Introduction

This article explores how Jewish organizations navigate settler colonialism and Indigenous–settler relations in Canada, especially given the position of Jews as a historically marginalized population with considerable internal diversity. It focuses especially on the way organizations are engaging with reconciliation, a controversial process that refers to the restoration or repair of damaged relationships between settler society and Indigenous peoples. That is, how do Canadian Jews draw on their distinctive experiences, histories, and traditions when engaging with the idea and practice of reconciliation? Moreover, how are these practices shaped by the sociopolitical context? I begin to answer these questions by theorizing the Jewish location within settler societies, focusing especially on Jews as “probationary settlers” in Canada. The discussion then considers reconciliation, some of its key critiques, and examines how Jews (and other minority migrant groups) navigate this process. Finally, the analysis addresses several frameworks or paradigms that Jewish organizations use to guide their reconciliation efforts: Holocaust commemoration and comparative genocide; diversity paradigms, which are often expressed through multicultural or anti-racist frameworks; and nation-to-nation relations. The goal of this analysis is to develop a preliminary roadmap for Indigenous–Jewish reconciliation on the basis of practices that have only begun to emerge in Jewish organizational settings. I argue that Jewish reconciliation frameworks are shaped by the shifting and somewhat ambiguous position of Jews within Canadian society. As such, each framework responds to the settler colonial state albeit in different ways—some are deeply entrenched in colonial ideology while others envision alternative forms of nationhood.

Jews occupy a precarious position in Canadian society that has historically manifested through support for the status quo. The Yiddish expression sha shtil, which translates as “Hush! Quiet!” and roughly means “don’t rock the boat,” refers to passive support for established social institutions. In his study of Holocaust commemoration in Canada, Franklin Bialystok observes that Jewish organizations in the early post-war period often embraced a sha shtil approach to social and political change. It reflected the broader goals of the established Jewish community “to free themselves of the constraints of the traditional immigrant community by moving to the suburbs, speaking English instead of Yiddish, rising from the proletarian ranks to the professions through education and acculturation, and abandoning their traditional secular and religious bonds” (Bialystok 2000, 7)—in other words, to become an integrated part of Canadian society. This strategy made sense within its context and, in particular, was rooted in the community’s fears of discrimination. At the time, Jews occupied a marginal position within Canadian society, and this precarity was only exacerbated by an influx of Jewish refugees who were mostly poor and had limited knowledge of English or French. Yet it also had obvious risks, namely that preserving the status quo has the effect of reinscribing social inequality. Social change requires people to reject the status quo by challenging dominant institutions, political frameworks, and social structures. As such, sha shtil may have been useful as a short-term survival strategy for Canadian Jews in the mid-twentieth century, but it also limited their ability to challenge social systems such as settler colonialism.

The most pervasive and deeply rooted form of inequality in Canada is between Indigenous peoples and settler society. As a settler colonial state, Canada was (and continues to be) founded on the displacement of Indigenous peoples from their land. As such, disparity between Indigenous peoples and settler society, which has been documented by several public inquiries, is a structural condition that permeates every social and political institution in the country. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC; 2015, 194, 186, 217) addresses these inequalities in detail, reporting for example that in comparison with their non-Indigenous counterparts: Indigenous adults are more than twice as likely not to complete high school; First Nations children are 12 times more likely to be placed in foster care; and Indigenous people are 7 times more likely to be admitted to the prison system. Addressing inequality and working to establish healthy Indigenous-settler relationships—a process often referred to as reconciliation—is unlikely to occur through simple changes to public policy or institutional practice. Rather, it requires the systemic and structural transformation of Canadian society. As Pam Palmater (2020, 231–32) explains, “reconciliation should have an existential, substantive meaning. It is not just about residential schools, but the entire relationship between Indigenous Peoples, the Crown, Canada and Canadians…I am talking about federal, provincial, territorial and municipal governments. But I also mean churches, Canadian citizens, mainstream media, corporations, businesses, universities and colleges.”

Canadian Jews have in recent years begun to consider their relationships with Indigenous peoples and how to be involved in the reconciliation process. Scholars document a long history of encounters between Jews and Indigenous peoples, which were often mediated by commercial trade and economic pursuits—activities deeply entangled with settlement and colonization (Colpitts 2013; Koffman 2020). According to David Koffman (2017), Canadian Jews have expressed particular “interest” in Indigenous issues since 2002 when David Ahenakew, former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, made antisemitic remarks during a lecture. Since then, Koffman argues, Jewish engagement with Indigenous peoples has centered on two themes: self-determination as it pertains to people and land, and suffering related to histories of social exclusion and discrimination. The present article builds on Koffman’s analysis in a few key ways. Whereas Koffman broadly surveys Canadian Jewish engagement with Indigenous issues since the millennium, my analysis focuses specifically on the way this engagement is mediated by the discourse of reconciliation, which has proliferated since publication of the TRC’s final report in 2015. As such, this article also adds to Koffman’s study by documenting more recent examples of Indigenous-Jewish engagement. Moreover, my analysis attempts to develop a theoretical model that can help to better understand and explain the nature of Indigenous–Jewish relations in settler colonial societies.

Within settler colonial Canada, Indigenous-Jewish relations are often characterized by an imbalance of power. For example, Holocaust commemoration is an important site of dialogue between Jewish and Indigenous experience, but it also demonstrates how exchanges can be embedded within asymmetrical power relations (Stanger-Ross and Marks 2022; Chalmers 2019b). Reflecting on the intersection of Holocaust memory and settler colonial genocide in Canada, Dorota Glowacka demonstrates that historical comparisons have a tendency to reproduce dominant (i.e., Eurocentric and colonial) forms of social recognition. As such, uncritical comparison of Indigenous and Jewish histories can lead to a dilemma wherein “non-white systems of knowledge have to be verified by the white epistemic apparatus in order to be recognized as valid” (Glowacka 2019, 407). This means that even if Canadian Jews eschew sha shtil and actively challenge the status quo, they may do so in ways that continue to rely on prevailing social and political frameworks. This raises the question—to draw on Audre Lorde’s (1984) now-classic formulation—whether it is necessary to rock the boat or dismantle it.

