Review of Fields of Exile by Nora Gold

Nora Gold

Dundurn Press (2014), 424 pages, E-book $9.99, Trade Paperback $24.99, available here.

Fields of Exile is a portrait of love and hate. The heroine, Judith, loves Israel. And the book’s finest writing details that love in beautiful, sensual prose. But after ten sweet years in the arms of her beloved land, Judith returns to Canada and enrolls in a Master’s of Social Work program. And there she encounters hatred.

It’s a hatred that Jews with leftist friends or who have had the misfortune to be on campus since the launch of the Palestinian terror war against Israel in September 2000 will recognize: it’s the 21^st Century manifestation of Jew-hatred.

Personally, I’ve been called a Nazi while wearing a kippa when I was at a party with leftist friends. To be precise, because I was visibly Jewish that day, I was asked if I was a Zionist.

I thought it a weird question, like asking someone if they’re a suffragette, if they believe women should have the vote. Doesn’t everybody? Wasn’t that question already decided?

Am I a Zionist? Do I think Jews should have their own country? Again, wasn’t that question already decided? Israel exists, right? So, yeah, I said, of course I’m a Zionist. Well then, I was told, you’re a Nazi.

According to a remarkable number of self-described “progressives,” Israel is the epitome of earthly evil and should cease to exist. Such progressive aren’t particular about what should happen to the Jews who live there, either – or to Jews who have the nerve to call themselves Zionists.

This is the re-born hatred that Judith walks into when she enrolls in a Master’s program at a fictional university near Toronto. As a reader, I found her achingly naive. Judith finds it normal for an academic department to have a declared political agenda. Her university was already like that ten years earlier when she took her BSW.

She does feel uneasy when one student dares to dissent from the ruling ideology of “anti-oppression.” The pack turns on this hapless student who declares an opposition to abortion. She’s ridiculed, humiliated, torn to shreds by her enlightened comrades.

Not that Judith agrees with this anti-abortion student. Judith is herself a child of the left. In Israel, she did good work building bridges between Israeli and Palestinian youths, and she is among a handful of Israelis who still believes in the peace movement. This, after Israel’s supposed peace partner responded to two comprehensive peace proposals with a campaign of suicide bombings.

While Palestinian terrorists blow up seniors at aPassover seder and murder teenagers at an all-ages disco, Judith and her friends stand in front of the Israeli prime minister’s office to protest against their own government.

But they are not so deluded as to admire the terrorists – unlike the students Judith finds in Canada, who do idolize terrorists and figure Israelis are getting what they deserve.

For me, the great strength of this novel is Nora Gold’s spot on portrayal of the shock of encountering antisemitism, the dizzying dismay of finding that howling hateful horde even here in Canada.

On the other side of the ledger, though, I think the novel wastes too many words on Judith’s ruminations about Jews in exile versus Jews in Israel. I don’t see this as much of an issue in the Jewish community and it’s of even less interest to the wider public.

Pr0-Palestinian thug assaults Israel supporter at protest

Also, Gold invents a new Palestinian terror group, which massacres a group of children in a bombing attack. I have a queasy feeling that Gold isn't sure she can trust readers to be outraged by Hamas or the other terrorist groups operating in Israel and so felt she had to invent a group that’s even worse.

In a similar vein, Gold’s anti-Israel activists tend to slide into outright antisemitism in obvious ways. But this is a substantial novel. With close to 130,000 words to work with, Gold could have exposed more subtle varieties of hatred.

Still, her book couldn’t be more timely. During the recent Hamas–Israel war, we saw the president of York University’s student federation idolizing one of the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists, posting photos and quotes on his Facebook page. Meanwhile, on its Facebook page, York’s anti-Israel apartheid group posted an interview with a Gaza-based terrorist. This, unfortunately, was no surprise as the apartheid group regularly features terrorists and their supporters at its anti-Israel events.

Even worse, we’ve seen Jews physically assaulted, with Jews punched and kicked and one Calgary man dragged across the street by an Israeli flag tied around his neck.

To be sure, the haters are few in number, but they can’t be ignored. Nora Gold is affiliated with the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), which like the fictional university in her novel, is committed to an "anti-oppression" ideology and is one of the centres of the new antisemitism. So her novel is something of an insider’s view of the hatred that infects our campuses. For anyone interested in what's happening on our campuses and in what the leaders and teachers of tomorrow are being taught, it's a must read.

A slightly shorter version of this review was published in the Jewish Tribune.

