The Antisemitic Tropes Spouted Against Avi Lewis
Following Lewis' election, antisemitism has covertly entered the conversation
Since the election of Avi Lewis as leader of the NDP, legacy news media has launched into a frenzy. Lewis, certainly one of the leadership candidates situated to the political left of typical NDP leadership, made history as the second Jewish leader of a federal political party in Canada. The first was his grandfather, David Lewis, who also led the NDP. Policies of his platform include a public option for groceries, a green transition and opposing Israel's genocide against Palestinians.
Much fruitful debate could be had about the actual viability of the NDP as a vehicle to achieve these aims. The party is notoriously in ruins after the last federal election and organizational problems have hounded them for the past ten years. However, that's merely a small facet of the approach news media has had to his leadership win. A constant stream of antisemitic attacks are now a regularity in the discussion about Lewis.
In the context of the right-ward shift of Canadian society since the 1980s, Lewis is not all that radical. Toronto city councillor Anthony Perruzza put a motion forward to open city-run public grocery stores. Canada is routinely on fire every summer, which would explain a green transition. The majority of Canadians believe Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. Lewis' positions are not fringe. Indeed, they are commonplace among Canadians, if not the mainstream.
But you wouldn't know that by legacy news media. Rosie Barton called him an "anticapitalist" who spread falsehoods about Mark Carney aping Donald Trump. He risked "being too far-left" and "fringe." Robert Benzie, on the Sunday Scrum with Barton, said that focusing on Gaza would make the NDP a "boutique party" that would become a left-wing version of the People's Party of Canada. Similarly, panelists on CTV Question Period called Lewis a "pure ideologue from the progressive left" coming with "a message that is REALLY hard left."
This is to be expected when someone with politics mildly left of explicit neoliberalism takes the national stage. However, the condemnation of Lewis has veered into antisemitic territory. Many play into Zionist tropes of Judaism as synonymous with Israel, with some even echoing early 20th century conspiracy theories.
Scott Martin
The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs has been cited in multiple reports on Lewis' win as they slam him for being anti-Zionist. As Lewis himself explained, Jewish anti-Zionism has been a long tradition in the community. As organizations like Independent Jewish Voices and Jews Against Genocide have made clear, Judaism is not measured by support of Israel, despite claims to the contrary.
Possibly the most distilled version of Judaism and Israel being synonymous was written by Konrad Yakabuski and published in The Globe and Mail. Yakabuski claims Lewis' election proves "The NDP has an antisemitism problem." Yakabuski posits opposition to a "Jewish state in the Middle East" constitutes antisemitism due to an uptick in antisemitism in the wake of October 7th. "Left-wing denunciations of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, legitimate on their own," he writes. "Are now routinely laced with antisemitic tropes and dog whistles that serve to encourage anti-Israel extremists." His evidence? People wearing keffiyehs and a Palestinian flag being waved on stage. Visible nods to Palestinian humanity constitutes antisemitism, according to Yakabuski.
Other hollow justifications for the party's antisemitism include the dishonest claim that "The Epstein Class," a term deployed by Manitoba NDP premier Wab Kinew, is an antisemitic dogwhistle. Additionally, support for Rima Hassan after she was barred from entering the country, seemingly at CIJA's behest, is also touted as proof. Similar sentiments have been expressed in articles by other right-wing ideologues.
It's disingenuous and incorrect to suggest that opposition to the construction and maintenance of an ethnostate constitutes antisemitism. Shortly after Lewis' election win, members of the Israeli Knesset popped champagne celebrating the passage of a death penalty law solely for Palestinian prisoners. This law is a manifestation of Zionism, as is the degradation and mass killings of Palestinians that has occurred over the past two-and-a-half years. To suggest these outlooks are fundamental to Judaism is antisemitic and dangerous. Further, there is evidence to suggest that Israel's actions contribute to a rise in antisemitism, as the state's position is that they are inseparable from Judaism. Why is this never considered?
