By Adam Hummel

I.

I am not here on behalf of any organization. No federation asked me to do this. No donor is underwriting it and no board approved the message. I am a father, a husband, a lawyer, and a Canadian Jew who has been paying close attention - and I have some things to say. What follows is entirely my own.

We have just celebrated Yom Ha’atzmaut - Israel's Independence Day. Yom Ha'atzmaut is a lesson about a people who did not wait for the world's permission. For two thousand years, the Jewish people carried a dream - of return, of sovereignty, of a place in the world that was theirs by right and not by sufferance. They were told it was impossible and dangerous. And then, on a Friday afternoon in May 1948, David Ben-Gurion stood in Tel Aviv and read eleven minutes of text that changed everything. Not because the conditions were perfect - they were not. Not because the enemies had relented - they had not. But because someone decided that the waiting was over, and that the future required them to move toward it, not wait for it to arrive.

II. 

I wasn’t born here nor did I come to this country. I was brought here. I was one year old. My parents decided South Africa was no longer safe, and Canada was the place that said yes. I had no opinion on the matter. I had no language for it. That is how a lot of us got here - not by grand design, not by conviction, but by luck and paperwork and someone somewhere stamping an approval, and a set of parents who made a decision that changed everything.

My parents fell in love with this country the way immigrants do - not with its politics or its mythology, but with its texture. The way a hockey game feels in February. The way a Toronto spring arrives like something you didn’t know you’d been waiting for. The way people here hold a door open for a stranger and mean it. We built our lives here. I built a family here. I met my wife here. Made a career here. We have three kids - two girls and a boy - and they go to school here. Canada isn’t a country I chose the way you choose a meal off a menu. It is a country that chose my family first, and I chose it back with everything I had - as an adult, with full knowledge of what I was choosing.

So when I sit here and tell you that we’re in trouble - that Canadian Jewry is facing something we haven’t faced in a long time - I want you to understand that this is not the speech of someone who hates this country, or has given up on it, or is looking for an exit. It is the speech of someone who loves it enough to be honest about it.

I have been trying to read everything. Every op-ed, every community letter, every thread, every lament (though I gave up on reading every WhatsApp message). There is no shortage of writing about how dark things are in Canada right now for Jews. And much of it is accurate. But I have noticed something underneath all of it - something that the writers rarely say out loud: most of us don’t actually want to leave. Deep down, most Canadian Jews want to stay here. Want their children to grow up here. Want to make this country as good as it can be. We sometimes say otherwise. We threaten, we fantasize, we catastrophize. But what we say is not always what we think. And what we think, if we are honest, is: I want to fight for this place. I just need someone to tell me it is worth fighting for.

This is me telling you that I believe it’s worth fighting for.

III. 

Let’s begin with what happened in early March.

Synagogues in the Greater Toronto Area were shot at. Not vandalized. Shot at. Bullets entered buildings where we pray. Buildings where our children learn. And when I talk to people about it, I notice something troubling in the responses. There is shock, yes. But beneath the shock there is a familiarity that should disturb all of us. A sense of: of course. Of course this happened! We’ve been watching it coming for a while now.

That normalization is itself a crisis. When the physical targeting of Jewish houses of worship starts to feel like an expected development rather than an unthinkable one, something has shifted in the moral atmosphere of this country. And we should not let that shift pass without naming it directly.

I know that in some circles, talking about Jewish vulnerability invites accusations of exaggeration. So, let’s begin by putting some numbers on the table.

In 2024, B'nai Brith Canada recorded 6,219 antisemitic incidents. The highest number ever documented since their audit began in 1982. That is not a spike or simply a bad year. That is seventeen incidents of hate every single day. Every single day. While you were dropping your kids at school, while you were sitting in traffic, while you were making dinner - seventeen times, somewhere in this country, a Jew was targeted for being a Jew. And those are just the reported cases. 

Jewish Canadians make up roughly one percent of this country's population. And yet we account for nineteen percent of all police-reported hate crimes. In-person harassment has grown by nearly sixty percent between 2022 and 2024. We aren’t imagining this. We aren’t being dramatic. The data is unambiguous.

