In an opinion piece for The Canadian Jewish News, Linda Hershkovitz — a gender-equality consultant and past president of the New Israel Fund of Canada — pushes back on the framing that the broader Jewish community was uniformly alarmed by Avi Lewis’s NDP leadership win. Writing as a lifelong NDP voter raised by a labour-official father and social-democratic, pro-Israel parents, she argues the party still comes closest to representing her values on the environment, human rights, economic inequality, equity and feminism, even as she objects to some party figures’ anti-Israel positions.
She cites polling indicating that roughly 7 per cent of Canadian Jews voted NDP in the last election — a share comparable to the proportion of Jews who are Orthodox or who live in British Columbia — to argue that left-wing Jewish voters are a real if stigmatized constituency, not a fringe. She singles out The CJN’s own coverage of the Lewis leadership vote for allowing critics to speak for Jews like her without interviewing anyone who shared her perspective, and closes with a call for greater Jewish pluralism and against treating demands for “unity” as a means of silencing diverse views.
Source: The Canadian Jewish News. Reproduced for reference under fair dealing (Copyright Act, s. 29).