"Canada's Polite Pogrom" with Jesse Brown

What happened to Canada? Once known as one of the most peaceful, multicultural countries in the world, Canada has become the epicenter of a disturbing wave of anti-Jewish violence: weekly synagogue shootings, a Jewish girls' school in Toronto shot at three separate times, a Jewish grandmother stabbed in an Ottawa kosher supermarket, and 14 shots fired at a Jewish-owned restaurant on the second night of Passover.

In this episode, Naya Lekht sits down with Jesse Brown — founder and publisher of CanadaLand, Canada's largest podcast network, winner of the Hillman Prize for Investigative Reporting, and author of the viral Atlantic piece "Canada's Polite Pogrom" — to investigate how this happened, why it's still happening, and what the rest of the world needs to understand before it's too late.

Jesse doesn't offer easy answers. He traces the roots of the anti-Zionist hate movement from Nazi Germany through the Soviet Union into today's post-colonial academy, explains why Canada's multicultural identity left its institutions uniquely unprepared to recognize anti-Jewish hatred disguised as political activism, and argues that pleas for sympathy are a dead end. Instead, he makes the case for naming what we're actually up against: a radicalized ideology that believes what it says.

This is one of the most honest conversations about Jewish life in the diaspora you'll hear this year.

About the Guest

Jesse Brown is the founder and publisher of CanadaLand, the first and largest podcast network in Canada. He is the winner of the Hillman Prize for Investigative Reporting and the National Magazine Award for Humor. CanadaLand's podcasts have won gold awards from the Signal Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. As a journalist, Jesse focuses on Canadian media — reporting and analysis of what the press gets right and what it gets wrong. Since October 7th, he has devoted his work to documenting anti-Jewish discrimination and the anti-Zionist hate movement in Canada, a focus that led to his recent limited audio series What Is Happening Here? and his viral Atlantic essay Canada's Polite Pogrom.

Jesse will be joining Naya on stage May 17th at the first-ever World Symposium Against Anti-Zionism in Toronto.

Listen & Follow

🎙️ Jesse's limited series: What Is Happening Here? — available wherever you get your podcasts 📰 Read: "Canada's Polite Pogrom" in The Atlantic 🎟️ World Symposium Against Anti-Zionism — Toronto, May 17, 2026

Clarifying the complex. Step into my classroom. 

Transcript

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naya lekht: Well, welcome to Don't Know Much About, where it all begins. Starting over, sorry.

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naya lekht: Well, welcome to Don't Know Much About, where it all begins with a question. Now, if you've been keeping up with latest news coming out of Canada, you know the picture unfolding there is quite alarming, quite dismal. Weekly shootings at synagogues, anti-Zionist mobs mobilizing on the streets.

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naya lekht: Chanting death to Israel, Jewish Girls School in Toronto was shot at on three separate occasions.

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naya lekht: A Jewish grandmother was stabbed in a kosher supermarket in Ottawa. Pro-Palestinian groups launch a campaign to revoke the accreditation of 17 Canadian Jewish sleepaway camps because the summer camps were accused of supporting genocide.

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naya lekht: And, you know, just two days ago, on the second night of Passover, 14 shots fired at a Jewish-owned restaurant. It's almost really unbelievable. With me today to discuss what is going on is Jesse Brown, founder and publisher of CanadaLand, the first and largest podcast network in Canada.

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naya lekht: He's the winner of the Hillman Prize for Investigative Reporting and the National Magazine Award for Humor. CanadaLand's podcasts have won gold awards from the Signal Awards and from the Digital Publishing Awards. Now, as a journalist, Jesse focuses on the Canadian media.

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naya lekht: providing reporting and analysis of what the news media gets wrong, and what it does right. And after October 7th, he began documenting news coverage of both anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in Canada.

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naya lekht: This resulted in widespread criticism of Jesse and his coverage, a boycott, really, also of Canada Land by over a thousand former subscribers.

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naya lekht: public criticism from some of his own staffers. Nevertheless, he continues to report on anti-Jewish discrimination in Canada, resulting in his recent limited audio series, What is Happening Here? which

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naya lekht: I listen to with great interest, but also trepidation. Jesse will be joining me on stage this May, May 17th, for the first ever World Symposium Against Anti-Zionism.

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naya lekht: In Toronto, and I hear it's already created quite a stir on Reddit, with countless people writing, what the F? Why are they conflating anti-Zionism with Jew hatred? So, Jesse, welcome to my show, Don't know much about.

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Canadaland: Thank you for having me, Nya. Thank you so much.

