Jewish Communal Identity at the Crossroads: Early Jewish Responses to Canadian Multiculturalism, 1963-1965

Abstract

This article challenges the assumption that the Canadian Jewish community embraced the discourse and potential of multiculturalism rapidly and enthusiastically. It has been proven that certain groups—most notably the Ukrainians—used the hearings of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, which promised to consider the ‘‘contributions of the other ethnic’’ groups, to promote the idea that Canada is multicultural. But the largest organization of Canadian Jewry—the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC)—was very cautious in its dealings with the Commission. It only participated in the Preliminary Hearings, in order to protest the preamble’s language that referred to the ‘‘two founding races. From the records of meetings, it is evident that CJC, based in Montreal—which was the home of the largest Jewish community in Canada at the time—was worried that introducing ‘‘multiculturalism’’ would offend the French. This article also asserts that CJC was not willing to define the Jews as an ethnic group, which was the implied category for groups in the new discourse of multiculturalism. CJC thought that a self-definition of the Jews as an ethnic group would weaken the place of Jews in Canadian society, both because of how Jews defined themselves on the census of 1961 and because they believed that they had a higher profile in the division of society into Protestant—Catholic—Jew than in a society divided into ethnic groups.