And it is not abstract. Jewish schools have been shot at and firebombed. A Jewish school bus was torched. A Jewish bookstore was smashed. Bomb threats have been called in to community centres. The National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa - a monument to murdered Jews - was defaced. Synagogues are encased in bulletproof glass. When charges are laid against perpetrators, they are frequently dropped. The message sent to the people doing this is: there are no consequences. And so they continue.

Some of our children are removing their Star of David necklaces before they walk into school. Again: Jewish children in Canadian schools are hiding who they are because they have learned that being visibly Jewish makes them a target. More than forty percent of reported incidents in Ontario's K-12 schools involve Nazi salutes or Holocaust denial. On university campuses, Jewish students describe being excluded, isolated, surrounded by hostility. And a recent study found that thirty-one percent of Jewish doctors in Ontario are considering leaving the country. Thirty-one percent! Doctors. People who built careers and lives here helping others. Considering leaving.

I am telling you all of this because I refuse to be accused of minimizing what is happening. I’m not minimizing it. It is serious. The fear is real. The incidents are real. The data is real. Anyone who says otherwise is lying or not paying attention.

And I am also telling you this because I think the response to all of it matters. Fear is information. What we do with that information - that’s the question I want to spend the rest of this speech on.

But before I move on, I want to name something that the statistics alone cannot capture. Jesse Brown - the founder of Canadaland, an important independent journalist in this country, recently wrote a piece in The Atlantic that I think every Canadian Jew should read. He called what’s happening today a “polite pogrom.” His argument is that alongside the violence and the vandalism, there is something quieter and in some ways more corrosive happening: Jews are being pushed out of public life. Out of universities. Out of newsrooms. Out of hospitals. Out of institutions they helped build. Not with fire, but with DEI frameworks that do not recognize antisemitism as a category, with union policies that ostracize Jewish members, with institutional indifference that makes staying untenable.

Brown makes one observation that I can’t stop thinking about: nobody is counting. The institutions from which Jews are quietly disappearing do not collect data with Jewish as a category of self-identification. Which means that the numbers I just cited - as alarming as they are - are almost certainly undercounts. We are measuring what we can see. We have no idea how much we cannot.

A polite pogrom in Canada. That is where we are.

IV. 

Let me talk about our politicians.

I’m a lawyer working in immigration law. I have spent years in Federal Court, in submissions to ministers, in reading the language of the state very carefully for what it actually means beneath what it says. So when I watch Canadian politicians respond to antisemitism, I watch with professional attention. And what I see is fecklessness dressed up as diplomacy.

We have governments at every level that can draft a press release in under an hour. They can convene an emergency debate. They can express grave concern with the same fluency they bring to everything else they express. What they can’t seem to do is act in ways that impose any cost on those who target Jews.

Canada recognized a Palestinian state. I want to be precise about what I think about that, because I’m not necessarily a maximalist on the question of Palestinian statehood in 2026. What I am is a realist about timing and incentive. We as a country recognized that state while Israeli hostages - dead and alive - were still being held in Gaza. Jewish men, women, and children, taken on October 7, some of them still alive in tunnels while Canadian diplomats were signing documents handing over more power to their captors. We recognized that state at a moment when the Palestinian government - if you can call something so dismembered a “government” - was run by people whose founding charter called for our destruction, by people who sympathize with the terrorists who perpetrated October 7 and every terror attack before and since, at a moment when Jewish communities in Canada were being targeted, at a moment when antisemitism on our streets was metastasizing visibly. 

And let’s be honest about why. Jewish Canadians represent roughly one percent of the population. Arab and Muslim Canadians represent somewhere between three and four percent - and crucially, they’re concentrated in swing ridings in exactly the cities that decide Canadian elections. Now, I’m not saying this to cast suspicion on Arab or Muslim Canadians, who are absolutely as entitled to political representation as anyone else. I am saying this because our politicians made a calculation, and we should name the calculation for what it was. When governments weigh which community’s concerns to prioritize, they count. And right now, in the ridings that matter, we are being counted and found wanting - not because our cause is less just, but because our numbers are smaller, and, in some cases, our political loyalty has been taken for granted for far too long. 