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naya lekht: So I want to tell you that growing up in the United States, I had this, like, image of Canada as this, like, Charlie and the Maple Syrup Factory kind of place, and when I was in high school, I even visited Montreal, and it was just such a peaceful, like, neutral… like, nothing will hap… nothing happens in Canada.

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naya lekht: But in 2024, I was writing a piece on the IRA definition and its relationship, to anti-Palestinian racism, and you know, while researching, I found out that it was crafted by the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association. And already then, that's 2024,

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naya lekht: It was already adopted by the Toronto School District, and I also found out that Israel Apartheid Week, which became staple all across North America.

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naya lekht: by the year already 2005, also was founded, came out of Canada.

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naya lekht: And then I began to talk to people, really, living in Canada, and they were telling me, like, these horror stories. And a friend who, immigrated from the former Soviet Union to Canada, she said to me, you know, this is not the country we came to.

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naya lekht: So, Jesse, I know you've devoted so much time to this. What happened in Canada, or perhaps to Canada? How did this neutral, happy place become this epicenter for violence?

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Canadaland: That's what I set out to investigate in this series.

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Canadaland: I think that sometimes Canada can get overly flattened, but largely, it's based on some truths. It's a very peaceful country. It's a very diverse, multicultural country. It's a country that has accepted a lot of people from all over the world.

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Canadaland: It's maybe my favorite thing about Canada and Toronto specifically, is that we're kind of like an example of how very divergent people can coexist, with a really small amount of friction. And for most of my life, I…

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Canadaland: you know, up until October 7th, I don't think I experienced one act of serious discrimination. So…

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Canadaland: How did this turn on a dime?

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Canadaland: what is it about Canada that… where you think that we would be inured to this? We actually accelerated into a spike of

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Canadaland: demonstrable, measurable anti-Jewish sentiment, that, as you described, and that's really just the tip of the iceberg, has transformed Jewish life here. That's what I set to look into, and there's a lot of theories, there's a lot of conclusions,

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Canadaland: A couple that we focus on are…

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Canadaland: that it is exactly the tolerance of Canada, and almost turning multiculturalism and diversity and inclusion and a lot of the kind of more modern manifestations of DEI thinking into our national identity that has left us incredibly vulnerable.

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Canadaland: when anti-Jewish hatred masks itself as a political movement.

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Canadaland: our systems were just completely unprepared to see it for what it is. You combine that with

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Canadaland: during the Justin Trudeau years, an acceleration of the open-door policy. One that, in theory.

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Canadaland: as the, you know, great-grandchild of, you know, war immigrants and pogrom refugees, I fully support we should take people in who need refuge.

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Canadaland: But we tripled our Muslim population in Canada in a very short period of time. And we also stopped really naturalizing people. So we took in tens of thousands of people from, you know, one example is Syria.

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Canadaland: Where people are taught that there is no distinction between the Zionist enemy and Jews, it's just one and the same, and there is, you know, a documented education system that teaches hatred.

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Canadaland: There's a lot of other factors. The immigrant experience is different than it used to be. The access to progression and equity, I think those things are real. So all…

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Canadaland: all of the kind of conditions were laid out for something that I think nobody really saw coming. There's also the academic side of this, that our academy, our universities.

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Canadaland: embraced post-colonial theory, and we saw flourishing of Middle East studies departments that are funded by foreign, you know, Muslim Brotherhood-connected entities in Qatar. You know, this has sort of been laced into progressive Canadian culture, and we saw, you know, similar to what's seen elsewhere, this sort of alliance of

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Canadaland: progressives with people with Islamist ideologies. All of these things kind of turn into a perfect storm. And, you know, I also think that the Jewish institutional world, so focused on anti-Semitism, was also unprepared to really identify and push back against this in an effective way. That's starting to change.

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naya lekht: Right, I'm reminded also of your recent piece in The Atlantic, titled Canada's Polite Poggrom, and I think it perfectly really sums up the tolerance of the intolerant.

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naya lekht: You know, the first line you write, Ted Rosenberg quit teaching geriatric medicine after 30 years because his employer

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naya lekht: the University of British Columbia was too tolerant.

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naya lekht: So I guess my question to you is as follows, you know, I was just, before I hopped on to record with you, I was listening to one of your, episodes with, I think he was a rabbi, I think it was episode 3, the Jewish man who denied.

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Canadaland: Not a rabbi. There's a different guy who is, calls himself a rabbi, who is an anti-Zionist Jew. This is, this is an activist and sort of an activist organizer named David Meslin in that episode.

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naya lekht: Right, that's the one. And, I remember you said to him, like, look, Jews are experiencing

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naya lekht: highest levels of Jew hatred since October 7th. My question is.

