Rights-Based Community Practice and Academic Activism in a Turbulent World

By Jim Torczyner

Routledge/2021

Reviewed by Gil Troy

March 13, 2021

Most academics are mules, plodding away for the long haul, boring into their research. Some are stallions, galloping gracefully from idea to idea. Most rare are the bumblebees, cross-pollinating academic ideas into the “real world,” generating social and political honey.

Jim Torczyner is a world-class bumblebee. A professor of social work and founder of the McGill Middle East Program in Civil Society and Peace Building, renamed ICAN McGill. Jim arrived in Montreal in 1973 fresh from the University of California, Berkeley, and armed with an MSW, a DSW, a vision, creativity, guts, and a roguish New York charm.

This social worker superhero has misnamed his engrossing tale, which is really a memoir wrapped in a blueprint for change. In a rare nod to academic niceties, he burdened his book with the name Rights-Based Community Practice and Academic Activism in a Turbulent World for Routledge, the academic publisher. A more accurate title capturing this unsculpted book’s stream-of-consciousness nature would be: “Confessions of a True Social Justice Warrior: Fighting for Peace and against Poverty in Montreal, Israel-Palestine-Jordan, and beyond…”

Like every superhero, Torczyner — a valued McGill colleague but not a close friend — has an otherworldly origin story. Actually, he has two, reflecting his instinctive generosity and impressive ability to learn from so many people.

This proud Jew and progressive Zionist recalls asking his Holocaust-survivor grandmother why she enjoyed sitting on her porch, smiling away, well into her 80s. She answered: “Because my neighbors are happy.” Remembering her years spent hiding in a cemetery in Belgium, she explained: “And when they are happy, I can live in peace.”

Decades later, in 1974, community organizing in Montreal’s heavily Jewish, economically strained Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood gave Torczyner another “aha” moment. While going door-to-door, he befriended a broken, Polish-speaking Holocaust survivor. One day, a middle-aged black woman gave the man some clothing to sew. Surprised, Torczyner asked her if she spoke Polish.

“I don’t have to speak Polish to feel that man’s pain,” Jasmine Williams said. “As a Black woman, I feel it and it’s deep.” Williams kept tearing clothing and paying a dollar for repairs, “Because every human being has a right to feel he is a part of something.”

Williams “lit up my world,” Torczyner recalls. These two women’s “practical altruism” inspired the “rights-based practice I developed first in Canada at Project Genesis, then adapted to the Middle East with the McGill Middle East Program in Civil Society and Peace Building (MMEP).” Self-interested altruism promotes the “coexistence” his grandmother explained “so naturally.”  It “means changing the public discourse … understanding power dynamics and utilizing nonviolent conflict strategies” to promote “universal rights, reciprocity and inclusion.”

Trigger warning: Torczyner is no snowflake, tiptoeing around, preaching love and justice. He’s a scrapper. When a Jordanian solider asks, “Is that a Jewish car?” as Torczyner enters from Israel, he snaps, “Well actually, it’s probably Catholic. It is a Fiat, from Italy.”

Torczyner devoted himself to solving two incredibly knotty problems: what Daniel Patrick Moynihan called North America’s “tangle of pathology,” which locks poor people in a cycle of cultural, social, economic, and political breakdown; and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Torczyner’s main weapons have been storefronts dispensing advice and healing from Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian social workers trained at McGill and redeployed on the conflicts’ front-lines, along with academic exchanges bridging the Israeli-Arab divide.

Trigger warning: Torczyner is no snowflake, tiptoeing around, preaching love and justice. He’s a scrapper. When a Jordanian solider asks, “Is that a Jewish car?” as Torczyner enters from Israel, he snaps, “Well actually, it’s probably Catholic. It is a Fiat, from Italy.” And when told that specific, restrictive, rules govern university centres, he makes his centre a “consortium.”

That mix of grit, guts, and goodness has worked miracles. Torczyner claims his outreach projects have helped one million people in the Middle East since the 1993. Those are just the direct hits — the true number is surely orders-of-magnitude more.

The book has a black-and-white, good guys versus bad guys quality. The heroes are the poor and his participants: his students and colleagues; his funders – especially from Montreal’s extraordinarily generous Jewish community; and his academic patrons, including two visionary McGill leaders, the late chancellor, Gretta Chambers, and the former principal, Bernard Shapiro.

The villains are the structural problems of the poor and the oppressed, the ongoing Middle East conflict which keeps flaring as Torczyner buzzes about, and a long line of government and academic bureaucrats who just don’t get “it” – or him. His successes keep mocking the narrow-minded bean counters and rule-enforcers – as well as today’s “woke” social justice warriors. While fighting shadow wars over language and cancelling people willy-nilly, they cannot match Torczyner’s effectiveness in fighting poverty, racism, and hatred.

The book ends on a surprising, wistful, note. Ultimately, Torczyner loses his federal funding but keeps the program going through Quebec, foundation and generous philanthropic gifts. Still, one doesn’t get a sense that Torczyner would have played it any other way. That’s his great strength — and it’s to our great benefit: in Montreal, the Middle East, and beyond.

Gil Troy is a Distinguished Scholar of North American History at McGill University. The author of nine books on American History and three books on Zionism, his book, Never Alone: Prison, Politics and My People, co-authored with Natan Sharansky, was just published by PublicAffairs of Hachette.