By Mayer Wochyniak
The National Post ran a piece this week calling Concordia University a “wretched hive of antisemitic scum and villainy.” It’s a headline built to travel, and it did. People shared it, argued about it, agreed with it, rolled their eyes at it, and then mostly felt like the situation had been diagnosed and contained.
That reaction says as much as the article itself.
Because if Concordia bothers you, it’s probably not because it’s uniquely broken. It’s because it’s familiar in ways people don’t like to admit.
No one should pretend Jewish students at Concordia are just being sensitive. They aren’t. There have been incidents, and some of them are uncomfortable precisely because they’re so ordinary. One that stuck with me involved a Jewish student being told to take off his kippa because it made others uncomfortable. Not during a protest. Not shouted. Just said, calmly, like a reasonable suggestion, as if the problem was the visibility, not the comment.
That didn’t need a headline to matter.
Moments like that don’t come out of nowhere. They happen when people feel confident they’re on the right side of things, when they assume the room will nod along, or at least stay quiet. And often, it does.
There’s been a lot of talk about campus culture, activism, and rhetoric, but what’s striking isn’t the volume. It’s how normal some of this has become. Jewish students talk about choosing when to speak and when not to, about deciding which conversations aren’t worth the cost, about learning quickly which rooms feel welcoming and which ones don’t.
That doesn’t mean everyone on campus thinks the same way. Far from it. But it does mean that certain ideas get more space than others, and certain discomforts are treated as acceptable collateral.
Painting Concordia as some kind of moral disaster zone makes for a clean story, but it misses what’s actually going on. What’s happening there didn’t start there, and it isn’t staying there. Similar conversations are happening in unions, cultural spaces, professional organizations, and other campuses, just usually in softer language and behind better branding.
Concordia doesn’t hide it very well. It’s loud, messy, and public. That makes it an easy target, but also an easy distraction.
Universities still like to say they value debate and critical thinking, but in practice there’s often a narrow range of views that come without social consequences. Once that sets in, people stop asking questions and start repeating things, and whole groups get reduced to symbols instead of individuals.
Jews end up caught in that flattening, treated less like people on campus and more like representatives of something they didn’t volunteer to represent.
The National Post wants Concordia to be the problem. That’s simple. It suggests that fixing one place fixes the issue. It also means no one else has to look too closely at their own institutions, their own silences, or the things they’ve learned to tolerate because pushing back feels exhausting.
Concordia isn’t an exception. It’s just visible.
If it makes people uneasy, that’s probably a good thing. Not because it’s uniquely dangerous, but because it looks a lot like places we already know. And because it hints at how easy it is for certain lines to blur when no one is very interested in holding them.
That’s not a Concordia problem, it’s a Canada problem.