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naya lekht: why are people, like, we are… we are taught here in the United States that if somebody is experiencing racism, we believe them. You know, there's believe them, hashtag, when there was the Me Too movement with women. Why are… why do Jews not get the same treatment? Why are we not believed? I mean.

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naya lekht: I often have this conversation with many of my friends, and I'm like, I don't quite understand what is so difficult for people to understand, which is we've got thousands of Jews who are reporting feeling

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naya lekht: anti-Semitism, and I'm not a big proponent of that term as well, because I think it's anti-Zionism, okay? But… we're being told to believe people who experience racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny. Why are… what are we tolerant of the intolerance when it comes to Jews? What is your opinion?

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Canadaland: Well, it shocked me, because it's not just that there's disbelief, it's who it's coming from. You know, it's not everybody who

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Canadaland: believes, victims of racism and sympathizes with them and offers allyship. It's not everybody who spread the hashtag Believe Women, it's the progressive left. And I frankly am quite sympathetic to those sentiments.

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Canadaland: It doesn't mean that you remove due process, it doesn't mean that everything they're saying is gospel truth, but when somebody puts their hand up and says, I have been harmed, I have been raped, I have been discriminated against, let's start from a default position of belief.

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Canadaland: Because it's so destructive when we gaslight people and we say, prove it, you know? I wasn't adherent to those sentiments when they became popular, and I believe them now. I was shocked at how they were not extended to Jews. And it took me a while to really understand what was going on, because the double standard was so appalling.

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Canadaland: And the fact that it was coming from people who were so highly attuned, so highly sensitive to every microaggression, to, you know, sometimes overextending and over-believing. But even in the face of evidence, there would be this,

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Canadaland: defiance and disbelief. And, you know, it really is a frustrating exercise to, you know, where I find myself kind of almost sputtering to make the case, where you would see something happening that was just such overt, anti-Jewish discrimination or even violence, and, you know, it would start with.

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Canadaland: well, how… like, is that real, or is that… is that, the camera angle, you know, misleading us? Or, you know, was that actually taken there, or… and then it would move into, okay, so yes, it did happen, but, you know, maybe it was a Jew who did it. Maybe this is a false flag.

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Canadaland: You know, and then when you get past those defenses, you finally get to, well, okay, it did happen, it did happen to Jews, it did happen from anti-Zionists to Jews.

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Canadaland: But does this really matter when you consider the genocide in Gaza? You would find yourself at this relativism, this whataboutism, which is another phrase that was, you know, something to be avoided and frowned upon by the exact same people when it was about other groups.

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Canadaland: I've ultimately come to the conclusion that these are futile arguments to have.

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Canadaland: You are dealing with people who are deeply immersed and attached.

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Canadaland: and loyal to an ideology that prohibits sympathy or concern for Jews, that has come to define any amount of attention to, discrimination against Jews as contrary to the greater cause.

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naya lekht: decided on the anti-Zionism.

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Canadaland: the anti-Zionist ideology is that, yeah, holds that this is, you know, it might be a lie, it might be… it might be a paid-for lie, it might be an organized lie. I've been… I'm accused on a daily basis of being a Mossad agent. Like, there's almost, like.

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Canadaland: after… and people really and truly do believe this, because they are so immersed in a fixation, a hate fixation, on Israel.

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Canadaland: that it does seem ridiculous to them when you say, hey, the window of my Jewish business was just broken by a brick or was shot at 14 times. Like, well, that person just saw, you know, 30 days in a row of the corpses of children. So, you know, some of that information

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Canadaland: might be, you know, actually taken from Gaza, some of that information, there is propaganda and lies that happens there. Regardless, and not to, you know, not to diminish, you know, the horrors of war.

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Canadaland: what does that have to do with a sudden, and daily assault on a small, vulnerable minority in North America?

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Canadaland: you can find yourself struggling to make that case. Like, I have nothing to do with the pictures that you've been immersed in from Israel. I do have something to do with my, you know, the public school in my neighborhood, the businesses in my neighborhood, the synagogues that me and my family go to. These are seen as completely invalid things to be talking about, because you're speaking to people who are adherents of a totalizing ideology.

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naya lekht: Okay, well, I want to dig a little bit into that, a few things that you said.

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naya lekht: you said, what does this have to do with this small minority of Jews in North America? I think that they don't see Jews as a minority. I think that this is beyond… like, I definitely think anti-Zionism is a very deadly, lethal… it's the… I call it the third era of Jew hatred.

