Welcome to Toronto, the West’s newest sanctuary city—for Americans – Air Mail – April 19, 2025

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Welcome to Toronto, the West’s newest sanctuary city—for Americans

By Jennifer Gould, April 19, 2025, Reading Time: 4 minutes

In the sixth and final season of The Handmaid’s Tale, refugees from Gilead, America’s post-democratic theocracy, find safe haven in “Little America”—a fictional neighborhood of Toronto.

In the real world, Toronto is also becoming a popular sanctuary. Just as during the Vietnam War, when many American families, including that of the urbanist Jane Jacobs, flocked north, today the continent’s fourth-largest city is welcoming disaffected U.S. academics and scientists.

Once known as the leader of the free world, these days America feels more “like 1933 in Germany,” says Marci Shore, a professor of Eastern European intellectual history, who is leaving Yale University for the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.

I interviewed Shore shortly before the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion was firebombed after Josh Shapiro and his family’s Seder on the first night of Passover, which celebrates freedom and the Jews’ escape from slavery.

Shore’s husband, Timothy Snyder, the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and the author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, is also leaving Yale to teach at Munk.

Source Links: Trump-Wary American Academics Flee to Toronto, Canada – Air Mail