Episode Transcript
Antifascist Dad Podcast — Episode 45: When Zionists Dominate Antisemitism Discourse
Guest: Daniel Sailofsky
Matthew Remski: Hello, everyone. This is Matthew Remski, and this is Antifascist Dad Podcast, episode 45: When Zionists Dominate Antisemitism Discourse, with Daniel Sailofsky.
As always, you can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name, and I'm on YouTube and TikTok as Antifascist Dad. Now, the Patreon for this show is antifascistdadpodcast. I really appreciate your support — it helps keep this work going.
Subscribers get early access to a second weekly episode. And today I'm going to do a little coda where I apply Lara Sheehi's concept of psychic intrusion, which you might remember from last week, to the subject that Daniel and I tackle today. This is looking at how confusion, fear, exhaustion, and despair are mobilized against young people attempting to see their material conditions clearly — namely, that their heritage or the dominant culture they live under are complicit in genocide. Now remember, if you can't afford to support the show, those Patreon episodes all eventually get unlocked, because this is an educational project.
I'd also direct you to the link for my book in the show notes. It's called Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times.
Now, if you've listened for a while to this show, you know the story of how I started this project to provide antifascist resources to our kids, beginning with answering the question: how did Trump win a second time?
So I started thinking and writing about this in a very anxious rush, I suppose, as one does as a parent when something dangerous comes up. You don't expect that fever. You don't expect it to go that high.
You didn't expect your kid to get bullied at school or discriminated against by a teacher. You didn't anticipate him falling off that climbing structure and breaking his arm.
And so that took me through about a year of determined fix-it-type research and drafting and drafting and drafting. And the feeling was rather simple. There's a social and political danger, and you're going to need to give them tools.
But during that time I also had this other zone of feeling in relation to young people, but people who are not my kids, not the same age.
And it kind of loomed in and out of my consciousness during that year of 2024. And that feeling was rage.
And it peaked in the late spring as I watched militarized cops in New York, Louisiana, and dozens of other cities brutalize college students in their anti-genocide encampments.
There's a bit of psychological folk wisdom I picked up somewhere — I'm not quite sure where it's from.
And it says that you'll be most triggered by things that happen to people who are of the age at which something unprocessed happened to you. And this feels like it tracks for me in this instance, because when I was at U of T, I wasn't heavily politically engaged in any collective activity, but I knew who among my peers and mentors were able to listen to me and take me seriously and support me.
The issues, whether they were intellectual or moral, that I felt strongly about as I was trying to understand the world, were never mocked or degraded or punished.
When I did go through a direct action period with environmental and anarchist groups and got as far as being arrested for a sit-in at a Canadian Armed Forces office, the matter was pretty simple. Like, the state just exercised its violence and removed us. No one from the outside called us stupid or naive. Nobody made us scapegoats of media attention. No one told us that our concern for the First Nations children who were going deaf because of low-flying jet training over their land was stupid, or worse, that our concern was in itself a form of violence.
If anyone had told me that, I don't know what I would have done with a feeling of betrayal.
And yet the Jewish, Christian, Muslim, atheist, white, brown, black, straight, queer, immigrants and non-immigrants who formed those anti-genocide encampments and chanted and prayed together, who stayed resolute in their messaging that the university must divest from genocide profiteering, that the government must stop selling arms to the IDF — their generosity and altruism and energy were defamed with one of the most provocative, silencing, damaging, and dangerous labels in the world. They were told that their opposition to Israeli policy and Canadian complicity was antisemitic. Antisemitic.
Can you believe that? Meaning bigotry. The immediate, juvenile, instinctual drive to find another group of people and the individuals within it disgusting, or morally corrupt, or psychologically deranged, or perverse, or dangerous to you and your kin — which taught that kind of like the most horrific term you could call a person, right? Like a capo, for those who wouldn't know, would be someone who was disloyal and kind of working with the Nazi occupation, or the Nazis, against Jews during the Holocaust — that's what we're referred to.
Showing support and solidarity for an oppressed group would be terrified. And that's what's so hard about it.
The — the constant, like, Jewish testing that goes on, right? People claiming you're not a Jew because of this. Right. Boiling down a centuries-old religion and culture to support for an ethnostate that's been around for 75 years or whatever it is.
Antisemitism remains a cultural poison in right-wing politics. It was at the heart of QAnon, and there were reports of some campus protesters uttering bigoted remarks. But encampment culture throughout North America throughout that spring was uniformly committed to message discipline. They had these long lists of rules, and "no antisemitism or Islamophobia" — these rules were up at the top. You couldn't get into the U of T encampment without being told that discriminatory language and behavior would not be tolerated.
Nonetheless, these young people were watching, along with all of us, as one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world targeted and murdered children lining up for flour and water, and they said "Free Palestine," or even "Death to the IDF," while they tried to stand between their own tuition dollars and the missiles sold to Israel. And they were called stupid. They were called bigots.
And it was effective, not only because it caused some of these sensitive people to inappropriately doubt themselves, to ask: am I really antisemitic? Does my opposition to Israel's apartheid and genocide have bigotry at its root?
With those questions being especially haunting for the anti-Zionist Jews, and worse still for those with any Marxist training who are already in the habit of self-criticism.
So that was the internal price. But then, in the discourse wars, the spokespeople got tangled up for weeks defending themselves against a bogus accusation.
So I'm going to run this conversation I had with Daniel Sailofsky, an assistant professor at U of T's Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education.
His PhD is in sociology from McGill. He teaches masculinity, violence against women, sports psychology, and he's a member of the non-Zionist Jewish Faculty Network, which authored a response to something called the CASE report, which is our main focus today.
And in our discussion he offered the opinion that this accusation of antisemitism might be all the moral ammunition the pro-Zionism lobby has left.