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naya lekht: But I also think that because of DI and because of progressivism, they are… that framework primes individuals to view minorities in only one way. And it affects even Jews. So I was talking to even a colleague of mine who's Jewish, and I said to her, I'm going to be giving a talk

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naya lekht: at a medical school, because I do a lot of training, I'm going to be giving a talk on anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism at a medical school. And she said, why? I said, well, you know,

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naya lekht: there's a lot of trainings, DI trainings, about how certain hate affects minorities, and she said.

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naya lekht: But Jews aren't… Jews are not a minority. They're white, and they're… they're very affluent, they're successful.

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naya lekht: And I think that is also a very deadly… very,

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naya lekht: unhealthy way of looking at the world and looking at human beings that we only empathize with a human being if they are quote-unquote oppressed. Which brings me to the question of…

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naya lekht: this is something I believe, maybe you can push back, which is that I don't think Jews are oppressed, I think they're hated.

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naya lekht: And that's why it's very difficult for those in the progressive space to understand, because it is true that Jews are successful.

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naya lekht: Right? You have a successful media company, one of the most successful ones in Canada, right? Jews are very educated, it is true. In terms of power, Israel definitely has more power. So, I think it's very hard for them to empathize, but I think that that's an unhealthy way to empathize with human beings. I can only empathize if you belong to an oppressed group.

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Canadaland: I think that there's a lot of truth to that. I am not soliciting anyone's

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Canadaland: empathy. And I don't think that Jews should be out there, hat in hand, asking that people feel for us. I want to kind of take on the points you made, in turn.

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Canadaland: to the initial proposition, I was quite sympathetic to it for some time, where I felt that it was true that though there's always going to be anti-Semitism, and not every Jew is successful, and there are Jews who are oppressed, even in North America, Jews constituted a wonderful success story of how oppression could be overcome.

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Canadaland: And when I look back on my family, I had a family member who fleed the Holocaust, came to Canada, and was locked up here. They had internment camps in Canada because they couldn't tell Nazis apart from Jews.

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Canadaland: There were quotas for Jews, in law schools and universities. There were deeds that you could not sell your land

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Canadaland: to a Jew in Canada. This was not very long ago.

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Canadaland: Jews overcame all of that, and by and large, are affluent, and are… achieved belonging and acceptance. And my sense of justice and education was that it's now our role to be a voice for other people who are climbing that same ladder.

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Canadaland: And so when the rhetoric or, you know, the thinking was, it's not our turn.

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Canadaland: to, benefit from various programs. I thought, that's right. That's right. It is accurate that there are people who are systemically oppressed, and they should have the benefit of these various

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Canadaland: efforts and programs, I still generally feel that way. What I didn't realize was happening in the background was that my conception of Jews as

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Canadaland: yes, a minority, but a no longer oppressed minority, had been replaced with what you just described. A sense that not only had Jews kind of, like, lost their minority status, not only had Jews become white, like, let me tell you, my grandfather was not a white man. You know, whatever the color of his skin, he was… he spoke in a thick Yiddish accent, and he was a fruit peddler, and he hung out in, like, an immigrant, you know, what was

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Canadaland: considered a Warren of Winnipeg, and you know, he was as my… he was garlicky. You know, he was not a mainstream

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Canadaland: like, wasp Canadian by any means, so whiteness is a very fluid concept as well. I am a white man, you know? I benefit in, you know, unless I had… only having put my hand up and said, I am a Jew, have I felt anything other than white privilege? So, all of these concepts make a lot of sense until you realize that we had slowly been moved out of one category, and not just into whiteness, but almost as like an apex predator of white

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Canadaland: That this ideology had been festering.

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Canadaland: in all sorts of quarters, that we were, you know, slave masters, and that we were uncommonly involved in the slave trade, and that, you know, you know, whether it was that we were, you know, these sort of arch-capitalists, that we were… all of it, you know, and I learned in the investigation of this series.

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Canadaland: can really be traced back to the foundation of anti-Zionist propaganda and the anti-Zionist hate movement, which had its seeds in Nazi Germany, but really flourished in the Soviet Union. And this was really being disseminated throughout

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Canadaland: the world, and as these ideas of post-colonial studies became more and more popular, Jews were increasingly being associated.

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Canadaland: with the oppressor. And so, you know, that gets us to where we are now, where I think that, yes.

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Canadaland: There has kind of been solidified a notion

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Canadaland: of who is really valid of human concern. You know, empathy, maybe we're talking, you know, six of one, half a dozen of the other, but, it's…

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Canadaland: I find that the danger and the path ahead is not, like, that we need to regain the world's sympathy or empathy, which I think Jews, you know, in many ways throughout the decades, through, you know, the stories that we told people and telling victim narratives of the Holocaust, has backfired tremendously, though a lot of that was just about telling our stories.