While the present study focuses on settler colonialism, reconciliation, and Indigenous-Jewish relations within contemporary Canada, many of these findings are relevant to other settler colonial contexts. Australia is a particularly salient comparison because, like Canada, it is a settler society that originated as a colony of the British empire. As such, Australian society has in recent decades confronted its own history of settler colonialism, land theft, and colonial genocide (Wolfe 1994; Moses 2008). These conversations have similarly coalesced around the discourse of reconciliation, which in Australia is led mainly by the not-for-profit organization Reconciliation Australia.Footnote 1 Although the discourse of reconciliation does not prevail in every settler society, such as the USA or Palestine/Israel, the present study may still provide insight to building respectful relations between Indigenous peoples and refugee or diaspora communities in these contexts.

Settler Colonialism and the Jewish Location

Before exploring Jewish approaches to reconciliation, it is useful to consider how Canadian Jewry is positioned within settler colonial society. Patrick Wolfe (2012, 286) defines settler colonialism as a distinct form of imperial domination where “European intruders [strive] to dispossess indigenous peoples and replace them on their land.” He stresses that settler colonialism is not an act of displacement but rather a set of structural conditions embedded within social, political, and cultural institutions (Wolfe 2006). As such, settler colonialism configures human populations in distinctive ways and governs interactions between groups. A prevailing population model frames settler colonial societies as a binary opposition between colonizer and colonized. This model characterizes the theory of Frantz Fanon (1963, 38), who describes “the colonial world [as] a world cut in two…The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers. The two zones are opposed.” From this perspective, settler colonial societies contain two discrete groups, the “settler” and the “native,” who are separated by a frontier that preserves both difference and opposition between them. While this model can provide insight to social dynamics in colonial contexts, it does not accurately reflect population economy in countries such as Canada, Australia, and the USA. Marginalized migrants such as refugees or the descendants of enslaved persons, for example, are neither Indigenous (to that colonized territory) nor are they unambiguous members of the settler class.

Lorenzo Veracini offers a more nuanced model of population economy in settler societies. This model retains the distinction between migrant/Indigenous as well as colonizer/colonized, although it does not necessarily conflate these categorical divisions (i.e., migrants are not always colonizers). In particular, Veracini (2010, 16–17) proposes that settler colonial societies contain three broad populations that interact in complex ways: the settler collective, a population of historical (usually European) migrants who have permanently occupied a territory; the Indigenous other, the traditional and ancestral inhabitants of that territory; and exogenous others, marginalized and often racialized migrants excluded from the settler collective, such as refugees or temporary foreign workers. Each population contains diversity (i.e., there are diverse Indigenous peoples rather than a singular “native”), and furthermore, the boundaries between populations are often permeable. For example, exogenous others may also be “‘probationary’ settlers, waiting to be individually admitted into the settler body politic” (Veracini 2010, 26). In this way, minority groups can be complicit in settler colonialism while also remaining marginal populations.

Partly because of these porous boundaries, Jews have come to occupy a complicated and somewhat ambiguous position within settler society. Many Jews migrated to Canada and other settler societies because of increasing antisemitism and persecution in the places they had often lived for centuries. In Canada, the first major wave of Jewish immigration occurred during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as East European Jews fled from pogroms and political instability in the Russian Empire. The second major wave followed the Second World War, which left tens of thousands of European Jews living as displaced persons. Between 1946 and 1951, more than 15,000 Jewish survivors arrived in Canada as war orphans, skilled workers, or refugees, and the number of survivors continued to grow in the following years (Tulchinsky 2008, 403). While many of these immigrants found improved conditions and opportunities in Canada, they nevertheless encountered continued discrimination and social exclusion (Robinson 2015, 106–15). In other words, Jews were exogenous others in Canada during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the decades following the war, however, Canadian Jewry successfully fought for anti-discrimination legislation and gradually integrated into mainstream Canadian society, a process facilitated by the emergence of multiculturalism as a national framework in the 1970s (Tulchinsky 2008, 427–58). The effect was that, by the end of the twentieth century, Canadian Jews were largely accepted as—and perceived themselves to be—members of the settler collective. In this way, Canadian Jewry followed the trajectory of the “probationary settler” who begins as a racialized other and gradually transitions to become part of the settler class.

Outside of Canada, namely in Palestine/Israel, the Jewish relationship to settler colonialism becomes further nuanced. The Jewish people originated in the biblical land of Israel, a region that is today contested by Palestinians and Israelis. Although a small number of Mizrahi Jews have continuously lived in the region, the majority migrated from the area beginning around the first century to become a transnational and de-territorialized community of diaspora (Boyarin and Boyarin 1993; see also Daniele 2020). When Jews began to migrate en masse to the newly founded State of Israel in 1948, many perceived this as a return to their ancestral homeland. The status of Jews within this modern nation-state is therefore hotly contested. On the one hand, some scholars and activists view the State of Israel as a settler colonial project where Jewish society is the colonizer (Veracini 2006; Zureik 2016). On the other hand, there is ongoing discussion concerning whether Jews qualify as an Indigenous people (Koffman 2017, 44–47; see also B’nai Brith Canada 2017; Feldman 2020).Footnote 2 In short, when considered in the context of diaspora and transnational Jewry, Canadian Jews do not occupy a single position within settler society but rather inhabit multiple, shifting, and contested locations.