They can't defend the apartheid state. They can't defend the estimated 90,000 or more — it might be up to 200,000 — deaths, or the many, many more injured, in Gaza. They can't defend the images of 68 million tons of rubble, estimated to take seven years to clear. They can't stop the Trump family from releasing AI videos of a new resort on the Gaza shore.
So what can they do?
They can say that those who oppose them are opposing them for the same reasons that the Nazis opposed them. They can use the one rhetorical device they have left, and they can push that accusation toward policy outcomes.
So this past August 5th saw the publication of the CASE report — that is, the Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences report.
It's a federally linked study posted on the Canadian government's website, currently under its Holocaust and Antisemitism section, which gives it official-seeming legitimacy despite its kind of murky origins. It was commissioned amid concern over post-October 7th campus activism, and it surveyed about 900 online respondents recruited via Canadian Zionist organizations like B'nai Brith, Hillel, and CIJA.
But it didn't have any controls. There was no student ID verification in order to post your response. It allowed for duplicate or non-student entries.
Its definitions for essential terms were sourced from a magazine article and a partisan Senate hearing.
And these definitions equated anti-Zionism with antisemitism, calling it libel and describing anti-Zionists as seeking Israel's annihilation.
So that's what we'll talk about today. Daniel is part of the Jewish Faculty Network, which issued that response to this deeply flawed method and design of the CASE study. And we'll walk through that together now.
Matthew Remski: Hello, Daniel. Welcome to Antifascist Dad Podcast.
Daniel Sailofsky: Thanks so much for having me. Happy to be here.
Matthew Remski: Okay, so we're going to get into the details of the CASE report in a bit, and into the Jewish Faculty Network's response in detail. But can we just start with whether you can tell me about early signs, following October 7, 2023, that the students you know and teach would be at the center of this political battle over the meaning and perceptions of antisemitism?
Daniel Sailofsky: Yeah, I think there were some signs, definitely, on campus where I was working at the time, University of Toronto, that there were lots of politically mobilized and active students that were going to come out against Israel's war and eventual genocide — it's ongoing — in politically conscious and vocal ways. So I saw that from some students. And at the same time, though, we also saw a kind of faculty response — or not even faculty as much as administrative response — that was Zionist in orientation, for lack of a better way to describe it. And because of that, I could already see that some of those battle lines were being drawn. I can also say that, having been a Zionist myself when I was in my early years as a Jewish student, I knew the kind of messaging that those students were receiving in their lives and in their homes and in their community institutions. So I lived that. So I knew it. So I knew what their responses would be to that, too. So I could see, again, those lines being drawn — a lot to do with my own past experience and my now-lapsed, for quite a while, lapsed Zionist upbringing.
Matthew Remski: Well, that's kind of fascinating. I imagine that you could sort of feel what was about to happen then — that this sort of very set of talking points, a particular type of response, a kind of defensiveness, that this be very naturally emerging. You could sense it.
Daniel Sailofsky: Absolutely, I could sense it. I could also see it because I have lots of friends — or more, acquaintances, former colleagues — that are from sort of my childhood and growing up as a — as a Zionist. And so because of that, I could not only feel it coming from what my past was, but I could see their own responses to things going on, and see the very different responses to the Gaza genocide as it was ongoing. So I would see it from their side. And I do think we live in a kind of echo chamber world, and people like to talk about that. But because of my upbringing and because of the worlds that I inhabit, I was able to see both. I wasn't in only one echo chamber. I will admit there are some people I had to block and get rid of, because their stuff was kind of so heinous that was being posted online. And so I lost a bit of that, just for my own mental health as well, to not be seeing that all the time. But I still keep in contact with some, but more just see and observe a lot of people from my past on things like Instagram and Twitter, and even conversations with my family and my extended family. So I saw it happening before my eyes, really.
Matthew Remski: If we fast forward to the spring of 2024, the campus protests really kick off, and I'm wondering what you observed during that.
Daniel Sailofsky: Yeah, so that was when I was a bit more active in it, really. So I was one of the faculty members who was helping with the encampment at U of T. And what I really saw there was just divergent realities that were being lived and then explained by media and those who are either Zionist or at least very critical of anti-Zionist organizing. So I would live the reality of going to the encampment, being welcomed with open arms, hosting encampment Shabbats — so, like, Shabbat Friday night services. There were some of the most beautiful moments I've had in my life, I would say, and definitely in my time in Toronto. So living those, and then reading and hearing about the "hate encampment" or the "hate march" that's being conducted — right, we'd have Zionist agitators come around to try to get a rise out of us and get people to say things or do things. And there was pretty good kind of messaging discipline, and we didn't have that happen. But that was really what I observed, the encampment protest that I was really part of. And I wasn't one of the organizers, but I was someone who would help bring in coffee, get supplies in that people wanted to donate. On the day that we had to tear down the whole encampment because of the injunction set by U of T, I was one of the cars that was ferrying stuff to shelters and to places where all of this donated goods could still be used and not thrown out. And so I was involved in that way. But really, the disjuncture between what this actually was, what it was standing for — the kind of beautiful community, learning, and solidarity that was being expressed — versus what was presented to many in the public about this, this radical encampment that was for hate and pro-Hamas and all these kind of talking points — it was jarring, but not surprising, I guess.
Matthew Remski: Were the counter-protest interventions specifically aware of the fact that you were hosting Shabbat on Friday? Like, would that be disrupted? Like, was the contradiction that sharp?
