From the JI – Page 40

Pledge reflects motives

In June, the Spanish government passed a law granting descendants of Sephardi Jews forced from that country in the 15th century the right to dual Spanish citizenship.

Only someone unfamiliar with the toing and froing of Jewish migrations and expulsions could be blind to the magnificence with which this move dovetails with history. For millennia, princes and fiefs, kings and counts expelled the Jews from their realms in one generation and then enticed them back in successive ones, when their perceived value rebounded or when the duchy or kingdom was in financial peril. Sometimes it took a generation, sometimes it took 600 years, as in the case of Spain, which, it should be noted, is now just a few notches above Greece on the financial solvency scale.

But Jews who consider taking up Spain’s generous offer will be taking a sober second look after recent events. OK, the events were a relatively small-scale tempest – a reggae festival in Valencia – but the lessons are wide-ranging and deeply telling.

Matisyahu, the once Chassidic, now just Jewish, reggae rapper, was disinvited from the Rototom Sunsplash Festival after he refused to sign a pledge in support of a Palestinian state. The boycott, divestment and sanctions movement had convinced the festival organizers that participants should be forced to commit to the Palestinian cause.

The quality of the performers or the wishes of the audience were secondary to the political positions of the musicians, apparently. Why this obscure music festival should become a flashpoint for a kerfuffle over the Middle East may seem baffling, but the strategy of the movement has been to demand loyalty oaths from anyone at any time in any place. Canadian film festivals, including the Toronto International Film Festival and the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, have been roiled over the topic in the past. These efforts at a “cultural boycott” are atrocious enough, but the worst tactics of the movement promote an academic boycott, which is as close as we can come to literal book-burning.

Is it additionally appalling that Matisyahu is not Israeli, but American? Sort of. The boycotters have attacked Israelis for the most part, but now they are turning their cannons on anyone who might think that Israel has a right to exist alongside a Palestinian state. (Note that the oath did not address a two-state solution. Coexistence is not top of the agenda for BDSers.)

Not all Jews are Zionists and, indeed, some Jews support the BDS movement. However, if you believe in the right of self-determination for the Palestinian people, but not for the Jewish people, then you are at the least a hypocrite.

The BDS movement, while a relatively new phenomenon, has its historical antecedents in the people who would paint Stars of David on Jewish shop windows. It is a mob of bullies for the most part, which calls itself pro-Palestinian, but exhibits nothing positive, only hatred and vilification of Israel.

Although a reggae festival might seem an odd place to start, the BDSers and the larger “pro-Palestinian” contingent could buy themselves some legitimacy by taking an oath themselves: to work together with all people to find a peaceful resolution so that two peoples can live in coexistence in Jewish and Palestinian states. It’s a pledge the Jewish people accepted in 1947-48 and have reiterated throughout the ensuing seven decades. The Matisyahu brouhaha is an example of the answer the Jewish people have received to that olive branch.

Another option?

When the Iranian nuclear agreement was revealed recently, a former Swedish prime minister tweeted: “I think the work of the Nobel committee of the Norwegian Parliament this year just got much easier.”

The work of the Nobel committee has not been flawless overall. They bestowed the honor on Yasser Arafat before the world discovered that the old terrorist had not changed his spots. And, in 2009, they awarded it to a newly elected U.S. President Barack Obama, apparently as an aspirational move intended to recognize things the committee hoped he would do, rather than anything he had already done.

If the parties involved in the Iranian deal receive the Nobel, it will be no less aspirational, although we all hope for the best.

The amount of ink (or its digital equivalent) spilled on the subject of the Iranian nuclear deal possibly surpasses that associated with any diplomatic arrangement in history. The Treaty of Versailles, the Munich Agreement (“Peace in our time!”) and the Potsdam Agreement took place in times when not everyone had a squawking lectern, as we all now do in the digital world. The volume of opinions – in both the auditory and magnitudinal senses of the term – have been vast.

This is one of the reasons, as acknowledged in last week’s issue, that we have not devoted enormous space to the topic. One would need to be a hermit to have avoided the agitated attitudes on one side of the topic or the other.

