Canada’s main progressive party aims to make a comeback under its new leader Avi Lewis, a Jewish anti-Zionist.

Lewis, a filmmaker and former journalist, was elected to lead the New Democrats on Sunday. He campaigned on principles that have energized the global left, including affordability, the environment and unapologetic anti-Zionism. He repeated his position on Israel in his acceptance speech in Winnipeg.

“When Israel commits a genocide in Gaza, we call it by its name, and we do everything in our power to bring it to an end,” Lewis said in his speech.

Lewis hopes to rebuild a party that suffered its worst losses in history during the 2025 federal election. Center-left voters who were alarmed by President Donald Trump’s threats to Canada flocked to the Liberal Party and elected Mark Carney as prime minister.

Lewis comes from a line of progressive royalty. His grandfather, David Lewis, was one of the founding members of the New Democrats and its leader in the 1970s. His father, Stephen Lewis, led the party in Ontario. He is also the great-grandson of Moishe Lewis, who was an outspoken member of the socialist Jewish Labour Bund in Eastern Europe and immigrated to Canada in 1921.

Lewis is married to Naomi Klein, a prominent author and critic of Israel. Klein was among several writers who declined to participate in PEN America’s annual World Voices festival in 2024, saying [that] the group failed to “stand firmly” with Palestinian writers. She also addressed protesters during a rally outside U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s residence in Brooklyn during Passover that year, called “Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel,” and urged Jews against worshipping the “false idol” of Zionism.

Lewis was formerly a reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Al Jazeera. In a debate with other candidates in January, he described himself as an “anti-Zionist Jewish person” seeking to “unlearn and unpack the Zionist myths that most Canadian Jews were brought up with.”

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, an advocacy arm of the Jewish Federations of Canada, said it acknowledged Lewis’ victory “with a deep sense of sadness.”

“Avi Lewis is himself Jewish, and we respect his family’s history in this party,” the group said a statement. “But Jewish identity is not a shield against accountability. When a leader declares that Zionism is inseparable from ethnic cleansing, he is not engaging in legitimate policy critique. He is telling Jewish Canadians that a core part of their identity is illegitimate.”

On the eve of the New Democratic Party’s leadership convention, CIJA joined dozens of rabbis from across the country in an open letter criticizing the party.

“Too often, the NDP’s response to antisemitism in Canada has been inconsistent, hesitant, or clouded by rhetoric that fails to recognize how hatred manifests in today’s environment,” said the letter.

Perhaps anticipating Lewis’ victory, they added, “Even more troubling is the repeated elevation of fringe or non-representative Jewish voices to deflect, dilute, or dismiss the legitimate concerns of the vast majority of the Canadian Jewish community.”

Eight decades ago, Andrew Cassel’s father was bundled aboard a prison ship in England and sent to Canada as an “enemy alien”, where he was held behind barbed wire for two years. The elder Cassel was part of a little-known operation that in 1940 targeted about 2,300 Jewish Europeans whom the British feared were spies for Adolf Hitler. Now, Cassel—along with other descendants and some historians—are raising awareness about what he calls “Canada’s dirty little secret”.

The prisoners lived in harsh conditions at nine prisoner-of-war camps in Quebec, Ontario and New Brunswick. In some cases, they were locked up together with groups of real Nazi soldiers and German U-boat crews who’d been captured by the Allies during the Second World War. But they weren’t spies—they were doctors, professors, Yeshiva students and bankers who fled to England to escape the Holocaust. The British government soon realized their mistake, but Canada took until 1943 to release all the prisoners. Some experts blame widespread antisemitism in the Canadian government for the undue delay.

[…]

I was right there when one officer said he really doesn’t like his position. He would rather be guarding German prisoners of war who have the decency to stand up for their own country and not like these Jews who betray their country, Germany, or at least pretend that they’re enemies of Germany. They were rabble for them. There […] was a lot of antisemitism.

[…]

Shield was one of 2,300 European Jews who England feared were acting as spies for Hitler, even though they were actually Jewish refugees who had fled from Germany and Austria and Italy to England to escape the war. Far from being spies, they all hated the Nazis.

Some like Schild had been in Dachau or survived Kristallnacht, many had lost their families to the flames of the Holocaust. In the summer of 1940, with the Nazis pushing West and France now fallen, the panicked British government sent four boatloads of these Jewish civilians to Canada. They were crammed on board together with 7,000 real Nazi prisoners of war.

Only three of the prison ships survived the Atlantic crossing.

The Canadian military was told the deportees were dangerous Nazi enemy aliens. They were greeted with fixed bayonets, herded into nine different internment camps in remote areas of New Brunswick, Quebec, and Ontario, where they were held locked behind barbed wire under harsh conditions.

The army deprived them of basic supplies, forced them to work for the war effort. Two of the prisoners died.

And even after Winston Churchill’s government realized they’d made a mistake and formally asked to release the Jewish men and send them back, it took another three years until the last of them were set free. Canada’s wartime leaders notoriously didn’t want to take in Jewish refugees at all. Eventually, about half the prisoners got to stay. The rest were deported.

And while some remained grateful this journey saved them from the Holocaust, the prison experience traumatized others, which is why now some of the internees’ descendants have launched a petition to the House of Commons asking Canada to make amends for what happened even all these 80-odd years later.