. You cannot have everything at once.

I work a lot more now than I did when I was younger. I’m more senior, I make more money, I manage people, I have a side hustle, and there is more pressure to perform. I’ve given up things I once enjoyed doing and I’ve been ok with that up to this point.

At some point in the climb though, the incremental increase in responsibility and the incremental increase in what you’re paid to carry it can start to separate. A lot of people don’t think about that. A VP I met with recently framed it in a way I keep coming back to: At every jump, you need to evaluate if that incremental increase in comp and responsibility is worth what you are willing to give for it. It’s completely fine to decide you don’t want to be a C-level or a VP or a Director. You just have to actually decide.

You Need to Become a Good and Accurate Self-Critic

One of the most important parts of being a leader is holding other people accountable for actions and results. The worst thing you can do is wait for someone else to make you accountable to yourself.

As you grow, you learn when criticism is warranted, when it isn’t, and how to take feedback productively. Whenever you screw something up, there will be things inside your control and things outside it. One of my old managers told me you should be the hardest critic of yourself, but only when there’s something to be critical about.

Have Goals Beyond Money and Reassess Them Often

I never wanted to be in business. I wanted to be a fighter pilot. After that didn’t work out, I had no real career goal other than getting to a certain annual salary number by a certain date. When it happened earlier than I thought, I got thrown for a loop. Psychologists call this the “Arrival Fallacy”. I call it Aubrey’s big f-ing existential wake-up call.

Money is important. Probably more important today than ever because everything is so freaking expensive. But money on its own is not as important as what you use it to do, and whether what you use it for actually matters to you. You are going to trade a lot to get it.

I still care a lot about how much I earn and expect to be paid appropriately for what I can do. However, with only 16,308 days left in my life account, I’m thinking a lot more about what the money is for and how I can use it.

A Bonus: Don’t Be a “Me vs Them” Person

Almost all of my career has been spent in cross-functional or advisory roles, which invariably means having to get things done through people who don’t have to listen to me. Younger Aubrey got frustrated when a colleague didn’t do what he wanted and started thinking about the relationship in adversarial terms.

Older Aubrey has come to realize being a “Me or Us vs Them” person is incredibly unproductive in every respect. It hurts you and it hurts others. Scott Galloway calls this insanity. I agree. It doesn’t matter if someone doesn’t agree with you or won’t do what you want initially. If you think they are your enemy, you will never get anywhere. That is true in business and it’s true in life. Start with a positive assumption. Be a good teammate. Assume everyone is doing their best until you have reason to believe otherwise.

Here’s to the next 16,308.

Aubrey Chapnick is a Toronto based professional with a background spanning Product Marketing leadership roles, financial writing, management consulting, sales and capital markets. He has over a decade of experience across fintech, banking, SaaS and holds an MBA from the Sauder School of Business at UBC and is a past Globe and mail business education contributor.

I watched the Ontario Liberal leadership race debate. Twice.

You probably don’t need to. And you likely haven’t. As of the publishing of this article, the YouTube stream has yet to hit 10,000 views. There’s something about Ontario politics that just does not seem to resonate with Ontarians.

It’s a sleepy industry, and the debate was sleepy. What’s frustrating as an observer who has met most of these candidates personally, I can attest to the fact that in reality, they are anything but sleepy. They are smart and passionate and energetic, but something about the presentation of this event did not hit home. The technical production of the debate has done the Ontario Liberal Party no favours.

The video was grainy. The questions were dull. The candidate interaction was missing. By my count, there were a grand total of 0 disagreements during the debate. Even the moderator, Tina Yazdani — who is an incredible reporter — was sleepy at times. She barely asked follow-up questions and never pushed back.

Ultimately, the party is not doing itself any favours with this kind of presentation. It was no wonder that the Globe and Mail’s report on the debate was just as dull. Their chief takeaway was that shockingly, the candidates who sit in the legislature think it’s important to sit in the legislature while the others don’t. During a sleepy news cycle, there was practically 0 coverage. There was no live audience, there was no candidate profiling. This is essentially a semi-final for who is going to run the Province of Ontario, the most indebted sub-sovereign state in the world, and just about no one is paying attention.

Yes, it’s early, and there’s a long way to go. But the central issue with provincial politics — and one that the Ontario Liberal Party can certainly think about attacking as an opportunity — is the lack of awareness and buy-in for this kind of event.

If a leadership debate happens in the woods, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

The party can perhaps be forgiven for not delivering a Netflix special. It is leaderless and relatively speaking still decimated, recovering from the Wynne cataclysm. So perhaps this production was (re)growing pains for an institution that ought to have a little more flair.

Who won? Nobody, really (I do have a winner listed below). Doug Ford, probably.

All that being said, There is real value in actually paying attention to the substance of this debate. Each candidate brings to the table a wealth of skills and traits that make them suited for public office.

The race is wide open.

So here’s my rundown of the five candidates, how they performed, and what they might need to do to next.

1. Lee Fairclough

On her best days, Fairclough has a Churchillian quality to her. She comes across as suited to be a wartime politician. She has the bona fides. She was considered a favourite early on in this race. She has a strong message and wants to frame her MPP experience alongside a strong healthcare record as what should carry her to the leadership.

She is the MPP for Etobicoke-Lakeshore and positioned herself as an expert on healthcare. Before government she was the president of St. Mary’s General Hospital in Kitchener senior vice-president at CAMH. She also now has over a year under her belt of understanding the inner workings of the legislature. But the takeaway from the debate is that she really despises Doug Ford.

While all candidates took various digs at the premier, Fairclough might have been the most guilty of focusing on the negatives of the premier as opposed to her own positive qualities. In a crowded field, being the anti-Ford candidate doesn’t resonate when that is table stakes to being leader of the OLP. That being said, the people who vote tend to be entrenched partisans, and they really hate Doug Ford — so perhaps this is intentional.

2. Eric Lombardi

Lombardi is the longest shot to win this race given his age and experience. But he does have the most thought-out platform and a real vision for change.

The policy wonks in the Liberal base and those across partisan lines have been paying close attention to Lombardi. This can be a strength or a weakness for the candidate. Supporters would suggest this opens up the Liberal tent, while detractors would suggest this compromises “Liberalness.”

Lombardi is attempting to position himself and the Liberal party writ-large as going through a renaissance for the future. He clearly believes that the Ontario Liberal Party needs to set itself apart and cannot just be an alternative to Doug Ford and the Conservatives. Rather, they need to have a positive purpose and build out a vision. Lombardi is taking a gamble that voters actually want substance and not just platitudes.

Paradoxically, to win over more die-hard Liberal voters, he might actually need to simplify the message a little. People reading this article are the 1%. They like to know exactly what the precise target for costing and policies around budget cuts is going to be. But that is not the masses. So Lombardi needs to distill his message into plainer language for certain broader audiences. “I have it all figured out, take my word for it and check receipts if you doubt” is different from “Here is exactly how I have figured it out.”

3. Navdeep Bains

Bains has an aura best likened to a wise, kind uncle. He has a calm demeanour and often referenced his heavy federal experience in his time on the mic.

Of all the candidates, Bains perhaps focused most on the economy. He, however, did not get into detail on any of his statements, something that was a criticism of his platform that had been released earlier on Monday — vague promises with no details, which in his defence is exactly what all three Ontario major parties presented in the last provincial election.

Despite his assurances that it was a misconception, Bains is likely the favourite as of today and has the most momentum. He has the longstanding connections to the federal Liberal party apparatus, and he has spent lots of time working in corporate Ontario, which means deep pocketbooks and strong personal relationships.

As a frontrunner, Bains is the most likely to receive criticism, so he will be happy with the sleepiness of the evening. I would like to see Bains opine on why he feels he can drop into provincial politics after being in the federal cabinet. There is also an exploration to be done on why he thinks Ontarians should be interested in returning to a Trudeau-era staple. The federal Liberals have been spending their time the last year and a half trying to distance themselves from anything related to Justin Trudeau. The status quo is great for Bains.

4. Stephanie Bowman

Stephanie Bowman is the MPP for Don Valley West. She spent the debate drawing on her track record of winning, having served in the legislature for four years. Bowman has the most provincial legislature experience, having been an MPP since the ancient year that was 2022.

That is rather indicative of Bowman’s appeal. She is the elder stateswoman within this group, and has more provincial legislature experience than the rest of the lot combined. I say that last part in jest, but it does go to show just how open this race can be.

Bowman’s best riffs were when she focused on the mechanisms of actually winning a provincial election. Bowman seems to best understand, or at least talks the most about, demonstrating tactical acumen when it comes to actually forming government. Whoever wins this race needs to make sure that this is top of mind for the party.

Bowman spoke about her economic background, having been an executive in the finance sector as well as sitting on the Bank of Canada board of governors. Bowman mentioned a tax cut, but did not elaborate.

Similarly to Fairclough, she needs to remember who she is debating — i.e., not Doug Ford.

5. Dylan Marando

If I had to declare a winner for this debate, I would ultimately tap Marando, simply because, as the kids say, “he’s got that riz.” (Riz is Gen Z slang for charisma, I am told.)

Marando pushed his back office experience in both the Prime Minister’s Office and the Premier’s Office. Marando’s narrative is an attempt to draw a parallel to Dalton McGuinty. He believes the path ahead is to emulate the rise of the McGuinty Liberals in the late nineties and early two-thousands. Rhetoric-wise, Marando did the best, and that’s why I suggest he “won” the debate. If that means anything at all.

Marando played some classical politician greatest hits. He did it with gusto, and he was by far the most entertaining person to listen to throughout the debate. He was, however, also guilty of the Doug Ford bashing, and the chief criticism is that his proposed policies were high level.

The Takeaways:

All the candidates should remember that thinking Doug is doing a bad job is table stakes. While a dig here and there makes sense, it’s not a particularly good use of mic time.

There were hardly twenty thousand people who voted in the prior Ontario Liberal leadership race. So do debates even really matter?

Moving forward, here’s what each of the candidates will need to do to give themselves the best shot at success.

Bains will need to stay the course and try and keep this race sleepy.

Fairclough and Bowman need to figure out how they’re going to differentiate themselves. Bowman’s entrance crowds Fairclough’s lane specifically. Competition over the narrative of “the woman who has the experience fighting Doug Ford, having sat in the legislature” means both need to communicate why they are uniquely situated to win.

Marando and Lombardi will need to learn from each other if they want to be successful moving forward. Both could be strong youthful figures of change — “echo politicians.” Marando could borrow from Lombardi’s substance. Lombardi could borrow from Marando’s charisma.

All that being said, nobody has taken control. No one has yet emerged as a clear favourite, and the OLP would do well to think about how to galvanize the race a little.

The final wrinkle that needs to be addressed is the friction that comes with the format of runoff voting. It is difficult to project who is everyone’s second-favourite choice. The format complicates the strategy tremendously, because attacking another candidate comes with the risk of alienating their supporters. Candidates kept their powder dry last night, and a hesitation to make enemies might be the real explanation for why the debate was a bit of a snooze.

Moving forward, candidates who feel they need a spark will need to point out and leverage their differences. The key will be to find the right avenues of attack, but do so in the most respectful way possible.

For politics nerds, this race is fascinating. But for the vast majority of the sixteen million or so Ontarians, there is not nearly enough energy for this race to permeate the membrane of the collective consciousness or the news cycle.

If that is going to happen, it means that the party needs to do a better job. It means that the candidates need to do a better job. It means the media needs to do a better job.

The OLP leadership is there for the taking, and with Doug Ford’s popularity plunging, the premiership is there for the taking. Will one of these five find a way to break through?

You can watch the debate yourself here:

“Internalized homophobia and transphobia refers to the involuntary belief in society’s negative perceptions of homosexuality, queerness, and the trans experience. This internal conflict can lead to feelings of shame, self-loathing, and a diminished sense of self-worth. It’s crucial to recognize that these feelings are a byproduct of societal prejudice and not a reflection of an individual’s worth or identity.” - The Trevor Project


Imagine, for a moment, that you’re back in high school. You have a friend, who we’ll call Joseph, who is hypermasculine.

Joseph is sixteen. Joseph is the kind of guy who thinks men should never wear pink. That’s “gay.” That’s a symbol of weakness. Joseph spends his free time working out. He plays football. Joseph bullies the nerds and the theatre kids. Joseph spits at effeminate guys. He calls them “faggots,” and he uses whatever tools he can to demonstrate just how manly he is.

You might think Joseph is just a homophobic kid. He’s a jerk. But why does he feel so strongly about masculinity? We know that bullies usually have a backstory. There is typically a reason why. This might be true for Joseph — he’s made up, after all. But maybe Joseph reminds you of someone you knew when you were sixteen.

This version of Joseph has a gay older brother. That older brother is estranged. Joseph had a front-row seat to the exiling of someone he loved because of an immutable part of their identity — homosexuality. Joseph learned this behaviour, his total disdain for homosexuality, effeminate men, and the colour pink, from his own personal experience. He has a clear model of what happens to gay men. They lose everything.

For Joseph, this experience functions as a potent warning: if you are gay, and people know it, there will be terrible consequences. Joseph loves his family. He loves his friends, and he loves playing on the football team. So he would absolutely want to distance himself from his older brother. He can only imagine the risk and threat to his world that would come from that association.

Joseph might have grown up going to church. He watched as his older brother — once a member of the church youth group — was cast out by the local minister. His church friends broke off communication. The clergy condemned him. His family was shamed and embarrassed. Joseph’s older brother is going to hell. There was something terribly wrong with him, and he is guilty. It’s no wonder that Joseph is homophobic. Perhaps this situation should have elicited more sympathy from Joseph. But he is the younger brother. He is learning this behaviour. We imagine Joseph, and we can see him, and his life and his behaviour make sense.

