Jew World Order

A year after the University of Toronto re-offered attorney and legal scholar Valentina Azarova a job directing its International Human Rights Program following donor pressure to deny her a visa, she has turned the school down. The university faced backlash over allegations of stifling academic freedom and censure from a teacher’s union.

Initially, Azarova’s was not public and contingent upon ironing out some immigration hurdles. She is based in Germany and required sponsorship to accept the role. But the job was suddenly withdrawn after pressure from David Spiro, a judge on the Tax Court of Canada, who is also the chair of United Jewish Appeal (UJA) Toronto’s Public Affairs Committee and the former co-chair of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs Toronto (CIJA).  We now know Gerald Steinberg, the founder of NGO Monitor, and Shimon Fogel, head of the CIJA, asked Spiro to raise the issue during a scheduled fundraising call with a university assistant vice-president. 

According to Steinberg’s private emails to CIJA officials that were later circulated online, “the hope is that through quiet discussions, top university officials will realize that this appointment is academically unworthy … and that a public protest campaign will do major damage to the university, including in fundraising.” In response to Spiro raising Azarova’s purported anti-Israel scholarship, emails and phone calls were exchanged between an assistant dean an assistant vice-president. A university autopsy of the affair published in March said the purpose was to convey that “the Jewish community would not be pleased by the Preferred Candidate’s appointment.”

Spiro’s influence over the University of Toronto largely comes from his family’s wealth. His uncle, Larry Tanenbaum, an owner of the Toronto Raptors, financed the University’s Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies. One of a half dozen wealthy donors that replaced the nominally democratic Canadian Jewish Congress with the donor-run CIJA, Larry Tanenbaum and his brother have given the University of Toronto at least $10 million and helped raise $10 million more.

CIJA and Spiro’s pull at the University is magnified by their ties to other pro-Israel donors. The source of the institution’s largest-ever donation worked with the Tanenbaums to found CIJA. In 2019 Gerald Schwartz and Heather Reisman donated $100 million to the University of Toronto.

The Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies has close ties with the University of Toronto’s Andrea and Charles Bronfman Chair in Israeli Studies. Alongside funding for the Anne Tanenbaum Centre, the famously Zionist Bronfman family provided $1.5 million to create the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Chair in Israeli Studies. The Bronfman Chair in Israeli Studies is now part of the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, which was set up in 2010 with $35 million from Barrick Gold founder Peter Munk. In 1999 the Canadian Jewish News reported on a sizable donation Munk made to Israel’s Technion University and a speech in which he “suggested that Israel’s survival is dependent on maintaining its technological superiority over the Arabs.”

Beyond their ties to wealthy donors, Spiro and CIJA are pushing against an open door. An insider breached confidentiality by releasing information pertaining to Azarova’s application.

In other circumstances, CIJA may have succeeded in leveraging their influence to affect hiring policy with few noticing. But the administration handled the withdrawal of Azarova’s job offer poorly and the hiring committee loudly criticized the outside intervention. Simultaneously, public pressure forced the Canadian Judicial Council to investigate Spiro for bias and over 1,000 academics signed a public letter critical of the flagrant assault on academic freedom. Ratcheting the campaign up significantly, the 70,000 member Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) censured Canada’s largest and most influential university.

In a bid to tamp down the uproar, the university administration hired a former Supreme Court Justice, Thomas Cromwell, to muddy the waters. In his report on the scandal, Cromwell laid out a damning set of facts but exonerated the administration, noting “I would not draw the inference that external influence played any role in the decision to discontinue the recruitment of the Preferred Candidate.” Gertler and the University administration played up the exoneration, but for those who looked beyond the headlines the report confirmed the extent of outside intervention and administrators’ deference to donors.

Cromwell’s absurd exoneration of University of Toronto administrators wasn’t the first time he had put his Supreme Court credentials at service of a Toronto university looking to clean up an Israel lobby mess. Amidst an uproar about a protest on campus York hired Cromwell to whitewash the university’s handling of when Jewish Defence League-aligned throngs attacked pro-Palestinian students protesting a November 2019 presentation by Israeli military reservists. One of the injured Palestinian solidarity students said he was knocked unconscious. Cromwell scapegoated Students Against Israel Apartheid as the aggressors. In a sign of Cromwell’s sympathies, he was a keynote speaker at a CIJA/UJA conference earlier this year, at the same time as he was overseeing the inquiry into whether a UJA representative and former CIJA official acted improperly in the Azarova affair.

As the CAUT boycott of the University of Toronto gained steam, B’nai B’rith labeled those defending academic freedom as antisemitic. In response to the recent announcement concerning Azarova, B’nai Brith’s senior legal advisor, David Matas reiterated the group’s position proclaiming, “the suggestion that her initial non-hiring had anything to do with Jewish money and influence remains an unacceptable antisemitic trope.”

Simultaneously, B’nai B’rith began to prepare for the possibility that the university would reverse itself by calling on the federal government to presumptively deny Azarova a work permit. In effect, the human rights group asked the federal government to ban international academics from working in Canada if the candidate had been critical of Israel.

This is the context in which Azarova was re-offered the position to lead the law school’s International Human Rights Program. She says university administrators negotiated in good faith and offered her academic freedom. But Azarova declined the position because she didn’t want to be hounded by pro-Israel groups, and the University of Toronto couldn’t protect her from attacks. This is likely for good reason. Prior to the Azarova affair, B’nai B’rith responded to two University of Toronto student votes in support of Palestinian rights by launching a scurrilous campaign against institutional antisemitism. 

The CBC reported earlier this month that the school said it updated donation guidelines to underscore the importance of institutional autonomy and confidentiality in all hiring decisions,” adding “appropriate terms for interaction with alumni and donors.”

At one level the Azarova affair has been a huge embarrassment for the Israel lobby and the university, in that the school more or less acknowledged it would curry political favor to a donor and allow money to influence academic affairs. The CAUT-led boycott, in turn, forced Canada’s largest university to re-offer Azarova the position. But Azarova’s reason for declining the job demonstrates that even when vindicated, those who are unfairly maligned for their positions on Palestine don’t end up unscathed. 

Source