Yet there has been very little nuance in this discussion. Either the agreement, as the American politician and cable news mouthpiece Mike Huckabee says, leads Israelis “to the door of the oven,” or it guarantees Iran, as the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” organization J Street posited in a big spread in the New York Times, “Zero pathways to the bomb.”

There is, frankly, no way to tell at this point whether the agreement augurs peace or disaster. Everything you hear about it is opinion, conjecture. It will take 20, 50, 100 years or more to know whether this was a good deal or a catastrophic one.

By this very statement, we acknowledge the significance of the issue. Whatever one thinks about the agreement, this is nothing less than an existential matter. Extreme comments may well be excused because the stakes are literally as high as they could possibly be for the Jewish people. The Western powers have made a deal with a theocracy that has sworn repeatedly, emphatically and unequivocally to eradicate Israel from the planet.

The agreement is intended to prevent that genocidally obsessed regime from obtaining nuclear weapons. If it succeeds, it will remove an unparalleled threat to the Jewish people. If it fails, the outcome is unthinkable. The problem we face as people living in the present is that we cannot foresee which outcome the agreement portends. But the question is, what’s the alternative?

There is a campaign afoot to convince members of the U.S. Congress to reject the deal, which would scupper it. (Iran’s “parliament” has also scheduled a vote – after the American vote, presumably so they don’t look like dupes should the legislators of the Great Satan reject it after they have endorsed it.)

But the alternative to an imperfect deal has been the issue from the start. According to experts, the Iranian nuclear infrastructure has been built specifically to protect it from most external military threats, developed in missile-proof bunkers and diverse locations that make military intervention exceedingly difficult.

In an ideal and less dangerous world, of course, the mass of Iranian people – whose grandparents and even parents recall life as part of the pre-revolution world – would rise up against their oppressors and demand a democratic society determined to live in peace with their neighbors and the world.

In the meantime, we are faced with this: a terrible, hateful Iranian regime that has made at least a kabuki of a diplomatic overture, which evokes the words of Moshe Dayan. “If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.”

Our right to discussion

Pamela Geller is a bully of global standing. And recently she turned her sights on our community.

Geller is an American writer, blogger, activist and president of the American Freedom Defence Initiative, which the respected Southern Poverty Law Centre calls an anti-Muslim hate group. Her provocations came to greatest public attention when she opposed construction of an Islamic community centre in New York City that was criticized for being somewhat adjacent to the World Trade Centre site.

Somehow, earlier this month, a local Shabbat dinner discussion that was to be facilitated by a New Israel Fund of Canada representative drew her attention.

On July 8, Geller posted on her blog an article titled “United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism supports boycott against Israel.” Like almost everything else on her website, the short piece is deceptive, manipulative, unfair and false. In it, she accuses Congregation Har El in West Vancouver, which was set to host the event targeted to the under-40 crowd, of supporting “the boycott against Israel” and writes that “the traitors of New Israel Fund give information to the United Nations to harm Israel’s soldiers.…”

The New Israel Fund describes itself as the “nation’s leading organization committed to democracy and equality among all Israelis.” It supports human rights organizations in Israel, among which people of almost any political persuasion could probably find something objectionable. But NIF unequivocally does not support the boycotting of Israel. Whatever one might think of its political orientation or those of the frontline groups it funds, it is a legitimate nonprofit agency functioning under the laws of Israel. If it weren’t, the Israeli government would have shut it down.

But the legitimacy of the New Israel Fund is, at best, secondary to the larger issues here. Never mind that Geller extrapolates one event at a single synagogue to represent the views of the entire global Conservative movement – that is silliness that doesn’t warrant refutation – the fact is that Geller was able to kibosh an event in our community. Given the power of bullying in general, and the power of this bully in particular, we cannot blame the organization involved for shying away from the event, though we regret that it happened.

Two other New Israel Fund of Canada events are scheduled to take place in Vancouver in the fall. On Sept. 9, a symposium featuring Ronit Heyd, executive director of Shatil, and Jonathan Kay, editor-in-chief of The Walrus magazine, will engage with the audience on the topic The Backstory: Behind What You Know About Israel. On Nov. 16-17, Anat Hoffman, executive director of the Israel Religious Action Centre, will tackle the topic From the Back of the Bus to the Top of the Agenda.