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Canadaland: people look at the position that Jews have in society, and it doesn't match with the movies of Jews in, you know, striped pajamas in Auschwitz, and they've concluded that they're being tricked. What we need to teach people

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Canadaland: is that… The Jews of Germany.

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Canadaland: were affluent.

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Canadaland: The Jews of Germany were part of the establishment. The Jews of Germany were in a very similar position to Jews in America and Canada. They were not in little, you know… again, I don't want to speak holistically, but they had reached an uncommon level of assimilation.

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Canadaland: And it's for that that they were hated. It's as they were seen as an invasive

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Canadaland: species that needed to be exterminated. We need to remind people of our actual history, of what hatred actually is. We were not necessarily the underclass in the societies that turned against us during the Holocaust.

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naya lekht: Right. You know, it's interesting that you're talking about Germany, and our affluence and success, and the anxiety, always, of the anti-Semite, of the Jew hater.

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naya lekht: It's not that… I write about this, it's not that they hate the Jew because the Jew is subhuman, it's that they hate the Jew because they're so terrified that the Jew will invade and take over and transform their society.

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naya lekht: So, interestingly enough, just a few days ago, I'm reading a book.

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naya lekht: And Theodore Herzl, his vision for a Jewish homeland was…

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naya lekht: scoffed at, and really rejected by the Jewish establishment in Germany. They didn't want to be associated, they didn't want… they were so highly assimilated, they didn't… they rejected it. Who rejected it? It was actually the non-Jews, the… the Kaiser, the officials, and the Russian Jews who were living in the shtetles, they liked the idea, but…

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naya lekht: But why am I mentioning this? Because just a few minutes ago, You had said.

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naya lekht: I'm a Jew in Canada. My community is… where… I mean, are you in Toronto?

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Canadaland: I am.

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naya lekht: My community is Toronto, why are they associating me with Israel? And I kind of…

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naya lekht: I kind of hear those echoes with the German Jews who rejected, you know, Theodor Herzl's vision.

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naya lekht: I kind of have a different take of this. I don't blame the anti-Zionists for associating me, Jew, with Israel.

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naya lekht: Because I do think that… We are… is it…

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naya lekht: three eras of Jew hatred. Hating the Jew for their religion, for their race, and today it's a national. It's hating Jews on their national origin. And national origin is associated with state, so…

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naya lekht: in many ways, I… you know, I don't know if you meant it that way, but I felt… I heard those echoes of the very assimilated German Jews who rejected that vision of…

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Canadaland: Yeah, I think it's a valid point, and it's one of the more difficult ideas to get across. I don't want to argue that Jews should not be associated with Israel.

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Canadaland: We are associated with Israel, and Jews who say, hey, Judaism's got nothing to do with Israel, are wrong. They're wrong. We are the people of Israel, you know, next year in Jerusalem, this is not a new idea, this is not 1948. We are associated with Israel in ways

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Canadaland: religious, genetic.

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Canadaland: familial, political, you know, and it really isn't about… there's a lot of North American Jews who want to make it about whether or not you have a political attachment, or, you know, like, well, that's not my form of the religion, or that's not my political… If you are a Jew, you are connected to Israel umpteen ways.

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Canadaland: The distinction is, I am not responsible for what the Jewish government does.

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Canadaland: Right? And that, like, I don't think that that should be so difficult to get across in the same way that, like, if we're to have an environment that is incredibly hateful in our public institutions, to, let's say, China.

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Canadaland: And we're going to spread, like, the government of China… we would take efforts to make sure that Chinese people were not talking about you.

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Canadaland: We understand that you are connected to China, you're Chinese! We understand that, but we're gonna make sure that we don't make this an uncomfortable or even a hostile place for Chinese public school students or Chinese employees. That would be a priority. No such distinction is made for Jews.

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naya lekht: That's right. I remember after 9-11, there was a concerted effort, to mandate education in schools, and really not to conflate Muslims with the actions of these, you know, terrorists who did these heinous acts.

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naya lekht: And you use the China example. I'm from the former Soviet Union, so I'm gonna use the Russia example. Russia invades Ukraine.

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naya lekht: thank God no Russian in the diaspora is getting attacked, but that's healthy. And so it kind of proves my point that it is animated by anti-Jewish conspiratorial thinking.

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naya lekht: this connection of Jews to the Israeli government or to Israel. It is animated by Jew hatred. Which leads me to another question.

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naya lekht: By the way, I just wanted to give you a huge shout-out, which is, you appeared on CBS, right?

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Canadaland: Yeah.

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naya lekht: And she asks you, she goes, what, like, what's happening in Canada? Why, what do you… and you just, like, look at her, and you go, it's the anti-Zionist hate movement. And I have to tell you, you know, I've been… I'm not an October 8th Jew. I've been fighting anti-Zionism since…

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naya lekht: I came to college campus in the early 2000s, okay, in California.

