Avi Lewis Is About to Make Jew-Hate the NDP's Official Slogan
I spent 24 years as an NDP strategist, organizer, federal and provincial executive member, and proud fighter for working people under Jack Layton’s big-hearted vision. That party once tried to be for all Canadians. It dreamed of lifting everyone up.
In 2017, I first raised the alarm inside the party and publicly. I declared myself a Christian-Zionist: someone who believes Israel has the right to exist as the Jewish homeland and who fights for social justice. The backlash was immediate, vicious, and personal.
Harassment. Pressure from elected officials and activists. The clear message that supporting Israel’s existence made me the enemy within.
That was the moment I knew antisemitism and anti-Zionism weren’t fringe anymore. They were growing, normalizing, and being rewarded.
I fought it internally for years. I documented the escalation. I warned leadership. I watched colleagues stay silent as the rot spread from activist corners into caucus language and policy. Good people looked the other way while antisemitic tropes were rebranded as “anti-Zionism” or “Palestine solidarity.”
By 2023, I could no longer pretend. I resigned from the federal executive and left the party for good. In my departure piece for The Hub, I wrote that while the NDP had always had problems with antisemitism in its ranks, under Layton and especially under Tom Mulcair, there were efforts to rein in the more virulent anti-Israel sentiments. “This has not been the case under (Jagmeet) Singh.”
Jagmeet Singh’s politics had become a dead-end of divisive identity politics that replaced Layton’s “love is better than anger” with rage, wedge issues, and a willingness to stoke lies about Israel and Jewish Canadians. The party no longer cared how its positioning hurt the Jewish diaspora at home.
Post-October 7, it accelerated into the open. NDP caucus members wore keffiyehs in the House. They pushed a motion recognizing “the State of Palestine” that read like it was drafted in Hamas headquarters. They embraced activist antisemitism without apology. The last fig leaves were gone.
And now the full-circle moment has arrived: Avi Lewis is running to lead the NDP, and at the party's leadership convention in Winnipeg this weekend, he's the odds-on favourite to win.
Since October 7, Avi has been relentless and increasingly unhinged in his rhetoric — “genocide,” “apartheid,” arms embargoes, lectures, framing Canada’s support for Israel as complicity in war crimes. He has spent years before that attacking the IHRA definition of antisemitism, calling B’nai Brith a “hard-right Zionist outfit,” standing with candidates accused of antisemitism, and insisting the real problem is always “the Israel lobby.”
His record makes clear: the Jewish state’s very existence and right to self-defence are the problem — not Hamas’s charter, not the massacre of 1,200 Israelis, not the hostages.
If/when Avi Lewis becomes leader, antisemitism and anti-Zionism will no longer be tolerated in the NDP. They will become a foundational pillar of the party’s identity. The mask drops completely. The party that once aspired to govern for everyone will have chosen a side. The side that says the world’s only Jewish state is the root of evil, and Jewish Canadians are acceptable collateral damage in the “resistance.”
This is not ancient history. This is the direct line from my 2017 warning, through years of internal battles I ultimately lost, through my 2023 exit, straight to this leadership race.
I’m not the only voice that was ignored. Look at Selina Robinson, former BC NDP cabinet minister, proud progressive, proud Jew. She championed calling out Jew-hate inside her own caucus and government. She was removed from cabinet simply for defending Israel’s right to exist after October 7.
Colleagues sent her antisemitic emails that minimized the slaughter of Jews; the rest of the caucus stayed silent. She resigned from the NDP in disgust and sat as an independent. Her story is mine, multiplied by every Jewish New Democrat who was scared into silence or was pushed out. The party abandoned her, and every Jewish Canadian was watching.
Jewish Canadians: this is your warning.
The NDP is not “evolving on Palestine.” It is racing to brand itself as the party of anti-Zionism. When Avi Lewis takes the helm, the last pretense disappears.
Every synagogue already facing post-October 7 hate, every Jewish school with security guards, every community centre that has seen vandalism will feel the federal political weight of it,t too.
To my former NDP colleagues who stayed silent or looked the other way: history will judge this clearly. You chose the activist base and electoral purity over basic human decency. You chose grievance over the Jewish Canadians who helped build this party for generations.
To every Canadian — progressive, conservative, or in between — who still believes politics should unite and lift people rather than tear them down: see this for what it is. The NDP Jack Layton built is gone. What remains is a vehicle for division and hatred, and Avi Lewis would make that its permanent brand.
This is not left versus right. It is whether a major Canadian party in 2026 can still reject hatred of Jews. The answer, right now, is no, unless enough of us say it loudly, clearly, and without apology.
Jewish Canadians, former New Democrats of conscience, concerned progressives: the full circle is closing. Do not let it lock.
Call it what it is. Fight it. Remember who we were, and who we must never become again.