Her grandfather bought and sold "junk from a horse-drawn cart" to Yiddish-speaking customers, and although the family was poor and Zaide never learned English, they never felt "isolated or despised".
Barbara Kay joined Ezra Levant's conservative online media channel Rebel News, in February 2017, as its Montreal correspondent.
She stated her respect for Ezra Levant and Faith Goldy, but felt that the Rebel Media "brand" had been "tarnished" by several contributors who did not reflect the views of mainstream conservatives like herself.
[13][2] Kay wrote that the Israeli Apartheid Week, an American import, was part of a larger movement growing in anticipation of the May 14, 2008, 60th anniversary of Israel's founding.
She describes those "who are aligned with the hard left" as "anti-Zionist and supportive of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions(BDS) movement", with the worst of these "confined to university campuses."
She was dismayed that a German court "found that the Muslim firebombers of a synagogue in Wuppertal were not guilty of a hate crime because they had been motivated by anti-Zionism and events in the Middle East.
"[2] Jonathan Kay, wrote that "Barbara is stuck in a time warp and seems to think we still live in the era when Svend Robinson, Antonia Zerbisias and Naomi Klein are still loud and influential voices in the arena of Canadian foreign policy ...
The idea that Canada's intelligentsia is a seething mass of anti-Zionist agitation is about 15 years out of date ... the issue of Zionism has so totally consumed Jewish advocacy groups in the West, that it has created what is, in effect, a spiritual faith unto itself, complete with its own forms of excommunication, liturgy and revealed truth.
"[2] While Kay acknowledges that the feminism of the 1960s had "worthy ideals" of empowering women, she wrote in 2004 that the feminist movement had been "hijacked by special interest groups nursing extreme-grievance agendas".
[14] Writing for the National Post, Kay offered the opinion that honour killing is not strictly a Muslim phenomenon and that it is enabled by factors including sexism, dowries and a lack of a dependable legal system.
Kay who was a young teenager at the time was "existentially" shaken by the possibility of that a "monstrous totalitarian" communist regime might attack the "freedom-loving West".
[1] Her hatred of totalitarianism and communism was fueled by a "positive exposure to capitalism" and by books that she read, such as George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon (1940), Ayn Rand's Anthem (1946), and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962).
In contrast, her husband "whose Russian heritage had opened a privileged window on the realities of Soviet triumphalism, was a Reagan-style "evil-empirist" avant la lettre.
"[17] In an article in which she compared contemporary identity politics with communism, Kay questioned the erection of an 18-foot bronze statue of Karl Marx, commemorating the 200th anniversary of his birth in Trier, Germany.
[Notes 1] Citing the 1949 publication The God That Failed by former communist writers who denounced communism, Kay wrote that the book has "much to say about their identity-politics cultural cousins of today, and explained why we—classic liberals and conservatives—don't have common ground for discussion or debate with them."
Kay wrote that if the rabbis, whom she called "black hats", cannot observe "small courtesies" then they should "stay in their self-wrought ghettoes and eschew public life altogether".
[25] In her July 28, 2010 National Post article, Kay 2007 wrote about Jewish messianism, the theme of a 2007 Michael Chabon novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, against the backdrop of the rise of the Haredi Judaism in 2010, an "extreme right wing ultra-Orthodox" that numbered approximately 1.3 million in 2010.
[28] Her claim that prudent women face a "statistically nugatory" chance of being assaulted was referred to as "irresponsible nonsense" by Toula Drimonis and Ethan Cox.
[29] In 2018, Kay received criticism for comments she made in a National Post column about the perpetrator of the Toronto van attack, saying "I would have preferred it [sic] this had been an act of jihadism or something else linked to a clear ideology or cause" and that "Islamist terror is at least something we have come to understand".