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naya lekht: And to hear someone on a mainstream media say that was…

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naya lekht: Wow. So, big kudos to you. But then afterwards, you said something very important, and I want to talk about that. You said…

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naya lekht: That these knee-jerk statements that come from politicians, like, antisemitism has no place in British society or Canada, or, you know, Mumdani loves to say, like, he's never… he's not gonna stand for antisemitism in New York, you're saying they're largely ineffective. I agree with you. Can you tell me why you think that?

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Canadaland: I don't think they mean anything to anyone at this point.

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Canadaland: I think that… At best, like, a lot of people, it actually angers them.

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Canadaland: It's, it's,

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Canadaland: Oh, you want me to sympathize with you at this moment when, as previously just, you know, described, they're seeing these images which they associate with us.

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Canadaland: Even the people who are doing these things don't consider themselves anti-Semites.

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Canadaland: So, it doesn't speak to the person who's perpetrating this. It doesn't say, oh, I don't want to be one of these hated anti-Semites. It offers no comfort to Jews.

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Canadaland: So, who is this for? I think it's just a ritual, it's an exercise, it's thoughts and prayers. We're sorry your school got shot, thoughts and prayers, you know, we're sorry that your synagogue got vandalized. Antisemitism has no place here. Antisemitism has a place.

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naya lekht: For sure.

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Canadaland: in America, like, this is a place of anti-Semitism. Toronto is a place of anti-Semitism, like never before. You know, it has refound its place. We have to accept that, first of all. And second of all.

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Canadaland: what… What are we actually up against here?

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Canadaland: We are up against a hate movement that

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Canadaland: I don't think that the people… I can even accept

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Canadaland: that some people who are part of that movement, not only do they not consider themselves anti-Semitic, but I accept that some of them are not anti-Semites. I accept that. I believe that some of the people in this movement really and truly hate Israel and Zionism and Zionists, and might be Jewish themselves, have Jewish friends, and have no actual, like.

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Canadaland: feeling in their hearts, that… I don't need to prove otherwise, and I'm tired of trying to prove to people, oh, actually, you are an anti-Semite. If you are an anti-Zionist who hates Israel and wants it to be destroyed, well, that's a weird thing to be. Like, it is a weird thing

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Canadaland: to want a country destroyed. You can really hate Putin, but if you want Russia destroyed, you want to dismantle that country.

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Canadaland: And you have… you can't really articulate any kind of a safe future for Russians that's practical. Some people will give you…

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Canadaland: a whole narrative about how all the Israelis will be safe in a new, you know, Hamas-ruled, you know, Palestine. The disregard for Jewish lives and Jewish safety is inherent in these arguments. You know, the fact that you want to eradicate a country means you are filled with hate, and the fact that you're taking that hateful movement.

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naya lekht: But what if I feel… wait, hold on, but what if I feel righteous? What if I feel like… when Ron… look, I'm from the former Soviet Union. My family celebrated the fall of the Soviet Union. Which, by the way, when you dismantle the Soviet Union, they lost a lot of territory in Eastern Bloc. They did lose a lot of their sovereignty over those lands.

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naya lekht: Also over the, Central Asian countries.

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naya lekht: But what if you truly buy in, and you believe that there's a genocidal Nazi regime on Earth right now? I always, you know, I do a lot of teaching. I always ask students, okay, if you knew that there was a school

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naya lekht: That literally had… it was a Nazi school. Every morning, they did the Heil Hitler salute. What do you want… wouldn't you want that school to stop existing?

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Canadaland: Yes?

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naya lekht: So why is that hateful? Why is that hateful to want to eradicate a hate…

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naya lekht: An entity that practices genocide, apartheid, racism, fascism.

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Canadaland: Well, it's hateful, it might be justified, but it is hateful. They'll say it's hateful. They'll say, we hate Zionism, we're not against.

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naya lekht: Okay, but it's… but it's… it's justified hate. I hated the Nazi… I hate the Nazis, too.

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Canadaland: And they're… and they're perfectly… they're perfectly, free to think that.

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Canadaland: it's, you know, people have a strange idea about hate laws. It's not against the law in Canada or anywhere to hate. You can hate Israel. You can hate a country. You can have.

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naya lekht: You said it's just a pretty weird thing to… it's a pretty weird…

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Canadaland: I think it is weird, it's hateful, it's destructive, but I think you described very accurately the belief system. They believe that they are fighting the new Nazis. Okay, that is what they believe, and we have to accept that, they believe that. Once we accept that.