Daniel Sailofsky: Oh, yeah, they came to them. I mean, they had some of those — I don't know how they call themselves, but Jewish Defense League types that are kind of borrowing the kind of imagery and symbolism from the Haganah, like paramilitary terrorist units of the '40s, but where they're the Jewish defense organizations — they would come. And because we were so inclusive, as long as they didn't, outwardly at the door, kind of say, like, "this is what we're here for," we would let them in, and we knew they were agitators, right? They would stand in the back, they would try to record, and then they would ask what we're doing and try to kind of, again, get a rise out of us. And what we mostly did was just ignore them, right? That was what we mostly did. And we'd always have — I forget the term that we use for them, but like, monitors, safety people who are kind of monitoring for those kind of counter-protesters, or whatever you want to call them. Agitators is really the right word. So a few of them would come to Shabbats — I would say, of the, like, in May 2024 to June, of the, like, six, seven, eight Shabbats we did, probably half of them had those kind of agitators come. They weren't loud, because they were so small in numbers, but they would just stand there and try to record and try to kind of show this crazy thing that was happening — which, again, you'd be watching people celebrating Shabbat, passing around challah and juice to kids as well, right? We had some of our activists and faculty members bring our kids — I hadn't had my first kid then, but people would bring their children, 5-year-olds, 7-year-olds, playing soccer, right? Like, doing prayers in Hebrew, English, and Arabic, with Palestinian people joining us. Like, it was — it was just, again, the disjuncture between what's being presented and what was happening is just so vast.
Matthew Remski: Yeah. I mean, one of the things that's so disturbing to me, as an outsider to Jewish community and life, is the accusations and counter-accusations about what real belonging is. And specifically around — like, it was very hard for me to understand this attempt from Zionist protesters to label Jewish devotionalism and solidarity as being somehow part of an antisemitic activity. Like, that just broke my brain. I can't imagine what it would be like for you.
Daniel Sailofsky: Yeah. I'll tell you also just the affective impact of it, which is that it hurts, right? Like, yeah, I've been called — not in person, but I've been called on emails and social media — like, I've been called a capo, which is kind of like the most horrific term you could call a person, right? Like a capo, for those who wouldn't know, would be someone who was disloyal and kind of working with the Nazi occupation or the Nazis against Jews during the Holocaust, right? That's what we mean, referred to —
Matthew Remski: Right.
Daniel Sailofsky: For showing support and solidarity for an oppressed group.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Daniel Sailofsky: And that's what's so hard about it. The — the constant, like, Jewish testing that goes on, right? People claiming you're not a Jew because of this. Right. Boiling down a centuries-old religion and culture to support for an ethnostate that's been around for 75 years or whatever it is. Right. It's baffling, but also, again, not surprising, as someone who grew up in it, because there was no Judaism and Israel growing up in a Zionist community, right? They were one and the same. I tell people all the time certain things — that if I tell other people who grew up in a Zionist Jewish area, they're just like, this is normal. So, examples: I could sing the Israeli national anthem when I was like 4 years old, right? I knew that one before I knew the Canadian national anthem. When our teachers at school and Jewish day school would draw the map of Israel — I can still do it quite easily — it's not that they would speak derogatorily about the Gaza Strip or the West Bank. They didn't exist. So they would just draw the full map of Israel that includes Gaza and the West Bank and just not even include it. It was just considered — that was all Israel. It was not —
Matthew Remski: That's probably more effective for kids, isn't it?
Daniel Sailofsky: Right, of course. And it was like, I didn't even know what settlements were, right? Like, I'm 17, 18, a fairly politically conscious 17- or 18-year-old person growing up in a suburb of Montreal, and I didn't even know what these things were, right? I would travel to Israel with my family — it would just not be talked about. It would not be discussed. The very idea of Palestinians as a group wasn't discussed. It was "Arabs" —
Matthew Remski: Right.
Daniel Sailofsky: They're Arabs. As if an Arab from Saudi Arabia and a person from Syria and a person from Palestine and a person from Egypt — as if they're all one and the same.
Matthew Remski: And there's no — they're all the same person.
Daniel Sailofsky: Yeah, that kind of erasure. It's not even — it wasn't even a derogatory treatment of Palestinians. It was that they don't even exist, right? There's no such thing as Palestinians — this is a constant. This is the kind of thing you grew up with, and not, you know, in an indoctrination extremist group when you're 17 that you join, but like, when you're 5 years old and 6 years old and 7 years old, it's what you learn. It just becomes the air you breathe in a lot of ways. So because of that — again, seeing some of this backlash to Jews and to anyone who's anti-Zionist and doesn't support Israel — it's not surprising, because that is considered part and parcel of being Jewish in the 21st century, especially in North America. And I would even argue, especially in Toronto and in Montreal — they are maybe the most Zionist-extreme places, I would argue, anywhere outside of Israel. I would say they're more extremely Zionist than any place in the United States, even. I have thoughts about why that is, but that's a broader conversation.
Matthew Remski: Yeah, I mean, that does sound like a broader conversation. I'm fascinated. I want to get to the CASE report, but just to follow up on the testing — the cultural and religious testing — one of the things that seems very poignant and disturbing to me is the fact that my understanding of Jewish religious tradition and culture is that it literally lives and dies on argumentation, and on a kind of constant discussion over, well, what does the law mean, and where are we supposed to be, and what does God want us to do — who really knows, we're going to keep discussing. I mean, when I found out that the Talmud actually is, you know, one verse and then a series of arguments with the rabbis beating each other up over the centuries around it, I'm like — this is a culture that is actually bound together by a kind of discourse that affords disagreement, and it has to, and that's part of a survival strategy. And then somehow Israel kind of erases all of that.
Daniel Sailofsky: Absolutely. I mean, the joke is always two Jews, three opinions.
Matthew Remski: Right, right, right.
Daniel Sailofsky: And that tradition — this is so sad to me, really, it's again one of the sad parts to me — which is that that tradition, for a lot of topics, and especially any topic to do with Israel, which it now touches more and more spaces, it's gone, right? That idea of even having an argument, having nuance, having discussion — it's gone. And those who don't support the party line, the Israeli party line, we're out of the conversation entirely. So much so that we're not Jewish —
Matthew Remski: Right.
