Against this backdrop, two recent developments connected to Manitoba deserve attention from healthcare and academic leaders. Both suggest a more constructive and principled approach to anti-Jewish racism: one grounded in inclusion, cultural safety, and institutional responsibility rather than exceptionalism or avoidance.

A Notable Shift in Manitoba Healthcare Policy

Shared Health Manitoba recently introduced new anti-racism policies that contain an important and underappreciated feature: Jewish people are explicitly included within discussions of racial marginalization.

This matters.

One of the persistent challenges in conversations about antisemitism is the tendency to separate Jewish experiences from broader anti-racism work. Jews are often treated as politically exceptional, difficult to categorize, or somehow outside standard equity frameworks. The result can be institutional hesitation, inconsistency, or silence.

Shared Health’s policy instead adopts an explicitly inclusive framework:

“To affirm Shared Health’s commitment to addressing Systemic Racism experienced by Indigenous, Black (people who identify as Black, Afro Indigenous, or peoples of African descent (for example, Africans from North, Central, South, East, or West Africa, and people from the Caribbean, Americas, and Europe), ... and racially marginalized staff, patients, and clients, including but not limited to: Jewish people, Chinese, East Asian, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Latin American, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and South East Asian. This list is not exhaustive, and we recognize that different forms of inequality work together and animate each other.”

The policy further states:

“For the purposes of this policy, the term ‘racially marginalized’ will be used as a collective term to reflect our ongoing commitment.”

By including Jewish people within an anti-racism framework, Shared Health models a more coherent approach. It recognizes that anti-Jewish racism exists while avoiding the divisive instinct to “other” Jews from conversations about discrimination and safety.

Importantly, the policy also reflects a broader understanding that different forms of discrimination intersect and reinforce one another rather than existing in isolation.

The policy further reinforces an important principle from culturally safe healthcare: safety is defined by patients and communities, not by institutions alone.

As articulated in The First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Health Core Competencies (Second Edition, 2024):

“Cultural safety is an outcome based on respectful engagement that recognizes and strives to address power imbalances inherent in the healthcare system. It results in an environment free of Racism and Discrimination, where people feel safe when receiving health care. ‘Safety’ is defined by those who receive services, not those who provide it.”

This definition is important because it shifts the focus from institutional intention to lived experience. A healthcare environment may believe itself to be inclusive while patients, learners, faculty, physicians, or staff experience it differently.

The framework emphasizes cultural humility, trauma-informed practice, reflection on implicit bias, and recognition of historical and contemporary discrimination. These principles are not limited to one community. They provide a meaningful framework for supporting Jewish patients, learners, physicians, faculty, and staff as well.

The Senate Report on Antisemitism

A second important development is the recent report from the Canadian Senate Standing Committee on Human Rights entitled Standing United Against Antisemitism—Protecting Communities and Strengthening Canadian Democracy.

At the time of the report’s adoption, two of the nine committee members were Manitoba senators: Senator Mary Jane McCallum and Senator Marilou McPhedran. The report also notes contributions from Senator Dr. Gigi Osler.

The report contains twenty-two recommendations. One is especially relevant to healthcare and academic institutions:

“That the Government of Canada support professional development for educators and administrators at primary, secondary and post-secondary levels. This work should include improved capacity to identify and respond to hate, bias, and antisemitic incidents, greater understanding of historical and contemporary antisemitism, and support for respectful discussion of contentious geopolitical issues consistent with democratic values and Charter protections.”

This recommendation is notable because it moves beyond symbolic recognition. It focuses on institutional capacity: the ability of organizations to recognize anti-Jewish racism, respond appropriately, and sustain respectful professional environments even during periods of intense geopolitical tension.

For healthcare and academic institutions, this is increasingly important.

Cultural Safety Includes Jewish Canadians

In medicine and academia, there is growing recognition that psychologically and culturally safe environments are essential for patient care, learning, research, and professional collaboration. Yet Jewish experiences are still inconsistently understood within these conversations.

There remains hesitation in some institutional settings to address antisemitism with the same clarity and structural seriousness applied to other forms of racism and discrimination. At times, healthcare leaders may fear that acknowledging anti-Jewish racism will itself become politically contentious.

But culturally safe care does not require ideological uniformity. It requires professionalism, humility, and an ability to recognize the humanity and lived experiences of patients and colleagues.

