For months, anti-Israel demonstrators have been engaged in an insidious campaign targeting one of Canada’s greatest success stories: Heather Reisman and her Indigo bookstore empire.
The crusade against the Canadian retailer is part of the broader boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel that gained new life among those who have singled out the Jewish state as the source of all evil since Hamas’s brutal October 7 massacre.
The boycott campaign took a particularly dark turn last November, when protesters vandalized an Indigo store in downtown Toronto, papering it with posters accusing Reisman, whose philanthropy has supported Jewish communities in Canada and Israel, of funding genocide, and defacing its glass door with red paint. Eleven people were charged with “hate-motivated” mischief and criminal harassment (though the charges against four of those individuals were subsequently dropped).
But that did not deter the activists, including many academics, who have been sticking up for the alleged vandals, arguing that their actions were a legitimate form of political expression, that Reisman was targeted for her political views, not because she’s Jewish, and that the criminal charges are intended to distract attention from the war in Gaza.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Even if we give the demonstrators — which include a number of academics from York University and an elementary school teacher — the benefit of the doubt and assume their protest was not motivated by antisemitism (which it clearly was), vandalizing private property is not a form of political speech. It is criminal, plain and simple.
Recently, the Reisman witch hunt has reached a fever pitch. Earlier this week, anti-Israel demonstrations were held outside Indigo stores in Toronto, while an online campaign dubbed “Indigo Kills Kids” has been leading a renewed push to boycott the chain.
Its website accuses Reisman, Indigo’s founder and CEO, of “involvement in the oppression of Palestinians” and “complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” while its social media feeds include drawings of a dead child in an Indigo shopping bag.
Reisman is primarily being targeted for her work with the HESEG Foundation, a charity she founded with her husband, Gerry Schwartz, in 2005 that provides educational scholarships for lone soldiers who have completed their service in the Israel Defence Forces.
Activists argue this is akin to supporting a foreign military. They not only want Canadians to boycott Indigo due to the private philanthropy of its CEO, which is of course outside the control of the corporation itself, they also want the Canada Revenue Agency to strip the HESEG Foundation of its charitable status, as it recently announced it would do to two other Jewish charities that have been the target of anti-Israel activists for years.
This is another argument that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, as providing educational opportunities to former soldiers who have no family supports in Israel has nothing to do with aiding the military itself — especially in a country where military service is mandatory.
Nor does Israel’s defensive war against Hamas — which savagely raped and murdered 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took over 250 hostages on October 7 — amount to a “genocide,” as Israel’s critics falsely contend.
The lies being peddled against Reisman and her company are part of a broader campaign on the part of Hamas and its supporters to degrade global support for Israel’s right to defend itself and stem the flow of international investment and private charitable work in the Jewish state.
It’s an odious campaign that has led to mass demonstrations, on our streets and university campuses, celebrating the slaughter of innocent civilians and spreading the propaganda of Islamist terror organizations and enemy states.
In reality, Reisman should be celebrated as one of this country’s most successful entrepreneurs, and a woman who has shared her prosperity with the rest of society through her extensive charitable work.
Born in Montreal to a middle-class Jewish family, Reisman earned a degree in social work from McGill University. She co-founded her first business, a consulting firm, in 1979. In 1996, she founded Indigo, opening her first store in Burlington, Ont., the following year.
In 2001, her company acquired Chapters, making it Canada’s largest book retailer. Reisman then proceeded to adapt the chain to the internet age, expanding Indigo’s product range beyond books and co-founding e-reader maker Kobo, which was eventually sold to a Japanese firm.
Her vast charitable work includes over $28 million donated to Canadian public school libraries, funding for scientific and medical research, $100 million to help create the Schwartz Reisman Innovation Centre at the University of Toronto, along with support for numerous Jewish community organizations in the Greater Toronto Area.
Heather Reisman is a successful businesswoman in a country in which entrepreneurialism and innovation are in short supply, and she’s used that success to give back to her community and the only pluralistic democracy in the Mideast. These are virtues we should be striving for as a society, not protesting against.
Hopefully, reasonable Canadians will not allow these noisy Israel-haters and terrorist-supporters to dictate their shopping habits. Perhaps they’ll even follow the lead of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs and push back against this detestable smear campaign by making their next book purchase at Indigo. Happy reading, everyone.