Robert Brym and Rhonda Lenton open their new study with a sentence that should stop every Canadian Jew cold: the golden age of Canadian Jewry ran from the early 1960s to the early 2020s, and it is over.

Their Canadian Jewish Barometer 2026 (Canadian Jewish Studies, vol. 44) surveyed more than three thousand Canadians, six hundred of them Jews. Eighty-eight percent of Canadian Jews now say they feel less safe here than five years ago; two years ago it was sixty-three. Thirty-four percent have stopped wearing something in public that marks them as a Jew — a kippah, a Star of David, the necklace their grandmother gave them. Twenty-six percent have thought seriously about leaving the country.

And thirty-nine percent — nearly four in ten of us — have begun to worry that a Holocaust could eventually happen in Canada.

That number is not hysterical. In 2024 there was one anti-Jewish hate crime in this country for every 366 Jews, and we are the only community in Canada that needs bollards, cameras and a guard at the door of its house of prayer.

So let me say what Tisha B’Av exists to say: the danger is real, and our mourning was never nostalgia. It was a siren.

And let me say the second........

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