Michael Zwaagstra: Enough about "white privilege," kids need basic knowledge

Print-based literacy, "an unfortunate example of the  neo-liberal agenda"

Michael Zwaagstra's recent experience of teacher's school

Education schools and teacher colleges have long been obsessed with issues of race and culture to the detriment of the academic basics. I experienced this personally during an education graduate course I recently completed. Throughout the course, the professor and students made repeated references to “white privilege” and frequently bashed Western civilization for being racist and sexist. 

During one of our discussions, the professor even suggested that there is too much focus on reading and writing in public schools. In her opinion, reading and writing was only one form of literacy and other forms deserve equal attention. Many students backed up the professor’s position. One of them went so far as to argue that the excessive focus on print-based literacy is an unfortunate example of the so-called neo-liberal agenda.

Success – The Toronto School Board takes the International Sex Workers’ day off its Days of Significance Calendar

Every year, the Toronto District School Board publishes a Days of Significance Calendar for students. It includes the holidays of different religions and various UN mandated observances, such as the International Day of Families (May 15). 

The TDSB also included the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers on the Calendar.

Sex Workers’ Day is celebrated by prostitutes, strippers, porn actors, dominatrixes and, until this school year, by the Toronto District School Board. The day’s purpose is to “advocate for removal of all laws that criminalize sex work” and to remove all negative stigma so that prostitution becomes just one more career path.

Last March, I wrote a letter to the Board suggesting that they might want to rethink their endorsement of this day. After all, a school board must be politically neutral; it shouldn’t be endorsing anyone’s politics – not to mention that a school board really shouldn’t be helping to make prostitution a respectable career for young people.

I followed up with a couple more emails, then a couple phone calls and was at last assured that the appropriate committee would look into it. And then I heard nothing.

So this fall I started sending emails again. An email to Donna Quan, the new Director of Education, finally produced a two-line reply (not from Ms Quan herself): The sex workers day had been taken off the Days of Significance Calendar, and the Calendar itself had been taken off the public website.

In other words: okay, first, the Board’s noticed it’s not a good idea to endorse prostitution as a career path, and second, annoying parents can no longer check what the Board thinks is worth promoting. Now only teachers and TDSB staff get to look at the Days of Significance Calendar.

What might be on the Calendar? Well the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) has produced a Days of Significance Calendar for schools. OISE trains our most senior educators and many teachers, and unfortunately, OISE believes the purpose of schools is to indoctrinate kids into far left activist politics.

OISE thinks kids ought to be taught to observe the birthday of the founder of the Communist Party of Canada, that kids need to celebrate the Quebec student protests against tuition fees becoming almost as high as their cell phone bills, and that kids should should learn that Stephen Harper is a war criminal and Che Guevara is a martyr to social justice. And to promote their political perspective, OISE has created a Calendar (see here).

The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario – the most radical and politicized of our teacher unions – has endorsed this Calendar (see here).

Will the Toronto Board adopt it, too? I doubt it. There are still lots of sane people working for the Board. But who knows? Unless a teacher rats them out, the Board can do all sorts of strange things without parents knowing.

* 

Read my earlier, more detailed posting about the Board’s promotion of International Sex Workers’ Day here. 

An Open Letter to Toronto District School Board Chair Bolton and Director Spence regarding the Board's Strategy Consultations

I've re-posted the open letter below from the Eye on a Crazy Planet blog:

Dear Trustee Bolton and Director Spence:

I am the Co-Chair of the Parents’/School Council at Central Technical School in Toronto, which as you know is one of the largest high schools in the city with a student population of over 1900.

Regarding the current consultations conducted by the TDSB for the K-12 Strategy for the coming years, there is an issue of very serious concern about which I would like to offer my comments.

The so-called social justice aspects of the curriculum frequently reflect a subjective and highly politicized interpretation of the word “justice”. As such, the way it is approached needs a very serious review, and in my opinion a complete overhaul. 

There are inappropriate attempts in the TDSB to integrate so-called social justice aspects into subjects like Math, where questions such as “Calculate how 5 global social issues could be solved if the US military budget were applied to them” are posed to children in their mid-teens. The obvious implication is that military budgets and the military in democratic countries like the US and Canada somehow detract from the resolution of social problems.

What are not addressed are the catastrophic results that would occur if democracies did not have the means to protect themselves. Anyone who is familiar with European history between the World Wars understands the horrendous consequences of Britain and France’s decision to decommission most of its naval capabilities after WW1.

One can have reasonable debates about such matters, but the clear purpose of questions of the nature in the example provided is to indoctrinate to a particular type of thinking. And frankly, the people at OISE (The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education) who have designed such questions have nowhere near the knowledge in geo-political affairs or history required to understand them thoroughly.