Canadian physicians and healthcare leaders can support culturally safe healthcare for Jewish Canadians while simultaneously supporting inclusion and dignity for all communities. These goals are not contradictory.

Indeed, the frameworks increasingly used across healthcare — trauma-informed practice, anti-racism, cultural humility, and psychologically safe learning environments — may offer some of the best tools available for addressing anti-Jewish racism constructively and consistently.

A Leadership Opportunity

The current moment presents an opportunity for Canadian healthcare and academic institutions.

Not merely to condemn antisemitism episodically after major incidents, but to integrate Jewish inclusion thoughtfully into broader institutional commitments to equity, cultural safety, and respectful professional dialogue.

The Manitoba-linked examples above are important not because they resolve these challenges, but because they suggest a path forward: inclusion rather than exclusion, consistency rather than exception, and principled leadership rather than institutional avoidance.

In a period marked by polarization and fear, that is worth recognizing.

Across centuries, anti-Jewish narratives have adapted to different societies, political movements, and historical eras. The language changes. The ideological frameworks change. The claimed justifications change. Yet certain structural patterns recur with remarkable consistency.

Today, three major forms of anti-Jewish racism remain active in Western societies:

• Medieval anti-Judaism

• Modern antisemitism

• Contemporary antizionism

These forms are ideologically distinct and sometimes mutually antagonistic. Yet they often share several recurring features:

• a common target (Jewish individuals or Jewish collective identity)

• recurring mechanisms of dehumanization

• conspiracy narratives

• purity narratives

• and the attribution of implausible power to Jews

Understanding these recurring patterns may help healthcare, academic, and civic leaders respond more coherently to anti-Jewish racism in contemporary institutions.

Recurring Mechanisms of Dehumanization

Different forms of anti-Jewish racism frequently rely on similar mechanisms of dehumanization.

Three recurring patterns are especially common:

Double Standards

Jews or Jewish institutions are judged by standards not applied to others in similar circumstances.

Demonization

Jews are portrayed not merely as mistaken or flawed, but as uniquely malevolent, dangerous, corrupting, or evil.

Delegitimization

Jewish identity, belonging, institutions, or collective self-determination are portrayed as inherently illegitimate.

These patterns do not eliminate the possibility of legitimate criticism of individual Jews, Israeli governments, religious institutions, or political movements. Democracies require open criticism and debate. The issue is not criticism itself, but the application of exceptionalized standards and dehumanizing narratives.

Conspiracy and Purity

Across eras, two underlying logics repeatedly emerge within anti-Jewish ideologies: conspiracy and purity.

Conspiracy Narratives

Jews are portrayed as secretly controlling events, institutions, media, finance, governments, wars, immigration, social movements, or cultural change.

In different historical periods, Jews have been accused simultaneously of orchestrating capitalism, communism, secularism, globalization, moral decline, and social instability — often contradictory accusations united primarily by the attribution of hidden power.

Purity Narratives

Society is framed as requiring purification from Jewish influence — religiously, racially, culturally, politically, or morally.

In medieval Europe, this could take theological forms. In racial antisemitism, it became biological. In some contemporary ideological environments, Jews may be portrayed as embodying corruption, colonialism, oppression, or structural injustice in uniquely essentialized ways.

Although the language evolves, the underlying logic remains recognizable: society can supposedly be redeemed or purified through exclusion, elimination, or resistance to Jewish influence.

Attribution of Implausible Power

A recurring feature of anti-Jewish racism is the attribution of extraordinary and implausible power to Jews.

Historically, Jews have been accused of:

• killing God

• controlling monarchies

• manipulating financial systems

• orchestrating revolutions

• controlling wars

• undermining nations

• or secretly directing global events

Contemporary forms may portray Jews or Israel as uniquely responsible for global injustice or geopolitical instability.

These narratives are not evidence-based analyses of power. They are ideological constructions that assign exaggerated agency to a relatively small minority population.

This pattern helps explain why anti-Jewish racism can persist across dramatically different political movements, including movements otherwise opposed to one another.

Medieval Anti-Judaism

Medieval anti-Judaism emerged primarily within Christian theological frameworks.

Jews were portrayed as spiritually dangerous, cursed, or collectively guilty of deicide. Blood libels, accusations of ritual murder, well poisoning, and host desecration became recurring myths used to justify exclusion, violence, forced conversion, and expulsion.

These narratives established many of the symbolic foundations later inherited by modern antisemitism.