Now imagine that Joseph himself is in the closet.

Suddenly, all of his behaviours, all of his notions of what life is like for any gay man, take on a completely different meaning. His hateful behaviour and rhetoric are not just aggression — they are a defence mechanism.

Joseph is living in a context where he would lose everything that mattered to him if he was honest about who he really was. In fact, he is heavily incentivized to quash even the slightest hint of who the real Joseph is. He can never show weakness. If he is seen giving even an inch of sympathy to his brother, or to a trans kid in his school, that could be the string that unravels his entire facade. His life would be ruined. He can’t imagine anything else than the life he has — a life where he could self-actualize. Maybe his sexuality isn’t even that important to him. Lots of people don’t find love. That is saddening and angering, but Joseph can’t fathom that other reality, so he doubles and triples down. He can leave no doubt.

Joseph shows up to protests with his church against gay marriage. He repeats the rhetoric he heard from his parents, teachers, and friends. He actually sort of believes what he’s saying. Even though he knows it is rooted in lies, his homophobia is completely internalized. He believes that gay people are worth less than others. He has been beaten down by systemic homophobia from the society and circumstances around him. Joseph has a well-documented phenomenon called internalized homophobia.

That internalized prejudice has permeated his mind. It has trapped him in a self-destructive, self-loathing loop.

In other words, Joseph is a self-hating gay.

To be clear, Joseph does not necessarily hate himself. He likes himself — he just doesn’t like that part of his identity. He’d rather it not be there. He does hate anyone like him, though, because of what that piece of identity represents. It is a constant reminder that he is vulnerable, that he could lose his livelihood. The devastation that would arrive if he succumbed to his own nature is impossible to reckon with.

Joseph is a real person. He is many real people living throughout history. He is any number of American politicians who have voted against gay rights but were later found out to be gay, or caught with male escorts. He is the priest who came out at the age of 75 after a lifetime of denial. He is all the high school bullies who were afraid, and so lashed out as a self-defence mechanism.

All of these examples are easily recognized, and each of these people is both a victim and a villain. They are victims because of what society informed them about themselves. They are villains because they did not have the strength to overcome that. They allowed systemic homophobia to take over, and they acted accordingly.

To explain this behaviour, we can break the motivations down into three primary emotions — fear, shame, and guilt — each of which fits within an umbrella of a fourth trait: insecurity.

Fear is a chief motivator — fear of what might happen if a person is outed. Often, like in Joseph’s case, this fear is entirely justified.

Then there is the immense shame that comes from coming to terms with one’s own identity. This is the cycle: you hold a negative preconception of who a person or a subset of people are, and then you realize you’re part of that subset. There is nothing more shameful than understanding your own contribution to some greater evil. You are ashamed of spiting your God or your community.

Finally, there is tremendous guilt, especially after turning against a fellow homosexual within the community. Self-preservation sometimes requires sacrifice. Guilt comes after someone with internalized homophobia lashes out at another — they join the angry mob to hide and blend in with the majority. This leads to profound guilt.

Each of these is wrapped in insecurity. Fear, shame, and guilt all share one fundamental quality: they are antithetical to the safety almost all humans seek. When cognitive dissonance runs that deep, we can pity and sympathize with these people. We can also admit that their behaviour is a problem, harmful to the gay community. At some point, they can no longer excuse themselves and play the victim. Eventually, they need to be accountable for their actions.

This gay man is insecure about his identity, and has become self-hating.

This phenomenon is well documented. It is talked about. There are ample resources online. There are organizations like the Trevor Project and the Rainbow Project. There are guides, resources, and support groups, all readily available to those reckoning with this brand of self-loathing.

This condition translates easily onto other identities within the LGBTQ+ community. The mechanism and behaviour are essentially the same for many lesbians and trans people. We can see it translated into internalized racism — the same trajectory, but for people of colour, those who either can or cannot hide their ethnicities, heritages, or phenotypes. Victims of sexual assault feel these same feelings and exhibit these same behaviours. It is all well documented, a fundamental part of equity initiatives.

Perhaps most tragically, there is clear data showing that people with these internalized prejudices tend to live with elevated rates of mental health problems, anxiety, and depression. Those mental health issues only exacerbate the problem further — leading to downward spirals, and self-reinforcement.

We know there is systemic homophobia. It is taken for granted in western society. We know that solving it is a fundamental tenet of coalitions on the left. We know that perpetuating it is explicit among certain religious coalitions on the right.

We also know that, similar to systemic homophobia, systemic Judeophobia exists. In Parts 2 and 3 of this series, we demonstrated strong, irrefutable evidence of systemic prejudice against Jews, Judaism, Israel, and Israelis, both historically and in the modern context.

So we can take Joseph, the gay man who hates gay people for legitimate reasons — all baked in fear, shame, guilt, and insecurity — and graft that onto the Jewish experience, especially around Israel.

In the exact same way that the homosexual living with internalized homophobia picked up emotional baggage through childhood, through peer groups, through social and community groups, through religion — we can find Jews who feel the exact same way our poor high school bully felt.

For one of many potential reasons, these Jews have absorbed and internalized systemic Judeophobia. They have become “self-hating.”

In the next parts of this series, we will examine the mechanisms of insertion. Through real-life scenarios and anecdotes, we will see how internalized Judeophobia enters a person’s mind and becomes part of their identity.

Broadly, these experiences can be broken down into two categories: pushes and pulls.

Pushes are incentive structures that push people away from their Jewish identity — situations, emotions, and circumstances that they are leaving, running from, or trying to dissociate from. Any of them can lead to the internalization of prejudice.

Pulls, on the other hand, are the incentive structures that actively attract a Jew toward another identity. The pulls leave the Jewish person with fool’s gold — choices that, as we demonstrated in Parts 4, 5, and 6, are part of the asymptote of assimilation.

In other words, there are carrots and sticks.

It is vital to examine these insertion mechanisms — to understand the logical pathways, to witness the scenarios by which Jews end up imbibing self-destructive thinking and behaviour into their psyche.

Each individual’s case is different, but just as Jewish identity can be pinned down, there are archetypes. There are familiar beats that graft onto friends, children, celebrities, political figures, and others. These are real people you know. How they arrived at internalized Judeophobia will be explored in the parts that follow.

“This is the paradox. In their own land, the place where every other nation is to some degree united, Jews were split beyond repair. In dispersion, where every other nation has assimilated and disappeared, they remained distinctive and, in essentials at least, united. There is something surpassingly strange about Jewish peoplehood.” - Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

In Part V of this series we looked at key historical examples of failed attempts at assimilation. That predominant historical trail for better or for worse focuses on Ashkenazi Jews and their experience. Ashkenazi Jews typically hail from Eastern Europe, places like Russia, Poland and Germany. In a kaleidoscope of Europeans, they look like they are white. We saw how Ashkenazi Jews have been subject to Judeophobia in all its different manifestations: antisemitism, anti-Zionsm, etc.

Jewish history magnifies Ashkenazi experience due to several understandable reasons and coincidences of history. Ashkenazi Jews are the most documented. They happened to be living on the main stage of history for the greater part of the last thousand years. Their populations are the forefathers of western diaspora judaism, and they happen to have lived in societies with better historical record keeping. They also were the primary target for the Holocaust, which grants them eternal status in the Jewish collective memory.

Except in some specific Sephardic circumstances, the diaspora was heavily Ashkenazi. This remains so but was especially so until the 1950s and 60s in the diaspora. That is the moment when many Sephardic Jews fled North Africa for the west, as well as when Mizrahi Jews entered the equation. Sephardic Jews have roots in places like Toronto and Montreal, but are, for the most part, white presenting. Mizrahi Jews on the other hand, are not. They still constitute a small proportion of the population, but their existence throws a wrench in Jewish identity as well as provides a boondoggling effect on the primary attitudes and assumptions about western Jews.

Mizrahi Jews are Jews from the Middle East. They lived for two thousand years in modern places like Iraq, Iran, Egypt, and Syria. Each of these countries until relatively recently had significant Jewish populations. Of course, there were a small number of Mizrahi Jews living in what is now Israel as well. After the establishment of the state of Israel, Mizrahi Jews either fled or were forced out of their countries of origin. Most relocated to Israel. Some came to Canada and the United States.

Interestingly, the global reunification of all Jews was supercharged through the creation of Israel. That destination became the ground where there was convergence of the separate Jewish sub ethnicities.These groups were able to blend via giving up aspects of their individual cultural quirks but moved the zeitgeist of Jewish peoplehood into something new. Israel acted as a scaffold by which they could create common ground.

In the diaspora, as far as assimilation is concerned, Mizrahi Jews are another short leap away from assimilation. Mizrahis have much darker skin tones. They often have strong accents, especially those who have arrived recently from the Middle East. This provides a terminus for assimilation, as they cannot be white presenting and say “Belgian”, “Canadian”, “American”, etc.

In the modern context, Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews have the unique privilege of picking up all the challenges of not being white-presenting. We would expect this to offer express entry to the coalitions of intersectionality. In reality, Mizrahi & Sephardic Jews have yet to have been permitted access to these alliances.

Especially so if they refuse to recant any allegiance to Israel. Modern Mizrahi Jews are typically emigres from Israel - and their national heritage (broad political allegiance) tends to prohibit them from getting inside the door. They for the most part have left Israel as they are concerned about matters of safety. They are overwhelmingly liberal. The irony that the spaces they would naturally navigate to if not for their country of origin is drastic.

It needs to be stated that the majority of cases for diaspora Jews are still “white” or Ashkenazi. It is why the western caricature of a Jew is as a white person, an oppressor in the Middle East, and also why the ethnic facts on the ground in Israel are so damning to the narrative of Israel as a racist enterprise.

Under most circumstances, with enough effort, white Jews can blend in. Many Ashkenazi Jews could historically pass in some circumstances as white by changing names, or forgoing religious observance. There was perhaps a belief that hostility was contingent on visibility rather than identity.

This position was the perch where many diaspora Jews thought they were comfortable sitting prior to 2023. This was the illusion of assimilation. After October 7th, there came the phenomenon of October 8th Jews. October 8th Jews exist because they were forced to pick. Jews could continue on their slow crawl towards the asymptote of assimilation, so long as they passed the next purity test.

That purity test is an acceptance that Ashkenazi Jewish Whiteness was a driver of oppression. For Mizrahi Jews, that option isn’t possible. They can’t be called oppressors, they aren’t white. They can’t be called victims, they are Israeli. This short circuits the entire philosophy and topples the house of cards of intersectionality. Their very existence ought to dispel and expose the hypocrisy and gaping holes in the leftist coalitions. Mizrahi Jews have been forced out of their countries of origin. They have brown skin. They have strong accents. They tend to have left Israel because they disagree with the right-wing nature or religious aspects of their government. They are a minority in every sense of the word, and yet they are still not permitted.

This demonstrates the critical flaw, and a most tragic outcome. You have left leaning people of colour from the Middle East fleeing a war zone, and being denied access to support and succor from coalitions of the left. The egress is denied. Even the Jews that don’t appear Jewish in any way are unable to assimilate. Some ancient property within them, their experience of living a certain way omits them.

Which leaves one final group of Jews to examine – Jews by choice i.e., recent converts. These converts are perhaps the most brave and committed Jewish population there is. They have adopted the identity. They have done so for reasons of faith, love, commitment, or feeling. Modern experience shows us that converts are never allowed to join leftist coalitions. This is the same as the historical case. Converts to Judaism were considered blood traitors by the Nazis. It is something of a one-way street. It is counter intuitive though. It would stand to reason that if you weren’t Jewish 5 years ago, you could probably give that up now. But even those who have gone on the lengthy journey to join the Jewish tribe and have now somehow decided that it was just a phase for whatever reason, can never have been “not Jewish.” When you convert, it’s a bit like the Hotel California. You can check out anytime you want, but you can never leave.

Perhaps this is why the rabbis made it so difficult to become Jewish. There is a responsibility and a cost that comes with this. It is nearly impossible to “undo”. Converting to Judaism means picking up relatively few friends compared to many, many enemies. Suddenly that force of nature that is Judeophobia sets its target on the convert. It is unrelenting and constantly needs pushing back. There can be no uncrossing the bridge.

So what does all of this context around assimilation actually teach us about those who have internalized Judeophobia, i.e. - self-hating Jews? The fundamental point is that all of these verticals of Jewish identity – ethnic differences, religious observance, cultural, political, and values based aspects – combine into something immutable, greater than the whole, and nearly impossible to shed. That is the concept of Jewish peoplehood. That is the next core evolution in how to think about Jews. Not as a religious group, but as a “people”.

Being part of that “peoplehood” is the binary - it is in or it is out. It is also the battleground upon which “self-hating” Jews have to reckon with their internalized Judeophobia. The vastness of identity within the Jewish people, and those who are irrevocably tied to it, comes with clear downsides. We see this clearly with conversion candidates. Yet they still cross the threshold and become part of the peoplehood. Many Jews, if given a time machine, would not choose to be part of the peoplehood. So, when they have Jewish baked into their identity, it can be a source of resentment. Because to be Jewish is to be inexorably linked to history. It means carrying the weight of that historical memory. This is the first kernel of how Judeophobia becomes internalized. It is the path to self-hating. At last we will come to explore those mechanisms more broadly in the next part of this series.

