2025 - Year in Review

The big Canadian story of 2025 is an offshoot of the global one, namely the second Donald Trump presidency, from January onwards. Onwards into eternity, maybe. Constitutions can be amended or just tossed in bonfires.

No, Trump hasn’t annexed Canada, but he’s considered it, which is sufficient to make the Air Show days hit different, with those sounds of jets over Lake Ontario. There have been tariffs. Elbows have gone up, cross-border travel has gone down. Ask Canadian schoolchildren if they can name the U.S. president or the Canadian prime minister and the answers might disappoint. But in their defense, one of these leadership changes was the more momentous. Instead of Justin Trudeau, there’s a less Ken-doll-looking, stodgier Trudeau alternative. As versus in America where it’s been closer to regime-change than administration-change, in ways that may seem more obvious from outside the States than within.

The big Canadian Jewish story of the year has been the bifurcation of Canadian and American paths regarding the fight against antisemitism.

First, because it’s the more startling, the American path: The Trump administration has declared a war of sorts on Jew-hatred. There’s this ramped-up movement to deport foreigners and defund universities. Much of this is being done in the name of defending Jews. This despite (or, possibly, because of) the fact that most American Jews vote Democrat. This despite (or not) the fact that shutting out international students includes excluding Israelis, and that cracking down on universities isn’t great for Jewish studies programs or Jewish academics.

While the anti-antisemitism pretext appears to be losing steam in favour of an amorphous, target-shifting xenophobia, it spanned much of 2025 and hasn’t entirely dissipated, even as antisemitic nativist right-wing influencers gain ground. (More on that momentarily.) An America that’s otherwise purging DEI and sensitivity has, confusingly, carved out an exception for Jews. Instead of Jews not counting, it’s only Jews counting, which is in some ways worse.

In Canada, it’s more business-as-usual, as though Canada were an alternate universe where the Biden administration never ended. For better or worse, there is no war on antisemitism happening here. Canadian Jews document incidents, at times feeling a bit helpless as the incidents just keep happening. But also, Canada is not this hotbed of antisemitism, wherein if an antisemitic act occurs, the police and government officials endorse or even take credit for it. Jews are the same un-counting minority we had been in the 2010s and earlier.

In September of 2025, Canada recognized Palestine, a gesture that I interpreted as at one and the same time an eventually necessary gesture towards a peaceful two-state solution (it’s not as if Canada concurrently ceased recognizing Israel) and an awkward one in light of the barrage of Free Palestine gestures directed at Canadian Jews just trying to go about their (ahem, our) days. All told, I’m not sure this was much of a new development, Canada being in line with Western Europe in this manner.

The U.S. has offered up a cautionary tale to Canadian Jews, a real be careful what you wish for. If you were no great fan of the university encampment protesters, the last thing you should want is for one of their more sympathetic-seeming leaders to be abducted. Annoying student radicals were instantaneously recast as martyrs. Indeed, as Trump made Jews and Zionism his cause, anti-Trumpers could and often would express their dislike of the American regime by sporting keffiyehs. Fighting antisemitism had already become a bit right-wing-coded pre-Trump, during the social-justice-mad 2010s; in 2025 it became extreme-right-coded, as versus right-leaning liberal centrist-coded. This was not, in my view, great for the Jews.

Meanwhile, in New York City, anti-Trump passions (and a host of other factors, including weak opposing candidates) fuelled the success of Zohran Mamdani, set to become mayor on the first day of the new year. A politician whose central activist cause has been Palestine, who is quite far to the left but who (after all that!) gets along with Trump, and who, like the president, has disproportionately low support from Jewish voters. Not none—I see you, Jews for Mamdani, Jews for Trump, all five of you—but the dominant political sentiment gauged anecdotally and by voting patterns is a kind of wistful nostalgia for the Clintonian 1990s. I still get these residual it must be tough to be a Jew in Canada remarks from Jews back in the States, but it’s not clear how things shake out.

So maybe the Jewish future is more in Canada, after all. My own sure seems to be. And to stay on a personal note: 2025 has been a good year for The CJN’s Opinion section, which I am honoured to edit. In my weekly column I try to make sense of zoomed-out shifts in how it’s going for North American Jews via examples from the news and the culture. Opinion at The CJN has launched a monthly Letters column. There are also two new Opinion podcasts: Avi Finegold’s Not in Heaven and mine, The Jewish Angle. The section also runs freelance op-eds, and continues to be your source for a wide range of viewpoints on matters of importance to Canadian Jews.

Here’s hoping 2026 is a tranquil one, and the only thing we have to opine on is whether latkes or hamentashen are better. 

Source: Phoebe Maltz Bovy