Daniel Sailofsky: We're not considered even, like, the correct Jews. We shouldn't be saying anything because we don't represent Jews.
Matthew Remski: Right, right.
Daniel Sailofsky: As if — as if one entire group of people that lives in a variety of different places in the world, and has lived in a variety of different places in the world for centuries, are all going to have the same views, right? So it's not just this — not just this, like, religion, this flattening of an entire religion. It's the flattening of an entire culture. And it's the — it's the erasure of years of history. So when you were saying that Jewish culture is defined by — like, you were about to say that it was defined by this argumentation — and I would argue you could even say, until recently, that it was defined by the pursuit of justice and the care for the oppressed.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Daniel Sailofsky: Like, that was our raison d'être for so long, right? It's always why I have a problem with people — not a problem, but people like to make this usually antisemitic — they try to make an antisemitic kind of claim about Jews and socialists. And the problem with that claim is that it's sort of —
Matthew Remski: Right, right.
Daniel Sailofsky: A lot of Jews were socialists, a lot of Jews were progressive, especially like the era of the Bund, with, like, Molly Crabapple's book discussing that, right? So this kind of derogatory claim — it's actually one that we should be proud of, right? Right. And there is this amazing tradition — I have some of it in my family, not a lot of it, but some of it in my family, of activists who were fighting in labor unions, right? My grandmother loves to talk about, you know, the Jews that she knew who marched with Martin Luther King, right? And to see so much of that thrown away in order to defend a violent ethnostate — I know my view of it being sad is by far not the most important, it's more horrific for the people suffering from this. But from my perspective, it hurts, right? It hurts to know that this tradition, this wonderful tradition of learning, of argumentation, of care for those who need it, it's being erased as we speak. And that's hard.
Matthew Remski: Can you give us the 101 on the CASE report?
Daniel Sailofsky: Yeah. So I had a feeling that this report was coming — just, I know some people in the academic space who mentioned that there might be some kind of antisemitism federal report coming. From what I understand, it was a task force — I don't know where it kind of originated from, but it was at least requested by federal sources, and it was eventually posted, giving a lot of legitimacy to it. It was posted on the federal government website. It's not like a directive as of yet, right? It's listed under the Canada, the Holocaust, and Combating Antisemitism tab, if you will, on their website. But it's meant to be a survey of antisemitism on campuses. And I even think that the onus for this is based on this almost American framing that campuses are this hotbed of leftist radical activity, right? So it's using this kind of moral panic to then suggest we need this report on antisemitism. And we knew it was coming. My colleagues and I had a feeling it was coming — my colleagues, I'm talking about the Jewish Faculty Network, the non-Zionist Jewish group on campus that's existed, to be clear, at U of T and across Canada for, I think, 15 years now. So it's not a recent thing. Some of the Jewish faculty groups that have now popped up that are Zionist, they are a very recent thing — they are a last-two-or-three-years thing. But we've been around for a while, so we knew it was coming. And we had a feeling, based on who the authors are, that it would be much more of a report on anti-Zionism, and a report that, most importantly, conflates the two in ways that are problematic for a variety of reasons. And that's exactly what it was. There's a full survey, but the report's also been pushed out publicly in tranches. So there's been the first big report that had this overwhelming message of extreme antisemitism and hatred on campuses. And then the follow-up — so far there's only been one other follow-up so far — that presented another view that I think we'll talk about, but that was kind of buried in the second report, which is an important update. But we knew this was going to be flawed, and it was just as flawed as we expected, right? And we'll talk about that.
Matthew Remski: As to its visibility and relevance — it's not really a government report, it's on the federal government site. I'm not quite sure about the commissioning or the responsibility for it. But what's the implication of it being up there on our federal government site?
Daniel Sailofsky: We don't know yet. But we do know that there's a legitimacy thing to it, right? I think that there still is — whether we think it's legitimate or not — that Maple Leaf and the Canadian Gov site brings with it legitimacy, and with that it has the veneer, I think, of objectivity. And those who wrote it will claim that yes, they are Jewish, and yes, they are Zionist, but that doesn't mean —
Matthew Remski: They are non-objective.
Daniel Sailofsky: That doesn't mean they're subjective. And again, a larger conversation — but no one's subjective, that's how I think — no one is perfectly, sorry, no one is perfectly objective. But they would claim that this is a representative study, and the implications of that could be — and I think we've already seen in other spaces — it has been a quelling of free speech, a quelling of specific types of free speech, and a quelling of dissent of, again, a violent ethnostate, that if it were any other state, I think would be receiving this criticism with no complaint by anybody.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Daniel Sailofsky: If another state was doing this and being critiqued in the way that Israel is being critiqued, nobody would claim that the true victims of this are those supporting the violent state, right? It's a reversal of victimhood here that we see, that is frightening, right? The supporters of the violent ethnostate who are killing Palestinians — supporters of those, they are framed through a study like this as the victims. And this kind of reversal of the victims allows for erasure and allows for quelling of dissent, allows for quelling of freedom of speech under the guise of protecting Jews. And not only do I think that a report like this — and my colleagues and I think a report like this — not only do I think it does not protect Jews, but it actually puts us in harm's way much more. It is the ultimate boy-who-cried-wolf situation, where real instances of antisemitism will be ignored by people because of these false claims of antisemitism. There will be real antisemitism that happens that people will understandably think is not antisemitism, or think is being made up, because of this conflation.
Matthew Remski: So we'll get to those definitions. But with regard to how it integrates with the Canadian zeitgeist, and perhaps even policy — how do you see its timing being related to — do you see its timing being related to the new Bill C-9, put out by the Carney government, combating hate speech?
