This past weekend we were privileged to welcome a thoughtful and articulate new voice to the the podium in our synagogue. Adam Louis-Klein delivered the Dvar Torah to about 75 congregants gathered at Ottawa’s Kehillat Beth Israel for Shabbat morning services. Later he spoke to us at greater length over lunch. Questions and discussion flowed for an hour after his formal talk. His topic is of immediate interest to many of us, because it addresses the onslaught of hostility we have been dealing with for the past 21 months.
Jews in Ottawa and around the world inhabit a daily echo chamber, full of alarming news about Israel’s war, in Gaza and on other fronts. This news is often accompanied by expressions of outrage and anguish, which usually treat Israel as entirely culpable for the harm that is happening in Gaza. While most of us share the anguish over the suffering in Gaza, along with grief and fear for our Israeli friends and family caught up in the war, we are baffled and angered at the one sided treatment of the conflict, a conflict triggered by the Hamas invasion of October 7, 2023.
Guest Author Adam Louis-Klein is completing his PhD. in Anthropology at McGill University
Adam Louis-Klein provides a vocabulary and a framework we can use to talk about what is happening to us, and a way to make sense of it. Here are the words of Torah delivered by him at Kehillat Beth Israel this past Shabbat. We thank Adam for agreeing to publish them here.
Dvar Torah for Shabbat Matot-Massei on July 26
——Adam Louis-Klein at Kehillat Beth Israel Ottawa
We are living through a turning point in Jewish history.
The attacks of October 7th were not just another round of violence between Israel and Gaza. They marked a rupture—both a shift into a new era and a reopening of old, unfinished histories.
As Yardena Schwartz recently wrote in her book on the 1929 Hebron massacre, Hamas’s actions echo back to the earliest days of the Muslim Brotherhood and figures like Haj Amin Al-Husseini, an early Islamist who collaborated with the Nazis. 10/7 was not simply terror. It was a continuation of a century-long war on Jewish existence.
What’s different now is that the old division of labor—where antisemitic violence was "outsourced" to the Middle East—is breaking down. Today, it’s being extended and mirrored by the ideological antizionism of the West.
But I believe something else is emerging too—on our own side. A shift and a return.
Today, I want to take up a challenge posed by journalist Matti Friedman at the recent AJC Global Forum. In a powerful talk, Friedman described how much of the legacy media has been compromised by institutional antizionism.
He noted that reporters today often no longer ask, “Is this true?” Instead they ask, “Who does this serve?” That’s not journalism—it’s Stalinist logic. And it began in the universities.
Friedman made a provocative claim. He said: given this capture, maybe it’s no longer even useful to fight antisemitism.
What did he mean by this? I'd like here to take up his important challenge.
I think, at minimum, he was naming a deeper truth: that antisemitism is not a set of ideas to debate, but a structure of power. It mobilizes majorities to redefine what’s real—so that Jewish resistance, Jewish speech, Jewish life itself, becomes not just wrong, or criticizable, but illegible.
Einat Wilf has called this the placard strategy—the relentless attempt to pin every negative accusation onto the word Israel. And today, in the age of social media, that strategy has gone algorithmic. It circulates lies, libels, and incitement at astonishing speed.
The result? Antisemitism mutates into antizionism—not by shedding its past, but by burying it. Antizionism's own roots in Nazism, Stalinism, and Islamism aren’t gone. They’re just hidden beneath a new surface: the language of “justice.”
So what is Friedman’s response, then? He says: go inward. Don’t fight antisemitism. Learn Hebrew. Study our texts. Deepen our identity. Because if we define ourselves through the fight alone, we risk reinforcing the very image they project onto us—the defensive Jew, the defiant Jew, the Jew always on trial.
Because that’s what they want. Not a conversation—but a courtroom. They want the spectacle of judgment, the performance of guilt. And simply standing in the dock can make the accusation seem plausible.
Now, I don’t believe we should stop fighting antisemitism and antizionism. On the contrary, we must—but not as a standalone battle.
What we face now is a single, deeper imperative: to reclaim who we are and to tell the truth about what we are up against.
I’ve felt the force of this calling in my own life.
In the months before October 7, I was living deep in the Amazon, with the Indigenous Desana people. My work there was centered on their own peoplehood. I was asking: Who are the Desana? What is their sacred story? What defines them—from within, not from without?
And that’s when it struck me. This is exactly what’s being taken from us.
In our absence, others have rewritten our story. We’ve been recast—white colonists, right-wing “racists,” generic “Zionists.” Our indigenous connection to the Land of Israel has been erased. Our peoplehood flattened. Our story silenced.
And here’s the irony. The very anti-colonial critique I studied in the academy—and that I still affirm in my work with the Desana—has been twisted. From a tool of affirmation, to one of erasure.
While I was with the Desana, I felt something else too: a strange kinship. A shared position that cuts across the binary of “white” and “indigenous.” They saw it too. I’ve seen it among other Indigenous peoples—who recognize the Jewish story as their own, before activist networks impose a different script.
That’s where the myth of the Lost Tribes of Israel still lives. And in my own return to Jewish life after October 7th, I’ve come to feel like I’ve been walking my own Zoharic path—out of exile, and toward renewal.
But now, we face a new kind of exile.
It’s not only the exile of past centuries—it’s a present-day estrangement. A sense of foreignness even here, in North America. Our right to be here is questioned. Our right to exist in Israel is attacked. And now it’s clear: the two are linked.
Antizionism attacks its displaced image of Israel—and then incites violence against diaspora Jews in its name.
We are being exiled from institutions we helped build: the academy, liberalism, the left. Once, we were cast as the model minority—the ideal diasporic intellectual, the archetypal victim. But that role was always conditional. As Hussein Aboubakr Mansour has shown, it eventually flips. When the Jew is but the symbol of victimhood, rather than ordinary people, the next day the Jew becomes the symbol of oppression. And the old exclusions return.
So what do we do?
We must reclaim our language. We do not cede the ground. We are an oppressed people fighting a system of institutional racism whose shape we know in our bones.
Yes, the academy has devolved into ideological mob-rule. But we can still return it to its center. We must rebuild the space of reason—where tsedek (justice), emet (truth), and chesed (loving-kindness) regain their authentic meanings.
To speak from a place of Jewish dignity then is not in conflict with being a light to the nations. Quite the opposite. In a world of distortion, exclusion, and libel, we must fight for the truth—not only for ourselves, but for what is true in all of us.
We are not survivalists. We are not fighting just to persist. Our survival today is now bound to the survival of truth itself—in a world where it is once again under siege.
So I would suggest then, in response to Matti Friedman's challenge : To fight antizionism and to reaffirm the deeper meaning of our peoplehood are not two paths. They are one.
We are now on our own masot—our own journeys through the desert, with many stations ahead before we arrive at redemption. And like the book of Bamidbar, which we complete this week, the path is uneven. But we know what we’re fighting for.
And that’s what matters.
Shabbat shalom."
We were pleased to learn that Adam Louis-Klein will be taking up an appointment as a fellow at the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. We look forward to hearing much more from him in the months and years to come.
We are feeling pumped because Canadian Zionist Forum recently reached the 1000 subscriber milestone. Thanks to all of our readers for your interest and support. While our content is free to read for all, we are especially grateful to our paid subscribers for opting to support us financially. This helps us grow the publication. If you are not yet a member of this elite group, but value what we do, please consider joining it by upgrading your subscription today.
If you are a paid subscriber you can leave a comment.
If you would rather make a one time contribution you can buy me a coffee.
Thank you to everyone for reading Canadian Zionist Forum.
A lovely ipiece!
very interesting - I wish I could have attended and heard more during the discussion