Last week, the Toronto District School Board held two virtual meetings that lasted seven hours each. In those 14 hours, trustees were set to vote on whether to receive a report on antisemitism in the county’s biggest public school system—a report that offered 32 recommendations for confronting and mitigating antisemitism in public schools.
Once again, this was to vote on whether to receive the report. Not to enact all 32 recommendations, but simply to accept that it was done.
Why did it take 14 hours to discuss?
The meetings—which The CJN’s education reporter, Mitchell Consky, attended—were bombarded by mostly anti-Zionist delegates who argued that the report should not consider anti-Zionism as a contemporary form of antisemitism. (Read Consky’s pieces here and here.) On the other hand, the community saw pro-Zionist activists slam the report for trying to shoehorn antisemitism into a “diversity, equity and inclusion” framework that create a hierarchy of victimhood. Consky joins Avi Finegold and Phoebe Maltz Bovy on Bonjour Chai to explain what went on in those titanic meetings and the shifting politics at play.
Transcript
Transcripts are AI-generated and may contain minor errors.
Avi Finegold: So, can you start by telling us a bit about your beat with the TDSB? What does it look like to cover the TDSB the past few months and leading up to what’s been going on over the past week or so?
Mitch Consky: Yeah, so when I was officially brought on to The CJN, I wasn’t supposed to be covering anything but postsecondary education. It was supposed to be universities from coast to coast, specifically. Then there’s been a lot of stuff going on, specifically at the TDSB that has caused me to expand my beat to more generally focus on education in Canada. You know, a few months ago, there was a protest for the Grassy Narrows River Run, which then devolved into an anti-Israel chant for a lot of students that were not sanctioned to be there. A lot of parents got upset, and it caused a lot of backlash in the community. There have been discussions about what to do in terms of a lot of the anti-Zionist sentiment that has trickled into TDSB school systems and what to do about this unprecedented rise in anti-Semitism, not just in the TDSB but, you know, in schools throughout the country. So, my beat has now expanded into that, and then it really started focusing on what happened last week with this anti-Semitism report.
Avi Finegold: So yeah, tell us about this report. Apparently, there were two very long meetings about it. Let’s start with the report itself and then talk a bit about the first meeting discussing it.
Mitch Consky: Yeah, so both of these meetings started at 4:30. They were virtual, thank God. But they started at 4:30 PM and went until 11:30. So these were extremely long meetings. This was essentially to vote on whether or not the board of trustees should receive this new anti-Semitism report. I’ll tell you about this report before I get into what actually happened.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Could I just ask what it means to receive a report? Would they ever not receive a report?
Mitch Consky: Yeah, that’s a great question, Phoebe. It’s rare that they wouldn’t receive a report, especially given the extent of the consultations. This report was essentially a summary of community consultations with several Jewish groups. It was called Affirming Jewish Identities and Addressing Anti-Semitism. It was developed after multiple consultations with Jewish community leaders and faith leaders. It includes 32 recommendations, such as integrating Jewish experience into the curriculum beyond Holocaust education and increasing Jewish representation among staff. The most contentious issue, which really was the crux of the conflict within these meetings, was addressing anti-Zionism as a contemporary form of anti-Semitism. It was really that definition, or that correlation, that caused the most conflict within these meetings. The first night was essentially just a delegation hearing. So it was a public hearing, and it included over 87 or 90 delegates. Most of these delegates, I will say, were anti-Zionist. A lot of them were affiliated with Independent Jewish Voices, and they expressed deep concern with equating anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism and the larger implications of what that could mean. It seemed like there were a lot of the same talking points over and over again. I’ll say an important detail that happened: one of the delegates declared family relations to a prominent Holocaust survivor named Bill Gleason. The next day, one of the trustees got to speak up during the proceedings and actually said that the family reached out to her and told her that they have never heard of the delegate that declared family relations. It seemed that there were a lot of anti-Zionist delegates that were rooting their arguments in their relation to Holocaust survivors.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Okay, so this is something I really wanted to just jump in and ask about—the sort of who’s who of this—because this is something I’ve wondered about just generally in post 10-7 tensions in Toronto about who’s speaking for the Jews, sort of a perennial Bonjour Chai question. Of the anti-Zionist delegates, how many were Jewish would you say proportionally?