Daniel Sailofsky: Yeah, I think it's a piece of propaganda — it's a document that is manufacturing consent for the — again, it keeps using the same words, I'm sorry — the quelling of dissent, for the silencing of those who want to stand up for Palestinians, those who want to actually do anything they can to place a consequence on Israel for its behavior. So it's not an accident that we have this Combating Hate bill, which, like all bills, is written in a way that — who's going to have a problem with combating hate speech? Everybody hates hate speech. But it's different when you weaponize the combating of hate speech to hurt another group, right? And that's what I think we see here. And a document like this is going to manufacture consent, and immediately was picked up by all of the mainstream publications in Canada. There was a ridiculous mayoral — with big scare quotes, "debate" — trying to be organized by Jesse Brown, to get Olivia Chow in there to basically harangue her for her lack of action on antisemitism in Toronto, right? This is already being used to manufacture all sorts of consent. It's already being used to elevate the fears of Jewish people in Toronto. I can speak anecdotally as well — my family will come visit, and they understand this better because I talk to them all the time about it, but their friends will be like, "are you okay in Toronto? It's so antisemitic there," right? And everything's like, "this school is so antisemitic." I was told, by someone in my parents' friends, they were like, "oh yeah, I went to York — it was good then, before it got so antisemitic" —
Matthew Remski: Right.
Daniel Sailofsky: Because I'm teaching at York now. And it's just — there's this, it's in the water now, right? These same Zionist Jews — this is just more confirmation of their fears of antisemitism. And I think it'll also have the effect of creating, making these communities even more insular than they already are, which, again, is going to have downstream negative consequences, not just for everybody, but for Jews specifically. And again, I don't think it's an accident that this was released soon after the Combating Hate Speech report, which will allow for more erasure and more quelling of dissent.
Matthew Remski: This principle of "it's in the water" — it's going to be tied up inextricably with the bad definitions at play, that expressions of dissent with regard to Israeli actions are now sort of just generalized as well — yes, things are becoming antisemitic, more antisemitic. So we'll get to those definitions, but before that, I wanted to ask: when you're reading the study, as somebody who does quantitative and qualitative research in physical education and the history of phys. ed, did you see the methodological problems with the CASE report on first pass?
Daniel Sailofsky: Yes, I will say I think I was primed to see them, because I knew the authors and I knew what their message was going to be, what they were up to. But right away — I mean, you can see that it's not a huge sample, it's not a badly sized sample, I think it's about 900. Right away, though, there were reports from people I knew who said that there was no barrier to entry to the report, so you could just be a regular community member —
Matthew Remski: And it was online.
Daniel Sailofsky: Right. And it was online, right? Let's just underline this for a moment.
Matthew Remski: This means that anybody who had the link to the survey could register, say that they attended a particular university, not show any ID for that.
Daniel Sailofsky: No student ID. I go to McMaster — I know people who, activists who tried, right, they were just like, "I'm going to" — not only did they succeed, but they were able to post multiple times. And maybe I will give them — I'm trying to be as generous as possible, when I do any critique of methodology I want to be as generous as possible to the authors, so that I can still say, even taking the generous view, it's still wrong. Maybe they had a way of verifying that people couldn't actually respond twice — I don't think so, though, right? Like, if you responded from a laptop and then a phone, probably could do that, right? So you could respond multiple times, which somebody tried.
Matthew Remski: But given the fact that that criticism has been out right from the start, and nobody's really responded to it, I don't imagine that they did protect against that.
Daniel Sailofsky: If they did have a way to defend themselves, they probably would. And the lack of checking that they're actually students — I mean, that's egregious, incredible, right? And again, I don't have verification of some of this, but even some of the qualitative — the quotes that were being used — we have seen what happens to professors and academics who slip up in their words, or who say pretty heinous stuff. There's consequences. Everyone has phones, everyone has recordings. And some of the quotes that were given here — like a professor professing that Hitler was right — I'm sorry, but there's just no chance that that happened and wasn't reported on.
Matthew Remski: Right.
Daniel Sailofsky: There's just no way. There's no way that a professor could get away with saying that in a class with many students, and not one person would mention it to anybody. It just — I can't. And again, I have no verification on this, maybe it really happened, I can't know for sure, I wasn't there. But it just seems to me like something that you would need to verify, because it's so — to me it's so impossible that that could actually be said. And that's just one part of the methodological critique. The main one is also where they recruited from. And they explained in the study that they recruited from Jewish community organizations, and then they named some of them: B'nai Brith, Hillel, CIJA. These are avowedly Zionist Jewish organizations. They're not like, "oh, we let everybody in and it happens that most of us are Zionists" — these are organizations where you cannot be anti-Zionist within them. And then to claim that this is where you recruit from, but you have a clear representative sample of Jewish students — it's just untrue, right? I liken it to: if you were doing a study about the exercise habits of athletes, of people on campus, and then you recruited only through the varsity sports teams, and then you were like, "this is a really, really healthy student population, they all do so much exercise" — it's like, yes, you recruited through a means that would get you the most fit people, people who exercise and have to exercise all day. Of course, if you recruit through Zionist organizations, yes, you will get Zionist people responding. You will get people who conflate, because they've been taught to conflate Zionism and antisemitism. And I don't want to skip too much ahead, but you see this just with that second report — the report that was not put in the first big report that was blasted everywhere, but that was posted kind of quietly. The second report, which showed that of the very few non-Zionist Jews who responded, 92% said that there was no antisemitism that they observed on campus. That seems to me like it would be a really important finding to dig deeper into. And yet, not only was it not talked about much, it was in a fully entirely different report. And to me, that's egregious in its own right. Like, even if that's a small finding for you, you need to mention it somewhere, right? It needs to mention that this extremely important and different group — that, yes, you didn't sample enough of at all — has this vastly different experience, right? And it's not a vastly different experience that can be explained by chance. It makes complete sense, if you correctly do not understand Zionism and antisemitism as the same thing.
