Extreme Prejudice
October 7th:
Searching for the Humanitarian Middle
Marsha Lederman
McClelland & Stewart, 259 pp.
What does it mean, in a free society, to be “brave enough to speak up”? If nothing else, it implies there are others who are afraid to speak up. What are they afraid of? What hushes them into keeping their opinions to themselves?
To be brave enough to speak up means you have something to say that you know a lot of people are not going to like. They are going to lash out at you, but you have the courage to say it anyway, in defiance of the outrage. You brave the consequences. And you do so because you believe that what needs to be said can make a difference in how people think. You can change minds. Even if you are mocked, despised, intimidated for what you say, you believe in your right to say it.
It is a heroic thing to stand against the majority, unless it is a vile thing to do. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Oswald Mosley were both jailed for speaking up.
Marsha Lederman’s October 7th is a book that comes out of the Hamas attacks on Israel and Israel’s military response, but it’s not an account of the war in Gaza or how it is playing out in Israeli politics or in the Arab world. It is about how the conflict is being felt here in Canada, culturally. It is about protests and speaking up, student encampments and campaigns of complaint. It worries about intimidation and a tense, fearful politics of confrontation that has nothing to do with Carney or Poilievre, Alberta or Quebec, right-wing or left-wing. The politics she describes runs underneath all that, like a poison. The book is about antisemitism but not only about antisemitism.
Lederman is a columnist and arts correspondent for the Globe and Mail and the author of Kiss the Red Stairs, a memoir of the Holocaust and her grandparents. She abhors what Hamas planned and executed on October 7, an unforgiveable act of butchery. She also detests the politics of Benjamin Netanyahu and the butchery of what his government has done in response in the name of Isreal. And she is shaken by the fury and hatred stirred up by both.
Just as not all Palestinians were responsible for October 7, not all Jews are culpable for what has happened to Gaza. Not even, by a long shot, all Israelis. In their intensity and persistence, the anti-Netanyahu protests in Israel dwarf anything the anti-Trump constituency in the US has managed to muster. It is not a people or an ethnicity or a faith that has destroyed Gaza, it is a political faction. Just as it was not a people or an ethnicity or a faith that carried out the October 7 attacks. It was a political faction.
The book is a collection of columns and articles Lederman wrote for the Globe and Mail, unspooling with events. We see things as she reacts to them. She comes to the problem not with policy proposals, but with vignettes. First and foremost, she wants us to feel what this means.
What is it like to go about your day in this liberal democratic society of tolerance and diversity, knowing there is hostility out there toward you that could catch you at any moment? Anything from a small slight to a gross injustice to an ugly scene. Maybe an encounter in a convenience store, maybe something that happened to your kid coming home from school, maybe a cop who just takes a dislike to you, maybe a crowd of people massed in the streets, chanting against you.
Lederman is well aware that this thrum of anxiety is shared by Arab, Muslim, Indigenous, Black, Asian, Brown, Gay, Lesbian, Trans, and every Canadian who has felt bigotry and spite from their supposed fellow Canadians. She knows the pain of Palestinians because she can feel it through the pain of what happened to her family. She uses antisemitism to illustrate every other vicious prejudice we have in Canada, of which, goddamn it, one is too many.
Any society that allows free speech is going to end up with antisemitism and Islamophobia. (For that matter, any society that prohibits free speech will still have antisemitism and Islamophobia.) The quandary is what to do about it. How does one respond to rage? How can one undo the unjust vilification of entire peoples?
The book is subtitled “Searching for the Humanitarian Middle,” but there is no humanitarian middle between what Hamas did on Oct. 7 and what Isreal has done in return. There is, though, perhaps a humanitarian middle to be found in how we in Canada speak about our differences on the Middle East and the issue of Palestine and Israel, how we can protest one another without threatening one another. That’s what Lederman is advocating.
Her vignettes put you, the reader, in the position of having to decide yourself. She lays out the particulars and you must play along. What would you have done, for example, had you been on the board of a performing arts institution in the wake of Oct. 7 when an avalanche of angry opinion demanded that an upcoming engagement be cancelled because the author/artist/musician was Israeli/Palestinian/had expressed views that enraged Israelis and/or Palestinians? (It’s interesting how many engagements were cancelled in the heat of the political moment. Then later, when temperatures cooled, how many statements of regret were issued for decisions that had been too hastily taken.)
Lederman is a calm, measured voice who writes for the Globe and Mail, whose readers are in the main calm and rational themselves. Even so, the subject matter of Israel and Palestine, antisemitism and Islamophobia, has become so incendiary that it takes a measure of bravery to speak up. The book’s final chapter provides a sample of the hate mail Lederman received in response to these pieces when they were first published. She was called a self-hating Jew. Someone hoped she had a pager Mossad could detonate remotely so that she would be killed or severely burned. “It’s become normal for me this year, this hatred,” she writes.
Though an important institution, the Globe and Mail is an old school media property with a much smaller footprint than the YouTube, Reddit, Discord, etc. platforms through which the discourse on Oct. 7 and Gaza is now playing out in all its fury. Lederman hopes to help find a middle ground between the extremities of anger, but that’s not what the new school media are interested in. For them, it’s all about the extremities of anger. Speaking out in order to stir things up.
eg The Hill Times December 8, 2025