Instead, tropes of the "self-hating Jew" are deployed against Jewish anti-Zionists for opposing the Israeli project. This latest iteration involves calling Lewis, as well as newly-elected NDP President Niall Ricardo (who himself is Jewish), antisemitic for opposing Zionism, as in the Globe and Mail piece.
However, this is not the only antisemitic trope deployed against Lewis. As discussed earlier, his positions are not radical and are not socialist by any means. Lewis has taken control of a party that has moved further to the right in recent decades, with policies that barely challenge the operation of capitalism. That hasn't stopped right-wing critics from calling him a communist. Don Braid, writing for the Calgary Herald, said "Lewis's economic notions border on 20th-century communism." Braid's basis for this is a history of being in East Berlin, the Soviet Union and... Somalia.
Despite the fact that nationalization, which Lewis supports to some extent, would represent a return to the Keynesian economics of the post-WWII era in capitalist countries, many right-wing voices use this as proof positive that Lewis is communist. For example, Braid's comparisons of nationalization to a Soviet economy is unhinged. As Braid states "That's not democratic socialism anymore. It's communism." It simply is not.
Other public figures have deployed similar redbaiting about Lewis. Alberta premier and UCP leader Danielle Smith said the federal NDP is "pretty communist" after Lewis' win. One Juno News article writes that Lewis is "an heir to a lengthy socialist legacy that traces back to the violent far-left revolutions of the early 20th century." Sylvain Charlebois, the self-proclaimed "Food Professor," posted on X that Lewis "makes Karl Marx look like a capitalist."
These claims against a decidedly not communist party leader with a Jewish identity echo the antisemitic "Judeo-Bolshevism" conspiracy. It's almost certain that no one lobbing this label are doing so intentionally, but Lewis' Jewish identity adds another bigoted layer to these claims. In short, the belief in Judeo-Bolshevism posits that the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was launched and guided by Jews. It also conflates communism with Judaism, merging the two into one. As Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels claimed in a 1935 speech, "It was the Jew who discovered Marxism. It is the Jew who for decades past has endeavored to stir up world revolutions through the medium of Marxism."
Yakabuski even stumbles upon this rhetoric in his Globe column decrying Lewis for standing against an ethnostate committing genocide. "The NDP... is now a party of the far left. It threatens to do here what France Unbowed, Spain’s Podemos and Sumar and Germany’s Die Linke have done to politics in their respective countries." This connection to a far-left global coalition on such tenuous grounds may not be explicitly connected to the "Judeo-Bolshevism" conspiracy, but it remains extremely concerning.
It is clear, however, that calling the Jewish leader of a party a "communist" on flimsy and unsubstantiated claims does reinforce this Judeo-Bolshevism conspiracy. In the rationale spouted here, communism now has a dangerous presence in Canada and its carrier is an outspoken Jew. This is one of the most dangerous antisemitic conspiracies of the modern era.
Scott Martin
Not all criticism lobbed against Lewis is antisemitic, to be clear. One can even mischaracterize him as far-left (as Barton has done) without invoking this Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy. It also does not mean Jewish people cannot be communist or far-left. However, the media excoriation of Lewis is extremely telling. For not pledging loyalty to Israel as a Jew and for generally supporting nationalization, prominent voices are calling him antisemitic and a communist. This is extremely dangerous.
It's quite shocking that such antisemitic tropes are openly deployed against Lewis. For the crime of opposing Zionism and suggesting policies that would have been commonplace in Canada in the 1950s, this bigoted rhetoric is readily deployed against him. But what's even more surprising is that there has been no examination of this trend of language used against a prominent Jewish Canadian.
The interests of Zionism and pro-Israel sectors have dominated the conversation around antisemitism, leaving anti-Jew hate that doesn't conform to those parameters more or less acceptable in public discourse. It's moments like these where we need to examine the real effects of antisemitism and how Israel and Zionism affect our understanding of this deep and persistent rot in society.