The “how” though, is dependent on the context of “why”. Assimilation is impossible because of the binary of Jewish peoplehood. Rather than being a checklist, or a menu of options you can select from as the times suit you, it is an entrenched feature. This comes from the outside. History’s starkest proof is this: the Nazis, not the Jews, decided who was Jewish. The Nuremberg Laws consulted ancestry. A convert to Christianity, a secular socialist, an assimilated war veteran, all were classified by their genealogy. The same fact, unfortunately, still is present today. We see it whenever a Jewish institution is vandalized.

We saw that all too well with the tragedy committed by Hamas on October 7th. Among the victims in 2023 were peace-loving ravers and kibbutzniks who drove sick and wounded Gazans to Israeli hospitals. They were dedicated peace activists, some of the most politically dovish people in Israel, all murdered. Not to mention their support workers and English teachers, and even many Arab Israelis, were massacred. Their beliefs and choices did not function as an exemption.

Hamas, the Nazis, the Spanish, the Soviets, none of them ever really saw the nuance. They just saw an opportunity to paint an enemy for personal gain and a people that needed to be extinguished. Their hatred gave their movement a common enemy. A common enemy is a powerful uniting force.

There is no amount of assimilation or blending in that can prevent the identity from being assigned to Jews from the outside. It always ends up this way. The only path to control Jewish identity therefore is to claim it, with pride and with a positive purpose. Only with a deliberate commitment to making Jewishness fit into a Jew’s individual life, can Jews ever truly be part of the fabric of Western society. The Jewish identity is not a monolith, but it does have a soul, a zeitgeist that moves and morphs slowly through history. Today, that is Jewish peoplehood. A global club that can’t be quit. The antithesis to Jewish peoplehood is Systemic Judeophobia. When this prejudice and hate get internalized, we see the emergence of the self-hating Jew.

After Canada went out of the World Cup, we wrote about the success that was 2026. Now that the dust has settled, we can look forward, and Canadians can begin to set their sights on improving the association during the next cycle. Ultimately, that needs to start with becoming a top team in the Western Hemisphere. Canada can worry about getting lucky in a World Cup against European opposition once they’ve proven they can contest finals in the smaller competitions, the Gold Cups, and the Nations League.

Canada’s path to improvement needs to be thorough. The transformation needs to be both on the domestic and international levels. It needs to run from the small, to the deep foundational. All of it is important, and the task that Kevin Blue and the association have before them is massive. They cannot boil the ocean, but they can start where they are. So here is where I would look first:

Is Anybody Watching?

The simplest gap to close is to actually get Canadian soccer games on television for fans to consume. For free.

Did you know that in between matchdays at the World Cup there were eight teams playing in the quarter finals of the Canadian Championship? Of course you didn’t. That’s because the game wasn’t viewable on any sports channel that anyone actually has.

When the Major League Baseball schedule breaks for the All-Star in mid-July, there is nothing on the sports calendar in North America. Football, Hockey, Basketball, Baseball - it’s all dormant. For three precious days, men of all ages actually have to talk to their wives in the evening. This is one of several golden opportunities for soccer to take centre stage in living rooms, on phones, and on laptop screens across the country.

The inverse of this, the restrictive nature of the viewing experience, is the single greatest own-goal for Canada Soccer right now. Instead of making those games free for anyone to watch, they lock them behind a subscription service called OneSoccer. Only the most die hard fans are even aware of OneSoccer’s existence. Even the waitstaff at many pubs couldn’t tell you what it was.

When the local sports bar doesn’t carry the games, there is a major problem. To go back to July, for budding fans who might have the footy bug, World Cup fever was at its height. There were Canadian teams playing meaningful games. But if a soccer team scores a goal in Halifax, and no one is watching the game on TV – do any fans make a sound? No.

For whatever reason, the big two broadcasters in Canada, TSN and Sportsnet, do not want to pay for the rights for these games. Perhaps they feel it is too expensive. Perhaps soccer just isn’t a vertical they want to pursue. They would likely say they don’t have the games because no one is going to watch. Well, no one is watching because it isn’t on TV. Chicken, meet Egg.

On the flip side, the Canadian Soccer Association feels like they have a product worth paying for. They want to be compensated for that entertainment.

Regardless of why they lock it down though, they are sacrificing the long-term growth of the game for the short-term financial gains. Rights deals can be lucrative, but realistically, how much can they be making on Leg 1 of Athletico Ottawa vs FC Supra de Quebec? How many young fans, especially in that part of the country might have tuned in and been inspired to follow the team after watching Eustaquio score for Canada?

What’s particularly jarring is that this extends out beyond just this tournament. It extends to all the professional clubs. Watching CPL, Canada Premier League, is difficult to do. For fans of MLS teams – the highest professional division played in this country – they have it even worse.

TFC, Vancouver Whitecaps and CF Montreal are all locked behind another separate subscription service. If you want to watch MLS you need to subscribe to Apple TV. There is no other way to access these clubs. It is a nonsensical broadcasting arrangement, one which the clubs themselves likely don’t love. Between all the competitions that might happen over the course of a year, to watch Whitecaps or CF Montreal, you need three separate subscriptions: Apple TV, OneSoccer, and TSN. That works out to something like $50 or $60 a month. Why would anyone pay that when a Fubo subscription – where you get the (arguably) best league in the world, the EPL – is $15 a month? Growing the game in Canada can only happen once fans are exposed to the game. Otherwise, there is no ladder for the fan to start climbing. So, they simply never get on that ladder. They do something else that they can access. It is obvious, but that is the essence of accessibility: Access.

Canada Soccer needs to make the game free, or as free as possible for everyone and anyone to consume. That will drive interest.

This gets even worse because this trend continues into how Canada broadcasts and advertises its national team’s games. The sad reality is that most Canadians only become aware of the national team in the lead-up to the World Cup. They treat it sort of like the Olympics – “Oh, that’s something I pay attention to for fun once every four years.”

But Canada Soccer is not the Olympic men’s hockey team – Canada plays games throughout the year, every year. The World Cup is simply the crown jewel of a rich tapestry of international play. But to look back at 2025, the exact moment that Canadians should have been building their peak hype and awareness, a year before hosting the World Cup – TSN only carried one of six Canada Soccer matches. Only two of those games were even played in Canada.

Again, Chicken, meet Egg.

How will anyone care, if they don’t already, and you don’t make it easy for them? Without access, it won’t even occur to most people that they could care. Beyond access, it is an awareness problem.

Canada Soccer needs to stop gating itself. It needs to be as welcoming as possible for new fans. As it stands, they are asking for people to pay a premium for something that they don’t even know exists. In countries like Portugal, any national team match is on RTP (their version of the CBC). The national team is a point of national pride, and it’s a big reason why soccer is the most popular sport in Portugal. Portugal only has 10 million people in it, but they are considered contenders at every tournament they enter. They know something about how to promote their game and incentivize fans to care. “Caring” leads more people into the ecosystem. Those are seeds that need to be planted.

What’s more, in the age of YouTube, with freemium everywhere – this is so glaringly obvious. There lies another glaring opportunity: with the departure of Hockey Night in Canada as a CBC mainstay, this kind of product is exactly what needs to fill the void on Saturday nights. There is tremendous potential here. Small operations, like Canada Soccer, the Canadian Premier League, and the PWHL, should be all over this primetime slot – begging to give their product away to fans. It’s now $350 for a year to watch the NHL on Sportsnet+. Canada Premier League Side Halifax Wanderers has an entire season’s worth of tickets for that price. The CBC and CBC Gem are still free for Canadians. Make it happen.

Beyond CONCACAF and the Gold Cup

One particular set of free games that need to exist are the Nations League games, as well as the Gold Cup. Canada already qualifies for these competitions every year. If they want the program to be competitive globally, they need to start playing more regular competitive matches against competitive programs. So, Canada Soccer needs to do whatever it takes to get a regular spot at the Copa America. The Copa, as currently constructed, has sixteen teams. There are only ten countries in South America. Canada (as well as Mexico and the USA) should become permanent parts of Copa America until further notice.

The Copa is the third biggest tournament in the world. Becoming a mainstay of it will immediately give Canada some legitimacy as a footballing nation, especially if they can have some legitimate success. Running up against Guatemala and Haiti is not going to do that for them. The best players oftentimes don’t play during Nations League or the Gold Cup, because there is no cachet. Canada would field its best possible side at the Copa.

Canada was able to attend the 2024 version ahead of hosting the 2026 World Cup. Moving forward, competitive Canada games against tough competition like Uruguay and Argentina are far more valuable than friendlies against Tunisia and Iceland.

Making a Rivalry Between Big Brother & Little Brother

In addition to the Copa, there is an obvious and golden opportunity available for Canada Soccer – a new initiative with their rivals to the south.

The proposal would be to start a yearly competition with the US — you can call it the 49th Parallel, and play it in border towns like Detroit. Or you can always host it in the fall and battle over whose Thanksgiving is the correct one. Call it the “Turkey Bowl”, or “la coupe Dinde”. No matter, Canada should be going toe to toe with the Americans in a competition with hardware on the line. Every year.

Fans respond well to staples, patterns, and flagship events. A “friendly” with the Americans, an actual trophy on the line, would do wonders for Canadian pride, and give some real stakes to the competition. These “derbies” are the bread and butter of rivalries within towns in Europe. Canada and the US should establish this new tradition and repeat it every year. This could be reworked or extended to include Mexico as well. Maybe they can leverage soccer as a path to free trade.

Major League Soccer and the CPL

While Canada needs to be ramping up its competition on the international level with the Americans, many have started to believe there is an inevitable breakup on the way between Canada and MLS. This is a controversial opinion, and would be difficult to do, but it is likely for the best. Major League Soccer is moving to a winter schedule – Toronto and Montreal can’t realistically host home games in the winter. Vancouver is on its way to getting sold. There is tremendous smoke around the rumours of Las Vegas. The writing is on the wall.

20 years ago, when Canadian teams joined MLS, the Canadian Premier League didn’t exist. It does now. So here is a natural receiving ground for these clubs.

TFC, CF Montreal, and Whitecaps FC should leave MLS and join the CPL.

There’s a wonderful, in-depth article on Substack by Paul Beirne explaining why this is a win for all parties — a must-read for soccer fans.

Paul covers many angles about that debate. One he doesn’t touch on, however, is that MLS suffers from the North American sports parity disease.

European league football thrives in part because of exceptionalism. The whole system of player transaction and movement is designed to move talent to the biggest clubs. For Canada, an analogue would be moving players from places like Winnipeg, Quebec City, and Brampton, to the bigger clubs like Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto. From there, promising young players go international. The club system is superior. It is an ecosystem that creates a niche for all types of players. It is an escalator up and down. There are pathways for teenaged players to come up via grassroots initiatives, mature into talent, and climb the ladder. Then, when they are winding down their careers, oftentimes these legends return home, finishing out their final playing days with nostalgia. They leverage this into real ties to the local clubs and communities, jobs in the sport, ambassadorships, and mentorship for the next generation.

Parity, despite what Gary Bettman might think, is not a desirable outcome. It certainly isn’t the way to grow your league into a mainstay. Again, to use Portugal as an example: In any given year, there are realistically only three teams that can win the league title. Counterintuitively to the North American mindset, this is actually healthy.

This reality removes the fan’s obsession with unattainable championships. In the NHL, there are 32 teams but only one can go home happy. That is sometimes referred to as “ring culture”. Ring culture leads to load management and no-stakes regular seasons. That’s why the NBA tried to invent the in-season tournament.

In Europe, domestic teams will play in multiple competitions. They will have opportunities for relegation and promotion. There are regional trophies, and there are massive rivalries because there are plenty of matches with actual stakes.

Portugal punches way above its weight in international competition. They are seen as global giants, but their population is a quarter of the size of Spain and Argentina. They are successful because their system incentivizes the right culture, structure, and mindset. Canada can do the same: it can set the culture.

The Long Game – Culture

Culture is what needs to be the driving goal for Canada Soccer. The structural solutions exist. CPL can be the only Canadian league. TFC doesn’t have to be locked behind Apple TV. As Sportsnet continues to try and paywall gate the NHL away from the masses, there is a massive opportunity for smaller enterprises to fill the gaps. That is the opening that comes with consolidation. You need the right culture to act as a counter (counterculture) to the mainstream. That’s how Pepsi gets in line with Coke.

Soccer clubs in Canada have the ability to capitalize on another huge driver behind the sport’s success: community. The big four sports (Football, Hockey, Basketball, Baseball) just don’t have the institutional habits of building this kind of local infrastructure. There are not really any established academies except for in soccer, because any recruits just end up in a general draft. There are no junior programs. Those programs provide meeting grounds, and they can provide a vector to build strong communities.

When the community is strong, the participation and its success follow organically. Another benefit of shedding ring culture’s obsession with championships is that the primary objective of fandom changes. A feeling of belonging becomes the main event – not just wins and losses or playoff runs.

The North American sports franchise model cannot work as constituted for soccer in Canada. The fan culture and infrastructure just doesn’t exist yet. It is like hockey in Arizona, or baseball in Montreal. Once a team is out of its competitive cycle, the fan support completely dwindles, and understandably so: the leagues only incentivize winning.

Canada Soccer, and Canadian Soccer as a movement, has the opportunity to think differently. It can reimagine what the culture of the sport is in this country. It can go a different way. It can make itself accessible.

Canada is a country of immigrants. We have some of the most amazing talent, sourced from all over the world. Our nation has some of the greatest wealth. We could be supreme in soccer. But in order to ever really be a global giant, we will need to completely transform the way we look at the sport. Canada Soccer can take advantage of this confluence of conditions. They can make the game accessible for everyone. They can build the main events. They can change the culture. It’s up to us where we go from here.