The message sent to every person in this country who marches in the streets calling for the elimination of Israel was: your pressure works. The message sent to every Jewish family watching their community under assault was: you are not the constituency that matters right now

That is not foreign policy. That is an abdication.

And it is not just the Liberals. The NDP has become, in any honest accounting, an anti-Israel party. Not critical of Israeli policy - anti-Israel. Antizionist. There is a difference, and they’ve crossed it. And when I watch someone like Avi Lewis - a man who comes from one of the most storied families in Canadian Jewish public life, a family that built institutions that served this community for generations - when I watch him carry that lineage into a movement that has made common cause with those who would see Israel destroyed, I have no polite words. That is a betrayal. Of our community. Of Canadian values. Period.

And the police. I want to be careful here because I know there are individuals in law enforcement who are doing their jobs with integrity and courage. I know that police officers are standing outside our schools and our shuls and our community buildings, and I am genuinely grateful for that. The men and women who show up every day to protect our institutions deserve our thanks, and they get it. But the institutional record since October 7 has been, at best, inconsistent. There are documented cases of Jewish community members reporting threats and harassment and receiving responses that would be unrecognizable to any victim of a different targeted group. There are marches that have crossed every legal and moral line and received what can only be described as a permissive audience from law enforcement. Most synagogues now require private security because the public infrastructure cannot or will not provide meaningful protection.

You know a community is in trouble when it has to pay twice for its own safety. Once in taxes, and once out of pocket. We are paying twice.

V. 

Now let me talk about our schools. Because if there is a place where the long-term project of Canadian Jewry is either built or eroded, it is in the education of our children.

My kids go to Jewish day school. And I want to tell you something about those schools right now: they are bursting at the seams. Thank God. Since first COVID-19 and then October 7, enrollment has surged. Parents who were on the fence have made the decision. Families who assumed the public system would serve their children well enough have reconsidered. The demand for Jewish day school education in this city is greater than it has been in years, and it’s not slowing down. That is a blessing and a challenge. We need more space. We need more capacity. We need to be able to say yes to every Jewish family that wants this for their child. That requires money, and vision, and institutional will. It requires all of us.

But we cannot abandon the public system either. The majority of Jewish children in this country still attend public schools, and those children deserve a community that fights for them. The mainstream Jewish kid. The kid who loves Israel, who went to camp, who had a bar or bat mitzvah, who carries an identity that is 3,000 years old. That kid is sitting in a Canadian classroom right now, and the equity framework surrounding them has been quietly, methodically rewritten to treat their identity as a problem.

We’re watching something troubling happen in school boards across this country. The framework known as Anti-Palestinian Racism (APR) has been imported into equity policies in ways that effectively treat any expression of Jewish attachment to Israel as suspect. Criticizing specific Israeli government policies is not antisemitism - no reasonable Jewish person thinks that, and most engage in such criticism. But defining Jewish identity itself - the attachment to the land of Israel that has been part of Jewish religious and cultural life for 3,000 years - as a form of racial oppression? That is not equity. That is ideology. And it has no place in a publicly funded school.

My three kids are going to grow up in this country. And I want them to do that with their full identity intact - their Canadianness and their Jewishness and their love of Israel - without having to choose which one they are allowed to carry into a classroom or university lecture hall. That’s not too much to ask. It actually is the minimum.
But I want to say something else too, because the problem in our schools is not only what is being done to Jewish children from the outside. It is also what we are failing to give them from the inside.

We have developed a habit of teaching Israel as a debate rather than an inheritance. We hand our kids a shield - talking points, historical facts, legal arguments - but we forget to give them a home. A child who knows Israel only as a controversy to be defended has been given ammunition and no foundation. The first time someone challenges them on a campus or at a dinner table, they either fight or they fold, because they were never given anything deeper to stand on.

