WINNIPEG – Last week in the Winnipeg Sun, I reported on the fear Jewish teachers, staff and students have about toxic and open antisemitism being manifested as a result of government-mandated Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies. According to Dr. Ted Rosenberg, those same influences have overtaken the medical field, are endangering Jewish patients and care providers, and are squeezing Jews out of health care professions.
Rosenberg was raised in Winnipeg, graduating a few years ahead of me from Joseph Wolinsky Collegiate. He saw and experienced prejudice against Jews along the way as he followed a path towards becoming a specialist in geriatrics. In elementary school he and his two brothers, all of them under the age of nine, were beat up by older kids one morning — and the principal told their mother “boys will be boys.” As he completed his training, a medical officer of health characterized Moses as a “coward” for fleeing after killing an Egyptian slave master, and a chaplain belittled Judaism as “superstitious teachings.”
Jew-hatred always lurked beneath the surface even in polite society, but after the terrorist attack on Israeli communities on October 7, 2023, a coordinated tidal wave of it funded by Iran, Qatar and other malevolent actors erupted on campuses across North America, including within the University of British Columbia and the medical faculty, where he had been teaching for thirty years. The misinformation, tropes and vilification of Zionism — the belief in the right of a Jewish homeland in Israel — played out with real-life consequences.
A UBC resident lamented the massacre of a friend at the Nova music festival on Oct. 7 and was attacked online, and “then one of her professors began harassing her on social media,” arguing that “Hamas treats the hostages beautifully.” Rosenberg said the DEI office claimed social media fell outside the medical faculty, yet “if anyone had made those comments about Black people or Indigenous people or LGBTQ+ people, they would never be tolerated, they’d be drummed right out of the Faculty of Medicine.”
A “Call to Action for Gaza” petition was already signed by almost 40% of the medical students, seeking to pressure the administration with a distorted narrative about the regional conflict. Rosenberg found himself becoming an activist because “I have to teach these students, and what they were basically saying is that I as a Zionist support white European settler-colonial genocide and apartheid and the intentional murder of women and children.”
He wrote to the Dean and UBC President about “the dangers that inaccurate information, anti-Semitic libels and inflammatory rhetoric posed to teaching, collaboration among colleagues and the Jewish public seeking health care.”
Meanwhile, on the UBC campus and others worldwide, posters of kidnapped hostages were ripped down, and protesters who “could not even identify which river and sea they were screaming about” called for the death of Israelis and glorified dead terrorists. Hamas talking points and red triangles — a mark to kill a target — were common, including in hospital work stations. Jews and Zionists were expected to denounce their ancestors and their faith and go along with the “genocide” lie to be included in the health care fraternity.
In December 2023, a letter signed by 284 physicians voiced concerns after the UBC leadership pointed to newly written DEI policies on discrimination as proof they had taken action. After a weak response, Rosenberg resigned his position, explaining, “you did not address any of our specific concerns re: the medical student’s petition, antisemitism within the faculty, or concerns that politicization and polarization of the Middle East conflict are creating a toxic work environment.”
He checked the links to the policies and DEI site and found: “Two words are conspicuously absent from all these documents: 1. Jew(ish) and 2. antisemitism.” The word “antisemitism” was not included in “the multitude of other ‘anti’s’ that appeared. This lack of official acknowledgment of antisemitism by the Faculty of Medicine and UBC is perplexing.”
“One-third of the medical students and some faculty have publicly expressed their contempt towards me, as a Jew. I cannot take the risk of being accused of implicit harassment or racism, which is indefensible, by a ‘triggered’ student. Unfortunately, I have no faith in due process in a faculty that does not even acknowledge the existence or presence of antisemitism/Jew-hatred or my right to work in a depoliticized environment.”
That toxic environment has evolved not by accident, but by design.
“Health care used to be a ‘safe place’. When I went to medical school, we did not talk politics with our patients. We did not talk religion. We kept our personal lives out so people felt safe, they could open up, we don’t need to all share the same opinion. But now, it’s become the opposite, where social-justice activism has become not only the norm, but a requirement, and it’s using Critical Race Theory (CRT) and ‘settler colonialism’ melded into this DEI framework that divides the world into oppressors and oppressed.”
As a result, Rosenberg told me, there are Jewish medical students who change their name to avoid harassment. Medical-school applicants who were rejected reapplied under their new name and were accepted. And a de-facto quota has emerged because anyone entering medicine in the last 15 years “has been trained in this, that we have an obligation to fight this (Jewish) racism, and there’s an intersectional part that everyone — LGBTQ, African, Indigenous — you need to join in and show that you too care.”
Unlike the old days where academic excellence counted, “To get into medical schools in western countries right now, your core competencies are your social-justice activism and you have to be interviewed and write a letter of what you’re doing for society for the greater good like volunteer work.”
It’s easy to see how that funnels students in high school towards the popular causes touting anti-Semitic ideologies, fuelling the Jew-hate in medical faculties as well as education and other fields of study.
Rosenberg said that by comparison, “If you’re a white male Jew and they ask you what you did for social-justice activism, and you volunteered with Magen David Adom (the Israeli version of the Red Cross) or in an Arab-Jewish peace program in Israel. There’s nothing you can say about Israel that’s not going to be viewed as ‘racist’ or ‘Zionist’ and you know where that application is going to go, at the bottom of the pile.”
As a result, “the rates of Jews being accepted to medical faculties have dropped to historical lows. The negative impact of DEI and ‘decolonization’ on Jews in health care is becoming increasingly evident.”
And evident in patient care. His own brother “was given insufficient local anesthesia by a Muslim ophthalmologist angry about the war in Gaza” and later found out he wasn’t the only one. Here in Winnipeg, over 550 health care professionals, from doctors to nurses to mental-health workers to dentists to investigators, have signed a petition similar to the one at UBC. That has Jews in Winnipeg concerned they will be mistreated and discriminated against in health care settings. Whether Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara, a self-proclaimed social-justice activist, can be trusted to protect Jews from such malpractice is an open question.
Dr. Ted Rosenberg wrote an excellent book about his experiences entitled Ayekha, Where Are You? A Memoir and Reflection about Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism and the Western Response to October 7, 2023. It’s available on Amazon and at Ayekha.ca. He is speaking on Sunday night about the book, and more information is at https://tinyurl.com/mv8vwhv.
— Marty Gold is a Winnipeg journalist and a guest writer for the Winnipeg Sun. You can find more of his work at The Great Canadian Talk Show. The article first appeared in the Winnipeg Sun.