The FIFA World Cup is going to 64 teams. UEFA revolutions aside, the expansion is inevitable at this point. Assuming that ship has sailed, we can focus on what the expansion to 48 brought, and hope to avoid repeating those same mistakes. With a diluted field, the first round of the World Cup in 2026, the group stages, was essentially meaningless. This is the most glaring issue, and it only gets worse with an expansion. Just under three quarters of the games were low stakes.

So, with the impending further expansion, FIFA needs a format that could fix some of the most common concerns. Not one that exacerbates them.

That starts with addressing the low stakes nature of the group stage. While many attribute the blunting of tension to the existence of third-place finishers (more on that below), the true root cause was the drastic delta of quality between groupmates. Revisiting the schedule, only a handful of the games were contested between top sides. There were Morocco-Brazil, France-Norway, and perhaps England-Croatia. With twelve groups, there are simply not enough good teams to make it all interesting.

With that delta, the format saw an unprecedented rise in blowouts. Canada crushed Qatar, Germany beat up on Curaçao. There were 18 group stage games decided by three or more goals. There were only 5 in 2022, and 8 in 2018. FIFA loves to flaunt Cabo Verde as a success, but they were the exception, not the rule. With more blowouts set as the expectation, many more of these games become uninteresting. Many fans will set their alarms for the round of 32. We can only imagine the carnage for minnows in an even further expanded field.

Speaking of minnows, the expanded format missed the mark on qualification. The confederations’ allocations were clearly mismanaged. Most of all, it was unfair to Europe. 6 of the 8 quarterfinalists were European, which is a clear indicator that they deserve more slots (if you weren’t already convinced). Federations like Denmark and Italy missed out, while Jordan, Curaçao, and New Zealand all made it in. There are flaws in UEFA’s formatting which I spoke about here. This injustice can be remedied by allocating an outsized percentage of the 16 new slots to Europe.

A further problem with the qualification format is that for some teams, luck of the draw made the fixtures academic. A team like Morocco’s toughest competition was the country of Niger (not Nigeria). New Zealand had to fend off mighty New Caledonia. This means that for a lot of teams, qualification becomes a snooze. Those are the games where tough competition might improve federations. Pressure makes diamonds, after all. An expanded format with rejigged allocations can fix this issue.

To dwell further for a moment on those low-ranking teams, don’t they want more than just being there? While qualifying for the World Cup is an accomplishment, and should be celebrated, one might suspect that having competitive matches would be better for everyone involved. But for the minnows that are Jordan, Uzbekistan, and Iraq (pay no attention to the AFC trend), it must have been a bit like eating something that’s past its best-before date.

This is a separate argument to that of qualification, but it is all related. Those minnows getting blown out have the extra effect of compromising the fairness as it pertains to the third-place finishers. I.e., Sweden had the good fortune of playing against Tunisia, and that disparity essentially cost a country like South Korea a third-place qualification for the next round and a chance to go on a run.

More importantly perhaps, this made the tournament extremely hard to follow. The randomness of the third-place teams, the ambiguity of who might play who, the fact that some first-place finishers got to play against third-place teams but not others, it was all a mess. For fully invested fans, there were simply too many permutations to follow along, and that made a lot of games irrelevant to watch. It was even problematic for gamblers, as predictions became too hard to make with the bracket so ambiguous.

Each of these issues share the same core problem: the format of the tournament. I contend that FIFA has an opportunity to solve all of these issues when they invariably go to 64 teams. It just requires a bit of creative thinking, and perhaps most problematically, that not all World Cup qualifiers ought to be treated equally.

The solution I’m proposing with the 64-team tournament is to split the World Cup into two divisions — 32 teams in an A division and 32 teams in a B division. The As consist of roughly the top 32 qualifiers, and the Bs, the rest of the field. This format is inspired by precedent. It pulls from the logic of the page playoff system, wherein the first-place team plays the second-place team, and the winner of that goes to the final.

It also borrows from Olympic women’s hockey, wherein all of the favourites were in a division where they were playing for seeding, and then the teams that were clearly second-best in a different tier — like Italy, the hosts — got to play against teams that they might have a chance to win against. Ultimately, this makes the games more competitive, more compelling, and it still leaves every team with a chance to go on a run and win the whole thing.

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Qualification can remain up to the individual federations, but the best-performing teams in qualification will be placed in the A division. That top 32 is a rough simulacrum of the World Cup prior to 2026 — 32 teams with approximately the same confederation allocation.

Each of those groups plays off against each other as per usual, but the big difference is the top three teams of every single “A” group move on to the round of 32. This results in the top 32 teams in the world playing against each other for 24 knockout spots. The fourth-place teams are eliminated at the end of the group stage.

In the B division, it’s also eight groups of four, reaching 32 teams, but these are the bottom 32 ranked teams in the World Cup. This is where you see Curaçaos, New Zealand, Uzbekistans, etc. For each group, only the group winner moves on to the knockout stage.

Top finishers in A division groups will play against the top finishers in B division groups. The rest of the round of 32 comprises 2nd- and 3rd-place finishers from groups in the A division.

The key here is that any team can in theory go on a Cinderella run and win the whole thing.

This format solves each major concern discussed earlier. Every group stage match becomes meaningful. Seeding matters in the A division, getting 3 points matters in the B division. While you might find a matchday 3 fixture that doesn’t have competitive relevance, this is a problem that already exists for minnows. Even so, in that case, where it’s Tonga against Armenia, both teams would now have a realistic chance of getting their first World Cup win or their first World Cup goals. These are meaningful consolation prizes that aren’t available to the minnows in a straight 4-pot format.

By its very nature, and perhaps most importantly, the delta in quality between teams will be much lower. The matches will all be competitive. Curaçao doesn’t have to play Germany anymore. They get to play against teams at their own skill level.

More teams means more slots, but FIFA will need to allocate them properly. Giving more slots to Europe means justice from a competition perspective. The two-tier format also means that qualification becomes a lot more interesting. Suddenly nations need to play for seeding. As it stands in South America, you only have to be in the top six or seven to qualify, whereas in this new qualification format, perhaps only the best four or five teams will make it to the top tranche, which will incentivize them to win more. This prevents qualified teams from resting on their laurels, and allows for a longer, more significant qualifying schedule.

Notably, this would be a win for everyone in the chain, which means FIFA might actually go for it. It’s a win for FIFA. Gianni Infantino gets more games. More games means more money. Hooray for FIFA. It’s a win for all the confederations because it adds more slots in qualifying. It is a win for every country because now qualifying is more forgiving for tougher confederations, and minnows will have a chance to actually win games and pursue more than simply being at the tournament.

Most importantly, it is good for fans because we get to watch games that matter.

There is no “perfect” format, this one will have some fixtures that don’t matter. There will still be blowouts. FIFA will always have its warts. But there are side benefits to this as well. You can ensure the A division games are played in the bigger, more expensive stadiums. The smaller matches might be made more affordable (look, we can dream).

FIFA is going to FIFA, they can’t turn down money - so they will almost certainly go with a 64-team format that has a straight 16 groups of 4. But maybe, just maybe, they can adopt this format and make the competition competitive again.

To demonstrate the format for those who prefer to see it, I spent some time a few weeks back building a simulator. It includes everything from qualification all the way to the end.

You can check it out here: https://www.worldcup64.com/

https://www.worldcup64.com/

“History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes” - Mark Twain

While assimilation is desirable for many Jews, there is two thousand years of historic evidence that proves that eventually, Judeophobia gets in the way of true assimilation. The only plausible way it works is on long enough timelines. You need generations of populations attempting to assimilate, either by choice or by force. Even then, the exercise of assimilation is wrought with perils, and even the most committed are vulnerable to the whims of the dominant local demographic populations.

The proof cases are everywhere. One of the best examples is the reform movement, inspired by adopting enlightenment values, it was an attempt to blend Jewish life with modernity. One of its goals was a promise of the eventual elimination of prejudice against Jews, or Judeophobia. A valiant goal, but futile.

Indeed, Reform Judaism came about in an era where for the first time in history, religion was being considered a subclass in and of itself. It was separate from a person’s citizenship or their nationality. One of the key outcomes of Liberalism was the separation of church and state.

So 19th-century European Jewish reformers undertook a sincere project - they would position Judaism in the same class as any other western religion. That came directly as a compromise with post-Napoleonic western European society. The walls of the Jewish quarters would come down. Jews were English, French, nationals or Dutch nationals first, and Jewish second. It is a model that has continued until today, even in Israel, religion does not inform citizenship.

Of course, despite their best efforts, eventually the Holocaust occurred and those continental European Jews were offered no protection. Attempts at assimilation did not prevent even the most secular of Jews from the death camps. The promise of religion being a benign characteristic evaporated.

Post Weimar Germany’s succumbing to the appeal of Naziism provides the most tragic lessons.

What is clear is that assimilation was no salve. German Jews are recorded as being,

at the time the most “assimilated” Jews in Europe in the 30s. Reform Judaism was a German concept initially. That blending provided no cover though, as a distinct population, they were scapegoated and targeted for extermination. Survivors sometimes concluded “we didn’t assimilate enough” rather than “assimilation itself failed”. The Holocaust proves that even this complete attempt at abandonment of Jewish identity brought no safety. The decision on what it was to be Jewish was never in their hands in the first place.

This is most particular to the religious observance and practice of the era. Secular Jews were just as targeted as religious Jews in Germany. While short term, certain individuals would have benefited from becoming more German, on a long enough time horizon, that religious abandonment, faith aside, is not enough to prevent discrimination.

While the German example is the most extreme, it is not an uncommon story in history. In part IV of this series, we established the five verticals of assimilation: religious, cultural, values based, political, and ethnic. Ethnic and religious assimilation do not work, as we can see from early modern European history, these can’t ever all be eliminated fully. Thus the asymptote is never reached. These examples are the most famous, but every era has an echo or a rhyme.

One of the most famously represented failures of Jews to truly assimilate is that of 16th & 17th century Spain. Despite being forced to convert to Catholicism, the infamous Spanish Inquisition was established as a kangaroo court devoted to the complete assimilation of course. The irony was that the local Iberian populations didn’t actually want Jews to be equal. Spain established blood purity laws known as limpieza de sangre that existed precisely to leave a divide between ethnic Spanish and Jewish populations. There were “Christians” and there were “New Christians”. Everyone knew the difference. There is a rebuilt church in Lisbon wherein a massacre of “New Christians” occurred in 1506.

This is the template for how attempts to truly blend in and assimilate ever really goes. The host society both denies Jewish practice (we don’t want them to be different) but denies true assimilation (We don’t want them to be us). This can’t be reconciled, and eventually, when the Judeophobes get what they asked for, they do not stop. Rather, they pivot the attack vector.

In modern Iberia, there is a lot of Jewish ancestry showing up in DNA testing, so, on a long enough timeline these barriers erode. Erosion is the perfect analogue though, because it took literally hundreds of years and multiple generations for that distinction to disappear.

With the scientific tools of modernity, we can easily see how even more problematic integrating would be in the face of a crusade like that of the inquisition. In the 16th and 17th century, Spanish Jews could move a few towns over, lie about their papers, and try to blend in. With modern DNA testing for example. The Spanish inquisition would have clear information on everyone’s lineage. The ethnic vertical is the most extreme example, because it is the ultimate blocker. Nevertheless, the other verticals need to be referenced because they demonstrate the self harm and ultimate futility that a yearning to drop the Jewish identity is.

The great 20th century Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt, wrote the biography of a German socialite, Rahel Varnhagen. According to Arendt, Varnhagen was all in on assimilation. She converted from Judaism and climbed the social ladder. Only late in her life did she recognize that this abandonment of her culture was considered to have been as her biography put it “the greatest platitude, the most inconceivable meanness”. Varnhagen died before the Holocaust, but she would certainly have fallen victim to it had she been alive. Arrendt knew that assimilation for German Jews was an illusion. Varnhagen was an excellent model, but of course not an isolated case.

Varnhagen’s attempt at assimilation was beyond simply religion, it was complete and it was cultural. It included everything from the language she used to the foods she ate to the mannerisms she employed. However, she was unable to escape her deep seated Jewish values or political inclinations. That subconscious throughline continued to guide her and set her apart from her peers. At the end of her life, she had regrets about that path. It wasn’t worth it. This is intuitive and self evident. It is absurd to imagine any Jewish person at the end of their life wishing they had abandoned their culture more. No, the reverse is almost always true - it is basic collective wisdom that attachment to family, charity, and cultural roots only become more significant with age. You cannot really leave behind your originating culture and values. It is your source code.

The verticals of politics and philosophy are the flip side to the Varnhagen case. There are some who might acknowledge that the path to assimilation is by hiding their Jewishness in plain sight. Perhaps by acknowledging and glossing over that origin, in the context of it being something that they have moved on from, they can assimilate. In Isaac Deutscher’s book, The Non-Jewish Jew (1968) https://www.amazon.ca/Non-Jewish-Other-Essays-Isaac-Deutscher/dp/0192111892 he traces a lineage of famous thinkers (Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Freud) who tried to transcend their Jewishness. They declared publicly that they had moved on. These were great philosophers that espoused revolutionary worldviews. They changed the way the world thought about itself. There are two ironies at play here though. The first, according to Deutscher is that these world views were grounded in and worked as successor values systems to their Jewish heritage. These were functionally attempts to abandon a set of Jewish values by establishing new ones. The second irony is that with the long view of history, they all are remembered, and were attacked in life and posthumously specifically as Jews. Despite their best attempts to gloss over this piece of their identity, it remained a vulnerability. So we see how philosophy cannot depart the individual.

