The following is a guest blog post and reflects the views of the author.
In the 1930s, the Canadian painter Emily Carr felt ill at ease about the effects of industrial logging on the natural landscape in British Columbia. In her painting “Scorned as timber; beloved of the sky,” Carr depicts a heavily deforested landscape with a single tree standing, which we might infer has been rejected as not valuable enough to log. The lonely tree is tall, slender, and resilient. Unlike the exploitative humans, the sky embraces the tree for its innate worth – value that cannot be reduced to utility.
Carr’s tree is thus spiritually dignified, reminding us also of the Biblical motif of the prophet who is scorned by humans but loved by God. If we humanize the tree, Carr’s painting carries a message about the potential of Canada to be an inclusive place that truly celebrates diversity, including persons who may not be able to work due to a disability but who nevertheless have inviolable worth. There is much to be said about the relevance of “Scorned as timber, beloved of the sky” when it comes to protecting the wellbeing of people with disabilities – but my focus today is on another concern – the problem of antisemitism.
Antisemitism: A Threat to Canada's Cultural Fabric
Today, almost one hundred years after Carr painted “Scorned as timber, beloved of the sky,” another kind of exploitative industry is at risk of changing the Canadian landscape – albeit the cultural rather than the natural landscape. I am talking about the attempt to manufacture antisemitism out of the Canadian desire to protect those who are suffering.
Most Canadians of all ethnicities or religions are not antisemitic. We want to work and live peacefully, and we want the same for other people around the world. War is terrible, and it is a noble and genuine sentiment to desire for it to stop.
The problem is that peace-loving Canadians who want to think and do “what is right” are being given the message by anti-Israeli influencers that if they care about justice, they must accept as self-evident truth the idea that Israel is a genocidal apartheid state. In reality, Israeli society for the most part seeks peace and stability but has been forced into a tragic war by ruthless terrorist organizations who are passionately committed to the idea of destroying Israel without regard to the suffering that this agenda has brought upon the Palestinian people, most of whom want to live and work peacefully.
Israeli politicians are flawed and have made many mistakes, but even the most exemplary leader would have been forced into war by the massacre and hostage taking of October 7, 2023, which the Hamas had hoped would develop into a greater war against Israel. The effect of Israel hate on the Canadian cultural landscape is to channel antisemitic tropes toward Zionism and to thus exclude “Zionist” from the list of peaceful identities that may be allowed to flourish on this land – even though almost half of the Jewish people live in Israel and most Jewish people outside of Israel have a positive connection to Zionism. And in this way, the Canadian love of justice is at risk of being cheapened and turned into raw material for hate and false moral superiority.
Personal Perspectives on Hate and Resilience
As a Canadian who grew up in Israel, I know that the demonization of Israel preys on the fact that many Canadians know relatively little about Israel or its people. I recently listened to an interview on an Israeli YouTube channel with an Israeli woman who described the worldview that she grew up with in the Israeli left: we were taught to believe that both among us and among the Palestinians, the majority of people want peace, not war – but also that in every nation there may be some destructive leaders.
Because there is nothing we can do about those who want war among the Palestinians, our focus should be squarely on self-criticism. Many Israelis have been educated to strive to make themselves as morally exemplary as possible: to criticize the settlers, to criticize right-wing politicians, to never stop demonstrating our desire for peace. But this way of thinking and of fashioning one’s self-image has been challenged by empirical reality (in ways that many Canadians may not have had their ideals challenged).
While it is true that the majority of people in every society want to live peacefully, it is also true that the Hamas took pleasure on October 7, 2023 in murdering, torturing, raping, and kidnapping some of Israel’s most left-wing, peace-seeking people. Israelis have to live with the reality that nothing they do for peace seems to matter much in certain situations as long as the desire to destroy Israel is dominant. Israelis outside of Israel who are citizens of other countries also have to live with the reality that some people live side by side with us while apparently experiencing the feeling of moral superiority over us.
We have to live in a reality in which our beautiful but imperfect world is full of dictators and corrupt politicians – and yet somehow Israel is highlighted as the worst evil of all, with little acknowledgement of the fact that we have been educated to love and want peace.
Occasionally, small reminders of how blind hate is, of what people might not know when they make bigoted assumptions about Israel, seem to come from nature itself.
For example, when it first snows in winter in Ottawa, I am reminded of a story that I have heard about the winter of 1950, when my father, Oded, was born in Jerusalem a couple of years after the establishment of Israel. The winter of 1950 saw Jerusalem blanketed with an unusually heavy covering of snow (typically, snow in Israel, if it appears at all, melts quickly). According to the story I heard, some of the Arabs said that this was a sign that Allah was blessing the new Jewish state – blessing, not cursing.
But these voices of Arab people who long for normalcy and acceptance of Israel so that all inhabitants of the land can live in stability and prosperity rarely make it into the “from the river to the sea” discourse (meaning the destruction of Israel) that is often presented by anti-Israel activists as the only genuine form of “justice.”
My father has been a stay-at-home dad, a sculptor, and an independent physicist. During the War of Attrition, he was a special-forces soldier who developed a deep dislike of war. The art critic Iritte Benson wrote about my father, “He sculpts in woods such as mahogany, pine and oak, instinctively bringing out their innate, hidden forms rather than forcing his ideas on the raw block.”
While my father got pine and oak from nature, the mahogany could be seen as a variation on the “scorned as timber” theme: a factory ordered the raw blocks to make legs for billiard tables, but changed their minds. And out of these discarded blocks came art that Benson described as “curvaceous, sensual & biomorphic in nature, yet. . . strikingly refined” and with a “truly superb finish.”
