How a Jewish summer camp basketball game 40 years ago fought to undo antisemitic lessons

When Hart Snider was nine years old, he played a basketball game at summer camp that changed his life.

It was 1983 and his teammates were Jewish kids like him staying at Camp BB Riback, on the shores of Pine Lake near Red Deer, Alta.

The opposing team was made up of students from a nearby town called Eckville, who had previously been taught by a notorious Holocaust denier named James (Jim) Keegstra.

"I remember being nervous before they came … talking to my friends about it and thinking what's going to happen," Snider told CBC's Allison Dempster.

His initial worries faded when the Eckville students arrived, and the two groups spent the day together, including playing that fateful basketball game.

It ended up bringing the two teams together, at least for a day. Snider produced an animated short about it with the National Film Board of Canada in 2011, and released a comic book memoir in 2022. Both are titled The Basketball Game.

Snider recently returned to the camp to mark the 40th anniversary of the game. He says he wants to ensure people don't forget about the game, or the lessons he and his fellow players learned that day.

"I think just that people being brave enough to stand up to antisemitism and hate, led to something amazing that I think is now a part of Alberta history. And I hope one day, that if people talk about the Keegstra affair they can also talk about the good that was done," he said.

Keegstra served as Eckville's mayor in the 1970s, and had been teaching for 14 years before he was dismissed in 1982.

It was alleged that he had been teaching his high school social studies classes that the Holocaust was a hoax, and that Jewish conspiracies were responsible for many of the world's problems.

He was charged with "wilfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group" under the Criminal Code of Canada.

The case ended up in the Supreme Court and, in a landmark ruling, became the first successful conviction under the Code's hate speech provisions. Keegstra died in 2014.

Jody Miller Elliot was one of Keegstra's students. She remembers that he liked to debate, but only as long as he won.

"He was an effective teacher, which was scary, because the content he taught you, you learned," said Elliot, 57, who now lives in Langley, B.C.