In a similar vein we can examine the attempted political escapees. Leon Trotsky specifically had a demise that highlights the futility to abandon Jewish principle via politics. His political allegiance was to Marxism. He was integral in establishing what became the Soviet Union. Inevitably though, Trotsky was eventually exiled and assassinated by the Stalinists.

Despite feeling completely assimilated and having renounced any semblance of his own personal connection to Judaism, his political enemies were able to weaponize his Jewish roots.

Stalin for his part, did this by utilizing code words to appeal to antisemites with the lure of semantics. He associated Trotsky and his followers with “rootless cosmopolitanism”, “foreign intellectualism”, and “bourgeois elements”. This is alarmingly not so different from modern uses and applications of terms like the “globalist elites,” the “Epstein class,” or the “Zionist entity.” Stalin was a master at propaganda via dog whistles. The tip of the Judeophobic spear today leverages this exact same model. It is a back door injection of a dose of antisemitism. It is the trojan horse of what we might call the self-hating Jews with internalized Judeophobia.

The Spanish, the Nazi’s, the Soviets. These are the most famous and the most tragic examples. They need to be heeded as warnings of the futility of true assimilation. Jewish populations have remained distinct throughout history precisely because they cannot ever truly blend in and hide their Jewishness.

The conclusion that must be made therefore is ultimately that the only path forward is for Jews to incorporate their Jewish identity proudly and on their own terms. This does not mean blindly accepting all tenets of Judaism or all philosophical or political viewpoints of the mainstream Jewish line of thinking. To not identify with a mainstream opinion or custom is one thing. To succumb to the outside pressure though, to walk into the open arms of Judeophobes and allow oneself to be tokenized because of that contrary opinion, is another thing entirely. That tokenization is a classic behaviour of an aspiring assimilator. It never ends well.

We will explore tokenism and tokenization in a later edition of this series, but the use case is clear. To debate with Rabbis and other Jews about whether the laws of keeping Kosher are valid and right is one thing. To become a public figure that actively works to destroy the institute of Kashrut for their own personal gain is a treacherous act.

This line of thinking is clear and obvious, but when we apply this same line of thinking to Jewish politics or a Jewish state, the systemic Judeophobia manifests as making this line of attack excusable. It blurs the line and enables rhetoric that would not apply to other populations. The public performative vitriol is somehow excusable. This is a trick that Jews play on themselves in the name of assimilation.

Of course, a far higher percentage of Jews identify with Israel rather than believe in keeping Kosher. Surely, being critical of one’s own beliefs is warranted and encouraged, both in western society as well as Judaism. But attempting to question and change the establishment views by building internal coalitions and debate, is not the same as joining an invading army or opening the portcullis to Judeophobes.

There is one subset of the Jewish population that has been missing from our examination thus far, Mizrahi Jews. In the next entry of this series, we will look at the way the changing demographics of Judaism in the west interact with the attempt at assimilation. It is the final piece of context that needs to be established before we finally turn towards the mechanics and manifestation of internalized Judeophobia.

“You’re on the bridge to nowhere and you’re getting there fast” - Sam Roberts Band

October 7th shattered an illusion for diaspora Jews. Prior to that day, Jews living in Canada, the United States, Australia, and England felt like they fit in. They were certain that they would be protected based solely on the fact they lived in a Liberal democracy. Antisemitism was barely on anyone’s radar.

Nearly three years later, each of those statements is no longer a given. Many Jews have gone so far as considering an exit strategy if things ever went sideways. That feeling of being assimilated has dissipated. There is now a feeling of threat.

Shockingly, the vast majority of the threat has come from coalitions of the left. In part III of this series, we saw that Jews are granted card holding status from those coalitions so long as they do not hold any problematic ideas vis-à-vis their Judaism or their Jewish values. Yet still, there are many Jews who will suppress those aspects in order to belong.

They should know better. Throughout history, Jews have tried to assimilate. Yet time and time again, the lesson is clear: it is practically impossible to complete the process. Attempts at assimilation are like an asymptote - you can never quite get there, at least not in any short term sense. History shows us the reality that it is never left to the Jews as to whether they can truly assimilate.

Leftist coalitions (the primary target of most Jews seeking assimilation) are dominated by rabid adoption of postmodern theory and its world view of intersectionality. There is a paradox in intersectionality, however, that becomes clear after going even a couple of intersections down the chain of marginalization. Jewishness has been declared non-applicable for intersectionality. There is a lack of nuance, every individual person must be either the oppressor or the oppressed. This is based entirely on their immutable characteristics. The result is a binary. In or out.

To be included in coalitions of the progressive left means accepting that you have to make a choice. Therefore, being Jewish cannot be benign. This underscores why defining and classifying the insidiousness of internalized Judeophobia is so vital. Ultimately, Jews can’t opt out of their Jewishness.

So why do Jews join these coalitions? Why do they stick around in them once it becomes clear that Judaism or sympathy for Israeli lives or for Israel is not welcome within them?

There are two primary drivers at play, a push and a pull. The push will be explored later in this series, but can be summarized as a perceived hindrance. There is some aspect of Jewishness holding a person back from achieving their goals. The pull, on the other hand, stems from the most simple of desires – wanting to be liked. The yearning for assimilation begins in something ordinary, the wish to be accepted, well-regarded, safe, and prosperous. That primal human longing to be part of a tribe is the magnet that begins the pull, a subconscious allure to blend into the local context.

In reality though, the promised end goal has always been, aside from the most extreme circumstances, just out of reach. Receiving acceptance from the predominant local demographic becomes akin to chasing the dragon. Each component part that is shed, or swapped out, only feeds the demands for the altar of assimilation.

Assimilation, or the pursuit of assimilation, needs to be defined here. I define it as such: “to give up increasingly large parts or portions of one’s identity in exchange for an adopted identity.” Therefore, to understand the process of assimilation, we need to both define Jewish identity and then define its absence or relinquishment. Identity, of course, is fluid. There is no hard, firm line where you suddenly stop being Jewish. Instead, these attributes are lost slowly, they phase out. It is not a clean break.

This is because everywhere, and in all aspects, identity is fundamentally a gradient. This is the real challenge with this realm of thought - arriving at definitions. We start at the conclusion of identity: we do know that identities exist. We work backwards from there to find our component parts. Jewish identity is particularly elusive. It’s like that Potter Stewart line about pornography: “I know it when I see it.”

To have a proper discussion about anything, you need to define it. Make no mistake, you can define it. Jews, Israel, and Jewish identity are constant battleground topics. Con artists and bad faith actors hide in the nuance. When logically cornered, they will retreat into “you don’t speak for all Jews,” and no progress or conclusions can ever be made. There are also the realities of tokens who say “As a Jew, that’s not how I feel about it.”

Bad faith actors will reference this and posit that Israel is not central to Jewish identity because it is not central to every Jew’s Jewish identity. That carousel of dodging the question needs to be stopped. Yes, we can define Jewish identity. We can do so in the same way we can define any identity. Via the averages of mainstream Jewish behaviour, thought, and opinion. There are two thousand years of Jewish history and millions of Jews living today that can provide valid data points. Those data points form a picture, clusters of trends that can be looked at as a whole.

From those, we start to create identifiable shapes. There is this notion of “Jew” and of “Non-Jew” and the various degrees of assimilation compose the gradient between them. The same way you know when someone is “Queer” (gay, straight, non-binary, etc) or “Italian” (genetically Italian, or raised in Italy). Curiously, this line of thought is rarely, if at all, applied to Israel’s enemies. Bad faith actors are tnever shot down as “not speaking for all Palestinians.”

Of course, you can slice identity forever, but we have to draw the line eventually. As guideposts, we can look at the primary subtypes of Jewish identity in the diaspora to ground the conversation.

In the West, Jewish groups are generally broken down into three categories. Modern Orthodox, practicing, and non-practicing.

The first group, the Modern Orthodox Jews, are clearly not assimilated. They pay taxes, they vote, and they are accountable to the local rule of law. They are legally citizens of whatever country they live in. Their passports say that they belong. The preservation of their culture and habits, however, does set them apart and eliminates them from seriously being considered “assimilated.”

They often live in cultural enclaves for legitimate reasons. The Orthodox dress differently and they observe unique customs. They are instantly recognizable as being different than “normal.” This may seem obvious but it is important to establish this population as a prominent node on the gradient. They are not more “Jewish” than others, but they are more “observant.”

Our second big node is the population that makes up what I will call “practicing” Jews. They are mainly comprised of Jews who come from the Conservative and Reform traditions. They are much further along the gradient to assimilation. This is most demonstrable because they are often not visibly Jewish, and can blend in without trouble in the majority of circumstances.

Conservative and Reform Jews will live predominantly secular lives. They will actively participate in society, and before October 7th, they would have felt like they fit in. That might be the most salient connector - a feeling of unease and danger. Safety aside, these Jews can be grouped together as they subscribe to a set of key values, as well as preferences both named and unnamed that continue to set them apart from the general population. The Jewish relationship with Christmas and Chinese food being a low-stakes yet surprisingly apt example. On the more serious side, key values that are widely adopted include Tzedakah, education, and attachment to and recognition of Israel as the Jewish homeland. These key markers are shared typically (but not always) by the Modern Orthodox populations.

For the Conservative and Reform populations, the summation of identity boils down to being people who, faith aside, are still practicing Judaism in some sense. This clearly eliminates them from being eligible to be fully “assimilated.” In other words, they retain their Jewish identity.

Those pieces of identity can be defined. There is some threshold, 50, 60, 90% of traits, views and behaviours, that make up the polity of Jewishness. Of course, not every Jewish family actually incentivizes their children to go to university, but most do. Jews do not have a monopoly on education as a value, but education is a Jewish value. Not every Jewish person has a Bar Mitzvah, but most do. Many cultures have a coming-of-age ceremony baked in. The nexus of these two begins to build a profile. Once you combine a hundred or more of these traits, you have the identity. Whether or not any individual sees any of these traits as vital or meaningful to their Jewish identity is another matter. How you see these traits is highly influenced by your own bias and sociological interpretation.

For example, keeping kosher is certainly a religious and cultural Jewish practice. But not all Jews keep kosher. Vegans keep kosher. But of course, not all vegans are Jews. This is the crux of the abstract nature of human identity.

The primary point is that when examining any individual within a parent identity, it will be easy to find one of an infinite amount of verticals that would appear to break with what is considered mainstream and “normal” for that parent identity. But the child pieces of identity must be spoken of as valid pieces of the identity because they exist on the whole in terms of averages over large swaths of the parent population. That shared understanding, yes - this thing is part of being Jewish - is ultimately where the definitions have to draw some invisible line that informs the discussion. It doesn’t matter if some small part of a population disagrees with a notion. To speak plainly. If the vast majority of Jews are Zionists, for example, being a Zionist is a Jewish trait. They do. It is.

The counter to this is to use the best sociological method that researchers would provide for proving any identity, that being self-identification. But this is clearly problematic. For example, while “Messianic Jews” (Jews for Jesus) would consider themselves Jewish, the vast majority of Jews do not count them as being part of the Jewish people. They are a tiny minority, and their central tenet is counter to Judaism.

The Messianic Jews show us, therefore, that we cannot simply rely on self-identification. As far as assimilation, Messianic Jews are no longer included as part of the Jewish people, but they are also not assimilated. Many Jews for Jesus would have all the markers of Jewishness, but they are not taken seriously when they speak “as a Jew.”

This all might appear pedantic, but it is vital to the conversation. We can and do draw lines as to what can be considered “Jewish.” There is a precedent here. The flip side of this pedantry is that although you can’t assimilate, you can be something else. A Messianic Jew cannot be accepted into mainstream Judaism, but they also cannot give up all the aspects of their Judaism and assimilate. In other words, they can’t ever not have been Jewish. This comes into play when you understand how Jews (and the offshoots like Messianic Jews) are treated by Judeophobes, including antisemites. They can be wielded as tokens.

This is salient because it provides a wonderful analogue to the third category of Jews - the Jews who no longer self-identify as Jewish in any way. They are the ones who are much closer to reaching the asymptote of assimilation. They may never have been inside a synagogue. They might pray at a church, be completely atheist, and only have one Jewish grandparent. They certainly never had a Bar Mitzvah, or eaten a latke, and they could not utter even a single word in Hebrew. Are they fully assimilated?

The short answer is no. They are closer — but total assimilation is a fool’s errand. As we can see from history, the path through the maze of attempted assimilation always leads to the same destination: ostracization, discrimination, and diminishment. Only through strength, celebration, and positive purpose do Jews ever achieve the safety all humans yearn for. This is the lesson.

Nevertheless, despite the clear futility, many continue to attempt to shed their identity. That mechanism can be expressed as a slow erosion of each component part of the Jewish identity. Those components can be sorted into five primary verticals: religious, cultural, values, politics, and ethnicity. Jews can go down the path, but just like the asymptote in your 12th grade calculus class, they can never quite arrive.

A stranger, unfamiliar with the local landscape is looking for a place to eat with their family. They arrive at a block with two restaurants open. The first is a McDonald’s jam packed with people. Next door there is a gourmet burger bar, but there is only one couple inside. Where should they go for dinner?

That stranger would reasonably assume that McDonald’s was the better choice. They would be forgiven for thinking that. The majority of people clearly prefer McDonald’s so it is likely to be the better option. It’s more affordable, and its popular. Under scrutiny however, the gourmet burger bar is going to be a much better choice. Only when they dig into the facts and understand that the gourmet spot is healthier, they realize its the better option.