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Canadaland: then we can have a wider conversation as a society, not with them. They are not coming back from those beliefs. They are fully committed to them.

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Canadaland: We can have a wider conversation with everyone else and say, okay, this is the anti-Zionist hate movement. It has an object of hate that it is fixated on, it wants to destroy the country of Israel.

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Canadaland: It doesn't believe that there are any innocent civilians in Israel. It believes that a violent uprisal against every citizen of Israel is justified, and by extension, many of its adherents believe that its supporters in the diaspora in North America are also valid targets.

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Canadaland: This movement proves that they are serious about this every day. They are part of an escalating campaign of violence targeting citizens of these countries. That is what they believe. I don't want to argue with them anymore. They'll agree with me about that.

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naya lekht: Alberta will tell you that Israel is, you know, must be eradicated. It's the enemy of humanity. She said that in the UN floor, the enemy of humanity.

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Canadaland: That's right. And so I think we need to appeal to our governments and to our neighbors, not to sympathize with us, but to understand that the people who are

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Canadaland: Wearing masks, and sporting military fatigues, and who say that they believe in violent uprising, and who have the banners and flags of militant

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Canadaland: Terrorist groups, violent militias, if you don't like the word terrorism, and who believe

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Canadaland: an extension of anti-Zionist ideology to the world. They'll say this as well. We want to eradicate.

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naya lekht: It's globalized the antifa, right.

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Canadaland: Yes, we have to, like, we have to make people understand what is true.

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Canadaland: that this is not about, you need to sympathize with me or protect me. You need to understand that this is a radicalized movement that really does believe. It believes what it is saying. And they emphasize this. They say, when we say decolonized, did you think that we were joking? What did you think we meant by it?

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naya lekht: Seriously.

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Canadaland: Yeah, and this is something that has a lot of historical precedence, because when a society turns on its Jews, it is often, whether it's in the Soviet Union, or whether it was America turning against, you know, communists, it is a sign of paranoia, low trust.

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Canadaland: scapegoating that never ends with Jews. It is of concern to everyone. It should be of concern to everyone.

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naya lekht: So you're… you're saying, and I completely, by the way, agree with you, there's no talking to them. They're… they're bought in, there's no… but you're saying we have to somehow talk to the leaders, the politicians, to make them understand that there's… that it's something very wrong.

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naya lekht: about wanting to eradicate an entire country, and to see people living in your country, Canada, in your country, England, in your country, America, as targets.

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naya lekht: A civilian… these are civilians living in your… your citizens.

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naya lekht: And there are targets. I see.

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naya lekht: But at the same time, you did go back… I'm aware of this kind of conversation, and I have this with a few friends, where they're like, look, we don't have to make the case that anti-Zionism is a form of Jew hatred in order for people to care. Like, it's enough that you want to eradicate an entire, country. And my response is…

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naya lekht: I think there's something…

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naya lekht: there's something alarming to me, and maybe I'm, you know, there's something alarming to me that I have to… that in order for the world to care, I have to hide the Jew.

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Canadaland: Yeah.

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Canadaland: I understand that feeling.

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naya lekht: Right, I think that, over the summer, or a few months ago, the physicist David Deutsch, went on a podcast and, discussed this pattern

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naya lekht: the mind virus, that not now, not today, not 50 years, just historically, there's just a kind of, a callousness that the violence against Jews just does not elicit

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naya lekht: Maybe empathy is the wrong word, but concern.

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naya lekht: And we're fine, we're, like, thinking, okay, so maybe we need to find a different way to strategize. Maybe… maybe we shouldn't say that anti-Zionism is about Jew hatred, but to me, it's like, that's even… that is even more of an alarm that you have to hide the Jew in order for people to care.

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Canadaland: Look, I don't want to hide anything, and I just want to, first of all, I want strategies that work.

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Canadaland: And… I also want to have a clear definition of terms.

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Canadaland: There is something that happened on the social level that we're going to be reckoning with for a long time.

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Canadaland: We've been betrayed. We thought that our neighbors had our backs, we thought that…

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Canadaland: I will look out for you. If something happens to your kid, I care, and I expect the same in return. We thought that in our workplaces, there were certain lines that wouldn't be crossed, and we found

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Canadaland: in a really bitter and painful way, that we do not have that support. We are not looked on the way we thought we were looked on, or some people are just not willing to stick their necks up for us.

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Canadaland: We've found that on an institutional level, we've found that from our leaders. We are not safe in the way that we thought, and there is a sense of betrayal that I think is…

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Canadaland: It's gonna have to be reckoned with.

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Canadaland: That, I think, needs to be dealt with separately.