Modern Antisemitism

Following the Enlightenment, anti-Jewish racism increasingly shifted from theological to political and racial frameworks.

Jews were portrayed as alien, disloyal, cosmopolitan, subversive, or conspiratorial actors undermining nation-states and civilizations from within.

Historical examples include:

• the Dreyfus Affair

• The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

• and Nazi racial ideology

In this framework, Jewishness became racialized rather than merely religious.

The Holocaust represented the most catastrophic expression of this ideology.

Contemporary Antizionism

Criticism of Israeli governments, military actions, or public policy is a legitimate part of democratic discourse. Advocacy for Palestinian rights, dignity, and self-determination is likewise legitimate and necessary.

The difficulty arises when opposition to Israeli policy is replaced by the denial of Jewish collective legitimacy altogether.

In this essay, “contemporary antizionism” refers not to all historical forms of anti-Zionist thought, but to contemporary movements and discourses that deny Jewish collective legitimacy or normalize hostility toward Jews through the language of anti-Israel activism.

Examples include

• portraying Israel as illegitimate among nation-states

• applying exceptionalized moral standards

• denying Jewish historical connection to the land

• rationalizing violence against Israeli civilians

• or extending hostility toward Israel into hostility toward Jews globally

This distinction matters.

Perhaps the most difficult — but essential — task for leaders today is learning to distinguish between legitimate political advocacy and forms of discourse that dehumanize Jews or deny Jewish collective humanity and legitimacy.

Protecting Palestinian human rights and recognizing anti-Jewish racism are not mutually exclusive commitments. Democratic pluralism requires the capacity to hold both realities simultaneously.

Why This Matters for Institutions

Healthcare, academic, and civic institutions increasingly confront tensions surrounding antisemitism, Israel-Palestine discourse, protest movements, and cultural safety.

These are difficult conversations precisely because anti-Jewish racism often presents itself indirectly — through coded language, exceptionalized standards, conspiracy narratives, or the normalization of exclusion.

Institutions therefore require more than reactive statements after major incidents. They require conceptual clarity.

Understanding the architecture of anti-Jewish racism does not eliminate political disagreement. It does, however, help institutions distinguish between legitimate democratic discourse and forms of dehumanization that undermine cultural safety, pluralism, and professional integrity.

That distinction is becoming increasingly important.

It is a test of whether the people in our systems can apply their stated values consistently—even when the issues are complex, politically charged, or uncomfortable.

If cultural safety is defined by the patient’s experience, then the standard is clear:

Jewish patients—and healthcare professionals—must be able to enter clinical and academic spaces without having to manage, explain, or defend their identity.

Here are Three Mantras To Help Support Clinical and Academic Health Care Leaders

1. Canadian physicians with a worldview of shared humanity and universal human rights can deliver culturally safe healthcare to Jewish Canadians using cultural humility; a basic knowledge of Jewish history, demographics, and practices; an approach to anti-Jewish racism; an openness to potential for implicit bias against Jewish people; and a trauma-informed approach.

2. There is no contradiction for physicians between providing culturally safe healthcare to all Jewish Canadians and inclusive spaces for all Jewish physician colleagues, and supporting and advocating a Middle East peace that equally values the safety, security, and rights of all peoples in that region.

   For over a century, the Arab/Palestinian-Jewish/Israeli conflict has caused immense and ongoing acute, chronic, and intergenerational trauma for both Arabs and Jews in the Middle East and around the world. Canada and other liberal democracies acknowledge the rights to security, safety, and dignity of all peoples in the Middle East, including national self-determination for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and for Jews in Israel; and support peace to be achieved with the least amount of further harm possible for the millions of people in each group.

3. The most effective way for Canadian society to confront anti-Jewish racism is by strengthening what has served this country well for decades: commitment to universal human rights, liberalism, multiculturalism, and pluralism.

   This approach is strengthened by Holocaust education that teaches both authoritarianism in general (“man’s inhumanity to man”) and the history of centuries of recurrent targeting of Jewish people in specific (“man’s inhumanity to Jews”).

   The corollary to this approach is that leadership in confronting anti-Jewish racism must come from all leaders, and especially from non-Jewish leaders. Historically and sociologically, anti-Jewish racism does not originate within the Jewish community; it is imposed upon Jews by external actors who hold deeply distorted beliefs about who Jews are and impose external Western constructs on an ancient people with its unique combination of peoplehood, ethnicity, Indigeneity, and religion.