The Challenge and the Solution
Many employers now invest significant time and funds in DEI programming for their teams. To ensure it’s inclusive, you must first recognize its gaps. Once you identify that the Canadian Jewish experience with antisemitism is absent or underrepresented in your current DEI space, you can then move forward to have a constructive and impactful conversation.
Mixed Signals
Times and expectations have changed. Today, companies and organizations recognize their success is linked to their sensitivity to Canada’s increasingly multicultural society. If they want an effective workforce, diversity, equity and inclusion are no longer a nice-to-have but rather a need-to-have. But what happens when that programming is itself not fully inclusive and doesn’t live up to the equity and diversity it’s supposed to ensure?
DEIs Harmful Blind Spots
While DEI training in Canada promotes tolerance and respect for multiculturalism, too often its content excludes Jews and ignores or downplays antisemitism. This is despite Canadian Jews being the most targeted religious minority when it comes to hate crimes, according to Statistics Canada.
Providing a greater understanding of Canada’s Jewish community, this event will help the Human Resources Community ensure that Jewish voices are heard, respected and understood. The presentation covers historic and contemporary antisemitism, how to address it and ways to build allyship. As part of its content, it provides the following:
- The ability to name and identify multiple forms of antisemitism, old and new.
- Knowledge of the origins of antisemitism; often referred to as “history’s oldest hatred”.
- An understanding of the link between historical and current manifestations of antisemitism.
- A recognition that antisemitism is an integral part of DEI discussions on hate and intolerance.
- How to be an ally in fighting antisemitism, as part of an overall commitment against hatred of minorities.
This event is in partnership with the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center (FSWC), which is one of Canada’s leading human rights organizations combatting antisemitism and other forms of hate. The FSWC was founded in 1989 and through its extensive advocacy work and education programs teaching the lessons of the Holocaust and other genocides, FSWC promotes the principles of tolerance, social justice and democracy. Based in Toronto, FSWC is affiliated with the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an international human rights organization headquartered in Los Angeles, which has an official NGO presence at the United Nations, UNESCO, the Council of Europe and the Latin American Parliament.