Any external threats to these events proceeding should be met by our community with a united voice – regardless of our political views. It is our community’s right to discuss whatever issues we deem important – and to determine where the limits, if any, of that discussion lay.

Report offers mixed bag

On the one hand, good news. On the other, bad. The Jewish People Policy Institute delivered its annual assessment to the Israeli cabinet a few weeks ago and it’s a mixed bag.

The annual assessment purports to be the sole “annual stocktaking of the Jewish world,” taking into account the state of affairs in Israel and the Diaspora. The Jewish People Policy Institute, which was created by the Jewish Agency, has been producing this report for 11 years now. It was presented to the cabinet by Stuart Eizenstat, a former U.S. ambassador to the European Union, and Dennis Ross, another high-level American diplomat, who served as the presidential envoy for the Middle East.

Nearly absent in the report, oddly, is any deep introspection on the crucial U.S.-Israel relationship. Among the least specific recommendations is a call for a comprehensive governmental discussion on the “complex fabric of the U.S.-Israel relationship.” It almost appears that the topic, so electric at times in the past year, is too much for the report to embrace.

The report does include, however, a specific appendix on dealing with the potential aliya of 120,000 French Jews. Yet it is nearly silent on European antisemitism, except in the context of its potential for increasing migration to Israel. Antisemitism on American college campuses receives exponentially more attention than antisemitism in Europe. It is almost as though the authors have given up on the sinking ship of European Jewry and are instead devoting their resources to bailing water from the boat of American campus activism.

The strength of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement has clearly, and rightly, raised alarms at the highest levels. The authors say that Israel and its allies must take an offensive, not just a defensive, approach to the movement – and it states bluntly what plenty of Israel’s overseas allies and enemies have been suggesting for years. While unmasking BDS for what it is – “a movement that rejects a two-state outcome and coexistence” – Israel must also show its commitment to coexistence, Ross bluntly told the cabinet, by “aligning its settlement policy with its support for a two-state outcome. Meaning it needs to stop building outside the blocs.”

The report’s litany of troubles on the geopolitical front is long – Iran on the threshold of nuclear power, worsening security conditions on Israel’s northern and southern borders, the erosion of Israel’s international standing – but the authors see positive developments as well.

Israel is not facing a military threat from a conventional state army. Hezbollah is busy in Syria. Egypt is acting to stop arms smuggling into Gaza. Israeli relations with moderate Sunni Muslim countries are improving as they share common cause in opposition to Iran and jihadism.

As close as the report comes to unequivocal good news is in the demographic realm. Depending on the arithmetic used, the Jewish population in the world is approaching the level it was at before the Holocaust. There are 14.2 million people who identify as Jewish, in addition to one million people in the Diaspora who identify as partially Jewish and about 350,000 immigrants to Israel who are not halachically Jewish but qualify under the Law of Return. That brings the number of Jews close to the 16.5 million who were alive in 1939.

Eizenstat said, “This is a great affirmation of the Jewish people’s commitment to life and continuity but also requires new policy responses and outreach for those who have only marginal connections to Judaism and Israel.”

There are some interesting developments in the Diaspora – meaning, in this case, the United States. For the first time ever, a majority of offspring of mixed marriages in the United States are self-identifying as Jewish. The authors urge Jewish leaders and institutions to encourage the involvement of these individuals in the community.

There is also a huge swath of Americans who define themselves as “Jews of no religion” or “partially Jewish” and the report urges the development of Jewish social networks to engage these people, as well.

The face of American Jewry is changing in other ways. The “historical middle,” Jews who have strong connections to Israel and their Jewish identity but are integrated into secular society, is declining, while Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox communities in the United States are growing rapidly. It also notes that young American Jews are “becoming more, not less, pro-Israel and that growth is happening almost entirely within the politically conservative Orthodox community.”

Canadian Jewish life is experiencing many of the same forces reshaping that of the United States, no doubt. All tolled, in a world in uproar, life remains overwhelmingly comfortable for Canadians, Jewish and not – something we should never take for granted, as forces of animosity and vilification exist here, too, and Israel faces real threats. But there are other issues facing the Jewish community – internal ones. The JPPI data hint at an increasingly polarized Diaspora community, religiously and politically, but don’t offer any analysis. A job beyond its scope, perhaps, but an issue about which we should all be thinking.

