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The good news, at least according to Dr. Rachel Fish, is that “we” are winning. But this is precisely the problem. Speaking last month at the annual Sol and Florence Kanee Distinguished Lecture in Winnipeg—a high-profile event hosted at the Shaarey Zedek Synagogue and sponsored by both the synagogue and the Asper Foundation—Fish devoted her address to what she sees as a losing battle against antisemitism on North American campuses and in public life. Now director of the Brandeis University President’s Initiative on Antisemitism and co-founder of Boundless, which describes itself as a “non-profit think-action tank” working to “revitalize Israel education and take bold collective action against Jew-hatred,” Fish cast the struggle in stark terms: the forces advancing anti-Zionist politics are gaining ground.

In Fish’s telling, this “we” consists of a loose but influential coalition of university faculty, students, and activists who, she argues, have been fostering anti-Israel sentiment—and, by extension, Jew-hatred—since her own pro-Israel advocacy work began in the early-2000s. By the end of the evening, it became clear that “we” referred not simply to anti-Zionists, but to anyone unwilling to collapse criticism of Israel into antisemitism.

Indeed, her speech followed the same narrative as the 2004 film she produced as a member of the David Project (a now dissolved American pro-Israel campus group) called Columbia Unbecoming. This film, produced during the Second Intifada, shone a spotlight on a handful of Jewish students at Columbia University who professed to feeling bullied, censored, and silenced for their attempts to advocate for Israel by pro-Palestinian faculty in the university’s Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department. Fish cited this film proudly in her speech, arguing that things have only gotten worse. Her accusation that Columbia as an institution strongly supports an anti-Israel bias within its faculty may surprise those of us who remember the violent clampdown on the pro-Palestine Columbia encampment in 2024, facilitated by the university’s administration, and the post-encampment report from the university’s Task Force on Antisemitism that equated anti-Zionism with antisemitism. This is exactly the sort of conflation that sustained the logic of Fish’s recent speech. Throughout, criticism of Israel was conflated with antisemitism, even while Fish conceded that such an equation was “very hard to navigate” once you factored in all the Jewish and Israeli activists and Holocaust survivors who have spoken out against Israel’s genocidal actions since its now years-long assault on Gaza began after the events of October 7, 2023. As the evening wore on, Fish’s answer to these complications became clear: set them aside and return to the core premise underpinning the entire presentation—that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are ultimately inseparable.

Over the last year, Winnipeg has become an active battleground between the........

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