Talia Klein Leighton compares being a Canadian Jew since October 7 to a frog in a pot of boiling water.
"Every time I wake up and I realize that the water's getting hotter, somebody greases the bowl," Leighton, president of Canadian Women Against Antisemitism, told National Post. "The level of tolerance that this country seems to have adopted in terms of antisemitism is breathtaking."
The facts are well-known: B'nai Brith Canada registered 6,800 antisemitic incidents in 2025, up from 2,769 in 2022. Synagogues have been shot and firebombed, Jews have been beaten and shot at with pellets because they were Jewish, and "F--k the Jews" graffiti is increasingly commonplace. Anti-Israel protesters marched angrily for many months through Jewish residential neighbourhoods in Toronto.
Leighton remembers her life growing up in Guelph — she moved there at the age of three in 1975 with her South African family — as one of a handful of Jews in a small city peppered with antisemitism. There were swastikas spraypainted on her locker and "horrible Holocaust jokes."
She found community at York University in Toronto in 1991 as a student, where she was immersed in a community of conscientious and active Jews on campus. She remembers school effectively closed for high holidays and administrators receptive to the concerns of Jewish students.
"It was wonderful to be a Jew at York. There was a vibrant community," Leighton said.
She juxtaposed her experience as a student with her return to campus in 2004 as director of Hillel, a Jewish cultural group on campus. "By then, it was a completely different place to be a Jew," she said. "The anti-Zionist left-wing academic was already starting to infuse the university."
She remembers monitoring an event during Israel Apartheid Week, when a speaker asked the crowd to identify if "there were any Jews in the room." The participants quickly pointed Leighton out. "That was definitely bracing," she remembers.
The timing lines up with the work of emeritus sociology professor Robert Brym at the University of Toronto, a leading researcher of Canadian Jews, who has published several landmark studies on the community.
"The statistics on hate crimes in Canada are pretty clear on this. It's really in the early 2000s that hate crimes against Jews in Canada started to go up in a significant way," he said. The changing sentiment came against the backdrop of the Second Intifada and the emergence of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in the mid-aughts.
Brym referenced figures from B'nai Brith's annual audit of antisemitic incidents to note that there was just a single antisemitic incident per 100,000 members of the Canadian population pre-2000 while today that figure is 16.5.
"By this measure, then, the rate of antisemitic incidents is more than 16.5 times higher today than it was before 2000," he explained.
