Honourable chair and members of the committee, I appreciate your commitment to addressing the significant and growing challenge of hatred in our society, particularly the escalating rise in Jew hatred we're experiencing on campuses.
I'm here to speak up on behalf of thousands of Jewish students across this country. My name is Yos Tarshish. I'm the director of Hillel Queen's, and I'm here representing Hillels on campuses all over the country.
I've spent about 15 years deeply immersed in Jewish student communities in Canada and around the world, and this tenure's afforded me a broad insight into the patterns of anti-Semitism, particularly in a university setting. It's allowed me to observe its fluctuations and to see when it rises and when it falls.
Anti-Semitism is not a new or novel phenomenon here in Canada. From as early as the 1920s, Canadian Jews faced systematic barriers to entry into Canadian universities. Universities like McGill only rescinded their numerous classist quotas on Jewish students in the 1960s.
In 2009, Jewish York University students had to barricade themselves inside their Hillel building to keep themselves away from a violent mob.
In 2022, Dr. Ayelet Kuper's landmark report into anti-Semitism within the University of Toronto's Temerty school of medicine uncovered really deep-seated biases that show how prejudice infiltrates even the most prestigious of academic institutions.
Sadly, these are really just the tip of the iceberg, and Jewish students are facing really terrible things every single day. We're observing this anti-Semitism on campus taking three main forms. The first is both verbal and social harassment. The second is physical and symbolic acts. The third is disqualification and exclusion.
For the first form, harassment, in February, a Jewish student walking on campus at York University had his picture taken from behind. That picture was then uploaded onto TikTok, where thousands of comments mocked his choice of kippah, or head covering. There were thousands of comments.
A story I shared yesterday in the press conference we held follows on from the story Nati shared about five mezuzahs being removed from residence buildings. In January, at the Residence Society general assembly, which is the democratically elected student government for 6,000 students in Queen's residence, when the question was asked by a first-year Jewish student of how—