Dire new poll results?

A new report suggests potentially alarming trends in support for Israel among Americans.

Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant produced a poll, sponsored by the Jewish National Fund, of the country’s “opinion elites” – highly educated, very active political operatives – and found sharply divergent views between advocates for each party.

“Israel can no longer claim to have bipartisan support of America,” Luntz asserted.

Among the Democrats Luntz polled, 76% of those responding said that Israel has “too much influence” on U.S. foreign policy. Among Republicans, the number who affirmed that position was 20%.

Asked if Israel is a racist country, 40% of Democrats said it is, while 13% of Republicans agreed.

As to whether Israel wants peace with its neighbors, 88% of Republicans contended that it does, while just 48% of Democrats said so.

Questioned whether they would be more likely to vote for a politician who supports Israel and its right to defend itself, 76% of Republicans said yes, but only 18% of Democrats concurred. Seven percent of Republicans said this would make them less likely to support the candidate, while 32% of Democrats said so.

Asked whether a politician who criticizes Israeli occupation and “mistreatment of Palestinians” would get their vote, 45% of Democrats said yes, while six percent of Republicans agreed.

One-third of Democrats and 22% of Republicans said that they were upset that “Israel gets billions and billions of dollars in funding from the U.S. government that should be going to the American people”

On the choice of whether the United States should support Israel or the Palestinians, 90% of Republicans said Israel and two percent said Palestinians. Among Democrats, 51% said Israel and 18% said Palestinians. Asked to self-identify, 88% of Republicans and 46% of Democrats called themselves “pro-Israeli,” while 27% of Democrats and four percent of Republicans said they were “pro-Palestinian.”

Half of Democrats and 18% of Republicans said that “Jewish people are too hypersensitive and too often labeled legitimate criticisms of Israel as an antisemitic attack.”

The numbers look bad at first glance. But first glance is about all Luntz has given us. As other commentators have noted, the entirety of the poll’s methodology and results have not been made public, and the term “elites” suggests the interviewees may have been more “activist” than the average voters – read: “more liberal” in the case of Dems and “more conservative” in the case of Republicans.

As well, we would like to point out that asking someone if they support Palestinians or Israelis is a “false choice,” almost akin to asking which of their children they support. Such simplistic dichotomies are yet another example of the weakness of polling.

However, regardless of the specifics of the poll and its merits, Luntz had some common sense suggestions about pro-Israel messaging to which Americans, especially Democrats, respond well: messages of encouraging more communication and cooperation, and more diplomacy and discussion, not less, for example. The boycott, divestment and sanction movement, for instance, is opposed to these things and that is an Achilles’ heel for them.

Emphasizing the equality of women and freedom of religion, he found, were effective at increasing sympathy for Israel, while less successful were messages emphasizing the need for Jewish sovereignty after the Holocaust, claims to the Holy Land and depicting Israel as a “startup nation,” said Luntz.

Though the extent of the “crisis” may not be as severe as Luntz implies – Democratic nominee-apparent Hillary Clinton is striking an unambiguously pro-Israel tone in her campaign, for example – no one doubts that there are frictions in the Israel-U.S. relationship that are stronger on the Democratic side.

Certainly the petulant relationship between U.S. President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has not made things better.

There is also the fact of 15 years and counting of concerted anti-Israel mobilization on the left, especially on American university campuses, and in the burgeoning online media world.

Some of the unfriendliness may reflect simple political differences between a Democratic administration in the United States and a Likud government in Israel.

Despite the right-wing government in Israel, though, it remains ideologically consistent for people on the left and centre-left to remain committed to Israel because of its inherent liberal values. That is a message that needs to be more emphatically expressed by Israel activists on this side of the ocean. It won’t solve every problem, but it will be a start.

Canada, in this as in other things, differs. In Canada, the trajectory may well be the opposite, with the federal government’s pro-Israel position dragging the opposition parties and some of the public closer to Israel.

