The New Swastika
Anti-Jewish hate is a test for free societies
(The effigy of a Jewish man with a noose around his neck, Montreal, May 2026)
(Continued from our previous essay)
Most historians agree Hitler and the Nazi regime were motivated to wage wars of conquest at least partly by hatred of Bolshevism and rivalry with the British empire and the United States. But from the start, the primary goal of Nazi Germany was to restore the empire it had lost in 1918 and destroy the Jewish people.
In fact, they saw these objectives as inter-linked. The 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact made Stalin’s USSR a key enabler of the Holocaust, which intensified dramatically after the Nazis had occupied most of western Europe.
By 1945, the Jewish population of the USSR had fallen to about 2.3 million. It stayed at this level until 1959, when it began to fall again.
By 1971, only 2.1 million Jews were left in the Soviet Union. In the 1970s and 1980s, about 300,000 emigrated. After 1988, about 1.7 million more left.
Most went to Israel, but also the US, Germany and other countries.
Today Russia has a remaining core Jewish population of only 132,000.
Consider the scale of this decline. From a peak of about five million Jews living mostly in the Pale of Settlement around 1900, Russia’s Jewish community has fallen back to being just over half the size of Toronto’s.
Pinchas Goldschmidt, the Swiss-born chief rabbi of Moscow since 1993, resigned and left Russia in 2022, shortly after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.
What does this mean? As we rightly work to ensure Holocaust remembrance continues for future generations, we often forget the role that the Russian empire, the Soviet Union and post-1991 Russia have played as primary drivers of Anti-Semitism, enablers of pogroms and the Holocaust itself.
From the time of the partitions, Russia placed stringent restrictions on Jewish life. Starting in the early 1880s, it has been convulsed by imported and self-inflicted Anti-Semitism in times of peace, war, revolution and dissolution on a scale that has that reduced the Jewish population of Russia, once home to half the world’s Jews, to two percent of its level in 1900. Far less than one percent of the world’s Jews now live in Russia. Why? Because Russia remains the world’s most prodigious source of Anti-Semitic disinformation, policy and propaganda.
In fact, it is fair to say that the two greatest sources of Anti-Semitic ideology and violence for the past 150 years have been Russia and the Nazi regime.
The Nazis were defeated in 1945. But Russia continues to fuel Anti-Semitism through state propaganda, active measures and support for terrorism.
In pursuing this indescribably vile and dangerous agenda, Moscow’s main ally since 1979 has been Iran’s Khomeinist regime, still dedicated to Israel’s destruction.
Today’s resurgent Anti-Semitism in Toronto and around the world is mostly stoked by deliberate programmes of online hate speech backed by Russia and China, as well as activists with links to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a banned entity.
This systematic campaign of disinformation has obscured, for many, the reality of Iran’s aggression, proxy wars and state sponsorship of terrorism.
It sustains the myth in Europe and Canada that UNRWA was a humanitarian agency serving Palestinians, rather than a thoroughly compromised front for Hamas.
It has made it ‘fashionable’ to be Anti-Zionist — even though Canada spearheaded the postwar establishment of Israel as a vibrant democracy and homeland for Jews in response to the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust.
This massive disinformation has left our authorities so far unwilling to end Anti-Semitic hate speech, incitement or violence in Montreal, Toronto and elsewhere. Instead our governments fail to act to prevent deliberate targeting of people and institutions because they are Jewish — when they could do much more.
Five years before my father was born a riot took place in Christie Pits after Torontonians who sympathized with the Nazi cause unfurled a huge Swastika flag at a baseball game where one of the teams was predominantly Jewish.
Beyond Protestant-Catholic violence around the annual Orange Day parade, that riot may have been Toronto’s most “shameful episode” — in the phrase of Marcus Gee’s foreword to The Riot at Christie Pits by Cyrill Levitt and William Shaffir.
As Gee added in the 2018 revision to his foreword, “It was also the dawn of something new and really quite wonderful. It is no exaggeration to say that the city where Jew and Gentile once beat each other bloody is now the hope of the world.”
Those words could not be written today.
Beyond eight cities in the US and four in Israel, Toronto is one of four more cities — the three others are Buenos Aires, London and Paris — that are home to the world’s largest Jewish populations.
We are the only one whose motto is ‘diversity is our strength’.
Yet today we are failing our Jewish neighbours and fellow citizens.
We have left them and the entire Canadian population unprotected from hate speech backed by a hyper-aggressive Russian state. We have left them and our city vulnerable to violence orchestrated by terrorist and criminal networks backed by Iran, whose operatives continue to organize in Canada on an alarming scale.
Today’s Anti-Semitism in Canada deserves a much firmer response from all levels of government — as well as from law enforcement and the justice system.
We have made Toronto a city where people of all backgrounds are free to celebrate their ethnicity, culture and religion; to choose their gender identity and sexual orientation; to embrace indigenous and immigrant heritage; to explore art, social perspectives, political views and human values of limitless range. But we only achieved this by standing firm against hate.
I’m not sure what my father would say about what our Jewish friends are going through in Toronto today.
For a start, I know he would be agog, stunned and angry — just as many Canadian Jews, their friends and allies are bewildered, disoriented and frightened.
Standing up to this current wave of Anti-Semitism is a new test for Toronto and for Canada. Standing against Anti-Semitism is a hallmark of civilization. Allowing, appeasing or apologizing for it are signs of decline and failure.
We will not defeat war, aggression or bullying in the world by ignoring them at home.
We must end the scourge of Anti-Semitism now.
Torontonians and Canadians must show that hate speech has no place in our society; that the lessons of the Christie Pits riot and None Is Too Many policy of the 1930s and 1940s were learned once and for all; that Russia and Iran are today’s aggressors, seeking to destroy Ukraine, Israel and all democracies; that Israel and Ukraine are historic and enduring allies, friends and partners with an inherent right to collective self-defence that deserves our full support.
Those who celebrate Al Quds Day; chant ‘globalize the Intifada’ at intersections; scream ‘death to Israel’ in Jewish neighbourhoods; or hang Jewish men in effigy in the streets of Montreal have unveiled today’s Swastika flag.
Our response today must be very firm.
Russia and Iran are waging wars in Europe, Asia and Africa. They are simultaneously stoking extremism to polarize our societies and debase our response.
The roots of Anti-Semitism are deep and horrific. In 1939, hatred of Jews was a primary motive for aggression that quickly became a world war.
Russia and Iran are trafficking in such hate again today. We need to show the courage and wisdom to confront and end it here in Canada — and to defeat Russian and Iranian aggression abroad. Failure to do so will put us rapidly at risk of wider conflicts at home and overseas.
Russian chauvinist aggression has always been fuelled by Anti-Semitism, just as Nazi ideology was. Since 1979, Iran has given Moscow a new set of capabilities — dubbed the ‘axis of resistance’ in 2002 — for persecuting Jews.
Israel has rightly fought back, just as Ukraine under a Jewish president is battling valiantly to remove a huge part of Europe from the charnel house that the Russian and Soviet states have been over centuries for Jewish and other minorities.
Canada needs to take swift action against Anti-Semitic hate and join our allies to defeat chauvinistic Russian and Iranian aggression worldwide.