How the synagogue audience reacted to Mark Carney’s 'covenant' speech on antisemitism

With its quotations from the prophets Isaiah and Amos, the philosophers Aristotle and Charles Taylor, and the Nobel Laureate Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s landmark speech on antisemitism aimed for some of the most rousing oratory of his premiership, as he urged all Canadians to engage with this challenge that should not be for Jews alone.

But the strongest reaction in the audience at Toronto’s Holy Blossom Temple, the oldest synagogue in Canada, was to what the prime minister left unsaid.

“He did not use the word ‘Zionism’ once and he could have,” said Mark Sandler, a prominent criminal lawyer and a former national chair of B’nai Brith League for Human Rights.

“I welcomed the fact that he said that no member of the Jewish community should be held collectively responsible for what happens elsewhere in the world. Having said that, I was disappointed because the contemporary antisemitism that we’re experiencing is so often tied to anti-Zionism,” Sandler said. “We need explicit references to the fact that antisemitism embraces anti-Zionism, the demonization and delegitimization of those of us who believe that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. And if that is not front and centre in the fight against antisemitism, we’re going to fail.”

“That was the overwhelming reaction in the room,” said Steven Pinkus, vice president of Mainstreet Research, a polling firm. He was encouraged, though, by both the content of the speech and for what it says about the priorities of this Liberal government. “I am so tired, angered, at hearing from the Jewish community that the man is an antisemite, and he clearly put that to rest.”

This speech on Monday evening was hotly anticipated, both for the seriousness of the matter and the fact it could have been given with similar urgency months ago.

“We are listening carefully for your clear commitment to confront antisemitism wherever it festers,” said Yael Splansky, Holy Blossom’s senior rabbi, in welcoming remarks. She said antisemitism is “not a Jewish problem” just as people of colour alone cannot solve racism and women alone cannot solve misogyny. “Only government can govern,” she said. But her congregants often feel they are forced, as Jewish Canadians, into the impossible choice to “relinquish one identity or the other…. We do not want to live in fortresses.”

Pinkus said the ranks of the ministers alongside Carney were encouraging. They included Vince Gasparro, Danielle Martin, Anthony Housefather, Gary Anandasangaree and Leslie Church. Evan Solomon gave welcoming and closing remarks. Marc Miller was announced as chair of the new Ministerial Advisory Council on Rights, Equality and Inclusion.

“The antisemitic voices in the Liberal caucus have been silenced,” Pinkus said. “I see it reflected in who’s around him and who he’s listening to.”

“It’s not a performance. This is who he is. It’s what he believes,” said Barry Campbell, a former Liberal MP in the 1990s in this midtown Toronto riding.

Campbell, who is Jewish, said he appreciated that Carney issued a challenge to all Canadians to see that antisemitism is not an exclusively Jewish problem. He said Carney captured the unease for Jewish Canadians about living their faith and identity freely and with confidence.

“This needs to be a country where people can live openly and authentically. He captured that. Jews have been hesitant about being visibly Jewish,” Campbell said. So he found it powerful and correct that Carney’s speech called on Canadians to recognize that “Canada’s civic compact is failing Jewish Canadians,” and that if this “covenant” fails for one community, it fails for all.

Carney’s speech used the word “covenant” nine times. For example, Carney said the deeper work that Canadians must now shoulder “is the renewal of the Canadian covenant itself,” the same covenant Canada failed to honour, for example, when in 1939 it turned away the MS St. Louis, a ship carrying nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees fleeing genocide in Europe. That word “covenant” is an especially powerful one in the Jewish context, meaning an agreement with God.

“I’m sure it wasn’t chosen accidentally,” Campbell said.

Michael Diamond, a philanthropist and prominent advocate in Toronto’s Jewish community, said he expected a five out of ten speech but got a seven out of ten.

Carney spent time and cares, he said. His understanding is full and complete. “I believed what he had to say and he owned what he had to say,” Diamond said. Carney articulated the theory, and now it is the responsibility of Canadians to enliven it, to ensure Canadian Jews are not held responsible for the decisions of a foreign government even though they have an allegiance to the country.

“We don’t attack Russian Canadians,” Diamond said as a comparison.

“He did not say ‘Being a Zionist is not racist,’” Diamond said, echoing the common criticism. “That would have been another layer in the foundation he built. But (the speech) lays the foundation for what we want, which is equal treatment no matter what happens elsewhere in the world.”

“I feel tepid toward it … tentative,” said Leslie Wolfe, a labour education consultant with the Canadian Jewish Labour Committee. “I think there is good intention but I just don’t know what in practicality will come from the announcement of what is basically a new committee.”

She expressed skepticism about a federal government “identities committee” whose first order of business is to learn about antisemitism.

“How much more learning needs to be done,” she said. “I feel impatient for something to be done.”

• Carney says Jewish Canadians are being 'brutally targeted' and the country is failing them
• Read Mark Carney's speech arguing that the crisis of antisemitism 'demands a targeted response'

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