25-05-2025
Barbara Kay: Antisemitism plagues Canadian medical schools. It isn't healthy
Universities are ground zero for the most virulent strains of antisemitism that plague the West today. But within them, some clusters are more problematic than others. Above all, the widespread antisemitism in university faculties of medicine and affiliated hospitals.
Simmering for decades in these departments, the October 7 pogrom unleashed a dramatic surge in its expression amongst students, faculty and practitioners that cries out for attention at the highest levels.
Research on this subject is accumulating. It's essentially a borderless issue, as becomes clear in the international perspective undertaken in an April report by Israel's Rambam Maimonides Medical Journal, which compares the experiences of Jewish medical personnel in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the U.S.
One Canadian example at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of British Columbia (UBC) describes the 1930s-Germany vibe common in Canada's largest medical faculties:
'Social media posts vilifying Israel and espousing Jew hatred were circulated by physicians at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of British Columbia after the October 7 massacre. Allegations included Christ-killing, organ trafficking, and other nefarious conspiracies supposedly hatched by Jewish doctors. Some asserted that Jewish faculty should not be allowed to adjudicate resident matching because the examining doctors were Jewish and might be racist.'
It gets worse.
When three hundred Jewish students signed a letter expressing concern about UBC's tolerance of Jew hatred, 'the Dean of the medical faculty refused to recognize antisemitism as a problem at UBC or to meet with (their) representatives.'
This refusal to address antisemitism in the faculty led to the public resignation of Dr. Ted Rosenberg, a senior Jewish faculty member, last January.
'Sadly,' the report authors conclude, reported experiences by Jewish physicians 'are mostly congruent and illustrate the existence and degree of antisemitism and anti-Zionism expressed toward healthcare providers in their respective countries.'
As a result, a career in medicine, where Jews have disproportionately flourished for so long, is losing its lustre.
The Jewish Medical Association of Ontario (JMAO) conducted a 2024 survey, which has yet to be published, of 944 Jewish doctors and medical students from across Canada. Two thirds of respondents were 'concerned that antisemitic bias from peers or educators will negatively affect their careers.'
JMAO organizers pronounced themselves 'stunned' to discover 80 per cent of respondents — about 380 people — had faced antisemitism at work since October 7, 39 per cent in hospitals and 43 per cent in academic institutions. Thirty-one per cent of respondents from Ontario — about 150 people — are considering emigrating to the U.S. or Israel on that account.
Dr. Lisa Salomon, JMAO's president, told me via email that while enrolment decline of Jewish students could reflect other factors, the anecdotal evidence is 'deeply concerning.'
According to Salomon, 'At the University of Toronto — the largest medical school in Ontario and located in the city with the largest Jewish population in Canada — we estimate that only 11 Jewish students are currently completing their first year of medical school out of a class of 291. This is approximately half the number of Jewish students in the previous year's class….' (For historical contrast, a physician friend who graduated from U of T's medical school in 1974 was one of 46 Jews in a class of 218.)
Grassroots Canadian organizations like Doctors Against Racism and Antisemitism (DARA) (on whose honorary board I sit) have provided a cornucopia of evidence that the situation for Jews at the U of Toronto's Temerty Faculty of Medicine has become dire.
DARA has pushed back with dynamism and moral clarity for years: petitions, open letters to deans and university presidents, political activism. But quelling this rapidly spreading epidemic will take measures that voluntary organizations do not have the authority to impose.
The worst news on this front is that the problem may be insoluble.
On May 18, Tablet Magazine published an article with the provocative title, 'Ask your doctor if Jihad is right for you.' The more sober subheading declares that American medicine's antisemitism problem is 'driven by foreign-trained doctors importing the Jew-hatred of their native countries.'
The article's authors, Jay P. Greene, and Ian Kingsbury, respectively a Senior Fellow at Do No Harm, a health care advocacy non-profit, and its director, conducted research based on data amassed by the organization Stop Antisemitism. Their findings project a grim future for healthcare.
The authors identified a 'set of over 700 people from all walks of life profiled by Stop Antisemitism for displaying flagrant hostility toward Jews and Israel.' They found that doctors were 'almost 26 times overrepresented in the list of antisemites relative to their prevalence in the workforce.' Half of the Jew-hating doctors 'received their medical degrees abroad,' many in the Middle East or Pakistan, where open expression of extreme antisemitism is considered 'appropriate or even enlightened.' Homegrown cosplaying revolutionaries, imbued with DEI-based revulsion from Zionism, follow their lead.
As in the U.S., where the Trump administration is currently investigating antisemitism within the medical faculties at four elite universities, Canada needs more doctors than can be domestically sourced. We will therefore continue to welcome medical students, residents and practitioners from regions where antisemitism is a cultural norm.
Only a small fraction of them will choose to fan flames of hate against their Jewish colleagues. But that small fraction, supported by international entities bent on dangerous mischief, is enough to sow high anxiety in a targeted community that, on this file above all others, wasn't born yesterday.
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