The rise of Montreal’s Jewish Left

Exploring the role of anti-Zionist Jewish activists in the current global political climate

NewsHannah Scott-Talib — Published February 11, 2025 6 minutes

On his father’s side, his relatives are of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Saltiel had always known this side of his family to be outwardly Jewish in their practices and proud of their Jewish identity. Many of them, he says, were also Zionists. 

His mother, however, was of Sephardic Jewish descent, with her grandmother being a Holocaust survivor. In the 1940s, at the height of World War II, this side of Saltiel’s family had been living in Salonika (modern-day Thessaloniki), Greece. During the Holocaust, over 40,000 of the approximate 43,000 Jewish residents of Salonika were killed—around 90 per cent of Greece’s entire Jewish population. 

“For my great-grandmother, she was the literal sole survivor of her whole entire family,” Saltiel said. 

As a result of this deep-rooted history, growing up, Saltiel recalls a much different experience on his mother’s side when it came to practicing Judaism.

“My great-grandparents had been very clear that they were afraid that we would be persecuted again, and therefore we didn’t learn any of our languages, we didn’t practice Judaism in any way that was [obvious],” Saltiel said. 

Now, as an anti-Zionist Jewish activist, Saltiel is a member of Montreal’s chapter of Independent Jewish Voices (IJV). IJV is a grassroots organization grounded in Jewish tradition that opposes all forms of racism and advocates for justice and peace for all in Israel-Palestine, according to its website. And in the context of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, Saltiel says that being a member of IJV has been, in some ways, a form of saving grace for him.

“It can be quite difficult to see people who share a cultural background or heritage with you to be so aggressively defending an active genocide,” Saltiel said. “And so being able to find each other and show up together and have these conversations, for many of us, has been very, very helpful in holding onto our Jewish culture.” 

Yet, it is not only organizations like IJV that reject the principles of Zionism. In particular, Montreal’s Hasidic Jewish community has been active in their condemnation of the state of Israel since Oct. 7, 2023.

“It’s important to recognize that a lot of these groups are anti-Zionist from a religious perspective, and by the ways in which they interpret the Torah, which dictates that Jewish people should not be in that land unless we are invited back by the Messiah,” Saltiel said.

He added that settling in the modern state of Israel goes against scriptural followings. 

“It’s [also] about the violence part, where Jewish people also should not be acting in this manner with such violence—that goes very strongly against Jewish values,” Saltiel said.

Jordan Molot, a fourth-year PhD student at Concordia University’s Religions and Cultures department, says that Jewish communities with anti-Zionist beliefs are not a recent emergence.

“There’s always been a stream of anti-Zionist Jewish thought, or at least non-Zionist-thinking,” Molot said. 

While Molot’s dissertation specifically explores the transnational links of 18th-century Jewish settlers in Canada, he added that he has a particular research interest in the development of Jewish politics in the 20th century.

“We can trace back an anti-Zionism genealogy that goes back to the emergence of Zionism itself as a political idea,” Molot said. “Contrary to popular belief, the popularity of Zionism was not immediate and it wasn’t all-encompassing.”

The Jewish Labour Bund (JLB) was a key movement that opposed Zionism in its early stages in the late 19th century, according to IJV Concordia member Myriam Reed, who has been granted a pseudonym for safety reasons. 

“[The JLB promoted] this idea of ‘Wherever we are, is our home,’ pushing against this nationalist, settler-colonial ideology that Zionism became,” Reed said. “We are a part of any society, we are here, you can’t push us out.”

It wouldn’t be until the late 1960s that Zionism became truly popularized in association with the Jewish identity, according to Molot.

“Following the Six-Day War in 1967, Zionism becomes ‘the mode’ of Jewish self-understanding and Jewish self-identity,” Molot said. “But beforehand, it was very much up in the air.”

According to Molot, the classical secular Zionist narrative of what is often called “the Jewish story” performs a double reading of scriptural myths and historical accounts of Jewish migrations from the time of the Babylonian and Roman expulsions into the present. 

“The most central historical slippage in these readings is its application of the nation-state model into ancient history, wherein the ancient Kingdom of Israel and Judea is seen as congruent to the contemporary nation-state,” Molot added.

And yet, in Molot’s experience, he said he finds that Zionism, for many modern Zionist Jewish people, is less of a material concept and more of an emotional one. He recalls a question a professor asked at an Introduction to Judaism course at Concordia a few years ago, a course in which Molot was the teaching assistant. The students were asked “What does Zionism mean?” and the answers, Molot says, were remarkable. 

“They were saying things like: ‘Zionism is about feeling safe when you walk down the street. It’s about self-determination. It’s about sovereignty. It’s about making sure that Jews are never put in the position of the Holocaust ever again,’” Molot said. “I was so struck that every single example that they gave was all about Zionism as a kind of ideal. It’s an ideation; they see Zionism as the ideological project.”

In this way, Molot says that Zionists and pro-Palestine activists are often “practically speaking separate languages” when it comes to their definitions of Zionism.

For Zionists, according to Molot, Zionism is primarily an appeal to emotion. On the other hand, he said that the Palestinian liberation movement is backed by the notion of Zionism as a very real and material concept. He added that, in regard to the ongoing actions of the Israeli government, Zionism represents a military project and a repressive regime.

“I think the state of Israel is seen as this redemptive project [to Zionists], but what pro-Palestine activists are getting at in their critiques of Zionism is not necessarily that Jews don’t have a right to safety,” Molot said. “What they’re really getting at is the construction of an inherently violent regime; it’s a project that crushes bones and puts bullets in babies’ heads.”

While groups such as IJV have greatly helped Jewish pro-Palestine activists such as Saltiel to find a sense of community among other anti-Zionist Jewish activists, a majority of Jewish people in Canada still identify with Zionism and the state of Israel.

According to a 2024 New Israel Fund study, 84 per cent of Canada’s Jewish population say they are “very” or “somewhat” emotionally attached to Israel. The study also found that 51 per cent of Canada’s Jewish population consider themselves Zionists.

“At the same time that the Jewish Left movement is gaining traction, it’s still a minority in Montreal, and especially in Canada,” Molot said.

Looking ahead, Saltiel says that IJV has no plans to stop its activism for Palestine simply due to the ceasefire agreement that was recently put in place.

“We are not slowing down simply because there has been some version of a ceasefire,” Saltiel said. “We believe it needs to go far beyond this, including an actual liberation of Palestine.”

For activists like Reed, the return to promoting ideologies stemming from deep-rooted Jewish movements such as the JLB provides a framework for the future of anti-Zionist Jewish activists.

“It’s a really important and amazing reclamation that has been happening for a long time, but especially, I think generations now are more interested in their own heritage,” Reed said. “There’s been this resurgence in understanding this [lesser known] history.”

A previous version of this article had mistakenly named Zev Saltiel's great-grandparents as his grandparents. The Link regrets this error.

This article originally appeared in Volume 45, Issue 9, published February 11, 2025.