The deeper thing is the story. Not the timeline, but the story. The unbroken chain from Sinai to the kibbutzniks draining swamps to the paratroopers at the Western Wall to the hostages coming home. The idea that Jewish history is not a collection of episodes scattered across other people's civilizations but one continuous, unfinished project - and that every Jewish kid alive today is part of it. That is not a debate position. That is an inheritance. And you can’t fight for something you were never taught to love.

The day schools bursting at the seams - right there, that’s an opportunity. But only if we fill those seats with that kind of education. Capacity without content is just a bigger room.

VI. 

Here is something I genuinely believe about Canadian Jews that I do not think we say enough: We are uniquely equipped for this moment.

This country taught us something that very few Jewish communities in the Diaspora have had the opportunity to learn. Canada is a place built on the explicit recognition that you can hold more than one identity at once. We built a country on it. The French and the English did not disappear into each other. They remained themselves. The immigrants who arrived from every corner of the world weren’t asked to abandon their languages, their customs, their loyalties. They were asked to add Canada to what they already were.

That is not a small thing. In America, the great bargain was assimilation - the so-called “melting pot.” You came in as Polish or Italian or Jewish and you became American, with everything that implied about what had to go. Canada however was never intended to work that way. The founders of this country didn’t want a melting pot. They wanted a mosaic. You came in as yourself, and Canada asked: what can you contribute? That ethos made space for people like me at a time when none wasn’t too many. It made space for Jewish people to be exactly what Jewish people have always been - a people who carry their entire civilization with them wherever they go.

So when someone tells me that being a Zionist and being a Canadian are in conflict - that you must choose between your attachment to Israel and your loyalty to this country - I want to say clearly: that’s not a Canadian argument. It’s an American import. It has no place in this country's political vocabulary, and it never did. Canadian Jews are not a hyphenated people who have to apologize for the second half of their identity. We are the fullest expression of what this country imagined when it imagined itself. We are both things. Fully. We must express that without apology.

VII. 

Now, about us.

First, about our institutions. Our federations. Our UJA. Let me be specific about what we are actually talking about, because I think some of the people who are loudest in their criticism have somehow forgotten.

UJA funds Jewish day schools - the very schools whose enrollment is surging right now because parents want their children to have a Jewish education. It funds Jewish camps, where generations of kids have had their most formative Jewish experiences. It funds Birthright, which has sent tens of thousands of young Canadian Jews to Israel for the first time and in some ways changed the trajectory of their Jewish lives. It helps fund the JCCs - the building where your kids swim, where your parents go to stay active, where the community gathers. It funds services for the elderly, employment programs, mental health support, food banks. It funds to a certain extent the organizations fighting antisemitism in the courts and the corridors of power. UJA is not an abstraction. It is the infrastructure that makes Jewish life in this city possible, and most of us are swimming in it without noticing the water.

Is federation - any federation across this country - perfect? No. No institution that large, that complex, gets everything right all the time. Criticism is legitimate. Ideas are welcome, and not just from the donors. If you think something should be done differently, make the case. That is how institutions improve, and the best ones genuinely want to hear it. In many cases our Canadian Jewish institutions have never had much competition, which leads to things going stale. Competition is good. It challenges people and institutions to do better, and it is needed. There is, however, always a microscope looming over our community, and we owe it to each other to have these fights with grace and dignity. 

There is a difference between criticism that builds and criticism that tears down. One comes with an idea. The other comes only with a grievance. You don’t have to love every decision an institution makes to recognize that without it, something irreplaceable disappears. So before anyone picks up the megaphone: what happens to the people being served if these institutions are weakened? If you do not have a serious answer to that question, put it down.
We don’t need to attack each other. We have enough enemies.

And that brings me to the people I am less willing to be gentle about. I am talking about the anti-Zionist Jews. The ones who march with our enemies. The ones who give interviews to media that would not cover a pogrom. The ones who make careers out of being the acceptable Jew, the “As-a-Jews,” the “Un-Jews,” - the one the progressive establishment can point to and say: see, even the Jews agree with us.