Matthew Remski: Let's get to that. At the center of the methodology are these super flawed definitions of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Can you walk us through those?
Daniel Sailofsky: The first one I'll say is that their first definition of Zionism is: "scholarship points out that Zionism is," and then they give the definition. The scholarship that's cited is a magazine article and a Senate hearing — like a partisan Senate hearing. Maybe this is okay if we're talking about a really niche term that no one's ever studied before, there's not many definitions of it, so we have to use this one —
Matthew Remski: There's a lot of work on Zionism.
Daniel Sailofsky: There is tens of thousands of scholarly pages of scholarly work done by Zionists. There are multiple Zionism, racism, Judaism scholars in Canada, there's many of them, right? They have written books. There's so many definitions of Zionism, and there's so much context to it that is just not there, right? The scholarship cited is — and what bothers me so much is, it wouldn't be accepted in a paper that was written to these professors. If the professors that were on this report received that as the definition, they'd be like, "you got to use a better source than that for your definition." "Zionism refers to the belief that Jewish people have the right to self-determination in part of their ancestral homeland." That's also based on the IHRA definition — the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition — which has been discounted in all sorts of scholarly spaces. All sorts of scholarly spaces say this is not a good definition that we will not use. U of T, for example, has officially said that this is not the definition they will use.
Matthew Remski: I mean, what stands out to me, just on its face — and it's not like I've become more educated in this in the last couple of years, of course, but I think even prior to that, I think maybe even when I was in college — the notion of somebody saying that Zionism was a belief, instead of also, you know, a political movement with a history that actually originated somewhere, and this is what it did and this is what it motivated — it's just, it's incredible to me. It's insane. I think what is so insulting to me about the CASE study is that it makes a virtue of the respondents' ignorance, right? It basically infantilizes them by using these really bad, ahistorical definitions.
Daniel Sailofsky: I just want to read out one of the definitions — the first larger definition that's used, that's quoted, this is the one that's from Tablet magazine and from a partisan Senate hearing. It says that "scholarship defines anti-Zionism as relying on libel and distortion to claim that the Jewish collective, Israel, rather than the individual Jew, is uniquely evil. It further asserts that Jews, who have thousands of years of history in this place, are fabricating a legitimate claim to their ancestral homeland. Anti-Zionism claims that Israel, exceptionally, is the one state that must be eradicated."
Matthew Remski: Incredible.
Daniel Sailofsky: There are so many flaws with this definition. First, with the use that it is "based on libel," right — that bringing in this kind of historically used definition that painted — that was correctly kind of used to explain real antisemitism — but saying that any — it's immediately terming anti-Zionism as libel, as fake, as a lie.
Matthew Remski: Yes, this is medieval blood-drinking stuff — yeah, that's blood libel. So they've taken the blood out of it, but they're leaving the word "libel" in, to flag that they're saying this is really blood libel.
Daniel Sailofsky: And claiming that anti-Zionism is the claim that Israel is the one state that must be eradicated — as if people who are anti-Zionist have no other political convictions, as if people who are anti-Zionist aren't also against all sorts of oppression in all sorts of places, right? And the other definition that's used — and this one's easy to find, because I can just control-F for the word "annihilation" — but another terminology note, later, in one of those boxes that's meant to draw your eyes, is: "anti-Zionism refers to a movement that calls for the annihilation of Israel and denies the Jewish people the right to self-determination," blah, blah, blah. And again, this use of such inflammatory language of "annihilation" — as if being anti-Zionist means — it sounds like being anti-Zionist means you want to, you know, nuke the state of it, like, take it off the map, right?
Matthew Remski: Yeah, that's what the protesters in the quad at U of T were advocating for, that you could somehow have a doomsday weapon and remove that territory from the earth somehow.
Daniel Sailofsky: It's absurd, right? And there's no scholarly backing to this. There's no accounting for the history of anti-Zionism, of principled Jewish anti-Zionism. There's no accounting for — and again, like you said, there's no accounting for the fact that anti-Zionism and Zionism are not — they're not philosophical, theoretical beliefs, right, they're movements, political movements that have existed and have had real consequences. Zionism isn't a belief in a Jewish homeland — it is the violent dispossession of Palestinian people from their home to make room for a Jewish ethnostate. You can claim that Zionism should be about all these other things, but you have to deal with what it is in actuality. And this is a problem I deal with constantly with people in my own life, which is that they have a romanticized notion and nostalgia for an Israel that has never existed, and for a Zionism that has never existed. So they imagine Zionism as this — Jews just want self-determination in a place that is safe for themselves in their ancestral homeland.
Matthew Remski: So the Zionism that's never existed is a Zionism without consequences, right?
Daniel Sailofsky: Yeah. It's the Zionism where we get to live in our ancestral homeland, and we get to run the government, and we get to — I'm saying "we" as Jews — we get to be the controlling arm of this ethnostate, and that has no negative consequences for anybody else, right? Nobody else lived here before, nobody else has been dispossessed, nobody else — there's no negative consequence to this, other than a positive for us. It's as if the land of Palestine was uninhabited before, and we just took it over —
Matthew Remski: And positively made the desert bloom and grew watermelons and so on, because nobody else was doing anything.
Daniel Sailofsky: Yeah, nobody else was growing anything. There were no villages, there was no collective, there was no democracy, there was nothing before it — "we made this amazing." And that's propaganda that's drilled into you from the first days of activism. I mean, the amount of tzedakah, charity, that we would give to JFN — right, the Jewish — sorry, JNF, the Jewish National Fund — thinking that this is just an environmental thing that likes to grow trees in Israel, right? JNF was an explicit policy, was an explicit organization that was designed to take land and ensure that it was in Jewish hands — this is in the '20s and the '30s and the '40s — and this was presented to us as this kind of apolitical, environmental group that was for planting trees, and who could have a problem with planting trees, right? So it's this kind of nefarious framing that we see all the time, and that becomes, like I said, part of the water. And these terms that I've seen debunked so easily are still so pervasive.