The Possibility and Peril of Reconciliation in Canada

Over the past two decades, reconciliation has become a dominant framework in Canada for addressing Indigenous–settler relations and the country’s ongoing history of settler colonialism (James 2017; Wyile 2017). Reconciliation emerged as a political framework during the Nuremberg trials in the wake of the Second World War, which held individuals accountable for their roles in war crimes and entrenched the idea of political states as moral actors. Drawing on the logic of Nuremberg, dozens of nation-states have since conducted truth and reconciliation commissions in response to histories of state violence, often though not always during periods of political transition (Gaertner 2020, 18–66). In Canada, reconciliation took shape as a public and political discourse in the 1990s, although as Hannah Wyile (2017) observes, two distinct versions appeared: “reconciliation-as-relationship,” which is rooted in transitional justice and seeks to heal relationships between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state; and “reconciliation-as-consistency,” wherein Canadian society demands that Indigenous peoples accept the fact of state supremacy. The national focus on reconciliation reached a peak largely through the activities of the TRC, which began its proceedings in 2009 and released its final report in 2015.

Reconciliation is a controversial approach to Indigenous–settler relations. Critics observe that while Canada’s federal and provincial governments claim to support reconciliation, they nevertheless create policies that marginalize Indigenous peoples. In The Reconciliation Manifesto, Arthur Manuel (2017, 200–209) argues that “real reconciliation” is possible through the affirmation of Indigenous rights and the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty. He observes that federal and provincial governments transform reconciliation into a hollow discourse that they use to support their own economic and political interests. Using tactics such as Reconciliation Framework Agreements, the federal government extinguishes Aboriginal title and denies constitutional rights in the name of reconciliation. David Gaertner (2020, 220–221) describes this as a “shallow” or “state-centred” reconciliation that sustains the settler colonial state and its capitalist agenda. The language and practice of reconciliation becomes “a state good…a product that the settler colonial government [uses] to manufacture, trade, and profit from” (Gaertner 2020, 6). In this way, the state uses reconciliation simultaneously to advance and conceal the colonial project: the government continues its usual business of land theft and resource extraction while invoking reconciliation to deflect challenges to state legitimacy. As Andrea Landry (2021, 38–39) explains, “reconciliation has become the brand that settler-colonialism has latched on to in order to assert themselves as the ones in power, as the dominant force, within the relationship between Indigenous peoples and settlers…Yet, how can Indigenous peoples reconcile with the colonizer when the knife of the colonizer continues to be forced into our backs?”

In light of ongoing violence to Indigenous peoples and land, some land defenders and activists have concluded that “reconciliation is dead” (Murphy 2020; Palmater 2020, 264–67). This position crystallized during government attempts to build the Coastal GasLink pipeline on the unceded territory of the Wet’suwet’en Nation in northern British Columbia. In 2018, the Supreme Court of British Columbia granted an injunction to Coastal GasLink that prevented protesters from interfering with construction and authorized police to intervene in the seizure of land. When the Royal Canadian Mounted Police launched an armed invasion in February 2020, which involved the arrest of land defenders and Wet’suwet’en Matriarchs, the Unist’ot’en (2020) issued a statement: “Canada tears us from our land. Tears us from our families, from our homes…We have had enough. Enough dialogue, discussion, negotiation at the barrel of a gun. Canada comes to colonize. Reconciliation is dead.” Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists subsequently adopted this argument, transforming “reconciliation is dead” into a social movement in Canada and beyond (Murphy 2020). For example, Vu Bistu Geven?/Where Have You Been?, an artistic collaboration that critically explores Jewish relationships to land and colonialism, began partly as a response to this movement. Members of its artistic team express support for Indigenous rights and assert that “reconciliation is over now as an idea that’s plausible, and our only option is to just side with the Indigenous people…There’s no reconciliation on the horizon” (Romaine et al. 2022, 59:10).

If reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state is no longer viable, reconciliation may still be productive when implemented at the community or grassroots level. The Aboriginal Healing Foundation’s concluding volume on reconciliation, Cultivating Canada: Reconciliation Through the Lens of Cultural Diversity, explores reconciliation from the perspectives of newcomers and racialized minorities in Canada (i.e., in contrast to settlers of British or French ancestry). In his introduction, George Erasmus (2011, vii) explains that “those who have arrived in Canada from places of colonization, war, genocide, and devastation will very likely have valuable insights into historical trauma.” Indeed, scholars have begun to explore the unique roles that refugees, recent immigrants, and racialized persons can play in the reconciliation process (Datta 2020, 2021). This research considers what newcomers and Indigenous peoples can learn from one another and how these groups can work together to dismantle oppressive structures. For example, Edie Venne (2021) observes that immigrant communities are often proficient in the retention and transmission of traditional languages, and she suggests that newcomers can provide insight and support for the revitalization of Indigenous languages. Yet it is important to note that while newcomers and Indigenous peoples often share experiences of discrimination and marginalization, structural inequalities nevertheless exist between them. Nisha Toomey et al. (2021, 63) point to “the multiple ways that the Canadian state recruits newcomers into settler colonial logics” through the immigration process and other forms of socialization. As such, recent immigrants are faced with a challenge and responsibility: first, to become aware of the settler colonial state and their position within it, and second, to challenge colonial structures in a way that contributes to the liberation of Indigenous peoples and marginalized populations.

Jewish Reconciliation Frameworks

On the basis of the final report of the TRC, it is unclear specifically what role Canadian Jews and Canadian Jewish organizations should play in the reconciliation process. The TRC’s 94 Calls to Action primarily address Canadian governments, public institutions, and the Christian churches that operated Residential Schools. Yet it is possible to interpret several calls in a way that is relevant to Jewish organizations, especially those that address education, heritage, and memory. For example, the 79th Call to Action calls for “a reconciliation framework for Canadian heritage and commemoration [that integrates] Indigenous history, heritage values, and memory practices into Canada’s national heritage and history” (TRC 2015, 340). The Jewish Federation of Ottawa collaborated with the First Peoples Group in 2022 to provide an Indigenous Awareness Training Program “in a direct response to the 92nd call to action” for education initiatives in the corporate sector (Ottawa Jewish E-Bulletin 2022). Reconciliation is not limited to the Calls to Action, however, for each person and community has a unique but integral role to play. It is crucial that everyone understands their role because, as Palmater (2020, 266) observes, “people…hold the real power, and that when they choose to exercise that power, they can have a major impact on the status quo.”