This isn’t dissent. Dissent is honourable. Dissent is Jewish. What this is - lending your Jewish name and your Jewish face to a movement whose goals include the destruction of the world's only Jewish state, at a moment when synagogues in your country are being shot at - is far closer to betrayal. You are not a brave truth-teller. You aren’t a poor kid who didn’t learn about the Palestinians sufficiently in day school. You are providing cover. And the community you’re providing cover against is the one that would still show up for you if you needed it.
I am not calling for anyone to be silenced. In Canada, people can say what they want. I am however calling for the community to stop treating this as a respectable internal debate and start naming it for what it is. There is a difference between a Jew who criticizes the Israeli government and a Jew who makes common cause with those who want Jews dead. We have been too polite about that distinction for too long.

I’m not standing here to tear anything down. I’m standing here to build something. But you cannot build on a foundation that’s being undermined from within. So: stop attacking the institutions that feed the poor and protect the vulnerable. And start being honest about who, in this community, has crossed a line that cannot be uncrossed.

VIII. 

I know what some of you are thinking. I know because I hear it at Shabbos tables and in school parking lots and in the hallways after shul. Some people look at all of this - the shootings, the politicians, the schools, the division - and they say: maybe it’s time to go.

Florida. Texas. Israel. The communities that feel safer. The places where you don’t necessarily have to hold your breath every time there’s a headline. I understand that impulse too. I feel it. I won’t pretend that the thought has never crossed my mind on a dark day.

But I want to push back on it, hard. And I want to push back not with a lecture but with some honesty, because I think the people saying 'just leave' aren’t being honest with themselves or with us.

Let me start with something I actually believe: I love the idea of aliya. The word itself - aliya - means going up. A rising of the soul. There is something in it that speaks to everything I find beautiful about Zionism: the idea that the Jewish return to the land isn’t just a political project but a spiritual one. If all things were equal, and I could wave a wand and transplant my family and my career and my community overnight, then yes. I understand the pull. I feel it. Israel is extraordinary.

But all things are not equal. And I think we need to stop pretending they are. Israel is a country at war. It is one of the most expensive places in the world to live. Housing prices in Tel Aviv make Vancouver look reasonable. The bureaucracy is formidable. The social pressures are real. Uprooting a family - pulling children out of schools, leaving careers, learning to navigate a new system in a new language - is not necessarily a lifestyle upgrade. It is an enormous undertaking that most families, if they are being honest, are simply not in a position to do. And telling someone in distress that the answer is to move to Israel is, I’m sorry, not solidarity. It’s a conversation-ender dressed up as advice.

Florida and Texas are a different conversation. I understand the appeal - warm weather, lower taxes, large Jewish communities, a political climate that feels more comfortable right now. I’m not here telling anyone where to live, and I genuinely mean that. If you’ve made that move and it is right for your family, I respect it. 

But I want to gently push back on the idea that it is a solution. Every place in the world is subject to political change. The American political climate that feels hospitable today looked very different ten years ago and may look very different ten years from now. Moving to a red state to escape the progressive politics making your Canadian city uncomfortable is a reasonable short-term calculation. It is not a permanent answer, in my opinion. There is no permanent answer to antisemitism except a Jewish community strong enough to defend itself wherever it lives. The community exists here. It needs to be built, not abandoned. 

Leaving is not a strategy. It is a feeling. And feelings may sometimes lead us somewhere we did not intend to go. I am sure this offends some people, and I’m sorry if it does, but I believe this is important to say. 

The institutions of this country are still functioning. The courts still work. The press, despite its many failures, still exists. Civil society is still alive. Our community is not small. We have lawyers and politicians and community leaders and writers and artists and doctors and business people and educators. We have one of the most organized and resourceful and affluent Jewish communities in the world. We have big organizations and grassroots organizations when the other organizations just don’t do it for us. We have day schools. We have a legal infrastructure and a political presence and an institutional history.

If we leave, we don’t just give up those things for ourselves. We give them up for the community that stays. We weaken the very fabric we spent generations building. And the people who want us gone - the people who are shooting at our shuls and marching in our streets and writing our children out of the equity curriculum - they win. Not by force. By attrition.

