The Relationship Between Antisemitism and Jewish Collective Wellbeing

• In Event: Three Perspectives on Antisemitism

Abstract

Jewish people have experienced both violent and subtle forms of persecution, including genocides and expulsions, throughout their history leading to a myriad of health and well-being impacts on Jewish individuals and communities that remain insufficiently understood. Leveraging Jewish diasporism as a theoretical framework to understand Jewish community wellbeing through a lens of displacement, home, land, and belonging, I will present a framework to understand the relationship between experiences of historical and contemporary antisemitism and the contemporary health and well-being for Jewish communities using the Toronto (Canada) Jewish community as case study. The Canadian Jewish community is one of the largest Jewish communities in the diaspora and over half of this population resides within Toronto, many of whom are Holocaust survivors and their descendants.
Antisemitism has been on the rise both globally and within Canada over the past 15 and more acutely in North America since 2016 including related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This expanding violence facing the Jewish community has been made drastically worse with a tripling of hate crimes against Jewish people in Toronto since the October 7th, 2023, attacks by Hamas in Southern Israel and the ensuing war. Antisemitism is a risk factor for Jewish people to experience mental health concerns including psychosis, anxiety, and depression and can cause feelings of disconnection that leads to social isolation, physical health illnesses, and mental health diagnoses. These issues can continue long after the threat(s) are gone and leave Jewish people with long term mental and physical illnesses that reduce quality of life including loss of education and employment. It is widely understood that systemic and interpersonal violence impact the well-being of targeted communities; however, the implications of this have not been fully explored within Jewish communities, including in Canada

Author

• Sterling Stutz, University of Toronto