The following analysis is based on a survey of Jewish organizations in Canada. It focuses on practices, policies, programs, and other activities that address reconciliation from a Jewish perspective or within a Jewish context. I began by surveying Jewish federations—via websites, publications, and other publicly available content—and branching out to museums, archives, and other organizations as appropriate. Most federation websites include an archive of local Jewish events and activities, which was useful for identifying relevant organizations and practices. Due to a relative paucity of examples, the only criteria for selection was that a program or practice focuses specifically on reconciliation (rather than broadly on Indigenous–settler relations, for example).

Reconciliation frameworks/paradigms often overlap, intersect, and blend with one another as well as other public and political discourses. In other words, while I identify three distinct frameworks, I do not suggest that they are pure or discrete categories. Each organization may favor a particular paradigm, although they tend to engage in reconciliation in ways that rely on multiple strategies. These paradigms also tend to interact with other sociopolitical discourses such as human rights or Quebecois nationalism. Moreover, I do not suggest that the following paradigms—genocide, diversity, and nationalism—are the only way to structure an analysis of reconciliation frameworks. Rather, I have selected the following categories partly because they are closely entwined with Canadian public discourse and therefore provide unique insight to Canadian Jewish experience. While Jewish approaches to reconciliation are only beginning to emerge, the limited cases that currently exist may yield useful insights for future strategies.

The Holocaust and Comparative Genocide

Holocaust commemoration is an important point of intersection between Jewish and Indigenous histories. As Koffman (2017, 30) observes, “Jewish efforts to articulate terms for solidarity with Indigenous peoples…sprang from a sense of sympathy with hardships and historical predicaments Indigenous communities faced and face.” This approach is largely rooted in the comparative study of genocide, and in particular, the fact that both the Holocaust and settler colonialism constitute programs of mass violence sponsored by modern nation-states. Historical parallels have become even more salient through the findings of recent public inquiries: The TRC (2015, 1) concluded that “Canada’s Aboriginal policy…can best be described as ‘cultural genocide’” and the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (2019, 5) determined that “violence experienced by Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people amounts to genocide.” While comparisons often focus on superficial similarities between the Holocaust and settler colonialism, some scholars highlight that these genocides are embedded within broader sociohistorical processes. For example, A. Dirk Moses (2002) argues that the Holocaust and Indigenous genocides are rooted in the nineteenth and twentieth century processes of modernization, nation-building, and racial ideology which demanded the extinction of both Jews and Indigenous peoples.

Comparative frameworks are problematic because they can reproduce unequal power relations. A key criticism is that people widely perceive the Holocaust as a prototypical genocide and that Holocaust memory may therefore conceal, occlude, or distort other cases of genocide (Moses 2002; MacDonald 2008; Rothberg 2009, 12–16). The uneven treatment of genocide has contributed to controversy surrounding the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR), for example, which devotes a gallery to the Holocaust but also addresses other genocides (Lehrer 2015). During exhibition planning and design, several groups (especially Ukrainian interest groups) lobbied for recognition of their respective atrocities within the museum, producing an “‘Oppression Olympics’ whereby groups compete for the mantle of the most oppressed without dismantling dominant structures and discourses” (Hankivsky and Dhamoon 2013, 900). In other words, Holocaust memory can reproduce the status quo, and in settler colonial contexts, can contribute to the erasure or delegitimization of Indigenous genocides within public and political discourse (Logan 2014; Savage 2013). Partly because of the Holocaust’s potential both to illuminate and to eclipse other genocides, scholars are divided about whether the CMHR is a colonial or decolonial institution (Logan 2014; Lehrer 2015; Duhamel 2017; Chalmers 2019a, 263–321). Genocide commemoration does not necessarily lead to competition and erasure. In a study of Residential Schools photographs, D. Lyn Daniels uses W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz to bring the history of Residential Schools into conversation with the Holocaust. While acknowledging the potential pitfalls of this approach, she contends that comparisons can be productive when used to critically explore issues of state power. Daniels (2018, 2) therefore proposes reading Austerlitz not as a study of the Holocaust but rather “as an account of the ongoing effects of the increasing intrusion of the state into the lives of individuals, similar to intrusions experienced by Indigenous peoples.”

Canadian Jewish organizations host a variety of programs, exhibitions, public statements, and other initiatives that compare Jewish and Indigenous experiences of persecution. Some initiatives explicitly create dialogue or explore parallels between events. In response to the “discovery” of 215 unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, for example, a group of rabbis from Hamilton issued a statement that highlights historical and ideological similarities. Among other things, this statement observes that “our people were killed in the name of enlightenment as the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, not at all unlike the Indian Problem spoken of by the Canadian, Duncan Campbell Scott, who ran the residential school system from 1913 to 1932” (Arnold 2021). An art exhibit sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Edmonton and the Edmonton Public Library, “They Didn’t Know We Were Seeds,” invites comparisons in a less direct way.Footnote 3 The exhibit includes eighteen portraits by Carol Wylie, nine of Holocaust survivors and nine of Residential School survivors. In an artist statement, Wylie explains that the portraiture series aims both to document individual stories of survival and “to create a silent dialogue between Jewish survivors and Indigenous survivors.”

Other initiatives avoid overt comparisons but rather situate Indigenous genocides within a broader context of Holocaust commemoration. As part of its programming for Holocaust Education Week 2021, the Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre included the event “We Were Children Talkback: Canadian Residential School Denialism,” which discussed the “denial, distortion, and minimization” of Residential School history. Similarly, the Montreal Holocaust Museum has organized several events that focus on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. The museum explains that this programming is rooted in its mission “to sensitize the public to the universal perils of antisemitism, racism, hate, and indifference [by making] past-present links between the history of the Holocaust and human rights abuses today” (Montreal Holocaust Museum 2020a, 27). Programming at the Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre and Montreal Holocaust Museum reveals the challenge of comparative approaches. These events focus specifically on Indigenous genocides and therefore avoid making direct comparisons to the Holocaust. Yet both events position Indigenous genocides within the context of Holocaust commemoration. As such, they risk framing the Holocaust as a prototypical genocide and thereby using Holocaust memory to interpret the experiences of Indigenous peoples.

