At Concordia University, where I teach in downtown Montreal, there is a street corner where demonstrators of all stripes show up with placards and bullhorns. The customary hour is midday, the general atmosphere that of a low-budget circus. For a number of months, this corner was home to many pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel demonstrations, which in turn led to the infamous afternoon in September of 2002 when security concerns and a melee inside the university’s Hall Building brought the cancellation of a speech by Israel’s former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The event became notorious for a number of reasons: the inability of Montreal police and Concordia security to prevent the mayhem, the roughness with which the would-be audience was treated by anti-Netanyahu activists and the images of these activists smashing a plate glass window and tossing furniture in the Hall Building foyer.
The Concordia campus was abruptly thrust into an international discussion...
Norman Ravvin’s recent novel is The Joyful Child (Gaspereau Press, 2011). Previous books include a story collection, Sex, Skyscrapers and Standard Yiddish (Paperplates Books, 1997), and a volume of essays entitled A House of Words: Jewish Writing, Identity and Memory (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997). He lives in Montreal.
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