That is reflected further in the way the TDSB teaches about such issues as the internment of Japanese-Canadians during World War 2. It is right and proper this be taught.  But it is taught in middle school to students who are not instructed about the causes and history of the Second World War. Nor are they yet provided with reasonable context, such as the treatment of minorities by Imperial Japan prior to and during the war. The result is an implication that Canada is and was a particularly and unusually racist country for its time when that is historically untrue.

In fact, the TDSB’s providing politicized indoctrination under the guise of social justice is becoming pervasive through the system. I was at the TDSB Futures conference earlier this year where Director Spence delivered an address. One of the keynote speakers was Tim Wise, who blamed the inequities in the education system on “white privilege.” (More on Tim Wise here.)

That fatuous reasoning left absent the fact that inequities in education in Canada transcend racial divisions and far more often than not are independent of them. More alarming, Mr. Wise, with the apparent approbation of the TDSB, said that education needs to focus less on the individual and more on the collective, including collective racial identities.

                                                                                                                          

This flouts everything opponents of racism have been fighting for many years. As a society, we have been working towards achieving a color-blind world that deals with individuals as individuals and not as part of collectives differentiated by ‘race’ or ‘color.’

It is deeply disturbing that, while with the best of motives, the TDSB, has been working to counter such progress through its use of ill-advised trends put forward by politicized activists in the education system and in politicized programs in institutions like OISE.

These are but a very few of many examples currently occurring within the TDSB.

These questions are designed through programs at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, which has programs that specifically teach teachers to be activists against neo-liberalism (i.e. free-market, liberal democracies) in schools. These same people frequently advocate for solidarity with Communist Cuba.

It should not be necessary to point out how disturbing it is that our children’s’ curriculum are in many instances designed by people who advocate against a system that has produced the freest, most prosperous societies in the world’s history in favor of a repressive, totalitarian society that imprisons dissenters. Yet because of its recurrence in the TDSB, such admonitions are regrettably necessary and will be for the foreseeable future.

Honest people can disagree about ideas and we should always strive for improvement. People have a right to hold different opinions on how to approach the matters discussed above. Unfortunately, the term “critical thinking” which is so often used by TDSB personnel in describing the approach they want to instil actually means trying to create a “group think.” Specifically, “critical thinking” is a doctrine that criticizes of our democratic foundations while promoting ideologies that are antithetical to them.

Social justice for someone who admires Che Guevara has a very different meaning for those of us who believe in free speech and parliamentary democracy.  People have the right to share their views with their children on their own time, but not to attempt to indoctrinate the children in Toronto’s public school system with them. 

Some of the fault for the concerns I have delineated rests squarely with the Ontario Ministry of Education, which is responsible for the Province’s curriculum. But much of it also rests with the TDSB.

With the challenges facing our children, who will grow up in a world undergoing a technological revolution, the limited time they spend in schools should focus on giving them the tools they need for success in such a world. This is the focus on which I hope the TDSB will concentrate going forward.

Sincerely,

Richard Klagsbrun

Read another excellent piece on the meaning of "social justice" in our kids' schools here.

A new racism in our kids’ schools

On May 5, an American, Tim Wise, was a keynote speaker at the Toronto District School Board’s  (TDSB’s) Futures Conference on Equity and Inclusive Education.

Wise is a card-carrying member of the American far left and doesn’t believe Israel has any right to exist.

Moreover, he frequently writes for the far left magazine Counterpunch. This magazine also publishes articles by the Holocaust denier Israel Shamir, by Gilad Atzmon who suggests that “maybe Hitler was right,” and by James Petras who believes that the “Zionist power configuration” controls America.

Strange company for a man who calls himself an anti-racist. But in truth, Wise’s mission is to emphasize racial divisions, not bridge them, and on May 5, he lectured Canadian teachers about the evils of “white privilege.”

In his essays, Wise explains white privilege thus: “The concept is rooted in the common-sense observation that there can be no down without an up.” Or if blacks are underprivileged, whites must be “overprivileged.”

To illustrate, Wise gives a laundry list of supposed white privileges, including “not having to worry about triggering negative stereotypes, rarely having to feel out of place, not having to worry about racial profiling, etc.”

Note that these privileges are defined negatively. Obviously, stereotyping is wrong. But how does not being stereotyped amount to a privilege? Or if blacks are deprived of dignity, are we to understand that whites must have too much of it, as if there’s just so much human dignity to go around?