A pair of articles in Zachor, a biannual magazine published by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, provide further insight to such comparisons. One article is written by Robbie Waisman, a Holocaust survivor and educator whose work addresses reconciliation and Indigenous-Jewish relationships. Waisman, who was an honorary witness for the TRC, explains that he is motivated largely by the silence surrounding the history and legacy of Residential Schools: “When I ultimately shared my experiences as a Holocaust survivor with First Nations communities, first in Yellowknife and later elsewhere in Canada, I was totally astonished and rewarded by the fact that some who had never spoken about their horrible experiences were encouraged to do so” (Nemetz and Waisman 2015, 13). While stressing that “it is impossible to compare the Holocaust to any tragedy in recent history,” Waisman explains that “having gone through the Holocaust gave me an opportunity to connect with [Indigenous peoples] and to help them realize what they can do with their lives after their traumatic past” (Nemetz and Waisman 2015, 14). The emphasis on sharing stories of survival—rather than understanding historical parallels—has several implications. First, it allows Waisman to address histories of violence while focusing on healing and relationship building within contemporary Canada. However, it also evades debates concerning (and to some extent gives implicit support to) the Holocaust’s “uniqueness.”

Waisman’s article complements a subsequent article by Brad Marsden, an educator and intergenerational Residential School survivor from Gitksan Nation. Responding to a seminar at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Marsden (2018, 7) notes “I was struck by the similarities of the Jewish people’s and First Nations people’s experiences, and more importantly, their reactions and responses to these respective traumas.” Marsden uses his own experience to explain how silence perpetuates intergenerational trauma, and he encourages people to share their stories of suffering and survival. Like Waisman, Marsden (2018, 10) avoids historical comparisons and instead focuses on the ways people respond to traumatic events: “Even though the dates, details and methods of the Jewish and First Nations communities may be different, it is the resulting disempowering feelings such as: anger, fear, confusion, helplessness, disempowerment, shame and guilt that are the same and the ways we have chosen to respond to them.” Both Waisman and Marsden explore storytelling as an important part of the healing process, and in this respect they suggest that Indigenous peoples can learn from Jewish responses to the Holocaust. As such, they employ a comparative framework that does not address events themselves but rather individual and community responses to these histories.

Comparative genocide, especially as it overlaps with Holocaust commemoration, is perhaps the most common framework that Jewish organizations use to approach reconciliation and Indigenous–Jewish relations. Comparisons can be explicit or implicit, and they may address various dimensions of genocide: historical similarities and differences, common sociohistorical conditions, individual and collective responses to trauma. These conversations regularly overlap with discourses surrounding human rights, discrimination, state power, and other themes. It is noteworthy that many comparisons focus on Residential Schools—the last of which closed in 1996—rather than addressing settler colonialism as an ongoing process. These comparisons enable the “strategic isolation and containment of residential schools as a discrete historical problem of educational malpractice rather than one devastating prong of an overarching and multifaceted system of colonial oppression that persists in the present” (Henderson and Wakeham 2009, 2). Comparative frameworks may therefore be especially productive when attuned to the broader structural, ideological, and historical forces that shape Canadian society.

Diversity, Multiculturalism, and Anti-racism

Multiculturalism, which was adopted as federal policy in 1971 and codified in the 1988 Canadian Multiculturalism Act, has become the leading framework for governing difference and diversity within the public sphere in Canada (Kymlicka 2021). As such, it is a key way for minority groups, such as Jews and many non-European migrant communities, to position themselves within the Canadian state and society. Multiculturalism is based on the premises that, first, Canadian society comprises diverse ethnic, religious, linguistic, and other cultural groups; and second, these groups are entitled to preserve and express their cultural traditions. As both a political ideology and public discourse, multiculturalism creates national unity largely through the accommodation, expression, and celebration of diversity in public life (Mann 2016; Kymlicka 2021). While framed as a “cultural” project, multiculturalism emerged in the early twentieth century as a way to regulate “race” and remains rooted in racial ideology (Meister 2021). Consequently, Canadian governments often frame multiculturalism as a dimension of anti-racism,Footnote 4 although scholars critically ask whether multiculturalism functions “as/and/or” anti-racist practice (Mills 2007).

Multiculturalism and anti-racism can be problematic when applied to Indigenous peoples, land, or reconciliation. In their critique of a multicultural book series on Canadian history, Krysta Pandolfi and Carl E. James (2017, 104) observe that “attempts at inclusive education within a paradigm of a historicized multiculturalism…appear to be contingent on an uncritical embrace of Western imperial narratives based on discourses of terra nullius, individualism, and conquest.” Multiculturalism elides Indigenous peoples and land in several ways: it either erases Indigenous peoples from Canadian history; or it reduces “Indigeneity” to “culture” and thereby assimilates Indigenous peoples into Canadian society. As such, decolonizing and Indigenist scholars distinguish between anti-racist and anti-colonial practice (Lawrence and Dua 2011). Eve Tuck et al. (2012, 23) explain that frameworks such as multiculturalism and anti-racism involve “acts of inclusion [which] assimilate Indigenous sovereignty, ways of knowing, and ways of being by remaking a collective-comprised tribal identity into an individualized ethnic identity.” While acknowledging the potential value of such frameworks, they also stress that decolonization “cannot easily be grafted onto pre-existing discourses/frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they are anti-racist” (Tuck and Yang 2012, 3). In other words, multicultural, anti-racist, and diversity paradigms can be effective ways to manage difference within Canadian society, but they are inadequate responses to settler colonialism because they decenter Indigenous peoples and land.Footnote 5

