FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
5 August 2026
OTTAWA — Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) is raising serious concerns about the methodology, framing, and advisory process behind the Government of Canada-commissioned report, “Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences (CASE)”.
IJV unequivocally condemns antisemitic harassment, threats, Holocaust denialism, and discrimination. The experiences described by students in the report deserve to be taken seriously. However, research intended to shape government and university policy must be representative and capable of distinguishing antisemitism from political disagreement.
The CASE survey was distributed through Jewish student organizations, community networks, and other related channels. The report acknowledges that recruitment was uneven across organizations, provinces and institutions; that the survey was not weighted; and that its results should be interpreted descriptively rather than as precise population estimates. Nevertheless, the report makes broad claims about antisemitism becoming systemic across Canadian postsecondary institutions.
“The report makes sweeping national claims from a self-selected and unweighted sample,” said IJV member Nir Hagigi, a recent Carleton University graduate and incoming MA student at York University. “The experiences described by respondents deserve to be heard, but they cannot automatically be generalized to every Jewish student or every Canadian campus.”
IJV was not consulted during the development of the report, was not invited to participate in its advisory process, and was not given an opportunity to distribute the survey to the hundreds of IJV student members connected to campuses across the country.
Instead, the survey appears to have been circulated primarily through established Jewish organizations that have often marginalized progressive, non-Zionist, and anti-Zionist Jewish students. This recruitment process inevitably limited who encountered the survey and whose experiences were represented.
The advisory board also raises concerns about representation. Its members include representatives associated with mainstream Zionist institutions. IJV could not identify even a single anti-Zionist or non-Zionist Jewish organization or scholar on the board, nor any meaningful representation of the progressive Jewish students whose experiences the report claims to document. A study purporting to reflect the diversity of Jewish student experiences should not be developed through such a narrow institutional and demographic lens.
The report’s assumptions are also embedded in the survey itself. One question combines “Jews, Judaism, Israel, or Zionism” into a single category, making it incredibly difficult to distinguish anti-Jewish prejudice from criticism of a state or political ideology.
The report also adopts highly contested definitions, presenting Zionism as Jewish self-determination in an “ancestral homeland” while defining anti-Zionism as a movement rooted in “libel and distortion” that seeks the “erasure” (and, elsewhere, the “annihilation”) of Israel. The report further utilizes the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which has been repeatedly criticized for its chilling effects on freedom of expression.
“This report begins from the assumption that Jewish identity and Zionism are inseparable. That assumption excludes many Jews before the research even begins,” said Larry Haiven, a member of IJV’s Steering Committee and professor emeritus at Saint Mary’s University. “Antisemitism must be confronted seriously, but criticism of Israel and opposition to Zionism cannot simply be counted as evidence of hatred toward Jews.”
IJV is calling on the federal government and Canadian universities not to use the CASE report to justify censorship, surveillance, or restrictions on free speech and advocacy. Future research must include a broader range of Jewish students and organizations, disclose its recruitment partners, use more representative methods, and clearly distinguish Jewish identity from political belief.
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Media contact:
Nir Hagigi, Acting Communications Coordinator
Independent Jewish Voices Canada
communications@ijvcanada.org