In both Canada and the United States, pro-Israel activists should be careful to tend all sides of our gardens. We need to ensure that people of all political persuasions understand that the existence, security and thriving of Israel is not a partisan matter, but one that, in addition to all the other reasons, makes the world a better place.

Nonsense is Trudeau’s

The Islamist group ISIS is the most technologically and media-savvy terror group ever. Their propaganda employs the highest calibre of videography and documentation. The images they capture – and successfully disseminate to the world – are among the most gruesome imaginable.

Just last week, well-produced films showed the group drowning five men in a cage and included footage of the men’s deaths captured by underwater cameras. The same video showed men being bound together at the neck by a fuse connected to explosives, like a chain of firecrackers.

On the very day that these horrendous images were leading every newscast, federal Liberal leader Justin Trudeau appeared on the CBC in an interview with veteran reporter Terry Milewski. Trudeau, who voted a few weeks ago against extending the Canadian military’s contributions to fighting ISIS, insisted that, were he to win the election this October, the Canadian military’s efforts against ISIS would end.

“If you don’t want to bomb a group as ghastly as ISIS, when would you ever support real military action?” asked Milewski.

The would-be prime minister’s reply to this legitimate and, indeed, crucial question: “Terry, that’s a nonsensical question.”

The nonsense is Trudeau’s.

It is true that Western powers cannot cure the world of every despot and dictatorship. The United States military has worn itself out and tested the dedication of military families trying. Yet there are times when action cannot be avoided.

Milewski gave Trudeau the opportunity to clarify what he was saying, to ensure that this was not another of the Liberal leader’s rookie mistakes. But, no, this was what Trudeau had come on television to say.

Whether one adheres to ethical pacifism or not, it is a coherent ideology. But this is not what Trudeau is proposing. He is not suggesting that Canada abandon its military or become a neutral state. He is saying that Canadian forces should not be deployed against ISIS. OK, then. If our admittedly limited military force is not mobilized against ISIS, what cause would we mobilize against? In what circumstances does “Never again” come into play, if not against the actions of a group such as ISIS?

It must be noted, of course, that Trudeau’s position mirrors that of New Democratic party leader Thomas Mulcair. The New Democrats also voted against extending the mission against ISIS and this position is equally flawed. But it is at least consistent with the worldview of a party that has never been burdened with the mantle of government. NDP governments at the provincial level have often risen to the occasion and discovered pragmatism when power has been thrust upon them. Should some current polls bear out and Mulcair were to become prime minister, the confluence of common sense, the magnitude of power and the need to reach out to experienced hands would almost certainly adjust their foreign policy. Perhaps we are being too generous, but Mulcair has taken a party whose foreign policy (especially vis-a-vis Israel) had become a fringe circus and brought it more in line with European parties of the left (for whatever that is worth).

Unfortunately, the Liberal case is quite different. Say what one will about the value of the Senate these days, those who served as Liberals in the upper chamber represented a cache of experience at governing that Trudeau desperately lacks. Last year, Trudeau threw them out of his caucus in a showy spectacle meant to demonstrate leadership. He is left with a caucus of 36 MPs, most of whom, in the immortal words of a former prime minister who happens to have been the current Liberal leader’s father, are “nobodies 50 feet off Parliament Hill.” It is not clear that he is seeking out or receiving rational foreign policy advice from anyone.

What makes Trudeau’s position most atrocious is that it seems to have been taken for the worst reasons. The Liberals, as is a perennial problem for opposition parties, must oppose. But foreign policy is a tricky area in which to plant a political flag. Foreign affairs should not be off limits, by any means, to criticism and differences of opinion. Yet neither should the serious issues of foreign policy be subject to knee-jerk political considerations. But this seems to be part of the explanation for Trudeau’s position.

Another likely motivating factor is that the NDP has been peeling anti-Harper votes away from the Liberals. There is a very real possibility that, if polling trajectories continue, the majority of Canadians who seek to end the Conservative government’s tenure will move en masse to the party that polls suggest is most fit to achieve that end. To stanch the flow to the NDP, Trudeau seems ready to abandon the victims of ISIS.

The irony of this entire balagan is that Trudeau’s actions will probably have precisely the opposite effect on potential Liberal voters.

The JI wins two Rockowers

Earlier this month, the American Jewish Press Association announced the winners of this year’s Simon Rockower Awards for Excellence in Jewish Journalism, which honor achievements in Jewish media published in 2014. In its division (newspapers with 14,999 circulation and under), the Jewish Independent garnered two first places.

Publisher and editor Cynthia Ramsay won the first place award for excellence in writing about Jewish heritage and Jewish peoplehood in Europe for her article “World Musician at Rothstein” (Nov. 21, 2014), about the work of Lenka Lichtenberg. The group Art Without Borders was bringing Lichtenberg to Vancouver from her home base of Toronto for a solo performance at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre. The article includes reviews of Lichtenberg’s three most recent CDs and how, in all of her music, “the memory and traditions of those who have lived before can be heard – they are celebrated, and merge with the memories, traditions and passions of Lichtenberg and the artists with whom she collaborates.”

The JI editorial board – Pat Johnson, Basya Laye and Ramsay – won the paper’s other award: first place for excellence in editorial writing. The three editorials that comprised the winning entry were “The message is universal” (March 7, 2014), about plans for the Canadian National Holocaust Monument to be constructed in Ottawa; “The spirit of Limmud” (Feb. 14, 2014), about how the vision and passion of one woman, Ruth Hess-Dolgin z”l, significantly enriched our community by initiating the movement to bring Limmud here; and “Uniquely set apart for exclusion” (May 9, 2014), about the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations decision to exclude J Street from the group.

The Rockower awards will be presented at AJPA’s annual conference, which, for the second year in a row, is scheduled around the Jewish Federation General Assembly being held in Washington D.C. Nov. 8-10. AJPA sessions will be held Nov. 9-11. The entire list of Rockower winners can be found at ajpa.org/?page=2015Rockower.

Sacred task of Canada

Canada has changed dramatically in the past half-century. In two years, we will mark the 150th anniversary of Confederation. When we last celebrated such a momentous landmark birthday – in 1967 – it was a time of perhaps unprecedented optimism and belief that the world was better for having Canada in it. Yet, even in that celebratory year, the culmination of a decade of upheaval both positive and negative, no one could have predicted the Canada we would build in the next generation.

It was in that decade that Canada’s immigration laws – which since the 1920s had been notoriously stringent and oriented almost exclusively to white migrants – became part of the multi-hued world. A royal commission on bilingualism and biculturalism opened the door to viewing Canada outside the British colonial and cultural prism through which it originated in 1867. Within a few short years, the ethnic mix of the country would expand the concept of multiculturalism, opening up an exciting new amalgam of peoples from around the world, though not without some significant social challenges. Even so, for a country whose demographic face has changed so dramatically in a relatively short amount of time, we have adapted to it in ways that should inspire pride.

It has been said that Canadians, polite and welcoming to strangers by reputation, are also self-critical in ways almost unknown in other countries. When there have been incidents of which Canadians should be ashamed – and, as in any country, there have been plenty – we do have a tendency to self-castigate.

On the other hand, sometimes not quickly or adequately enough. As we wrote in this space last week, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report on the catastrophic history and legacy of the Indian residential schools program highlights one of this country’s worst open sores – and that confronts only one portion of this country’s treatment of indigenous peoples. It took too long to reach this point of truth and reconciliation and it remains to be seen if action and genuine reconciliation will be the result. It is worth repeating, in this Canada Day edition of the paper, that it is our responsibility as Canadians to ensure that the recommendations of this report are not ignored or dismissed.

And Canada has a legacy of racism and antisemitism. Not just a legacy, but an active problem in many places and in many contexts. But, in a country as diverse as ours, in the year 2015, we as a collective are doing pretty well at getting along.

It has not only been the comparatively speedy and dramatic shift in ethnic demographics that has changed Canada. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has been the lynchpin for judicial and legislative changes that have altered the face of the country and the day-to-day lives of its citizens. From the start, the entrenched equality of women was a significant constitutional right. By the 1980s, when the Charter took effect, it may have seemed ludicrous that a woman would not be considered legally equal – but let us not forget that the country to our south had spent a chunk of the previous decade arguing over precisely that point and the effort to entrench in the U.S. Constitution an equal rights provision failed, leaving women constitutionally unequal to men.

Court interpretations of the Charter have led to some of Canada’s most stunning progressive steps, including marriage equality. Yes, it was the courts (successive provincial decisions and then the Supreme Court of Canada) that made marriage equal, but Parliament quickly acceded (not that they had much choice) and public opinion is now overwhelmingly on side. Numerous less prominent cases have swung on the Charter’s provisions and while our American cousins fret over judicial “overreach” or “activism” when courts interpret the laws of the land (as is their constitutional role in both countries), Canadians seem to accept and even admire our Charter and its impact on the country. Polls, reliable as they may or may not be, suggest that 82% of us like the Charter.

Canada has sometimes been seen as an unnatural country, not one united by language or race or even geography, because we’ve got too much diversity for any of these to be a unifying factor. But we have found things to unify us.

In a world where diverse people stuck within random national boundaries seem to have too often sought out differences, accentuated them and fought over them, Canadians have accepted our lot as destined to share this space – and found our own ways to coexist, to identify the things that unite us, even celebrate the things we do not share in common, and make the best of it.

We are not perfect. No country is. Jewish tradition says that God created an imperfect world and it is humanity’s responsibility to strive to repair it. Perhaps, in a constitutionally mandated non-denominational way, this is also the role of successive generations of Canadians: inherit a country and strive to make it better. On Canada Day this year, may we rededicate ourselves to this sacred task.

Truth and reconciliation

Earlier this month, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released the summary of its compendious report on the history and legacy of the Indian residential schools system. As the testimony of more than 6,750 witnesses to the commission demonstrated, that dark history, which lasted more than a century, has had catastrophic impacts on individuals and communities across the country.

There has been some controversy over the commission’s use of the term “cultural genocide” to describe the process by which the schools intended to eradicate the vestiges of First Nations culture from the children. However, as the summary document notes, “the central goals of Canada’s aboriginal policy were to eliminate aboriginal governments; ignore aboriginal rights; terminate the treaties; and, through a process of assimilation, cause aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious and racial entities in Canada.”

There were 3,201 registered deaths of children in residential schools, but estimates are that nearly twice that many died – a proportion, the commission notes, that about equals the fatality rates of Canadian soldiers in the Second World War. Only half of registered deaths cited a cause, most commonly tuberculosis. Pneumonia, influenza, fire and suicide were also too-common causes of death among the children.

Over more than 100 years, an estimated 150,000 children were confined to the constellation of 139 schools, most of which were run by churches acting on behalf of the federal government. There are about 80,000 living survivors.

Traditional clothes were removed and discarded, native languages generally forbidden. Physical, sexual and psychological abuse permeated the schools, as witnesses recounted harrowing experiences at the hands of white authority figures.

Even the ostensible purpose of the schools – education – was usually sublimated to forced labor, in which children were used to run the facilities that incarcerated them.

In 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized for the Canadian government’s role in residential schools, but the commission explicitly urges the country to move from “apology to action.”

There are 94 recommendations in the TRC’s report, including that the government should acknowledge that the state of aboriginal health today is a result of previous government policies. On education, the report urges legislation on aboriginal education that would protect languages and cultures and close the education gap experienced by First Nations peoples. It calls for a public inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women and girls. It asks for a national council for reconciliation to report on reconciliation progress and an annual State of Aboriginal Peoples report to be delivered by the prime minister. A statutory holiday should be created, the report says, to honor survivors, their families and communities, and memorials, community events and museums should be funded.

“We have described for you a mountain. We have shown you a path to the top. We call upon you to do the climbing,” Judge Murray Sinclair, the commission chair, said in releasing the report.

The commission’s recommendations are a call to action not only for the government but for Canadian citizens. We must ensure that we as individuals and collectively as Canadians take seriously the commission’s findings and that our governments act in ways that respect this history and ameliorate its impacts as much as possible.

Six Jewish organizations – Ve’ahavta, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, the Canadian Council for Reform Judaism, Reform Rabbis of Greater Toronto, the Canadian Rabbinic Caucus and the Toronto Board of Rabbis – issued a statement of solidarity and action acknowledging the residential schools experience and its contemporary consequences.

As Jewish Canadians, we have devoted ourselves to remembering and educating about our own history and it is heartening to see our communal organizations acknowledging and standing up for the experiences of other communities. We, too, can join in the reconciliation process in many ways, beginning with the very small act of signing the solidarity pact, which can be found at statementofsolidarity.com.

The pact’s call to action includes a commitment “to meaningful public education in the Jewish community and beyond, and outreach to indigenous communities to guide us to help improve the quality of life of indigenous peoples.” At press time, its events/initiatives section asked visitors to “stay posted,” but it is up to all of us to make sure that we act in solidarity, not merely voice it.

All Canadians have an interest in making sure our government and society is held accountable for our past and that we do everything possible to ensure a better future for aboriginal Canadians. Because of our own history, Jewish Canadians have perhaps a special role in seeing this process through.

A Jewish take on Magna Carta

The 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta falls on June 15. It is a significant document not only in the history of England and the history of democracy, but also in the history of the Jews. There is a surprising (to some) aspect to the seminal document of British constitutional monarchy.

If you tune into the right channels on the wireless this weekend – don’t you love how that word has gone from archaic to high-tech in less than a generation? – you will probably hear much about the anniversary of this pivotal document. You might not hear about the Jewish angle to the story.

The Magna Carta emerged, effectively, as a constitutional document in the days when constitutional limits to the rights of kings were unknown. England’s King John was confronted by 25 barons who weren’t so happy with their relationship and, lo, faced with the threat of insurrection, he became the accursed monarch who, with the stroke of a quill, under duress, set the stage for the limitations of divine right that have resulted in the reduced British monarchy we see today.

Eight centuries ago, the king had his barons and knights, the nobles had their vassals and so on down the feudal pecking order. And then there were the Jews.

Jews in England at that time, and in many places at other times, existed outside the carefully proscribed feudal system. There were advantages to this exclusion – who wants to be a serf? – until there were not. The king was the protector of the Jews, which seemed like a sweet deal – until it was not.

Like nobles, Jews had a direct relationship with the monarch. Unlike nobles, they had little in the way of leverage when the relationship went south. For the masses, there was nothing endearing in the Jews’ special relationship to the king.

The Magna Carta is a document that, for the first time, set limits on the rights of the king in his relations with his nobles and, by extension, theoretically anyway, his public. Appropriately enough, it also outlined the relationship between the king, nobles and Jews.

This turned out to be a problem. The Bible forbids “usury,” the application of interest on loans “to your brother.” Christians, under a widespread interpretation, would not lend with interest to other Christians. The ironic corollary to this is that Christians did not lend at all, or at least not often. Jews, on the other hand, forbidden from owning land, banned from many of the crafts guilds, were seriously limited in their professional options. Jews found niches as butchers and in some other fields, but moneylending was a lucrative option where few options existed. It was also a dangerous position for a socially vulnerable group. Who doesn’t love a lender in the brief period of time when you need money? But who needs the demands for repayment?

At a time – the first time – when the king was being held to account, being in cahoots with the monarch was not a summer day in Yalta. Or Dorset, as the case may have been.

Since Jews could not own real estate, debtors who died saw their estates confiscated by the Jews’ protector, the king. The Magna Carta codified that, if a subject died indebted to a Jew, the obligation owed would revert to the king, but without interest. Likewise if the Jewish debt-holder dies – if the Jew to whom money was owed died before the debt was repaid, the interest would be forgiven.

Another clause specified that debts were to be paid through liquid assets, not through land, which meant that the king could not expand his real estate holdings through his relationship with Jews, thereby reducing the value to the king of this special relationship. And new taxes were imposed on Jews that exhausted the community economically, further reducing their worth to the monarch.

When John’s son, Henry III, was on the throne in 1253, he declared: “No Jew remain in England unless he do the king’s service, and that from the hour of birth every Jew, whether male or female, serve us in some way.”

By the end of that century, the last Jew was expelled from England, a consequence, in no small part, of clauses in the Magna Carta and their intended and unintended consequences.