The limitations of diversity paradigms are evident in the way some Jewish organizations develop programming. Kolot Mayim Reform Temple in Victoria, for example, organized a six-part lecture series in 2021/22 called “Celebrating Diversity in Jewish Life.” Each lecture focused on an aspect of diversity or difference in regard to Jewish experience, which included: feminist and transgender readings of Torah; disability within the Jewish community; and the intersection of Jewish identity with other ethno-racial identities. The final lecture in the series, “An Indigenous and Jewish Dialogue on Truth and Reconciliation,” entailed a conversation between Adam Cutler, senior rabbi at Adath Israel Congregation, and Patricia June Vickers, a trauma scholar, intergenerational Residential School survivor, and member of the Eagle clan from Gitxaala. The event “br[ought] together two Canadian voices” to ask “is there a place where Indigenous people’s journey towards truth and reconciliation can meaningfully intersect with the history and values of the Jewish community?” (Kolot Mayim Reform Temple n.d.). By framing Indigenous peoples as a “Canadian voice,” Kolot Mayim assimilates them into the settler colonial state; it elides the fact that Indigenous peoples are distinct and sovereign nations whose members may in some instances actively refuse Canadian citizenship (see Simpson 2014). Furthermore, the lecture series as a whole decenters Indigenous peoples and land. To be sure, the “Indigenous and Jewish Dialogue” event placed Indigenous peoples, land, and reconciliation at the center of its discussion; within the context of the larger six-part series, however, Indigeneity becomes only one example of difference within Canadian society.

Jewish organizations may also decenter Indigeneity through the work of anti-racist, interfaith, or diversity committees. In 2021, Beth Tzedec Congregation (2021) in Toronto created an Anti-Racism, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee “to promote a safe and welcoming environment for all within the Beth Tzedec community.” While broadly promoting diversity locally and nationally, the committee has also organized events that explore Indigenous–settler relations. In the same year, the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver (2022, 9) and the Rabbinical Association of Vancouver created the role of Interfaith Liaison to “provide a consistent voice and presence at the many tables at which faith communities gather [and] raise awareness and acceptance of the diversity of faith-based communities.” One of its main initiatives has been “The Other People” project, which is “a group of individuals representing Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, the Indigenous community, the Black community, and Judaism” who deliver presentations on social exclusion and discrimination to local high schools (Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver 2022, 18). While this partnership may be an effective way to build relationships and provide anti-discrimination programming, it is noteworthy that it limits Indigeneity (as well as Black and Jewish identities) to often faith-based definitions. Like Beth Tzedec’s Anti-Racism Committee and Kolot Mayim’s “Celebrating Diversity” series, “The Other People” project does not accurately reflect the role of Indigenous peoples and land within the settler colonial project.

The governance of difference in the public sphere has evolved differently in Quebec, where conversations surrounding diversity are shaped by the sociopolitical framework of interculturalism. Whereas multiculturalism promotes cultural diversity within a (purportedly) neutral public sphere, interculturalism recognizes the existence of a cultural majority.Footnote 6 Specifically, Quebecois interculturalism promotes a shared national identity that preserves certain elements of the majority culture, while at the same time responding to minority groups in a way that does not demand their assimilation into the dominant culture. As Gérard Bouchard (2015, 31) explains, interculturalism becomes a form of “integrative pluralism, centred on a balanced perspective on the majority-minorities relationship and conceived in a spirit of synthesis, which requires taking into account the various dimensions (cultural, civic, political, and social) inherent to the management of diversity.” In Quebec, the majority culture comprises Francophone and historically Catholic dimensions of Quebecois society and its respective values, traditions, and institutions (in contrast to Anglophone and historically Protestant culture in the rest of Canada). It is noteworthy that Bouchard (2015, 8) specifically excludes Indigenous peoples from the intercultural model “at the request of the aboriginals themselves [who] do not want to be considered a cultural minority (and even less an ‘ethnic group’) within the Quebec nation.”

The Montreal Holocaust Museum responds to diversity in a way that engages both multicultural and intercultural paradigms. This approach is evident in its public statement on Bill 62, a law concerning “state religious neutrality” that, among other things, denies public services to Muslim women who wear a face covering. The museum stresses that “without respect for cultural differences and religious practices, we cannot respect human dignity. In our view, social cohesion does not depend on cultural or religious uniformity, but on respect for all members of society” (Montreal Holocaust Museum 2017). In this statement, the museum challenges interculturalism, which privileges a cultural majority, while advocating for a multicultural approach that focuses on individual expressions of cultural difference. To some extent the museum applies this approach to Indigenous–settler relations. The Montreal Holocaust Museum (2019; 2020b) has published several statements on Indigenous peoples and settler colonialism in Quebec, responding specifically to the report of the Viens Commission, the death of Joyce Echaquan, and Premier Francois Legault’s denial of “systemic racism” in the province. While these statements often refer to “systemic discrimination” against Indigenous peoples (thereby echoing the language of the Viens Commission), they also use the language of racism and multiculturalism. For example, one statement affirms that “unchecked racism has deadly consequences for Indigenous Peoples, Black people, and other people of colour” (Montreal Holocaust Museum 2020b). Although the museum is not always consistent in its approach, it sometimes frames Indigenous–settler relations through a diversity paradigm that is informed by both Canadian and Quebecois models.

Reconciliation has a complicated relationship to diversity, anti-racist, and multicultural frameworks. Since the 1970s, multiculturalism has become the leading national discourse on difference, so it is especially comprehensible to and salient for many people living in Canada. To be sure, settler colonialism is a multifaceted social structure that acts upon gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race, and other aspects of identity in complex ways (see Arvin et al. 2013). Moreover, Indigeneity is neither race nor culture, although settler colonialism is rooted in racist and white supremacist ideology (TRC 2015, 47–53). However, settler colonialism is at root the dispossession of Indigenous land, and any productive response must keep Indigeneity, Indigenous peoples, and land at the center of discussion. Diversity paradigms are flawed because they fundamentally misrepresent the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian settler state. What they fail to comprehend, as Audra Simpson (2014, 3) explains with specific reference to the Kanien’kehá:ka of Kahnawà:ke, is that Indigenous peoples “are Indigenous nationals of a strangulated political order who do all they can to live a political life robustly, with dignity as Nationals.”