That, in a nutshell, is social proof bias. Your LLM is the stranger. Counting the people in the McDonald’s is how it is deciding what to report back to you.

This has real implications on how Canadians define truth. Only with a commitment to truth can we achieve a just society. So, in a conversation I had with Claude (my AI of choice), I was troubled to see some serious bias in what it was reporting back as facts.

This is a clearly documented phenomenon, with major studies emerging to prove its various manifestations. This is a major flaw in what LLMs are returning to chatbot users. Frankly, not enough people are talking about it.

This began because I wanted to run a thought experiment to contrast the framing of the Nakba to the framing of the treatment of German civilians after World War 2. The context is not particularly relevant, but this is a hot button topic among some circles in Canada these days. It gets right at the heart of biases of omission.

So looking to explore how we might compare and contrast some similar scenarios, I asked Claude to frame the atrocities committed against German civilians as a German Nakba. I was looking to contrast why no one seems to care about the plight of the German citizens after their government declared war with the plight of the Palestinians.

While I had gone looking for a thought experiment, I was exposed to a flaw far more nefarious and relevant. Canadians are becoming more reliant on LLMs all the time, and our people, especially our young people, don’t have the media literacy to detect that bias.

The bias is there and demonstrable. It is reproducible. Initially when I asked about the Nakba, the AI gave me a one sided account about the atrocities. As I pressed the AI about its responses, it increasingly admitted that it was in fact presenting a one-sided version of history.

A simple question or two dispels the partiality. The AI even apologies when you catch it exhibiting bad behaviour. So why is it there?

Anthropic (the parent company of Claude) doesn’t have a political bias as far as I can tell. So it is not intentional. Nevertheless, bias is inserted because of the fundamental mechanism of how LLMs work. LLMs comb the Internet and look to certain sites more commonly, like Wikipedia or Reddit for their information. Models cited Reddit is reference in 40% of instances and Wikipedia in over 25%, per this Semrush analysis of 150,000+ citations last summer.

In a way, that makes sense. Wikipedia has been a widely trusted source for decades. It was oftentimes better than the science textbooks I was using when I was an undergrad. For fact based disciplines, this isn’t a problem. When you’re talking about math or chemistry it is very difficult to insert bias: 1 + 1 is always going to equal 2.

Where this doesn’t apply nearly as cleanly though, is in the humanities. Any history in which the narrative hasn’t been completely settled is particularly exposed. On Wikipedia (as well as Reddit) and more expansively the Internet writ large, there are tremendous biases at play. Millions of data points that can be crawled, all of them without requisite context. But as Ivan Bassov put it here in the summer of 2025: “open to all” has quietly morphed into “dominated by the most organized and persistent.” In other words, these source sites are extremely susceptible to falsehoods.

Once the misinformation has its foothold, and is masquerading as the “source of truth” there is opportunity for social proof bias. Remember our McDonald’s example from earlier? Social proof bias comes into play where you believe something to be true because other people believe it to be true. There is a good base of logic there, we are a species that communicates and shares information. The trust we have in others shortcuts and eliminates the need to examine if the underlying premise is factual by trusting the masses. Ie, everyone says not to eat the poisonous mushroom, so I don’t eat it.

This is sometimes also referred to as the wisdom of crowds. But that wisdom has a clear counterpoint, echoed in the familiar refrain from your parents: if your friends jump off a bridge, will you jump off it too? Like in the McDonald’s example, just because something has been adopted widely, does not mean that it is good for you. Or, if a claim is widely circulated like “vaccines cause autism”, no one examines the base claim - it just lives on, propelled by the momentum of thousands of lies.

This is a sharp analogue for how chatbots are picking up data points. They are looking to see if there is consensus, and therefore quantity matters much more than quality. LLMs are built on pattern recognition. So the more something appears, the clearer the pattern.

In other words, the more popular an opinion is, the more likely it is going to be picked up by an LLM and regurgitated to a user. This matters because even though we all should know better, most users default to trusting their AIs. This is only increasing as time goes on. It’s an inevitable byproduct of using technology.

For example if Claude reports 1 + 1 = 2 accurately, that starts a feedback loop training the user to believe that it is right. So when you ask Claude about the Nakba, you are primed to believe it without pushing back. The same for any kind of politics, or disputed historical grievance. Claude presents a best guess, but it doesn’t really know what it is saying.

Most alarmingly, this presents a glaring hole for bad actors to exploit. Nefarious goals can ultimately be achieved. Those villains can bypass going through the trouble of hacking the source code of the chatbot, they can simple attack the much more exposed “facts” that the chatbot is relying on.

The playbook is simple enough to understand. Hijack organizations like Wikipedia that are not equipped to handle sophisticated brigading. Flood Reddit with fake facts or with facts that are biased or contain glaring omissions. The LLM crawls Wikipedia, Reddit, Al Jazeera, or a personal blog with a critical mass of backlinks. It says “this is probably good” and reports it back. Repeat a lie enough, and it starts to sound an awful lot like the truth.

What’s most glaring is that we know that foreign state actors are already doing this. It has been well documented that this is happening in Canada. In Warren Kinsella’s book, the hidden hand, he provides ample evidence about how western state institutions are being influenced.

Truth tellers cannot play whack-a-mole fast enough to fight the disinformation, and it is being codified, one wiki edit and one reddit comment at a time.

So we need to sound the alarm.

We need to ensure that the companies building and operating LLMs are accounting for this kind of bias in their algorithms. According to Pew Research, half of American adults use chatbots to search for information. This cannot be ignored. Correcting course here will require strong guidance from the government to ensure that biases are not leaking into the information our citizens are consuming. We need federal powers to reaffirm a commitment to truth in these models.

It is common wisdom that anything you know about AI will be irrelevant in a couple of months. So it is of course reasonable that there are some gaps given the speed at which AI capabilites are evolving. But this needs to be addressed. The risks are clear: Reddit is an anonymous forum that anyone can post on. Wikipedia can and is well documented to be the subject of brigading — when users coordinate together to overrun moderation by sheer force of numbers.

These sites, as currently policed, cannot be the sources of truth. This is information warfare, and it needs to be taken extremely seriously. That is as good a place as any for federal institutions to start. There needs to be safeguards in place to prevent this kind of subtle influence from manipulating public opinion.

To demonstrate how these conversations go, I am providing below the full unabridged transcript of my conversation with Claude. The front half is not as relevant (it’s the bit about comparing the Germans and the Nakba), but I’m including it for posterity. To save you a bit of time, I’ve placed the quotes that I believe are most salient at the top of that document. But of course, feel free to read the whole thing here: Claude Transcript

To overcome small sample size bias, and to prove that this is not unique to Claude, I replicated this experiment in Google AI mode. The results were essentially the same. It was more balanced than Claude, but still defaulted to telling one side of the story until pressed.

The transcript of that conversation can be found here: Google Transcript

Needless to say, this was an eye opening experience.

AI is the new frontier of human ingenuity. Systemic bias like this is one of the most obvious ways it can go astray. This risk is especially dangerous for minority populations. When “truth” becomes a numbers game instead of grounded in fact, that is a path towards a heavily compromised society. There will always be propaganda, but we have to at least try to fight it from becoming accepted as fact. There has to be an agreed upon shared understanding of what these models can and can’t do. There is a precedent as well, LLMs already block potentially criminal or racist conversations. Despite valid objections around freedom and free speech, these guardrails do need to be in place. The potential consequences of bad actors wielding this power are just too severe.

At the end of our conversation, Claude provides some potential solutions to prevent this from happening. One of them is simply sending a signal to Anthropic (or whichever company’s AI you are using) and reporting the conversation as biased. We need more good people doing that at the very least. Rewriting history to achieve a political goal is a dangerous precedent to set.

You can easily run similar experiments in your own conversations with AI. I’d love to see some more of them.

In 2016, I worked the Christmas season at the LCBO.

Ten years later, two things still stand out from that job.

The first - every morning I opened the store, two men were waiting. One was a French businessman who’d buy two mickeys of Smirnoff and quickly stuff one into either pocket. The other was a scraggly vagabond who went straight to the fortified wines and grabbed a bottle of Kelly’s — the best bang for your buck, alcohol-content-wise, in the store. The lesson: addiction can impact anyone.

The second standout was the training seminar. Specifically, the one directive broke my mind at the time: if someone is stealing from the store, do not intervene. That’s what security is for, and your safety is not worth a couple bottles of scotch. As a 25-year-old with a bit of a temper, I knew this would be a challenge.

The one time I witnessed a robbery in broad daylight, a man walked in with two large backpacks and began shovelling bottles of Oban into them. One of my colleagues tried to stop him. She screamed. The manager restrained her. Despite the adrenaline, I kept my cool.

My colleague was disciplined with a warning.

We were reminded that the only acceptable move in that scenario is to ask the thief: “Sir, can I help you pay for that?”

This policy remains in place today. I knew that it happens with some regularity — videos surface online from time to time. Recently, a friend of mine was fired from the LCBO. Their offence: failing to report a colleague who’d tried to intervene in a robbery.

Then the other day, I got to relive my youth: while heading into my local liquor store, I noticed four grungy looking people outside. It’s not uncommon to see a poor soul and their dog panhandling by the entrance of this location. But these four stood out — I was pretty sure they were smoking crack. This store is next to a school.

A few minutes later though, while exploring the vintages section, I noticed my four friends from earlier out of the corner of my eye in the store looking at buying some whiskey. I suppose I’d misjudged them. Then it happened. Straight to the scotch: two of them cramming bags full of bottles, the other two keeping watch. Everyone in the store stood by. The customers, the employees, even the security guard. The guard it seemed had actually cleared a path so the group could get out without friction. An employee asked, “Can I help you pay for those?”

I got the final moments on video.

After watching this go down, I approached the employees and expressed my sympathy for their plight. I explained that I used to do their job. They confirmed it. The directive hasn’t changed: don’t intervene. The employee’s safety isn’t worth it. As it turns out, the security guards operate under that same directive.

What floored me about that conversation with the young cashier is that she mentioned that this happens every day. I pushed back — “literally, every day?” “No, but like five or six times a week is totally normal.”

This is the part that’s so soul-crushing: the resignation of our citizens to the normalization of this kind of criminality. The quiet acceptance that this is simply a fact of life. That there’s nothing they can do about it. That there’s nothing anyone else will do about it either.

Then comes the surreal moments after — standing in line for the privilege of paying for your own wine. Those four walked out with dozens of bottles for free. We pay $20 for a bottle of wine that costs $3 in Europe, because that’s what the social contract asks of us. That’s the civil thing to do. But for a fleeting moment, you picture it: walking out the front door yourself, bottles in hand, not paying, as an act of protest. A glorious little act of defiance. This injustice cannot stand.

I tap my Mastercard. “Would you like to donate $1 to the children’s hospital?”. “No thanks”. No revolution today.

You can get over that double standard quickly enough. You get over the feeling of danger. But what hurts the most is that the LCBO — the Liquor Control Board of Ontario — is a provincial institution, funded by taxpayers. We are the ones who are paying the taxes. So all of this theft can and should be considered as directly stealing from all of us.

This normalization is insidious precisely because it is the first crack in the social contract. Those cracks lead to a frayed society. When you see this low-level criminality happening in plain sight, you begin to wonder who else is watching, and what lesson they’re taking from it. For some, the lesson will be that breaking the law does not lead to consequences. In other words, there is no deterrence.

Now, on any individual account, the policy of non intervention by liquor store staff makes sense. No employee should be encouraged to physically stop a robbery. You never know how out of their mind a thief is, or whether they’re armed. Their lives are not worth a couple bottles of Oban.

There is also the broader civic argument: some would say this kind of low-level theft is cheaper, city- and province-wide, than funding the policing, jail time, and rehabilitation these people would otherwise need — people driven to criminality by unfortunate circumstances none of us can fully account for.

We can sympathize with these people, but it has gotten out of control. This needs to stop because it is wrong, but even more importantly because of what it represents.

Without a social contract, we have no shared reference point. When the institutions meant to enforce the law visibly fail to do so, when they fail publicly, again and again, citizens stop trusting them at all. It’s part of why private security has become such a booming business in Toronto. Walking through the more affluent neighbourhoods in the city, you can see that many have already lost that trust.

So where is the leadership on this? Who is or who should be responsible for stopping it?

There are some likely candidates that might logically be held accountable. You can picture their responses though. The CEO of the LCBO? He’d simply call it shrinkage, The same way any other retailer prices in theft and damaged goods. The Premier? He’d call it a local issue. The OPP doesn’t police Toronto after all. The Toronto Police Chief? He’d say it isn’t a priority, that the crime is victimless, and no one is getting hurt. The police will be focusing on using their limited resources on other files. The Mayor? She would surely say that this is a policing matter, and because she doesn’t sit on the police board, she couldn’t possibly be held accountable.

A grand exercise in finger-pointing. “It’s not my responsibility.”

And yet the Premier is happy to turn American booze at the LCBO into a political football. The previous CEO was plenty proud of his sustainability record. The Police Chief and the Mayor keep advertising the apparent record lows in crime.

None of them take the responsibility. All of them take the wins.

This has become the standard retort to any systemic issue. “That’s not my job” has become the default answer.

Perhaps no one is injured, but what about the ruined lives of the people doing the stealing? The mental health of the employees and the witnesses? The dollars stolen that could have gone toward healthcare, treatment, or addiction care instead?

All of it gets forgotten, but none of it is unrelated. Taxpayers are footing the bill either way. They are doing their part, working hard, and being asked to ignore what their eyes and ears are telling them about the grand bargain. That is what’s really at stake here: the social contract.