The ability to discover what is already there is a quality that characterizes both art and science. In the Preface to his edition of the Works of Shakespeare, the eighteenth-century editor William Warburton described Shakespeare as a thinker who “investigates every hidden spring and wheel of human action” (1: xxiv), somewhat in the same way in which Isaac Newton discovered the underlying principles of motion in the physical world.
Forcing ideas on the raw block or discovering hidden forms: these two possibilities help to distinguish between genuine art and less meaningful work and between true science and pseudoscience. It seems to me that they might also have something to say about how our ideas about the world are shaped more broadly in the culture – and specifically in the present moment about how Canada will respond to the attempts of some Israel haters to “sculpt” it into an antisemitic society.
If Israel haters view Canadian culture as a raw block, the question becomes whether spreading antisemitism would be a case of trying to force ideas on that raw block or rather a case of discovering hidden forms that were always there and that may now be instinctively brought out and polished for all to see.
When Israeli Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer died at the age of 98 on October 18, 2024, he left behind an obituary that he had written for himself. Bauer says that he is glad to belong to the Jewish people – a group which he characterizes as “fascinating, annoying, repulsive, exciting, horrible, wonderful people” (translated from Hebrew). “Repulsive” stands out – do people indeed find us repulsive? And will they feel increasingly comfortable to put those feelings on display as their vulnerabilities are being cultivated by the antisemitic Israel-hate industry?
Latent Antisemitism: Lessons from History
The literary tradition shows us that throughout history, the repulsive Jew has been a trope. In the English literary tradition alone there are, among others, Chaucer’s Prioress who asserted that Satan built a wasp’s nest in the Jews’ hearts, or Fagin in Oliver Twist who exploits children and whom Dickens mercilessly describes as having a “repulsive face,” or Meyer Wolfsheim in Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby who has hair “luxuriat[ing] in either nostril.” And, of course, antisemitism is also depicted in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta.
Are the symbolic patterns that helped to bring these literary characters to life and that leap out at us from the pages of the past also lying dormant in Canadian culture as hidden forms that may be activated by the hate industry? Will latent antisemitism make itself increasingly visible, bold and striking if Canada allows itself to be molded by charismatic haters into an antisemitic society?
Or could it be that haters who try to force their ideas upon what they perceive as the raw block of Canadian culture will fail because most Canadians of all religions and ethnicities do indeed have a genuine commitment to being a society where every Canadian can feel at home and where Israel hate, the latest metamorphosis of antisemitism, does not exist as a significant innate hidden pattern? Will Canadians intuitively recognize that a society that normalizes antisemitism might also be making itself more vulnerable to islamophobia and to other forms of hate because in a society that accepts hate, there is an elevated risk that constructive and peaceful people will be judged unfairly according to false stereotypes and assumptions?
Bauer concludes his own obituary by saying that while he believes in the possibility of positive change and correction, he rejects the concept of utopia: “I do not believe in utopias because every utopia leads, sooner or later, to murder” (translated from Hebrew). With antisemitism on the rise in Canada, we have proven that we are not a perfectly nice place and that we have to be careful about the potential of utopian notions of moral superiority to inspire vanity. We have seen that chasing the inner glow of moral rectitude can turn us into raw material in the hands of manipulators who are trying to give an antisemitic flavor to the Canadian value of caring for those who are suffering.
December 20, 2024, will mark 100 years since Hitler was released from prison. Hitler spent his lenient year in prison following the failed Beer Hall Putsch working on Mein Kampf and strategizing about how to turn Germany into a Nazi state. In earlier days, Hitler had wanted to be an artist, but his paintings were mediocre – flat in execution and failing to arouse emotion.
As an artist, Hitler did not seem to possess a significant talent to discover and express hidden patterns. As a dictator, however, he succeeded devilishly in bringing out the latent antisemitism of his society and pushing it to its grotesque limit – to the destruction of humanity. The raw block succumbed to Hitler with much less resistance than should have been the case. It seems that antisemitism was not something that was forced by Hitler upon European society but that very much existed as an underlying pattern to be reactivated. In other words, Hitler had good raw materials to work with that yielded willingly to his shaping hand.
Canada’s Choice: Resistance or Compliance?
Today, some Israel haters are trying to sculpt Canada into an antisemitic society, even though most Canadians of all ethnicities and religions are not hateful and want to live and work peacefully together. But do hate mongers have productive materials to work with? Are they bringing out hidden patterns in our society, or are they forcing their ideas on a raw block that will prove resistant and refuse to bend to hate?
The question of whether or not Canada will be shaped into an increasingly more antisemitic society remains an open one and depends on what kind of fiber we are made of. For that answer to be no, we will have to work hard on cultivating inner strength so that the desire to do what is right is not manipulated into the false moral superiority that animates antisemitism.
Like the humble but determined tree in Carr’s painting, we can stand strong in defiance of the industry of hate. I hope that when it comes to the efforts of that industry to manufacture hate and ignorance, Canada will be “scorned as timber” and remain “beloved of the sky” because it will refuse to be shaped into a society where antisemitism and other forms of hatred can thrive.
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Sources:
Emily Carr's Painting – Wiki Commons
The Iritte Benson quotes are from Joseph A. Melamed’s Art in Israel Today. Published by World of Art, 1991. Page 53.
Yehuda Bauer’s obituary (in Hebrew).
About the Author
Gefen Bar-On Santor Gefen Bar-On Santor teaches English at the University of Ottawa, as well as adult-education literature courses at the Soloway Jewish Community Centre in Ottawa, Canada. She is an enthusiastic believer in life-long learning and in the relevance of fiction to our lives. She also writes a blog at The Times of Israel and on her Substack.