Mitch Consky: So that’s a great question. I think they all declared that they were Jewish. We actually reached out to the TDSB to ask them what the process of verification was in terms of anybody’s identity. We didn’t get a response, so they all said that they were Jewish.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So something I just want to bring up about this is, on the one hand, I am not somebody who says that if you’re an anti-Zionist, you’re not really Jewish. I’m the least interested in telling people this. On the other hand, I have seen stickers up, flyers up, whatever, all over my bit of Toronto that say Jews for a Free Palestine. And as much as I will respect the Jewish identity of other people, do I respect the Jewish identity of a sticker? Do I know what that even means? You know what I’m saying? What I found interesting is just demographically knowing how many Jews there are in Toronto and how many Jews there are roughly in this part of Toronto, you would think that everybody for Free Palestine is Jewish. Maybe that’s the case. I wouldn’t rule it out. I just don’t know, and I feel like that’s something that’s very hard to sort of verify.
Mitch Consky: I think that’s true. Something that’s really interesting is that the superintendents that were behind this report—which again, I want to emphasize this—this report was not a series of prescriptions, it was not a strategy, it was no official policy. This was essentially a community outreach summary. It was a community report of consultation. This is what the majority of the Jewish community who they interviewed said. The important factor here is that this was called one of the biggest community consultation reports in TDSB history. The overwhelming majority, and they did clarify that there were some fringe groups that were anti-Zionists, but within this report, there was a majority that did equate anti-Zionism as a contemporary form of anti-Semitism. It begs the question; this report does not ignore the fact that there are a lot of Jewish anti-Zionists. It actually also identifies the fact that in order to develop an effective strategy, there would need to be further consultations in the next phase with people that don’t identify as Zionists.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Just one more demographic thing and then I will let Avi speak, I promise, which is just that we had guests on from the New Israel Fund, right, to talk about that survey that showed that 51% of Canadian Jews are—was it only 51% are Zionists or something like this? But then, like when you look at the percent that want Israel to exist as a Jewish state, it’s like virtually all.
Mitch Consky: So this is an important piece in all of this. Essentially, a lot of the anti-Zionist delegates in the first public hearing brought up this report. It was actually by the New Israel Fund of Canada, and it found that 51% of Canadian Jews do not identify as Zionists. However, it also states that 94% of Canadian Jews support Israel’s right to exist, which in many definitions is the definition of what Zionism is. The survey didn’t offer too much explanation as to why. There could be many reasons we could imagine, one of them being that calling yourself a Zionist right now isn’t the most popular thing to do, at least publicly.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: We had them on for the people who made this.
Avi Finegold: Yes, we’ve discussed this on the show before, and yeah, that was a big part of our personal upshots.
Mitch Consky: Right, so what did they say? Did they give further explanation?
Avi Finegold: From what I recall, I believe that they said there were definitely some issues they thought of after the fact, that they should have asked more clarifying questions. But I think there was a recognition—it’s impossible to know for sure—but there was a recognition that likely was that Zionism is a political term for a lot of people and it’s loaded. They support Israel but recognize that Zionism has a lot of messiness attached to it, and they want to stay away from that term specifically.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Well, a really important thing that we have to mention is that they said this had never been asked in those terms before. They don’t actually know if this is fewer identifying as Zionists or more, so I think that is a really important piece. If we’re going to, we can’t really say, “Oh well, this shows a shift in such and such,” because they don’t know.
Avi Finegold: So, by the end of the first meeting, you have all of these people speak. There’s no vote, there’s nothing. It’s just a presentation of different people’s delegates, like you know, saying what they want to say, right? That’s my sense. And then, by the second meeting, there was a vote. I believe the, what happens with the report? Did it go into purgatory? Was it adopted? Was it rejected?
Mitch Consky: Had.
Avi Finegold: What’s the procedure? I know that it gets really technical in terms of procedures of the TDSB. Give us the highlights, what we actually need to know.
Mitch Consky: Well, okay, what I think one of the most interesting parts of the second meeting is that a couple of the trustees tabled a motion to send the consultation report back to staff, which would essentially defer the process for several months, maybe a year. The reason they proposed that motion was that they felt many of the delegates who spoke the previous night, their voices weren’t accurately reflected in this community consultation report. It’s also important to identify the fact that this report was not definitive. Key parts outlined the fact that further consultations were required. Essentially, it talked to numerous Jewish groups and had 32 recommendations, none of which were definitive strategies. It specifically mentioned further consultations are required. A couple of the trustees, Shelly Laskin being one of them, who has been a vigorous supporter of the Jewish community within the TDSB, didn’t recognize any value in sending a community consultation report back to staff when it already identified further consultations were required. It just seemed like a redundant procedure.
