A year later and we’re still here: Standing against antisemitism on campus and beyond

This article includes descriptions of antisemitism and may be triggering for some readers. The Peer Centre offers drop-in services and empathetic peer-based and is open Monday to Sunday from 12 p.m. to 10 p.m.

More than a year has ed now since Oct. 7, 2023, and it’s been difficult to put into words and even fathom what that really means—what it means for a whole year to have ed since the massacre of our loved ones, our people.

It feels like it was hundreds of lifetimes ago, but also yesterday, and now. It feels like time stopped ticking right after Oct. 7, and everything else in the world followed suit, breaking down. The openly flourishing antisemitism the Jewish community has since seen has been more than frustrating and exhausting. This issue is neither abstract nor distant from Queen’s campus.

This past year, our attempts to call attention to antisemitism were—and still are—routinely dismissed. Queen’s Jewish students have faced the destruction and unjust policing of our earnest expression, our Mezuzahs, which are traditional Jewish prayer scrolls hung outside doorways.

Some Jewish students made several attempts last year to reach out to other campus groups possessing various experiences with the war in Israel and Gaza, offering to create spaces for meaningful dialogue—attempts which were repeatedly ignored or thrown in Jewish students’ faces. In one case when an individual reached out to a campus group, asking if they’d be willing to talk to us about how we all can discuss the conflict without stooping to unintentional antisemitism, Islamophobia, or hurtful rhetoric, that individual was promptly blocked.

More than that, people outside of our community have decided they can deem what does and doesn’t count as antisemitism. Rather than holding meaningful dialogue with Jewish clubs and spaces at Queen’s, they rely on fringe Jewish voices to absolve them of any blame for their harmful and overtly antisemitic actions.

This is part of a complex permission structure for antisemitism that exists at Queen’s, which is far from unique. It’s part of a wider structure that’s been around for ages, devastating our people. It makes fighting antisemitism on campus frustrating and near impossible when our every attempt at calling it out results in denial, inversion, and the tokenization of fringe voices. Jews at Queen’s are exhausted, and we need something to change.

The permission structures that have enabled antisemitism to thrive historically function primarily by inverting or inventing our historical position and absolving any antisemitic act as one of valid “retaliation.”

For ages, blood libels painted Jews as killers of Christian children, and our refusal to mold to Christian traditions only further drove the Catholic Church’s efforts to either forcibly convert us, or murder us en masse.

In Nazi , so-called “racial science” painted us as threats to European society and the Aryan race, permitting antisemitism to flourish and sanctioning the industrial, systematic murdering of two-thirds of European Jewry—permitting the Holocaust.

In the Soviet Union, socialists painted us as global threats and Nazi aids, while painting themselves as the true victims of Nazi . Promptly, the KGB (Committee for State Security) began putting out every iteration of the phrases: “Zionism is Nazism” and “Zionism is genocide,” propaganda which seeped with ease from eastern ultra-leftist typewriters into the hands and minds of leftists in North America.

This brings us to today, where this permission structure is newly flourishing post-Oct.7, where our every attempt to call attention to antisemitism is denied and inverted, since “we” are the oppressors.

Our peers and student leaders share and interact with content online that calls for violence towards our people. The phrase “We’re not against Jews, only Zionists” stops having meaning after you’ve heard it a couple hundred times—after you’re numb from the pain of the murder, kidnapping, and brutalization of our people. After you’ve repeated the words “most Jews are Zionists” and instead of listening to us you’re uplifting those who rationalize the violence towards us.

“We’re not against Jews, only Zionists” stops having meaning after our hundredth attempt at explaining that Zionism is our Indigenous self-determination movement, which is the product of several thousand years of Jews yearning for our land back; several thousand years of traditions tying us to Eretz Yisrael (The Land of Israel).

When people scrawl tear down our Mezuzahs, and splash water over a chalk drawing of a simple Magen David on campus—the phrase “We’re not against Jews, only Zionists” stops having meaning, and it never meant much to begin with. For many of us, Zionism is inseparable from the very way we think about ourselves and our people. I don’t exist as a Zionist separately from the way I exist as a Jew.

Jewishness isn’t a part of me, it’s all of me—same goes with my queerness, my womanhood, and, indeed, my Zionism. There’s nothing dirty about the word “Zionist”—that I’m a Zionist means I am a living, breathing continuation of my ancestors’ dreams, their yearning for return, and their unwavering connection to our land.

Alongside my endless frustration with our campus, the difficulties of being a Jewish artist in online spaces led me to create The Kvell & Kibbitz, our creative Jewish zine at Queen’s where we’re able to unapologetically center and celebrate Jewishness in a space where we refuse to be diminished or twisted; in a space shaped uniquely by us and for us. In our second issue, we created a section where folks could send in their reflections on this past year as university students.

When we pointed to the words “student intifada” and “bring the revolution to your community” graffitied around campus as deeply painful and violent words for our community, we were accused by the campus’ Palestinian solidarity movement and an allied fringe Jewish group of “fear-mongering” and speaking up in bad faith, trying to take attention away from their cause on campus.

Here again is the permission structure for antisemitism; the ignorance of any pain we mention because our pain in itself is treated as a crime, distracting from something else. Here again, people hear Jews speak up about antisemitism, and their first instinct is to distrust us, deny our experiences, and chastise us for speaking up.

I was born and raised in Haifa during the Second Intifada, a time overshadowed by the constant threat of suicide bombings on buses, outside restaurants, and near hitchhiking posts. These memories blend with the relentless wail of sirens and the heavy steel doors of the Merkhav Mugan—the safe rooms we crowded into whenever an alarm sounded, their name meaning “protected space” in Hebrew.

The sound of a siren still frightens me and sends me into panic, years later, even when I know I’m safe. It’s morbid to see people on campus who have never experienced or felt any such trauma calling for an “intifada,” willfully ignorant of its realities. People I used to call my friends. I would like to ask them and folks on campus who engage in such rhetoric if they’re really ready to “globalize the intifada” and “bring the revolution” to their communities, because to our community, that looks like the globalization of our murder.

After the pain of last year, after losing friends during the Oct. 7 massacre and then to the vitriol against our people that followed, most of us are scared to get close to new people. People enjoyed laughing with me and being around me until I spoke about my Jewishness “too much” for their goyische tastes. I went from being their queer, “quirky Jewish friend” who told “interesting” stories and celebrated “interesting” holidays—as if that wasn’t reductive enough—to someone “uncomfortable to be around,” too loud of an Israeli.

I’m no longer interested in being quiet. None of us should have to be.

More than a year has ed since Oct. 7, 2023. A year where every single day since has felt like the same. The pain that came with last October will not go away until we bring our people home. It isn’t going away until we have a chance to start healing. It isn’t going away until there is peace in our land—not more radical violence. Israelis and Palestinians deserve radical peace. Around the world, and here on Queen’s campus, we deserve some of that peace too.

We deserve to be listened to and spoken with, consulted, understood, not spoken over. We deserve to exist, to learn, and to play on this campus, unconditionally.

Am Yisrael Chai (The People of Israel Live).

Sheana is a third-year history and English student.

The Journal accepts Letters to the Editor or Op-Eds from all of the Queen’s and Kingston community. Please submit Letters to the Editor at: [email protected].

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