Republished from The Grind Magazine
Campus Antisemitism Report Hid a Key Finding that Turns the Results Upside Down
In early August, the Canadian government released a report on the “alarming prevalence of campus antisemitism” at postsecondary institutions. The mainstream media was quick to uncritically parrot the report’s findings, despite early alarm bells raised by independent organizations about the report’s methodology.
After the initial news articles, there was a slew of opinion writing. On Aug. 18, for example, the Globe and Mail’s editorial board ran a column largely based on the report claiming that, on Canadian campuses, “Jewish students are not safe, not even in the classroom.”
However, closer scrutiny of the report — known as the Campus Antisemitism and Student Experience, or CASE, report — reveals both glaring bias and several methodological flaws that misrepresent the state of safety on campuses, while dangerously conflating anti-Zionist speech with antisemitism. The result has fed into a moral panic that has for several years now been used to clamp down on the pro-Palestine movement.
What’s wrong with the CASE report?
The CASE report was written by the tightly-connected Association for Canadian Studies and Metropolis Institute, based together in Montreal. The report was published by Canadian Heritage, where Marc Miller is the minister responsible.
The report claims to describe “[w]hat Jewish students experience,” but its methodology belies this.
First, the report is based on an online survey that lacked proper screening. For example, Dr. El Jones—an Associate Professor in political and cultural studies who is neither a student nor Jewish—was able tocomplete the survey, twice.
Second, the survey’s recruitment process, which prioritized explicitly Zionist organizations such as Hillel and Chabad, resulted in a clearly pro-Zionist bias: the report found that 86.8% of the survey respondents indicated that “Zionism” is very or somewhat important to them, despite the fact that a 2024 survey found that only half of Canadian Jews identify as Zionist.
Moreover, the report’s authors failed to consult with anti-Zionist Jewish organizations, such as Independent Jewish Voices, who could have shared the survey with its hundreds of student members. (The survey only included 900 respondents.) Indeed, the report itself admits it cannot be relied on as a representative sample of Jewish student experiences, noting that “[t]he Jewish survey is not weighted,” such that the results can only be “interpreted descriptively rather than as precise population estimates.”
Despite these glaring issues, mainstream media outlets were largely uncritical in their reporting. CBC, for example, initially reported in their article subheading that “95.7% of Jewish students say they saw or experienced antisemitism in 2025.” After the report was criticized, the article subheading was changed to “95.7% of surveyed Jewish students say… .”
The above methodological concerns, however, are amplified by a rhetoricalconcern, obscured by what one might call the CASE report’s “rolling disclosure” — an opaque process by which the report’s findings are slowly and partially revealed over time, rather than all at once. This complicates the ability for readers to scrutinize the report’s raw data, as well as its author’s interpretation of that data.
When the CASE report was first released on Aug. 5, it exclusively highlighted the experience of Zionist Jewish respondents, while making zero reference to the experience of those anti-Zionist students who participated in the survey.
Later, following a slew of serious methodological critique, the report’s creators responded on a Canadian Jewish News podcast episode released Aug. 14 (see 9:49-10:14) by selectively disclosing unpublished data from the report. Unsurprisingly, this previously suppressed data undermines the report’s exaggerated conclusions.
Then, writing in the National Post on Aug. 17, two of the report’s authors and one of its advisors noted that only 11 per cent of anti-Zionist Jewish respondents agreed with the statement that antisemitism was “a serious problem on campus.” When Zionist Jewish survey respondents answered that same question, that figure skyrocketed to 95 per cent.
Put differently, it is not simply “Jewish students” who consider antisemitism a serious problem on campus, but, more precisely, Zionist Jewish respondents that do.
In stark contrast, amongst anti-Zionist Jewish respondents, a whopping 92 per cent said their campuses were safe and inclusive for Jewish students. In the National Post column, the authors try to write off the anti-Zionist data as a “psychological or social” phenomenon rooted in “a desire for social acceptance.”
The reality seems much simpler: Zionist Jewish students conflate hostility towards Israel with hostility towards Jews, whereas anti-Zionist Jewish students do not.
Conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism
As the Jewish Faculty Network has observed, the report’s misrepresentation of antisemitism “attempts to turn a legitimate political position [i.e., anti-Zionism] into a synonym for hatred before a single survey question is even asked.”
And this misrepresentation is apparent in the report’s many frivolous examples: a student’s subjective claim of “encountering course content […] that portrayed […] Israel […] in [a] biased way” is called a “toxic classroom dynamic”; a professor “showing Al Jazeera videos” and wearing “pro-Palestine […] earrings” is labelled “classroom bias”; the report calls “antizionist indoctrination […] among the most worrying” of its findings. This is unserious.
Even the report’s examples of actual antisemitism are misleadingly presented by its authors. One appendix provides what the report itself calls “a selected sample” of comments from survey respondents, including various pro-Nazi references. But the report egregiously frames these references as representative of “the pro-Palestine movement”, which, according to one anonymous quote, “very loudly and publicly sympathize[s] with Hitler.” The report fails to provide a single example of this supposed “loud” and “public” sympathy from the avowedly left-wingmovement to decolonize Palestine. And the report obscures how Nazi sympathies are ideologically associated with the political right. In this way, the report crudely lumps right-wing discourse with left-wing activism to discredit Israel’s decolonial critics.
Indeed, the report is so dedicated to defending Israel and Zionism that it, while claiming to document antisemitism on Canadian campuses, includes a gratuitous reference denying the genocide in Gaza. The report states: “No court, international or otherwise has determined that the War in Gaza is a genocide.” This omits, however, that there is a virtual consensus amongst relevant scholars (including hundreds of international law academics), United Nations findings (including the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights), and Non-Governmental Organizations (including Amnesty International) that Israel is, indeed, committing a genocide in Gaza, a finding the Israeli NGO B’Tselem has confirmed.
The report relies on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which is widely discredited for conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. The government of Canada adopted the IHRA definition in 2019, despite its rejection by over 400 scholars of Antisemitism Studies and related fields, the Canadian Association of University Teachers (which represents 75,000 academic staff), and even one of the definition’s main authors, who now recognizes that it has been “weaponize[d]” by “rightwing Jewish groups.” The report does not acknowledge, let alone refute, this overwhelming critique.
Instead, the CASE report affirms IHRA by citing a non-peer-reviewed essay in Tablet magazine — a magazine so right-wing that the largest scholarly association in Jewish Studies stopped advertising in it. The frivolous examples above speak for themselves: despite claiming to be a report on “antisemitism,” the authors cast watermelon earrings, Peabody Award-winning journalism, and peace activism as intolerable campus expression.
The CASE report does not accurately document antisemitism; it perpetuates anti-Palestinian racism. That the Canadian government would characterize righteous dissent as “antisemitism” to discipline political discourse is an affront to our democratic principles and academic freedom. And that Canadian media would parrot such jejune propaganda is an affront to the accuracy and impartiality of our press.
The Association for Canadian Studies and Metropolis Institute acknowledged receipt of The Grind’s requests for comment but did not respond before publication. The article will be updated if they send comment.
Joshua Sealy-Harrington is an Associate Professor and the Chair in Palestinian Human Rights in Canada at the University of Windsor Faculty of Law.
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