Matthew Remski: It sounds like you're describing the Sierra Club for Zionism.
Daniel Sailofsky: Yes, the JNF hoodwinking is — it felt like a personal — not personal, but it felt like almost an attack, to think back to those little boxes while you're thinking you're giving your little coins into a nice charity, that again has the goal of growing trees on top of the ruins of a Palestinian village to ensure that people can't remember it, right? And just the erasure of an entire group of people, and the way that this was framed as "we were the good guys." And yeah, it's hard even still now to think back to things I thought and did.
Matthew Remski: In the CASE team's own follow-up — you've referred to this before, but 92% of the anti-Zionist Jewish participants who did take part reported no experience of antisemitism on their campus. Now, first of all, why did they release this at all? For one thing, they didn't release it in the first tranche, but they let it leak out afterward. But what do you think that number is telling us? For your first question —
Daniel Sailofsky: I have no idea why they released it at all, I'm surprised they did. I'll give them the tiniest bit of credit for transparency —
Matthew Remski: Some credit.
Daniel Sailofsky: Yeah, yeah, that's transparent. And I will say there's a few people on the list of authors that I was surprised signed off on this work, because I think that their work and politics are generally better than this, or I thought it was, I thought they were — so maybe that's some of it, like, people actually pushing for some transparency, and I'm sure there was pushback against them. What it tells us is that this is not a study of antisemitism, it's a study of some antisemitism and anti-Zionism. And it is done in this way purposefully, to inflate fears of antisemitism, to inflate the idea of how much antisemitism is out there. And more than that, more than even inflating the fears of antisemitism, it is a project meant to blur the lines between these terms, to make them one and the same. And I think why they're doing this is because they have nothing left. And when I say they have nothing left, I mean that there's no more arguments that can be made for Israel as some kind of moral state, right, that — "Israel is the most moral army in the world" — the amount of times I've heard that is just, it would blow your mind, right? But there's just no claiming that anymore, because we have media, like, you can see it, we have videos and audio from soldiers themselves saying what they're doing, we have videos from Palestinians, we have the rubble and the ruins, we have all of this, we have the settler violence in the West Bank being supported, or at least not being pushed down by the Israeli military and the Israeli state, we have Ben-Gvir, the Israeli defense minister — not some random person who has a podcast, but the Israeli defense minister — who gets a cake shaped like a noose for his birthday, because his main thing that he's always wanted is to bring back the hanging death penalty for Palestinians only, right? There are all these things that are dispelling any notion of that nostalgic Israel that's never existed, that people want. So because of that, all they have left is to claim that any critique of Zionism is a critique of Judaism, a critique of Jews, and is antisemitic.
Matthew Remski: You know, I haven't heard that particular framing before, that this is actually the last straw, that this particular defense —
Daniel Sailofsky: That's how I see it.
Matthew Remski: Yeah, that's very interesting to me. And it's very powerful, right? It is very confusing, it is super paralyzing — I have to admit that it works, because, just in my own life, to become completely transparent about this — I was astonished in the months after October 7th to watch many colleagues of mine in various forms of journalism, especially in the disinformation space, show themselves as actual very hardline Zionists. And it had never come up in conversation before, it had never — I was never like —
Daniel Sailofsky: You just assumed that they weren't.
Matthew Remski: I just assumed, like, oh, you know, you can't — you wouldn't, when push came to shove, be on the side of imperialism or colonialism, or you wouldn't be supportive of an apartheid state, because that's absolutely clear, isn't it? And these are people who can even admit some of those things, right? Can even be transparent with themselves and honest with themselves about those things. And that was an incredible experience. And I am now, as a non-Jewish person, in the position where I actually don't know — I actually don't know what a person believes, right, if they happen to be Jewish. And that doesn't slide — I'm smart enough to understand the history and the feeling and the disgust involved in what antisemitism really is, and so I'm inoculated against that. But for the people who don't have the kind of exposure and education that I do, I mean, it's going to be increasingly difficult for people, for non-Jewish people, to parse these two things apart, because these definitions have been conflated. And that is incredibly fucking dangerous. Like, it's so — it makes me so afraid, actually, for people like Jesse Brown, because, like, you know, as much of an asshole as he is, it's like, you are creating very dangerous conditions by which people are not going to be able to discern actual bigotry from politicized propaganda. And I don't know if you're intentionally doing that, I don't know if you're not smart enough to figure out how not to do that, but you are doing that, and that's going to have terrible downstream effects.
Daniel Sailofsky: Yeah. In their purported desire to protect Jews, or stop antisemitism, they are fueling the fire. And that's what we mean when we say that Israel is not only not a safe place for Jews, but it is making every other place unsafe. And the thing I won't deny is that there is more antisemitism online than there was in the past — 100%. There is more crazy, like, adulation for Nazis and Hitler, there is more "Hitler was right," there is more "look at Jews again," right, there's more of that now. And, again, longer conversation, but I think some of that is to do with what the Internet values and what it promotes, and algorithms, and the fact that social media companies do not care about people at all, or what they're doing, they just want clicks. There's some of that. But there's also some of the fact that when we are told that the things we see with our own eyes — the destruction of Gaza — is actually not what we say it is, and actually those are the good guys, and when we are told that over and over again, it's going to make people rightfully distrustful of the media and of the media's treatment and perception of Jews, right? Like, when Bari Weiss joins CBS News and fails upwards to CBS News, and then explicitly says that we want to make sure that we don't platform anti-Israel things — it's very hard to say then that Jews don't partially control the media. It's hard to say that when you see them controlling the media in that way, right? And again, these are real antisemitic stereotypes and ideas, but they are being fueled by an Israeli state that does not care what the impact is on Jews in Israel. I heard — there was a very popular Israeli podcast, and I listen to these sometimes because I speak some Hebrew, so I can often tell, like, I'll see something posted on X, or I'll be like, "there's no way they actually said that," because someone's translating it to English. Then I'll listen to it in Hebrew, and I'll be like, "oh, no, they actually said that." And one of these was someone saying that they were very excited for Zohran Mamdani to be elected in New York City, because it would create so much antisemitism that people would move to Israel. This is a Jewish person who seems to only care about Jewish people, but is saying that he wants Zohran, because Zohran's going to create antisemitism and that will push people to move to Israel — basically saying, "I actually want a negative outcome for my fellow Jews living in New York City, because it helps the Israeli project down the line." Like, that's what these people are saying out loud, right? And they're telling us who they are, right? And so when people believe them, and then are told that that's actually not what they mean — people aren't stupid enough to believe that.