That’s just not acceptable to me.

IX. 

So what do we do?

I don’t want to give you a list of policy recommendations. I am not a politician, and this is not a policy speech. But I want to say something about posture. About how we approach this moment.

We need to stop kvetching - stop complaining - and start doing.

I know that sounds simple. It is not. 

Kvetching is deeply satisfying. Kvetching is community. Kvetching is how we process difficulty without having to do anything about it. And God knows there is plenty to kvetch about. But the communities that survive, the communities that thrive, are not the ones that kvetch the loudest. They are the ones that convert their outrage into action.

We need doers. We need people who look at the security gaps in our community buildings and write the cheque, or make the call, or serve on the committee. Not because someone guilted them into it. Because they understand that institutions do not sustain themselves. They are sustained by people who show up.

We need thinkers. We need the people who can articulate who we are and why it matters, who can make the argument for Jewish continuity in a language that twenty-two-year-olds can hear, who can take the 3,000-year project of Jewish civilization and explain why it is still worth something in a world that has grown impatient with the past.

We need writers. Jewish journalism in this country is thinner than it should be. Jewish cultural life is richer than it gets credit for. We need people telling our story - not just to each other but to the country. The communities that are most visible are the communities that tell their stories best. We have extraordinary stories to tell.

We need fundraisers. The money doesn’t raise itself. Every program, every security guard, every teacher, every camp bed, every scholarship, exists because someone did the unglamorous and essential work of asking other people to give. That work is not less important than the glamorous work. It is the infrastructure on which everything else stands. And I want to make a specific ask right now, one that costs less than you think: in the coming year, give to one fewer non-Jewish charity, and give that money to a Jewish one instead. Not because other causes don’t matter. They do. But because our house needs tending, and we cannot tend it if we are always looking after everyone else's first.

And we need people who understand politics. Not politicians - people who understand how politics actually works.

We are deeply frustrated with the Liberal party. I understand that frustration. The recognition of a Palestinian state, the feckless responses to antisemitism, the performance of concern without action - I have named all of it tonight and I mean every word. But the Liberals currently run this country. And the lesson we should have learned - the difficult-to-acknowledge lesson - is that if you publicly and full-throatedly back the horse that loses with everything you have, the winning team notices. They remember who was in the other corner. That’s not a conspiracy. That’s politics. It’s how it has always worked.

Look at the United States. Israel has become a partisan issue there in a way that should terrify every one of us. When support for the Jewish state becomes the exclusive property of one political party, the Jewish community loses. Full stop. It does not matter which party it is. The moment Israel becomes a wedge issue, we’re in trouble. And we’re in trouble. We cannot let that happen here to the same extent it has happened there. That means we need to be smart. It means we need advocates in every party. It means we need to play a long game instead of satisfying ourselves with short-term expressions of outrage. It means we need to be in the room, even when the room is uncomfortable.

And we need all of you. Right here. Right now. Not in Florida. Not in Texas. Not, for most of you, in Israel - though if Israel is your calling, go with your whole heart, because you are needed there too. But if your life is here, if your children go to school here, if you built something here, and if your job can’t just be picked up and moved abroad - then here is where you are needed.

X. 

I was brought to this country as a one-year-old who had no say in the matter. I stay as an adult who has every say. That is the distinction. That’s the choice I am making now, speaking to you across whatever distance separates us.

The men and women who declared the State of Israel in 1948 did not wait for the conditions to be perfect. They were surrounded by armies. They had almost no air force, few heavy weapons, and no guarantee that anything they were building would survive the week. They declared the state anyway. Because they understood that waiting for the right moment was its own kind of defeat. Yom Ha'atzmaut is not just a celebration of what was born that day. It is an instruction: when the moment comes, you move toward it. You don’t wait for permission.

I stay because of what this country still is, even on its worst days. A place that believes, at some fundamental level, that difference is not a threat. That identity is not a crime. That people can carry more than one history and still build something together.