Nation-to-Nation Relations

Another way to approach reconciliation is as a relationship between distinct and autonomous nations. In Canada, nation-to-nation relations are the legal and political basis for the treaty-making process, and the TRC (2015, 249; see also the 45th Call to Action) refers to the Treaties between Indigenous nations and the British Crown as “a sacred obligation that commits both parties to maintain respectful relationships and share lands and resources equitably.” Rachael Yacaaʔał George (2017, 57–59) suggests that nation-to-nation models can be productive because they affirm Indigenous nationhood and self-determination; that is, they presuppose Indigenous peoples as sovereign and self-governing nations. In practice however, this framework has failed to facilitate reconciliation or produce respectful relations. For George and other critics of reconciliation (see preceding sections), nation-to-nation relations are fundamentally impossible in a colonial nation-state that denies Indigenous sovereignty, fails to respect the Treaties, and unilaterally imposes its will on Indigenous peoples and lands.

Yet the nation-to-nation model may be useful when considered outside the Canadian nation-state. Joshua Ben David Nichols proposes “reimagining” reconciliation in a way that rejects the premise of Crown sovereignty and is instead based on a relationship between nations. This involves transforming dominant political and legal frameworks “to disaggregate the notions of ‘nation’ and ‘state’ so that we can begin to come to grips with the pluri-national reality of the Canadian state. Practically speaking, this means that [the Constitution] must be interpreted in a manner that is consistent with the fact that Indigenous peoples are and have always been peoples” (Nichols 2020, 23). This may be an especially productive way for Canadian Jews to approach reconciliation because, to some degree, Jewish identity is based on the disaggregation of peoplehood and territory. For example, Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin (1993) contend that Jewish tradition took shape not in the biblical land of Israel but, rather, through the development of rabbinic thought within and about diaspora. In this way, diaspora becomes “the ground of Jewish identity” and Jewishness “begins with a people forever unconnected with a particular land, a people that calls into question the idea that a people must have a land in order to be a people” (Boyarin and Boyarin 1993, 718). That is, in contrast to Westphalian models of sovereignty, the Jewish people share a sense of nationhood without necessarily sharing geopolitical territory.Footnote 7 This political position may be especially useful in settler colonial contexts because, as Madeleine Cohen (2020, 7–8) observes, diasporic identity enables “a communal and even national identity rooted in a territory, but without claims to territorialism, chauvinistic nationalism, or exclusive rights to the land.”

While less common than diversity or Holocaust-based frameworks, a few organizations approach reconciliation as a relationship between nations. Unlike multicultural or anti-racist frameworks that frame Indigenous peoples as one of many cultural groups, a nation-to-nation paradigm is likely to center Indigenous peoples and land. Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom, a reform synagogue in Westmount, Quebec, has been especially active in developing this sort of programming. Under the “Community” section of its website, Temple includes a page devoted to truth and reconciliation. This page includes a territorial acknowledgement, a Yom Kippur sermon that addresses Jewish complicity in settler colonial genocides, and a list of recommended readings, films, and online resources, among other things. The synagogue conducts much of this work in a way that engages with Indigenous nations both locally and across Canada, and especially with the Kanien’kehá:ka nation upon whose land Temple is located. The territorial acknowledgement, for example, includes a 12-minute video recorded during Purim in 2022 that begins with a thanksgiving address from Ka’nahsohon Kevin Deer, a Faithkeeper from Kahnawake, who guided the writing of the acknowledgement. Apart from a reference to “the earliest treaties [which] were broken by Europeans,” the acknowledgement neither addresses Canada nor situates itself within the state’s legal and political frameworks (Temple 2022, 8:37).Footnote 8 Rather, it focuses on relationships between Jews and Indigenous peoples and the values “that our traditions and our spiritualities share” (Temple 2022, 5:17).

Temple’s commitment to reconciliation and relationship-building is largely expressed through the activities of its Truth and Reconciliation Committee, which was formed during summer 2021. The Committee “reach[es] out to local First Nations in the spirit of allyship and relationship building” and has initiated or supported various projects including (Temple 2021): a speaker series with Ry Moran, former director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation; a film screening of Beans and discussion with director Tracey Deer; and fundraising for the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal. Its most visible contribution is as a partner in the Indigenous Forced Displacement project led by Nakuset, executive director of the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal and a survivor of the Sixties Scoop. By publicly installing 50 portraits of Indigenous individuals living in the Montreal area, the project seeks to “bring…awareness of the phenomenon of forced displacement of Indigenous peoples and our resilience despite it” (“Indigenous Forced Displacement”); three of these portraits were installed at Temple (Arnold 2022; Stewart 2022). The Indigenous Forced Displacement project is noteworthy because it approaches reconciliation at a grassroots level by engaging with local Indigenous-led initiatives.Footnote 9 As such, along with other projects supported by the Committee, it demonstrates that reconciliation is not exclusively a national process and that Jewish organizations can contribute to reconciliation within their own communities and neighborhoods.

The Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia draws on the nation-to-nation paradigm in East End Stories, an exhibit that includes walking tours, online materials, and educational programming. East End Stories explores the history of immigration to Vancouver, with particular attention to the Jewish community in the city’s Strathcona neighborhood. The exhibit includes a study guide tailored for the British Columbia curriculum and “encourages students to partake in an awareness and appreciation for the multicultural contributions that have made Vancouver” (Knapp 2018, 11). While the exhibit focuses extensively on the neighborhood’s multicultural character, it does so in a way that neither reduces Indigeneity to “culture” nor assimilates Indigenous peoples into the multicultural milieu. The study guide begins with a territorial acknowledgement that explains “East End Stories was produced on the unceded and traditional territory of the Coast Salish peoples” (Knapp 2018, 2). It explores the implications of this by raising questions about Indigenous land and sovereignty:

What impact did the arrivals of immigrants and settlers into the lower mainland have on the local indigenous communities? How many indigenous communities and peoples were living around [the city] at this time in the late 1800’s? Have students use an indigenous map and pinpoint where the new immigrants were settling…Introduce the concept that, unless students are of indigenous descent, all Canadians are settlers (Knapp 2018, 14).