Matthew Remski: I guess the methodological question going forward is: can you imagine a way of actually measuring some sort of aggregate effect of hasbara over time, with the rise of online antisemitism that's actually real? That would seem to be the question that really deserves study, right? I believe that you are right, although I can't really — it's just a sense that I have, that there is more overt Nazi bullshit coming out, and real vile bigotry, and people confusing — I mean, it's in the U.S. Congress, it's Marjorie Taylor Greene, it's Tucker Carlson doing it, so of course it's going to show up everywhere. But I guess that's the correlation that has to be studied. Can you imagine — is there some way of doing that?
Daniel Sailofsky: I would have to think about it a lot longer, but it's so hard to do, for multiple reasons. I mean, the first one just being, like, how do we determine how many of these are bots? And how do we determine how much of this is being pushed by who, from where? But even if we were to determine that this many comments are actually real people expressing this kind of antisemitism, I guess the only thing I would try to point to would be: what else do they think? So my view would be — and maybe this is reflective of my leftist, Marxist bias — but I would be very strongly convinced that those people espousing these antisemitic, really truly antisemitic sentiments and threats online, they're not also going to be people who hold leftist opinions elsewhere.
Matthew Remski: Right, right.
Daniel Sailofsky: They're going to be people who are anti all immigrants, they're going to be people who are anti-Israel and Jews but also anti-Muslim and also anti-LGBTQ, right? Whereas I think you'll see that of the anti-Zionist side of this spectrum, these are people who are supportive of the removal of oppression, of anti-imperialism, they're supportive of those who are oppressed, they're supportive of the LGBTQ movement — these are people who, otherwise, in their politics, are not hateful, and they're not hateful of others, they're not xenophobic, right? And I'll tell you personally — this is a little personal anecdote — but one of my biggest moments of change and flight from Zionism was reading Michelle Alexander's — Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Reading that and being like, "this book is fantastic, it's everything I agree with, it's done so methodologically soundly, it's logical, it's great." Then reading about the author, because I'm like, "who is this woman?" And then I'm like, "oh wow, she's right about all these things, except she's wrong about Israel — it's so weird, she's right about all these oppressed groups and fighting for their rights and anti-imperialism, but it's weird, she's right about everything, but she's so wrong about this." Then I'm thinking, like, "that would be kind of weird, that someone is so correct on all these issues" — but is it possible, maybe I'm wrong? And that's what started getting me to think that I'm like, "all these people that I agree with about everything, and who hold the politics that I hold, they are on the side of Palestinian resistance and on the side of Palestinians, so maybe I have to reevaluate." Right? And that's where I would kind of lean into, in terms of doing a study about this, where I'm like, I think that these people who hold this virulent antisemitism, these are people on the political right, and these are people that we have to be concerned about. But nothing that Israel is doing is helping, and it is actively hurting. And the framing of the leftist, anti-Zionist camp as these antisemitic people — it's wrong, and it's harmful.
Matthew Remski: Has there been any response so far from the CASE authors to the JFN report?
Daniel Sailofsky: None yet that I know of. We released it Wednesday, last week, sent it to some MPs as well, trying to make sure — our goal with the letter, and it says so at the end of the letter I believe, is that at the very least — the very least — that they take this report with a heavy grain of salt, at the best that they completely disregard it and disavow it and even write that this is not a well-done report. And it's something that, I know I keep saying it, but we need to do good and correct work, or if we don't do good work and you have garbage data, you're going to get — garbage in, garbage out is the stats term for it, right? And this is a case of a completely methodologically flawed sample that does not reflect the breadth and diversity of the Jewish community, questions that were leading and would conflate Zionism and Israel in the same question — sorry, Zionism and Judaism in the same question. Double-barreled questions is what they're called, in a stats kind of terminology. There's all these flaws with it, and you can't use this to build policy, and you can't use this as evidence and as proof and as backing for certain policies. That's dangerous, for all the reasons we've been talking about.
Matthew Remski: Daniel, thank you so much for your time today. Thanks for your explanations, thanks for your work on this response to the CASE report, and yeah, all the best. I mean, it's not a great situation, but I'm glad that you're working on it.
Daniel Sailofsky: No, it's not. But it's something that we need to do, and it's absolutely vital, and for all the reasons we've described, we'll keep fighting the fight. And I really appreciate you giving us the platform here to discuss this. So thank you so much, and sorry for yapping a little bit too much.
Matthew Remski: Not at all. Thanks, Daniel.
Matthew Remski: Thanks again to Daniel Sailofsky for your time and insight. Up on Patreon now is a brief coda episode in which I look at exhaustion, confusion, fear, and despair, or how the psychic intrusions model of Lara Sheehi applies to the CASE report and the general position that anti-Zionists now find themselves in as they're bombarded with this accusation.
Thanks for listening, everybody. Take care of each other.
