The Medical Profession Hostile to Jewish Practitioners

"Social media posts vilifying Israel and espousing Jew hatred were circulated by physicians at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of British Columbia after the October 7 massacre."

"Allegations included Christ-killing, organ trafficking, and other nefarious conspiracies supposedly hatched by Jewish doctors."

"Some asserted that Jewish faculty should not be allowed to adjudicate resident matching because the examining doctors were Jewish and might be racist."

"Sadly, [reported experiences by Jewish physicians] are mostly congruent and illustrate the existence and degree of antisemitism and anti-Zionism expressed toward health-care providers in their respective countries."

Rambam Maimonides Medical Journal research

 

"[While enrolment decline of Jewish students could reflect other factors, the anecdotal evidence is] deeply concerning".

"At the University of Toronto -- the largest medical school in Ontario and located in the city with the largest Jewish population in Canada -- we estimate that only 22 Jewish students are currently completing their first year of medical school out of a class of 291."

"This is approximately half the number of Jewish students in the previous year's class."

Dr. Lisa Salomon, Jewish Medical Association of Ontario

Queen’s University set up a joint committee of Trustees and staff to “consider the problem created by the steady increase of Jewish students.”   Image by Josh Granovsky

 

 

Away back in 1974, for comparison's sake, of a class of 218 first-year medical students, 46 were Jews. The times they are a-changing. University medical schools' faculty and student population have changed in the last several decades, and for Jewish students studying medicine, decidedly not for the better. Back in the 1940s in Toronto and elsewhere in Canada, universities in general and medical faculties in particular set up restraining intake budgets -- quotas aimed at Jewish medical students when limits were placed on the number of Jewish students permitted to enroll. Jewish faculty members of medical schools were hired only on a temporary basis.

 

It seems that proudly multicultural Canada while still celebrating diversity as a cultural Canadian enrichment, has now seen to it that Canada's Jewish population has been set aside as a fringe element to be ignored and deplored. Suddenly the living spectre of antisemitism, so long kept under wraps in the polite society that Canada was, is no longer hidden, but out front and center, with the gradual and then !sudden! 'normalization' of Jew-hate in an immigrant-heavy population that has brought with it ancient antipathies and ethnic/religious hatreds.

 

This is by no remote perception of the imagination to be a glaring problem suddenly surfaced only in Canada, but one that has a universal international flavour, brought courtesy of strides in immigration acceptance, refugee-haven, and migrant-dominating movement of humanity into Europe and North America. Countries where Jew-hate is part of the cultural and historical record have gifted Western democracies with their population offcasts, mired deep in the tribal, sectarian values so long tamped down in the West.

 

Dialogue CPSO

When, in Canada of recent date, hundreds of Jewish students co-signed to a letter of concern related to the tolerance of Jew hatred at the University of British Columbia, "the Dean of the medical faculty refused to recognize antisemitism as a problem at UBC or to meet with [their] representatives". Jews have proven themselves to be naturally adept at the medical profession, and their appearance in that profession has always been disproportionate to their numbers in society. That is slowly, agonizingly undergoing a change with the atmosphere of acceptance closing in and closing down.

 

A 2024 survey conducted by the Jewish Medical Association of Ontario (JMAO) discovered that of 944 Jewish physicians and medical students across Canada, two-thirds of respondents were "concerned that antisemitic bias from peers or educators will negatively affect their careers". Organizers within JMAO discovered that 80 percent of respondents -- roughly380 in number -- had experienced antisemitism in the workplace since October7; 39 percent in hospitals; and 43 percent in academic institutions. An impressive percentage are considering relocating out of Canada.

 

Doctors Against Racism and Antisemitism (DARA) produced a veritable mountain of evidence that the situation prevailing for Jews at the University of Toronto Temerty Faculty of Medicine is nothing short of dire. For years DARA has produced petitions, open letters to deans and university presidents, engaged in political activism, but no actions in hope of pushing back the growing tide of antisemitism has made a dent in its practise. 

 

Tablet Magazine published an article on May 18, detailing that antisemitism is a problem in American medicine "driven by foreign-trained doctors importing the Jew-hatred of their native countries". The authors of the article representing a Senior Fellow at Do No Harm, and the health-care advocacy's director, conducted research based on data collected by the organization Stop Antisemitism, and their conclusions spoke of a health care crisis in the future. Identifying a "set of over 700 people from all walks of life profiled by Stop Antisemitism for displaying flagrant hostility toward Jews and Israel", that found doctors were "almost 26 times over-represented in the list of antisemites relative to their prevalence in the workforce". Let that sink in.

 

Of the Jew-hating doctors half "received their medical degrees abroad", in the Middle East or Pakistan for many, where extreme antisemitism expressed openly is widely viewed there as "appropriate or even enlightened". When these sentiments are openly displayed in Canada, as matter-of-fact 'realities', there is no lack of home-grown, DEI-infused, Zionism-repulsed hangers-on to follow the leaders with their own brand of antisemitism.

 

Then there is the acute dilemma of Jews who seek medical help, or who frequent pharmacies only to discover that among the medical profession and the pharmacies a gradual and large influx of devout Muslim-Canadians appear in the majority of the latter profession, and pop up regularly through referrals in the former. Some of those physicians emote discernible contempt for Jewish patients, while others are thoroughly professional, yet neither fully satisfy the essential need for patient confidence in the profession which proudly upholds its 'do no harm' pledge.

 

Pro-Palestinian encampment in an area that was fenced off at the University of Toronto campus in downtown Toronto, Thursday May 2, 2024. Photo by Ernest Doroszuk /Toronto Sun

The more the antisemitism and anti-Israeli hate in medical school grew, the more Gill Kazevman censored his true self. “I was no longer Gill, the Israeli, Hebrew-speaking medical student,” Kazevman writes in a personal essay in the Canadian Medical Education Journal. “I was now Gill, who had completed his undergraduate degree in New Brunswick, and whose accent sounded somewhat French. I stopped wearing identifiable Jewish accessories in academic settings. I stopped speaking Hebrew in public,” he wrote. “I went into hiding.” Now a full-fledged family doctor and hospitalist, Kazevman immigrated, alone, to Canada from Israel in 2012 at age 22, “full of hope” of finding a welcoming, inclusive and supportive environment. But when he applied to medical school in 2017, and circulated his CV to physician mentors, “their most consistent feedback was, ‘Do not mention anything relating to Israel.’” Scrubbed from his CV was any mention of his volunteer work with an Israel ambulance service. Gone was the name of his high school “to minimize the chance of identifying the country in which I went to school.” With every erased line, “I felt as if I was tearing off a small piece of myself.” Now 34, Kazevman became a Canadian citizen in 2022.  

Sharon Kirkey, National Post