I escaped a country that marked Jews. I never imagined Canada would forget how to protect them.

Look at the photograph of the little girl holding a Soviet passport. That girl is me.

In the Soviet Union, your passport did not merely tell the state who you were. On its infamous fifth line, it recorded your nationality. For Jews, that single word—Jewish—could follow you into a university, a workplace and encounters with state institutions.

You could contribute to science, medicine, engineering, culture, or the economy, but your accomplishments did not necessarily protect you because your identity could precede everything you had achieved.

My family knew what it meant to live in a society in which discrimination against Jews could coexist with grand declarations about equality, liberation and social justice.

That contradiction is important.

Oppression does not always announce itself as oppression. Sometimes it speaks the language of justice.

My family left that world for freedom.

Canada represented something profoundly different: democracy, individual liberty, equality before the law and the conviction that minorities should not have to fear the institutions created to protect them.

That is why what I see happening today is so painful.

When human rights lose their moral compass

The recent decision involving former Toronto Metropolitan University teaching assistant Ayman Elkasrawy should concern Canadians far beyond the Jewish community. As Tristan Hopper reported in the National Post on August 31, 2026, in “Human rights tribunal sides with TMU teaching assistant who decried ‘desecration by the Jews,’” Elkasrawy became embroiled in controversy after an Arabic-language prayer in which he was reported to have called for Jews to be slain “one by one.” His mosque and the Muslim Association of Canada condemned the prayer at the time. (National Post)

In Elkasrawy v. Toronto Metropolitan University, 2026 HRTO 1137 (Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, July 24, 2026), the Tribunal rejected his claim that his Muslim creed was a factor in his termination. However, it found........

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