By focusing on land, East End Stories positions Indigenous peoples as distinctive communities who preceded European settlement and multicultural ideology, instead of framing them as another aspect of cultural diversity within the multicultural mosaic. In other words, Indigenous peoples do not exist within multicultural society, but rather, Indigenous land is the larger context in which multiculturalism takes form. In this way, the exhibit creates an implicit distinction between Indigenous peoples, who are the ancestral and sovereign inhabitants of the land, and Canada, the multicultural nation-state.

The nation-to-nation approach is most explicit in the study guide’s discussion of nationalism. Through a study of tzedakah (charity) and the Hadassah Women’s International Zionist Organization, East End Stories explores the role Zionism played in Vancouver’s Jewish communal life. The study guide develops this theme by making comparisons between Zionism/Jewish nationalism and Indigenous nationhood in Canada:

The teacher should be prepared to talk about, and connect the concept of Zionism to Indigenous sovereignty in Canada. What are the difficulties that cultural communities face when trying to regain their homeland? The passage of time and influxes of settlers creates complex interwoven histories that have to be unraveled and recognized. How is Canada addressing Indigenous land rights, treaty rights, and sovereignty? (Knapp 2018, 24).

This exercise has obvious limitations, namely that it reinscribes the logic of Westphalian sovereignty while eliding discussion of Palestinian nationhood. Yet it is noteworthy that this exercise develops the concept of Jewish and Indigenous nationhood, positions these peoples as parallel to one another, and uses Jewish tradition to explore questions of Indigenous rights and sovereignty. This approach is significant because it creates the possibility for Jews and Indigenous peoples to engage in dialogue and relationship building outside the framework of the Canadian state. As such, the museum develops an approach to Indigenous-settler relations that, at least in theory, can avoid “state-centered” reconciliation and its capitalist and assimilationist agenda.

By addressing Indigenous–settler relations as a distinct nation, and especially as a people of diaspora, Jewish organizations create an alternative to state-centered reconciliation. A few organizations have adopted this framework in recent years, although they often do so in a preliminary way that occurs alongside or is blended with anti-racist, multicultural, or state-based practices. For example, while Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom often employs a nation-to-nation model, it also provides a statement for Canada’s first National Day of Truth and Reconciliation. This framework therefore reveals conflicting or overlapping nationalisms—i.e., Jewish, Indigenous, Canadian, Zionist, and Palestinian nationalisms—and the complex ways Canadian Jews are embedded within and complicit with the settler colonial state.

Navigating the Colonial Mesh

Canadian Jewish organizations employ a variety of reconciliation frameworks, each of which has its own possibilities and perils. Holocaust and genocide frameworks can illuminate past and present histories of state violence, and may be especially effective when they focus on structural conditions rather than specific policies. While diversity paradigms are particularly salient and coherent for the Canadian public, they are problematic because they regulate and govern difference by assimilating it into the state. Nation-to-nation paradigms enable relationship-building in a way that transcends the assimilationist and territorialist logic of the nation-state, although these practices exist at the complex intersection of multiple national identities. These forms of engagement echo the multifaceted and dynamic position of Jews within Canada. While contemporary Canadian Jews largely see themselves as integrated members of Canadian society, this has not always been the case. Moreover, the Jewish sense of belonging in Canada may at times be in tension with diasporic and Zionist ideas about nationhood. Jewish organizations have consequently developed a range of approaches that reflect a plurality of Jewish histories, identities, and spaces within Canada.

This plurality reflects the multifaceted nature of settler colonialism itself. Settler colonialism is a social structure founded on the dispossession of Indigenous land, but which also operates on gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, and other dimensions of human experience. It is imposed through social institutions, government policy, political ideology, forms of governance, and other sociopolitical processes. Andrew Woolford (2014, 32) proposes viewing settler colonialism as a “mesh” composed of multiple human and nonhuman networks which “expands and contracts across time and differentially across space, with gaps in the mesh loosening in some regions while perhaps closing more tightly around Indigenous communities in others.” Reconciliation, as a response to settler colonialism, will function in a similarly multilayered and interwoven way. Indeed, a variety of reconciliation frameworks have emerged which interact with one another as well as other social and political discourses. This suggests that one framework is not inherently preferable to another, but rather that multiple approaches are necessary to respond to the multiple sites where settler colonialism operates.

Jewish reconciliation frameworks illuminate how Jews have integrated into Canadian society, but they also provide insight regarding how Indigenous peoples and other migrant groups can establish respectful relations. Jewish organizations approach reconciliation in ways that are shaped by both national and local forces. Many organizations envision reconciliation as a national process that responds to Canadian institutions, laws, and policies while drawing on national discourses such as multiculturalism. Yet they are keenly aware that they live on the land of particular Indigenous people or peoples, and they often practice reconciliation through local engagement. Reconciliation becomes a balancing act between Canadian, regional, and Jewish identity that, to some extent, requires an ability to exist both within and without the logic of the settler colonial state. This act of negotiation may yield insights for other migrant or minority groups living in Canada and other settler societies, especially those who consider themselves diaspora communities. It demonstrates not only that minority migrant groups have a role to play in the reconciliation process, but that these groups also offer unique experiences and perspectives that can shape how this process unfolds. Approaching reconciliation as a minority group does not necessarily mitigate complicity for land theft and colonial violence, though it does reveal that the road to reconciliation contains many paths.