Jewish student sues TMU over ‘poisoned’ antisemitic environment

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A Jewish student has sued Toronto Metropolitan University, arguing that the university has become a “poisoned antisemitic learning and working environment” in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

Nicole Szweras, a student in the media production program and formerly an employee in the university’s “equipment distribution centre,” is seeking $1.3 million in damages.

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The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Ontario Superior Court, argues that Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) has violated several of its own policies, including its discrimination and harassment prevention policy and its statement of student rights and responsibilities, its poster policy and its bookable spaces policy, among others.

Those policies, the lawsuit argues, “are mere platitudes” that are not implemented or inadequate to keep Szweras or other Jewish students safe. The lawsuit says that antisemitism has been on “flagrant display” for the past year, particularly since October 7.

The lawsuit also alleges Szweras was wrongfully dismissed from her job at TMU and the university breached its contract with her.

TMU, formerly the downtown Toronto Ryerson University, has been the site of several controversies in recent months, both in-classroom, as a function of protests and anti-Israel postering campaigns, and as a result of interactions between students.

The lawsuit says students have been “harassed when seeking to express their views,” and faced statements such as “you people control the media. Hitler should’ve finished you off, you dirty Jew” and signs with statements such as “go back to where you came from.” Last month, the lawsuit says, a protester was carrying a sign that read “Zionism off our campus.”

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“To Nikki and other Jewish students, staff, and faculty this is a call for Jews to be removed from campus,” the lawsuit says. “This incident deeply affected Nikki, leading her to question her place in the world that tolerates this rhetoric.”

The lawsuit argues that anti-Zionism — essentially the opposition to the creation or continuation of the State of Israel — is “inherently discriminatory and antisemitic,” and that comparing Israel to the Nazis or saying it’s inherently racist are forms of antisemitism.

It also alludes to a long history of antisemitism at TMU. In 2010, a task force on anti-racism found there had been a “proliferation of anti-Semitic incidents such as anti-Semitic graffiti on campus” and that Jewish students found media coverage of Israel, particularly from the now-defunct Ryerson Free Press student newspaper, “bordered on anti-Semitic.”

The lawsuit notes that Szweras’s mother was born in Israel and that Szweras herself has Israeli citizenship. Additionally, her brother was in Israel on October 7 and she has family and friends there, including those who are fighting in the Israel Defense Forces in its offensive against Gaza.

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“The period following October 7, 2023 was a challenging time for Nikki as well as for Jewish students at TMU and Jews around the world,” the lawsuit says. “Shockingly, shortly following the October 7 Massacre and in the weeks and months thereafter, numerous TMU community members celebrated, justified, and excused Hamas’s mass rape, murder, and kidnapping.”

In the months since, the lawsuit says, Szweras’s “colleagues and co-students repeatedly posted inflammatory, false, inaccurate, and offensive posts about Israel, Zionism, and the October 7 Massacre.”

In particular, the lawsuit notes that Szweras and other Jewish students were exposed to speech they found offensive, such as the chant “From the River to the Sea Palestine will be free” and slogans alluding to Intifada — the term given to prior Palestinian uprisings — which have “undertones to the Nazi’s ‘Final Solution’ during the holocaust that exacerbates the intergenerational trauma experienced by the families of holocaust survivors, such as Nikki.”

“While catchy slogans to some, to Nikki and to Jewish people around the world these are slogans that call for the destruction of the State of Israel and violence against Jewish people everywhere,” the lawsuit says.

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The lawsuit argues that TMU, despite knowing about these slogans and actions, has not done anything to prevent them or advocate that people express their political views in a different manner.

It also notes other instances of what it identifies as offensive or discriminatory conduct, including a letter that circulated through the law school that, according to the lawsuit, defended Hamas’s actions and denied Israel’s right to exist. In response, TMU appointed former chief justice of the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal J. Michael MacDonald to review the incident and whether TMU policies had been breached.

The lawsuit characterized this as TMU having “outsourced its responsibilities” and, the lawsuit claims, used the external review underway by MacDonald as an excuse to avoid censuring students for other actions on campus.

The lawsuit also details multiple in-class incidents.

It says that several Jewish students left a law school class in tears after a professor “berated the State of Israel,” and while students were transferred to different classes, the professor was not disciplined. It also says in an anthropology class in November 2023 students were learning about “pinkwashing,” a strategy whereby organizations or nations point to their record on LGBT rights as a way to distract from other, less salubrious, conduct. The professor in that class used Israel’s stance on gay rights “as a distraction from Palestinian human rights questions” as an example of pinkwashing, which “Jewish students … understandably found offensive.”

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Szweras, the lawsuit says now feels “dread and panic” when she thinks about going to class and has contemplated transferring to a different university.

“She has been deprived of the educational opportunities, benefits, and educational fulfilment that non-Jewish students at TMU receive,” the lawsuit says.

TMU did not respond by press time to National Post’s request for comment.

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