Sarah Resnick (right), a Jewish woman from New York, moved to Winnipeg in summer 2024 over concerns about the American political climate. (Courtesy)

A year ago, Sarah Resnick had a good job and a Jewish community she liked in New York. She gave all that up to move to Winnipeg, a city where she knew nobody, in a country where she was not a citizen, in a climate whose extremes she was not used to.

“Do I prefer walking the dog in negative-40? No,” Resnick recalled of her first winter in Winnipeg. “The life that I’m building here is different than my life in New York, but it’s just as fulfilling.”

For Resnick, the frigid Manitoba winter was preferable to the alternative: staying in the United States after Donald Trump’s reelection.

Americans, including many American Jews, have floated moving to Canada at earlier stages in the now decade-long Trump era. But now, faced with a re-elected president who has pursued increasingly draconian policies in areas including immigration, education, free speech and beyond, some say they are now hearing echoes of prewar Europe — and a siren song telling them it’s time to leave. 

“It’s a really complicated situation, because the Jews are not being targeted by the administration,” said Heather Segal, a Jewish immigration lawyer based in Canada who works with clients looking to move in both directions. “But they’re feeling that the paradigm has shifted. And there’s such a fundamental cultural change, the zeitgeist has changed, that they don’t understand what’s going on in America, and that creates fear.”

Exactly how many Jews are fleeing to Canada is impossible to say, but some resources are available to those who do. The Winnipeg Jewish Federation has a program specifically to encourage Jews to immigrate there. And JIAS, the Canadian equivalent to the Jewish refugee aid group HIAS, was established in 1922 to help Jewish refugees settle in Toronto but now primarily works with other populations. (Representatives for the Winnipeg federation and for JIAS did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this article.)

Anecdotally, there does seem to be an increase. Segal previously fielded inquiries from Americans, including many Jews, looking to move to Canada in 2016 and 2020, prior to the election. But she says the current moment has brought even more interest. She estimates that she has seen a 50% increase in prospective Canadian immigrants since 2016. 

“I think that when things are changing, they’re never safe for Jews, and that creating an insurance policy is not fear-ridden,” she said. “They know this is not the America they grew up in. This is not who America is. This is not how Americans behave, that due process happens, and deportations without due process cannot be justified, that the number of executive orders are unacceptable, considering that this is a democratic nation with three branches of government.”

For Resnick, the deciding factor came before the most recent election, when the Supreme Court struck down the federal right to an abortion in 2022. “It was kind of a wake-up call to me that, regardless of who won the presidency, the Supreme Court was going to wield power in a way that I was not comfortable with,” she said. 

Shortly afterwards, she recalled, she saw “Leopoldstadt,” the Tom Stoppard play about Austrian Jews before the Holocaust. “I remember… thinking to myself, ‘God, I hope that we’re not in 1930s Vienna.’ And that feels so melodramatic. I know what it sounds like hearing those words come out of my mouth,” she said.

“And yet — and yet.”

When she told her mom about her plans to move, the response could have come out of the play. “She said to me, ‘I’m too old to get out. But I’m glad that you are,’” Resnick recalled. “I do genuinely think that Holocaust generational trauma is part of that.”

In 2024, two years after beginning the process of applying for permanent residency in Canada, Resnick landed a new job with the University of Manitoba. She moved to Winnipeg in July, prior to the election. She found an apartment to rent online; her new landlord happened to be Jewish. It felt like a sign.

In hindsight, she says of her decision, “I would rather be someone who made the choice and was overreacting than someone who got stuck.”

She’s not the only one. Recently a trio of prominent scholars of fascism and totalitarianism, two of whom are Jewish, made international news when they announced they would jointly be leaving Yale University to accept positions at the University of Toronto. In part, they said, they were doing so because the U.S. was barreling toward the very thing they studied.

“You can see certain patterns. And once you see the patterns and you can see what’s possible, you can’t un-know what’s possible,” Marci Shore, one of the Jewish professors to make the move, said in an interview. Shore is leaving Yale along with her husband and colleague Timothy Snyder and their fellow fascism scholar Jason Stanley, who is also Jewish.

The three scholars’ move had been in the works since before Trump’s reelection. Janice Stein, the Jewish director of the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, had been intent on recruiting them for years, Shore said. But other Jewish academics are joining them, like Chagai Weiss, an American-Israeli scholar of political science, who is also heading to the University of Toronto after a postdoc fellowship at Stanford. “Timing isn’t bad,” Weiss wrote on X in announcing his appointment.

While some interpreted the moves as indicative that the scholars are canaries in an American coal mine, others — including Jews on both sides of the border — said they disagreed with the impulse to flee. 

“We are not looking at 1930s Germany here. The Trump administration is complicated (and, in my view, suboptimal) for the Jews, but Jews are not the people it’s rounding up,” Phoebe Maltz Bovy, an editor at the Canadian Jewish News and a recent American emigre herself, wrote in a recent column about the professors. 

And Daniel Drezner, another Jewish scholar of global politics, asserted on his Substack that he is “not going anywhere” — though he said the arrest of a pro-Palestinian graduate student over an op-ed at Tufts University, where he is soon to become a dean, had raised the specter of authoritarianism. 

“The Trump administration’s actions are not as popular as many seem to think they are. There will eventually be a reckoning. And to facilitate that outcome, I choose to use voice instead of exit,” Drezner wrote.

But Shore isn’t so sure things will work out. She said her academic interest in Russia and its aggression towards Ukraine, in particular, has convinced her the U.S. is not far off from Putin’s brand of strongman government. 

“I’m a neurotic Jew. The lesson of 1933: You get out sooner rather than later,” she said. Both she and Resnick cited one Holocaust-era text in particular to justify how they felt while watching Trump target non-Jewish groups: German pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous “First they came for…” reflection. 

Snyder, for his part, wrote in an open letter that Trump did not influence his decision to move his family, including Shore, to Toronto. “I was not and am not fleeing anything,” he wrote in the campus newspaper. But he added that he understood why others might, added, “History shows that the people who attack universities are not friends of the Jews. The present American government is seeking not to combat antisemitism but to foment it.”

Rabbi Yehoshua Ellis, a member of the clergy at the Montreal-area liberal Orthodox synagogue Shaar Hashomayim, also knows a thing or two about fleeing danger zones. A Kansas City native, Ellis spent more than a decade living in Warsaw, Poland with his family, where as a working rabbi he provided assistance to Jewish Ukrainian refugees fleeing tensions and, ultimately, war with Russia. 

In 2023, with the region becoming more unsafe, Ellis wanted to move his family out of danger. An American citizen, he could have brought them back to the United States. Instead, he chose the Montreal job — despite his lack of connections or citizenship pathways, and the fact that by law his family would have to spend years learning French. He still didn’t hesitate.

“I have a great love for America, as does my family. But it felt like the temperature in America was just getting a bit too high,” Ellis said, also citing gun violence and lack of access to public transit as factors influencing his decision not to return. 

They moved shortly before Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, after which Montreal, like many other major metropolitan areas, saw an explosion of pro-Palestinian activism as Israel’s response became more and more destructive. Still, he hasn’t looked back. 

“In general I feel very happy about our decision to move to Montreal,” he said, adding that he believed the city’s Jewish community held “less agnosticism about Israel” than their American counterparts. “There’s a level of comfort in their skin that Jews have here that I haven’t experienced in most other places I’ve lived, certainly not in the Diaspora.”

Similarly, Resnick was willing to try Winnipeg, she said, because it had “a good Jewish community,” along with a range of synagogue options and programming specifically for young professionals (she’s 30 and single, making the prospect of a move easier). 

In New York she had attended a traditional egalitarian synagogue; in Winnipeg she alternates between the Conservative and Modern Orthodox congregations, depending on her mood. She already feels comfortable in this new community. Still, it has been an adjustment in many ways — and not just because of the cold, or Canada’s escalating tariff war with the United States.

Instead, some of the adjustments have been political. At her New York synagogue, Resnick said, she was “probably one of the most right-y people on Israel,” while being progressive on everything else. She described feeling unmoored politically, like other Jewish Americans post-Oct. 7. But in Winnipeg, she’s one of the furthest to the left.

“It’s amazing how the window shifts,” she said. “And I know my politics haven’t changed.”

As in New York, many of the other locals are fueled by concerns about rising antisemitism at home: Canada, like the States, has seen a severe uptick in campus activism and other radical actions since Oct. 7. 

Winnipeg in particular has seen a recent rash of antisemitic graffiti and other activities, including a protest outside the Federation building to oppose two Israeli military officers speaking on a pro-Israel “Triggered” tour. (Other extreme protests are unfolding in Toronto and at McGill University in Montreal, which recently saw a three-day pro-Palestinian student occupation that disrupted classes and other campus business; the country has also seen shootings outside synagogues and Jewish day schools, as well as infighting over Israel at Canadian cultural organizations.) 

There are many Canadian Jews who, like American Jews, are deeply unhappy with how their government has responded to antisemitism. “A lot of Jews have felt that the Canadian prime minister did not represent their interests, and did not do enough to shut down protests and did not defend Jews enough,” Segal said. “And there’s been a lot of places that have spoken out against Zionists, equated it with genocide and all the rest of it.”

Yet Resnick said she doesn’t always agree with her new neighbors about what Jews should be most worried about.

“I have had people react with, basically, this idea that antisemitism is the biggest problem facing Jews in America and Canada,” Resnick said. “And I just don’t know that I agree with that. Not that it’s not a problem — it’s definitely a problem. But I think it has taken more extensive conversation to communicate that there are other, troubling things beyond the antisemitism that are the reason I left.”

For her part, Shore — who was more sympathetic to the pro-Palestinian protesters — said that she and Snyder had first considered leaving the United States after Trump’s first election in 2016. They had offers then to move to Geneva, but stayed at the time, Shore said, because she felt that her students needed her, and that she could do some good as an academic who studies European political and intellectual upheaval. 

Snyder, who is not Jewish, channeled his own anger into the writing of “On Tyranny,” a book that builds on the analysis of Nazi language and tactics by Jewish thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Victor Klemperer. The book became a bestseller and totem of liberal resistance to the first Trump era. Shore’s Yale class read Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” 

One freshman, she recalled, raised their hand and said, “Oh my god, Professor Shore, she’s talking about us.” 

Now, with what Shore called the new administration’s “real, physical terror and violence,” she was no longer sure her presence at Yale would help in the same way. Could she physically stand between one of her international students and “a bunch of guys in masks” trying to deport them? She isn’t sure. 

Shore tried activism at first. She signed her name to a list of Jewish scholars protesting the Trump administration’s detention of pro-Palestinian activist and green card holder Mahmoud Khalil. 

She said she doesn’t normally “engage explicitly as a Jew,” but this time it felt important. “I felt that if Jews allow this administration’s cynical, disingenuous claim to be protecting us from antisemitism to be used as a pretext for abusing the rights of other people, we have morally bankrupted ourselves. We can’t let that happen,” she said.

Stanley, who is also Jewish, did not respond to a JTA request for comment. But he recently told NPR and other outlets that he decided to leave after Columbia University appeared to acquiesce to Trump’s demands to restrict student protester behavior in order to protect $400 million in federal grants the administration threatened to cancel over antisemitism concerns. 

The school’s actions have thus far failed to turn the tide of lost funds; the amount of federal grants being held from Columbia now reportedly sits at $700 million. Trump also has reportedly floated the idea of bringing the entire university under strict federal oversight. Stanley, the author of “How Fascism Works” and “Erasing History,” considered Columbia’s move a severe blow to academic freedom and a gateway to further antisemitism.

“This is the most antisemitic moment of my life as an American, because this is an antisemitic attack on antisemitism,” Stanley recently told Vanity Fair. “This regime is leaning into the stereotype that Jews control the institutions, and they’re exploiting that stereotype in order to attack the institutions. … They’re making campuses more dangerous because now everyone thinks that we control everything.”

The other Jewish emigres who spoke to JTA for this article, similarly, were not reassured by Trump’s actions purportedly taken to protect them. Both Resnick and Shore said they didn’t believe his attacks on campuses and international students in the name of fighting antisemitism would make Jews safer. Ellis, for his part, said none of it mattered in the face of Trump’s aggressive tariff proposals, which have thrown the global economy into crisis.

“It’s all going to be swept away with economic destruction. When the economy goes bad, the Jews are pretty much the forefront of the blame. It feels to me like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how strongly America supports Israel if America has no strength.”

For all of the stakes attached to her move, Resnick said she has felt immediately comfortable in Winnipeg — precisely because she is Jewish.

“I’ve been told, for example, by my boss, ‘Wow, you’re so brave to come here. You didn’t know anybody. You came with a blank slate,’” she said. “Because I knew I had the Jewish community here, it didn’t feel risky. I knew that if, God forbid, something happened, there would be a safety net, a security link that I could fall back on.” 

She added,  “One of the beautiful things about being Jewish is you can be anywhere in the world and you’re not alone, because we’re everywhere.”

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