On June 4, several “pro-Palestine” groups posted a list of restaurants in Montreal that should be boycotted because of their Jewish owners or perceived support for Israel. Two weeks later, the inevitable happened: someone opened fire on one of the restaurants on the list.

There were no casualties, but the incident reinforced a message Montreal Jews have heard loud and clear. The “reality in Montreal,” said Moshe Appel, a former resident who moved his family to Israel, is that “if you are visibly Jewish, you’re not safe.”

Montreal is home to about 90,000 Jews. Nearly 200,000 of us live in Toronto, where things aren’t any better. In December, anti-Jewish protesters started regular demonstrations on a bridge leading to Armour Heights, a neighborhood with a large Jewish community. The increasingly confrontational agitators “paraded with placards, including swastikas, photos of Hitler and other antisemitic content, set off smoke bombs, and festooned the sides of the overpass with Palestinian flags and banners… During their rallies, often held on Saturdays when many local residents walk to nearby synagogues or are at home for Shabbat, protestors used loudspeakers to bellow their incendiary chants.”

A regularly scheduled Nazi rally with Palestinian flags alongside the swastikas, in other words, that explicitly targets a Jewish population. Even after the Toronto police ordered them to stop mob-harassing Jews, the rallies continued.

The city’s Pride of Israel synagogue was pelted with stones and vandalized in late June, as was another shul, Kehillat Shaarei Torah. It was the third such attack on the latter since mid-April. In May, shots were fired at Bais Chaya Mushka school in Toronto. The Community Hebrew Academy had to be evacuated due to bomb threats in November.

In January, Jewish-owned grocery International Deli Foods was firebombed and spray-painted with “Free Palestine” graffiti. A couple weeks after Hamas’s attacks, the terror group’s supporters swarmed the Toronto franchise of Café Landwer, whose German-born founder fled Berlin in 1933. That same weekend, protesters targeted Aroma, an Israeli-founded coffee chain with a storefront in Toronto.

These incidents are not outliers. Through March, 56% of the hate crimes reported in Toronto were anti-Semitic in nature. Through the same time frame, the cost of policing the pro-Hamas protests exceeded $10 million for the city. Police were forced to add a command post in one neighborhood targeted by the protests.

Schools, it almost goes without saying, are no refuge. At the Ontario School of Art and Design, the president of the Jewish Club detailed the harassment, including death threats, she and other Jewish students receive. In May, the presidents of four universities were questioned by parliament over the anti-Semitism at their institutions: McGill University, the University of Toronto, the University of British Columbia, and Concordia University.

That last one has carved out quite a reputation for itself, a reputation that precedes October 7. Concordia’s Palestinian campus group praised the October 7 slaughter as “heroic.” A program by Israeli peace activists was canceled in March, and days later campus pro-Hamas demonstrators protested at the nearby Holocaust museum. The school put together a task force on “identity based violence” in the wake of an outbreak of anti-Semitism on campus, and named Rachel Berger, a defender of BDS, as its chair.

In March, Canadian Jewish groups sued the government over its new animal-welfare rules that threatened to end kosher slaughter in Canada. In July, Jewish graves in Montreal were defaced with swastikas. Liberal MP Anthony Housefather was targeted with Nazi signs telling him to “get out of Canada” on a lamppost in Montreal. “There has been no time in my lifetime when Jewish Canadians have felt as threatened as they do today,” Housefather said.

Montreal and Toronto were two of the early large Jewish communities in Canada in the 19th century. In the 20th, immigration quotas in the US led to a brief period of immigration to Canada, which soon launched its own crackdown on Jewish newcomers. Immigration from Europe was reduced to those with means, and entry to those from elsewhere in North America was limited to those with work experience in specific industries. “Canada closed its doors more tightly than almost anybody else,” said historian Paula Draper.

Then there was the infamous 1940 incident in which 7,000 Jewish students and refugees to the UK were mistakenly put on transfer ships with Nazi prisoners of war and sent to Canada. Britain alerted Canadian leaders to the mixup, but Canada held the Jewish refugees in prison alongside Nazis for three years. Eventually Britain was forced to send an envoy to personally clear the Jewish prisoners one by one.

Unlike the US, Canada has arguably not had its own real Jewish golden age. And that doesn’t appear likely to change in the near future.