Avi Finegold: It smacks of passing the buck.
Mitch Consky: Yeah, and especially after two back-to-back nights, you know, this started at 4:30 pm and then it ended at 11:30 pm, and it just seemed like there was no point to it. There were further arguments about whether or not they want to receive this report that says anti-Zionism is a contemporary form of anti-Semitism. Many trustees were against it; a few were for it. It just seemed like we were going in circles for a long time. The motion to defer the report was defeated 12 to 8, and the board ultimately did vote to receive the report 13 to 5. The next phase of consultations is set to take motion. Another motion that passed later on proposed that whatever anti-hate strategy would be encompassed within a larger DEI framework. It’s yet to be determined what the next steps are in terms of tackling anti-Semitism in schools.
Avi Finegold: Without getting into the politics of passing the buck or whatever, the question I have then is from my read of it. I know it seems fairly obvious that there are pro-Zionists who want this proposal report to be accepted. There are pro-Zionists who want this proposal to be rejected for reasons we can get into. There are anti-Zionists who want this report to be rejected. Are there anti-Zionists who want this proposal to be accepted? They might say, “I may be anti-Zionist and really looking at the plight of the Palestinian people, but I still think anti-Semitism is an important thing to discuss within Toronto schools.”
Mitch Consky: If there are, I didn’t hear that in the delegations, but I do want to hunker down on the fact that this report is not about it being accepted. It’s really just.
Avi Finegold: It’s a step one.
Mitch Consky: Yeah, it’s just step one. Right. To answer your question, I didn’t hear any anti-Zionist delegates saying that this report should still be received. It seemed that they were going through whatever mental gymnastics they could to try and say there’s no merit to this report at all, despite the fact that it was recognized by multiple people within the TDSB that this was one of the largest community outreach consultation reports in TDSB history.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So can we just address what specifically anti-Semitic bullying in the TDSB is? What does it consist of? What did they bring up?
Mitch Consky: Right, so there have been a lot of cases of Jewish students being demonized for their Israeli identity. Jewish pro-Israel delegates talked about how their children were told to remove their Star of Davids in classrooms.
Avi Finegold: By teachers or by other students?
Mitch Consky: By other students. There have been incidents where students have been told that Zionism equates to a form of racism, that it is a form of social violence, and a political ideology.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Once again, to sort of ask Avi’s question here again, was this in a lecture from a teacher or from a classmate? Was it that they heard somebody saying it or was someone like, “You Jewish classmate, Zionism is racism”?
Mitch Consky: Certain Jewish parent delegates expressed that this was coming from teachers. I know these are isolated events. Some of them have been within students, within interactions at the schoolyard, I’m sure. But to my understanding, there has been a lot of demonizing sentiment that has trickled into the actual faculty of these schools as well.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I mean, I guess I just… What I’m trying to make sense of is whether this is… Because this comes up all the time. Forgive me for being a bit of a New York provincial person, but whenever I’ve read about things in my own hometown, there’s much more discussion, I think, of anti-Zionism veering into anti-Semitism being taught than a discussion of everyday bullying of Jewish kids in this sort of like 1950s style. You know, somebody throws a penny down and has the Jew pick it up sort of bullying.
Mitch Consky: Right, right, right, yes.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So, I have a kid in TDSB and another who will be starting in TDSB next year. I know that, like, there are the inclusive pride flags in front of public schools in Toronto, and I think of that as kind of like an anti-bullying safe space measure that is specifically about LGBT students and families and faculty and so forth. But it is also kind of a general “you shouldn’t be bullying people on the basis of who they are, everybody’s welcome here” kind of message. But this seems a little bit like it’s a different question. It’s more about what’s being taught in the schools rather than kids being mean to each other on the basis of identity.
Mitch Consky: Right, and it’s… Yeah, it’s exactly. And that’s kind of… that’s the crux of what this debate and all this conversation has been around. Right. If you’re gonna just call Zionism merely a political ideology, then what a lot of trustees are saying is, is it really an attack on their identity? This report seems to suggest that the vast majority of the Jewish community, at least the people that were reached out to, the community members that were approached, do correlate Zionism with their Jewish identity. And so they feel that calling it a political ideology and attacking it in any way is just a simple form of anti-Semitism. What’s also important to mention is that a lot of the anti-Zionist delegates feared that receiving this report would mean they would no longer be justified in criticizing the IDF or Netanyahu’s government or anything to do with the state of Israel. They feared that receiving this report would dismantle any legitimate criticism of Israel. And what a lot of the pro-Israel delegates suggested is that there’s a stark difference between legitimate criticism of Israel and the demonization of Zionism. Right. And I’m sure we can think of specific examples of how that might be the case.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Well, I mean, wouldn’t this fall along the lines of just sort of general anti-bullying versus other things? Like, I guess what I’m saying is there’s a difference between somebody saying in a classroom that they think Zionism is a form of racism and somebody turning to a specific child and pinning that on that child because the child is Jewish, because that child is Israeli, because that child is wearing a Star of David necklace, whatever. And this is a lot about behaviors and not about beliefs entirely. Like, the same, like, you could say something neutral to somebody, but if you turn and sort of snarl it at them, it becomes hateful.
Avi Finegold: I’m getting the sense that in terms of what’s actually going on in schools at the TDSB, and probably elsewhere, is that there’s two different things. There are kids bullying kids using whatever slurs that come to mind in this politically charged atmosphere. They’re using Jewish smears and anti-Semitic tropes, but that’s just bullying by kids. And then there’s teachers. Totally separate from this, or not totally, but somewhat separate from this, is the fact that there are teachers promoting a certain ideology within the classroom when they’re talking about current events, saying, you know, Palestine, Gaza is horrible right now and Zionism is to blame. But we have to talk about the fact that, like, Palestine is really bad, and this is what’s going on in terms of current events. Right? So the TDSB, in some way, can be responsible for telling teachers not to talk about this in terms of current events. I know that you have your personal preferences, you have your personal politics, whatever’s going on with you. We don’t talk about Palestine in the classroom because it is a contentious thing that could happen, in theory, right? And to get kids to stop bullying is a much different discussion. Bullying happens all the time. It is one of the most pernicious things that happens in schools since time immemorial with kids. And it’s not going to go away just because there’s a report and because people decide, you know what, anti-Semitism is bad and we have to fight it. Right? So these are the two things that are going on here, and the people urging the TDSB to adopt this report, to receive this report, to act on it, assume that because we’re going to turn into fighting anti-Semitism, it’s all going to go away within a month because now we have action from the TDSB, which can happen by creating a policy right away and saying teachers shouldn’t talk about current events. And I actually have a lot of thoughts about that.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Because why, why should schools not talk about current events?
Avi Finegold: I’m not saying that they shouldn’t, but I think that what happens when we are in a much more politically charged environment is that schools talk about it, but there’s automatically a pro or anti-stance that the teachers seem to be taking, and that’s a problem. Right? When we talk about current events while taking a stance and saying, “This is what you should think” to children that are young and don’t necessarily know the nuances of what’s going on, the upshot of what’s going on, what happens is that kids who don’t have the ability to learn about nuance are just picking up what their teachers are telling, and that’s that. And then they’re going and bullying the kids that are around them. You know, I’m not sure about the notion of current events in school. I think it’s an open question. I think there’s so much because as soon as you open up the idea to current events, then everybody who is in the school and who is represented as a minority in the school, as an other in the school, is going to say, “Well, what about us? We should talk about my current events. We should talk about my issue. We should talk about my whatever.”
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Well, I think there are different ways of teaching things. I mean, you could say, like, there could be an assignment that’s find a news story and write about it wherever. Not everybody’s writing about the same news story. You know what I mean? Like, there are different ways.
Avi Finegold: But if a teacher, if a teacher then goes and says, if you find an article from the Jerusalem Post or Times of Israel, then you automatically get a zero. So, in that sense, I think the question at hand here is how do you deal with the idea of anti-Semitism and bullying? On top of that is this layer that it’s a very nuanced thing even within the Jewish community to go and say that, well, there are fringe people and we don’t want to accept them when the vast majority of people that are delegates, right, to this meeting are expressing their concern. Well, you know, either they’re going to go and say, well, we should have gotten more people bringing out more of our Zionist voices, and all of those people is the entirety of the group. But, like, that’s what the people are hearing. And they did an extensive report. From what I saw, the report itself has a lot of nuance in it that does talk about both sides of this. So what more could you possibly ask for? And yes, it’s a silly thing to go and table this discussion, but at the end of the day, it sounds like the TDSB is actually doing something real about antisemitism.
Mitch Consky: They’re trying to. I mean, look, I want to bring up one part of this report which was a recommendation to have safe spaces for Jewish students. This ties into what we were just talking about in terms of this being a two-faceted problem: one of it being the fact that teachers could be imposing a political ideology without nuance, the other being that this is a result of student bullying and peer bullying. You know, putting kids in a separate physical space, that’s a form of isolation. I don’t think that that’s going to help.
Avi Finegold: Is the recommendation that they wanted to have classrooms, and all classes for Jewish students should be separate from everybody else’s, or is it like you have a lunchtime club where you have a safe space for the Jewish students?
Mitch Consky: My understanding is that it would be a separate room, more like a lunch space. It would be a space where Jewish students could go if they feel in any way that they’re being made unsafe because of their Jewish identity. It was fairly vague in the report. There was not too much detail. It was, as I said, just a recommendation, not a specific strategy in mind. But a lot of Jewish groups really did reject that notion, including CIJA and JEFA, because they believed that that had sort of this heavy reliance on DEI policies. Critics such as JEFA believe that it’s really just this hierarchy of victimhood, and it fails to address the root cause of antisemitism when you’re really just putting the problem in a separate room.
Avi Finegold: How is it different than Pride clubs or a bunch of students that are from Niger and they decide, you know what, at lunchtime we want to hang out together. Can you give us a space?
Mitch Consky: Yeah, I mean, I think the difference is ultimately that that would be a club that’s rooted in pride, more of a collaboration.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: An affinity group, right? Like it’s an affinity group.
Avi Finegold: Yeah.
Mitch Consky: Well, this is a space to go when you’re afraid. It’s a safe room, essentially, that’s how it was proposed.
Avi Finegold: I guess you just have to rebrand it, if you ask, right?
Mitch Consky: Maybe it’s a branding question. But I mean, but this came up.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: During the encampments also, right? This whole discussion of marginalised minorities, discrimination, all this has been discussed in higher education and in education generally in the past 10, 15 years. There really has been this whole discussion of safe spaces, of microaggressions, that you should be safe in your school from being microaggressed. You know, a microaggression would be like if a white kid asks to touch a black kid’s hair. That would be a microaggression, right? It was a lot of discussion about microaggressions. Then you had the encampments and you had some Jewish students saying, hey, wait a second, I’m being microaggressed. And people being like, who cares? There’s Gaza. Shut up. Basically. And I think that I don’t really have firm conclusions on any of this. But what I’m saying is, I think the problem is that there was this framework in place and it made sense to a point. It made sense in certain contexts. It never fit for Jews. But the fact that it didn’t fit for Jews wasn’t a really big deal on October 6, 2023. Then it became a really big deal. And so I have kind of a big picture question. It’s a little bit out there, okay? Which is historically, Jews have been pretty into education, into higher education, into doing well in school, into being a good student, whatever. Not all Jews obviously are amazing in school. I had my share of non-amazing in school moments myself. But historically, the people of the book have valued education. Have Jews, as an education beat reporter, generally not about this specific TDSB story. Are Canadian Jews put off by education at this moment in time? Because there is this real move to defund education, mainly in the US but to some extent in Canada. Are Jews part of that? Are Jews like, screw it, education’s all about saying that Jews suck. We’ve gone off at least mainstream education. I mean, I realise this is unanswerable, kind of, but yeah.
Mitch Consky: And I don’t know if you know, because as you said, it does seem that the Jewish community has valued education so deeply. And I don’t think that has been totally derailed. I do think that there’s been a lot of distrust in university administrations and student unions, and I don’t know where that weariness is going to go. Perhaps it might move towards a defund education campaign in the future. I don’t know about one yet. I’m sure that there’s a lot of Jewish students that are afraid of what the future of university and public schools might mean. I know that I’m currently working on a feature story about how grad school applicants are afraid of mentioning their correlation to Jewish organisations in their grad school application essays. I know that there’s this fear and so, you know, the question is, are we moving towards a state of deeper assimilation or are Jews going to start rejecting education systems entirely? I don’t know the answer.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Or retreating to or embracing in a positive sense Jewish education? Avi.
Avi Finegold: Yeah, well, I’m actually, before I start thinking about that, I want to take a step back and just remark on the fact that what I seem to be hearing in this discussion is that, because I’ve said this many, many times, the government at all levels, police forces at virtually all levels have supported the Jewish community, have prosecuted and investigated all antisemitic acts that are serious whatever’s going on. The Jewish community has always had an ally in the government in North America for a very long time. And what we’re seeing is that education systems being their own little microcosm, are exercising power where they feel the government isn’t actually doing something, saying, well, we are pro-Palestine. The government’s not going to go and deal with these Zionists and, you know, sanction them for whatever it is and take away their protests and take away whatever it is. We are going to go and get into that, take, get into that role in some way or another. And I think that’s a fascinating thing that seems to be happening here.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: But education touches everybody in a different way than policing for sure. Like if all school children are being taught something, that’s different from if you happen to have a run-in with the cops.
Avi Finegold: And there’s your answer, Phoebe, as to maybe we shouldn’t be talking about current events in school, right? If school is about the lowest common denominator or the highest common denominator of society and saying that everybody should be going to school, there’s always going to be very diverse positions. Maybe we get those out of school and say it’s about teaching the basics and let your families teach you about what is, whatever’s going on in current events, or how to think about stuff.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So, I mean, what I would push back on is just like there’s history, right? You have to decide which history to teach, which country’s history to emphasize how much, and how you’re teaching it. These are all really loaded questions, and I don’t know that they are ultimately going to be less contentious than current events. It also depends on what age you’re talking about. I think it’s unrealistic to expect that an engaged 17-year-old is not reading the news in whichever format. You’re going to have kids coming to school wanting to talk about these things and already connecting it to history. Like, if you have a history lesson about World War II or the Second World War, and somebody brings up Elon Musk going to that AFD whatever rally, what would you have the teacher say?
Avi Finegold: I would rather teach in high school a class on media literacy than a class on current events.
Mitch Consky: Right.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: How to read the news. How could you possibly teach about media literacy without concrete examples from…
Avi Finegold: You use concrete examples, but you’re talking about the reliability of various sources versus whether or not we believe those sources based on your ideology.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Okay, but I feel like we’re talking a little bit past each other, just because like that is still talking about current events. It’s not. I think what you’re saying maybe is that there shouldn’t be a class where a teacher says this is what’s in the news and this is how to feel about it. In which case, I would agree, should be teaching them…
Mitch Consky: I mean, this is a, it’s a bit of a cliché, but teaching them how to think as opposed to what to think.
Avi Finegold: Right.
Mitch Consky: It shouldn’t be prescriptive. And that’s, I think, sort of the crux of the problem. That’s what a lot of critics are saying is that there seems to be this ideological prescription within teachers. I know that’s happening in universities probably to a much higher extent than TDSB school systems, but yeah. Like, should we be talking about politics in the classroom? I mean, yes, to a certain extent. I think that as Avi pointed out early on, there needs to be nuance, and as Phoebe said, you also have to decide which history you want to talk about or which history you want to assess. I think at a certain point, when kids graduate beyond TDSB and they go into university, there are specific courses that can tackle the complexity and the nuance of these discussions. But for teachers in the TDSB school system, it’s possible that they’re just not prepared. It’s possible that these students aren’t prepared either. And it could be dangerous.
Avi Finegold: Yeah, I agree. I actually have gone so far, and I believe that I’ve said this on the show in the past, and if I haven’t, I’m saying it now, and it’s way late in the show, so nobody’s listening to us anyways. But, like, I’ve been against the mandatory Holocaust education in Ontario schools and other provinces and other states because you’re opening up the door to basically every group saying, well, I need eight hours of the year, right, to teach my stuff. As I’ve spoken to many heads of schools and school administrators, there’s a finite amount of hours in the day for schooling. If you take eight hours for Holocaust education, you’re taking eight hours from something else. If you’re taking eight hours to go and teach the history of Stonewall and the Pride movement and the fight for gay rights, you’re taking eight hours out of something else. If you’re going to talk about civil rights or Indigenous rights or the histories behind all of these things, there’s a lot of stuff that is going to come up.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: But you’re also coming at that from a perspective of Jewish day school as an alternative.
Avi Finegold: I see Jewish day school as an alternative for people who see their Jewish identity as fundamental to who they are and don’t see that being represented in public schools.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: And you’re saying it shouldn’t be represented.
Avi Finegold: I’m not sure. I really don’t know, because I don’t need my Jewish identity to be taught to everybody as this, like, you have to know about the Jews and what’s going on. I don’t care.
Mitch Consky: Right.
Avi Finegold: I don’t hear that about people from, you know, Laos. I don’t hear that from people about Mongolia. I don’t hear that from people from Ghana. These are countries that are represented in Canada.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I think that there would be ways of demographically assessing who’s in a student body when determining what to teach in history. I can give an example from my own schooling, which is that I went to a high school in America that is very much Korean-American. We had, like, five minutes on Korean history, if that, or, like, nothing or something. I remember thinking that that was very strange.
Avi Finegold: And how much did you learn about the Holocaust?
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Well, I know what you want me to say is that it was all about the Holocaust, but I think it was mainly about China.
Avi Finegold: Yeah. I mean, like, how many Sikhs are students in the Toronto district school boards? There’s very little representation, it sounds like, in terms of education about what Sikhism is and what their history is going on. Why aren’t we learning about that? I’m okay with that. If we’re not learning about that, why do we need to learn about Jewish stuff? I think it’s civility. Teach people about antisemitism. Teach about bullying, about how we have to be nice to each other and how we have to respect each other. To turn this into a referendum on Jews and how we think about Jews is, I think, missing the entire point.
Mitch Consky: I agree with you. I just think that’s… I don’t know where this is going to go. I mean, I hear you. Maybe, like, are you suggesting that we just shouldn’t be talking about anything beyond Holocaust education? We should just keep the curriculum…
Avi Finegold: I’m even questioning Holocaust education. It’s important for people to know. But there’s so many things in which we need to be educated to be functioning adults in modern society, but we don’t learn those things all the time in school.
Mitch Consky: I hear you. I mean, I would have loved to learn how to file my taxes in high school. Right. Instead, I learned about equations that I have never needed to know since. But I really think that in this particular moment, when there is so much Holocaust distortion and Holocaust denial, I still do believe that it’s important to an extent. But I also hear you. I think that there’s so much to cover, and there’s so little time. I don’t know. Phoebe, what do you think?
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I think it’s important to have it. I don’t know whether it has to be a particular number of hours or something like that. I think it’s when you’re deciding what should be taught in Canadian schools. You’re looking at Canadian history both from the sense of Canada since, you know, the start, and also in the sense of who lives in Canada now and looking backward at those people’s histories. You have to kind of weave those two together. Yes, I think that this was a major world event that should be covered, and I don’t think it means that you have to not cover other things that happened. I guess I don’t see this as a problem, but I take Avi’s point in the general sense of, like, schools should be teaching to be nice to one another and not saying, don’t bully somebody because they’re, you know, wearing, like, green nail polish. Right. You know what I mean? You can’t make it down to every single thing, but to sort of zoom out again. There’s a lot of cringe stuff that we’ve talked about on the show that I’ve written about prior to working at the CJN about, like, awareness days and so forth. I find a lot of it very silly. However, what’s happening in the States now with banning all of this is also, I think, not the way to go. I think we want to be careful when we talk about things we find silly or not the most effective way of pushing back to say that this matters. It’s important to say that these things are silly and not the best way of pushing back against bigotry. But we also want to be clear that we’re not saying that we think the government should outright ban talking about it. I mean, I don’t know if you all are seeing these documents about all the banned words, whatever, that are DEI terms. So if you say, like, marginal, and then somebody’s talking about a marginal tax rate in an econ class, and that’s going to be banned now because it’s DEI. So what I’m saying is, you don’t want to suppress speech in the name of that. You want to be careful how you’re doing these things, I guess, is all I’d say on this.
Avi Finegold: I don’t disagree with that. And I think on that note, we can wrap this up. I’m sure there will be much more to talk about in future weeks about education. Mitch, please come back anytime.
Mitch Consky: Hey, thank you guys so much.
Show Notes
Credits
- Hosts: Avi Finegold and Phoebe Maltz Bovy (@BovyMaltz)
- Production team: Joe Fish (producer & editor), Michael Fraiman (executive producer)
- Music: Socalled
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