Jack Jedwab: Antisemitism flies in the face of Canadian multiculturalism

Hamas supporters protest in front of the Israeli Consulate in Toronto on June 5, 2025. Photo by Peter J. Thompson / NationalPost

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A June 2026 ACS-Léger survey finds that most Canadians reject the idea that the Holocaust belongs mostly to the past and has little relevance today. That’s reassuring. But the same survey also shows that roughly one-third of Canadians believe the Holocaust is no longer pertinent to the present. At first glance, this view might be interpreted as a desire to move beyond a painful and increasingly distant history. But a closer look at the survey results point to another explanation. The survey reveals that those relegating the Holocaust to the past are far more likely than other respondents to adopt antisemitic views.

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Among Canadians who say they have become more negative toward Jewish people in Canada since the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel, 51 per cent strongly agree that the Holocaust is mostly an issue of the past. This view is also held by 41 per cent of those who strongly agree that Israel’s military actions in Gaza justify negative attitudes toward Jewish people in Canada. Among those who strongly agree that Jewish people in Canada are responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, 55 per cent strongly agree that the Holocaust belongs to the past.

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What explains the connection between endorsing antisemitic tropes and the desire to “move on” from the Holocaust? It’s that its memory gets in the way. For those seeking to justify hostility toward Jews in Canada as a legitimate response to events in the Middle East, the Holocaust remains an impediment: a moral, historical and political warning against collective blame, demonization and the normalization of antisemitism. Declaring the Holocaust irrelevant to the present helps remove that obstacle.

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But this does not usually stop at forgetting. More often, it involves displacement: pushing the Holocaust out of the centre of historical memory and replacing it with an alternate version of the past, one in which Jews are no longer primarily remembered as victims of hatred but recast as beneficiaries of excessive sympathy, privilege, or even as perpetrators whose suffering has been overemphasized. In that reframing, Holocaust memory is not merely neglected; it is contested, minimized, inverted, or turned against Jews themselves.

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This helps explain why antisemitic attitudes and the desire to “move on” from the Holocaust are connected. The Holocaust stands as a rebuke to the mindset that antisemitism depends on: treating Jews as collectively responsible, imagining Jewish influence as insidious and presenting hostility toward Jews as a form of moral or political resistance. To diminish the Holocaust’s relevance is therefore to weaken one of the strongest historical barriers against the revival of antisemitism.

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In this sense, the desire to consign the Holocaust to the past is not simply amnesia. It is often an attempt to reorder memory in the service of a present-day political agenda — one that requires Jewish vulnerability to be forgotten, relativized, or replaced by a narrative in which antisemitism can be justified.

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On Canadian Multiculturalism Day, June 27, the survey results are especially insightful because they reveal how fragile the boundary can be between celebrating diversity and tolerating narratives that undermine it. Multiculturalism is not only about recognizing difference; it also depends on a shared refusal to hold communities collectively responsible for conflicts abroad, and on the willingness to protect minority communities from being judged through political grievances directed elsewhere.