Of course some people do come from a privileged background. I’d say that President Obama’s kids have a leg up on most people – and good for them! Life’s too short to worry about other people’s luck.

But the notion of white privilege is disconnected from any actual privilege. The claim is that ordinary, fair-minded and hardworking Canadians have more than they deserve – but only if they’re white.

A poor white kid with a single mom on welfare may not have breakfast, but theoretically he has a whole knapsack of privileges: male privilege, hetero privilege, ablest privilege – you name it.

Theorists of privilege fall into such absurdities because they discard individuals and see only groups; thus if some whites have been racists, all whites – you, me and our grand kids – are accountable for it.

So, for example, in “Of National Lies and Racial America,” Wise writes: “For most white folks, indignation just doesn’t wear well.”

Why? Because whites are morally compromised by the “genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans.” Obviously, no whites living today committed these crimes but other white people did and so, by the raced-based logic of privilege, whites today bear the responsibility.

Unfortunately, inviting Wise isn’t a one off for the Toronto District School Board. Much worse, the Board incorporates the notion of privilege into the curriculum with learning resources such as the “GLSEN Jump Start Guide: Examining Power, Privilege and Oppression.”

The literature on white privilege notes that students resist the concept. Sociologists Dan Pence and Arthur Fields write: “White students often react to in-class discussions about white privilege with a continuum of behaviors ranging from outright hostility to a ‘wall of silence.’"

Pence and Fields never consider that the students may correctly perceive themselves to be under racist attack.

The GLSEN guide recommended by the Toronto Board instructs teachers to solicit confessions from students about “the times that they have been oppressive or have used their privilege over someone else.”

Doubtless, our kids find it hard to come up with suitable sins. To help them, the guide gives an example: planning “a trip together without recognizing that one member of the group cannot afford to participate.”

That may not sound like oppression to me and you, but it’s all grist for teaching our kids that they’re part of a system of oppression that has produced every crime from slavery to genocide. The GLSEN guide observes that students may feel guilty. What a surprise!

Things may get worse. Professors at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) and the departments of education at York and Ryerson universities are busily lecturing student teachers on the ideology of white privilege.

This hit the news back in 2010 when the media noticed that OISE had granted a student a master’s degree for a thesis denouncing Jews as privileged and racist, and Holocaust education as a Zionist plot. (Read the Toronto Star's report on the scandal here, Werner Cohn's essay here, and his follow-ups here.)

It should come as no surprise that theorists who divides people into oppressed and oppressor groups, into good races and bad should put Jews in the bad column, particularly as the further to the left one goes, the more common it is to find people examining race through the lens of oppression and privilege.

As a parent of two kids in a Toronto public school, I'm glad to say that Toronto School Board truly does support equality for all our students, regardless of race, religion or sexual orientation  – and usually gets things right (though certainly not always). But because it supports equality, the Board must expel the notion of white privilege.

P.S. If Tim Wise has ever given two minutes thought to Canada, it’s not evident from his writings, but no one should doubt his talents as a speaker. At the TDSB’s Futures Conference, he reportedly compared being a person of colour to a disability, castigated Canadians for pervasive racism, and received a standing ovation. 
You can read a report on his talk here. Also, it was Richard K over at Eye on a Crazy Planet who broke the story about Tim Wise speaking at the TDSB's Future's Conference. Be sure to read his original piece here.

A slightly shorter version of this piece was originally published in the Jewish Tribune and on Harry's Place in Britain.

The OISE cult of conformity

OISE, the Mordor of Education

The Ontario Institute for studies in education trains teachers. Unfortunately, its been largely taken over by a far left cult that believes white people, particularly straight men, are oppressors.  Sociologist Werner Cohn has written an excellent series of blog postings about this. See here.

Below, I've pasted in one student's report of her year spent at OISE. I suspect my views on many matters might be closer to the views of her far left professors than to hers. For example, I think it's important that all children feel at home in our schools, which means our school must affirm their identities.

So it's important for kids to see their holidays recognized: Christmas for Christians, Rosh HaShannah for Jews, Eid for Muslims. Gay kids should be able to be who they are without being bullied. Girls should be able to walk the halls of high schools without having their asses grabbed. And no kid should ever have to put up with being harassed about their race. 

For the most part, Toronto schools seem to be doing a do good job - particularly on the multicultural front (though I do hear extremely disturbing things about bullying, sexual harassment and violence in some schools).