If you do not have faith in the social contract, it promotes corruption. If there is no rule of law, it promotes criminality. Some empathy for criminals is warranted, but that empathy cannot override the basic tenets of a democratic society. We are a long way away from failed state territory, but we are flirting with the first step towards failure - apathy towards state institutions.

The solutions are not complicated, but they require courage. First, a real commitment from leaders to stamp this criminality out. Long term solutions that prevent the theft, and diminish the conditions by which people are driven to criminality. Second is the shorter term solution. Actual law enforcement with simple principles: The law needs to apply to everyone, equally. Criminals need to be arrested. Arrests need to lead to charges. Charges to convictions (where appropriate). Convictions to sentencing.

This kind of scenario is the tip of the spear. It might look small — a few hundred dollars of scotch don’t move the needle on their own. It doesn’t really affect our day-to-day lives. So it is easy to move past. But the trends and forces of apathy towards criminality slowly erodes our social compact.

Trust in institutions matters.

Let’s do something to restore it.

“A sacred circle is drawn around those whom the progressive modern left are prepared to go into battle for, and it seems as if the Jews aren’t in it.”

― David Baddiel, Jews Don’t Count

In the previous edition, we looked at the historical proof for systemic Judeophobia and traced a surface level chronology of the phenomenon. Judeophobia’s two primary manifestations: An aversion to Jews and Judaism. An aversion to a Jewish state. This section will look at the modern context of systemic Judeophobia along those same lines, with a sharp focus on its core manifestation in the west: Anti-Zionism. Given that I am Canadian and the Canadian context is what I can best speak to, that is where I will focus my efforts. Readers in other jurisdictions will be able to graft their own local experiences onto this framework I am sure.

Jew hate and antisemitism (two key manifestations of Judeophobia) are clearly and dangerously on the rise in Canada. This is so pernicious, that a list of 100 business leaders recently put a call out to put a stop to it. Hate crimes are increasing. Jewish businesses are being targeted and vandalized. Synagogues are being shot at. It is so bad that the Prime Minister of the country flew into Toronto and made a speech addressing this very issue.

With such a clear problem manifesting within Canadian society, it would therefore follow that keen awareness and sympathy for Jews would be top of mind. Especially so given that Canada is in a particularly empathetic era: one of intersectionality and corporate diversity training. Canada has clear quotas for marginalized groups in public service. It has a population largely focused on the horrors of residential schools. It keeps a constant eye towards the perils of colonization. This way of thinking is particularly keen in Trudeau era leftist and progressive spaces.

Given the presence of the antisemitic incidents alongside the apparatus seemingly ready to support victims, we would expect the left to have a keen awareness and strong reaction to any and all Jew hate. Yet, the constant episodes and news articles do not move the hearts and minds of left wing ideologues. To make it more stark, the Judeophobic tendencies are not only ignored, they are actually reinforced by those same progressives. In other words, addressing the hatred of Jews and/or anything tangentially related to Israel is mysteriously and conveniently absent from the most sympathetic parts of society. The left wing cultural zeitgeist just doesn’t address Jews.

The omission is as glaring as it is nonsensical without the underlying explanation of systemic Judeophobia.

As an analogue and control group, we can look at the LGBTQ+ populations and compare them to Jews writ large within Canadian society. The comparison is potent for a number of reasons: both groups experience equal rights in law and theory but run into difficulty in practice. Neither are monoliths: Both contain tremendous diversity within their populations. Both populations are discriminated against for their immutable characteristics. Those characteristics are hard to define, they break out into many different personal and sub-group identities. They are therefore oftentimes lumped together under the umbrella of being “Jews” or “Queer” respectively.

The comparison is most salient though when we look at these two groups of people as “others” who can, in the right circumstances pass as “normal”. Of course there are key differences between the Queer and Jewish experiences, but the historical treatment of homosexuals and Jews in the west are similar. These two groups ought to form a natural alliance built on a shared experience of historical exclusion. Yet one is included, and the other is not.

This exceptional status can only be explained by systemic Judeophobia. Both groups have long been victims of right wing and religious fundamentalist hate. But only Jews are also excluded from left wing ideology. Where a queer person can find refuge in the left without compromising their identity, Jews are asked to hide their views on Israel, or risk alienation from precisely the refuge they would typically look towards for succour.

Ultimately, this is the equivalent of being psychologically surrounded by the systemic aversion to your identity and peoplehood.

As an historic and cultural group, Jews have been a significant minority in Canada for over a hundred years. Like many other ethnic groups, Jews came to the country primarily as economic migrants and refugees. Over those hundred years, Jews have had the staying power and good fortune to achieve prosperity. Yet, no other group of individuals is ostracized in the same way. In Toronto, where over half of the 400,000 Canadian Jews live, there are control groups to further demonstrate systemic Judeophobia.

An easy comparison is one with the Italian population. Italian migrants and Jews arrived in the country en masse at approximately the same time. They faced similar discrimination, they struggled as all migrants do. They understood each other’s plight, and stood up for each other when it mattered. This was perhaps best elucidated by the famous Christie Pitts riot in Toronto of 1933 where Jews and Italians literally fought Nazi supporters in a city park. Nearly one hundred years later however, the communities’ paths have diverged. While there used to be specific racial slurs for Italians, and a genuine dislike of the Italian way of life, any aversion to Italians has dissipated. There is rightfully no concept of prejudice against Italians in Canada anymore.

How can we possibly explain the difference? After their arrivals, both populations were forced to overcome a normal amount of newcomer aversion. Both populations established ethnic enclaves, older downtown boroughs packed with culture, and newer suburban cities a highway away from those cultural artifacts. In other words, Jews and Italians have seemingly assimilated and are operating and thriving in Canadian society.

Italians are also an apt comparison because Italy is no ancient country. Italy was only fully unified in 1871, four years after the establishment of Canada. Canada has considered Italy an enemy, in active combat with each other: Canada fought against Italy in the second world war. Yet, there is no question of the validity of Italy as a nation state.

There is no country’s diaspora, nor is there any legitimate Canadian minority whose support carries even close to the same compromises and qualifiers in Canadian society. There is political and social risk for supporting Jews and Israel in Canada. Heads of institutions either need to qualify their support before providing it, or balance it with platitudes to other minorities in the same breath. There are no such conditions for Italians.

None of this is to ignore legitimate criticisms of Israel’s foreign policy, Israel is a nation state just as flawed as any other global power. Yes, some of its national politicians are as contemptible as any awful global leaders. But the double standard used to classify Israel as a singular driver of the world’s problems is so extreme it borders on absurd. We can see this when we compare the Israeli-Iranian, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to other conflicts of the day. The lowest hanging fruit is the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

Despite widespread enmity towards Russia’s actions, there is not a single sane person that would argue that Ukraine or Russia should not exist. Of course, in this comparison, Israel is more like Ukraine - defending itself against attacks and threats from abroad. Democracies that are allies of NATO. Yet, somehow, that narrative has been flipped.

In a country like Canada, packed full of multiculturalism, there can be only one explanation - systemic Judeophobia. Something intangible and unique about the Jews and Israel makes it permissible to question their very existence. To debate borders and historical rights is one thing, to debate the legitimacy of the one Jewish state is another altogether. The double standard is the same as jew hatred is the same as antisemitism - all clear symptoms of systemic Judeophobia.

The examples of those double standards are endless. When other minorities overcome challenges to reach elected office, their diversity is lauded. When an Italian is elected as a mayor, or a Lesbian is elected Premier, their minority status is seen as an asset. It shows an ability to overcome stigma, or an ability to galvanize a community and reach out beyond it. It would be ludicrous to hear accusations of a globalist Italian or homosexual plot designed to seize Canadian institutions. Yet for Jews in positions of power, there is always talk of Zionist ambitions, incentives, handlers, and double loyalties. This is particularly alarming to modern Canadian Jews. While this rhetoric has always been a subtle feature of Canadian society, it used to be limited to private conversation or the darkest corners of the internet. Now, these points of view are common in the public discourse and rampant online.

As we leave these two comparative populations, each of these examples are ultimately evidence of a systemic problem: the inexplicable aversion to Jews, Judaism, Israel, and Israelis. In other words, systemic Judeophobia.

This is of course not a new phenomenon in the Canadian context. In the era of William Lyon Mackenzie King, “None is too Many” was the government’s immigration policy. The systemic Judeophobia was so overwhelming that Jews needed to create their own institutions — places like Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, or the Jewish Hospital in Montreal. This was not done out of preference, it was done because Jews were excluded from the mainstream. Growing up, my grandfather told us stories of his life as a doctor in the 1950s where there were signs at water fountains that read “No Dogs or Jews”.

The sense of normalcy we see today, where Jews do have hospitals and universities named after their communities, is a testament to the overcoming of systemic oppression, not the removal of it. Systemic Judeophobia never disappeared. Jews had beaten it back. This was a temporary victory. The virus that is antisemitism was incubating and morphing into something new.

At last we must address directly the primary contemporary manifestation of systemic Judeophobia: the unique contempt for Israel, or “anti-zionism”. Anti-zionism has picked up such ferocity and purchase in left wing spaces it defies logic. It has achieved that prominence in part because of its unique positioning as a judeophobic movement resistant to the taboos of antisemitism that came out of the Holocaust.

While post World War Canada was reckoning with antisemitism, it failed in addressing the underlying cause, Judeophobia. Antisemitism’s shortcoming was its inability to incorporate Israel. Advocates of the day cannot be blamed however, as the world has not known a Jewish state for two thousand years.

This change in the angle of attack – that Israel is a uniquely devilish entity – has become a societally appropriate manner to discriminate against Jews. As we saw in part two this is not new - it is a return to the ancient manifestations of Judeophobia: Discrimination against the one Jewish state in the land of Israel.

The blanket hate, the constant and total presence of anti-Zionist rhetoric, accusations of genocide, and double standards is severe. Further, the central tenets of the ideology defy any logic. It has become an omni-cause that can be used to explain any injustice.

This newfound outlet, an orgiastic compilation of Judeophobia disguised as being in the name of hating Israel, scratches at some primal itch. The hateful relish and take advantage of the double standard. Well meaning progressives are either ignorant of the facts or too afraid to point out the logical confusion.

Somehow a nation state of 10 million people is the root of all progressive grievances. There is no rational explanation for this besides systemic Judeophobia. According to Israel’s enemies, all of these are rational positions:

• Israel is committing a genocide against a people who’s population is increasing.

• Israel is a repressive theocracy despite it having the most liberal rights for Gays in the Middle East.

• Israel is an ethnostate despite it being composed of less than 30% Ashkenazi (white) Jews.

• Israel is an apartheid state despite Muslims and Israeli Arabs enjoying full rights within the country - including holding elected office.

• Israel is a colonial entity despite it being made up primarily of an indigenous people returning to their ancient land.

• Zionists control the media despite constantly being accused of atrocities and painted as villains in that very same media.

Then there are the comedic accusations that come and go, already forgotten since Algeria, Iran, and Egypt exited the world cup. Some soccer analysts and federation members declare that Zionists are influencing the outcomes for FIFA. They omit however, that those same Zionists are not sophisticated enough to rig the competition for Israel to qualify.

The example that hits closest to home is demonstrated by the reaction to this piece published on accordingto.ca - a story about Israelis migrants living in Canada.

Feedback to the piece included responses that neatly described this hate movement in its entirety: Canadian anti-Zionists would say that there is no place for zionism or Zionists in Israel, but they would also say that there is no place for Zionists here in Canada. In other words, there is no place for Zionists anywhere - thus the anti-Zionist movement reminds us why Zionism was ever necessary in the first place.

Despite all the contradictions in their thinking, progressive movements are relentless in their energy for despising Israel. The flames of hatred are fanned by religious fundamentalists. The most passionate anarchists relish in Anti-Zionism rooted in Judeophobia. Judeophobia is their lingua franca - Jews can be their scapegoat, no matter the issue of the day. Israel is often described as the global Jew, and there is unfortunately an understandable allure to this positioning. It plays on the human need to have simple solutions to complex problems. Digging deep for answers is painstaking when one could simply tap into the latent Judeophobia in the aether, like mana from heaven.

Finally there is the fact that there is relatively little social or political capital expended when blaming Israel or Jews for a problem. This is a systemic feedback loop that further normalizes Judeophobia. Leaning into this conflict is so popular that entire Canadian political careers become focused on it, despite it having next to no bearing on Canadian life.

Israel could make any number of policy decisions, it could double in size, or cease to exist entirely, and the facts on the ground for the vast majority of Canadians would not change one bit. Yet Israel is a focal point for every news outlet, the headlines take up so much oxygen it baffles the mind. Anti-Zionism is a focal point for every progressive movement. With no cost besides abandoning some loosely held ephemeral principals, it is all upside. The ends justify the means perhaps.

This is why the existence of Judeophobia defies logic. Human beings desire a target for othering, and these prejudices are deeply enmeshed into the western psyche.

There is a tremendous amount of well documented transgression. The sheer volume of hate, the constant sapping of energy, and the base level of discomfort and fear all add up. Ultimately this presents a pretty logical search for an escape route. Forgo the downsides of Jewish identity entirely. Explore the idea of abandoning your identity and assimilating. The pull is strong. The grass is greener perhaps without the Jewish anchor.

As we will see in the next edition here though, assimilation is never really possible.

Read Part IV Below:

With just four countries remaining, the World Cup is coming to an end, and the summer fling Canadians had with the beautiful game is already fading into memory.