I stay because my three kids will likely grow up here, and I want them to grow up in a community that is worth growing up in. One that is not diminished. Not fragmented. Not hollowed out from within or assaulted from without. A community that is alive, and serious, and proud, and unafraid.

I stay because I believe that the Canadian Jewish community - this community, our community - is one of the great achievements of Jewish history. Not just of Canadian history. Jewish history. We built something here. Something that did not exist before us and will not survive without us.

The state of Canadian Jewry is not good. I told you I was going to be honest. The threats are real, the political environment is difficult, the internal divisions are costly, and the complacency that comes from decades of relative safety has left us, in some places, underprepared. We take too much for granted, and I worry we do not do enough.

But the state of Canadian Jewry is not over.

Not even close.

We are here. We are organized. We are smart and resourceful and loud and committed. We have the tools. We have the people. We have the history.

What we need now is the will.

Stop waiting for someone else to fix it.

Stop waiting for the right politician or the right policy or the right moment.

The moment is now.

The community is you.

I want to close with something I have been thinking about. This time next year, I would like to sit down and write something different. I want to be able to say: our day schools expanded, and there is room for every family that wants in. I want to say: we engaged the new government, we were in the room, we were heard, and we made progress. I want to say: antisemitic incidents are down - not because antisemitism disappeared, let's not kid ourselves - but because we were organized, we pressured, we litigated, and we made the cost of targeting Jews in this country higher than it was. I want to say: we had the hard conversations about the anti-Zionists in our midst, and the mainstream community stopped treating their defection as a respectable opinion and started treating it as what it is. I want to say: more people gave, more people showed up, and more people did something.

That is the speech someone needs to give next year. Whether we can give it depends entirely on what we do between now and then.

Yom Ha'atzmaut sameach. Now let's get to work.

Stop Kvetching, Start Here

The speech is meant to start a conversation, not end one. Here are 10 questions: use them to argue, plan, and decide what you are actually going to do.

1. The speech argues that most Canadian Jews actually want to stay - that what we say isn't always what we think. Be honest: where are you actually at? And if you've had a genuine conversation about leaving, what would have to change to make you feel confident staying?

2. This speech calls out the difference between criticism that builds and criticism that tears down - and says that institutions like UJA deserve the former, not the latter. What is one thing you think a major Jewish institution in this city is genuinely getting wrong - and what would you actually do differently if you were in charge?

3. The speech says we have been teaching Israel as a debate rather than an inheritance - handing kids a shield instead of a home. Think about your own Jewish education: what gave you a foundation, and what left you unprepared? What does the next generation need that they are not currently getting?

4. The "doers, thinkers, writers, fundraisers" call is at the heart of the speech. Which one are you - and more importantly, what specific thing have you been meaning to do for this community that you haven't done yet? What is actually stopping you?

5. The speech takes a pointed position on anti-Zionist Jews - calling it closer to betrayal than dissent. Do you agree that there’s a line, and if so, where is it? How should the mainstream community respond when that line is crossed - and are we currently responding well?

6. The speech argues that Israel becoming a partisan issue in Canada - the way it has in the United States - would be catastrophic. Do you think we’re already heading in that direction? And what does smart, non-partisan Jewish political advocacy actually look like in practice in 2026?

7. The specific ask in the speech is to give to one fewer non-Jewish charity this year and redirect that money to a Jewish cause. Would you do it? What would you give to - and what does your answer reveal about where you think the community's most urgent gaps actually are?

8. The speech says that day schools bursting at the seams is an opportunity - but only if we fill those seats with the right kind of education. What does that education look like concretely? And who in this room has the ability to make that happen?

9. Jesse Brown's "polite pogrom" argument is that Jews are being quietly pushed out of Canadian public life - universities, hospitals, newsrooms - without anyone counting. Do you see this in your own professional world? And what is the right response when it happens to someone you know?

10. The speech ends with the address I want to be able to give next year. If you had to add one item to that list - one thing you personally want to be able to say was accomplished in the next twelve months - what would it be? And who in your orbit could help make it happen