Contemporary Antisemitism: Canada and the World

Jay Newman is a professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph. His
books include Inauthentic Culture and Its Philosophical Critics and
Biblical Religion and Family Values.

This slim volume represents a slim contribution to the vast and often
highly sophisticated scholarly literature on the grim subject of
anti-Semitism. The seven papers in the collection were among a larger
number presented at a 2003 University of Toronto conference, and one may
well suspect that some of the papers that have not been included would
be more useful than several that have.

The 2003 conference was no ordinary conference but something of an
“event” or indeed a “show,” and the two central speakers were
not academic scholars but rather those grand old politicos Brian
Mulroney and Roy McMurtry. The presentations of the former prime
minister and the current Ontario chief justice constitute, of course,
the centrepiece of this volume. Both men speak eloquently and
reasonably, but being politicians to the core, they focus attention on
their own contributions to combating anti-Semitism.

The five remaining essays are by moderately prominent scholars in the
field of Jewish studies, and despite the volume’s title, several focus
on historical rather than contemporary issues. These essays examine
recent anti-Semitic tendencies in Canada, Western Europe, and the Arab
world, and there is a general consensus among the scholars that much
recent anti-Semitism—if it is accurately characterized by this
term—reflects tensions arising from the Arab–Israeli conflict along
with corresponding demographic and ideological changes.

Contributors include Todd Endelman, Mark Tessler, Steven Zipperstein,
McGill sociologist Morton Weinfeld, and University of Toronto historian
Derek Penslar. The five scholarly essays are clear, well crafted, and
informative but vary somewhat in scope, methodology, and level of
sophistication. There is no bibliography or index, and the volume seems
in a way to have been intended more as a souvenir of an event than as an
authentic contribution to academic scholarship. Anti-Semitism is an
extremely grave subject, and when people address it in an academic forum
or publish books on it, they would generally do well to reflect closely
on whether the project in which they are participating does the fullest
justice possible to the countless victims of this dreadfully persistent
evil.