As mid July gives way to the dog days of summer, and with hockey training camps just over the horizon, most Canadians will forget about football. But before we move on, before we get our hopes up about Conor McDavid, Nick Suzuki, or Auston Matthews, it’s a perfect time to take a look at the state of the union of the men’s national program. What exactly did hosting (part of) a World Cup mean for this country? Was it worth it in the end?

In time, with a fond nostalgia, history will look back on this tournament as a resounding success for Canada soccer. The most optimistic Voyageurs might have been disappointed that their team went out in the last 16 against Morocco - especially so given Canada’s first half performance. But with the perspective of a little time passed, we can see the context of this program’s run in 2026. Coach Jesse Marsch may have been right, “we’d rather be us than them”.

By the time they bowed out, Canada was without their three best players, Schrodinger’s Alphonso Davies (hamstring), Qatari casualty Ismael Kone (broken leg), and the hollow performance of Jonathan David (just plain awful). Beyond that, the Canadians were playing hurt with key players compromised due to injury: Moise Bombito, Promise David, and Stephen Eustaquio. Then there are the two omissions of Sam Adekugbe (remember him?) and Marcelo Flores, who missed the tournament entirely. Altogether that is eight cards short of a full deck. Fans can see that Canada was far from the height of their powers during USA ‘26, and they can dream on about what might have been.

Despite all the obstacles though, the team redefined the conversation on what a successful men’s program can look like in the great white north.

Ahead of this World Cup, feckless Canada had been anemic on the global stage. They had never even tied a World Cup match, let alone pick up a full three points. They had a grand total of zero wins, zero ties, and six losses. This record had been complemented by scoring a meagre two goals in those six matches, (one of which was an own goal), while conceding twelve.

All of those ghosts are now banished. The glass ceiling pressures are remnants of the past. Canada have won a World Cup game, crushing Qatar six nil. They were victorious in a do-or die knockout game, a hard fought match against a resilient if not mundane South African side. They overcame the pressures of hosting, and grew into themselves after tying it late vs a Bosnia & Herzegovina side playing with house money.

The only two games they lost were to two quarterfinalists, Morocco and Switzerland. Neither of those teams were truly threatening to take home hardware, but both sit comfortably within the upper echelons of world football. For stretches, Canada was the superior side in both defeats.

With Canada’s breakout and arrival on the world stage, we can contrast them with their neighbours to the south. Prior to ‘26, even calling themselves little brother to the United States or Mexico might have been charitable. Those two nations hardly think about the rouge et blanc at all.

The Americans and the Mexicans have forever been the giants of CONCACAF. Those two behemoths have dominated the confederation’s landscape for a century. The USA and Mexico qualify for the World Cup with regularity - and it is a national crisis in DC and Guadalajara when they do not.

Yet, despite these augmented standards, neither country has had any bonafide success on the world’s biggest stage.

Canada’s modest achievement of reaching the last sixteen falls just one win short of matching the zenith of both American and Mexican achievement at the World Cup.

Over the hundred years since the tournament began, those two countries have a combined two wins in the round of 16 or later. Humble Canada therefore, with its harsh climate and relatively tiny population is punching above its weight.

While Canada was breaking new ground in Toronto, Vancouver, and Los Angeles, its two main rivals were unable to take any kind of meaningful step at this World Cup.

Both Mexico and the USA expected to be quarterfinalists on home soil.

Particularly delusional USMNT supporters were convinced that the trophy would stay in New York until 2030. As it played out, the US crashed out after a paltry performance against Belgium.

For the Mexicans, despite their very best efforts to channel the worst of the CONCACAF dark arts, Mexico could not muster a win at the storied Azteca when it mattered most against England. Even being up a man for half a game after a red card was shown to Jarell Quansah, El Tri were unable to banish their round of sixteen demons.

For Canada, the round of sixteen was paradoxically both a minimal expectation and a resounding success.

Expectations at this stage must always be moderated. None of these mighty European nations have won the World Cup: Netherlands, Croatia, Portugal, or Belgium. There has never been a champion from North America, Africa, or Asia - no country from any of those regions has ever even contested a World Cup final.

As a matter of fact, since the tournament in France in 1998, of the 32 final four spots, only 15 countries have produced a semi finalist. It must be kept top of mind, that while Canada is improving, so are Spain, France, England, and Argentina.

So achieving eternal glory by winning a world championship should not, and frankly can not be a reasonable goal. Without that heavy weight of expectation, we can redefine the bar of success. Any pressure that might have been present is suddenly released, and Canadians can instead focus on the process. That process though has significant shortcomings.

Ultimately, Canada is an immature footballing nation. The domestic league is amateur. Top sixteen at a World Cup was a pipe dream less than a decade ago. Every aspect of Canadian football has potential to improve in quality. The players, the team, the management, even the supporters need to be better.

But they also need to relish this moment. They need to enjoy the journey for what it has been and what it will become. Any win at the World Cup should be cherished. Any goal should be celebrated. When you frame 2026 this way, the tournament was a tour de force.

With an immature program, it must be said that Canada has a sometimes immature coach. Despite that criticism, Jesse Marsch remains the correct choice to lead this group.

Candidly, Canada is not a top side. There is no tactical mind on earth that can remove the physical limitations of aptitude. They are lightyears away from beating a side like England.

Canada can however, begin to slowly close the cultural gap between them and the premier footballing nations. England as the gold standard is the destination for global football. It is its zenith. The biggest clubs in the world are in London, Liverpool, and Manchester, and British culture often revolves around football and footballers. The consequences of that social calculus is that if a player is eligible and talented enough, they will do whatever it takes to take the field, sing “God Save the King”, and represent England.

That limit may never be reached, but Canada needs to continue to orient itself toward England as true north. The national team needs to establish a good name and build a strong reputation. It needs more young talent dreaming of singing “We stand on guard for thee”.

If those measures are the top incentives, a bombastic manager that is an expert recruiter and a motivator of men does need to be the priority. Growing the game and the program within Canada, despite all of its growing pains, is the most suitable path forward.

The way the Canadian squad responded to the injury of Ismael Kone speaks wonders about what Marsch, and John Herdman before him, have been able to achieve. When those players speak about brotherhood, it is not hollow platitudes. International football, we must be reminded, is not the players’ primary vocation. This is essentially their side hustle.

Marsch, for his part, absolutely deserves criticism for many of his choices. His bizarre handling of not disclosing Alphonso Davies’ availability, his unyielding loyalty to Jonathan David, and the puzzling timing of his substitutions are all legitimate questions that demand answers.

Changing any of these details however, would not suddenly morph Canada into a serious contender. Canada Soccer’s shortcomings are far more foundational than one man choosing the team while he gleefully pumps his arms on the sideline.

The trend as it stands is that Canada Soccer is ascendant – so why would you consider changing the coach?

The sad reality of Canada Soccer’s ascendance however, is that it is occurring despite itself. Historically, the CSA is an awful institution. Recently, under intrepid CEO Kevin Blue, the organization is starting to turn things around. They are slowly improving. But there is a tremendous amount of work that remains to be done.

Rome was not built in a day, and the lengthy list of change candidates demand attention. There are too many to tackle in one cycle, but Blue and his brain trust have to start somewhere. So as a partner article to this one, in our next edition we will examine some of the lower hanging fruit. In that examination, we will dig into what Canada Soccer fans should be looking towards, hopeful of, and respectfully demanding over the next qualifying cycle.

In the meantime though, we should pour a cold one, light a cigar, and savour the positives in Canada’s coming out party.

They should now be considered a mainstay of the beautiful game.

“Antisemitism is not a unitary phenomenon... Antisemitism is not a belief but a virus. The human body has an immensely sophisticated immune system which develops defences against viruses. It is penetrated, however, because viruses mutate. Antisemitism mutates.”

- Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

In the introduction of this series, I introduced the concept of internalized Judeophobia, which is the internalization of systemic Judeophobia — the fear, hatred, or aversion to Jews, Israelis, Judaism, and/or Israel.

In order to understand the consequences of this internalization and how it becomes internalized, we must first understand the systemic origins of the problem. What exactly is systemic Judeophobia? How is it different from antisemitism?

First, “antisemitism” is a manifestation of Judeophobia. It is an outdated term coined in the 19th century by antisemites. Judeophobia, which I wrote at length about here, is the far older, constant thread of the Jewish experience.

Judeophobia predates antisemitism by millennia. It has gone by different names, but the aversion to Judaism and Jews, Israel and Israelis, whether by the name Hebrew, Jew, Israelite, Zionist, or otherwise, is firmly embedded into Jewish history. The accusations change era to era, but there is always that core aversion and discrimination. Like Sacks says, the virus mutates and shifts to fit the times in which it exists. Among others, that historical journey has manifested Judeophobia in terms of tribalism, religious oppression, racial discrimination, and political othering.

There are two historical threads that need to be tracked to reach a comprehensive understanding, first the manifestations of Judaism, and then the thread concerning a Jewish state.

In ancient times, Judeophobia was a question of peoplehood, a disdain and aversion to the Hebrews as a tribe and a people. This is first documented in biblical times, though it is cemented throughout history. Just about every Jewish holiday consists of some form of addressing Judeophobia. Thus, the well known pre-meal adage “They tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat”.

As history progressed, the hate morphed into monotheistic sectarian strife. Jews have been tolerated throughout history, their presence is self evident of that, but this ancient hatred inevitably flares up, and turns into violence and persecution. There are the well known epochs of the Crusades, Christian pogroms, and the Spanish Inquisition. In the Arab world there are the less well known but just as brutal Islamic conquests, the Almohad caliphate, and recently the 20th century grand exodus of Jews from the Muslim world.

In the post Napoleonic era, as Judaism morphed from being primarily an ethnic peoplehood into a religion in a post enlightenment sense, the hatred began to express itself via political mechanisms. With society geared towards reason and the scientific method, Jews thrived in enlightenment Europe. But eventually, the convenience and utility of Judeophobic tendencies become irresistible. In the short term, blaming Jews has proven to be a winning formula.

Most famously and successfully of course, the Nazis found a convenient target in Jews, and were able to convince Germans that Jewish betrayal was responsible for losing the first World War. Corrupting enlightenment ideas of science and reason, and borrowing from 19th century social Darwinism, the Nazis framed their hate as racial antisemitism. This of course was the foundation for the Holocaust, and there is no event more emblematic of systemic Judeophobia than the murder of six million Jews.

Politically right wing regimes do not have a monopoly on Judeophobia. On the left, the Marxists and Soviets were able to target Jews (eventually Zionists) as the scapegoat for their problems. In the Soviet case, this was in part inherited from Tsarist Russia; Jews had been subject to violence and political othering while confined to ethnic and religious enclaves. After the Russian revolution in 1917, and until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the aversion carried on. The USSR had the 20th century distinction of manifesting Judeophobia in all of its plentiful forms, a kaleidoscope of hate: tribal, ethnic, religious, and political. The very existence of Jews was completely antithetical to communist goals.

None of this is new information to anyone with a basic level of understanding of Jewish history. But it bears repeating in the framework of Judeophobia. Systemic aversion to Jews and Judaism is much better understood as a cultural and historical throughline. The second half of the Judeophobic blanket, the aversion to Israel and Israelis, is also a feature of history. “Anti-Zionism” is not a new phenomenon. It was simply dormant because it lacked a target for two thousand years.

Ancient Israel, the kingdom of Judah (Judaea) was a constant target of invasion, conquest, and oftentimes forced assimilation. The Babylonians, the Seleucid Greeks, and the Romans all attempted to destroy the Judean way of life in their own way.

The Romans were particularly successful with their ultimate conquest and absorption of Judea as a Roman province. This was followed by the expulsion of most Jews from the region. Were the Romans antisemitic? They would not have considered themselves so. But the Romans would have looked at the Jewish way of life as inferior. They were certainly Judeophobic. They had an aversion to the Kingdom of Judah, its citizens, and what it stood for. They wanted to end the customs and rituals of Judaism, and they knew the best way to do that was to remove the native population from their land. They were so committed to this line of thinking that they renamed the province entirely.

These two key manifestations of what it means to be Jewish at all are tightly knit. The intangibles of the relationship with the divine, the customs and tradition of the religion, as well as the tangibles of the ritual, which oftentimes specifically revolve around architecture and geography. Israel or any historical analogue of Israel is the grounding conduit for Judaism. Temporarily removing a Jewish state in the land of Israel did not eliminate Judeophobia, it simply turned that aspect of the hatred dormant until a Jewish state was reformed. As it happened, this episode of dormancy lasted for two thousand years.

So, we can see clearly that these two primary streams within Judeophobia are well established. Hate, fear, and a general aversion to Jews and Judaism, as well as Israel and Israelis (or their ancient analogues). History shows us that Sacks’ virus analogy holds. That infection can manifest via any of the tribal, religious, racial, or political access points. With Israel, the next mutation occurs. It is a different spin on a classic case: the geopolitical.

It bears mentioning that this is where this idea differentiates itself from the emergent popular term “Jew Hate”. “Jew Hate” is another manifestation of Judeophobia, in this case the obvious and overt hatred of Jews. “Jew Hate” however, does not address Israel in any meaningful way. It therefore suffers from the same semantic shortcomings of “antisemitism”. Jew hate is a visceral term, therein lies its power. It hits at the core manifestation that Jews are dealing with on the surface. It is a symptom however. The root cause is the more useful “Judeophobia”.

Understanding the systemic conditions for Judeophobia is the key groundwork for understanding the “self-hating” Jew. This segment focused on the past, and it orients us in the correct framing. This primes us to understand how systemic Judeophobia manifests in western society today.

In the next edition of the series, we will explore the core manifestations of systemic Judeophobia on a more practical level, specifically in the Canadian context.

Read Part 3 Below: