Antisemitism Training for Vancouver Parents Sparks Controversy

Plans by the Vancouver District Parent Advisory Council to host an online antisemitism training tomorrow evening have raised fears that the workshop may conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism and stifle difficult but important conversations about the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

Independent Jewish Voices Vancouver and Parents 4 Palestine Vancouver issued a joint statement last week, calling on Vancouver DPAC and the Vancouver School Board to rescind its invitation to Project Shema.

Tamara Herman, an IJV member, agrees that antisemitism training is desperately needed in Vancouver public schools. But she fears the Chicago-based organization is not the right choice to hold it.

“I’m Jewish, my grandparents are Holocaust survivors, so for me antisemitism training is critical,” said Herman, who has one child in elementary school and another starting kindergarten next year.

IJV and Parents 4 Palestine have offered to present their own respective antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism workshops instead of the training to be held by Project Shema, but say they haven’t had a response from Vancouver DPAC.

IJV, which describes its work as advocating for “justice and peace for all in Israel-Palestine,” has about 1,700 members across Canada, with its membership doubling over the past year since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack that killed nearly 1,200 people in Israel, and Israel’s subsequent military response, which is estimated to have killed 43,000 Palestinians.

In a case that remains before the International Court of Justice, South Africa has accused Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

Herman’s concern about tomorrow’s training was sparked by a recent petition against the holding of another workshop in Massachusetts.

That petition, started by parents, objected to Project Shema’s history of co-hosting events with the Anti-Defamation League, an American organization that has faced internal criticism over its defence of the Israeli government and has been accused of targeting Palestinian rights groups.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance includes some types of criticism of Israel in its definition of antisemitism, such as “applying double standards” by requiring behaviour of Israel “not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” and “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.” It has been adopted by Canada but not B.C.

“It's actually really dangerous, for Jewish people, to equate us with the State of Israel,” Herman said. “I'm really worried about my children’s future in a way that I have never been worried before.”

Project Shema’s response

In a conversation with The Tyee, Project Shema co-founder and vice-president of community engagement Zach Schaffer said the organization’s goal is to depolarize difficult conversations around antisemitism.

He said that parents who signed the petition in Massachusetts and later attended the program “were surprised by the nuance and care.”

“It sparked a very powerful conversation in that room,” Schaffer said, adding that he hopes concerned parents will attend Wednesday’s presentation. “They will see that our facilitators do everything we can to nurture a psychologically safe and brave space to have all kinds of conversations. We welcome folks of any identity or perspective.”

Schaffer said the group does not offer education or advocacy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nor does it “share 100 per cent of our values” with all its partners.

“We're in a very divisive and binary moment and we honour the complexity,” Schaffer said. “Advocating for Palestinians is not antisemitic and criticizing the Israeli government or army is not antisemitic.”

Vancouver DPAC chair Melanie Cheng declined The Tyee’s interview request to discuss tomorrow’s workshop, instead forwarding a letter from the Rabbinical Association of Vancouver supporting the Project Shema training.

“The children and families in our congregations have experienced first-hand antisemitism in the Vancouver School Board schools and we know that the training provided by Project Shema is necessary and long overdue,” said the letter, which was signed by nine rabbis.

It added that Project Shema was chosen following “a public and transparent months-long process” and a vote by the Vancouver DPAC executive. Cheng did not respond to The Tyee’s followup questions about the process.

The letter described IJV and Parents 4 Palestine as “Palestine-focused groups” that were attempting to “cancel or hijack” the training. It rejected the groups’ offers to host their own trainings, calling IJV a “fringe group” and noting that it has hosted rallies with Samidoun, an organization that advocates for Palestinian prisoner rights and was recently listed as a terrorist group by Canada.

“The DPAC antisemitism sensitivity webinar is not about Israel, Palestine or the current conflict,” the rabbis wrote. “Any attempts by outside groups to characterize it as such is further evidence of the need for antisemitism education and sensitivity training within the Vancouver School Board district.”

Schaffer said Project Shema addresses “contemporary antisemitism” by recognizing that conversations about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can include language harmful to Jews, just as it can harm Muslims.

“But our focus is not on the conflict,” he added. “Our focus is on Jewish safety and inclusion in the United States.”

Project Shema’s characterization of Zionism

Project Shema’s K-12 Jewish Parents Resource Guide describes a “surge of anti-Jewish rhetoric” over the past year and adds that antisemitism is “usually made worse when conflict emerges between Israel and Hamas regardless of our feelings about the conflict.”

It says that a “false binary” conflates the State of Israel and Zionism — which advocates for Jews’ right to return to the Holy Land — with “racism, colonialism, and white supremacy, rather than a movement for Jewish liberation and national self-determination.”

“In this binary framework, Jews who simply support Israel’s right to exist (a.k.a. Zionism), even those who vehemently disagree with Israeli government policy, are considered akin to white supremacists,” the materials say. “It then becomes acceptable to demonize Jews in Israel and harass Jews in the diaspora because of their perceived connection to Israel.”

Project Shema says that phrases like “decolonize Palestine” and “from the river to the sea,” which are commonly heard at protests supporting Palestinian freedom, are meant to justify Hamas’s attack and are “understood by most Jews as a call to end the state of Israel, a future only possible through violence.”

“The only way to achieve literal decolonization is through mass acts of violence against Israeli Jews or roughly half the Jews on Earth,” the resource guide says.

In their joint statement, IJV and Parents 4 Palestine point to a Project Shema slide presentation that says the terms “genocidal” and “racist,” when used to describe Israel, cause “anti-Jewish harm.”

“It is an indisputable fact that Israel is currently on trial for the crime of genocide,” the groups wrote, adding that a recent United Nations investigation found that Israel was committing war crimes. “These are facts and denying them constitutes anti-Palestinian racism.”

A recent report from the UN about Israel reads, in part, “The violence that Israel has unleashed against the Palestinians post-7 October is not happening in a vacuum, but is part of a long-term intentional, systematic, State-organized forced displacement and replacement of the Palestinians. This trajectory risks causing irreparable prejudice to the very existence of the Palestinian people in Palestine. Member States must intervene now to prevent new atrocities that will further scar human history.”

‘You cannot separate a Jew from Israel’

Rabbi Dan Moskovitz is past chair of the Rabbinical Association of Vancouver and senior rabbi at Vancouver’s Temple Sholom. He said it would be impossible to offer antisemitism training without speaking about Israel.

“You cannot separate a Jew from Israel. It has been part of us since the beginning and the founding of the Jewish people. We've been praying to Israel and a return to our native homeland for 3,500 years,” Moskovitz said.

“Obviously, Israel comes up in conversations about antisemitism, but [Project Shema] are probably as progressively aligned as you could possibly get for these kinds of groups,” he added. “This is what they do and they do this all over North America.”

He told The Tyee he wasn’t involved in organizing the workshop and had no direct connection with Project Shema, but he supports the choice and hopes it will spark much-needed conversations about antisemitism in Vancouver schools.

He said “horribly antisemitic and discriminatory practices” exist in Vancouver schools and used the example of a 10-year-old boy who was assaulted by other children who linked his religion to the actions of Israel.

“That 10-year-old is not responsible for the actions of the Netanyahu government,” Moskovitz said. “But if you don't talk about that, he's going to keep getting beaten up.”

Moskovitz’s concerns frequently overlapped those of Herman with IJV. He encouraged discussion about the conflict in the Middle East as a means to combat antisemitism, which he described as “linking Israel and Judaism in ways that are dangerous to the Jewish community.”

But he rejected the idea that the two groups could come together to create an antisemitism training that would satisfy everyone.

“IJV does not speak for the Jews,” Moskovitz said, adding that the organization represents a small portion of the 400,000 Jewish people in Canada. “There's no reason for them to be involved in this.”

Anti-Palestinian racism in Vancouver

Aysha Jameel is a Palestinian parent with two children in Vancouver public schools. She described instances of anti-Palestinian racism in the classroom similar to the antisemitism described by Moskovitz. The Tyee is using a pseudonym for Jameel because she expressed concern that speaking out may further impact her children’s safety.

She said her teenage daughter has been repeatedly singled out as Palestinian in front of her classmates and teachers have spread misinformation about the conflict in the classroom.

In one instance, she believed the errors were unintentional, a result of the teacher’s confusion about the conflict and fear about appearing antisemitic. But when Jameel offered to act as a resource for the teacher, the gesture was declined.

“Teachers in particular are really, really scared to lift up the humanity of Palestinians,” Jameel said. “That silencing, that chilling effect, advances the status quo and the status quo right now is the dehumanization and genocide of Palestinian people.”

Jameel is involved with Parents 4 Palestine Vancouver, which describes itself as “a multi-racial, interfaith, inclusive community of families on unceded Coast Salish territories.” Its 270 members include both Palestinian and Jewish parents.

She fears tomorrow’s workshop may include rhetoric conflating support for Palestinians with antisemitism, which could further silence Palestinian voices. She said she hopes the Vancouver School Board will bring in anti-Palestinian racism training for teachers so that they aren’t afraid to discuss the topic.

Rabbi Moskovitz said he would support workshops on Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism.

But he sees that as separate from the upcoming antisemitism training, from which he hopes that parents come away with a better understanding about the marginalization of Jews and threats to Jewish identity.

“At our rallies, we pray for peace,” Moskovitz said. “Peace is not just the absence of conflict, but the real existence and coexistence of these two people. It's not simply a ceasefire where everybody just stops shooting, but it's the next step beyond that, where everybody starts to live together in harmony and in collaboration.”

With files from Katie Hyslop.