But to get back to OISE, while supporting a diversity of identities, OISE draws the line at allowing diversity in thinking.  There is a party line at OISE that's taught to new teachers. It includes explicit support of the NDP, hatred of Israel and tolerance of antisemitism if it's dressed up as anti-Zionism, and hostility toward straight white males as oppressors. (Again, see Cohn's postings here.)

With teachers being educated in bigotry at OISE, is it any wonder that now we have a Toronto teacher connecting his students to antisemitic websites, as I noted in this recent article.
 
Here's one woman's experience of her year at OISE....

OISE, Indoctrinating the Teachers to Indoctrinate the Children
By: Ruthann Attia

I am sure that many of you have heard about the liberal and leftist agenda that has taken over our institutions of higher learning. I would like to share some of what I experienced attending the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE).

It was my first real experience in a Canadian public education institution as I had previously attended a small private high school, followed by attendance at a university in the United States. I can say now that I am very thankful that the time I did spend in the Canadian public education system was not lengthy.

I began my year at OISE with my mind open and ready to learn, with no previously conceived notions about the political atmosphere of teachers college; I had simply heard that, in general, it was often boring and easy. However, my experience at OISE was anything but boring. In fact, it left me feeling angry, deflated and, most of all, deeply saddened about the direction in which Canada is headed.

Initially, I was entirely shocked by the blatantly obvious political agenda. On the first day I noticed that my classroom wall had a poster listing the main Canadian political parties. It then listed each party’s supposed track record with major Canadian issues, such as health care and education. Unbelievably, the poster went on to proclaim, that, as future teachers, we should be sure to “Vote NDP.”

I looked around for other posters proclaiming the same for Conservatives and Liberals: I could find none. I was so shocked that I pulled out my cell phone and took a photo of it, as proof of the propaganda! Sadly, this poster was the least of my concerns by the year’s end.

Classes began and I was repeatedly baffled by the content of discussions being held in my classrooms. Such issues included why universities and high schools lacked transgendered washrooms, how to not stand for the national anthem, and censoring the celebration of Christmas in schools because it is too “painful of an experience for non-Christians”.

After speaking out numerous times and trying to create a more even-keeled discussion about several issues raised in class, I realized that what was most upsetting about this whole situation was that the door to discussion had been closed. Permanently.

My classmates and professors at OISE had absolutely no “tolerance” for anyone who opposed their views on tolerance, equity, diversity and social justice. I was fighting a losing battle. It was obvious that my classmates and professors were on a mission.

This mission involved indoctrinating each student teacher, and eventually each high school student, with the tenets of their secular religion. The religion’s highest objective was to attain “equity, diversity and social justice” in all aspects of education and social life.

While it sounded great, when seen through an OISE lens it was actually a very totalitarian policy, with a complex language and some very self-righteous believers. I could not even speak about a possible doubt without being cast out of the group altogether and labeled a diversity-hater and an enemy of social justice.

I desperately tried to fight this belief that I did not care about the issues discussed in class, simply because I approached them from a different angle. I was consistently shut down by shallow arguments and silly comments that implied I simply hadn’t developed as far as the rest of the group on the “progressive path”.

One of my classmates even began crying and told the class she found it very hurtful when people (looking in my direction) did not pay attention to issues she found to be of profound importance (this particular class focused on homosexual education). It was all very demeaning and, by the end of the year, I had mentally and emotionally checked out and no longer spoke in class at all.

Fighting against 30 classmates every day took its toll. The last comment I made in class was to let my peers and future colleagues know that it frightened me that they could not deal with my questions or my disbelief in their policies without ostracizing me, for how would they treat the high school students that disagreed with them? As you can imagine, this did not lead to an increase in my popularity.

Needless to say, the year passed by at a dreadfully slow pace. I found myself sitting through classes on how to get hetero-normative language out of the schools, reading countless documents that had been reviewed for “equity”, and reading mandatory Marxist and feminist literature.

I was urged to attend equity/diversity workshops, and asked to volunteer in Gender Construction workshops that were mandatory for grade 10 students, where issues like “straight supremacy” would be discussed by curious 15-year-olds.

At one point, a classmate asked the professor: “So, are we supposed to be activists, or teachers?” and the professor promptly replied, “Can the two really be separated?”

...

Looking back on my experience now, I realize that, as a student attending OISE, I was subject to what should be described as indoctrination. This indoctrination is of great concern not only to me, but also to all Canadians, no matter what side of the political spectrum.

It is institutions such as OISE that educate the educators, who will in turn educate the nation. It is scary and sad to think of the thousands of students who will be indoctrinated in the classrooms of all my like-minded, unquestioning, and intolerant OISE-educated peers.