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Canadaland: from… The threat on the streets and, to our systems and in our institutions.

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Canadaland: And I think that by muddying those things, it's almost like we're asking for a personal sympathy or regard, or, you know, like, please regard my humanity to a society at large.

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Canadaland: that, at the very moment when it is, being most whipped up into an anti-Jewish feeling, there's, I mean, the piece that I wrote for The Atlantic

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Canadaland: It went viral, it's the most widely read thing I've ever written, talking about this very thing, the polite pogrom. How… not about the gunshots, but about this sort of under-the-surface way in which Jews are being purged from institutions that have become hostile to us. And I… the amount of…

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Canadaland: hatred of, of, just ab… like… scorn.

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Canadaland: that I would dare to liken this to a pogrom, that I would plead this case at the time when Israel's doing what it's doing, was overwhelming. I don't regret writing that. I think I was documenting something that is absolutely true and accurate, and we're gonna have to deal with it. But there is…

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Canadaland: There is no way of countering the physical threat

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Canadaland: and the threat to our institutions through a plea for sympathy for Jews. That's… I… I think it's… I think it's a dead end.

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naya lekht: What a time.

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Canadaland: We have to show people that it's their own society that they have to fight for. It's their own humanity that they have to fight for, because, yeah.

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Canadaland: We're really feeling our numbers, you know? There's not a lot of us. And for all of the, lies about Jewish control and Jewish power and Jewish media control, wow, has the narrative gotten away from any place of sympathy or even regard for Jewish safety or Jewish lives.

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naya lekht: Wow. That's a really… It's a dark place that…

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naya lekht: You know, we just have to kind of acquiesce with the fact that we're just… they're not gonna come… no, they're not gonna come and save us.

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Canadaland: Yeah, but are you really that surprised? Like, I want to be… I want to engage with this fight in a different way. I don't want to live in a state of grievance and betrayal,

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Canadaland: I was taught.

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naya lekht: You just said they betrayed us, you just said that.

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Canadaland: I know it happened, but there is something… there's another ethic that I was brought up with, which is…

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Canadaland: Yes, integrate. And yes, be… yes, fight for other people's rights. And yes, live in this multicultural society, but understand the lesson of the Holocaust.

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Canadaland: Under the right circumstances, when the chips are down, your neighbor will turn you in.

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Canadaland: This is something about human… this is not about Jews versus Gentiles, this is a sad thing about human nature, and we are the carriers of this lesson. And when we say never again, it's not a plea for us. It's not a plea for, don't ever do this to us again.

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Canadaland: It's that we carry a moral lesson that maybe other people should be carrying, but somehow it's fallen to us, that you could be a Nazi. You could be swayed into this. You are a decent, good person who could be led down a road to atrocities, and it's our job to

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Canadaland: To stop people from that, to remind them of their capacity for that, and our own capacity for that.

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Canadaland: And so, I don't think we should carry that responsibility with a bitter sense of betrayal. I think that it's one of the things we're chosen for. And, you know, there's an honor to it, you know, so now.

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Canadaland: You know, this is awful, it's not anything that I was… that I experienced before, but it's also not an uncommon experience for a Jew, to be a Jew, to live under… under these circumstances, and to have to make… to have to have this fight.

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Canadaland: So let's, you know, let's try to take it on as a Jewish responsibility and a Jewish duty, and maybe even as a Jewish honor.

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naya lekht: Amazing. I completely agree with you. I'm so excited that you will be joining as a speaker.

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naya lekht: at the first ever World Symposium Against Anti-Zionism in Toronto. I really, am so grateful that you've joined, also on my show. Loved talking to you. Just before we go, anything coming up for you that you'd like people to know about? Any new series?

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Canadaland: I just want people to listen to what is happening here. This is, you know, I'm not an activist, or even having these kinds… I loved having this conversation with you, and I find myself stimulated, and exploring this is interesting to me, but my job is to talk to people and do journalism, and what is happening here.

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Canadaland: I sit down with the anti-Zionists, I sit down with anti-Zionist Jews, I sit down with Jews, I document what's been happening to them. It's not your usual yell fest. I think it's one of the most thorough documents of

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Canadaland: what is happening in our societies, and it is difficult to listen to at times, but I just encourage people to listen to it, and there'll be more coming soon. So, what is happening here? You can search for it where you listen to podcasts.

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naya lekht: Absolutely. Big kudos to you. I was listening to a few, and I was raging inside. I'm like, wow, he's so calm, and you really are an amazing journalist, in that you give the voice, and you listen to people you don't agree with, and you really give them

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naya lekht: the opportunity to speak, so amazing. So thank you so much for joining us on this very special episode of Don't Know Much About.