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'Unbelievably unacceptable': How Netanyahu lost Heather Reisman
Indigo CEO Heather Reisman is speaking out about rising antisemitism and the anti-Israel protests that have dogged her for years — and revealed she no longer supports Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
She said in a podcast interview that she and her husband Gerald Schwartz, the founder and chairman of Onex Corporation, have known the statesman “for a very long time” and “had a very warm relationship with him for many years.”
But she said she now aligns with “the views of some of the individuals running against him” – citing how “he became further aligned with the right,” and “allowed all those West Bank settlements to keep going.”
She appeared on Unholy: Two Jews on The News podcast, with hosts Yonit Levi and Jonathan Freedland, published Aug. 4. In the 40-minute interview, she expressed her thoughts on why antisemitism has become prevalent in Canada, her political views, and spoke about how she has been the target of protesters.
During the interview, she said “what has animated that (political) middle… is deep hope that there will be a change” in Israel.
Her view is that Netanyahu’s choice to build a coalition with two controversial Knesset members — Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich — was “just so unbelievably unacceptable to everything we hold dear about liberal democratic values.”
Though she did not elaborate, both men have received backlash for certain statements. Ben-Gvir remarked in August 2023 that “My right … to roam the roads of Judea and Samaria [is] more important than the right of movement of the Arabs.” Smotrich said in August 2024 it might be “justified and moral” to starve two million Gaza civilians until hostages were returned, while saying international constraints prevented it.
On the topic of “fomenting” antisemitism, Reisman described “three strands” behind the rise.
One was the “critical race social justice movement, that moved into DEI” that excluded Jews, that laid the “seeds for all these efforts on campus,” against Israel.
Secondly, she faulted “the left-leaning union movement in Canada,” with which some have a “fraught relationship with the Jewish community.”
Without naming him, it appeared she referenced Fred Hahn, one-time president of CUPE Ontario, who drew widespread condemnation for social media posts immediately following October 7 referring to the “power of resistance” and declaring that “resistance brings progress.”
And finally, she pointed to “social media discussion of this war” that paints Israel as a “big, strong military, this economically sophisticated country starving children.” These campaigns will prove “very difficult indeed to disabuse people of the view entirely gleaned through social media in the last two years.”
“I mean, the people who are fomenting antisemitism, they have been brilliant on social media since the day it came out. They use that; it’s a bit like a reverse David and Goliath,” said the co-founder of the HESEG Foundation, which assists lone soldiers in Israel.
Reisman declined a follow-up interview with the National Post.
Often appearing as a headliner for Jewish community programs, she interviewed Rachel Goldberg-Polin in Toronto on June 4, at a live Chabad on Bayview event, the Canadian launch for Goldberg-Polin’s memoir, When We See You Again.
Reisman and her husband are major philanthropic supporters of UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, notably through their lead gift for the Schwartz/Reisman Centre on UJA’s Jewish Community Campus and through a UJA legacy commitment
Both Reisman and Indigo have been attacked by anti-Israel activists many times since the Israel-Hamas war began.
In October 2023, Indigo’s flagship Toronto storefront was plastered with posters bearing her image, with red paint splashed over them, and the word “genocide” written across. “So that language was being introduced long before social media could ramp it up, and long before those aspects of the war that I think some of us would question,” she told the podcasters.
Protesters came into the store posing as customers, wrapping themselves in white sheets, and lying on the floor with what appeared to be blood all over them, she described. In another example, screaming protesters stood outside, accusing her of being “responsible for killing babies” and “genocide,” and that she personally funds the IDF. It is “a narrative not one bit rooted in one iota of truth.”
She said she was targeted because she was “high profile” and Jewish.
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